"What, indeed, would the majority of the sections do when it is demonstrated that a dozen raving maniacs at the head of a sans-culottes section puts the other forty-seven sections of Paris to flight ?"--Through this desertion of the state and themselves, they surrender in advance, and, in this great city, as formerly in ancient Athens and Rome, we see alongside of an immense population of subjects without any rights, a small despotic oligarchy in itself composing the sovereign people.[3380] VI .-- Composition of the party.
Its numbers and quality decline .-- The Underlings .-- Idle and dissipated workmen .-- The suburban rabble .-- Bandits and blackguards .-- Prostitutes .-- The September actors.
Not that this minority has been on the increase since the 10th of August, quite the reverse .-- On the 19th of November, 1792, its candidate for the office of Mayor of Paris, Lhuillier, obtains only 4,896 votes.[3381] On the 18th of June, 1793, its candidate for the command of the National Guard, Henriot, will secure but 4,573 votes; to ensure his election it will be necessary to cancel the election twice, impose the open vote, and relieve voters from showing their section tickets, which will permit the trusty to vote successively in other quarters and apparently double their number by allowing each to vote two or three times.[3382] Putting all together, there are not six thousand Jacobins in Paris, all of them sans-culottes and partisans of the "Mountain."[3383] Ordinarily, in a section assembly, they number "ten or fifteen," at most "thirty or forty," "organized into a permanent tyrannical board."...

"The rest listen and raise their hands mechanically."...

"Three or four hundred Visionaries, whose devotion is as frank as it is stupid, and two or three hundred more to whom the result of the last revolution did not bring the places and honors they too evidently relied on," form the entire staff of the party; "these are the clamorers of the sections and of the groups, the only ones who have clearly declared themselves against order, the apostles of a new sedition, scathed or ruined men who need disturbance to keep alive," while under these comes the train of Marat, vile women, worthless wretches, and "paid shouters at three francs a day."[3384] To this must be added that the quality of the factious is still more reduced than their number.

Plenty of honest men, small tradesmen, wine dealers, cook-shop keepers, clerks, who, on the 10th of August, were against the Court, are now against the Commune.[3385] The September affair, probably, disgusted them, and they were not disposed to recommence the massacres.

A workman named Gonchon, for example, the usual spokesman of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, an upright man, sincere and disinterested, supports Roland, and, very soon, at Lyons, seeing how things are with his own eyes, he is to loyally endorse the revolt of the moderates against the Maratists.[3386] "The respectable class of the arts, says observers, "is gradually leaving the faction to join the sane party."[3387] "Now that water-carriers, porters and the like storm the loudest in the sections, it is plain to all eyes that the gangrene of disgust has reached the fruit-sellers, tailors, shoe-makers, bar owners," and others of that class.[3388]--Towards the end, "butchers of both classes, high and low, are aristocratized."-- In the same way, "the women in the markets, except a few who are paid and whose husbands are Jacobins, curse and swear, fume, fret and storm." "This morning," says a merchant, "four or five of them were here; they no longer insist on being called citoyennes; they declare that they "spit on the republic."[3389]--The only remaining patriot females are from the lowest of the low class, the harpies who pillage shops as much through envy as through necessity, "boat-women, embittered by hard labor,[3390]...
jealous of the grocer's wife, better dressed than herself, as the latter was of the wives of the attorney and counselor, as these were of those of the financier and noble.