And who are greater rascals the renegades who, after three years of patient effort, just as the sect finally reaches its goal, oppose its accession to power![1181] At Nimes, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Toulon, and Lyons, not only have they interfered with or arrested the blow which Paris struck, but they have put down the aggressors, closed the club, disarmed the fanatical and imprisoned the leading Maratists; and worse still, at Lyons and at Toulon, five or six massacreurs, or promoters of massacre, Chalier and Riard, Jassaud, Sylvestre and Lemaille, brought before the courts, have been condemned and executed after a trial in which all the forms were strictly adhered to .-- That is the inexpiable crime; for, in this trial, the "Mountain" is involved; the principles of Sylvestre and Chalier are its principles; what is accomplished in Paris, they have attempted in the provinces; if they are guilty, it is also guilty; it cannot tolerate their punishment without assenting to its own punishment.

Accordingly, * it must proclaim them heroes and martyrs, * it must canonize their memory,[1182] * it must avenge their tortures, * it must resume and complete their assaults, * it must restore their accomplices to their places, * it must render them omnipotent, * it must force each rebel city to accept the rule of its rabble and villains.
It matters little whether the Jacobins be a minority, whether at Bordeaux, they have but four out of twenty-eight sections on their side, at Marseilles five out of thirty-two, whether at Lyons they can count up only fifteen hundred devoted adherents.[1183] Suffrages are not reckoned, but weighed, for legality is founded, not on numbers, but on patriotism, the sovereign people being composed wholly of sans-culottes.
So much the worse for towns where the anti-revolutionary majority is so great; they are only more dangerous; under the republican demonstrations is concealed the hostility of old parties and of the "suspect" classes, the Moderates, the Feuillants and Royalists, merchants, men of the legal profession, property-owners and muscadins.[1184] These towns are nests of reptiles and must be crushed out.
IX.

Destruction of Rebel Cities Bordeaux .-- Marseilles .-- Lyons .-- -Toulon.
Consequently, obedient or disobedient, they are crushed out.

They are declared traitors to the country, not merely the members of the departmental committees, but, at Bordeaux, all who have "aided or abetted the Committee of Public Safety;" at Lyons, all administrators, functionaries, military or civil officers who "convoked or tolerated the Rhone-et-Loire congress," and furthermore, "every individual whose son, clerk, servant, or even day-laborer, may have borne arms or contributed the means of resistance," that is to say, the entire National Guard who took up arms, and nearly all the population which gave its money or voted in the sections.[1185]--By virtue of this decree, all are "outlaws," or, in other words subject to the guillotine just on the establishment of their identity, and their property confiscated.
Consequently, at Bordeaux, where not a gun had been fired, the mayor Saige, and principal author of the submission, is at once led to the scaffold without any form of trial,[1186] while eight hundred and eighty-one others succeed him amidst the solemn silence of a dismayed population.[1187] Two hundred prominent merchants are arrested in one night; more than fifteen hundred persons are imprisoned; all who are well off are ransomed, even those against who no political charge could be made; nine millions of fines are levied against "rich egoists." One of these,[1188] accused of "indifference and moderatism," pays twenty thousand francs "not to be harnessed to the car of the Revolution;" another "convicted of having shown contempt for his section and for the poor by giving thirty livres per months," is taxed at one million two hundred thousand livres, while the new authorities, a crooked mayor and twelve knaves composing the Revolutionary Committee, traffic in lives and property.[1189] At Marseilles, says Danton,[1190] the object is "to give the commercial aristocracy an important lesson;" we must "show ourselves as terrible to traders as to nobles and priests;" consequently, twelve thousand of them are proscribed and their possessions sold.[1191] From the first day the guillotine works as fast as possible; nevertheless, it does not work fast enough for Representative Freron who finds the means for making it work faster.
"The military commission we have established in place of the revolutionary tribunal," he writes, "works frightfully fast against the conspirators....

They fall like hail under the sword of the law.
Fourteen have already paid for their infamous treachery with their heads.