The Constituent Assembly had set aside the King, the Legislative Assembly had deposed him, the Convention had decapitated him.

Afterward each fraction of the sovereign body in the Convention had proscribed the other; the Montagnards had guillotined the Girondists, and the Thermidorians had guillotined the Montagnards.

Later, under the Constitution of the year III, the Fructidorians had banished the Constitutionalists, the Directory had purged the Councils, and the Councils had purged the Directory .-- Not only did the democratic and parliamentary institution fail in its work and break down on trial, but, again, through its own action, it became transformed into its opposite.

In a year or two a coup d'etat in Paris took place; a faction seized the central power and converted it into an absolute power in the hands of five or six ringleaders.

The new government at once re-forged the executive instrument for its own advantage and refastened the blade firmly on the handle; in the provinces it dismissed those elected by the people and deprived the governed of the right to choose their own rulers; henceforth, through its proconsuls on mission, or through its resident commissioners, it alone appointed, superintended, and regulated on the spot all local authorities.[2102] Thus the liberal constitution, at its close, gave birth to a centralized despotism, and this was the worst of its species, at once formless and monstrous; for it was born out of a civil crime, while the government which used it had no support but a band of bigoted fanatics or political adventurers; without any legal authority over the nation, or any moral hold on the army, detested, threatened, discordant, exposed to the resistance of its own upholders, to the treachery of its own members, and living only from day to day, it could maintain itself only through a brutal absolutism and permanent terror, while the public power of which the first care is the protection of property, consciences, and lives, became in its hands the worst of persecutors, robbers, and murderers.
III.