ful body of troops were sent for, which brought them to submission. The legion was disbanded, and dispersed into the communes to which the men belonged.

This proved a measure of the most fortunate policy. Incensed at the proceedings of government against them, the jacobins had formed one of the most daring and deeply-planned conspiracies that had yet taken place among the many which had marked this eventful revolution. It was conducted with the profoundest secresy. The conspirators never met twice in the same place; and it was hardly possible to trace their motions, though their leaders constantly assembled every day, and government was apprised of the existence of a plot.

The minister of police, Merlin, of Douay, a name well known, being either inactive or lukewarm in this affair, another man was placed in his office, of more activity and zeal. This was Cochon, who exerted himself with so much care and diligence, that the haunts of the conspirators were at length discovered, and most of the principal ones arrested.

The conspiracy was to have been carried into execution upon the eleventh of May, and the discovery of this design was not made till the ninth. On the morning of the tenth, the directory informed the two councils of the particulars of this conspiracy, which was in every respect a most dreadful and dangerous one. Two men were at the head of it, equally noted for their boldness and resolution. The one was Babeuf, from whom it took its name. This man, conformably to the custom prevailing among the

rigid democrats at this time, had assumed the name of a famous republican of old, Gracchus, thereby to denote his inflexible adherence to the popular cause. He was a man of parts, in the exercise of which nothing was able to daunt him. The other chief actor in this conspiracy, was the celebrated Drouet, the post-master of Varennes, who stopped the unfortunate Lewis XVI. in his flight; and, as a reward of his fidelity to the nation, was elected a member of the convention. Having fallen into the hands of the Austrians, and suffered a long and severe imprisonment in Germany, he had acquired a popularity which recommended him so strongly to the people of his own district, that they elected him a deputy to the legislative body, when the new constitution was formed. The other principal authors of this conspiracy were general Rossignol, notorious for his cruelties in La Vendée; Julian, a confidential agent of Roberspierre; Amar, a noted associate of that tyrant; Laignelot, a man of abilities, and a member of the late convention.

The plan of the conspirators, as laid by the directory before the two councils, was to massacre these three bodies, the field officers of the Parisian military, and the constituted authorities of Paris, and to give up the citizens to plunder and slaughter. From the papers that were seized, it appeared that they had formed a complete scheme of government. The legislature was to have consisted of about seventy of those members of the late convention, who had not been re-elected; of a deputy from each of the provincial departments; and of some of the deputies

3

to

same manner.

If reports may be credited, a still more atrocious plan remained to be executed, after completing the former. A secret directory, composed of four persons, was to have a number of confidential agents under their orders; who were, after the insurrection had succeeded, to have murdered as many of their own party as were pointed out to them by these directors, in order thereby to get rid of those who, not being acquainted with their ultimate designs, would probably have opposed them. So carefully had they provided against discovery, that numbers of the actors in this terrible tragedy were not to have known any but their immediate employers, who were themselves to be dispatched, if any of those agents were either to be dicovered or to betray them. It has been a matter of much doubt, whether a conspiracy of so horrible a nature could have been brought to a complete execution, had circumstances been ever so favourable to the conspirators. But the antecedent massacres, at several

and seized,

periods of the revolution, have too fatally evinced, that the shedding of blood was become so familiar a scene in France, and that the spirit of assassination was so prevalently dif fused among surprising numbers, that this horrid project would, in all likelihood, have been executed as unreluctantly as others had been, and that its framers would not have been disappointed for want of hands to perpetrate the horrors they had in contemplation.

Babeuf, the chief contriver of this atrocious plot, boldly acknowledged himself the author of the treasonable writings found in his possession. When required to denounce his accomplices, he answered, that they little understood his character who thought him capable of betraying his friends. He continued, from his prison, to set the directory at defiance, and to address them on a footing of perfect equality. He wrote a long letter, dictated by phrenzy as much as by firmness, wherein he told them, that it was not in their power to prevent the insurrection intended against them, which he dignified by the epithet of holy, threatening them with death unless they retracted their proceedings against him and his party, and promising, if they acted becomingly, a share in the new government.

Whatever might be the motives that influenced government, the trial of the conspirators was unaccountably delayed. The council of five hundred did not vote the impeachment of Drouet until the eighth of July following, when it was negatived by fifty-eight against one hundred and forty, a proof that he had a strong party in that house. About a month after, he escaped [L4]

from

from his confinement, through the connivance, it was suspected, of the government. But his associate, Babeuf, was not so fortunate. He was tried by the high criminal court at Vendome, which condemned him to death.

Great and unfeigned was the satisfaction of the public at the discovery and suppression of this sanguinary plot. The jacobins became more than ever the objects of general execration. The extermination of all who rejected their principles seemed a fundamental maxim of that inexorable faction. Their inflexible resolution and perseverance in their projects, which, had they been attended with humanity, might have rendered them respectable, only tended to excite a dread and abhorrence of them. Thus, they were viewed by the generality as the pests of the community; and a speedy riddance of them became the wish of all but those who were involved in the criminal intrigues.

It was not with the same facility that government was able to crush the advocates of the persecuted royalists. A seizure of those estates, which were to devolve to emigrants on the demise of the actual possessor, had been decreed by the council of five hundred, and reject ed by that of elders. The decree excepted only that portion which by law was to remain with the present possessor. It was warmly opposed, as too rigorously intrenching upon the rights of private property; but, after long and violent debates, it was decreed that, instead of a direct seizure, that moiety should be levied for the use of the state which the legislature had already appropriated to that purpose. This, how

ever, it was plain, afforded no relief to the possessor.

The chief obstacle to these and to the other pecuniary arrangements, respecting the estates of emigrants, was the difficulty of finding pur chasers for the lands that had been declared national property. Many individuals, though warmly adher ing to the republic, reprobated the confiscation of property on any pretext, while no misdemeanor was imputable to the proprietor; who, while obedient to the laws, could not, without manifest injustice, be punished for the misdeeds of others. The sale of confiscated estates, met also with perpetual obstructions from the scruples infused into the minds of numbers by the nonjuring clergy; who explicitly denounced damnation to those who purchased them. Hence a large proportion of national lands remained unsold, to the great inconvenience of the government, in its want of those sums that would have been produced by the disposal of them.

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This interference of the nonjuring clergy, in a matter of so much importance to the ruling powers, could not fail to increase their ba tred to that order of men. They accused them of contributing to the detriment of the state, by their bigotry, than its foreign enemies had done by their arms. They perverted the dispositions of the weak and the ignorant, by intimidating them with arguments founded upon falsehoods and absurdities. The unhappy propensity of unenlightened minds to superstition gave ecclesiastics so decided an ascendancy over them, that, unless they were checked by the most effectual restraints, they would progressively become the ab

solute

solute dictators of society. This was undeniably an evil of such enormity, that all reasonable men would concur in the necessity of obviating it by every means that appeared indispensibly requisite. The only expedient that seemed to promise efficacy was to interdict every individual of that profession from interfering in political matters, either directly or indirectly, under the severest penalties. Such was the language of the staunch friends to the republican system, and to that freedom of thought upon all subjects, which now characterised so numerous a part of the French na

tion.

While the French government and its adherents were complaining of the undue influence of the refractory clergy, these retorted the representations made to their disadvantage, by appealing to the people, on the little justice they had to expect from men, so many of whom disregarded those principles on which alone the morality of mankind, and their integrity in the most essential transactions of society, are usually founded. These principles were those of religion, without which little confidence could be placed in each other by the generality of men, who had neither abilities nor leisure to argue themselves into virtue and honesty by philosophical reasonings, and were much more easily kept in good order by those precepts and doctrines that had been established and respected during so many ages, than by the maxims and opinions lately introduced. The clear and visible consequence of these had been the embroilment of the public in continual feuds, and the overturning of a governmeat, under which, with all its im

perfections, the nation had enjoyed much more tranquillity and satisfaction, than it had known since the introduction of the present system.

The principal allegation against the soundness of the principles, on which the successive rulers of the republic had conducted themselves, was the shameful negligence of which they had all in their turn been guilty, in deferring upwards of three years the inquiry into the murders committed in September, 1792. These were universally reprobated by all parties: they had covered the French nation with disgrace, and exposed it to the abhorrence of all Europe; and they still remained unpunished and uninvestigated. Of those who had been the reputed authors and abettors; some indeed were no more, but others remained, who were happily divested of the power of opposing the course of justice.

These reproaches bore hard upon government, and it found itself unable to stem the torrent of complaint against the long and scandalous neglect of executing that justice upon the criminals, which they so fully deserved. A tribunal was erected, in May, before which their trials began upon the twenty sixth. Several of those arraigned before it were sentenced to die, and others to be imprisoned but as it appeared that the generality had been the mere tools of others, and had been impelled to the commission of those enormities, through mistaken zeal, and an erroneous persuasion that they were avenging their country, in compassion to their ignorance, they were acquitted of evil intentions, and pardoned.

These acquittals were so many, and the punishments so few, comparatively

paratively to what had been expected, and loudly demanded, that the public was entirely disappoint ed: the more indeed, that some, who were deemed the principal promoters of those criminal transactions, found means to escape the vengeance of the law.

Before this tribunal were also brought those citizens of Paris, who had taken up arms to oppose that decree of the convention, by which two-thirds of its members were to be returned deputies to the new legislature. Lenity being now, to use a very common phrase, become the order of the day, they were acquitted, to the great joy of their fellow citizens, who now sincerely repented the violent measures they had been persuaded to adopt upon that occasion, through the intrigues of men who had much more in view, the attainment of their private ends, than the publie objects which they pretended to have so much at beart. These, the people of Paris were at present convinced, would have been much more effectually accomplished by the steady and persevering strength of argument and remonstrance, in which they would have probably been gradually joined by multitud-s in all the departments. But had they failed in these endeavours, still they would not have been the dupes and victims of private ambition, and shed their blood for men who, like most aspiring characters, would, if successful, have forgotten their services, and repaid them with ingratitude.

After having thus, in some degree, satisfied the demands of the nation, the directory now turned its attention to a business which required more than ever the cares Cavilbiby

and exertions of government: this was the department of the finances, which having, since the foundation of the republic, been supported by the most extraordinary and unprecedented means, were now beginning to tutter, and to threaten instant ruin.

The credit, at first given to the assignats, had long been gradually falling, and they were now become of no value. It was therefore indispensible to replace them by a currency of more estimation. The specie of the nation was either hidden by those who would not part with their hoards, or in those avaricious hands that had accumulated it for the purpose of swelling its value in pecuniary transactions with those who wanted it. The means of bringing it forth, in the ordinary occurrences of society, were studiously sought, but could not be found, while those terrors and uncertainties continued, that made every man tremble for his property. The esta blishment of the new constitution was beginning to remove these apprehensions: but they still retained much of their influence, and the scarcity of hard money was still an universal complaint.

In order to remedy the depreciation. and indeed the inutility of assignats, government procured the passing ofa decree, on the 25th of March, which it hoped might tend to expedite the sale of the national property in lands. Twenty-two years purchase was the price at which they had been fixed since the year 1790, when the national assembly first had recourse to this method of supplying the wants of the state. By the decree now passed, a new fabrication of paper money was issued, to the amount of two thousand four hundred millions

of