Survival of the Revolution in France 459
from on high. The section assemblies long practiced open voting. The ruling Com-
mittee imposed secret voting, which reduced the influence of the most militant.
Many demands were never granted. It was a favorite idea of the popular demo-
crats that public employments should go to worthy family men and elderly patriots
of limited means. The ruling Committee never accepted any such principle. The
popular democrats, and their journalistic spokesmen, inveighed against big busi-
ness men and wholesale traders, who were accused of withholding goods from the
market. The Committee of Public Safety protected them, needing the services of
men whose operations were above the shopkeeping level. “Profit” had an evil sound
to the sans- culottes; the Committee accepted it as a necessity of the economic
system, and allowed for it in its scales of administered prices. There were requests
for more free time and easier conditions for workmen in the arms manufactories.
The Revolutionary Government adopted a stern code of labor discipline. There
were demands for rent controls, which the government never conceded, believing
that the price controls were only a temporary wartime expedient, and fearing that
rent controls might become permanent if incorporated in leases. The sections and
the Commune resisted and evaded the legislation setting ceilings on wages. The
Committee of Public Safety tried to enforce it, knowing that otherwise the price
controls would not work at all. By a politically somewhat inept measure, on July
23, 1794, which aimed at enforcing the already legalized wage scales, but which
had the effect of abruptly cutting wages in half for many workers, the Committee
alienated popular sympathy at the very moment when the Convention was con-
spiring to overthrow Robespierre.
Independent Revolutionary activists, or persons outside the government who
identified themselves with the cause of the needy, now received short shrift. The
government proposed to attend to the needy itself, and denounced such agitators
as enragés. Such was Jacques Roux, a priest who had become a vehement popular
spokesman; he was put in prison, where he committed suicide. An organization of
Revolutionary Women, who continued to complain of high prices and shortages,
was broken up.
The last weeks of 1793 saw the outburst of Dechristianization. It developed
independently in various parts of France, but in Paris, where the mass of sans-
culottes seem to have been indifferent to it, it was brought on by certain promi-
nent figures in the sections and in the Commune. It appealed most strongly to
intellectuals of various types, such as the poet Fabre d’Eglantine, who coined the
names for the months in the Republican Calendar, and the printer and bookseller
Momoro, a chief sponsor of the Worship of Reason as conducted in a grand
festival at Notre Dame in November. The Committee of Public Safety, while
embarrassed at seeming to defend priestcraft and superstition, regarded such
anti- Christian demonstrations as highly impolitic. Robespierre called them “phil-
osophical masquerades.”
Robespierre himself, so long as the Brissot group had been in power, had been
indulgent to the claims of the Paris sections to a direct and immediate sovereign
liberty of their own. He had been tolerant of insurrectionism, and would not con-
fine the right of resistance to “legal” channels. Now, as spokesman for the Revolu-
tionary Government, he adopted a different tone. In a great speech of February 5,