460 Chapter XIX
1794 in the Convention, he took care to offer definitions of “true” democracy,
which he said the Revolutionary Government meant to introduce, as distinct from
the mistaken democracy with which plausible agitators tried to confuse the
people.
“Democracy,” he said, “is not a state in which the people, continually assembled,
itself directs public affairs; still less is it a state in which a hundred thousand frag-
ments of the people, by contradictory, hasty and isolated measures, should decide
on the destiny of society as a whole. Such a government has never existed, and if it
did could do nothing but throw the people back into despotism.”
This was an admonition to the Paris sections and corresponding local bodies
throughout the country.
“Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws of its own
making, does for itself what it can do well, and by its delegates what it cannot.”^16
This was a vindication of delegated authority, or of the powers which a repre-
sentative democracy should confer on its government. It must be remembered that
the idea of representative democracy was still new and unformulated in Europe,
since “democracy” had hitherto meant a direct democracy feasible in very small
states, and since representative institutions, as they had come down from the Mid-
dle Ages, were linked closely to ideas of social rank and estate.
Robespierre went on to remark, reminding his hearers of the war, that the mili-
tary strength of a democracy lay in the fact that all citizens felt that they fought in
their own interest—and that France was the first “true democracy” granting a full
equality of rights. “That, in my opinion, is the real reason why the tyrants allied
against the Republic will be defeated.”
There were some who could be electrified by such doctrine, others to whom it
seemed remote and unreal. There were some, among the ordinary people, who
hoped for more material benefits from the Revolution. The Committee of Public
Safety devised a new program looking toward an equalization of wealth: property
was now to be confiscated from “suspects” (not only from émigrés and the church
as hitherto), and transferred gratis to “indigent patriots” (not sold to new buyers, as
in the past). This measure failed in its purpose. It made no dramatic impact on the
sans- culottes, who saw nothing new in confiscations from enemies of the state. In
any case the real poor people of the city, whose problems were food shortage and
poor housing, had little to gain from the problematic future ownership of land,
most of it agricultural.
Unrest continued in the Paris sections. Militants resented the loss of initiative.
There was talk of another insurrection or “rising,” or vast popular demonstration
against the Convention, such as had ousted the Brissotins on June 2.
There were “ultras” of another kind against whom the Revolutionary Govern-
ment also turned. These were the foreign revolutionaries and ideologists who
abounded in Paris, who preached universal revolution, and whose real aim was to
use France to liberate their own countries or “the world.” During the Year II,
among the most authentic Jacobins, there was a strong nationalist reaction against
revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The men in the Revolutionary Government, while
16 C. Vellay, ed., Discours et rapports de Robespierre (Paris, 1908), 324–28.