BOOK XVI

I.

In proportion as power snatched from the hands of the king by the Assembly disappeared, it passed into the commune of Paris.  The municipality, that first element of nations which are forming themselves, is also the last asylum of authority when they are crumbling to pieces.  Before it falls quite to the people, power pauses for a moment in the council-chamber of the magistrates of the city.  The Hotel de Ville had become the Tuileries of the people; after La Fayette and Bailly, Petion reigned there:  this man was the king of Paris.  The populace (which has always the instinct of position) called him King Petion.  He had purchased his popularity, first by his private virtues, which the people almost always confound with public virtues, and subsequently by his democratic speeches in the Constituent Assembly.  The skilful balance which he preserved at the Jacobins between the Girondists and Robespierre had rendered him respectable and important.  Friend of Roland, Robespierre, Danton, and Brissot, at the same time suspected of too close connection with Madame de Genlis and the Duc d’Orleans’ party, he still always covered himself with the mantle of proper devotion to order and a superstitious reverence for the constitution.  He had thus all the apparent titles to the esteem of honest men and the respect of factions; but the greatest of all was in his mediocrity.  Mediocrity, it must be confessed, is almost always the brand of these idols of the people:  either that the mob, mediocre itself, has only a taste for what resembles it; or that jealous contemporaries can never elevate themselves sufficiently high towards great characters and great virtues; or that Providence, which distributes gifts and faculties in proportion, will not allow that one man should unite in himself, amidst a free people, these three irresistible powers, virtue, genius, and popularity; or rather, that the constant favour of the multitude is a thing of such a nature that its price is beyond its worth in the eyes of really virtuous men, and that it is necessary to stoop too low to pick it up, and become too weak to retain it.  Petion was only king of the people on condition of being complaisant to its excesses.  His functions as mayor of Paris, in a time of trouble, placed him constantly between the king, the Assembly, and the revolts.  He bearded the king, flattered the Assembly, and pardoned crime.  Inviolable as the capital which he personified in his position of first magistrate of the commune, his unseen dictatorship had no other title than his inviolability, and he used it with respectful boldness towards the king, bowed before the Assembly, and knelt to the malcontents.  To his official reproaches to the rioters, he always added an excuse for crime, a smile for the culprits, encouragement to the misled citizens.  The people loved him as anarchy loves weakness; it knew it could do as it pleased with him.  As mayor, he had the law in his hand; as a man, he had indulgence on his lips and connivance in his heart:  he was just the magistrate required in times of the coups d’etat of the faubourgs.