ABSTRACT
Nous sommes placts entre Vanarchie du terrorisme et celle du royalisme.
FLORENT GUIOT , representative on mission in the Nord
ALL through the autumn of 1793 the Committee of Public Safety consolidated its authority in the Convention and the country at large. The system of government, based on a sovereign assembly and an executive similar to a war cabinet, evolved, in the British way, both by statutory decision and the accumulation of precedent. The Committee's victory of 24th25th September, when it was attacked in the Assembly by malcontents of various persuasions, gave it a measure of control over representatives on mission, who were gradually transformed into its own agents. The decree of 10th October, which shelved the application of the new constitution until peace returned, officially entrusted the Committee with the supervision of ministers, generals and local government. The establishment of a national food commission, under the control of Lindet, on 22nd October, greatly extended its control over the economy and partially centralized the system of requisitioning on which towns and armies increasingly depended for their bread. This process of centralization reached its climax with the important decree of 4th December which was intended to substitute a
unified national policy for the chaotic local initiative of the autumn.1 The Central Government now asserted its complete control over representatives on mission, who were forbidden to delegate their powers and to maintain their own revolutionary armies or impose special taxation without approval from Paris. The powerful Departments were replaced as organs of revolutionary local government by the humbler Districts, to each of which was attached an Agent National, nominated by the Committee. The latter now assumed the power to dismiss elected local government officials and replace them with its own nominees-a threat to their position on the Paris Commune that was not lost on Hebert and Chaumette. Departments, Districts and their comites de surveillance, generals and civil and military courts were each to submit reports to the Central Government every ten days. In this way revolutionary France acquired a bureaucratic organization without parallel in eighteenth-century Europe.2
