Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/123

Rh were peddled in small quantities by revendeurs or higglers. To control the prices charged by such persons, chiefly women, who made their way into alleys, to the doors of apartments, and to the service entrances of the rich, was practically impossible. The growth of this contraband trade contributed to the unpopularity of a law which was ruinous only to honest butchers and grocers.

In the study of the maximum legislation the close connection between the influence of the Paris radicals and the two laws of September 11 and of September 29 has not been sufficiently emphasized. When late in August it became clear that the first grain maximum was a failure, the tide of sentiment in the Convention seemed to be running against the policy of a maximum. Paris then intervened with demands and menaces. On September 4 the municipal council voted to proceed to the Convention in a body and demand the immediate creation of a "revolutionary army, which should march wherever necessary to thwart the manoeuvres of egoists and forestallers [i. e., grain merchants and farmers], and bring them to justice". Chaumette, speaking for the commune the next day, urged that a guillotine accompany the army, in order that at a blow the lives of intriguers, as well as their plots, should be cut off. This, he said, would force "avarice and cupidity to disgorge the riches of the earth". The agitation to strengthen the food laws and to carry them out rigorously enabled Billaud-Varennes and Collot d'Herbois to force their way into the Committee of Public Safety. The existing members of the committee, if we may judge by the later speeches of Saint Just and Barère, took a critical attitude toward the maximum laws. In the spring of 1794 Barère, speaking in behalf of the committee for the adoption of the new schedules of prices, declared frankly that the original maximum laws were a feature of the "profound system of the counter-revolutionary cabinet of London and Paris". Not many days afterward the committee ordered the arrest of Chaumette, the spokesman of the Paris radicals in the food agitation of September.

These are only a few of the interesting problems the study of which is facilitated by the publications of the Commission. It is to be hoped that the burdens which the war has laid upon France will not fatally hamper the work undertaken by the Commission and its co-operating scholars.