The French Revolution, Volume 3 The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4
by
Hippolyte A. Taine

Part 8 out of 12



only four thousand, which is creditable to Paris. - Mallet-Dupan,
II., 52. (cf. "The Revolution," II., 353.) - Gouvion St. Cyr, I.,
137. "In these times, the representatives had organized in Haut-Rhin
what they called a revolutionary army, composed of deserters and all
the vagabonds and scamps they could pick up who had belonged to the
popular club; they dragged along after it what they called judges and
a guillotine." - "Hua, "Souvenirs d'un Avocat," 196.

[151] Riouffe, "Memoires d'un deténue." P.31.

[152] Ibid., "These balls were brought out ostentatiously and shown to
the people beforehand. The tying of our hands and passing three ropes
around our waists did not seem to him sufficient. We kept these irons
on the rest of the route, and they were so heavy that, if the carriage
had tilted to one side, we should inevitably have had our legs broken.
The gate-keepers of the conciergerie of Paris, who had held their
places nine-teen years, were astonished at it."

[153] Archives des Affaires étrangères, vol.331. (Letter of Haupt,
Belfort, Frimaire 13, year II.)

[154] Ibid. (Letter by Desgranges, Bordeaux, Frimaire 10.)

[155] Ibid., vol.332. (Letter of Thiberge, Marseilles, Frimaire 14.)
"I surrounded the town with my small army."

[156] Ibid., 331. (Orders of Representative Bassal, Besançon Frimaire
5.) "No citizen shall keep in his house more than four months'
supplies. . . . Every citizen with more than this will deposit the
surplus in the granary 'd'abondance' provided for the purpose. . .
. Immediately on receipt of the present order, the municipality will
summon all citizens that can thresh and proceed immediately, without
delay, to the threshing-ground, under penalty of being prosecuted as
refractory to the law. . . . The revolutionary army is specially
charged with the execution of the articles of this order, and the
revolutionary tribunals, following this army with the enforcement of
the penalties inflicted according to this order." - Other documents
show us that the revolutionary army, organized in the department of
Doubs and in the five neighboring departments, comprises, in all, two
thousand four hundred men. (Ibid., vol., 1411. Letter of Meyenfeld
to Minister Desforges, Brumaire 27, year II.) - Archives Nationales,
AF., II., 111. (Order of Couthon, Maignet, Chateauneuf, Randon, La
Porte and Albitte, Commune-Affranchie, Brumaire 9, year II.,
establishing in the ten surrounding departments a revolutionary army
of one thousand men per department, for the conscription of grain.
Each army is to be directed by commissioners, strangers to the
department, and is to operate in other departments than in the one
where it is raised.)

[157] Archives des Affaires étrangères, 331. (Letter of Chépy,
Frimaire II.) - Writing one month before this, (Brumaire 6) he says:
"The farmers show themselves very hostile against the towns and the
law of the maximum. Nothing can be done without a revolutionary
army."

[158] Mercier, "Paris Pendant la Révolution," I., 357.

[159] Hua, 197. I do not find in any printed or manuscript document
but one case of resistance, that of the brothers Chaperon, in the
hamlet of Leges, near Sens, who declare that they have no wheat except
for their own use, and who defend themselves by the use of a gun. The
gendarmerie not being strong enough to overcome them, the tocsin is
sounded and the National Guard of Sens and the neighborhood is
summoned; bringing cannon, the affair ends with the burning of the
house. The two brothers are killed. Before being overcome, however,
they had struck down the captain of the National Guard of Sens and
killed or wounded nearly forty of their assailants. A surviving
brother and a sister are guillotined. (June, 1794. Wallon, IV.,
352.)

[160] Moniteur, XVIII., 663. (Session of Frimaire 24, report by
Lecointre.) "The communes of Thieux, Jully and many others were
victims to their brigandage." - "The stupor in the country is such
that the poor sufferers dare not complain of these vexations because,
they say, they are only too lucky to have escaped with their lives." -
This time, however, these public brigands made a mistake. Gibbon's
son happens to be Lecointre's tenant farmer. Moreover, it is only
accidentally that he mentions the circumstance to his landlord; "he
came to see him for another purpose." - Cf. "The Revolution," vol.
II., 302. (There is a similar scene in the house of one Ruelle, a
farmer, in the commune of Lisse.)

[161] Passim Alfred Lallier, "Le sans-culotte Goullin." - Wallon,
"Histoire du Tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris," V., 368. (Deposition
of Lacaille.) - In addition to this, the most extraordinary monsters
are met with in other administrative bodies, for example, in Nantes, a
Jean d'Héron, tailor, who becomes inspector of military stores.
"After the rout at Clisson, says the woman Laillet, he appeared in the
popular club with a brigand's ear attached to his hat by way of
cockade. His pockets were full of ears, which he took delight in
making the women kiss. He exposed other things which he made them
kiss and the woman Laillet adds certain details which I dare not
transcribe." (" Le patriote d'Héron," by L. de la Sicotière, pp.9 and
10. Deposition of the woman Laillet, fish-dealer, also the testimony
of Mellinet, vol. VIII., p.256.)

[162] Wallon, V., 368. (Deposition of de Laillet.)

[163] Ibid., V., 37'. (Deposition of Tabouret.)

[164] Ibid., V., 373. (Deposition of Mariotte.)

[165] Monieur, XXII., 321. (Deposition of Philippe Troncjolly.) -
Berryat Saint-Prix, "La Justice Révolutionnaire," 39.

[166] Campardon, "Histoire du Tribunal Révolutionnaire," II., 30.
They have ten francs a day, and full powers conferred on them.
(Orders of Carrier and Francastel, October 28, 1793.) "The
representatives. . . . confer collectively and individually, on
each member of the revolutionary company, the right of surveillance
over all 'suspect' citizens in Nantes, over strangers who come to or
reside there, over monopolists of every sort. . . . The right to
make domiciliary visits wherever they may deem it advisable. . . .
The armed force will everywhere respond to the demands made upon it in
the name of the company, or of any individual member composing it." -
Berryat Saint-Prix, p. 42. - Alfred Lallier, " Les Noyades de
Nantes," p.20. (Deposition of Gauthier.) Ibid., p.22. "Damn,"
exclaims Carrier, "I kept that execution for Lamberty. I'm sorry that
it was done by others."

[167] Alfred Lallier, ibid., pp.21 and 90. - Cf. Moniteur, XXII.,
331. (Deposition of Victoire Abraham.) "The drowners made quite free
with the women, even using them for their own purposes when pleased
with them, which women, in token of their kindness, enjoyed the
precious advantage of not being drowned."

[168] Campardon, II., 8. (Deposition of Commeret.) - Berryat Saint-
Prix, p. 42.-Ibid., p.28. Other agents of Carrier, Fouquet and
Lamberty, were condemned specially, "for having saved from national
vengeance Madame de Martilly and her maid . . . They shared the
woman Martilly and the maid between them." In connection with the
"dainty taste" of Jacobins for silk dresses M. Berryat Saint-Prix
cites the following answer of a Jacobin of 1851 to the judge
d'instruction of Rheims; on the objection being made to him that the
Republic, as he understood it, could not last long, he replied:
"Possibly, but say it lasts three months. That's long enough to fill
one's pocket and belly and rumple silk dresses?" Another of the same
species said in 1871: "We shall anyhow have a week's use of it."
Observers of human nature will find analogous details in the history
of the Sepoy rebellion in India against the English in 1803, also in
the history of the Indians in the United States. The September
massacres in Paris and the history of the combat of 1791 and 1792 have
already provided us with the same characteristic documents.

[169] Alfred Lallier, "Les Fusillades de Nantes," P.23. (Depositions
of Picard, commander of the National Guards of the escort. - Cf. the
depositions of Jean Jounet, paver, and of Henri Ferdinand, joiner.)

[170] Sauzay, "Histoire de la Persécution Révolutionnaire dans le
Département du Doubs," VII., 687. (Letter of Grégoire, December 24,
1796.) "An approximative calculation makes the number of the authors
of so many crimes three hundred thousand, for in each commune there
were about five or six of these ferocious brutes who, named Brutus,
perfected the art of removing seals, drowning and cutting throats.
They consumed immense amounts in constructing 'Mountains,' in
reveling, and in fetes every three months which, after the first
parade, became parodies, represented by three or four actors in them,
and with no audience. These consisted, finally, of a drum-beater and
the musical officer; and the latter, ashamed of himself, often
concealed his scarf in his pocket, on his way to the Temple of Reason.
. . . But these 300 000 brigands had 2 or 300 directors, members of
the National convention, who cannot be called anything but scoundrels,
since the language provides no other epithet so forcible."


BOOK FOURTH. The Governed.

CHAPTER I. The Oppressed.

I. Revolutionary Destruction.

Magnitude of revolutionary destructiveness. - The four ways of
effecting it. - Expulsion from the country through forced emigration
and legal banishment. - Number of those expelled. - Privation of
liberty. - Different sorts of imprisonment. - Number and situation
of those imprisoned. - Murders after being tried, or without trial.
- Number of those guillotined or shot after trial. - Indication of
the number of other lives destroyed. - Necessity and plan for wider
destruction. - Spoliation. - Its extent. - Squandering. - Utter
losses. - Ruin of individuals and the State. - The Notables the most
oppressed.

The object of the Jacobin, first of all, is the destruction of his
adversaries, avowed or presumed, probable or possible. Four violent
measures concur, together or in turn, to bring about the physical or
social extermination of all Frenchmen who no longer belong to the sect
or the party.

The first operation consists in expelling them from the territory. -
Since 1789, they have been chased off through a forced emigration;
handed over to jacqueries, or popular uprisings, in the country, and
to insurrections in the cities,[1] defenseless and not allowed to
defend themselves, three-fourths of them have left France, simply to
escape popular brutalities against which neither the law nor the
government afforded them any protection. According as the law and the
administration, in becoming more Jacobin, became more hostile to them,
so did they leave in greater crowds. After the 10th of August and 2nd
of September, the flight necessarily was more general; for,
henceforth, if any one persisted in remaining after that date it was
with the almost positive certainty that he would be consigned to a
prison, to await a massacre or the guillotine. About the same time,
the law added to the fugitive the banished, all unsworn priests,
almost an entire class consisting of nearly 40 000 persons.[2] It is
calculated that, on issuing from the reign of Terror, the total number
of fugitives and banished) amounted to 150 000[3] the list would have
been still larger, had not the frontier been guarded by patrols and
one had to cross it at the risk of one's life; and yet, many do risk
their lives in attempting to cross it, in disguise, wandering about at
night, in mid-winter, exposed to gunshots, determined to escape cost
what it will, into Switzerland, Italy, or Germany, and even into
Hungary, in quest of security and the right of praying to God as one
pleases.[4] - If any exiled or deported person ventures to return, he
is tracked like a wild beast, and, as soon as taken, he is
guillotined.[5] For example, M. de Choiseul, and other unfortunates,
wrecked and cast ashore on the coast of Normandy, are not sufficiently
protected by the law of nations. They are brought before a military
commission; saved temporarily through public commiseration, they
remain in prison until the First Consul intervenes between them and
the homicidal law and consents, through favor, to deport them to the
Dutch frontier. - If they have taken up arms against the Republic
they are cut off from humanity; a Pandour[6] taken prisoner is treated
as a man; an émigré made prisoner is treated like a wolf - they shoot
him on the spot. In some cases, even the pettiest legal formalities
are dispensed with.
"When I am lucky enough to catch 'em," writes Gen. Vandamme, "I do
not trouble the military commission to try them. They are already
tried - my saber and pistols do their business."[7]

The second operation consists in depriving "suspects" of their
liberty, of which deprivation there are several degrees; there are
various ways of getting hold of people. - Sometimes, the "suspect" is
"adjourned," that is to say, the order of arrest is simply suspended;
he lives under a perpetual menace that is generally fulfilled; he
never knows in the morning that he will not sleep in a prison that
night. Sometimes, he is put on the limits of his commune. Sometimes,
he is confined to his house with or without guards, and, in the former
case, he is obliged to pay them. Again, finally, and which occurs
most frequently, he is shut up in this or that common jail. - In the
single department of Doubs, twelve hundred men and women are
"adjourned;" three hundred put on the limits of the commune, fifteen
hundred confined to their houses, and twenty two hundred
imprisoned.[8] In Paris, thirty-six such prisons and more than
"violins", or temporary jails, soon filled by the revolutionary
committees, do not suffice for the service.[9] It is estimated that,
in France, not counting more than 40,000 provisional jails, twelve
hundred prisons, full and running over, contain each more than two
hundred inmates.[10] At Paris, notwithstanding the daily void created
by the guillotine, the number of the imprisoned on Floréal 9, year
II., amounts to 7,840; and, on Messidor 25 following, notwithstanding
the large batches of 50 and 60 persons led in one day, and every day,
to the scaffold, the number is still 7,502.[11] There are more than
one thousand persons in the prisons of Arras, more than one thousand
five hundred in those of Toulouse, more than three thousand in those
of Strasbourg, and more than thirteen thousand in those of Nantes. In
the two departments alone of Bouches du-Rhône and Vaucluse,
Representative Maignet, who is on the spot, reports from 12,000 to
15,000 arrests.[12] "A little before Thermidor," says Representative
Beaulieu, "the number of incarcerated arose to nearly 400,000, as is
apparent on the lists and registers then before the Committee of
General Security."[13] - Among these poor creatures, there are
children, and not alone in the prisons of Nantes where the
revolutionary searches have collected the whole of the rural
population; in the prisons of Arras, among twenty similar cases, I
find a coal-dealer and his wife with their seven sons and daughters,
from seventeen down to six years of age; a widow with her four
children from nineteen down to twelve years of age; another noble
widow with her nine children, from seventeen down to three years of
age, and six children, without father or mother, from twenty-three
down to nine years of age.[14] - These prisoners of State were
treated, almost everywhere, worse than robbers and assassins under the
ancient régime. They began by subjecting them to rapiotage, that is
to say, stripping them naked or, at best, feeling their bodies under
their shirts; women and young girls fainted away under this
examination, formerly confined to convicts on entering the bagnio.[15]
- Frequently, before consigning them to their dungeons or shutting
them up in their cells, they would be left two or three nights pell-
mell in a lower hall on benches, or in the court on the pavement,
"without beds or straw." "The feelings are wounded in all directions,
every point of sensibility, so to say, being played upon. They are
deprived one after the other of their property, assignats, furniture,
and food, of daylight and lamp-light, of the assistance which their
wants and infirmities demand, of a knowledge of public events, of all
communication, either immediate or written, with fathers, sons and
husbands."[16] They are obliged to pay for their lodgings, their
keepers, and for what they eat; they are robbed at their very doors of
the supplies they send for outside; they are compelled to eat at a
mess-table; they are furnished with scant and nauseous food, "spoilt
codfish, putrid herrings and meat, rotten vegetables, all this
accompanied with a mug of Seine water colored red with some drug or
other."[17] They starve them, bully them, and vex them purposely as if
they meant to exhaust their patience and drive them into a revolt, so
as to get rid of them in a mass, or, at least, to justify the
increasing rapid strokes of the guillotine. They are huddled together
in tens, twenties and thirties, in one room at La Force, "eight in a
chamber, fourteen feet square," where all the beds touch, and many
overlap each other, where two out of the eight inmates are obliged to
sleep on the floor, where vermin swarm, where the closed sky-lights,
the standing tub, and the crowding together of bodies poisons the
atmosphere. - In many places, the proportion of the sick and dying is
greater than in the hold of a slave-ship. "Of ninety individuals with
whom I was shut up two months ago," writes a prisoner at Strasbourg,
"sixty-six were taken to the hospital in the space of eight days."[18]
In the prisons of Nantes, 3000 out 13,000 prisoners die of typhoid
fever and of the rot in two months.[19] 400 priests[20] confined on a
vessel between decks, in the roadstead of Aix, stowed on top of each
other, wasted with hunger, eaten up by vermin, suffocated for lack of
air, half-frozen, beaten, mocked at, and constantly threatened with
death, suffer still more than Negroes in a slave-hold; for, through
interest in his freight, the captain of the slaver tries to keep his
human consignment in good health, whilst, through revolutionary
fanaticism, the crew of the Aix vessel detests its cargo of "black-
frocks" and would gladly send them to the bottom. - According to this
system, which, up to Thermidor 9, grows worse and worse, imprisonment
becomes a torture, oftentimes mortal, slower and more painful than the
guillotine, and to such an extent that, to escape it, Champfort opens
his veins and Condorcet swallows poison.[21]The third expedient
consists of murder, with or without trial. - 178 tribunals, of which
40 are ambulatory, pronounce in every part of the territory sentences
of death which are immediately executed on the spot.[22] Between
April 6, 1793, and Thermidor 9, year II., (July 27th, 1794) that of
Paris has 2,625 persons guillotined,[23] while the provincial judges
do as much work as the Paris judges. In the small town of Orange
alone, they guillotine 331 persons. In the single town of Arras they
have 299 men and 93 women guillotined. At Nantes, the revolutionary
tribunals and military committees have, on the average, 100 persons a
day guillotined, or shot, in all 1,971. In the city of Lyons the
revolutionary committee admit 1,684, while Cadillot, one of
Robespierre's correspondents, advises him of 6,000.[24] - The
statement of these murders is not complete, but 17,000 have been
enumerated,[25] "most of them effected without any formality, evidence
or direct charge," among others the murder of "more than 1200 women,
several of whom were octogenarians and infirm;"[26] particularly the
murder of 60 women or young girls, condemned to death, say the
warrants, for having attended the services of unsworn priests, or for
having neglected the services of a sworn priest.

"The accused, ranged in order, were condemned at sight. Hundreds of
death-sentences took about a minute per head. Children of seven, five
and four years of age, were tried. A father was condemned for the
son, and the son for the father. A dog was sentenced to death. A
parrot was brought forward as a witness. Numbers of accused persons
whose sentences could not be written out were executed."

At Angers, the sentences of over four hundred men and three hundred
and sixty women, executed for the purpose of relieving the prisons,
were mentioned on the registers simply by the letters S or G (shot or
guillotined).[27] At Paris, as in the provinces, the slightest
pretext[28] served to constitute a crime. The daughter of the
celebrated painter, Joseph Vernet,[29] was guillotined for being a "
receiver," for having kept fifty pounds of candles in her house,
distributed among the employees of La Muette by the liquidators of the
civil list. Young de Maillé,[30] aged sixteen years, was guillotined
as a conspirator, "for having thrown a rotten herring in the face of
his jailer, who had served it to him to eat." Madame de Puy-Verin was
guillotined as "guilty" because she had not taken away from her deaf,
blind and senile husband a bag of card-counters, marked with the royal
effigy. - In default of any pretext,[31] there was the supposition of
a conspiracy; blank lists were given to paid emissaries, who undertook
to search the various prisons and select the requisite number of
heads; they wrote names down on them according to their fancy, and
these provided the batches for the guillotine.

"As for myself," said the juryman Vilate, "I am never embarrassed. I
am always convinced. In a revolution, all who appear before this
tribunal ought to be condemned." -

At Marseilles, the Brutus Commission,[32] "sentencing without public
prosecutor or jurymen, sent to the prisons for those it wished to put
to death. After having demanded their names, professions and wealth
they were sent down to a cart standing at the door of the Palais de
Justice; the judges then stepped out on the balcony and pronounced the
death-sentence." The same proceedings took place at Cambrai, Arras,
Nantes, Le Mans, Bordeaux, Nîmes, Lyons, Strasbourg, and elsewhere. -
Evidently, the judicial comedy is simply a parade; they make use of it
as one of the respectable means, among others less respectable, to
exterminate people whose opinions are not what they should be, or who
belong to the proscribed classes;[33] Samson, at Paris, and his
colleagues in the provinces, the execution-platoons of Lyons and
Nantes, are simply the collaborators of murderers properly so called,
while legal massacres complete other massacres pure and simple.

Of this latter description, the fusillades of Toulon come first, where
the number of those who are shot largely surpasses one thousand;[34]
next the great drownings of Nantes, in which 4,800 men, women and
children perished,[35] the other drownings, for which no figures may
be given;[36] then the countless popular murders committed in France
between July 14, 1789, and August 10, 1792; the massacre of one 1,300
prisoners in Paris, in September, 1792; the long train of
assassinations which, in July, August and September, 1789, extends
over the entire territory; finally, the dispatch of the prisoners,
either shot or sabered, without trial at Lyons and in the West. Even
excepting those who had died fighting or who, taken with arms in their
hands, were shot down or sabered on the spot, there were 10,000
persons slaughtered without trial in the province of Anjou alone:[37]
accordingly, the instructions of the Committee of Public Safety, also
the written orders of Carrier and Francastel, direct generals to
"bleed freely" the insurgent districts,[38] and spare not a life: it
is estimated that, in the eleven western departments, the dead of both
sexes and of all ages exceeded 400,000.[39] - Considering the program
and principles of the Jacobin sect this is no great number; they might
have killed a good many more. But time was wanting; during their
short reign they did what they could with the instrument in their
hands. Look at their machine, the gradual construction of its parts,
the successive stages of its operation from its starting up to
Thermidor 9, and see how limited the period of its operation was.
Organized March 30 and April 6, 1793, the Revolutionary Committees and
the Revolutionary Tribunal had but seventeen months in which to do
their work. They did not drive ahead with all their might until after
the fall of the Girondists, and especially after September, 1763 that
is to say for a period of eleven months. Its loose wheels were not
screwed up and the whole was not in running order under the impulse of
the central motor until after December, 1793, that is to say during
eight months. Perfected by the law of Prairial 22, it works for the
past two months, faster and better than before, with an energy and
rapidity that increase from week to week. - At that date, and even
before it, the theorists have taken the bearings of their destinies
and accepted the conditions of their undertaking. Being sectarians,
they have a faith, and as orthodoxy tolerates no heresy, and as the
conversion of heretics is never sincere or durable, heresy can be
suppressed only by suppressing heretics. "It is only the dead," said
Barère, Messidor 16, "who never return." On the 2nd and 3rd of
Thermidor,[40] the Committee of Public Safety sends to Fouquier-
Tinville a list of four hundred and seventy-eight accused persons with
orders "to bring the parties named to trial at once." Baudot and Jean
Bon St. Andre, Carrier, Antonelle and Guifroy, had already estimated
the lives to be taken at several millions and, according to Collot d'
Herbois, who had a lively imagination, "the political perspiration
should go on freely, and not stop until from twelve to fifteen million
Frenchmen had been destroyed."[41]

To make amends, in the fourth and last division of their work, that is
to say, in spoliation, they went to the last extreme: they did all
that could be done to ruin individuals, families and the State;
whatever could be taken, they took. - The Constituent and Legislative
Assemblies had, on their side, begun the business by abolishing tithes
and all feudal rights without indemnity, and by confiscating all
ecclesiastical property; the Jacobin operators continue and complete
the job; we have seen by what decrees and with what hostility against
collective and individual property, whether they attribute to the
State the possession of all corporations whatever, even laic, such as
colleges, schools and scientific or literary societies, hospitals and
communes, or whether they despoil individuals, indirectly through
assignats and the maximum, or directly through the forced loan,
revolutionary taxes,[42] seizures of gold and silver coin,
requisitions of common useful utensils,[43] sequestrations of
prisoners' property, confiscations of the possessions of emigrants and
exiles and of those deported or condemned to death. No capital
invested in real or personal property, no income in money or produce,
whatever its source, whether leases, mortgages, private credits,
pensions, agricultural, industrial or commercial gains, the fruits of
economy or labor, from the farmers', the manufacturers' and the
merchant's stores to the robes, coats, shirts and shoes, even to the
beds and bed-rooms of private individuals - nothing escapes their
rapacious grasp: in the country, they carry off even seed reserved for
planting; at Strasbourg and in the Upper Rhine, all kitchen utensils;
in Auvergne and elsewhere, even the shepherd's pots. Every object of
value, even those not in public use, comes under requisition: for
instance,[44] the Revolutionary Committee of Bayonne seizes a lot of
"cotton cloth and muslin," under the pretext of making "breeches for
the country's defenders." On useful objects being taken it is not
always certain that they will be utilized; between their seizure and
putting them to service, robbery and waste intervene. At
Strasbourg,[45] on a requisition being threatened by the
representatives, the inhabitants strip themselves and, in a few days,
bring to the municipality "6,879 coats, breeches and vests, 4,767
pairs of stockings, 16,921 pairs of shoes, 863 pairs of boots, 1351
cloaks, 20,518 shirts, 4,524 hats, 523 pairs of gaiters, 143 skin
vests, 2,673, 900 blankets, besides 29 quintals of lint, 21 quintals
of old linen, and a large number of other articles."

But "most of these articles remain piled up in the storehouses, part
of them rotten, or eaten by rats, the rest being abandoned to the
first-comer. . . . The end of spoliation was attained." - Utter
loss to individuals and no gain, or the minimum of a gain, to the
State. Such is the net result of the revolutionary government. After
having laid its hand on three-fifths of the landed property of France;
after having wrested from communities and individuals from ten to
twelve billions of real and personal estate; after having increased,
through assignats and territorial warrants, the public debt, which was
not five billions in 1789, to more than fifty billions;[46] no longer
able to pay its employees; reduced to supporting its armies as well as
itself by forced contributions on conquered territories, it ends in
bankruptcy; it repudiates two-thirds of its debt, and its credit is so
low that the remaining third which it has consolidated and guaranteed
afresh, loses eighty-three per cent. the very next day. In its
hands, the State has itself suffered as much as the private
individuals. - Of the latter, more than 1 200 000 have suffered
physically: several millions, all who owned anything, great or small,
have suffered through their property.[47] But, in this multitude of
the oppressed, it is the notables who are chiefly aimed at and who, in
their possessions as well as in their persons, have suffered the most.



II. The Value of Notables in Society.

Various kinds and degrees of Notables in 1789. - The great social
staff. - Men of the world. - Their breeding. - Their intellectual
culture. - Their humanity and philanthropy. - Their moral temper. -
Practical men. - Where recruited, - Their qualifications. - Their
active benevolence. - Scarcity of them and their worth to a
community.

On estimating the value of a forest you begin by dividing its
vegetation into two classes; on the one hand the full-grown trees, the
large or medium-sized oaks, beeches and aspens, and, on the other, the
saplings and the undergrowth. In like manner, in estimating society,
you divide the individuals composing it into two groups, one
consisting of its notables of every kind and degree, and the other, of
the common run of men. If the forest is an old one and has not been
too badly managed, nearly the whole of its secular growth is found in
its clusters of full-grown trees. Nearly all the useful wood is to be
found in the mature forest. A few thousand large handsome trees and
the three or four hundred thousand saplings, young and old, of the
reserve, contain more useful and valuable wood than the twenty or
thirty millions shrubs, bushes and heathers put together. It is the
same in a community which has existed for a long time under a
tolerably strict system of justice and police; almost the entire gain
of a secular civilization is found concentrated in its notables,
which, taking it all in all, was the state of French society in
1789.[48]

Let us first consider the most prominent personages. - It is
certain, that, among the aristocracy, the wealthiest and most
conspicuous families had ceased to render services proportionate to
the cost of their maintenance. Most of the seigniors and ladies of
the Court, the worldly bishops, abbés, and parliamentarians of the
drawing-room, knew but little more than how to solicit with address,
make a graceful parade of themselves and spend lavishly. An ill-
understood system of culture had diverted them from their natural
avocations, and converted them into showy and agreeable specimens of
vegetation, often hollow, blighted, sapless and over-pruned, besides
being very costly, over-manured and too freely watered; and the
skillful gardening which shaped, grouped and arranged them in
artificial forms and bouquets, rendered their fruit abortive that
flowers might be multiplied. - But the flowers were exquisite, and
even in a moralist's eyes, such flowering counts for something. On
the side of civility, good-breeding and deportment, the manners and
customs of high life had reached a degree of perfection, which never,
in France or elsewhere, had been attained before, and which has never
since been revived;[49] and of all the arts through which men have
emancipated themselves from primitive coarseness, that which teaches
them mutual consideration is, perhaps, the most precious. The
observance of this, not alone in the drawing-room, but in the family,
in business, in the street, with regard to relatives, inferiors,
servants and strangers, gives dignity, as well as a charm, to human
intercourse. Delicate regard for what is proper becomes a habit, an
instinct, a second nature, which nature, superimposed on the original
nature, is the best, inasmuch as the internal code which governs each
detail of action and speech, prescribes the standard of behavior and
respect for oneself, as well as respect and refined behavior towards
others. - To this merit, add mental culture. Never was there an
aristocracy so interested in general ideas and refinement of
expression; it was even too much so; literary and philosophical
preoccupation excluded all others of the positive and practical order;
they talked, instead of acting. But, in this limited circle of
speculative reason and of pure literary forms, it excelled; writings
and how to write furnished the ordinary entertainment of polite
society; every idea uttered by a thinker caused excitement in the
drawing-room: the talent and style of authors were shaped by its
taste;[50] it was in the drawing-rooms that Montesquieu, Voltaire,
Rousseau, d'Alembert, the Encyclopedists, great and little,
Beaumarchais, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Champfort, and Rivarol,
involuntarily sought listeners and found them, not merely admirers and
entertainers, but friends, protectors, patrons, benefactors and
followers. - Under the instruction of the masters, the disciples had
become philanthropists; moreover, the amenities of manners developed
in all souls compassion and benevolence: "Nothing was more dreaded by
opulent men than to be regarded as insensitive."[51] They concerned
themselves with children, with the poor, with the peasantry, setting
their wits to work to afford them relief; their zeal was aroused
against oppression, their pity was excited for every misfortune. Even
those whose duties compelled them to be rigid tempered their rigidity
with explanations or concessions.

"Ten years before the Revolution," says Rœderer,[52] "the criminal
courts of France were no longer like before. . . . Their attitude
had changed. . . All the young magistrates, and this I can bear
witness to, for I was one myself, pronounced judgments more in
accordance with the principles of Beccaria,[53] than according to
law." -

As to the men in authority, military administrators and commandants,
it was impossible to be more patient, more mindful of human blood.
Their qualities turned also here into defects, for, through excess of
humanity, they were unable to maintain order, as is evident when
facing the insurrections that took place between 1789 and 1792. Even
with the force in their own hands, amidst gross insults and extreme
dangers, they dreaded to make use of it; they could not bring
themselves to repressing brutes, rascals and maniacs: following the
example of Louis XVI., they considered themselves as shepherds of the
people, and let themselves be trampled upon rather than fire upon
their flock. - In reality, they had noble, and even generous and big
hearts: in the bailiwick assemblies, in March, 1789, long before the
night of August 4, they voluntarily surrendered every pecuniary
privilege; under severe trials, their courage, heightened by polished
manners, adds even to their heroism, elegance, tact and gaiety. The
most corrupt, a Duke of Orleans, the most frivolous and the most
blasé, a Duc de Biron, meet death with stoical coolness and
disdain.[54] Delicate women who complain of a draught in their
drawing-rooms, make no complaint of a straw mattress in a damp, gloomy
dungeon, where they sleep in their clothes so that they may not wake
up stiffened, and they come down into the court of the Conciergerie
with their accustomed cheerfulness. Men and women, in prison, dress
themselves as formerly, with the same care, that they may meet and
talk together with the same grace and spirit, in a corridor with an
iron grating within a step of the revolutionary Tribunal, and on the
eve of the scaffold.[55] -- This moral temper is evidently of the
rarest; if it errs on either side it is on that of being too refined,
bad for use, good for ornament.

And yet, in the upper class there were associated with two or three
thousand idlers amongst a frivolous aristocracy, as many serious men,
who, to their drawing-room experience, added experience in business.
Almost all who held office or had been in the service, were of this
number, either ambassadors, general officers or former ministers, from
Marshal de Brogue down to Machaut and Malesherbes; resident bishops,
like Monseigneur de Durfort, at Besançon;[56] vicars-general and
canons who really governed their dioceses on the spot; prelates, like
those in Provence, Languedoc and Brittany, who, by right, had seats in
the provincial "Etats", agents and representatives of the clergy at
Paris; heads of Orders and Congregations; the chief and lieutenant
commandants of the seventeen military departments, intendants of each
generalité head-clerks of each ministry, magistrates of each
parliament, farmers-general, collectors-general, and, more
particularly in each province, the dignitaries and local proprietors
of the two first orders, and all leading manufacturers, merchants,
ship-owners, bankers and prominent bourgeois; in short, that élite of
the nobles, clergy, and Third Estate, which, from 1778 to 1789,
constituted the twenty-one provincial assemblies, and which certainly
formed in France the great social staff. - Not that they were
superior politicians: for in those days there were none, scarcely a
few hundred competent men, almost all of them being specialists.
Nevertheless, it was in these few men that nearly the entire political
capacity, information and common sense of France was to be found.
Outside of their heads the other twenty-six millions of brains
contained but little else than dangerous and barren formulas; as they
alone had commanded, negotiated, deliberated and governed, they were
the only ones who understood men and things tolerably well, and,
consequently, the only ones who were not completely disqualified for
their management. In the provincial Assemblies they were seen
originating and conducting the most important reforms; they had
devoted themselves to these effectively and conscientiously, with as
much equity and patriotism as intelligence and thoroughness; most of
the heads and sub-heads of the leading public and private branches of
the service, guided by philosophy and supported by current opinion for
twenty years, had likewise given evidence of active benevolence.[57] -
Nothing is more precious than men of this stamp, for they are the life
and soul of their respective branches of service, and are not to be
replaced in one lot, at a given moment, by persons of equal merit. In
diplomacy, in the finances, in judicature, in administration, in
extensive commerce and large manufacturing, a practical, governing
capacity is not created in a day; affairs in all these are too vast
and too complicated; there are too many diverse interests to take into
account, too many near and remote contingencies to foresee; lacking a
knowledge of technical details, it is difficult to grasp the whole;
one tries to make short work of it, one shatters right and left and
ends with the sword, obliged to fall back on systematic brutality to
complete the work of audacious bungling. Except in war, where
apprenticeship takes less time than elsewhere, ten years of
preparatory education plus ten years of practical experience are
required for the good government of men and the management of capital
assets. Add to this, against the temptations of power which are
strong, a stability of character established through professional
honor, and, if it so happens, by family traditions.

After having directed financial matters for two years, Cambon[58] is
not yet aware that the functions of the fermiers-généraux of indirect
taxes differ from those of the receveurs-géneraux of direct taxes;[59]
accordingly, he includes, or allows to be included, the forty-eight
receveurs in the decree which sends the sixty fermiers before the
revolutionary Tribunal, that is to say, to the guillotine; and, in
fact, all of them would have been sent there had not a man familiar
with the business, Gaudin, Commissioner of the Treasury, heard the
decree proclaimed in the street and run to explain to the Committee on
Finances that "there was nothing in common" between the two groups of
outlaws; that the fermiers were holders of leases on probable profits
while the receveurs were paid functionaries at a fixed salary, and the
crimes of the former, proved or not proved, were not imputable to the
latter. Great astonishment on the part of these improvised
financiers! "They make an outcry," says Gaudin, "and assert that I am
mistaken. I insist, and repeat what I have told the President,
Cambon; I affirm on says to one of the members, 'Since that is so, go
to the bureau of procès-verbaux and scratch out the term receveurs-
généraux from the decree passed this morning.' my honor and offer to
furnish them the proof of it; finally, they are satisfied and the
President " - Such are the gross blunders committed by interlopers,
and even carried out, when not warned and restrained by veterans in
the service. Cambon, accordingly, in spite of the Jacobins, retains
in his bureaux all whom he can among veteran officials. If Carnot
manages the war well, it is owing to his being himself an educated
officer and to maintaining in their positions d'Arcon, d'Obenheim, de
Grimoard, de Montalembert and Marescot, all eminent men bequeathed to
him by the ancient régime.[60} Reduced, before the 9th of Thermidor,
to perfect nullity, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not again to
become useful and active until the professional diplomats, Miot,
Colchen, Otto and Reinhart,[61] resume their ascendancy and influence.
It is a professional diplomat, Barthélemy, who, after the 9th of
Thermidor, really directs the foreign policy of the Convention, and
brings about the peace of Basle.

III. The three classes of Notables.

The Nobility. - Its physical and moral preparation through feats of
arms. - The military spirit. - High character. - Conduct of
officers in 1789-1792. - Service for which these nobles were adapted.

Three classes, the nobles, the clergy and the bourgeoisie, provided
this superior élite, and, compared with the rest of the nation, they
themselves formed an élite. - Thirty thousand gentlemen, scattered
through the provinces, had been brought up from infancy to the
profession of arms; generally poor, they lived on their rural estates
without luxuries, comforts or curiosity, in the society of wood-
rangers and game-keepers, frugally and with rustic habits, in the open
air, in such a way as to ensure robust constitutions. A child, at six
years of age, mounted a horse; he followed the hounds, and hardened
himself against inclemencies;[62] afterwards, in the academies, he
rendered his limbs supple by exercise and obtained that rugged health
which is necessary for living under a tent and following a campaign.
From early childhood, he was imbued with a military spirit; his father
and uncles at table talked of nothing but their perils in war and
feats of arms; his imagination took fire; he got accustomed to looking
upon their pursuits as the only ones worthy of a man of rank and
feeling, and he plunged ahead with a precocity which we no longer
comprehend. I have read many records of the service of gentlemen who
were assassinated, guillotined or emigrés; they nearly always began
their careers before the age of sixteen, often at fourteen, thirteen
and eleven.[63] M. des Echerolles,[64] captain in the Poitou
regiment, had brought along with him into the army his only son, aged
nine, and a dozen little cousins of the same age. Those children
fought like old soldiers; one of them had his leg fractured by a ball;
young des Echerolles received a saber stroke which cut away his cheek
from the ear to the upper lip, and he was wounded seven times; still
young, he received the cross of St. Louis. To serve the State, seek
conflict and expose one's life, seemed an obligation of their rank, a
hereditary debt; out of nine or ten thousand officers who discharged
this debt most of them cared only for this and looked for nothing
beyond. Without fortune and without influence, they had renounced
promotion, fully aware that the higher ranks were reserved for the
heirs of great families and the courtiers at Versailles. After
serving fifteen or twenty years, they returned home with a captain's
commission and the cross of St. Louis, sometimes with a small
pension, contented with having done their duty and conscious of their
own honor. On the approach of the Revolution, this old spirit,
illumined by the new ideas, became an almost civic virtue:[65] we have
seen how they behaved between 1789 and 1792, their moderation, their
forbearance, their sacrifice of self-love, their abnegation and their
stoical impassability, their dislike to strike, the coolness with
which they persisted in receiving without returning blows, and in
maintaining, if not public order, at least the last semblance of it.
Patriots as much as soldiers, through birth, education and conviction,
they formed a natural, special nursery, eminently worthy of
preserving, inasmuch as it furnished society with ready-made
instruments for defense, internally against rascals and brutes, and
externally against the enemy. Less calm in disposition and more given
to pleasure than the rural nobles of Prussia, under slacker discipline
and in the midst of greater worldliness, but more genial, more
courteous and more liberal-minded, the twenty-six thousand noble
families of France upheld in their sons the traditions and prejudices,
the habits and aptitudes, those energies of body, heart and mind[66]
through which the Prussian "junkers" were able to constitute the
Prussian army, organize the German army and make Germany the first
power of Europe.

IV. The Clergy.

Where recruited. - Professional inducements. - Independence of
ecclesiastics. - Their substantial merits. - Their theoretical and
practical information. - Their distribution over the territory. -
Utility of their office. - Their conduct in 1790-1800. - Their
courage, their capacity for self-sacrifice.

Likewise in the Church where nearly all its staff, the whole of the
lower and middle-class clergy, curés, vicars, canons and collegiate
chaplains, teachers or directors of schools, colleges and seminaries,
more than sixty-five thousand ecclesiastics, formed a healthy, well
organized body, worthily fulfilling its duties.

"I do not know," says de Tocqueville,[67] "all in all, and
notwithstanding the vices of some of its members, if there ever was in
the world a more remarkable clergy than the Catholic clergy of France
when the Revolution took them by surprise, more enlightened, more
national, less entrenched behind their private virtues, better endowed
with public virtues, and, at the same time, more strong in the faith.
. . . I began the study of the old social system full of prejudices
against them; I finish it full of respect for them."

And first, which is a great point, most of the incumbents in the town
parishes, in the three hundred collegial churches, in the small
canonicates of the cathedral chapters, belonged to better families
than at the present day.[68] Children were then more numerous, not
merely among the peasants, but among the inferior nobles and the upper
bourgeoisie; each family, accordingly, was glad to have one of its
sons take orders, and no constraint was necessary to bring this about.
The ecclesiastical profession then had attractions which it no longer
possesses; it had none of the inconveniences incident to it at the
present time. A priest was not exposed to democratic distrust and
hostility; he was sure of a bow from the laborer in the street as well
as from the peasant in the country; he was on an equal footing with
the local bourgeoisie, almost one of the family, and among the first;
he could count on passing his life in a permanent situation, honorably
and serenely, in the midst of popular deference and enjoying the good
will of the public. - On the other hand, he was not bridled as in our
day. A priest was not a functionary salaried by the State; his pay,
like his private income, earmarked and put aside beforehand, furnished
through special appropriations, through local taxes, out of a distinct
treasury, could never be withheld on account of a préfect's report, or
through ministerial caprice, or be constantly menaced by budget
difficulties and the ill-will of the civil powers. In relation to his
ecclesiastical superiors he was respectful but independent. The
bishop in his diocese was not what he has become since the Concordat,
an absolute sovereign free to appoint and remove at will nine curés
out of ten. In three vacancies out of four, and often in fourteen out
of fifteen,[69] it was not the bishop who made the appointment; the
new incumbent was designated sometimes by the cathedral chapter or
corporation; again, by a collegial church or corporation; again, by
the metropolitan canon or by the abbé or prior, the patron of the
place; again, by the seignior whose ancestors had founded or endowed
the Church; in certain cases by the Pope, and, occasionally, by the
King or commune. Powers were limited through this multiplicity and
inter-crossing of authorities. Moreover, the, canon or curé being
once appointed he possessed guarantees; he could not be arbitrarily
dismissed; in most cases, his removal or suspension required a
previous trial according to prescribed formalities, accompanied with
an examination, pleadings, and arguments before the officialité or
ecclesiastical court. He was, in fact, permanently placed, and very
generally his personal merit sufficed to keep him in his place. -
For, if the highest positions were bestowed according to birth and
favor, the intermediate positions were reserved to correct habits and
attainments. Many canons and vicars-general, and almost all the curés
in the towns were doctors of divinity or of canon law, while
ecclesiastical studies, very thorough, had occupied eight or nine
years of their youth.[70] Although the method was out of date, much
was learned at the Sorbonne and St. Sulpice; at the very least, one
became a good logician through prolonged and scientific intellectual
gymnastics. "My dear Abbé," said Turgot, smiling, to Morellet, "it is
only you and I who have taken our degree who can reason closely."
Their theological drill, indeed, was about as valuable as our
philosophical drill; if it expanded the mind less, it supplied this
better with applicable concepts; less exciting, it was more fruitful.
In the Sorbonne of the nineteenth century, the studies consist of the
speculative systems of a few isolated, divergent intellects who have
exercised no authority over the multitude, while in the Sorbonne of
the eighteenth century, the studies consisted of the creed, morality,
discipline, history and canons of a Church which had already existed
seventeen centuries and which, comprising one hundred and fifty
millions of souls, still sways one-half of the civilized world. - To
a theoretical education add practical education. A curé and with
still more reason, a canon, an archdeacon, a bishop, was not a passing
stranger, endowed by the State, wearing a surplice, as little
belonging to his age through his ministry as through his dress, and
wholly confined to his spiritual functions: he managed the revenues of
his dotation, he granted leases, made repairs, built, and interested
himself in the probabilities of the crops, in the construction of a
highway or canal, while his experiences in these matters were equal to
those of any lay proprietor. Moreover, being one of a small
proprietary corporation, that is to say, a chapter or local vestry,
and one of a great proprietary corporation of the diocese and Church
of France, he took part directly or indirectly in important temporal
affairs, in assemblies, in deliberations, in collective expenditures,
in the establishment of a local budget and of a general budget, and
hence, in public and administrative matters, his competence was
analogous and almost equal to that of a mayor, sub-delegate, farmer-
general or intendant. In addition to this he was liberal: never has
the French clergy been more earnestly so, from the latest curés back
to the first archbishops.[71] - Lastly, remark the distribution of the
clergy over the territory. There was a curé or vicar in the smallest
of the forty thousand villages. In thousands of small, poor, remote
communes, he was the only man who could readily read and write; none
other than he in many of the larger rural communes,[72] except the
resident seignior and some man of the law or half-way schoolmaster,
was at all learned.[73] Actually, for a man who had finished his
studies and knowing Latin, to consent, for six hundred francs or three
hundred francs a year, to live isolated, and a celibate, almost in
indigence, amongst rustics and the poor, he must be a priest; the
quality of his office makes him resigned to the discomforts of his
situation. A preacher of the Word, a professor of morality, a
minister of Charity, a guide and dispenser of spiritual life, he
taught a theory of the world, at once consoling and self-denying,
which he enforced with a cult, and this cult was the only one adapted
to his flock; manifestly, the French, especially those devoted to
manual and hard labor, could not regard this world as ideal, except
through his formulas; history, the supreme judge, had on this point
rendered its verdict without appeal; no heresy, no schism, not the
Reformation nor Jansenism, had prevailed against hereditary faith;
through infinitely multiplied and deeply penetrating roots this faith
suited national customs, temperament, and peculiar social imagination
and sensibility. Possessing the heart, the intellect, and even the
senses, through fixed, immemorial traditions and habits, it had become
an unconscious, almost corporeal necessity, and the Catholic orthodox
curé, in communion with the Pope, was about as indispensable to the
village as the public fountain; he also quenched thirst, the thirst of
the soul; without him, the inhabitants could find no drinkable water.
And, if we keep human weaknesses in mind, it may be said that
nobleness of character in the clergy corresponded with nobleness of
profession; in all points no one could dispute their capacity for
self-sacrifice, for they willingly suffered for what they believed to
be the truth. If, in 1790, a number of priests took the oath to the
civil constitution of the clergy, it was with reservations, or because
they deemed the oath licit; but, after the dismissal of the bishops
and the Pope's disapprobation, many of them withdrew it at the risk of
their lives, so as not to fall into schism; they fell back into the
ranks and gave themselves up voluntarily to the brutality of the crowd
and the rigors of the law. Moreover, and from the start,
notwithstanding threats and temptations, two-thirds of the clergy
would not take the oath; in the highest ranks, among the mundane
ecclesiastics whose skepticism and laxity were notorious, honor, in
default of faith, maintained the same spirit; nearly the whole of
them, great and small, had subordinated their interests, welfare and
security to the maintenance of their dignity or to scruples of
conscience. They had allowed themselves to be stripped of everything;
they let themselves be exiled, imprisoned, tortured and made martyrs
of, like the Christians of the primitive church; through their
invincible meekness, they were going, like the primitive Christians,
to exhaust the rage of their executioners, wear out persecutions,
transform opinion and compel the admission, even with those who
survived in the eighteenth century, that they were true, deserving and
courageous men.

V. The Bourgeoisie.

Where recruited. - Difference between the functionary of the ancient
regime and the modern functionary. - Appointments seen as Property.
- Guilds. - Independence and security of office-holders. - Their
ambitions are limited and satisfied. - Fixed habits, seriousness and
integrity. - Ambition to secure esteem. - Intellectual culture. -
Liberal ideas. - Respectability and public zeal. - Conduct of the
bourgeoisie in 1789-1791.

Below the nobles and the clergy, a third class of notables, the
bourgeoisie, almost entirely confined to the towns,[74] verged on the
former classes through its upper circles, while its diverse groups,
ranging from the parliamentarian to the rich merchant or manufacturer,
comprised the remainder of those who were tolerably well educated, say
100 000 families, recruited on the same conditions as the bourgeoisie
of the present day: they were "bourgeois living nobly," meaning by
this, living on their incomes, large manufacturers and traders,
engaged in liberal pursuits-lawyers, notaries, procureurs, physicians,
architects, engineers, artists, professors, and especially the
government officials; the latter, however, very numerous, differed
from ours in two essential points. On the one hand, their office, as
nowadays with the notaries' étude, or a membership of the stock-board,
was personal property. Their places, and many others, such as posts
in the judiciary, in the finances, in bailiwicks, in the Présidial, in
the Election,[75] in the salt-department, in the customs, in the Mint,
in the department of forests and streams, in presidencies, in
councils, as procureurs du roi in various civil, administrative and
criminal courts, holding places in the treasury, auditors and
collectors of the various branches of the revenue - all of which
offices, and many others, had been alienated for more than a century
by the State in return for specified sums of ready money; thenceforth,
they fell into the hands of special purchasers; the title of each
possessor was as good as that of a piece of real property, and he
could legally sell his title, the same as he had bought it, at a given
price, on due advertisement![76] On the other hand, the different
groups of local functionaries in each town formed their own
associations, similar to our notarial chambers, or those of our stock-
brokers; these small associations had their own by-laws, meetings and
treasury, frequently a civil status and the right of pleading, often a
political status and the right of electing to the municipal
council;[77] consequently, besides his personal interests, each member
cherished the professional interests of his guild. Thus was his
situation different from what it now is, and, through a natural
reaction, his character, manners and tastes were different. First, he
was much more independent; he was not afraid of being discharged or
transferred elsewhere, suddenly, unawares, on the strength of an
intendant's report, for political reasons, to make room for a deputy's
candidate or a minister's tool. This would have cost too much it
would have required first of all a reimbursement of the sum paid for
his office, and at a rate of purchase ten times, at least, the revenue
of the office.[78] Besides, in defending himself, in protesting
against and forestalling his disgrace, he would have been supported by
his entire professional guild, oftentimes by other similar bodies, and
frequently by the whole town, filled with his relations, clients and
comrades. The entire hive protected the bee against the caprices of
favoritism and the brutalities of despotism. At Paris, a certain
procureur, supported by his colleagues, is known to have imposed on a
noble who had insulted him, the most humiliating atonement.[79] In
fact, under the ancient régime, it was almost impossible for a
functionary to be removed; hence, he could fulfill his duties securely
and with dignity, without being obliged to keep daily watch of the
capital, of going to Paris to see how the official wind blew, to look
after all the influences in his favor, to nurse his relations with the
government and live like a bird on a branch. - In the second place,
there was a limit to his ambition; he did not keep constantly thinking
of mounting a step higher in the hierarchy; or how to pass from a
small town to a large one and hold on to his title; this would have
been a too troublesome and complicated matter; he would first have had
to find a purchaser and then sell his place, and next find a seller
and buy another at a higher price; a stock broker at Bordeaux, a
notary at Lyons, is not an aspirant for the post of stock broker or
notary at Paris. - Nothing then bore any resemblance to the itinerant
groups of functionaries of the present day which, in obedience to
orders from above, travels about governing each of our towns,
strangers on the wing, with no personal standing, without local landed
property, interests or means, encamped in some hired apartment, often
in a furnished room, sometimes stopping at a hotel, eternal nomads
awaiting a telegram, always prepared to pack up and leave for another
place a hundred leagues off in consideration of a hundred crowns extra
pay, and doing the same detached work over again. Their predecessor,
belonging to the country, was a stable fixture and contented; he was
not tormented by a craving for promotion; he had a career within the
bounds of his corporation and town; cherishing no wish or idea of
leaving it, he accommodated himself to it; he became proud of his
office and professional brethren, and rose above the egoism of the
individual; his self-love was bent on maintaining every prerogative
and interest belonging to his guild. Established for life in his
native town, in the midst of old colleagues, numerous relatives and
youthful companions, he esteemed their good opinion. Exempt from
vexatious or burdensome taxes, tolerably well off, owning at least his
own office, he was above sordid preoccupations and common necessities.
Used to old fashioned habits of simplicity, soberness and economy, he
was not tormented by a disproportion between his income and expenses,
by the requirements of show and luxury, by the necessity of annually
adding to his revenue. - Thus guided and free, the instincts of
vanity and generosity, the essence of French character, took the
ascendant; the councilor or comptroller, the King's agent, regarded
himself as a man above the common run, as a noble of the Third-Estate;
he thought less of making money than of gaining esteem; his chief
desire was to be honored and honorable; "he passed life comfortably
and was looked up to, . . . in the discharge of his duty, . . .
with no other ambition than to transmit to his children . . . .
along with their inheritance an unsullied reputation."[80] Among the
other groups of the bourgeoisie the same corporate system, the same
settled habits, the same security, the same frugality, the same
institutions, the same customs,[81] promoted the growth of nearly the
same sentiments, while the intellectual culture of these men was not
insignificant. Having leisure, they were given to reading; as they
were not overwhelmed with newspapers they read books worth reading; I
have found in old libraries in the provinces, in the houses of the
descendants of a manufacturer or lawyer in a small town, complete
editions of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Condillac,
with marks in each volume showing that the volume had been read by
someone in the house before the close of the eighteenth century.
Nowhere else, likewise, had all that was sound and liberal in the
philosophy of the eighteenth century found such a welcome; it is from
this class that the patriots of 1789 were recruited; it had furnished
not only the majority of the Constituent Assembly, but again all the
honest men who, from July, 1789 to the end of 1791 performed their
administrative duties so disinterestedly, and with such devotion and
zeal, amidst so many difficulties, dangers and disappointments.
Composed of Feuillants or Monarchists, possessing such types of men as
Huez of Troyes or Dietrich of Strasbourg, and for representatives such
leaders as Lafayette and Bailly, it comprised the superior
intelligence and most substantial integrity of the Third-Estate. It
is evident that, along with the nobles and clergy, the best fruits of
history were gathered in it, and most of the mental and moral capital
accumulated, not only by the century, but, again, by preceding
centuries.

VI. The Demi-notables.

Where recruited. - Village and trade syndics. - Competency of their
electors. - Their interest in making good selections. - Their
capacity and integrity. - The sorting of men under the ancient
regime. - Conditions of a family's maintenance and advancement. -
Hereditary and individual right of the Notable to his property and
rank.

Like a fire lit on a hilltop overlooking a cold and obscure
countryside, a civilization, kept alive with much expense on peaks in
a sea of human barbarity, radiating while its rays grow dim; its light
and warmth fading just as its gleams reach remoter and deeper strata.
Nevertheless, both penetrate yet sufficiently far and deep before
wholly dying out. If we want to appraise their power in France at the
close of the eighteenth century we must add to the notables the half-
notables of society, namely, the men who, like the people, were
devoted to manual labor, but who, among the people, led the way, say
one hundred and fifty thousand families, consisting of well-to-do
farmers, small rural proprietors, shopkeepers, retailers, foremen and
master-workmen, village syndics and guild syndics,[82] those who were
established and had some capital, owning a plot of land and a house,
with a business or stock of tools, and a set of customers, that is to
say, with something ahead and credit, not being obliged to live from
hand to mouth, and therefore, beginning to be independent and more
influential, in short, the overseers of the great social work-house,
the sergeants and corporals of the social army. - They, too, were not
unworthy of their rank. In the village or trade community, the
syndic, elected by his equals and neighbors, was not blindly
nominated; all his electors in relation to him were competent; if
peasants, they had seen him turning up the soil; if blacksmiths or
joiners, they had seen him at work in his forge, or at the bench.
And, as their direct, present and obvious interests were concerned,
they chose him for the best, not on the strength of a newspaper
recommendation, in deference to a vague declamatory platform or
sounding, empty phrases, but according to their personal experiences,
and the thorough knowledge they had of him. The man sent by the
village to represent them to the intendant and selected by the guild
to sit in the town council, was its most capable, and most creditable
man, one of those, probably, who, through his application,
intelligence, honesty and economy, had proved the most prosperous,
some master-workman or farmer that had gained experience through long
years of assiduity, familiar with details and precedents, of good
judgment and repute, more interested than anybody else in supporting
the interests of the community and with more leisure than others to
attend to public affairs.[83] This man, through the nature of things,
imposed himself on the attention, confidence, and deference of his
peers, and, because he was their natural representative, he was their
legal representative.

Upon the whole, if, in this old society, the pressure was unequally
distributed, if the general equilibrium was unstable, if the upper
parts bore down too heavily on the lower ones, the sorting, at least,
which goes on in every civilized State, constantly separating the
wheat from the chaff, went on tolerably well; except at the center and
at the Court, where the winnowing machine had worked haphazard and,
frequently, in an opposite sense for a century, the separation
proceeded regularly, undoubtedly slower, but, perhaps, more equitably
than in our contemporary democracy. The chance that a notable by
right could become a notable de facto was then much greater: it was
less difficult, and the inclination to found, maintain and perpetuate
a family or a business was much stronger; people looked more often
beyond themselves; the eyes naturally turned outside the narrow circle
of one's personality, looking backward as well as beyond this present
life. The (later) institution of an equal partition of property, the
(later) system of obligatory partition and the rule of partition in
kind, with other prescriptions of the (new) civil code, did not split
up an heritage and ruin the home.[84] Parental negligence and the
children's lack of respect and consideration had not yet upset the
authority and abolished respect in the family. Useful and natural
associations were not yet stifled in the germ nor arrested in their
development by the systematic hostility of the law. The ease and
cheapness of transportation, the promiscuity of schools, the
excitement of competition, everyone's rush to placement and office,
the increasing excitement of ambition and greed, had not (yet)
immeasurably multiplied the class of irresponsible malcontents and
mischievous nomads. In the political order of things, inaptitude,
envy, brutality were not sovereign; universal suffrage did not exclude
from power the men, born, bred and qualified to exercise it; countless
public posts were not offered as a prey to charlatanism and to the
intrigues of politicians. France was not then, as now-a-days, on a
way to become a vast lodging-house administered by casual managers,
condemned to periodical failures, inhabited by anonymous residents,
indifferent to each other, lacking local ties, lacking engagements and
having no corporate loyalties, merely tenants and passing consumers,
placed in numerical order around a common mess-table where each thinks
only of himself, gets served quickly, consumes what he can lay his
hands on, and ends by finding out that, in a place of this sort, the
best condition, the wisest course, is to put all one's property into
an annuity and live a bachelor. - Formerly, among all classes and in
all the provinces, there were a large number of families that had
taken root on the spot, living there a hundred years and more. Not
only among the nobles, but among the bourgeoisie and the Third-Estate,
the heir of any enterprise was expected to continue his calling. This
was so with the seignorial chateau and extensive domain, as with the
bourgeois dwelling and patrimonial office, the humble rural domain,
farm, shop and factory, all were transmitted intact from one
generation to another.[85] Great or small, the individual was not
exclusively interested in himself; his thoughts also traveled forward
to the future and back to the past, on the side of ancestors and on
that of descendants, along the endless chain of which his own life was
but a link; he possessed traditions, he felt bound to set examples.
Under this twofold title, his domestic authority was uncontested;[86]
his household and all his employees followed his instructions without
swerving and without resistance. When, by virtue of this domestic
discipline, a family had maintained itself upright and respected on
the same spot for a century, it could easily advance a degree; it
could introduce one of its members into the upper class, pass from the
plow or trade to petty offices, and from these to the higher ones and
to parliamentary dignities, from the four thousand posts that ennoble
to the legalized nobility, from the lately made nobles to the old
nobility. Apart from the two or three thousand gilded drones living
on the public honey at Versailles, apart from the court parasites and
their valets, three or four hundred thousand notables and half-
notables of France thus acquired and kept their offices, consideration
and fortune; they were therefore their legitimate possessors. The
peasant-proprietor and master-artisan had risen from father to son, at
four o'clock in the morning, toiled all day and never drank. From
father to son, the trader, notary, lawyer and office-holder, had been
careful, economical, skillful and attentive to business, correct in
their papers, precise in their accounts. From father to son, the
nobleman had served bravely, the parliamentarian had judged equitably,
as a point of honor, with a salary inferior to the interest of the sum
paid by him to acquire his rank or post. Each of these men received
no more than his due; his possessions and his rank were the savings of
his ascendants, the price of social services rendered by the long file
of deserving dead, all that his ancestors, his father and himself had
created or preserved of any stable value; each piece of gold that
remained in the hereditary purse represented the balance of a
lifetime, the enduring labor of some one belonging to his line, while
among these gold pieces, he himself had provided his share. - For,
personal services counted, even among the upper nobility; and all the
more among the lower class, in the Third-Estate, and among the people.
Among the notables of every degree just described, most of them, in
1789, were fully grown men, many of them mature, a goodly number
advanced in years, and some quite aged; consequently, in justification
of his rank and emoluments, or of his gains and his fortune, each
could allege fifteen, twenty, thirty and forty years of labor and
honorability in private or public situations, the grand-vicar of the
diocese as well as the chief-clerk of the ministry, the intendant of
the généralité as well as the president of the royal tribunal, the
village curé, the noble officer, the office-holder, the lawyer, the
procureur, the large manufacturer, the wholesale dealer, as well as
the well-to-do farmer, and the well-known handicraftsman. - Thus, not
only were they an élite corps, the most valuable portion of the
nation, the best timber of the forest, but again, the wood of each
branch belonged to that trunk; it grew there, and was the product of
its own vegetation; it sprung out of the trunk wholly through the
unceasing and spontaneous effort of the native sap, through time-
honored and recent labor, and, on this account, it merited respect. -
Through a double onslaught, at once against each human branch and
against the entire French forest, the Jacobin wood-choppers seek to
clear the ground. Their theory results in this precept, that not one
of the noble trees of this forest, not one valuable trunk from the
finest oak to the smallest sapling, should be left standing.

VII. Principle of socialist Equality.

All superiorities of rank are illegitimate. - Bearing of this
principle. - Incivique benefits and enjoyments. - How revolutionary
laws reach the lower class. - Whole populations affected in a mass.
- proportion of the lowly in the proscription lists. How the
revolutionary laws specially affect those who are prominent among the
people.

Not that the ravages which they make stop there! The principle
extended far beyond that. The fundamental rule, according to Jacobin
maxims, is that every public or private advantage which any citizen
enjoys and which is not enjoyed by another citizen, is illegitimate.
- On Ventôse 19, year II., Henriot, general in command, having
surrounded the Palais Royal and made a sweep of "suspects," renders an
account of his expedition as follows:[87] "One hundred and thirty
muscadins have been arrested. . . . These gentlemen are
transferred to the Petits-Pêres. Being well-fed and plump, they
cannot be sans-culottes." Henriot was right, for, to live well is
incivique. Whoever lays in stores of provisions is criminal, even if
he has gone a good ways for them, even if he has not overpaid the
butcher of his quarter, even if he has not diminished by an ounce of
meat the ration of his neighbor; when he is found out, he is punished
and his hoard confiscated. "A citizen[88] had a little pig brought to
him from a place six leagues from Paris, and killed it at once. Three
hours afterwards, the pig was seized by commissioners and distributed
among the people, without the owner getting a bit of it;" moreover,
the said owner "was imprisoned." - He is a monopolist! To Jacobin
people, to empty stomachs, there is no greater crime; this misdeed, to
their imaginations, explains the arrest of Hébert, their favorite: "It
is said at the Halle (the covered Paris market)[89] that he has
monopolized a brother of the order of Saint-Antoine[90] as well as a
pot of twenty-five pounds of Brittany butter," which is enough; they
immediately and "unanimously consign Père Duchesne to the guillotine."
(Note that the Père Duchesne, founded by Hébert, was the most radical
and revolutionary journal. (SR.) - Of all privileges, accordingly,
that of having a supply of food is the most offensive; "it is now
necessary for one who has two dishes to give one of them to him who
has none;"[91] every man who manages to eat more than another is a
robber; for, in the first place, he robs the community, the sole
legitimate owner of aliments, and next, he robs, and personally, all
who have less to eat than he has.

The same rule applies to other things of which the possession is
either agreeable or useful: in an equalizing social system, that now
established, every article of food possessed by one individual to the
exclusion of others, is a dish abstracted from the common table and
held by him to another's detriment. On the strength of this, the
theorists who govern agree with the reigning ragamuffins. Whoever has
two good coats is an aristocrat, for there are many who have only one
poor one.[92] Whoever has good shoes is an aristocrat, for many wear
wooden ones, and others go barefoot. Whoever owns and rents lodgings
is an aristocrat, for others, his tenants, instead of receiving money,
pay it out. The tenant who furnishes his own rooms is an aristocrat,
for many lodge in boarding-houses and others sleep in the open air.
Whoever possesses capital is an aristocrat, even the smallest amount
in money or in kind, a field, a roof over his head, half-a-dozen
silver spoons given to him by his parents on his wedding-day, an old
woollen stocking into which twenty or thirty crowns have been dropped
one by one, all one's savings, whatever has been laid by or
economized, a petty assortment of eatables or merchandise, one's crop
for the year and stock of groceries, especially if, disliking to give
them up and letting his dissatisfaction be seen, he, through
revolutionary taxation and requisitions, through the maximum and the
confiscation of the precious metals, is constrained to surrender his
small savings gratis, or at half their value. - Fundamentally, it is
only those who have nothing of their own that are held to be patriots,
those who live from day to day,[93] "the wretched," the poor,
vagabonds, and the famished; the humblest laborer, the least
instructed, the most ill at his ease, is treated as criminal, as an
enemy, as soon as he is suspected of having some resources; in vain
does he show his scarified or callous hands; he escapes neither
spoliation, the prison, nor the guillotine. At Troyes, a poor shop-
girl who had set up a small business on borrowed money, but who is
ruined by a bankruptcy and completely so by the maximum, infirm, and
consuming piecemeal the rest of her stock, is taxed five hundred
livres.[94] In the villages of Alsace, an order is issued to arrest
the five, six or seven richest persons in the commune, even if there
are no rich; consequently, they seize the least poor, simply because
they are so; for instance, at Heiligenberg, six "farmers" one of whom
is a day-laborer, "or journey-man," "suspect," says the register of
the jail, "because he is comfortably off."[95] On this account nowhere
are there so many "suspects" as among the people; the shop, the farm
and the work-room harbor more aristocrats than the rectory and the
chateau. In effect, according to the Jacobins,[96] "nearly all
farmers are aristocrats;" "the merchants are all essentially anti-
revolutionary,"[97] and especially all dealers in articles of prime
necessity, wine-merchants, bakers and butchers; the latter especially
are open "conspirators," enemies "of the interior," and " whose
aristocracy is insupportable." Such, already, among the lower class of
people, are the many delinquents who are punished.

But there are still more of them to punish, for, besides the crime of
not being destitute, of possessing some property, of withholding
articles necessary for existence, there is the crime of aristocracy,
necessarily so called, namely, repugnance to, lack of zeal, or even
indifference for the established régime, regret for the old one,
relationship or intercourse with a condemned or imprisoned émigré of
the upper class, services rendered to some outlaw, the resort to some
priest; now, numbers of poor farmers, mechanics, domestics and women
servants, have committed this crime;[98] and in many provinces and in
many of the large cities nearly the whole of the laboring population
commits it and persists in it; such is the case, according to Jacobin
reports, in Alsace, Franche-Comté, Provence, Vaucluse, Anjou, Poitou,
Vendée, Brittany, Picardie and Flanders, and in Marseilles, Bordeaux
and Lyons. In Lyons alone, writes Collot d'Herbois, "there are sixty
thousand persons who never will become republicans. They should be
dealt with, that is made redundant, and prudently distributed all over
the surface of the Republic."[99] - Finally, add to the persons of the
lower class, prosecuted on public grounds, those who are prosecuted on
private grounds. Among peasants in the same village, workmen of the
same trade and shopkeepers in the same quarter, there is always envy,
enmities and spites; those who are Jacobins become local pashas and
are able to gratify local jealousies with impunity, something they
never fail to do.[100]

Hence, on the lists of the guillotined, the incarcerated and of
emigrés, the men and women of inferior condition are in much greater
number, far greater than their companions of the superior and middle
classes all put together. Out of 12,000 condemned to death whose rank
and professions have been ascertained, 7,545[101] are peasants,
cultivators, ploughmen, workmen of various sorts, innkeepers, wine-
dealers, soldiers and sailors, domestics, women, young girls, servants
and seamstresses. Out of 1,900 emigrés from Doubs, nearly 1,100
belong to the lower class. Towards the month of April, 1794, all the
prisons in France overflow with farmers;[102] in the Paris prisons
alone, two months before Thermidor 9, there are 2 000 of them.[103]
Without mentioning the eleven western departments in which four or
five hundred square leagues of territory are devastated and twenty
towns and one thousand eight hundred villages destroyed,[104] where
the avowed purpose of the Jacobin policy is a systematic and total
destruction of the country, man and beast, buildings, crops, and even
trees, there are cantons and even provinces where the entire rural and
working population is arrested or put to flight. In the Pyrenees, the
old Basque populations "torn from their natal soil, crowded into the
churches with no means of subsistence but that of charity," in the
middle of winter, so that sixteen hundred of those incarcerated die
"mostly of cold and hunger;"[105] at Bédouin, a town of two thousand
souls, in which a tree of liberty is cut down by some unknown persons,
four hundred and thirty-three houses are demolished or burned, sixteen
persons guillotined and forty-seven shot, while the rest of the
inhabitants are driven out, reduced to living like vagabonds on the
mountain, or in holes which they dig in the ground;[106] in Alsace,
fifty thousand farmers who, in the winter of 1793, take refuge with
their wives and children on the other side of the Rhine.[107] In
short, the revolutionary operation is a complete prostration of people
of all classes, the trunks as well as the saplings being felled, and
often in such a way as to clear the ground entirely.

But in this ruthless felling, however, the notables of the people,
making all due allowances, suffer more than the ordinary people. It
is obvious that the Jacobin wood-chopper persecutes, insistently and
selectively, the veterans of labor and savings, the large cultivators
who from father to son and for many generations have possessed the
same farm, the master-craftsmen whose shops are well stocked and who
have good customers, the respectable, well-patronized retailers, who
owe nothing; the village-syndics and trades-syndics, all those showing
more deeply and visibly than the rest of their class, the five or six
blazes which summon the ax. They are better off, better provided with
desirable comforts and conveniences, which is of itself an offense
against equality. Having accumulated a small hoard, a few pieces of
plate, sometimes a few crowns,[108] a store of linen and clothes, a
stock of provisions or goods, they do not willingly submit to being
plundered, which is the offense of egoism. Being egoists, it is
presumed that they are hostile to the system of fraternity, at least
indifferent to it, as well as lukewarm towards the Republic, that is
to say, Moderates, which is the worst offense of all.[109] Being the
foremost of their class, they are haughty like the nobles or the
bourgeois and regard themselves as superior to a poor man, to a
vagabond, to a genuine sans-culotte, the fourth and most inexcusable
of all offenses. Moreover, from the fact of their superior condition,
they have contracted familiarities and formed connections with the
proscribed class; the farmer, the intendant, the overseer is often
attached to his noble proprietor or patron;[110] many of the farmers,
shopkeepers and craftsmen belonging to old families are considered as
affiliated with the bourgeoisie or the clergy,[111] through a son or
brother who has risen a degree in trade, or by some industrial
pursuit, or who, having completed his studies, has become a curé or
lawyer, or else through some daughter, or well-married sister, or
through one who has become a nun: now, this relation, ally, friend or
comrade of a "suspect " is himself a "suspect," - the last anti-
revolutionary and decisive barrier. Sober and well-behaved persons,
having prospered or maintained themselves under the ancient régime,
must naturally cherish respect for former institutions; they must
involuntarily retain a deep feeling of veneration for the King, and
especially for religion; they are devout Catholics, and therefore are
chagrined to see the churches shut up, worship prohibited and
ecclesiastics persecuted, and would again be glad to go to Mass, honor
Easter, and have an orthodox curé who could administer to them
available sacraments, a baptism, an absolution, a marriage-rite, a
genuine extreme unction.[112] - Under all these headings, they have
made personal enemies of the rascals who hold office; on all these
grounds, they are struck down; what was once meritorious with them is
now disgraceful. Thus, the principal swath consists of the élite of
the people, selected from amongst the people itself; it is against the
"subordinate aristocracy," those most capable of doing and conducting
manual labor, the most creditable workmen, through their activity,
frugality and good habits, that the Revolution, in its rigor against
the inferior class, rages with the greatest fury.

VIII. Rigor against the Upper Classes.

The rigor of the revolutionary laws increase according to the
elevation of the class. - The Notables properly so called attacked
because of their being Notables. - Orders of Taillefer, Milhaud, and
Lefiot. - The public atonement of Montargis.

For the same reason, as far as the notables, properly so-called, are
concerned, it bears down still more heavily, not merely on the nobles
because of ancient privileges, not merely on ecclesiastics on the
score of being insubordinate Catholics, but on nobles, ecclesiastics
and bourgeois in their capacity of notables, that is to say, born and
bred above others, and respected by the masses on account of their
superior condition. - In the eyes of the genuine Jacobin, the
notables of the third class are no less criminal than the members of
the two superior classes. "The bourgeois,[113] the merchants, the
large proprietors," writes a popular club in the South, "all have the
pretension of the old set (des ci-dévants)." And the club complains of
"the law not providing means for opening the eyes of the people with
respect to these new tyrants." It is horrible! The stand they take is
an offense against equality and they are proud of it! And what is
worse, this stand attracts public consideration! Consequently, "the
club requests that the revolutionary Tribunal be empowered to consign
this proud class to temporary confinement," and then "the people would
see the crime it had committed and recover from the sort of esteem in
which they had held it." - Incorrigible and contemptuous heretics
against the new creed, they are only too lucky to be treated somewhat
like infidel Jews in the middle-ages. Accordingly, if they are
tolerated, it is on the condition that they let themselves be pillaged
at discretion, covered with opprobrium and subdued through fear. - At
one time, with insulting irony, they are called upon to prove their
dubious civism by forced donations. "Whereas,"[114] says
Representative Milhaud, "all the citizens and citoyennes of Narbonne
being in requisition for the discharge and transport of forage;
whereas, this morning, the Representative, in person, having inspected
the performance of this duty," and having observed on the canal "none
but sans-culottes and a few young citizens; whereas, not finding at
their posts any muscadin and no muscadine; whereas, the persons, whose
hands are no doubt too delicate, even temporarily, for the glorious
work of robust sans-culottes, have, on the other hand, greater
resources in their fortune, and, desiring to afford to the rich of
Narbonne the precious advantage of being equally useful to the
republic," hereby orders that "the richest citizens of Narbonne pay
within twenty-four hours" a patriotic donation of one hundred thousand
livres, one-half to be assigned to the military hospitals, and the
other half, on the designation thereof by a "Committee of Charity,
composed of three reliable revolutionary sans-culottes," to be
distributed among the poor of the Commune. Should any "rich egoist
refuse to contribute his contingent he is to be immediately
transferred to the jail at Perpignan." - Not to labor with one's own
hands, to be disqualified for work demanding physical strength, is of
itself a democratic stain, and the man who is sullied by this draws
down on himself, not alone an augmentation of pecuniary taxation, but
frequently an augmentation of personal compulsory labor. At
Villeneuve, Aveyron, and throughout the department of Cantal,[115]
Representative Taillefer and his delegate Deltheil, instruct the
Revolutionary Committees to "place under military requisition and
conscription all muscadins above the first class," that is to say, all
between twenty-five and forty years of age who are not reached by the
law. "By muscadins is meant all citizens of that age not married, and
exercising no useful profession," in other words, those who live on
their income. And, that none of the middle or upper class may escape,
the edict subjects to special rigor, supplementary taxes, and
arbitrary arrest, not alone property-holders and fund-holders, but
again all persons designated under the following heads, - aristocrats,
Feuillants, moderates, Girondists, federalists, muscadins, the
superstitious, fanatics the abettors of royalism, of superstition and
of federation, monopolists, jobbers, egoists, "suspects " of incivism,
and, generally, all who are indifferent to the Revolution, of which
local committees are to draw up the lists.

Occasionally, in a town, some steps taken collectively, either a vote
or petition,. furnish a ready-made list;[116] it suffices to read
this to know who are notables, the most upright people of the place;
henceforth, under the pretext of political repression, the levellers
may give free play to their social hatred. - At Montargis, nine days
after the attempt of June 20, 1792,[117] two hundred and twenty-eight
notables sign an address in testimony of their respectful sympathy for
the King; a year and nine months later, in consequence of a
retroactive stroke, all are hit, and, with the more satisfaction,
inasmuch as in their persons the most respected in the town fall
beneath the blow, all whom flight and banishment had left there
belonging to the noble, ecclesiastic, bourgeois or popular
aristocracy. Already, "on the purification of the constituted
authorities of Montargis, the representative had withdrawn every
signer from places of public trust and kept them out of all offices."
But this is not sufficient; the punishment must be more exemplary.
Four of them, the ex-mayor, an ex-collector, a district administrator
and a notable are sent to the revolutionary Tribunal in Paris, to be
guillotined in deference to principles. Thirty-two former officers -
chevaliers of St. Louis, mousquetaires, nobles, priests, an ex-
procureur-royal, an ex-treasurer of France, a former administrator of
the department, and two ladies, one of them designated as "calling
herself a former marchioness" - are confined, until peace is secured,
in the jail at Montargis. Other former municipal officers and
officers in the National Guard - men of the law, notaries and
advocates, physicians, surgeons, former collectors, police
commissioners, postmasters, merchants and manufacturers, men and
women, married or widows and widowers - are to make public apology and
be summoned to the Temple of Reason to undergo there the humiliation
of a public penance on the 20th of Ventôse at three o'clock in the
afternoon. They all go, for the summons says, "whoever does not
present himself on the day and hour named will be arrested and
confined until peace is declared." On reaching the church, purified by
Jacobin adoration, "in the presence of the constituted authorities of
the popular club and of the citizens convoked in general assembly,"
they mount one by one into a tribune raised three steps above the
floor," in such a way as to be in full sight. One by one the national
agent, or the mayor, reprimands them in the following language:

"You have been base enough to sign a fawning address to Louis XVI.,
the most odious and the vilest of tyrants, an ogre of the human
species guilty of every sort of crime and debauchery. You are hereby
censured by the people. You are moreover warned that on committing
the first act of incivism, or manifesting any anti-revolutionary
conduct, the surveillance of the constituted authorities will be
extended to you in the most energetic manner; the tribunals will show
you less leniency and the guillotine will insure prompt and imposing
justice."

Each, called by name, receives in turn the threatened admonition, and,
descending from the tribune amidst hues and cries, all sign the
procès-verbal. But shame and guilt are often absent, and some of
them do not seem to be sufficiently penitent. Consequently, at the
close of the ceremony, the National Agent calls the attention of the
assembly to "the impudence manifested by certain aristocrats, so
degraded that even national justice fails to make them blush;" and the
Revolutionary Committee, "considering the indifference and derisive
conduct of four women and three men, just manifested in this assembly;
considering the necessity of punishing an inveterate aristocracy which
seems to make sport of corrective acts that bear only (sic) on morals,
in a most exemplary manner, decides that the seven delinquents "shall
be put under arrest, and confined in the jail of Sainte-Marie." The
three who have shown indifference, are to be confined three months;
the four who have shown derision, are to be confined until peace is
restored. Besides this, the decree of the National Agent and the
minutes of the meeting are to be printed and six thousand impressions
struck off at the expense of the signers, "the richest and most
'suspect,' " - a former treasurer of France, a notary, a grocer, the
wife of the former commandant of the gendarmerie, a widow and another
woman, - all, says the agent, " of very solid wealth and aristocracy."
"Bravo!" shouts the assembly, at this witticism; applause is given and
it sings "the national hymn." It is nine o'clock in the evening. This
public penitence lasts six hours and the Jacobins of Montargis retire,
proud of their work; having punished as a public affront, an old and
legal manifestation of respect for the public magistrate; having sent
either to the scaffold or to prison, and fined or disgraced the small
local élite; having degraded to the level of prostitutes and felons
under surveillance, reputable women and honorable men who are, by law,
most esteemed under a normal system of government and who, under the
revolutionary system are, by law, the least so.[118]


IX. The Jacobin Citizen Robot.

Two characteristics of the upper class, wealth and education. - Each
of these is criminal. - Measures against rich and well-to-do people.
- Affected in a mass and by categories. - Measures against cultivated
and polite people. - Danger of culture and distinction. -
Proscription of "honest folks."

Two advantages, fortune and education, each involving the other, cause
a man to be ranked in the upper class; hence, one or the other,
whether each by itself or both together, mark a man out for
spoliation, imprisonment and death. - In vain may he have
demonstrated his Jacobinism, and Jacobinism of the ultra sort.
Hérault-Séchelles, who voted for murdering the King, who belongs to
the Committee of Public Safety, who, in the Upper-Rhine, has just
carried out the worst revolutionary ordinances,[119] but who has the
misfortune to be rich and a man of the world, is led to the scaffold,
and those devoted to the guillotine readily explain his condemnation:
he is no patriot, - how could he be, enjoying an income of two hundred
thousand livres, and, moreover, is he not a general-advocate?[120] One
of these offenses is sufficient. - Alone and by itself, "opulence,"
writes Saint-Just, "is a disgrace," and, according to him, a man is
opulent "who supports fewer children than he has thousands of livres
income; in effect, among the persons confined as "rich and egoists" we
find, according to the very declaration of the Revolutionary
Committee, persons with incomes of only 4,000, 3,700, 1,500, and even
500 livres.[121] Moreover, a fortune or a competence, inspires its
possessor with anti-revolutionary sentiments; consequently, he is for
the moment an obstruction; "You are rich," says Cambon, making use of
a personification, "you cherish an opinion, which compels us to be on
the defensive; pay then, so as to indemnify us and be thankful for our
indulgence which, precautionary and until peace is declared, keeps you
under bolt and bar."[122] Rich, anti-revolutionary, and vicious,"
according to Robespierre,[123] "these three traits depend on each
other, and, therefore, the possession of the superfluous is an
infallible sign of aristocracy, a visible mark of incivism" and, as
Fouché says, "a stamp of reprobation." "The superfluous is an evident
and unwarrantable violation of the people's rights; every man who has
more than his wants call for, cannot use, and therefore he must only
abuse."[124] Whoever does not make over to the masses the excess of
what is strictly necessary. . . . places himself in the rank of
'suspects.' Rich egoists, you are the cause of our misfortunes!"[125]
"You dared to smile contemptuously on the appellation of sans-
culottes;[126] you have enjoyed much more than your brethren alongside
of you dying with hunger; you are not fit to associate with them, and
since you have disdained to have them eat at your table, they cast you
out eternally from their bosom and condemn you, in turn, to wear the
shackles prepared for them by your indifference or your maneuvers." In
other words, whoever has a good roof over his head, or wears good
clothes, man or woman, idler or industrious, noble or commoner, is
available for the prison or the guillotine, or, at the very least, he
is a taxable and workable serf at pleasure; his capital and
accumulations, if not spontaneously and immediately handed over, form
a criminal basis and proof of conviction. - The orders of arrest are
generally issued against him on account of his wealth; in order to
drain a town of these offenders one by one, all are penned together
according to their resources; at Strasbourg,[127] 193 persons are
taxed, each from 6,000 to 300,000 livres, in all 9 million livres,
payable within twenty-four hours, by the leading men of each
profession or trade, bankers, brokers, merchants, manufacturers,
professors, pastors, lawyers, physicians, surgeons, publishers,
printers, upholsterers, glass-dealers, rope-makers, master-masons,
coffee-house and tavern keepers. And let there be no delay in
responding to these orders within the prescribed time! Otherwise the
delinquents will be placed in the stocks, on the scaffold, face to
face with the guillotine. "One of the best citizens in the commune,
who had steadily manifested his attachment to the Revolution, being
unable to realize a sum of 250,000 livres in one day, was fastened in
the pillory."[128] Sometimes the orders affected an entire class, not
alone nobles or priests, but all the members of any bourgeois
profession or even of any handicraft. At Strasbourg, a little later,
"considering that the thirst for gold has always controlled the
brewers of the commune," they are condemned to 250,000 livres fine, to
be paid in three days under penalty of being declared rebels, with the
confiscation of their possessions;" then, upon another similar
consideration, the bakers and flour dealers are taxed three hundred
thousand livres.[129] In addition to this, writes Representative
Milhaud, at Guyardin,[130] "We have ordered the arrest of all bankers,
stock-brokers and notaries. . . . All their wealth is confiscated;
we estimate the sums under seal at 2 or 3 millions in coin, and 15 or
16 in assignats." There is the same haul of the net at Paris. By
order of Lhuillier, procureur of the department, "seals are placed in
the offices of all the bankers, stock-brokers, silversmiths, etc.,"
and they themselves are shut up in the Madelonettes; a few days after,
that they may pay their drafts, they are let out as a favor, but on
condition that they remain under arrest in their homes, at their own
expense, under guard of two good sans-culottes.[131] In like manner,
at Nantes,[132] Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux, the prisons are filled
and the guillotine works according to the categories. At one time
they are "all of the Grand Théatre," or the principal merchants, "to
the number of more than 200," are incarcerated at Bordeaux in one
night.[133] At another time, Paris provides a haul of farmer-generals
or parliamentarians. Carts leave Toulouse conveying its
parliamentarians to Paris to undergo capital punishment. At Aix,
writes an agent,[134]

"the guillotine is going to work on former lawyers a few hundred heads
legally taken off will do the greatest good."

And, as new crimes require new terms to designate them, they add to
"incivisme" and "moderantisme," the term "negociantisme," all of which
are easily stated and widespread crimes.

"The rich and the merchants," writes an observer,[135] "are here, as
elsewhere, born enemies of equality and lovers of hideous federalism,
the only aristocracy that remains to be crushed out."

Barras, with still greater precision, declares in the tribune that,
"commerce is usurious, monarchical and anti-revolutionary."[136]
Considered in itself, it may be defined as an appeal to bad instincts;
it seems a corrupting, incivique, anti-fraternal institution, many
Jacobins having proposed either to interdict it to private persons and
attribute it wholly to the State, or suppress it along with the arts
and manufactures which nourish it, in order that only a population of
agriculturists and soldiers may be left in France.[137]

The second advantage and the second crime of the notables is
superiority of education. "In all respectable assemblages," writes a
Dutch traveler in 1795,[138] "you may be sure that one-half of those
present have been in prison. Add the absent, the guillotined, the
exiled, emigrés, the deported, and note this, that, in the other
favored half, those who did not quaff the prison cup had had a
foretaste of it for, each expected daily to receive his warrant of
arrest; "the worst thing under Robespierre, as several old gentlemen
have told me, was that one never knew in the morning whether one would
sleep in one's own bed at night." There was not a well-bred man who
did not live in dread of this; examine the lists of "suspects," of the
arrested, of exiles, of those executed, in any town, district or
department,[139] and you will see immediately, through their quality
and occupations, first, that three-quarters of the cultivated are
inscribed on it, and next, that intellectual culture in itself is
suspect. "They were equally criminal,"[140] write the Strasbourg
administrators, "whether rich or cultivated . . . . The (Jacobin)
municipality declared the University federalist; it proscribed public
instruction and, consequently, the professors, regents, and heads of
schools, with all instructors, public as well as private, even those
provided with certificates of civism, were arrested; . . . . every
Protestant minister and teacher in the Lower-Rhine department was
incarcerated, with a threat of being transferred to the citadel at
Besançon." - Fourcroy, in the Jacobin Club at Paris, excusing himself
for being a savant, for giving lectures on chemistry, for not devoting
his time to the rantings of the Convention and of the clubs, is
obliged to declare that he is poor, that he lives by his work, that he
supports "his father, a sans-culotte, and his sans-culotte sisters;"
although a good republican, he barely escapes, and the same with
others like him. All educated men were persecuted," he states a
month after Thermidor 9;[141] "to have acquaintances, to be literary,
sufficed for arrest, as an aristocrat. . . . Robespierre . . .
with devilish ingenuity, abused, calumniated and overwhelmed with gall
and bitterness all who were devoted to serious studies, all who
professed extensive knowledge; . . . he felt that cultivated men
would never bend the knee to him [142]. . . . . Instruction was
paralyzed; they wanted to burn the libraries . . . . . Must I
tell you that at the very door of your assembly errors in orthography
are seen? Nobody learns how to read or write." - At Nantes, Carrier
boasts of having "dispersed the literary chambers," while in his
enumeration of the evil-minded he adds "to the rich and merchants,"
"all gens d'esprit."[143] Sometimes on the turnkey's register we read
that such an one was confined "for being clever and able to do
mischief," another for saying "good-day, gentlemen, to the municipal
councillors."[144]

Politeness has, like other signs of a good education, become a stigma;
good manners are considered, not only as a remnant of the ancient
régime, but as a revolt against the new institutions; now, as the
governing principle of these is, theoretically, abstract equality and,
practically, the ascendancy of the low class, one rebels against the
established order of things when one repudiates coarse companions,
familiar oaths, and the indecent expressions of the common workman and
the soldier. In sum, Jacobinism, through its doctrines and deeds, its
dungeons and executioners, proclaims to the nation over which it holds
the rod:[145]

"Be rude, that you may become republican, return to barbarism that
you may show the superiority of your genius; abandon the customs of
civilized people that you may adopt those of galley slaves; mar your
language with a view to improve it; use that of the populace under
penalty of death. Spanish beggars treat each other in a dignified
way; they show respect for humanity although in tatters. We, on the
contrary, order you to assume our rags, our patois, our terms of
intimacy. Don the carmagnole and tremble; become rustics and dolts,
and prove your civism by the absence of all education."

This is true to the letter.

"Education,[146] " says another contemporary, "amiable qualities,
gentle ways, a mild physiognomy, bodily graces, a cultivated mind, all
natural endowments are henceforth the inevitable causes of
proscription."

One is self-condemned if one has not converted oneself into a sans-
culotte and proletarian, in accordance with affected modes, air,
language and dress. Hence,

"through a hypocritical contest hitherto unknown men who were not
vicious deemed it necessary to appear so."

And worse still,

"one was even afraid to be oneself; one changed one's name, one went
in disguise, wearing a vulgar and tasteless attire; everybody shrunk
from being what he was."

For, according to the Jacobin program, all Frenchmen must be
recast[147] in one uniform mold; they must be taken when small; all
must be subject to the same enforced education, that of a mechanic,
rustic and soldier's boy. Be warned, ye adults, by the guillotine,
reform yourselves beforehand according to the prescribed pattern! No
more costly, elegant or delicate crystal or gold vases! All are
shattered or are still being shattered. Henceforth, only common ware
is to be tolerated or ordered to be made, all alike in substance,
shape and color, manufactured by thousands at wholesale and in public
factories, for the common and plain uses of rural and military life;
all original and superior forms are to be rejected.

"The masters of the day," writes Daunou,[148] "deliberately aimed
their sword thrusts at superior talent, at energetic characters; they
mowed down as well as they could in so short a time, the flower and
hope of the nation."

In this respect they were consistent; equality-socialism[149] allows
none but automatic citizens, mere tools in the hands of the State, all
alike, of a rudimentary fashion and easily managed, without personal
conscience, spontaneity, curiosity or integrity; whoever has
cultivated himself, whoever has thought for himself and exercised his
own will and judgment rises above the level and shakes off the yoke;
to obtain consideration, to be intelligent and honorable, to belong to
the élite, is to be anti-revolutionary. In the popular club of Bourg-
en-Bresse,[150] Representative Javogues declared that,

"the Republic could be established only on the corpse of the last of
the respectable men."

X. The Governors and the Governed.

Prisoners in the rue de Sévres and the "Croix-Rouge" revolutionary
committee. - The young Dauphin and Simon his preceptor. - Judges,
and those under their jurisdiction. - Trenchard and Coffinhal,
Lavoisier and André Chénier.

Here we have, on one side, the élite of France, almost every person of
rank, fortune, family, and merit, those eminent for intelligence,
culture, talent and virtue, all deprived of common rights, in exile,
in prison, under pikes, and on the scaffold. On the other side, those
above common law, possessing every office and omnipotent in the
irresponsible dictatorship, in the despotic proconsulships, in the
sovereignty of justice, a horde of the outcasts of all classes, the
parvenus of fanaticism, charlatanism, imbecility and crime. Often,
when these personalities meet, one sees the contrast between the
governed and the governors in such strong relief that one almost
regards it as calculated and arranged beforehand; the colors and brush
of the painter, rather than words, are necessary to represent it. In
the western section of Paris, in the prisons of the rue de Sévres[151]
the prisoners consist of the most distinguished personages of the
Quartier Saint Germain, prelates, officers, grand-seigniors, and noble
ladies, - - Monseigneur de Clermont-Tonnerre, Monseigneur de Crussol
d'Amboise, Monseigneur de Hersaint, Monseigneur de Saint Simon, bishop
of Agde, the Comtesse de Narbonne-Pelet, the Duchesse de Choiseul, the
Princesse de Chimay, the Comtesse de Raymond-Narbonne and her
daughter, two years of age, in short, the flower of that refined
society which Europe admired and imitated and which, in its exquisite
perfection, equalled or surpassed all that Greece, Rome and Italy had
produced in brilliancy, polish and amiability. Contrast with these
the arbiters of their lives and deaths, the potentates of the same
quarter who issue the warrants of arrest against them, who pen them in
to speculate on them, and who revel at their expense and before their
eyes: these consist of the members of the revolutionary committee of
the Croix-Rouge, the eighteen convicted rogues and debauchees
previously described,[152] ex-cab-drivers, porters, cobblers, street-
messengers, stevedores, bankrupts, counterfeiters, former or future
jail-birds, all clients of the police or alms-house riff-raff. - At
the other end of Paris, in the east, in the tower of the Temple,
separated from his sister and torn from his mother, still lives the
little Dauphin: no one in France merits more pity or respect than him.
For, if France exists, it is owing to the thirty-five military chiefs
and crowned kings of which he is the last direct scion; without their
thousand years of hereditary rule and preserving policy the intruders
into the Tuileries who have just profaned their tombs at St. Denis
and thrown their bones into a common ditch,[153] would not be
Frenchmen. At this moment, were suffrages free, the immense majority
of the people, nineteen Frenchmen out of twenty, would recognize this
innocent and precious child for their King, the heir of the people of
which their nation and country is formed, a child of eight years, of
rare precociousness, as intelligent as he is good, and of a gentle and
winning expression. Look at the other figure alongside of him, his
fist raised and with insults on his lips, with a hang-dog face,
bloated with brandy, titular governor, official preceptor, and
absolute master of this child, the cobbler Simon, malignant, foul-
mouthed, mean in every way, forcing him to become intoxicated,
starving him, preventing him from sleeping, thrashing him, and who,
obeying orders, instinctively visits on him all his brutality and
corruption that he may pervert, degrade and deprave him.[154] - In the
Palais de Justice, midway between the tower of the Temple and the
prison in the rue de Sèvres, an almost similar contrast, transposing
the merits and demerits, daily brings together in opposition the
innocent with the vile. There are days when the contrast, still more
striking, seats criminals on the judges' bench and judges on the bench
of criminals. On the first and second of Floréal, the old
representatives and trustees of liberty under the monarchy, twenty-
five magistrates of the Paris and Toulouse parliaments, many of them
being eminent intellects of the highest culture and noblest character,
embracing the greatest historical names of the French magistracy, -
Etienne Pasquier, Lefèvre d'Ormesson, Molé de Champlatreux, De
Lamoignon, de Malesherbes, - are sent to the guillotine[155] by the
judges and juries familiar to us, assassins or brutes who do not take
the trouble, or who have not the capacity, to give proper color to
their sentences. M. de Malesherbes exclaims, after reading his
indictment, " If that were only common-sense!" - In effect those who
pronounce judgment are, by their own admission, "substantial jurymen,
good sans-culottes, natural people." And such a nature! One of these,
Trenchard, an Auvergnat carpenter, portrays himself accurately in the
following note addressed to his wife before the trial comes on:

"If you are not alone, and the companion can work, you may come, my
dear, and see the twenty-four gentlemen condemned, all of them former
presidents or councillors in the parliaments of Toulouse and Paris. I
recommend you to bring something along with you (to eat), it will be
three hours before we finish. I embrace you, my dear friend and
wife."[156]

In the same court, Lavoisier, the founder and organizer of chemistry,
the great discoverer, and condemned to death, asks for a reprieve of
his sentence for a fortnight to complete an experiment, and the
president, Coffinhal, another Auvergnat, replies,

"The Republic has no need of savants."[157]

And it has no need of poets. The first poet of the epoch, André
Chénier, the delicate and superior artist who reopens antique sources
of inspiration and starts the modern current, is guillotined; we
possess the original manuscript indictment of his examination, a
veritable master-piece of gibberish and barbarism, of which a full
copy is necessary to convey an idea of its "turpitudes of sense and
orthography."[158] The reader may there see, if he pleases, a man of
genius delivered up to brutes, coarse, angry, despotic animals, who
listen to nothing, who comprehend nothing, who do not even understand
terms in common use, who stumble through their queries, and who, to
ape intelligence, draggle their pens along in supreme stupidity.

The overthrow is complete. France, subject to the Revolutionary
Government, resembles a human being forced to walk with his head down
and to think with his feet.
_____________________________________________________________________

Notes:


[1] Cf. "The Revolution," book I., ch. 3, and book III., chs. 9 and
10.

[2] Grégoire, " Memoires," II., 172. "About eighteen thousand
ecclesiastics are enumerated among the émigrés of the first epoch.
About eighteen thousand more took themselves off, or were sent off,
after the 2nd of September."

[3] Ibid., 26. "The chief of the émigré bureau in the police
department (May 9, 1805) enumerates about two hundred thousand persons
reached, or affected, by the laws concerning emigration." - Lally-
Tolendal, "Défense des Emigrés," (2nd part, p. 62 and passim).
Several thousand persons inscribed as émigrés did not leave France.
The local administration recorded them on its lists either because
they lived in another department, and could not obtain the numerous
certificates exacted by the law in proof of residence, or because
those who made up the lists treated these certificates with contempt.
It was found convenient to manufacture an émigré in order to
confiscate his possessions legally, and even to guillotine him, not
less legally, as a returned émigré. - Message of the Directory to the
"Five Hundred," Ventôse 3, year V.: "According to a rough estimate,
obtained at the Ministry of Finances, the number enrolled on the
general list of émigres amounts to over one hundred and twenty
thousand; and, again, the lists from some of the departments have not
come in." - Lafayette, "Mémoires," vol. II., 181. (Letters to M. de
Maubourg, Oct. 17, 1799 (noté) Oct. 19, 1800.) According to the
report of the Minister of Police, the list of émigrés, in nine vols.,
still embraced one hundred and forty-five thousand persons,
notwithstanding that thirteen thousand were struck off by the
Directory, and twelve hundred by the consular government.

[4] Cf. Mémoires of Louvet, Dulaure and Vaublanc. - Mallet-Dupan,
"Mémoires," II., 7. "Several, to whom I have spoken, literally made
the tour of France in various disguises, without having been able to
find an outlet; it was only after a series of romantic adventures that
they finally succeeded in gaining the Swiss frontier, the only one at
all accessible." - Sauzay, V., 210, 220, 226, 276. (Emigration of
fifty-four inhabitants of Charquemont, setting out for Hungary.)

[5] Ibid., vols. IV., V., VI., VII. (On the banished priests
remaining and still continuing their ministrations, and on those who
returned to resume them.) - To obtain an idea of the situation of the
emigrés and their relations and friends, it is necessary to read the
law of Sep.15, 1794 (Brumaire 25, year III.), which renews and
generalizes previous laws; children of fourteen years and ten years
are affected by it. It was with the greatest difficulty, even if one
did not leave France, that a person could prove that he had not
emigrated.

[6] Pandour, an 18th century Croatian foot-soldier in the Austrian
service: a robber. (SR)

[7] Moniteur, XVIII., 215. (Letter of Brigadier-general Vandamme to
the convention, Ferney, Brumaire I, year II.) The reading of this
letter calls forth "reiterated applause."

[8] Sauzay, V., 196. (The total is five thousand two hundred. Some
hundreds of names might be added, inasmuch as many of the village
lists are wanting.)

[9] Buchez et Roux, XXXIV., 434. (Trial of Fouquier-Tinville,
deposition of Therriet-Grandpré, one of the heads of the commission on
civil Police and Judicial Administration, 51st witness.)

[10] Report by Saladin, March 4, 1795.

[11] Wallon, "La Terreur," II., 202.

[12] Duchatelier, "Brest Pendant la Terreur," p. 105. - Paris,
"Histoire de Joseph Lebon," II., 370. - "Tableau des Prisons de
Toulouse," by Pescayre, p. 409. - " Recueil de Pièces Authentiques
sur la Révolution à Strasbourg," I., 65. (List of arrests after
Prairial 7, year II.) When the following arrests were made there were
already over three thousand persons confined in Strasbourg." - Alfred
Lallier, "Les Noyades de Nantes," p.90. - Berryat Saint-Prix, p.436.
(Letter of Maignet to Couthon, Avignon, Floreal 4, year II.)

[13] Baulieu, "Essais," V., 283. At the end of December, 1793,
Camille Desmoulins wrote: "Open the prison doors to those two hundred
thousand citizens whom you call 'suspects'!" - The number of prisoners
largely increased during the seven following months. ("Le Vieux
Cordelier," No. IV., Frimaire 30, year II.) - Beaulieu does not state
precisely what the committee of General Security meant by the word
déténu. Does it merely relate to those incarcerated? Or must all who
were confined at their own houses be included? - We are able to verify
his statement and determine the number, at least approximatively, by
taking one department in which the rigor of the revolutionary system
was average and where the lists handed in were complete. According to
the census of 1791, Doubs contained two hundred and twenty-one
thousand inhabitants; France had a population of 26 millions, and we
have just seen the number of each category that were under
confinement; the proportion for France gives 258 000 persons
incarcerated, and 175 000 confined to their houses, and 175 000
persons besides these on the limits in their communes, or ajournées,


 


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