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;[4146] 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.[4147]

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.[4148]

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;[4149] 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;[4150] 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."[4151] 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 Roederer,[4152] "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,[4153] 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.[4154] 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.[4155]--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;[4156] 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.[4157]--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[4158] is

not yet aware that the functions of the fermiers-généraux of indirect

taxes differ from those of the receveurs-géneraux of direct taxes;[4159]

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.[4160] 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,[4161] 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;[4162] 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.[4163] M. des

Echerolles,[4164] 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:[4165] 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[4166] 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,[4167] "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.[4168] 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,[4169]

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.[4170] 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.[4171]--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,[4172]

except the resident seignior and some man of the law or half-way

schoolmaster, was at all learned.[4173] 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,[4174] 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,[4175] 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![4176] 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;[4177] 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.[4178] 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.[4179]

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."[4180] 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,[4181] 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,[4182] 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.[4183] 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.[4184] 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.[4185] 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;[4186] 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:[4187] "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[4188] 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)[4189] that

he has monopolized a brother of the order of Saint-Antoine[4190] 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;"[4191] 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.[4192] 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,[4193] "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.[4194] 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."[4195] 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,[4196] "nearly all farmers are aristocrats;"

"the merchants are all essentially anti-revolutionary,"[4197] 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;[4198] 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."[4199]--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.[41100]

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[41101] 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;[41102] in the Paris prisons alone, two months before

Thermidor 9, there are 2 000 of them.[41103] 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,[41104] 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;"[41105] 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;[41106] 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.[41107] 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,[41108] 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.[41109] 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;[41110]

many of the farmers, shopkeepers and craftsmen belonging to old families

are considered as affiliated with the bourgeoisie or the clergy,[41111]

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.[41112]--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,[41113] 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,"[41114] 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,[41115] 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;[41116] 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,[41117] 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.[41118]

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,[41119] 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?[41120] 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.[41121] 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."[41122] Rich,

anti-revolutionary, and vicious," according to Robespierre,[41123]

"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."[41124] 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!"[41125] "You dared to smile contemptuously on the

appellation of sans-culottes;[41126] 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,[41127] 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."[41128] 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.[41129] In addition to this, writes Representative

Milhaud, at Guyardin,[41130] "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.[41131] In like manner, at

Nantes,[41132] 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.[41133] 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,[41134]

"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,[41135] "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."[41136]

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.[41137]

The second advantage and the second crime of the notables is superiority

of education. "In all respectable assemblages," writes a Dutch traveler

in 1795,[41138] "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,[41139] 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,"[41140] 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;[41141] "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 [41142]..... 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."[41143] 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."[41144]

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:[41145]

"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,[41146]" 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[41147] 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,[41148] "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[41149] 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,[41150] 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[41151] 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,[41152] 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,[41153] 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.[41154]--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[41155] 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."[41156]

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."[41157]

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."[41158] 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.

*****

[Footnote 4101: Cf. "The Revolution," book I., ch. 3, and book III.,

chs. 9 and 10.]

[Footnote 4102: 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."]

[Footnote 4103: 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.]

[Footnote 4104: 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.)]

[Footnote 4105: 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.]

[Footnote 4106: Pandour, an 18th century Croatian foot-soldier in the

Austrian service: a robber. (SR)]

[Footnote 4107: 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."]

[Footnote 4108: 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.)]

[Footnote 4109: 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.)]

[Footnote 4110: Report by Saladin, March 4, 1795.]

[Footnote 4111: Wallon, "La Terreur," II., 202.]

[Footnote 4112: 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.)]

[Footnote 4113: 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, that is to say, 608 000 persons

deprived of their liberty. The first two categories form a total of 433

000 persons, sufficiently near Beaulieu's figures.]

[Footnote 4114: Paris, "Histoire de Joseph Lebon," II., 371, 372, 375,

377, 379, 380.--"Les Angoisses de la Mort," by Poirier and Monjay of

Dunkirk (second edition, year III.). "Their children and trusty agents

still remained in prison; they were treated no better than ourselves...

. we saw children coming in from all quarters, infants of five years,

and, to withdraw them from paternal authority, they had sent to them

from time to time, commissioners who used immoral language with them."]

[Footnote 4115: Mémoires sur les Prisons," (Barrière et Berville

collection), II., 354, and appendix F. Ibid., II., 2262.--The women

were the first to pass under rapiotage." (Prisons of Arras and that of

Plessis, at Paris.)]

[Footnote 4116: "Documents on Daunou," by Taillandier. (Narrative by

Daunou, who was imprisoned in turn in La Force, in the Madelonettes, in

the English Benedictine establishment, in the Hotel des Fermes, and in

Port-Libre.)--On prison management cf., for the provinces, "Tableaux

des Prisons de Toulouse," by Pescayre; "Un Sejour en France," and "Les

Horreurs des Prisons d'Arras," for Arras and Amiens; Alexandrines des

Echerolles, "Une Famille noble sous la Terreur," for Lyons; the trial

of Carrier for Nantes; for Paris, "Histoire des Prisons" by Nougaret, 4

vols., and the "Mémoires sur les Prisons," 2 vols.]

[Footnote 4117: Testimony of Representative Blanqui, imprisoned at La

Force, and of Representative Beaulieu, imprisoned in the Luxembourg and

at the Madelonettes.--Beaulieu, "Essais," V., 290: "The conciergerie

was still full of wretches held for robbery and assassination,

poverty-stricken and repulsive.--It was with these that counts,

marquises, voluptuous financiers, elegant dandies, and more than one

wretched philosopher, were shut up, pell-mell, in the foulest cells,

waiting until the guillotine could make room in the chambers filled

with camp-bedsteads. They were generally put with those on the straw, on

entering, where they sometimes remained a fortnight... It was necessary

to drink brandy with these persons; in the evening, after having dropped

their excrement near their straw, they went to sleep in their filth....

I passed those three nights half-sitting, half-stretched out on a

bench, one leg on the ground and leaning against the wall."--Wallon, "La

Terreur," II., 87. (Report of Grandpré on the Conciergerie, March 17,

1793. "Twenty-six men collected into one room, sleeping on twenty-one

mattresses, breathing the foulest air and covered with half-rotten

rags." In another room forty-five men and ten straw-beds; in a third,

thirty-nine poor creatures dying in nine bunks; in three other rooms,

eighty miserable creatures on sixteen mattresses filled with vermin,

and, as to the women, fifty-four having nine mattresses and standing

up alternately.--The worst prisons in Paris were the Conciergerie, La

Force, Le Plessis and Bicêtre.--"Tableau des Prisons de Toulouse,"

p. 316. "Dying with hunger, we contended with the dogs for the bones

intended for them, and we pounded them up to make soup with."]

[Footnote 4118: "Recueil de Pièces, etc.," i., p.3. (Letter of Frédéric

Burger, Prairial 2, year II.)]

[Footnote 4119: Alfred Lallier, "Les Noyades de Nantes," p.

90.--Campardon, "Histoire de Tribunal Révolutionnaire de Paris," (trial

of Carrier), II., 55. (Deposition of the health-officer, Thomas.) "I saw

perish in the revolutionary hospital (at Nantes) seventy-five prisoners

in two days. None but rotten mattresses were found there, on each

of which the epidemic had consumed more than fifty persons. At the

Entrepot, I found a number of corpses scattered about here and there.

I saw children, still breathing, drowned in tubs full of human

excrement."]

[Footnote 4120: Narrative of the sufferings of unsworn priests, deported

in 1794, in the roadstead of Aix, passim.]

[Footnote 4121: "Histoire des Prisons," I., 10. "Go and visit," says

a contemporary, (at the Conciergerie), "the dungeons called 'the great

Cæsar,' 'Bombie,' 'St. Vincent.' 'Bel Air,' etc., and say whether death

is not preferable to such an abode." Some persons, indeed, the sooner

to end the matter, wrote to the public prosecutor, accusing themselves,

demanding a king and priests, and are at once guillotined, as they hoped

to be.--Cf. the narrative of "La Translation des 132 à Nantois Paris,"

and Riouffe, "Mémoires," on the sufferings of prisoners on their way to

their last prison.]

[Footnote 4122: Berryat Saint-Prix, p. IX., passim.]

[Footnote 4123: Campardon, II., 224.]

[Footnote 4124: Berryat Saint-Prix, 445.--Paris, "Histoire de Joseph

Lebon," II., 352.--Alfred Lallier, p. 90.--Buchez et Roux, XXXII., 394.]

[Footnote 4125: Berryat Saint-Prix, pp.23, 24.]

[Footnote 4126: Berryat Saint-Prix, p.458. "At Orange, Madame de

Latour-Vidan, aged eighty and idiotic for many years, was executed with

her son. It is stated that, on being led to the scaffold, she thought

she was entering a carriage to pay visits and so told her son."--Ibid.,

471. After Thermidor, the judges of the Orange commission having been

put on trial, the jury declared that "they refused to hear testimony

for the defense and did not allow the accused even informal lawyers to

defend them."]

[Footnote 4127: Camille Boursier," La Terreur en Anjou," p.228.

(Deposition of Widow Edin.) "La Persac, a nun ill and infirm, was ready

to take the oath. Nicolas, Vacheron's agent, assisted by several other

persons, dragged her out of bed and put her on a cart; from ninety to

ninety-four others were shot along with her."]

[Footnote 4128: Berryat Saint-Prix, p. 161. The following are samples of

these warrants: "S. (shot), Germinal 13, Widow Menard, seventy-two

years old, an old aristocrat, liking nobody, habitually living by

herself."--"Warrant of the Marseilles committee, Germinal 28, year II.,

condemning one Cousinéri for having continually strayed off as if to

escape popular vengeance, to which he was liable on account of his

conduct and for having detested the Revolution."--Camille Boursier,

p.72, Floréal 15, year II., execution of "Gerard, guilty of having

scorned to assist at the planting of a Liberty-pole, in the commune of

Vouille, Sep., 1792, and inducing several municipal officers to join him

in his insolent and liberticide contempt."]

[Footnote 4129: Wallon, "Histoire du Tribunal Révolutionnaire de Paris,"

V., 145.]

[Footnote 4130: Ibid., v., 109. (Deposition of Madame de Maillé.)--V.,

189. (Deposition of Lhullier.)--Cf. Campardon, in the same affairs.]

[Footnote 4131: Campardon, II., 189, 190, 193, 197. (Depositions of

Beaulieu, Duclos, Tirard, Ducray, etc.)]

[Footnote 4132: Berryat Saint-Prix, 395. (Letter of Representative

Moyse Bayle,)--Ibid., 216. (Words of Representative Lecarpentier

at Saint-Malo.) "Why such delays? Of what use are these eternal

examinations? What need is there of going so deep into this matter? The

name, profession and the upshot, and the trial is over."--"He publicly

stated to the informers: You don't know what facts you require to

denounce the Moderates? Well, a gesture, one single gesture, suffices."]

[Footnote 4133: Letter of Payan to Roman Formosa, judge at Orange: "In

the commissions charged with punishing the conspirators, no formalities

should exist; the conscience of the judge is there as a substitute

for these... The commissions must serve as political courts; they

must remember that all the men who have not been on the side of

the Revolution are against it, since they have done nothing for the

country... I say to all judges, in the name of the country, do not risk

saving a guilty man."--Robespierre made the same declaration in the

Jacobin Club. Frimaire 19, year II.: "We judge, in politics, with the

suspicions of an enlightened patriotism."]

[Footnote 4134: "Mémoires de Fréron" and on Fréron, (collection Barrière

et Berville,) p.364. Letter of Fréron, Toulon, Nivôse 16. "More than

eight hundred Toulonese have already been shot."]

[Footnote 4135: Lallier, p.90. (The eleven distinct drownings

ascertained by M. Lallier extend up to Pluviôse 12, year II.)]

[Footnote 4136: Moniteur, XXII., 227. (Official documents read in the

Convention, Ventôse 21, year III.) These documents authenticate an

ulterior drowning. Ventôse 9, year II., by order of Lefévre, adjutant

general, forty-one persons were drowned, among whom were two men

seventy-eight years of age and blind, twelve women, twelve young girls,

fifteen children, of which ten were between six and ten years old,

and five at the breast. The drowning took place in the Bourgneuf

bay.-Carrier says in the Convention, (Moniteur, XXII., p.578), in

relation to the drowning of pregnant women: "At Laval, Angers, Saumur,

Chaban-Gontier, everywhere the same things took place as at Nantes."]

[Footnote 4137: Camille Boursier, p.159.]

[Footnote 4138: Ibid., 203. Representative Francastel announces "the

firm determination to purge, to bleed freely this Vendean question."

This same Francastel wrote to General Grignon: "Make those brigands

tremble! Give them no quarter! The prisons in Vendée are overflowing

with prisoners!... The conversion of this country into a desert must be

completed. Show no weakness and no mercy... These are the views of the

Convention.... I swear that Vendée shall be depopulated."]

[Footnote 4139: Granier de Cassagnac, "His. du Directoire," II.,

241.--(Letter of General Hoche to the Minister of the Interior, Feb. 2,

1796.) "Only one out of five remains of the population of 1789."]

[Footnote 4140: Campardon, II., 247, 249, 251, 261, 321. (Examination of

Fouquier-Tinville, Cambon's words.)]

[Footnote 4141: Article by Guffroy, in his journal Le Rougiff: "Down

with the nobles, and so much the worse for the good ones, if there are

any! Let the guillotine stand permanently throughout the Republic. Five

millions of inhabitants are enough for France!"--Berryat Saint-Prix,

445. (Letter of Fauvety, Orange, Prairial 14, year II.) "We have but two

confined in our arrondissement. What a trifle!"--Ibid., 447. (Letter of

the Orange Committee to the Committee of Public Safety, Messidor 3.) "As

soon as the Committee gets fully agoing it is to try all the priests,

rich merchants and ex-nobles."--(Letter of Juge, Messidor 2.) "Judging

by appearances more than three thousand heads will fall in the

department."--Ibid., 311. At Bordeaux, a huge scaffold is put up,

authorized by the Military Committee, with seven doors, two of which

are large and like barn-doors, called a four-bladed guillotine, so as

to work faster and do more. The warrant and orders for its construction

bear date Thermidor 3 and 8, year II.--Berryat Saint-Prix, 285. Letter

of Representative Blutel, on mission at Rochefort, after Thermidor: "A

few men, sunk in debauchery and crime, dared proscribe (here) virtues,

patriotism, because it was not associated with their sanguinary

excitement: the tree of Liberty, they said, required for its roots ten

feet of human gore."]

[Footnote 4142: "Recueil de Pièces Authentiques, concernant le

Revolution à Strasbourg," I., 174, 178. Examples of revolutionary

taxes.--Orders of Representatives Milhaud, Ruamps, Guyadin, approving of

the following contributions, Brumaire 20, year II.

On 3 individuals of Stutzheim......150,000 livres.

" 3 " Offenheim....................30,000 "

" 21 " Molsheim.....................367,000 "

" 17 " Oberenheim....................402,000 "

" 84 " Rosheim.......................503,000 "

" 10 " Mutzig........................114,000 "]

Another order by Daum and Tisseraud, members of the committee who

temporarily replace the district administrators: "Whereas, it is owing

to the county aristocrats that the Republic supports the war," they

approve of the following taxes:

On the aristocrats of Geispolzheim, 400,000 livres.

ditto of Oberschoeffolsheim 200,000 "

ditto of Düttlenheim 150,000 "

ditto of Duppigheim 100,000 "

ditto of Achenheim 100,000 "]

List of contributions raised in the rural communes of the district of

Strasbourg, according to an assessment made by Stamm, procureur pro tem.

of the district, amounting to three millions one hundred and ninety-six

thousand one hundred livres.]

[Footnote 4143: "Recueil des Pieces Authentiques," etc., I., 23. By

order of the representatives under date of Brumaire 25, year II. "The

municipality of Strasbourg stripped the whole commune of shoes in

twenty-four hours, sending for them from house to house."--Ibid.. p.32.

Orders of Representatives Lemaire and Baudot, Frimaire I, year II.,

declaring that kitchen-utensils, boilers, sauce-pans, stew-pans, kettles

and other copper and lead vessels, as well as copper and lead not

worked-up, found at Strasbourg and in the departments, be levied

on."--Archives Nationales, AF., I., 92. (Orders of Taillefer, Brumaire

3, year II. Villefranche 1'Avergnon.) Formation of a Committee of ten

persons directed to make domiciliary visits, and authorized to take

possession of all the iron, lead, steel and copper found in the houses

of "suspects," all of which kitchen utensils, are to be turned into

cannon.--Mallet-Dupan, "Mémoires," I., 15.]

[Footnote 4144: Moniteur, XXV., 188. (Speech by Blutels, July 9, 1795.)]

[Footnote 4145: "Recueil du Pièces Authentiques," etc., I.,

24.--Grégoire, reports on Vandalism, Fructidor 14, year II., and

Brumaire 14, year III. (Moniteur, XXII., 86 and 751.)--Ibid., Letter

of December 24, 1796: "Not millions, but billions have been

destroyed."--Ibid.,, "Mémoires," I., 334: "It is incalculable, the

loss of religious, scientific and literary objects. The district

administrations of Blanc (Indre) notified me that to ensure the

preservation of a library, they had the books put in casks."--Four

hundred thousand francs were expended in smashing statues of the Fathers

of the church, forming a circle around the dome of the Invalides.--A

great many objects became worthless through a cessation of their use:

for example, the cathedral of Meaux was put up at auction and found no

purchaser at six hundred francs. The materials were valued at forty-five

thousand francs, but labor (for taking it down) was too high. (Narrative

by an inhabitant of Meaux.)]

[Footnote 4146: "Les Origines du Système Financier Actuel," by Eugene

Sturm, p.53, 79.]

[Footnote 4147: Meissner, "Voyage à Paris," (end of 1795), p. 65. "The

class of those who may have really gained by the Revolution.... is

composed of brokers, army contractors, and their subordinates, a few

government agents and fermiers, enriching themselves by their new

acquisitions, and who are cool and shrewd enough to hide their grain,

bury their gold and steadily refuse assignats."--Ibid., 68, 70. "On the

road, he asks to whom a fine chateau belongs, and they tell him with a

significant look, 'to a former scruffy wretch.'--'Oh, monsieur,' said

the landlady at Vesoul, 'for every one that the Revolution has made

rich, you may be sure that it has made a thousand poor.'"]

[Footnote 4148: The following descriptions and appreciations are the

fruit of extensive investigation, scarcely one tenth of the facts and

texts that have been of service being cited. I must refer the reader,

accordingly, to the series of printed and written documents of which I

have made mention in this and the three preceding volumes.]

[Footnote 4149: "The Ancient Regime," book II., ch 2, P IV.]

[Footnote 4150: Ibid., book IV., chs. I., II., III.]

[Footnote 4151: Lacretelle, "Histoire de France au 18eme Siecle," V.,

2.--" The Ancient Regime," pp. 163, 300.]

[Footnote 4152: Morellet, "Mémoires," I., 166. (Letter by Roederer to

Beccaria's daughter, May 20, 1797).]