[Footnote 4153: Beccaria (Cesare Bonesana, marquis de) (Milan 1738--id.

1794). Italian jurist, whose "Traité des délits et des peines" (1764)

contributed to the reforms and the softening of of European penal law.

(SR)]

[Footnote 4154: Mallet-Dupan, "Mémoires," II., 493. "While the Duke of

Orleans was undergoing his examination he read a newspaper."--Ibid.,

497. "Nobody died with more firmness, spirit and dignity than the

Duke of Orleans. He again became a royal prince. On being asked in the

revolutionary tribunal whether he had any defense to make, he replied,

'Rather die to-day than to-morrow: deliberate about it.'" His request

was granted.--The Duc de Biron refused to escape, considering that,

in such a dilemma, it was not worth while. "He passed his time in bed,

drinking Bordeaux wine.... Before the tribunal, they asked his name and

he replied, 'Cabbage, turnip, Biron, as you like, one is as good as the

other.' 'How!' exclaimed the judges, 'you are insolent!' 'And you--you

are windbags! I Come to the point; Guillotine, that is all you have

to say, while I have nothing to say.'" Meanwhile they proceeded to

interrogate him on his pretended treachery in Vendée, etc. "'You do not

know what you are talking about! You ignoramuses know nothing about war!

Stop your questions. I reported at the time to the Committee of Public

Safety, which approved of my conduct. Now, it has changed and ordered

you to take my life. Obey, and lose no more time.' Biron asked pardon of

God and the King. Never did he appear better than on the (executioner's)

cart."]

[Footnote 4155: Morellet, II., 31.-"Mémoires de la Duchesse de Tourzel,"

"de Mlle. des Écherolles," etc.-Beugnot, "Mémoires, I., 200-203. "The

wittiest remarks, the most delicate allusions, the most brilliant

repartees were exchanged on each side of the grating. The conversation

was general, without any subject being dwelt on. There, misfortune was

treated as if it were a bad child to be laughed at, and, in fact, they

did openly make sport of Marat's divinity, Robespierre's sacerdoce

and the magistracy of Fouquier. They seemed to say to all these bloody

menials: 'You may slaughter us when you please, but you cannot hinder

us in being aimable'"-Archives Nationales, F.7, 31167. (Report by the

watchman, Charmont, Nivôse 29, year II.) "The people attending the

executions are very much surprised at the firmness and courage they show

(sic) on mounting the scaffold. They say that it looks (sic) like going

to a wedding. People cannot get used to it, some declaring that it is

supernatural."]

[Footnote 4156: Sauzay, I.. introduction.--De Tocqueville, "L'Ancien

Regime et la Revolution," 166. "I have patiently read most of the

reports and debates of the provincial États,' and especially those of

Languedoc, where the clergy took much greater part than elsewhere in

administrative details, as well as the procès-verbaux of the provincial

assemblies between 1779 and 1787, and, entering on the study with the

ideas of my time, I was surprised to find bishops and abbés, among whom

were several as eminent for their piety as their learning, drawing

up reports on roads and canals, treating such matters with perfect

knowledge of the facts, discussing with the greatest ability and

intelligence the best means for increasing agricultural products, for

ensuring the well-being of the people and the property of industrial

enterprises, oftentimes much better than the laymen who were interested

with them in the same affairs."]

[Footnote 4157: "The Ancient Regime," p.300.--"The Revolution," vol. I.,

p. 116. Buchez et Roux, I., 481. The list of notables convoked by the

King in 1787 gives an approximate idea of this social staff. Besides the

leading princes and seigniors we find, among one hundred and thirty-four

members, twelve marshals of France, eight Councillors of State, five

maîtres de requêtes, fourteen bishops and archbishops, twenty presidents

and seventeen procureurs géneraux des parlements, or of royal councils,

twenty-five mayors, prévôts des marchands, capitouls, and equerries of

large towns, the deputies of the "Etats" of Burgundy, Artois, Brittany

and Languedoc, three ministers and two chief clerks.--The capacities

were all there, on hand, for bringing about a great reform; but there

was no firm, strong, controlling hand, that of a Richelieu or Frederic

II.]

[Footnote 4158: See "The Revolution II" Ed. Lafont page 617. US edition

P. 69. (SR.)]

[Footnote 4159: "Mémoires de Gaudin," duc de Gaëte.]

[Footnote 4160: Mallet-Dupan, "Mémoires," II., 25, 24. "The War

Committee is composed of engineer and staff-officers, of which the

principal are Meussuer, Favart, St. Fief, d'Arcon, Lafitte-Clavé and a

few others. D'Arcon directed the raising of the siege of Dunkirk and

that of Maubenge.... These officers were selected with discernment; they

planned and carried out the operations; aided by immense resources,

in the shape of maps, plans and reconnaissances preserved in the

war department, they really operated according to the experience and

intelligence of the great generals under the monarchy."]

[Footnote 4161: Miot de Melito, "Mémoires," I., 47.--Andre Michel,

"Correspondance de Mallet-Dupan avec la Cour de Vienne," I., 26. (January

3, 1795.) "The Convention feels so strongly the need of suitable aids to

support the burden of its embarrassments as to now seek for them among

pronounced royalists. For instance, it has just offered the direction of

the royal treasury to M. Dufresne, former chief of the department under

the reign of the late King, and retired since 1790. It is the same

spirit and making a still more extraordinary selection, which leads them

to appoint M. Gerard de Rayneval to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs,

chief-clerk of correspondence since the ministry of the Duc de Choiseul

until that of the Comte de Montmorin inclusive. He is a man of decided

opinions and an equally decided character; in 1790 I saw him abandon

the department through aversion to the maxims which the Revolution had

forcibly introduced into it."]

[Footnote 4162: Marshal Marmont, "Mémoires." At nine years of age he

rode on horseback and hunted daily with his father.]

[Footnote 4163: Among other manuscript documents, a letter of M. Symn

de Carneville, March II, 1781. (On the families of Carneville and

Montmorin-Saint-Herem, in 1789.) The latter family remains in France;

two of its members are massacred, two executed, a fifth "escaped the

scaffold by forestalling the justice of the people;" the sixth, enlisted

in the revolutionary armies, received a shot at nineteen years of age

which made him blind. The other family emigrated, and its chiefs, the

count and viscount Carneville commanded, one, a free company in the

Austrian service, and the other, a regiment of hussars in Conde's

army. Twelve officers of these two corps were brothers-in-law, nephews,

first-cousins and cousins of the two commanders, the first of whom

entered the service at fifteen, and the second at eleven.--Cf. "Mémoires

du Prince de Ligne." At seven or eight years of age I had already

witnessed the din of battle, I had been in a besieged town, and

saw three sieges from a window. A little older, I was surrounded by

soldiers; old retired officers belonging to various services, and

living in the neighborhood fed my passion.--Turenne said "I slept on a

gun-carriage at the age of ten. My taste for war was so great as to lead

me to enlist with a captain of the 'Royal Vaissiaux,' in garrison two

leagues off. If war had been declared I would have gone off and let

nobody know it. I joined his company, determined not to owe my fortune

to any but valorous actions."--Cf. also "Mémoires du Maréchal de Saxe."

A soldier at twelve, in the Saxon legion, shouldering his musket, and

marching with the rest, he completed each stage on foot from Saxony

to Flanders, and before he was thirteen took part in the battle of

Malplaquet.]

[Footnote 4164: Alexandrine des Echerolles, "Un Famille Noble sous la

Terreur," p.25.--Cf. "Correspondance de Madelle de Féring," by Honore

Bonhomme. The two sisters, one sixteen and the other thirteen, disguised

as men, fought with their father in Dumouriez' army.--See the sentiment

of young nobles in the works of Berquin and Marmontel. (Les Rivaux d'

Eux-meme.)]

[Footnote 4165: "The Revolution," I., 158, 325. Ibid., the affair of M.

de Bussy, 306; the affair of the eighty-two gentlemen of Caen, 316.--See

in Rivarol ("Journal Politique Nationale") details of the admirable

conduct of the Body-guards at Versailles, Oct. 5 and 6, 1789.]

[Footnote 4166: The noble families under the ancient regime may be

characterized as so many families of soldiers' children.]

[Footnote 4167: "L'Ancien Régime et la Revolution," by M. de

Tocqueville, p.169. My judgment, likewise based on the study of texts,

and especially manuscript texts, coincides here as elsewhere with that

of M. de Tocqueville. Biographies and local histories contain documents

too numerous to be cited.]

[Footnote 4168: Sauzay, I., introduction, and Ludovic Sciout, "Histoire

de la Constitution Civile du Clergé," I., introduction. (See in Sauzay,

biographical details and the grades of the principal ecclesiastical

dignitaries of the diocese Besançon.) The cathedral chapter, and that of

the Madeleine, could be entered only through nobility or promotion; it

was requisite for a graduate to have a noble for a father, or a doctor

of divinity, and himself be a doctor of divinity or in canon law.

Analogous titles, although lower down, were requisite for collegiate

canons, and for chaplains or familiars.]

[Footnote 4169: "The Revolution," I., 233.--Cf. Emile Ollivier, "L'Eglise

et l'Etat au Concile du Vatican," I., 134, II., 511.]

[Footnote 4170: Morellet, "Mémoires," I., 8, 31. The Sorbonne, founded

by Robert Sorbon, confessor to St. Louis, was an association resembling

one of the Oxford or Cambridge colleges, that is to say, a corporation

possessing a building, revenues, rules, regulations and boarders;

its object was to afford instruction in the theological sciences;

its titular members, numbering about a hundred, were mostly bishops,

vicars-general, canons, curés in Paris and in the principal towns. Men

of distinction were prepared in it at the expense of the Church.--The

examinations for the doctorate were the tentative, the mineure, the

Sorbonique and the majeure. A talent for discussion and argument was

particularly developed.--Cf. Ernest Renan, "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de

Jeunesse," p.279, (on St. Sulpice and the study of Theology).]

[Footnote 4171: Cf. the files of the clergy in the States-General, and

the reports of ecclesiastics in the provincial assemblies.]

[Footnote 4172: "The Revolution," p.72. (Ed. Lafont I, p 223 etc.)]

[Footnote 4173: In some dioceses, notably that of Besançon, the rural

parishes were served by distinguished men. (Sauzay, I., 16.) "It was not

surprising to encounter a man of European reputation, like Bergier, so

long curé of Flangebouche; an astronomer of great merit, like M. Mongin,

curé of la Grand Combe des Bois, whose works occupy an honorable place

in Lalande's bibliography, all passing their lives in the midst of

peasants. At Rochejean, a priest of great intelligence and fine feeling,

M. Boillon, a distinguished naturalist, had converted his house into a

museum of natural history as well as into an excellent school.... It was

not rare to find priests belonging to the highest social circles, like

MM. de Trevillers, of Trevillers, Balard de Bonnevaux of Bonétage, de

Mesmay of Mesmay, du Bouvot, at Osselle, cheerfully burying themselves

in the depths of the country, some on their family estates, and, not

content to share their income with their poor parishioners, but on

dying, leaving them a large part of their fortunes."]

[Footnote 4174: De Tocqueville, "L'Ancien Regime," 134, 137.]

[Footnote 4175: Terms signifying certain minor courts of law.]

[Footnote 4176: Albert Babeau, "La Ville sous l'Ancien Régime," p.

26.--(Advertisements in the "Journal de Troyes," 1784, 1789.) "For sale,

the place of councillor in the Salt-department at Sézannes. Income from

eight to nine hundred livres. Price ten thousand livres."--"A person

desires to purchase in this town (Troyes) an office in the Magistracy

or Finances, at from twenty-five thousand to sixty thousand livres; cash

paid down if required."]

[Footnote 4177: De Tocqueville, "L'Ancien Régime," p.356. The municipal

body of Angers comprised, among other members, two deputies of the

présidial, two of the Forest and Streams department, two of the

Election, two of the Salt-department, two of the Customs, two of the

Mint, two Council judges. The system of the ancient regime, universally,

is the grouping together of all individuals in one body with a

representative of all these bodies, especially those of the notables.

The municipal body of Angers, consequently, comprises two deputies of

the society of lawyers and procureurs, two of the notarial body, one

of the University, one of the Chapter, a Syndic of the clerks, etc.--At

Troyes (Albert Babeau," Histoire de Troyes Pendant la Révolution,"

p.23.) Among the notables of the municipality may be found one member of

the clergy, two nobles, one officer of the bailiwick, one officer of the

other jurisdictions, one physician, one or two bourgeois, one lawyer,

one notary or procureur, four merchants and two members of the trade

guild.]

[Footnote 4178: Albert Babeau, "La Ville," p.26. (Cf. note on preceding

page.) The Collector's Office at Reteil, in 1746, is sold at one hundred

and fifty thousand livres; it brings in from eleven thousand to fourteen

thousand livres.--The purchaser, besides, has to pay to the State the

"right of the golden marc" (a tax on the transfer of property); in 1762,

this right amounted to nine hundred and forty livres for the post of

Councillor to the bailiwick of Troyes. D'Esprémenil, councillor in the

Paris Parliament, had paid fifty thousand livres for his place, besides

ten thousand livres taxation of the "golden marc."]

[Footnote 4179: Emile Bos, "Les Avocats au conseil du Roi," p.340.

Master Peruot, procureur, was seated on the balcony of the Theatre

Français when Count Moreton Chabrillant arrives and wants his place. The

procureur resists and the count calls the guard, who leads him off to

prison. Master Peruot enters a complaint; there is a trial, intervention

of the friends of M. de Chabrillant before the garde des sceaux,

petitions of the nobles and resistance of the entire guild of advocates

and procureurs. M. de Chabrillant, senior, offers Peruot forty thousand

livres to withdraw his suit, which Peruot refuses to do. Finally, the

Count de Chabrillant is condemned, with six thousand livres damages,

(which are given to the poor and to prisoners), as well as to the

expense of printing two hundred impressions of the verdict.--Duport

de Cheverney, "Mémoires," (unpublished), communicated by M. Robert de

Crevecoeur: "Formerly a man paid fifty thousand livres for an office

with only three hundred livres income; the consideration, however,

he enjoyed through it, and the certainty of remaining in it for life,

compensated him for the sacrifice, while the longer he kept it, the

greater was the influence of himself and children."]

[Footnote 4180: Albert Babeau, "La Ville," p. 27;--"Histoire de Troyes,"

p. 21.--This portrait is drawn according to recollections of childhood

and family narrations. I happen to have known the details of two or

three small provincial towns, one of about six thousand inhabitants

where, before 1800, nearly all the notables, forty families, were

relations; to-day all are scattered. The more one studies documents, the

more does Montesquieu's definition of the incentive of society under

the ancient régime seem profound and just, this incentive consisting of

honor. In the bourgeoisie who were confounded with the nobility, namely

the Parliamentarians, their functions were nearly gratuitous; the

magistrate received his pay in deference. (Moniteur, V., 520. Session

of August 30, 1790, speech by d'Espremenil.) "Here is what it cost a

Councillor; I take myself as an example. He paid fifty thousand livres

for his place, and ten thousand more for the tax of the 'marc d'or.'

He received three hundred and eighty-nine livres ten sous salary,

from which three hundred and sixty-seven livres 'capitation' had to be

deducted. The King allowed us forty-five livres for extra service of 'La

Tournelle'. How about the fees? is asked. The (grande chambre) superior

court, asserted to have received the largest amount, was composed of one

hundred and eighty members; the fees amounted to two hundred and fifty

thousand livres, which were not a burden on the nation, but on the

litigants. M. Thouret, who practiced in the Rouen parliament, will

bear witness to this. I appeal to him to say conscientiously what sum

a Councillor derived from his office--not five hundred livres... When

a judgment cost the litigant nine hundred livres the King's portion was

six hundred livres... To sum up, the profits of an office were seven

livres ten sous."]

[Footnote 4181: Albert Babeau, "La Ville," ch. II., and "Histoire de

Troyes," I., ch. 1. At Troyes, fifty merchants, notables, elected the

judge-consul and two consuls; the merchants' guild possessed its own

hall and had its own meetings. At Paris, the drapers, mercers, grocers,

furriers, hatters and jewelers formed the six bodies of merchants.

The merchants' guild everywhere took precedence of other industrial

communities and enjoyed special privileges. "The merchants," says

Loyseau, "hold rank (qualité d'honneur), being styled honorable men,

honest persons and bourgeois of the towns, qualifications not attributed

to husbandmen, nor to sergeants, nor to artisans, nor to manual

laborers."--On paternal authority and domestic discipline in these old

bourgeois families see the History of Beaumarchais and his father. ("

Beaumarchais," by M. de Lomenie, vol. I.)]

[Footnote 4182: Albert Babeau, "Le village sous l'Ancien Régime," p.

56, ch. III and IV., (on the village syndics), and pp. 357 and 359. "The

peasants had the right to deliberate on their own affairs directly and

to elect their principal agents. They understood their own needs, were

able to make a sacrifice for school and church.... for repairs of the

town clock and the belfry. They appointed their own agents and generally

elected the most capable."--Ibid, "La Ville sous 1'Ancien Regime," p.29.

The artisans' guilds numbered at Paris one hundred and twenty-four.

at Amiens sixty-four, and at Troyes fifty, also Chalons-sur-Marne, at

Angers twenty-seven. The edicts of 1776 reduced them to forty-four at

Paris, and to twenty as the maximum for the principal towns within the

jurisdiction of the Paris parliament.--"Each guild formed a city within

a city... Like the communes, it had its special laws, its selected

chiefs, its assemblies, its own building or, at least, a chamber in

common, its banner, coat-of-arms and colors."--Ibid., "Histoire

de Troyes Pendant la Revolution," I., 13, 329. Trade guilds and

corporations bear the following titles, drawn up in 1789, from the files

of complaints: apothecaries, jewelers and watch-makers, booksellers and

printers, master-barbers, grocers, wax and candle-makers, bakers and

tailors, master shoemakers, eating-house-keepers, inn-keepers

and hatters, master-masons and plasterers in lime and cement,

master-joiners, coopers and cabinet-makers, master-cutlers, armorers,

and polishers; founders, braziers, and pin-makers; master-locksmiths,

ironmongers, tinsmiths and other metal workers, vinegar-makers,

master-shearers, master rope-makers, master-tanners, dealers

and master-dyers and dressers; master saddle and harness-makers,

charcoal-burners, carters, paper-makers and band-box-makers, cap-makers

and associates in arts and trades.--In some towns one or two of these

natural guilds kept up during the Revolution and still exist, as, for

example, that of the butchers at Limoges.]

[Footnote 4183: F. Leplay, "Les Ouvriers Européens," V., 456, 2nd ed.,

(on workmen's guilds), Charpentier, Paris.]

[Footnote 4184: F. Leplay, "Les Quvriers Européens," (2nd ed.) IV., 377,

and the monographs of four families (Bordier of Lower Brittany, Brassier

of Armagnac, Savonnier of Lower Provence, Paysan of Lavedan, ch. 7,

8 and 9).--Ibid., "L'Organization de la Famille," p.62, and the whole

volume.--M. Leplay, in his exact, methodical and profound researches,

has rendered a service of the highest order to political science and,

consequently, to history. He has minutely observed and described the

scattered fragments of the old organization of society; his analysis

and comparison of these fragments shows the thickness and extent of the

stratum almost gone, to which they belonged. My own observations on the

spot, in many provinces in France, as well as the recollections of my

youth, agree with M. Leplay's discoveries.--On the stable, honest

and prosperous families of small rural proprietors, Cf. Ibid., p. 68,

(Arthur Young's observation in Béarn), and p.75. Many of these families

existed in 1789, more of them than at the present time, especially

in Gascony, Languedoc, Auvergne, Dauphiny, Franch-Comté, Alsace and

Normandy.--Ibid., "L'Organization du Travail," pp.499, 503, 508.

(Effects of the "Code Civile" on the transmission of a manufactory and

a business establishment in France, and on cultivation in Savoy; the

number of suits in France produced by the system of forced partition of

property.)]

[Footnote 4185: F. Leplay, "L'Organization de la Famille," p.212.

(History of the Mélonga family from 1856 to 1869 by M. Cheysson.) Also

p.269. (On the difficulty of partitions among ascendants, by M. Claudio

Jannet.)]

[Footnote 4186: Rétif de la Bretonne, "Vie de mon Pere," (paternal

authority in a peasant family in Burgundy). The reader, on this point,

may test the souvenirs of his grand-parents. With reference to the

bourgeoisie I have cited the family of Beaumarchais. Concerning

the nobles, see the admirable letter by Buffon June 22, 1787,

(correspondence of Buffon, two vols., published by M. Nadaud de Buffon),

telling his son how he ought to act on account of his wife's behavior.]

[Footnote 4187: Moniteur, XIX., 669.]

[Footnote 4188: Dauban, "Paris en 1794," p.245. (Report by Bacon,

Ventôse 25, year II.)]

[Footnote 4189: Ibid. (Report by Perrière, Ventôse 26.)]

[Footnote 4190: Ironical, slang for a hog. TR.]

[Footnote 4191: Ibid., 245. (Report by Bacon, speech of an orator to the

general assembly of the section "Contrat-Social," Ventôse 25.)]

[Footnote 4192: "Un Sejour en France." (Sep., 1792.) Letter of a

Parisian: "It is not yet safe to walk the streets in decent clothes.

I have been obliged to procure and put on pantaloons, jacket, colored

cravat and coarse linen, before attempting to go outdoors."--Beaulieu,

"Essais," V., 281. "Our dandies let their moustaches grow long; while

they rumpled their hair, dirtied their hands and donned nasty garments.

Our philosophers and literary men wore big fur caps with long fox-tails

dangling over their shoulders; some dragged great trailing sabers along

the pavement--they were taken for Tartars.... In public assemblies, in

the theatre boxes, nothing was seen in the front rows but monstrous red

bonnets. All the galériens of all the convict prisons in Europe seem to

have come and set the fashion in this superb city which had given it to

all Europe."--"Un Séjour en France," p. 43. (Amiens, September, 1792.)

"Ladies in the street who are well-dressed or wear colors that the

people regard as aristocratic are commonly insulted. I, myself, have

been almost knocked down for wearing a straw hat trimmed with green

ribbons."--Nolhac, "Souvenirs de Trois Années de la Révolution at

Lyons," p.132. "It was announced that whoever had two coats was to fetch

one of them to the Section, so as to clothe some good republican and

ensure the reign of equality."]

[Footnote 4193: Buchez et Roux, XXVI., 455. (Speech by Robespierre,

in the Jacobin club, May 10, 1793.): "The rich cherish hopes for an

anti-revolution; it is only the wretched, only the people who can save

the country."--Ibid., XXX. (Report by Robespierre to the Convention,

December 25, 1793.): "Virtue is the appanage of the unfortunate and the

people's patrimony."--Archives Nationales, AF.,II., 72. (Letter of the

municipality of Montauban, Vendémiaire 23, year IV.) Many workmen in

the manufactories have been perverted "by excited demagogues and club

orators who have always held out to them equality of fortunes

and presented the Revolution as the prey of the class they called

sans-culottes.... The law of the 'maximum,' at first tolerably well

carried out, the humiliation of the rich, the confiscation of the

immense possessions of the rich, seemed to be the realization of these

fine promises."]

[Footnote 4194: Archives Nationales, F.7, 4421. Petition of Madeleine

Patris.--Petition of Quétrent Cogniér, weaver, "sans-culotte, and one

of the first members of the Troyes national guard."--(The Style and

orthography of the most barbarous kind.)]

[Footnote 4195: bid., AF., II. 135. (Extract from the deliberations

of the Revolutionary Committee of the commune of Strasbourg, list of

prisoners and reasons for arresting them.) At Oberschoeffolsheim, two

farmers "because they are two of the richest private persons in the

commune."--"Recueil de Pieces, etc.," I.. 225. (Declaration by Welcher,

revolutionary commissioner). "I, the undersigned, declare that, on the

orders of citizen Clauer, commissioner of the canton, I have surrendered

at Strasbourg seven of the richest in Obershoeffolsheim without knowing

why." Four of the seven were guillotined.]

[Footnote 4196: Buchez et Roux, XXVI., 341. (Speech by Chasles in the

Convention, May 2, 1793.)]

[Footnote 4197: Moniteur, XVIII., 452. (Speech by Hébert in the Jacobin

club, Brumaire 26.)-Schmidt, "Tableaux de la Révolution Française," 19.

(Reports of Dutard, June II.--Archives Nationales. F7., 31167. (Report

of the Pourvoyeur, Nivôse 6, year II.) "The people complain (se plain)

that there are still some conspirators in the interior, such as butchers

and bakers, but particularly the former, who are (son) an intolerable

aristocracy. They (il) will sell no more meat, etc. It is frightful to

see what they (il) give the people."]

[Footnote 4198: "Recueil de Police," etc., I., 69 and 91. At Strasbourg

a number of women of the lower class are imprisoned as "aristocrats

and fanatics," with no other alleged motive. The following are their

occupations: dressmaker, upholsteress, housewife, midwife, baker, wives

of coffee-house keepers, tailors, potters and chimney-sweeps.--Ibid.,

II., 216. "Ursule Rath, servant to an émigré arrested for the purpose of

knowing what her master had concealed.... Marie Faber, on suspicion of

having served in a priest's house."--Archives Nationales, AF., II., 135.

(List of the occupations of the suspected women detained in the cells

of the National college.) Most of them are imprisoned for being either

mothers, sisters, wives or daughters of émigrés or exiled priests, and

many are the wives of shopkeepers or mechanics. One, a professional

nurse, is an "aristocrat and fanatic." (Another list describes the

men); a cooper as "aristocrat;" a tripe-seller as "very incivique, never

having shown any attachment to the Revolution;" a mason has never shown

"patriotism," a shoemaker is aristocrat at all times, having accepted

a porter's place under the tyrant;" four foresters "do not entertain

patriotic sentiments," etc.--"Recueil de Pièces, etc.," II., 220.

Citoyenne Genet, aged 75, and her daughter, aged 44, are accused of

having sent, May 22, 1792, thirty-six francs in silver to the former's

son, an émigré and were guillotined.--Cf. Sauzay, vols. III., IV., and

V. (appendices), lists of émigrés and prisoners in Doubs, where titles

and professions, with motives for confining them, will be

found.--At Paris, even (Archives Nationales, F.7, 31167. report of

Latour-Lamontagne, September 20, 1793), aversion to the government

descends very low. "Three women (market-women) all agree on one

point-the necessity of a new order of things. They complain of the

authorities without exception.... If the King is not on their lips, it

is much to be feared that he is already in their hearts. A woman in the

Faubourg St. Antoine, said: If our husbands made the Revolution we know

how to make a counter-revolution if that should be necessary."]

[Footnote 4199: See above ch. V., P 4.--Archives Nationales, F.7, 4435,

No. 10. (Letter of Collot d'Herbois to Couthon, Frimaire 11, year II.)]

[Footnote 41100: Archives des Affaires étrangères, vol.331. (Letter of

Bertrand, Nîmes, Frimaire 3.) "We are sorry to see patriots here not

very delicate in the way they cause arrests, in ascertaining who are

criminal, and the precious class of craftsmen is no exception."]

[Footnote 41101: Berryat Saint-Prix, "La Justice Révolutionnaire," 1st

ed., p.229.]

[Footnote 41102: "Un Séjour en France," p. 186. "I notice that most of

the arrests now made are farmers." (In consequence of the requisitions

for grain, and on account of the applications of the law of the

maximum.)]

[Footnote 41103: "Bulletin du Tribunal Révolutionnaire," No.431.

(Testimony of Tontin, secretary of the court.) Twelve hundred of these

poor creatures were set free after Thermidor 9.]

[Footnote 41104: Moniteur, session of June 29, 1797. (Report of

Luminais.) Danican, "Les Brigands Démasqués," p. 194.]

[Footnote 41105: Meillan, "Mémoires," p. 166.]

[Footnote 41106: Berryat Saint-Prix, "La Justice Révolutionnaire,"

p. 419.--Archives Nationales, AF., II., 145. (Orders issued by

Representative Maignet, Floréal 14, 15 and 17, year II.) "The criminal

court will try and execute the principal criminals; the rest of the

inhabitants will abandon their houses in twenty-four hours, and take

their furniture along with them. The town will then be burnt. All

rebuilding or tillage of the soil is forbidden. The inhabitants will be

apportioned among neighboring communes; nobody is allowed to leave the

commune assigned to him under penalty of being treated as an emigré.

All must appear once every ten days at the municipality under penalty of

being declared 'suspect' and imprisoned."]

[Footnote 41107: "Recueil de Piecès, etc.," I., 52. (Carret de Beudot

and La Coste, Pluviôse 6, year II.) "Whereas, it being impossible to

find jurors within an extent of one hundred leagues, two-thirds of the

inhabitants having emigrated."--Moniteur, Aug.28 and 29, 1797. (Report

by Harmand de la Meuse.)--Ibid., XIX., 714. (Session of Ventôse 26, year

II., speech by Baudot.) "Forty thousand persons of all ages and both

sexes in the districts alone of Haguenau and Wissembourg, fled from the

French territory on the lines being retaken. The names are in our hands,

their furniture in the depot at Saverne and their property is made over

to the Republic."]

[Footnote 41108: Albert Babeau, "Histoire de Troyes," II., 160. "A

gardener had carefully accumulated eight thousand two hundred and

twenty-three livres in gold, the fruit of his savings; threatened with

imprisonment, he was obliged to give them up."]

[Footnote 41109: Archives Nationales, AF.,II., 116. (Orders of

Representative Paganel, Toulouse, Brumaire 12, year II.) "The day has

arrived when apathy is an insult to patriotism, and indifference a

crime. We no longer reply to the objections of avarice; we will

force the rich to fulfill the duties of fraternity which they have

abjured."--Ibid. (Extract from the minutes of the meetings of the

Central committee of Montauban, April II, 1793, with the approval of

the representative, Jeanbon-Saint-André.) "The moment has at length come

when moderatism, royalism and pusillanimity, and all other traitorous

or useless sects to the country, should disappear from the soil of

Liberty." All opinions opposed to those of sans-culotterie are blamable

and merit punishment.]

[Footnote 41110: Archives Nationales, F.7, 2471. (Minutes of the

Revolutionary Committee of the Tuileries section, meeting of September

17, 1793.) List of seventy-four persons put under arrest and among them,

M. de Noailles, with the following note opposite his name: "The entire

family to be arrested, including their heir Guy, and Hervet, their old

intendant, rue St. Honoré."]

[Footnote 41111: Archives des Affaires étrangères, vol. 322. (Letters

of Ladonay, Chalons, September 17 and 20, 1792.) "At Meaux, the brigands

have cut the throats of fifteen prisoners, seven of whom are priests

whose relations belong to the town or its environs. Hence an immense

number of malcontents."--Sauzay, I., 97. "The country curés are

generally recruited from among the rural bourgeoisie and the most

respected farmers' families."]

[Footnote 41112: Sauzay, passim, especially vols. 3, 4, 5, and 6.]

[Footnote 41113: Archives Nationales, F.7, 4437. Address of the popular

club of Clavisson (Gard.), Messidor 7, year II.--Rodolphe Reuss,

"Séligman Alexandre, sur les Tribulations d'un Israelite Strasbourgeois

Pendant la Terreur," p. 37. Order issued by General Diéche to Coppin,

in command of the "Seminaire" prison. "Strive with the utmost zeal to

suppress the cackle of aristocrats." Such is the sum of the instructions

to jail keepers.]

[Footnote 41114: Archives Nationales, AF., II., 88. (Edict issued by

Representative Milhaud, Narbonne, Ventôse 9, year II.) Article II. "The

patriotic donation will be doubled if, in three days, all boats are not

unloaded and all carts loaded as fast as they arrive." Article IV. "The

municipality is charged, on personal responsibility, to proportion the

allotment on the richest citizens of Narbonne." Article VII. "If this

order is not executed within twenty-four hours, the municipality will

designate to the commandant of the post the rich egoists who may have

refused to furnish their contingent, etc." Article VIII. "The commandant

is specially charged to report (the arrests of the refractory rich)

to the representative of the people within twenty-four hours, he being

responsible on his head for the punctual execution of the present

order."--Ibid., AF., II. 135. (Orders of Saint-Just and Lebas,

Strasbourg, Brumaire 10, year II.) The following is equally ironical;

the rich of Strasbourg are represented as "soliciting a loan on opulent

persons and severe measures" against refractory egoists.]

[Footnote 41115: Archives Nationales, AF., II., 92. Orders of

Representative Taillefer, Villefranche, Aveyron, Brumaire 3, year II.,

and of his delegate, Deitheil, Brumaire 11, year II.]

[Footnote 41116: This is the case in Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and

at Paris, as we see in the signatures of the petition of the eight

thousand, or that of the twenty thousand, and for members of the

Feuillants clubs, etc.]

[Footnote 41117: Archives Nationales, AF., II., 116. (Minutes of the

public session of Ventôse 20, year II., held at Montargis, in the Temple

of Reason, by Benon, "national agent of the commune and special agent

of the people's representative." Previous and subsequent orders, by

Representative Lefert.) Eighty-six persons signed, subject to public

penance, among them twenty-four wives or widows, which, with the four

names sent to the Paris tribunal and the thirty-two imprisoned, makes

one hundred and twenty-two. It is probable that the one hundred and six

who are wanting to complete the list of two hundred and twenty-eight had

emigrated, or been banished in the interval as unsworn priests.--Ibid.,

D.S., I., 10. (Orders by Delacroix, Bouchet and Legendre, Conches,

Frimaire 8 and 9, year II.) The incarceration of the municipal officers

of Conches for an analogous petition and other marks of Feuillantism.]

[Footnote 41118: The real sentiments and purposes of the Jacobins are

well shown at Strasbourg. ("Recueil de Pieces, etc.," I., 77. Public

meeting of the municipal body, and speech by Bierlyn, Prairial 25, year

II.) " How can the insipid arrogance of these (Strasbourg) people be

represented to you, their senseless attachment to the patrician families

in their midst, the absurd feuil1antism of some and the vile sycophancy

of others? How is it, they say, that moneyless interlopers, scarcely

ever heard of before, dare assume to have credit in a town of sensible

inhabitants and honest families, from father to son, accustomed to

governing and renowned for centuries?"--Ibid., 113. (Speech of the mayor

Mouet, Floréal 21, year II.) "Moral purification (in Strasbourg) has

become less difficult through the reduction of fortunes and the salutary

terror excited among those covetous men.. . Civilization has encountered

mighty obstacles in this great number of well-to-do families who have

nourished souvenirs of, and who regret the privileges enjoyed by, these

families under the Emperors; they have formed a caste apart from the

State carefully preserving the gothic pictures of their ancestors they

were united only amongst themselves. They are excluded from all public

functions. Honest artisans, now taken from all pursuits, impel the

revolutionary cart with a vigorous hand."]

[Footnote 41119: Archives des Affaires étrangères, vol. 1411.

(Instructions for the civil commissioners by Hérault, representative

of the people, Colmar, Frimaire 2, year II.) He enumerates the diverse

categories of persons who were to be arrested, which categories are so

large and numerous as to include nine out of ten of the inhabitants.]

[Footnote 41120: Dauban, "Paris en 1794," p.264. (Report of Pourveyeur,

Ventôse 29.) "They remark (sic) that one is not (sic) a patriot

with twenty-thousand livres (sic) income, and especially a former

advocate-general."]

[Footnote 41121: De Martel, "Fouché," p.226, 228. For instance, at

Nevers, a man of sixty-two years of age, is confined "as rich, egoist,

fanatic, doing nothing for the Revolution, a proprietor, and having five

hundred livres revenue."]

[Footnote 41122: Buchez et Roux, XXVI., '77. (Speech by Cambon, April

27, 1793.)]

[Footnote 41123: "Who are our enemies? The vicious and the rich."--"All

the rich are vicious, in opposition to the Revolution." (Notes made by

Robespierre in June and July, 1793, and speech by him in the Jacobin

club, May 10, 1793.)]

[Footnote 41124: Guillon, II., 355. (Instructions furnished by Collot

d'Herbois and Fouché, Brumaire 26, year II.)]

[Footnote 41125: De Martel, 171, 181. (Orders of Fouché, Nevers, August

25 and October 8, 1793.)]

[Footnote 41126: Guillon.-Archives des Affaires étrangères, F. 1411.

Reports by observers at Paris, Aug. 12 and 13, 1793. "The rich man is

the sworn enemy of the Revolution."]

[Footnote 41127: Archives Nationales, AF., II., 135. (Orders of

Saint-Just and Lebas, Strasbourg, Brumaire 10, year II., with the list

of names of one hundred and ninety-three persons taxed, together with

their respective amounts of taxation.)--Among others, "a widow Franck,

banker, two hundred thousand livres."--Ibid., AF., II., 49. (Documents

relating to the revolutionary tax at Belfort.) "Vieillard, Moderate and

egoist, ten thousand francs; Keller, rich egoist, seven thousand; as

aristocrats, of whom the elder and younger brother are imprisoned,

Barthélémy the younger ten thousand, Barthélémy senior, three thousand

five hundred, Barthelemy junior seven thousand, citoyenne Barthélémy,

mother, seven thousand, etc."]

[Footnote 41128: "Recueil de Pièces, etc.," I., 22. (Letter of the

Strasbourg authorities.) De Martel, p. 288. (Letter of the authorities

of Allier.) "Citizens Sainay, Balome, Heulard and Lavaleisse were

exposed on the scaffold in the most rigorous season for six hours (at

Moulins) with this inscription--'bad citizen who has given nothing to

the charity-box.'"]

[Footnote 41129: "Recueil de Pièces, etc.," I., 16.]

[Footnote 41130: Ibid., I., 159. (Orders of Brumaire 15, year II.)]

[Footnote 41131: Archives Nationales, F.7, 2475. (Minutes of the

Revolutionary committee of the Piques section.) September 9, 1793, at 3

o'clock in the morning, the committee declares that, for its part, "it

has arrested twenty-one persons of the category below stated." October

8, it places two sans-culottes as guards in the houses of all those

named below, in the quarter, even those who could not be arrested on

account of absence. "It is time to take steps to make sure of all whose

indifference (sic) and moderatism is ruining the country."]

[Footnote 41132: Berryat Saint-Prix, pp.36, 38. carrier declares suspect

"merchants and the rich."]

[Footnote 41133: Moniteur, XVIII., 641. (Letter of the representatives

imprisoned at Bordeaux, Frimaire 10, year II.)]

[Footnote 41134: Archives des Affaires étrangères, vol.329. (Letter of

Brutus, October 3, 1793.)]

[Footnote 41135: Ibid., vol.329. (Letter of Charles Duvivier, Lille,

Vendémiaire 15, year II.)]

[Footnote 41136: Speech by Barère, Ventôse 17, year II.]

[Footnote 41137: Archives des Affaires étrangères, vol. 331. Letter by

Darbault, political agent, Tarbes, Frimaire II, year II. (Project

for doing away with middle men in trade, brokers and bankers.) "The

profession of a banker is abolished. All holders of public funds are

forbidden to sell them under a year and one day after the date of their

purchase. No one must be at the same time wholesale and retail dealer,

etc." Projects of this sort are numerous. As to the establishment of a

purely agricultural and military Republic, see the papers of Saint-Just,

and the correspondence of the Lyons Terrorists. According to them the

new France needs no silk-weavers. The definite formulas of the system

are always found among the Babeuvists. "Let the arts perish, if it must

be so, provided real Equality remains." (Sylvain Maréchal," Maniféste

des Egaux.")]

[Footnote 41138: "Revue Historique," November, 1878. (Letter of M. Falk,

Paris, Oct.19, 1795.)]

[Footnote 41139: "Etude sur l'histoire de Grenoble Pendant la Terreur,"

by Paul Thibault. (List of notorious "suspects" and of ordinary

"suspects" for each district in the Isere, April and May, 1793.)--Cf.

the various lists of Doubs in Sauzay, and of Troyes, in Albert Babeau.]

[Footnote 41140: "Recueil de Pièces, etc.," I., 19, and the second

letter of Frederic Burger, Thermidor 25.--Archives Nationales, AF.,

II.,111.(Order of Representatives Merlincourt and Amar, Grenoble,

April 27, 1793.) "The persons charged with the actual government of and

instruction in the public establishments known in this town under the

titles of, 1st, Orphelines; 2nd Presentins; 3rd Capuchins; 4th, Le

Propagation; 5th, Hospice for female servants.... are put under arrest

and are forbidden to take any part whatever in the functions relating to

teaching, education or instruction."]

[Footnote 41141: Moniteur, XXI., 645. (Session of the Convention,

Fructidor 14, year II.)--"Bibliotèque nationale," LB41, 1802,

(Denounciation of the six sections of the commune of Dijon), 3: "Woe

betide those are seen in any way, either due to an honest affluence,

a good education, an elegant dress or some talent or other, as being

different from their fellow citizens! They are likely to be persecuted

or to be killed."]

[Footnote 41142: Perhaps there is a connection with Mao Zedong and the

Chinese Cultural Revolution. (SR.)]

[Footnote 41143: Moniteur, XVIII., 51. (Letter by Carrier, Brumaire 17,

year II.)--Berryat Saint-Prix, pp.36 and 38.]

[Footnote 41144: Berriat-Saint-Prix, 240 (The imprisoned at

Brest.)--Duchaltelier ("Brest pendant la Terreur," 205). "Of the 975

prisoners, 106 were former nobles, 239 female nobles, 174 priests or

monks, 206 nuns, 111 seamstresses, female workers etc, 56 were farmers,

46 artisans or workers, 17 merchants, 3 with a liberal profession. One

is imprisoned for having secret opinions, a girl, for being witty and

laughing at the patriots."]

[Footnote 41145: Mallet-Dupan, "Correspondance Politique." Introduction,

p. VIII. (Hamburg, 1796.)]

[Footnote 41146: Portalis, "De la Révision des Jugements," 1795.

(Saint-Beuve, "Causeries du Lundi," V., 452.)--Moniteur. XXII, 86

(Report of Grégoire, 14 Fructidor, year II): "Dumas said that all clever

men (les hommes d'esprit) should be sent to the guillotine... Henriot

proposed to burn the National Library.... and his proposal is repeated

in Marseille... The systematic persecution of talented persons was

organized.... Shouts had been heard in the sections: Beware of that man

as he as written a book."]

[Footnote 41147: "Tableau des Prisons de Toulouse" by Pescayre,

prisoner, year III, p. 317 ( Messidor 22nd, year II). Pinson, secretary

of the reception, indoctrinated as follows the old duke de Lesparre:

"Citoyen, your detention is used by your country as a means of

conversion. Eight of your immediate family have, because they did not

take advantage of his opportunity, carried their heads to the scaffold.

What have you done to avoid the sword of justice? Speak! What are your

feelings? Let us hear your principles. Have you at last renounced the

arrogance of the ancient regime? Do you believe in equality established

by nature and ordained by the Convention? Who are the sans-culottes you

associate with? Is your cell not a meeting place for the aristocrats?...

It is I, who in the future will be your company; I, who will make you

familiar with the republican principles, who will make you love them,

and who will take care of your improvement."]

[Footnote 41148: Taillandier, Mémoires écrits par Daunau, à Port-Libre,

in Aug. 1794, p.51, 52.]

[Footnote 41149: Granier du Cassagnac, "Histoire du Directoire," i.,

107. (Trial of Babeuf, extracts from Buonarotti, programme des "Egaux.")

"All literature in favor of Revelation must be prohibited: children are

to be brought up in common; the child will no longer bear his father's

name; no Frenchman shall leave France; towns shall be demolished,

chateaux torn down and books proscribed; all Frenchmen shall wear one

special costume; armies shall be commanded by civil magistrates;

the dead shall be prosecuted and obtain burial only according to the

favorable decision of the court; no written document shall be published

without the consent of the government, etc."--Cf. "Les Meditations de

Saint-Just."]

[Footnote 41150: Guillon de Montléon, II., 174.]

[Footnote 41151: "Memoires sur les Prisons," I., 211, II.,

187.--Beaulieu, "Essais," V., 320. "The prisons became the rendezvous of

good society."]

[Footnote 41152: "The Revolution," vol.3, ch. 6, ante.]

[Footnote 41153: Chateaubriand: "Génie du Christianisme," part 4,

book II., notes on the exhumations at St. Denis taken by a monk, an

eye-witness. Destruction, August 6 and 8, 1793, of fifty-one monuments.

Exhumation of bodies, October 12 and 25, 1793.--Camille Boursier, "Essai

sur la Terreur en Anjou," p.223. (Testimony of Bordier-Langlois.) "I

saw the head of our good Duke Réné, deposited in the chapel of St.

Bernardin, in the Cordéliers at Angers, tossed like a ball by some

laborers from one to the other."]

[Footnote 41154: R. Chantelauze, "Louis XVII.," (according to

unpublished documents). This book, free of declamation and composed

according to the critical method, sets this question at rest.]

[Footnote 41155: Wallon, "Histoire du Tribunal Revolutionnaire," III.,

285.--Campardon, "Hist. du Tribunal Révolutionnaire de Paris," I., 306.

Brochet, one of the jury, was formerly a lackey.]

[Footnote 41156: The above simply conveys the sense of the document,

which is here given in the original: "Si tu n'est pas toute seulle et

que le compagnion soit a travailier tu peus ma chaire amie venir voir

juger 24 mesieurs tous si-deven président on conselier au parlement

de Paris et de Toulouse. Je t' ainvite a prendre quelque choge aven de

venir parcheque nous naurons pas fini de 3 hurres. Je tembrase ma chère

amie et épouge." (TR).]

[Footnote 41157: Wallon, III., 402.]

[Footnote 41158: Campardon, II., 350.--Cf. Causeries du Lundi," II.,

164. Saint-Beuve's comment on the examination. "André Chénier, natife

de Constantinoble....son frère vice-consulte en Espagne. "Remark the

questions on his health and correspondence and the cock-and-bull story

about the 'maison a cotté.' "--They ask him where his servant was on

the 10th of August, 1792, and he replies that he could not tell. "A lui

representé qua lepoque de cette journee que touts les bons citoyent ny

gnoroit point leurs existence et quayant enttendue batte la générale

cettait un motife de plus pour reconnoitre tous les bons citoyent et

le motife au quelle il setait employée pour sauvee la Republique. A

repondue quil avoit dite l'exacte véritée. A lui demandée quel etoit

dite l'exacte veritée--a repondue que cetoit toutes ce qui etoit cy

dessue."]

CHAPTER II. FOOD AND PROVISIONS.

I. Economical Complexity of Food Chain.

Complexity of the economical operation by which articles of

prime necessity reach the consumer.--Conditions of the

operation.--Available resources.--Cases in which these are

not available.--Case of the holder of these being no longer

disposed to make them.

Suppose a man forced to walk with his feet in the air and his head

downward. By using extremely energetic measures he might, for a while,

be made to maintain this unwholesome attitude, and certainly at the

expense of a bruised or broken skull; it is very probable, moreover,

that he would use his feet convulsively and kick terribly. But it is

certain that if this course were persisted in, the man would experience

intolerable pain and finally sink down; the blood would stop circulating

and suffocation would ensue; the trunk and limbs would suffer as much

as the head, and the feet would become numb and inert.--Such is more

or less the history of France under its Jacobin pedagogues; their rigid

theory and persistent brutality impose on the nation an attitude against

nature; consequently she suffers, and each day suffers more and more;

the paralysis increases; the functions get out of order and cease to

act, while the last and principal one,[4201] the most urgent, namely,

physical support and the daily nourishment of the living individual,

is so badly accomplished, against so many obstacles, interruptions,

uncertainties and deficiencies, that the patient, reduced to extreme

want, asks if to-morrow will not be worse than to-day, and whether his

semi-starvation will not end in complete starvation.

Nothing, apparently, is simpler, and yet really more complex, than

the physiological process by which, in the organized body, the proper

restorative food flows regularly to the spot where it is needed, among

the innumerably diverse and distant cells. In like manner, nothing is

simpler at the first glance, and yet more complex, than the economical

process by which, in the social organism, provisions and other articles

of prime necessity, flow of themselves to all points of the territory

where they are needed and within reach of each consumer. It is owing to

this that, in the social body as in the organized body, the terminal act

presupposes many others anterior to and co-ordinate with it, a series

of elaborations, a succession of metamorphoses, one elimination and

transportation after another, mostly invisible and obscure, but all

indispensable, and all of them carried out by infinitely delicate

organs, so delicate that, under the slightest pressure, they get out

of order, so dependent on each other that an injury to one affects the

operations of the rest, and thus suppresses or perverts the final result

to which, nearly or remotely, they all contribute.

Consider, for a moment, these precious economical organs and their mode

of operation. In any tolerably civilized community that has lasted for

any length of time, they consist, first in rank, of those who possess

wealth arising from the accumulation of old and recent savings, that

is to say, those who possess any sort of security, large or small,

in money, in notes, or in kind, whatever its form, whether in lands,

buildings or factories, in canals, shipping or machinery, in cattle or

tools, as well as in every species of merchandise or produce.--And see

what use they make of these: each person, reserving what he needs for

daily consumption, devotes his available surplus to some enterprise,

the capitalist his ready money, the real-estate owner his land and

tenements, the farmer his cattle, seed and farming implements, the

manufacturer his mills and raw material, the common-carrier his vessels,

vehicles and horses, the trader his warehouses and stock of goods for

the year, and the retailer his shop and supplies for a fortnight.

To which everybody, the agriculturist, merchant and manufacturer,

necessarily adds his cash on hand, the deposits in his bank for paying

the monthly salaries of his clerks, and at the end of the week, the

wages of his workmen.--Otherwise, it would be impossible to till the

soil, to build, to fabricate, to transport, to sell; however useful

the work might be, it could not be perfected, or even begun, without a

preliminary outlay in money or in kind. In every enterprise, the crop

presupposes labor and seed corn. If I want to dig a hole I am obliged

to hire a pick and the arms to wield it, or, in other terms, to make

certain advances. But these advances are made only on two conditions:

first, that he who makes them is able to make them, that is to say, that

he is the possessor of an available surplus; and next, being the owner

of this surplus, that he desires to make them, with this proviso that

he may gain instead of losing by the operation.--If I am wholly or

partially ruined, if my tenants and farmers do not pay their rent,[4202]

if my lands or goods do not bring half their value in the market, if

the net proceeds of my possessions are threatened with confiscation or

pillage, not only have I fewer securities to dispose of, but, again,

I become more and more uneasy about the future; over and above my

immediate consumption I have to provide for a prospective consumption; I

add to my reserve stores especially of coin and provisions; I hold on to

the remnant of my securities for myself and those who belong to me; they

are no longer available and I can no longer make loans or enter upon my

enterprise. And, on the other hand, if the loan or enterprise, instead

of bringing me a profit, brings me loss; if the law is powerless or

fails to do me justice and adds extra to ordinary risks; if my work once

perfected is to become the prey of the government, of brigands or of

whoever pleases to seize it; if I am compelled to surrender my wares and

merchandise at one-half their cost; if I cannot produce, put in store,

transport or sell except by renouncing all profit and with the certainty

of not getting back my advances, I will no longer make loans or enter

upon any under-taking whatever.

Such is the disposition and situation of people able to make advances

in anarchical times, when the State falters and no longer performs its

customary service, when property is no longer adequately protected

by the public force, when jacqueries overspread the country and

insurrections break out in the towns, when chateaux are sacked, archives

burnt, shops broken into, provisions carried off and transportation is

brought to a halt, when rents and leases are no longer paid, when the

courts dare no longer convict, when the constable no longer dares serve

a warrant, when the gendarmerie holds back, when the police fails to

act, when repeated amnesties shield robbers and incendiaries, when

a revolution brings into local and central power dishonest and

impoverished adventurers hostile to every one that possesses property

of any kind.--Such is the disposition and situation of all who are in

possession of the means to initiate projects in socialistic times

* when the usurping State, instead of protecting private property,

destroys or seizes it;

* when it takes for itself the property of many of the great

corporations;

* when it suppresses legally established credits without indemnity;

* when, by dint of expenditure and the burdens this creates, it becomes

insolvent;

* when, through its paper-money and forced circulation, it annuls

indebtedness in the hands of the creditor, and allows the debtor to go

scot-free;

* when it arbitrarily seizes current capital;

* when it makes forced loans and requisitions;

* when its tax on productions surpasses the cost of production and on

merchandise the profit on its sale;

* when it constrains the manufacturer to manufacture at a loss and the

merchant to sell at a loss;

* when its principles, judged by its acts, indicate a progression from

partial to a universal confiscation.--

Ineluctably every phase of disease engenders the evil which follows:

it is like a poison the effects of which spread or pass onwards. Each

function, affected by the derangement of the adjacent one, becoming

disturbed in its turn. The perils, mutilation and suppression of

property diminish available securities as well as the courage that risks

them, that is to say, the mode of, and disposition to, make advances.

Through a lack of funds, useful enterprises languish, die out or are

not undertaken. Consequently, the production, supply, and sale of

indispensable articles slacken, become interrupted and cease altogether.

There is less soap and sugar and fewer candles at the grocery, less wood

and coal in the wood-yard, fewer oxen and sheep in the markets, less

meat at the butcher's, less grain and flour at the corn-exchange, and

less bread at the bakeries. As articles of prime necessity are scarce

they become dear; as people contend for them their dearness increases;

the rich man ruins himself in the struggle to get hold of them,

while the poor man never gets any, and the bare necessities become

unattainable.

II. Conditions in 1793. A Lesson in Market Economics.

Economical effect of the Jacobin policy from 1789 to 1793.

--Attacks on property.--Direct attacks.--Jacqueries, effective

confiscations and proclamation of the socialist creed.

--Indirect attacks.--Bad administration of the public funds.

--Transformation of taxation and insignificance of the

returns.--Increased expenditures.--The War-budget and

subsistence after 1793.--Paper money.--Enormous issues of

it.--Credit of the Assignats run down.--Ruin of Public

creditors and of all private credit.--Rate of interest

during the Revolution.--Stoppage of trade and industry.--Bad

management of new land-owners.--Decrease of productive

labor.--Only the small rural land-owner works

advantageously.--Why he refuses Assignats.--He is no longer

obliged to sell his produce at once.--High cost of food.--It

reaches a market with difficulty and in small quantities.

--The towns buy at a high price and sell at a low one.--Food

becomes dearer and famine begins.--Prices during the first

six months of 1793.

Such is the hardship in France at the moment when the Jacobin conquest

has been completed, a misery of which the Jacobins are the cause due to

the systematic war they have waged against property during the preceding

four years.

From below, they have provoked, excused, amnestied, or tolerated

and authorized all the popular attacks on property,[4203] countless

insurrections, seven successive jacqueries, some of them so extensive

as to cover eight or ten departments at the same time. The last one let

loose on all France a universal and lasting brigandage, the arbitrary

rule of paupers, vagabonds and ruffians; every species of robbery,

from a refusal to pay rents and leases to the sacking of chateaux and

ordinary domiciles, even to the pillage of markets and granaries. Free

scope was given to mobs which, under a political pretext, tax and ransom

the "suspects" of all classes at pleasure, not alone the noble and the

rich but the peaceable farmer and well-to-do artisan. In short, the

country reverted back to a natural state, the sovereignty of appetites,

greed and lust, to mankind's return to a savage, primitive life in

the forests. Only a short time before, in the month of February, 1793,

through Marat's recommendation, and with the connivance of the Jacobin

municipality, the Paris riff-raff had broken into twelve hundred

groceries and divided on the spot, either gratis or at the price it

fixed, sugar, soap, brandy and coffee.

From above, they had undertaken, carried out and multiplied the worst

assaults on property, vast spoliations of every sort; the suppression

of hundreds of millions of incomes and the confiscation of billions of

capital; the abolition without indemnity of tithes and quitrents; the

expropriation of the property of the clergy, of emigrés, that of

the order of Malta, that of the pious, charitable and educational

associations and endowments, even laic; seizures of plate, of the sacred

vessels and precious ornaments of the churches. And, because they have

the power, others still more vast. After August 10, their newspapers in

Paris and their commissioners in the departments,[4204] have preached

"the agrarian law, the holding of all property in common, the leveling

of fortunes, the right of each fraction of the sovereign people" to help

itself by force to all food and stores at the expense of the owner,

to hunt down the rich, proscribe "land-owners, leading merchants,

financiers and all men in possession of whatever is superfluous."

Rousseau's dogma that "the fruit belongs to everybody and the soil to

no one" is established at an early date as a maxim of State in the

Convention, while in the deliberations of the sovereign assembly

socialism, openly avowed, becomes ascendant, and, afterwards, supreme.

According to Robespierre,[4205]

"whatever is essential to preserve life is common property to society

at large. It is only the excess which may be given up to individuals and

surrendered to commercial enterprise."

With still greater solemnity, the pontiff of the sect, in the

Declaration of Rights which, unanimously adopted by the all-powerful

Jacobin club, is to serve as the corner-stone of the new institutions,

pens the following formula heavy with their consequences:[4206]

"Society must provide for the support of all its members. The aid

required by indigence is a debt of the rich to the poor. The right of

property is limited, and applies only to that portion which the law

guarantees. Every ownership, any trade, which bears prejudicially on the

existence of our fellow-creatures is necessarily illicit and immoral."

The meaning of this is more than clear: the Jacobin populace, having

decided that the possession of, and trade in, groceries was prejudicial

to its existence, the grocers' monopoly is, therefore, immoral and

illicit, and consequently, it pillages their shops. Under the rule of

the populace and of the "Mountain," the Convention applies the theory,

seizes capital wherever it can be found, and notifies the poor, in its

name,

"that they will find in the pocket-books of the rich whatever they need

to supply their wants."[4207]

Over and above these striking and direct attacks, an indirect and hidden

attack, even more significant, which slowly undermines the basis of all

present and future property. State affairs are everybody's affairs, and,

when the State ruins itself, everybody is ruined along with it. For, it

is the country's greatest debtor and its greatest creditor, while there

is no debtor so free of seizure and no creditor so absorbing, since,

making the laws and possessing the force, it can, firstly, repudiate

indebtedness and send away the fund-holder with empty hands, and next,

increase taxation and empty the taxpayer's pocket of his last

penny. There is no greater menace to private fortunes than the bad

administration of the public fortune. Now, under the pressure of Jacobin

principles and of the Jacobin faction, the trustees of France have

administered the country as if they purposely meant to ruin their ward;

every known means for wasting a fortune have been brought into play by

them.--In the first place, they have deprived him of three-fourths of

his income. To please the people and enforce the theory, the taxes on

articles consumed, on salt, with the excise subsidies and the octroi

duties on liquors, meat, tobacco, leather and gunpowder, have been

abolished, while the new imposts substituted for the old ones, slowly

fixed, badly apportioned and raised with difficulty have brought in no

returns. On the 1st of February, 1793,[4208] the Treasury had received

on the real and personal taxation of 1791, but one hundred and fifty

millions instead of three hundred millions. On the same taxes for 1792,

instead of three hundred millions it had obtained nothing at all.

At this date, and during the four years of the Revolution, the total

arrears of taxation amounted to six hundred and thirty-two millions--a

bad debt that can hardly be recovered, and, in fact, it is already

reduced one-half, since, even if the debtor could and was disposed to

pay, he would pay in assignats, which, at this time, were at a discount

of fifty per cent.--In the second place, the new managers had quadrupled

the public expenditure.[4209] What with the equipment and excursions of

the National Guards federations, patriotic festivals and parades,

the writing, printing and publication of innumerable documents,

reimbursements for suppressed offices, the installation of new

administrations, aid to the indigent and to its charity workshops,

purchases of grain, indemnities to millers and bakers, it was under

the necessity of providing for the cost of the universal demolition

and reconstruction. Now, the State had, for the most part, defrayed all

these expenses. At the end of April, 1793, it had already advanced to

the city of Paris alone, one hundred and ten million francs, while the

Commune, insolvent, kept constantly extorting fresh millions.[4210] By

the side of this gulf, the Jacobins had dug another, larger still, that

of the war. For the first half of the year 1793 they threw into this

pit first, one hundred and forty millions, then one hundred and sixty

millions, and then one hundred and ninety million francs; in the second

six months of 1793 the war and provisions swallowed up three hundred

million francs per month, and the more they threw into the two gulfs the

deeper they became.[4211]

Naturally, when there is no collecting a revenue and expenses go on

increasing, one is obliged to borrow on one's resources, and piecemeal,

as long as these last. Naturally, when ready money is not to be had on

the market, one draws notes and tries to put them in circulation; one

pays tradesmen with written promises in the future, and thus exhausts

one's credit. Such is paper money and the assignats, the third and most

efficient way for wasting a fortune and which the Jacobins did not fail

to make the most of.--Under the Constituent Assembly, through a remnant

of good sense and good faith, efforts were at first made to guarantee

the fulfillment of written promises the holders of assignats were almost

secured by a first mortgage on the national possessions, which had been

given to them coupled with an engagement not to raise more money on this

guarantee, as well as not to issue any more assignats.[4212] But they

did not keep faith. They rendered the security afforded by this mortgage

inoperative and, as all chances of re-payment disappeared, its value

declined. Then, on the 27th of April, 1792, according to the report

of Cambon, there begins an unlimited issue; according to the Jacobin

financiers, nothing more is necessary to provide for the war than to

turn the wheel and grind out promises to pay: in June, 1793, assignats

to the amount of four billion three hundred and twenty millions have

already been manufactured, and everybody sees that the mill must grind

faster. This is why the guarantee, vainly increased, no longer suffices

for the monstrous, disproportionate mortgage; it exceeds all limits,

covers nothing, and sinks through its own weight. At Paris, the assignat

of one hundred francs is worth in specie, in the month of June, 1791,

eighty-five francs, in January, 1792, only sixty-six francs, in March,

1792, only fifty. three francs; rising in value at the end of the

Legislative Assembly, owing to fresh confiscations, it falls back to

fifty-five francs in January, 1793, to forty-seven francs in April, to

forty francs in June, to thirty-three francs in July.[4213]--Thus

are the creditors of the State defrauded of a third, one-half, and

two-thirds of their investment, and not alone the creditors of the State

but every other creditor, since every debtor has the right to discharge

his obligations by paying his debts in assignats. Enumerate, if

possible, all who are defrauded of private claims, all money-lenders

and stockholders who have invested in any private enterprise, either

manufacturing or mercantile, those who have loaned money on Contracts of

longer or shorter date, all sellers of real estate, with stipulations

in their deeds for more or less remote payment, all landowners who have

leased their grounds or buildings for a term of years, all holders of

annuities on private bond or on an estate, all manufacturers, merchants

and farmers who have sold their wares, goods and produce on time, all

clerks on yearly salaries and even all other employees, underlings,

servants and workmen receiving fixed salaries for a specified term.

There is not one of these persons whose capital, or income payable in

assignats, is not at once crippled in proportion to the decline in

value of assignats, so that not only the State falls into bankruptcy

but likewise every creditor in France, legally bankrupt along with it

through its fault.

In such a situation how can any enterprise be commenced or maintained?

Who dares take a risk, especially when disbursements are large and

returns remote? Who dares lend on long credits--? If loans are still

made they are not for a year but for a month, while the interest which,

before the Revolution was six, five or even four per cent. per annum, is

now two per cent. a month on securities." It soon runs up higher and,

at Paris and Strasbourg we see it rising, as in India and the Barbary

States, to four, five, six and even seven per cent. a month.[4214]

What holder of raw material, or of manufactured goods, would dare make

entries on his books as usual and allow his customer the indispensable

credit of three months? What large manufacturer would presume to make

goods up, what wholesale merchant would care to make shipments, what man

of wealth or with a competence would build, drain and construct dams

and dykes, repair, or even maintain them with the positive certainty of

delays in getting back only one-half his outlays and with the increasing

certainty of getting nothing?

During a few years the large establishments collapsed in droves:

* After the ruin of the nobles and the departure of wealthy foreigners,

every craft dependent on luxurious tastes, those of Paris and Lyons,

which were the standard for Europe, all the manufactories of rich

fabrics and furniture, and other artistic, elegant and fashionable

articles.

* After the insurrection of the blacks in St. Domingo, and other

troubles in the West Indies, the great colonial trade and remarkable

prosperity of Nantes and Bordeaux, including all the industrial

enterprises by which the production, transportation and circulation of

cotton, sugar and coffee were affected;[4215]

* After the declaration of war with England, the shipping interest;

* After the declaration of war with all Europe, the commerce of the

continent.[4216]

Failure after failure, an universal crash, utter cessation of

extensively organized and productive labor: instead of productive

industries, I see none now but destructive industries, those of the

agricultural and commercial vermin, those of dealers in junk and

speculators who dismantle mansions and abbeys, and who demolish chateaux

and churches so as to sell the materials as cheap as dirt, who bargain

away national possessions, so as to make a profit on the transaction.

Imagine the mischief a temporary owner, steeped in debt, needy and urged

on by the maturity of his engagements, can and must do to an estate held

under a precarious title and of suspicious acquirement, which he has no

idea of keeping, and from which, meanwhile, he derives every possible

benefit:[4217] not only does he put no spokes in the mill-wheel,

no stones in the dyke, no tiles on the roof, but he buys no manure,

exhausts the soil, devastates the forest, alienates the fields, and

dismembers the entire farm, damaging the ground and the stock of tools

and injuring the dwelling by selling its mirrors, lead and iron, and

oftentimes the window-shutters and doors. He turns all into cash, no

matter how, at the expense of the domain, which he leaves in a run-down

condition, unfurnished and for a long time unproductive. In like manner,

the communal possessions, ravaged, pillaged and then pieced out

and divided off, are so many organisms which are sacrificed for the

immediate relief of the village poor, but of course to the detriment of

their future productiveness and an abundant yield.[4218]

Alone, amongst these millions of men who have stopped working, or work

the wrong way, the petty cultivator labors to advantage; free of taxes,

of tithes and of feudal imposts, possessing a scrap of ground which he

has obtained for almost nothing or without stretching his purse strings,

he works in good spirits.[4219] He is sure that henceforth his crop will

no longer be eaten up by the levies of the seignior, of the décimateur

and of the King, that it will belong to him, that it will be wholly his,

and that the worse the famine in the towns, the dearer he will sell his

produce. Hence, he has ploughed more vigorously than ever; he has even

cleared waste ground; getting the soil gratis, or nearly so, and

having to make but few advances, having no other use for his advances,

consisting of seed, manure, the work of his cattle and of his own

hands, he has planted, reaped and raised grain with the greatest energy.

Perhaps other articles of consumption will be scarce; it may be that,

owing to the ruin of other branches of industry, it will be hard to get

dry-goods, shoes, sugar, soap, oil, candles, wine and brandy; it

may happen that, owing to the bungling way in which agricultural

transformations have been effected, all produce of the secondary order,

meat, vegetables, butter and eggs, may become scarce. In any event,

French foodstuffs par excellence is on hand, standing in the field or

stored in sheaves in the barns; in 1792 and 1793, and even in 1794,

there is enough grain in France to provide every French inhabitant with

his daily bread.[4220]

But that is not enough. In order that each Frenchman may obtain his bit

of bread every day, it is still essential that grain should reach the

markets in sufficient quantities, and that the bakers should every day

have enough flour to make all the bread that is required; moreover, the

bread offered for sale in the bakeries should not exceed the price which

the majority of consumers can afford to pay. Now, in fact, through

a forced result of the new system, neither of these conditions is

fulfilled.--In the first place, wheat, and hence bread, is too dear.

Even at the old rate, these would still be too dear for the innumerable

empty or half-empty purses, after so many attacks on property, industry

and trade, now that so many hundreds of workmen and employees are out of

work, now that so many land-owners and bourgeois receive no rents, now

that incomes, profits, wages and salaries have diminished by hundreds of

thousands. But wheat, and, consequently, bread, has not remained at

old rates. Formerly a sack of wheat in Paris was worth 50 francs. In

February, 1793, it is worth sixty-five francs; in May, 1793, one hundred

francs and then one hundred and fifty; and hence bread, in Paris, early

in 1793, instead of being three sous the pound, costs six sous, in many

of the southern departments seven and eight sous, and in other places

ten and twelve sous.[4221] The reason is, that, since August 10, 1792,

after the King's fall and the wrenching away of the ancient keystone of

the arch which still kept the loosened stones of the social edifice in

place, the frightened peasant would no longer part with his produce; he

determined not to take assignats, not to let his grain go for anything

but ringing coin. To exchange good wheat for bad, dirty paper rags

seemed to him a trick, and justly so, for, on going to town every month

he found that the dealers gave him less merchandise for these rags.

Being distrustful and a hoarder, he must have good, old fashioned

crowns, with the ancient effigy, so as to lay them away in a jar or old

woollen stocking; give him specie or he will keep his grain. For he is

not, as formerly, obliged to part with it as soon as it is cut, to pay

taxes and rent; the bailiff and sheriff are no longer there to constrain

him; in these times of disorder and demagoguism, under impotent or

partial authorities, neither the public nor the private creditor has

the power to compel payment, while the spurs which formerly impelled the

farmer to seek the nearest market are blunted or broken. He therefore

stays away, and he has excellent reasons for so doing. Vagabonds and the

needy stand by the roadside and at the entrances of the towns to stop

and pillage the loaded carts; in the markets and on the open square,

women cut open bags of grain with their scissors and empty them, or the

municipality, forced to do it by the crowd, fixes the price at a reduced

rate.[4222]--The larger a town, the greater the difficulty in supplying

its market; for its provisions are drawn from a distance; each

department, each canton, each village keeps its own grain for itself

by means of legal requisitions or by brutal force; it is impossible

for wholesale dealers in grain to make bargains; they are styled

monopolists, and the mob, breaking into their storehouses, hangs them

out of preference.[4223] As the government, accordingly, has proclaimed

their speculations "crimes," it is going to interdict their trade and

substitute itself for them.[4224]--But this substitution only increases

the penury still more; in vain do the towns force collections, tax

their rich men, raise money on loan, and burden themselves beyond their

resources;[4225] they only make the matter worse. When the municipality

of Paris expends twelve thousand francs a day for the sale of flour at

a low price in the markets, it keeps away the flour-dealers, who cannot

deliver flour at such low figures; the result is that there is not flour

enough in the market for the six hundred thousand mouths in Paris; when

it expends seventy-five thousand francs daily to indemnify the bakers,

it attracts the outside population, which rushes into Paris to get

bread cheap, and for the seven hundred thousand mouths of Paris and the

suburbs combined, the bakers have not an adequate supply. Whoever comes

late finds the shop empty; consequently, everybody tries to get there

earlier and earlier, at dawn, before daybreak, and then five or six

hours before daybreak in February, 1793, long lines of people are

already waiting at the bakers' door, these lines growing longer

and longer in April, while in June they are enormously long.[4226]

Naturally, for lack of bread, people fall back on other aliments, which

also grow dearer; add to this the various contrivances and effects of

Jacobin politics which still further increase the dearness of food of

all sorts, and also of every other necessary article: for instance,

the extremely bad condition of the roads, which renders transportation

slower and more costly; the prohibition of the export of coin and

hence the obtaining of food from abroad; the decree which obliges each

industrial or commercial association, at present or to come, to "pay

annually into the national treasury one-quarter of the amount of its

dividends;" the revolt in Vendée, which deprives Paris of six hundred

oxen a week; the feeding of the armies, which takes one-half of the

cattle brought to the Poissy market; shutting off the sea and

the continent, which ruins manufacturers and extensive commercial

operations; the insurrections in Bordeaux, Marseilles and the South,

which still further raise the price of groceries, sugar, soap, oil,

candles, wine and brandy.[4227]--Early in 1793, a pound of beef in

France is worth on the average, instead of six sous twenty sous; in May,

at Paris, brandy which, six months before, cost thirty-five sous, costs

ninety-four sous; in July, a pound of veal, instead of five sous, costs

twenty-two sous. Sugar, from twenty sous, advances to four francs ten

sous; a candle costs seven sous. France, pushed on by the Jacobins,

approaches the depths of misery, entering the first circle of its

Inferno; other circles follow down deeper and deeper, narrower still

and yet more somber; under Jacobin impulsion is she to descend to the

lowest?

III. Privation.

First and general cause of privations.--The socialist

principle of the Revolutionary government.--Measures against

large as well as small properties.--Expropriation of all

remaining corporations, enormous issues of paper-money.

forced rates of its circulation, forced loans, requisitions

of coin and plate, revolutionary taxes, suppression of

special organs of labor on a large scale.--New measures

against small proprietorship.--The Maximum, requisitions for

food and labor.--Situation of the shop-keeper, cultivator

and laborer.--Effect of the measures on labor on a small

scale. Stoppage of sales.

Obviously, if the people is not being fed properly and in places not at

all, it is because one of the central and most important fibers of the

economical machine has been incapacitated. It is evident that this fiber

controls the sentiment by which man holds on to his property, fears

to risk it, refuses to depreciate it, and tries to increase it.[4228]

Obviously in the real human being, such as he actually is made up,

this intense sentiment, tenacious, always stirring and active, is the

magazine of inward energy which provides for three-fourths, almost the

whole, of that unremitting effort, that calculating attention, that

determined perseverance which leads the individual to undergo privation,

to contrive and to exert himself, to turn to profitable account the

labor of his hands, brain and capital, and to produce, save and create

for himself and for others various resources and comforts.

(It is probable that disinterested motives, pure love for one's

neighbor, for humanity, for country, do not form a hundredth part of the

total energy that produces human activity. It must not be forgotten that

the actions of men are alloyed with motives of a lower order, such as

love of fame, the desire of self-admiration and of self-approval, fear

of punishment and hope of reward beyond the grave, all of these being

interested motives, and without which disinterested motives would be

inoperative excepting in two or three souls among ten thousand.[4229])

Thus far, in society as a whole, this sentiment has been only partially

touched, and the injury has mainly been to the well-to-do or rich

classes. At first only one-half of its useful energy has been destroyed

since only those services rendered by the rich and wealthy classes

have been dispensed with. Little else than the labor of the capitalist,

proprietor or contractor has been suppressed, whose far-reaching,

combined, comprehensive labor, the rewards of which consist of objects

of luxury and convenience, ensure for society that abundant supplies

are always on hand, through ready and spontaneous distribution of

indispensable commodities. There remains (for the Jacobins) to crush

out what is left of this laborious and nutritive fiber; the remnant

of useful energy has to be destroyed down to its extirpation among the

people. Here there must be a suppression, as far as possible, of all

manual, rude labor even on a small scale, and of its rudimentary

fruits; the discouragement of the insignificant shopkeeper, mechanic

and ploughman must be effected; the corner-grocer must be prevented from

selling his sugar and candles, and the cobbler from mending shoes: the

miller must think of giving up his mill and the wagoner of abandoning

his cart; the farmer must be convinced that the best thing he can do

is to get rid of his horses, eat his pork himself,[4230] let his oxen

famish and leave his crops to rot on the ground.--The Jacobins are to do

all this, for it is the inevitable result of the theory that they have

proclaimed and which they apply. According to this theory the stern,

strong, deep-seated instinct through which the individual stubbornly

holds on to what he has, to what he makes for himself and for those that

belong to him, is just the unwholesome fiber that must be rooted out

or paralyzed at any cost; its true name is "egoism, incivism," and

its operations consist of outrages on the community, which is the sole

legitimate proprietor of property and products, and, yet more, of all

persons and services. Body and soul, all belongs to the State, nothing

to individuals, and, if need be, the State has the right to take not

only lands and capital, but, again, to claim and tax at whatever rate

it pleases all corn and cattle, all vehicles and the animals that draw

them, all candles and sugar; it has the right to appropriate to itself

and tax at whatever rate it pleases, the labor of shoemaker, tailor,

miller, wagoner, ploughman, reaper and thrasher. The seizure of men and

things is universal, and the new sovereigns do their best at it; for, in

practice, necessity urges them on; insurrection thunders at their door;

their supporters, all crackbrains with empty stomachs, the poor and the

idle, and the Parisian populace, listen to no reason and blindly insist

on things haphazard; they are bound to satisfy their patrons at once, to

issue one on top of the other all the decrees they call for, even when

impracticable and mischievous to starve the provinces so as to feed

the city, to starve the former to-morrow so as to feed the latter

to-day.--Subject to the clamors and menaces of the street they dispatch

things rapidly; they cease to care for the future, the present being all

that concerns them; they take and take forcibly; they uphold violence by

brutality, they support robbery with murder; they expropriate persons

by categories and appropriate objects by categories, and after the

rich they despoil the poor.--During fourteen months the revolutionary

government thus keeps both hands at work, one hand completing the

confiscation of property, large and medium, and the other proceeding to

the entire abolition of property even on a small scale.

Against large or medium properties it suffices to extend and aggravate

the decrees already passed.--The spoliation of the last of existing

corporations must be effected: the government, confiscates the

property of hospitals, communes, and all scientific or literary

associations.[4231]

To this we must add the spoliation of State credits and all other

credits: it issues in fourteen months 5 100 millions of assignats,

at one time and with one decree 1,400 million and another time 2,000

millions. It thus condemns itself to complete future bankruptcy. It also

calls in the 1,500 million of assignats bearing the royal stamp (à face

royale) and thus arbitrarily converts and reduces the public debt on

the Grand Ledger, which is already, in fact, a partial and declared

bankruptcy. Six months imprisonment for whoever refuses to accept

assignats at par, twenty years in irons if the offence is repeated and

the guillotine if there is an incivique intention or act, which suffices

for all other creditors.[4232]

The spoliation of individuals, a forced loan of a billion on the rich,

requisitions for coin against assignats at par, seizures of plate and

jewels in private houses, revolutionary taxes so numerous as not only to

exhaust the capital, but likewise the credit, of the person taxed,[4233]

and the resumption by the State of the public domain pledged to private

individuals for the past three centuries. How many years of labor

are requisite to bring together again so much available capital, to

reconstruct in France and to refill once again those private reservoirs

which are to contain the accumulated savings essential for the out-flow

required to drive the great wheel of each general enterprise? Take into

account, moreover, the enterprises which are directly destroyed,

root and branch, by revolutionary executions, enforced against the

manufacturers and traders of Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux, proscribed

in a mass,[4234] guillotined, imprisoned, or put to flight, their

factories stopped, their storehouses put under sequestration, with their

stocks of brandy, soap, silk, muslins, leather, paper, serges, cloth,

canvas, cordage and the rest; the same at Nantes under Carrier, at

Strasbourg under Saint-Just, and everywhere else.[4235]--"Commerce

is annihilated," writes a Swiss merchant,[4236] from Paris, and the

government, one would say, tries systematically to render it impossible.

On the 27th of June, 1793, the Convention closes the Bourse; on the 15th

of April, 1794, it suppresses "financial associations" and "prohibits

all bankers, merchants and other persons from organizing any

establishment of the said character under any pretext or title

whatsoever." On the 8th of September, 1793, the Commune places seals

"in all the counting-houses of bankers, stockbrokers, agents and

silver-dealers,"[4237] and locks up their owners; as a favor,

considering that they are obliged to pay the drafts drawn on them, they

are let out, but provisionally, and on condition that they remain under

arrest at home, "under the guard of two good citizens," at their own

expense. Such is the case in Paris and in other cities, not alone with

prominent merchants, but likewise with notaries and lawyers, with whom

funds are on deposit and who manage estates; a sans-culotte with his

pike stands in their cabinet whilst they write, and he accompanies them

in the street when they call on their clients. Imagine the state of

a notary's office or a counting-room under a system of this sort! The

master of it winds up his business as soon as he can, no matter how,

makes no new engagements and does as little as possible. Still

more inactive than he, his colleagues, condemned to an indefinite

listlessness, under lock and key in the common prison, no longer attend

to their business.--There is a general, total paralysis of those natural

organs which, in economic life, produce, elaborate, receive, store,

preserve, exchange and transmit in large quantities; and as an after

effect, embarrass, saturate, or weaken all the lesser subordinate organs

to which the superior ones no longer provide outlets, intermediary

agencies or aliment.

It is now the turn of the small enterprises. Whatever their sufferings

may be they are ordered to carry their work out as in normal times, and

they will be forced to do this. The Convention, pursuing its accustomed

rigid logical course with its usual shortsightedness, lays on them its

violent and inept hands; they are trodden down, trampled upon and mauled

for the purpose of curing them. Farmers are forbidden to sell their

produce except in the markets, and obliged to bring to these a quota of

so many sacks per week, military raids compelling them to furnish their

quotas.[4238] Shopkeepers are ordered "to expose for sale, daily and

publicly, all goods and provisions of prime necessity" that they have

on hand, while a maximum price is established, above which no one shall

sell "bread, flour and grain, vegetables and fruits, wine, vinegar,

cider, beer and brandy, fresh meat, salt meat, pork, cattle, dried,

salted, smoked or pickled fish, butter, honey, sugar, sweet-oil,

lamp-oil, candles, firewood, charcoal and other coal, salt, soap,

soda, potash, leather, iron, steel, castings, lead, brass, hemp, linen,

woolens, canvas and woven stuffs, sabots, shoes and tobacco." Whoever

keeps on hand more than he consumes is a monopolist and commits a

capital crime; the penalty, very severe, is imprisonment or the pillory,

for whoever sells above the established price:[4239] such are the simple

and direct expedients of the revolutionary government, and such is the

character of its inventive faculty, like that of the savage who

hews down a tree to get at its fruit.--Consequently, after the first

application of the "maximum" the shopkeeper is no longer able to carry

on business; his customers, attracted by the sudden depreciation in

price of his wares, flock to his shop and empty it in a few days;[4240]

having sold his goods for half what they cost him,[4241] he has got back

only one-half of his advances; therefore, he can only one-half renew his

assortment, less than a half, since he has not paid his bills, and his

credit is declining, the (Jacobin) representatives on mission having

taken all his coin, plate and assignats. Hence, during the following

month, buyers find on his unfurnished counters nothing but rubbish and

refuse.

In like manner, after the proclamation of the maximum,[4242] the peasant

refuses to bring his produce to market, while the revolutionary army is

not everywhere on hand to take it from him by force: he leaves his crop

unthrashed as long as he can, and complains of not finding the men to

thrash it. If necessary, he hides it or feeds it out to his animals. He

often barters it away for wood, for a side of bacon or in payment for

a day's work. At night, he carts it off six leagues to a neighboring

district, where the local maximum is fixed at a higher rate. He

knows who, in his own vicinity, still has specie in his pocket and he

underhandedly supplies him with his stores. He especially conceals his

superabundance and, as formerly, pretends to be poor and suffering.

He is on good terms with the village authorities, with the mayor and

national agent who are as interested as he is in evading the law, and,

on a bribe being necessary, he gives it. At last, he allows himself

to be sued, and his property attached; he goes to prison and tires the

authorities out with his obstinacy. Hence, from week to week, less flour

and grain and fewer cattle come to market, while meat becomes scarcer

at the butcher's, and bread at the baker's.--Having thus paralyzed

the lesser organs of supply and demand the Jacobins now have only to

paralyze labor itself, the skilled hands, the active and vigorous arms.

This is simply done by replacing the independent private workshop by the

compulsory national workshop in this way replacing piece-work by work by

the day, and the attentive, energetic workman who minds his business and

expects to earn money in return by inattentive apathic workmen pressed

into a poorly paid service but paid even when they botch the job or laze

about.--This is what the Jacobins do by forcibly commanding the services

of all sorts of laborers,[4243] "all who help handle, transport and

retail produce and articles of prime necessity," "country people who

usually get in the crops," and, more particularly, thrashers, reapers,

carters, rafts men, and also shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths and the

rest.--At every point of the social organism, the same principle

is applied with the same result. Substitute everywhere an external,

artificial and mechanical constraint for the inward, natural and

animating stimulant, and you get nothing but an universal atrophy.

Deprive people of the fruits of their labor, and yet more, force them

to produce by fear, confiscate their time, their painstaking efforts and

their persons, reduce them to the condition of fellahs, create in them

the sentiments of fellahs, and you will have nothing but the labor

and productions of fellahs, that is to say, a minimum of labor and

production, and hence, insufficient supplies for sustaining a very dense

population, which, multiplied through a superior and more productive

civilization, will not long subsist under a barbarous, inferior and

unproductive régime. When this systematic and complete expropriation

terminates we see the final result of the system, no longer a dearth,

but famine, famine on a large scale, and the destruction of lives

by millions.--Among the Jacobins,[4244] some of the maddest who are

clear-sighted, on account of their fury, Guffroy, Antonelle, Jean Bon

Saint-André, Collot d'Herbois, foresee the consequences and accept them

along with the principle. Others, who avoid seeing it, are only the more

determined in the application of it. However, they all work together

with all their might to aggravate the misery of which the lamentable

spectacle is so vainly exposed under their eyes.

IV. Hunger.

Famine.--In the provinces.--At Paris.--People standing in

lines under the Revolutionary government to obtain food.

--Its quality.--Distress and chagrin.

Collot d'Herbois wrote from Lyons on November 6, 1793: "There is not

two days' supply of provisions here." On the following day: "The present

population of Lyons is one hundred and thirty thousand souls at least,

and there is not sufficient subsistence for three days." Again the day

after: "Our situation in relation to food is deplorable." Then, the next

day: "Famine is beginning."[4245]--Near by, in the Montbrison district,

in February, 1794, "there is no food or provisions left for the people;"

all has been taken by requisition and carried off, even seed for

planting, so that the fields lie fallow.[4246]--At Marseilles, "since

the maximum, everything is lacking; even the fishermen no longer go out

(on the sea) so that there is no supply of fish to live on."[4247]--At

Cahors, in spite of multiplied requisitions, the Directory of Lot and

Representative Taillefer[4248] state that "the inhabitants, for

more than eight days, are reduced wholly to maslin bread composed of

one-fifth of wheat and the rest of barley, barley-malt and millet."--At

Nîmes,[4249] to make the grain supply last, which is giving out, the

bakers and all private persons are ordered not to sift the meal, but to

leave the bran in it and knead and bake the "dough such as it is."--At

Grenoble,[4250] "the bakers have stopped baking; the country people no

longer bring wheat in; the dealers hide away their goods, or put them in

the hands of neighborly officials, or send them off."--"It goes from bad

to worse," write the agents of Huningue;[4251] one might say even, that

they would give this or that article to their cattle rather than sell

it in conformity with the tax."--The inhabitants of towns are everywhere

put on rations, and so small a ration as to scarcely keep them from

dying with hunger. "Since my arrival in Tarbes," writes another

agent,[4252] "every person is limited to half a pound of bread a day,

composed one-third of wheat and two-thirds of corn meal." The next day

after the fête in honor of the tyrant's death there was absolutely none

at all. "A half-pound of bread is also allowed at Evreux,[4253] "and

even this is obtained with a good deal of trouble, many being obliged

to go into the country and get it from the farmers with coin." And even

"they have got very little bread, flour or wheat, for they have been

obliged to bring what they had to Evreux for the armies and for Paris."

It is worse at Rouen and at Bordeaux: at Rouen, in Brumaire, the

inhabitants have only one quarter of a pound per head per diem of bread;

at Bordeaux, "for the past three months," says the agent,[4254] "the

people sleep at the doors of the bakeries, to pay high for bread which

they often do not get... There has been no baking done to-day, and

to-morrow only half a loaf will be given to each person. This bread is

made of oats and beans... On days that there is none, beans, chestnuts

and rice are distributed in very small quantities," four ounces of

bread, five of rice or chestnuts. "I, who tell you this, have already

eaten eight or ten meals without bread; I would gladly do without it

if I could get potatoes in place of it, but these, too, cannot be had."

Five months later, fasting still continues, and it lasts until after the

reign of Terror, not alone in the town, but throughout the department.

"In the district of Cadillac, says Tallien,[4255] "absolute dearth

prevails; the citizens of the rural districts contend with each other

for the grass in the fields; I have eaten bread made of dog-grass."

Haggard and worn out, the peasant, with his pallid wife and children,

resorts to the marsh to dig roots, while there is scarcely enough

strength in his arms to hold the plough.--The same spectacle is visible

in places which produce but little grain, or where the granaries

have been emptied by the revolutionary drafts. "In many of the Indre

districts," writes the representative on missions,[4256] "food

is wanting absolutely. Even in some of the communes, many of the

inhabitants are reduced to a frightful state of want, feeding on acorns,

bran and other unhealthy food.... The districts of Châtre and Argenton,

especially, will be reduced to starvation unless they are promptly

relieved.... The cultivation of the ground is abandoned; most of the

persons in the jurisdiction wander about the neighboring departments

in search of food."--And it is doubtful whether they find it. In the

department of Cher, "the butchers can no longer slaughter; the dealers'

stores are all empty." In Allier, "the slaughterhouses and markets are

deserted, every species of vegetable and aliment having disappeared;

the inns are closed." In one of the Lozère districts, composed of five

cantons, of which one produces an extra quantity of rye, the people live

on requisitions imposed on Gard and the Upper Loire; the extortions of

the representatives in these two departments "were distributed among the

municipalities, and by these to the most indigent: many entire families,

many of the poor and even of the rich, suffered for want of bread during

six or eight days, and this frequently."[4257] Nevertheless they do not

riot; they merely supplicate and stretch forth their hands "with tears

in their eyes. "--Such is the diet and submission of the stomach in

the provinces. Paris is less patient. For this reason, all the rest is

sacrificed to it,[4258] not merely the public funds, the Treasury from

which it gets one or two millions per week,[4259] but whole districts

are starved for its benefit, six departments providing grain, twenty six

departments providing pork,[4260] at the rate of the maximum, through

requisitions, through the prospect of imprisonment and of the scaffold

in case of refusal or concealment, under the predatory bayonets of the

revolutionary army. The capital, above all, has to be fed. Let us see,

under this system of partiality, how people live in Paris and what they

feed on.

"Frightful crowds" at the doors of the bakeries, then at the doors of

the butchers and grocers, then at the markets for butter, eggs, fish and

vegetables, and then on the quay for wine, firewood and charcoal--such

is the steady refrain of the police reports.[4261]--And this lasts

uninterruptedly during the fourteen months of revolutionary government:

long lines of people waiting in turn for bread, meat, oil, soap and

candles, "queues for milk, for butter, for wood, for charcoal, queues

everywhere!"[4262] "There was one queue beginning at the door of

a grocery in the Petit Carreau stretching half way up the rue

Montorgueil."[4263] These queues form at three o'clock in the morning,

one o'clock and at midnight, increasing from hour to hour. Picture to

yourself, reader, the file of wretched men and women sleeping on the

pavement when the weather is fine[4264] and when not fine, standing up

on stiff tottering legs; above all in winter, "the rain pouring on their

backs," and their feet in the snow, for so many weary hours in dark,

foul, dimly lighted streets strewed with garbage; for, for want of oil,

one half of the street lamps are extinguished, and for lack of money,

there is no repaving, no more sweeping, the offal being piled up against

the walls.[4265] The crowd draggles along through it, likewise,

nasty, tattered and torn, people with shoes full of holes, because the

shoemakers do no more work for their customers, and in dirty shirts,

because no more soap can be had to wash with, while, morally as well

as physically, all these forlorn beings elbowing each other render

themselves still fouler.--Promiscuousness, contact, weariness, waiting

and darkness afford free play to the grosser instincts; especially in

summer, natural bestiality and Parisian mischievousness have full play.

"Lewd women"[4266] pursue their calling standing in the row; it is

an interlude for them; "their provoking expressions, their immoderate

laughter," is heard some distance off and they find it a convenient

place: two steps aside, on the flank of the row, are "half open doors

and dark alleys" which invite tête-à-tête; many of these women who have

brought their mattresses "sleep there and commit untold abominations."

What an example for the wives and daughters of steady workmen, for

honest servants who hear and see! Men stop at each row and choose their

dulcinea, while others, less shameless, pounce on the women like bulls

and kiss them one after the other." Are not these the fraternal kisses

of patriotic Jacobins? Do not Mayor Pache's wife and daughter go to the

clubs and kiss drunken sans-culottes? And what says the guard?--It has

enough to do to restrain another blind and deaf animal instinct, aroused

as it is by suffering, anticipation and deception.

On approaching each butcher's stall before it opens "the porters,

bending under the weight of a side of beef, quicken their steps so as

not to be assailed by the crowd which presses against them, seeming to

devour the raw meat with their eyes." They force a passage, enter the

shop in the rear, and it seems as if the time for distributing the meat

had come; the gendarmes, spurring their horses to a gallop, scatter the

groups that are too dense; "rascals, in pay of the Commune," range the

women in files, two and two, "shivering" in the cold morning air of

December and January, awaiting their turn. Beforehand, however, the

butcher, according to law, sets aside the portion for the hospitals,

for pregnant women and others who are confined, for nurses, and

besides, notwithstanding the law, he sets aside another portion for the

revolutionary committee of the section, for the assistant commissioner

and superintendent, for the pashas and semi pashas of the quarter, and

finally for his rich customers who pay him extra.[4267] To this end,

"porters with broad shoulders form an impenetrable rampart in front of

the shop and carry away whole oxen;" after this is over, the women find

the shop stripped, while many, after wasting their time for four mortal

hours," go away empty handed.--With this prospect before them the daily

assemblages get to be uneasy and the waves rise; nobody, except those

at the head of the row, is sure of his pittance those that are behind

regard enviously and with suppressed anger the person ahead of them.

First come outcries, then jeering and then scuffling; the women rival

the men in struggling and in profanity,[4268] and they hustle each

other. The line suddenly breaks; each rushes to get ahead of the other;

the foremost place belongs to the most robust and the most brutal, and

to secure it they have to trample down their neighbors.