I.
Intellectual incapacity.--How ideas are transformed into
marvelous stories.
To comprehend their actions we ought now to look into the condition of
their minds, to know the current train of their ideas, their mode of
thinking. But is it really essential to draw this portrait, and are not
the details of their mental condition we have just presented sufficient?
We shall obtain a knowledge of them later, and through their actions,
when, in Touraine, they knock a mayor and his assistant, chosen by
themselves, senseless with kicks from their wooden shoes, because, in
obeying the national Assembly, these two unfortunate men prepared a
table of taxes; or when at Troyes, they drag through the streets and
tear to pieces the venerable magistrate who was nourishing them at
that very moment, and who had just dictated his testament in their
favor. Take the still rude brain of a contemporary peasant and deprive
it of the ideas which, for eighty years past, have entered it by so many
channels, through the primary school of each village, through the return
home of the conscript after seven years' service, through the prodigious
multiplication of books, newspapers, roads, railroads, foreign travel
and every other species of communication.[5301] Try to imagine the
peasant of the eighteenth century, penned and shut up from father to
son in his hamlet, without parish highways, deprived of news, with no
instruction but the Sunday sermon, continuously worrying about his daily
bread and the taxes, "with his wretched, dried-up aspect,"[5302] not
daring to repair his house, always persecuted, distrustful, his mind
contracted and stinted, so to say, by misery. His condition is almost
that of his ox or his ass, while his ideas are those of his condition.
He has been a long time stolid; "he lacks even instinct,"[5303]
mechanically and fixedly regarding the ground on which he drags along
his hereditary plow. In 1751, d'Argenson wrote in his journal:
"nothing in the news from the court affects them; the reign is
indifferent to them. . . . . the distance between the capital and the
province daily widens. . . . Here they are ignorant of the striking
occurrences that most impressed us at Paris. . . .The inhabitants of the
country side are merely poverty-stricken slaves, draft cattle under a
yoke, moving on as they are goaded, caring for nothing and embarrassed
by nothing, provided they can eat and sleep at regular hours."
They make no complaints, "they do not even dream of complaining;"[5304]
their wretchedness seems to them natural like winter or hail. Their
minds, like their agriculture, still belong to the middle ages. In the
environment of Toulouse,[5305] to ascertain who committed a robbery, to
cure a man or a sick animal, they resort to a sorcerer, who divines this
by means of a sieve. The countryman fully believes in ghosts and, on
All Saints' eve, he lays the cloth for the dead.--In Auvergne, at the
outbreak the Revolution, on a contagious fever making its appearance,
M. de Montlosier, declared to be a sorcerer, is the cause of it, and two
hundred men assemble together to demolish his dwelling. Their religious
belief is on the same level.[5306] "Their priests drink with them
and sell them absolution. On Sundays, at the sermon, they put up
lieutenancies and sub-lieutenancies (among the saints) for sale: so much
for a lieutenant's place under St. Peter!--If the peasant hesitates in
his bid, an eulogy of St. Peter at once begins, and then our peasants
run it up fast enough."--To intellects in a primitive state, barren of
ideas and crowded with images, idols on earth are as essential as idols
in heaven. "No doubt whatever existed in my mind," says Rétit de la
Bretonne,[5307] "of the power of the king to compel any man to bestow
his wife or daughter on me, and my village (Sacy, in Burgundy) thought
as I did."[5308] There is no room in minds of this description for
abstract conceptions, for any idea of social order; they are submissive
to it and that is all. "The mass of the people," writes Governor in
1789, "have no religion but that of their priests, no law but that of
those above them, no morality but that of self-interest; these are
the beings who, led on by drunken curates, are now on the high road
to liberty, and the first use they make of it is to rebel on all sides
because there is dearth."[5309]
How could things be otherwise? Every idea, previous to taking root in
their brain, must possess a legendary form, as absurd as it is simple,
adapted to their experiences, their faculties, their fears and their
aspirations. Once planted in this uncultivated and fertile soil it
vegetates and becomes transformed, developing into gross excrescences,
somber foliage and poisonous fruit. The more monstrous the greater its
vigor, clinging to the slightest of probabilities and tenacious against
the most certain of demonstrations. Under Louis XV, in an arrest of
vagabonds, a few children having been carried off willfully or by
mistake, the rumor spreads that the king takes baths in blood to restore
his exhausted functions, and, so true does this seem to be, the
women, horrified through their maternal instincts, join in the riot; a
policeman is seized and knocked down, and, on his demanding a confessor,
a woman in the crowd, picking up a stone, cries out that he must not
have time to go to heaven, and smashes his head with it, believing that
she is performing an act of justice[5310]. Under Louis XVI evidence is
presented to the people that there is no scarcity: in 1789, [5311] an
officer, listening to the conversation of his soldiers, hears them state
"with full belief that the princes and courtiers, with a view to
starve Paris out, are throwing flour into the Seine." Turning to a
quarter-master he asks him how he can possibly believe such an absurd
story. "Lieutenant," he replies, "'tis time--the bags were tied with
blue strings (cordons bleus)." To them this is a sufficient reason, and
no argument could convince them to the contrary. Thus, among the dregs
of society, foul and horrible romances are forged, in connection
the famine and the Bastille, in which Louis XVI., the queen Marie
Antoinette, the Comte d'Artois, Madame de Lamballe, the Polignacs, the
revenue farmers, the seigniors and ladies of high rank are portrayed as
vampires and ghouls. I have seen many editions of these in the pamphlets
of the day, in the engravings not exhibited, and among popular prints
and illustrations, the latter the most effective, since they appeal to
the eye. They surpass the stories of Mandrin[5312] and Cartouche,
being exactly suitable for men whose literature consists of the popular
laments of Mandrin and Cartouche.
II.
Political incapacity.--Interpretation of political rumors
and of government action.
By this we can judge of their political intelligence. Every object
appears to them in a false light; they are like children who, at each
turn of the road, see in each tree or bush some frightful hobgoblin.
Arthur Young, on visiting the springs near Clermont, is arrested,[5313]
and the people want to imprison a woman, his guide, some of the
bystanders regarding him as an "agent of the Queen, who intended to blow
the town up with a mine, and send all that escaped to the galleys."
Six days after this, beyond Puy, and notwithstanding his passport, the
village guard come and take him out of bed at eleven o'clock at nights,
declaring that "I was undoubtedly a conspirator with the Queen, the
Count d'Artois and the Count d'Entragues (who has property here), who
had employed me as arpenteur to measure their fields in order to double
their taxes." We here take the unconscious, apprehensive, popular
imagination in the act; a slight indication, a word, prompting the
construction of either air castles or fantastic dungeons, and seeing
these as plainly as if they were so many substantial realities. They
have not the inward resources that render capable of separating and
discerning; their conceptions are formed in a lump; both object and
fancy appear together and are united in one single perception. At the
moment of electing deputies the report is current in Province[5314] that
"the best of kings desires perfect equality, that there are to be no
more bishops, nor seigniors, nor tithes, nor seigniorial dues, no more
tithes or distinctions, no more hunting or fishing rights,. . . that
the people are to be wholly relieved of taxation, and that the first two
orders alone are to provide the expenses of the government." Whereupon
forty or fifty riots take place in one day. "Several communities refuse
to make any payments to their treasurer outside of royal requisitions."
Others do better: "on pillaging the strong-box of the receiver of the
tax on leather at Brignolles, they shout out Vive le Roi!" "The peasant
constantly asserts his pillage and destruction to be in conformity with
the king's will." A little later, in Auvergne, the peasants who burn
castles are to display "much repugnance" in thus maltreating "such kind
seigniors," but they allege "imperative orders, having been advised that
the king wished it."[5315] At Lyons, when the tapsters of the town and
the peasants of the neighborhood trample the customs officials underfoot
they believe that the king has suspended all customs dues for three
days.[5316] The scope of their imagination is proportionate to their
shortsightedness. "Bread, no more rents, no more taxes!" is the sole
cry, the cry of want, while exasperated want plunges ahead like a
famished bull. Down with the monopolist!--storehouses are forced open,
convoys of grain are stopped, markets are pillaged, bakers are hung, and
the price of bread is fixed so that none is to be had or is concealed.
Down with the octroi!--barriers are demolished, clerks are beaten,
money is wanting in the towns for urgent expenses. Burn tax registries,
account-books, municipal archives, seigniors' charter-safes, convent
parchments, every detestable document creative of debtors and sufferers!
The village itself is no longer able to preserve its parish property.
The rage against any written document, against public officers, against
any man more or less connected with grain, is blind and determined.
The furious animal destroys all, although wounding himself, driving and
roaring against the obstacle that ought to be outflanked.
III.
Destructive impulses.--The object of blind rage.--Distrust
of natural leaders.--Suspicion of them changed into hatred.
--Disposition of the people in 1789.
This owing to the absence of leaders and in the absence of organization,
a mob is simply a herd. Its mistrust of its natural leaders, of the
great, of the wealthy, of persons in office and clothed with authority,
is inveterate and incurable. Vainly do these wish it well and do it
good; it has no faith in their humanity or disinterestedness. It has
been too down-trodden; it entertains prejudices against every measure
proceeding from them, even the most liberal and the most beneficial. "At
the mere mention of the new assemblies," says a provincial commission in
1787,[5317] "we heard a workman exclaim, 'What, more new extortioners!'"
Superiors of every kind are suspected, and from suspicion to
hostility the road is not long. In 1788[5318] Mercier declares that
"insubordination has been manifest for some years, especially among the
trades. . . . Formerly, on entering a printing-office the men took off
their hats. Now they content themselves with staring and leering at
you; scarcely have you crossed threshold when you yourself more lightly
spoken of than if you were one of them." The same attitude is taken by
the peasants in the environment of Paris; Madame Vigée-Lebrun,[5319] on
going to Romainville to visit Marshal de Ségur, remarks: "Not only do
they not remove their hats but they regard us insolently; some of them
even threatened us with clubs." In March and April following this, her
guests arrive at her concert in consternation. "In the morning, at
the promenade of Longchamps, the populace, assembled at the barrier of
l'Etoile, insulted the people passing by in carriages in the grossest
manner; some of the wretches on the footsteps exclaiming: 'Next year you
shall be behind the carriage and we inside.'" At the close of the
year 1788, the stream becomes a torrent and the torrent a cataract.
An intendant[5320] writes that, in his province, the government must
decide, and in the popular sense, to separate from privileged classes,
abandon old forms and give the Third-Estate a double vote. The clergy
and the nobles are detested, and their supremacy is a yoke. "Last July,"
he says, "the old States-General would have been received with pleasure
and there would have been few obstacles to its formation. During the
past five months minds have become enlightened; respective interests
have been discussed, and leagues formed. You have been kept in ignorance
of the fermentation which is at its height among all classes of the
Third-Estate, and a spark will kindle the conflagration. If the
king's decision should be favorable to the first two orders a general
insurrection will occur throughout the provinces, 600,000 men in arms
and the horrors of the Jacquerie." The word is spoken and the reality is
coming. An insurrectionary multitude rejecting its natural leaders
must elect or submit to others. It is like an army which, entering on
a campaign, finding itself without officers; the vacancies are for the
boldest, most violent, those most oppressed by the previous rule, and
who, leading the advance, shouting "forward" and thus form the leading
groups. In 1789, the bands are ready; for, below the suffering people
there is yet another people which suffers yet more, whose insurrection
is permanent, and which, repressed, persecuted, and obscure, only awaits
an opportunity to come out of its hiding-place and openly give their
passions free vent.
IV.
Insurrectionary leaders and recruits.--Poachers.--Smugglers
and dealers in contraband salt.--Bandits.--Beggars and
vagabonds.--Advent of brigands.--The people of Paris.
Vagrants, recalcitrants of all kinds, fugitives of the law or the
police, beggars, cripples, foul, filthy, haggard and savage, they are
bred by the social injustice of the system, and around every one of
the social wounds these swarm like vermin.--Four hundred captaincies
protects vast quantities of game feeding on the crops under the eyes of
owners of the land, transforming these into thousands of poachers, the
more dangerous since they are armed, and defy the most terrible laws.
Already in 1752[5321] are seen around Paris "gatherings of fifty or
sixty, all fully armed and acting as if on regular foraging campaigns,
with the infantry at the center and the cavalry on the wings. . . . They
live in the forests where they have created a fortified and guarded area
and paying exactly for what they take to live on." In 1777[5322], at
Sens in Burgundy, the public attorney, M. Terray, hunting on his own
property with two officers, meets a gang of poachers who fire on the
game under their eyes, and soon afterwards fire on them. Terray is
wounded and one of the officers has his coat pierced; guards arrive, but
the poachers stand firm and repel them; dragoons are sent for and the
poachers kill of these, along with three horses, and are attacked
with sabers; four of them are brought to the ground and seven are
captured. Reports of the States-General show that every year, in each
extensive forest, murders occur, sometimes at the hands of a poacher,
and again, and the most frequently, by the shot of a gamekeeper.--It is
a continuous warfare at home; every vast domain thus harbors its rebels,
provided with powder and ball and knowing how to use them.
Other recruits for rioting are found among smugglers and in dealers in
contraband salt[5323]. A tax, as soon as it becomes exorbitant, invites
fraud, and raises up a population of delinquents against its army of
clerks. The number of such defrauders may be seen when we consider the
number of custom officers: twelve hundred leagues of interior custom
districts are guarded by 50,000 men, of which 23,000 are soldiers in
civilian dress[5324]. "In the principal provinces of the salt-tax and
in the provinces of the five great tax leasing administrations (fermes),
for four leagues (ten miles) on either side of the prohibited line,"
cultivation is abandoned; everybody is either a customs official or
a smuggler[5325]. The more excessive the tax the higher the premium
offered to the violators of the law; at every place on the boundaries of
Brittany with Normandy, Maine and Anjou, four pence per pound added
to the salt-tax multiplies beyond any conception the already enormous
number of contraband dealers. "Numerous bands of men,[5326] armed with
frettes, or long sticks pointed with iron, and often with pistols or
guns, attempt to force a passage. "A multitude of women and of children,
quite young, cross the brigades boundaries or, on the other side, troops
of dogs are brought there, kept closed up for a certain time without
food or drink, then loaded with salt and now turned loose so that
they, driven by hunger, immediately bring their cargo back to their
masters."--Vagabonds, outlaws, the famished, sniff this lucrative
occupation from afar and run to it like so many packs of hounds. "The
outskirts of Brittany are filled with a population of emigrants, mostly
outcast from their own districts, who, after a year's registered stay,
may enjoy the privileges of the Bretons: their occupation is limited to
collecting piles of salt to re-sell to the contraband dealers." We might
imagine them, as in a flash of lightening, as a long line of restless
nomads, nocturnal and pursued, an entire tribe, male and female, of
unsociable prowlers, familiar with to underhand tricks, toughened by
hard weather, ragged, "nearly all infected by persistent scabies," and I
find similar bodies in the vicinity of Morlaix, Lorient, and other ports
on the frontiers of other provinces and on the frontiers of the kingdom.
From 1783 to 1787, in Quercy, two allied bands of smugglers, sixty and
eighty each, defraud the revenue of 40,000 of tobacco, kill two customs
officers, and, with their guns, defend their stores in the mountains; to
suppress them soldiers are needed, which their military commander
will not furnish. In 1789,[5327] a large troop of smugglers carry on
operations permanently on the frontiers of Maine and Anjou; the military
commander writes that "their chief is an intelligent and formidable
bandit, who already has under him fifty-five men, he will, due to misery
and rebellion soon have a corps;" it would, as we are unable to take him
by force, be best, if some of his men could be turned and made to
hand him over to us. These are the means resorted to in regions where
brigandage is endemic.--Here, indeed, as in Calabria, the people are on
the side of the brigands against the gendarmes. The exploits of Mandrin
in 1754,[5328] may be remembered: his company of sixty men who bring
in contraband goods and ransom only the clerks, his expedition, lasting
nearly a year, across Franche-Comté, Lyonnais, Bourbonnais, Auvergne
and Burgundy, the twenty-seven towns he enters making no resistance,
delivering prisoners and making sale of his merchandise. To overcome him
a camp had to be formed at Valance and 2,000 men sent against him;
he was taken through treachery, and still at the present day certain
families are proud of their relationship to him, declaring him a
liberator.--No symptom is more alarming: on the enemies of the law being
preferred by the people to its defenders, society disintegrates and the
worms begin to work.--Add to these the veritable brigands, assassins and
robbers. "In 1782,[5329] the provost's court of Montargis is engaged
on the trial of Hulin and two hundred of his accomplices who, for ten
years, by means of joint enterprises, have desolated a portion of the
kingdom."--Mercier enumerates in France "an army of more than 10,000
brigands and vagabonds" against which the police, composed of 3,756 men,
is always on the march. "Complaints are daily made," says the provincial
assembly of Haute-Guyenne, "that there is no police in the country."
The absentee seignior pays no attention to this matter; his judges
and officials take good care not to operate gratuitously against an
insolvent criminal, the result is that "his estates become the refuge of
all the rascals of the area."[5330]--Every abuse thus carries with it a
risk, both due to misplaced carelessness as well as excessive rigor,
to relaxed feudalism as well as to harsh monarchy. All the institutions
appear to work together to breed and or tolerate the troublemakers,
preparing, outside the social defenses, the men of action who will carry
it by storm.
But the total effect of all this is yet more damaging, for, out of the
vast numbers of workers it ruins it forms beggars unwilling to work,
dangerous sluggards going about begging and extorting bread from
peasants who have not too much for themselves. "The vagabonds about the
country," says Letrosne,[5331] "are a terrible pest; they are like an
enemy's force which, distributed over the territory, obtains a living as
it pleases, levying veritable contributions. . . . They are constantly
roving around the country, examining the approaches to houses, and
informing themselves about their inmates and of their habits.--Woe to
those supposed to have money!. . . What numbers of highway robberies and
what burglaries! What numbers of travelers assassinated, and houses and
doors broken into! What assassinations of curates, farmers and widows,
tormented to discover money and afterwards killed! Twenty-five years
anterior (page 384/284) to the Revolution it was not infrequent to
see fifteen or twenty of these "invade a farm-house to sleep there,
intimidating the farmers and exacting whatever they pleased." In 1764,
the government takes measures against them which indicate the magnitude
of the evil[5332].
"Are held to be vagabonds and vagrants, and condemned as such, those
who, for a preceding term of six months, shall have exercised no trade
or profession, and who, having no occupation or means of subsistence,
can procure no persons worthy of confidence to attest and verify their
habits and mode of life. . . . The intent of His Majesty is not merely
to arrest vagabonds traversing the country but, again, all mendicants
whatsoever who, without occupations, may be regarded as suspected of
vagabondage."
The penalty for able-bodied men is three years in the galleys; in case
of a second conviction, nine years; and for a third, imprisonment for
life. Under the age of sixteen, they are put in an institution. "A
mendicant who has made himself liable to arrest by the police," says
the circular, "is not to be released except under the most positive
assurance that he will no longer beg; this course will be followed only
in case of persons worthy of confidence and solvent guaranteeing the
mendicant, and engaging to provide him with employment or to support
him, and they shall indicate the means by which they are to prevent him
from begging." This being furnished, the special authorization of the
intendant must be obtained in addition. By virtue of this law, 50,000
beggars are said to have been arrested at once, and, as the ordinary
hospitals and prisons were not large enough to contain them, jails had
to be constructed. Up to the end of the ancient régime this measure
is carried out with occasional intermissions: in Languedoc, in 1768,
arrests were still made of 433 in six months, and, in 1785, 205 in four
months[5333]. A little before this time 300 were confined in the depot
of Besançon, 500 in that of Rennes and 650 in that of Saint Denis. It
cost the king a million a year to support them, and God knows how they
were bedded and fed! Water, straw, bread, and two ounces of salted
grease, the whole at an expense of five sous a day; and, as the price
of provisions for twenty years back had increased more than a third,
the keeper who had them in charge was obliged to make them fast or ruin
himself.--With respect to the mode of filling the depots, the police are
Turks in their treatment of the lower class; they strike into the
heap, their broom bruising as many as they sweep out. According to the
ordinance of 1778, writes an intendant,[5334] "the police must arrest
not only beggars and vagabonds whom they encounter but, again, those
denounced as such or as suspected persons. The citizen, the most
irreproachable in his conduct and the least open to suspicion of
vagabondage, is not sure of not being shut up in the depot, as his
freedom depends on a policeman who is constantly liable to be deceived
by a false denunciation or corrupted by a bribe. I have seen in the
depot at Rennes several husbands arrested solely through the
denunciation of their wives, and as many women through that of their
husbands; several children by the first wife at the solicitation of
their step-mothers; many female domestics pregnant by the masters they
served, shut up at their instigation, and girls in the same situation at
the instance of their seducers; children denounced by their fathers, and
fathers denounced by their children; all without the slightest evidence
of vagabondage or mendicity. . . . No decision of the provost's court
exists restoring the incarcerated to their liberty, notwithstanding the
infinite number arrested unjustly."
Suppose that a human intendant, like this one, sets them at liberty:
there they are in the streets, without a penny, beggars through the
action of a law which proscribes mendicity and which adds to the
wretched it prosecutes the wretched it creates, still more embittered
and corrupt in body and in soul.
"It nearly always happens," says the same intendant, "that the
prisoners, arrested twenty-five or thirty leagues from the depot, are
not confined there until three or four months after their arrest,
and sometimes longer. Meanwhile, they are transferred from brigade to
brigade, in the prisons found along the road, where they remain until
the number increases sufficiently to form a convoy. Men and women are
confined in the same prison, the result of which is, the females not
pregnant on entering it are always so on their arrival at the depot.
The prisons are generally unhealthy; frequently, the majority of the
prisoners are sick on leaving it," and many become rascals on coming in
contact with rascals.--Moral contagion and physical contagion, the
ulcer thus increasing through the remedy, centers of repression becoming
centers of corruption.
And yet with all its rigors the law does not attain its ends.
"Our towns," says the parliament of Brittany,[5335] "are so filled with
beggars it seems as if the measures taken to suppress mendicity only
increase it."--"The principal highways," writes the intendant, "are
infested with dangerous vagabonds and vagrants, actual beggars, which
the police do not arrest, either through negligence or because their
interference is not provoked by special solicitations."
What would be done with them if they were arrested? They are too many,
and there is no place to put them. And, moreover, how prevent people who
live on alms from demanding alms? The effect, undoubtedly, is lamentable
but inevitable. Poverty, to a certain extent, is a slow gangrene in
which the morbid parts consume the healthy parts, the man scarcely able
to subsist being eaten up alive by the man who has nothing to live on.
"The peasant is ruined, perishing, the victim of oppression by the
multitude of the poor that lay waste the country and take refuge in the
towns. Hence the mobs so prejudicial to public safety, that crowd of
smugglers and vagrants, that large body of men who have become robbers
and assassins, solely because they lack bread. This gives but a faint
idea of the disorders I have seen with my own eyes[5336]. The poverty
of the rural districts, excessive in itself, becomes yet more so
through the disturbances it engenders; we have not to seek elsewhere for
frightful sources of mendicity and for all the vices."[5337]
Of what avail are palliatives or violent proceedings against an evil
which is in the blood, and which belongs to the very constitution of the
social organism? What police force could effect anything in a parish in
which one-quarter or one-third of its inhabitants have nothing to
eat but that which they beg from door to door? At Argentré,[5338] in
Brittany, "a town without trade or industry, out of 2,300 inhabitants,
more than one-half are anything else but well-off, and over 500 are
reduced to beggary." At Dainville, in Artois, "out of 130 houses sixty
are on the poor-list."[5339] In Normandy, according to statements made
by the curates, "of 900 parishioners in Saint-Malo, three-quarters
can barely live and the rest are in poverty." "Of 1,500 inhabitants in
Saint-Patrice, 400 live on alms." Of 500 inhabitants in Saint-Laurent
three-quarters live on alms." At Marboef, says a report, "of 500 persons
inhabiting our parish, 100 are reduced to mendicity, and besides these,
thirty or forty a day come to us from neighboring parishes."[5340]
At Bolbone in Languedoc[5341] daily at the convent gate is "general
almsgiving to 300 or 400 poor people, independent of that for the aged
and the sick, which is more numerously attended." At Lyons, in 1787,
"30,000 workmen depend on public charity for subsistence;" at Rennes, in
1788, after an inundation, "two-thirds of the inhabitants are in a state
of destitution;"[5342] at Paris, out of 650,000 inhabitants, the census
of 1791 counts 118,784 as indigent.[5343]--Let frost or hail come, as
in 1788, let a crop fail, let bread cost four sous a pound, and let a
workman in the charity-workshops earn only twelve sous a day,[5344] can
one imagine that people will resign themselves to death by starvation?
Around Rouen, during the winter of 1788, the forests are pillaged in
open day, the woods at Baguères are wholly cut away, the fallen trees
are publicly sold by the marauders[5345]. Both the famished and the
marauders go together, necessity making itself the accomplice of crime.
From province to province we can follow up their tracks: four months
later, in the vicinity of Etampes, fifteen brigands break into
four farmhouses during the night, while the farmers, threatened by
incendiaries, are obliged to give, one three hundred francs, another
five hundred, all the money, probably, they have in their coffers[5346].
"Robbers, convicts, the worthless of every species," are to form the
advance guard of insurrections and lead the peasantry to the extreme
of violence[5347]. After the sack of the Reveillon house in Paris it is
remarked that "of the forty ringleaders arrested, there was scarcely one
who was not an old offender, and either flogged or branded."[5348] In
every revolution the dregs of society come to the surface. Never had
these been visible before; like badgers in the woods, or rats in the
sewers, they had remained in their burrows or in their holes. They issue
from these in swarms, and suddenly, in Paris, what figures![5349] "Never
had any like them been seen in daylight. . . Where do they come from?
Who has brought them out of their obscure hiding places?. . . strangers
from everywhere, armed with clubs, ragged,. . . some almost naked,
others oddly dressed" in incongruous patches and "frightful to look at,"
constitute the riotous chiefs or their subordinates, at six francs per
head, behind which the people are to march.
"At Paris," says Mercier,[5350] "the people are weak, pallid,
diminutive, stunted," maltreated, "and, apparently, a class apart
from other classes in the country. The rich and the great who possess
equipages, enjoy the privilege of crushing them or of mutilating them in
the streets. . . There is no convenience for pedestrians, no side-walks.
Hundred victims die annually under the carriage wheels." "I saw," says
Arthur Young, "a poor child run over and probably killed, and have been
myself several times been covered from head to toe with the water from
the gutter. Should young (English) noblemen drive along London streets
without sidewalks, in the same manner as their equals in Paris, they
would speedily and justly get very well thrashed and rolled in the
gutter."
Mercier grows uneasy in the face of the immense populace:
"In Paris there are, probably, 200,000 persons with no property
intrinsically worth fifty crowns, and yet the city subsists!"
Order, consequently, is maintained only through fear and by force,
owing to the soldiery of the watch who are called tristes-à-patte by the
crowd. "This nick name enrages this species of militia, who then deal
heavier blows around them, wounding indiscriminately all they encounter.
The low class is always ready to make war on them because it has never
been fairly treated by them." In fact, "a squad of the guard often
scatters, with no trouble, crowds of five or six hundred men, at first
greatly excited, but melting away in the twinkling of an eye, after the
soldiery have distributed a few blows and handcuffed two or three of
the ringleaders."--Nevertheless, "were the people of Paris abandoned
to their true inclinations, did they not feel the horse and foot guards
behind them, the commissary and policeman, there would be no limits to
their disorder. The populace, delivered from its customary restraint,
would give itself up to violence of so cruel a stamp as not to know when
to stop. . . As long as white bread lasts,[5351] the commotion will
not prove general; the flour market[5352] must interest itself in the
matter, if the women are to remain tranquil. . . Should white bread
be wanting for two market days in succession, the uprising would be
universal, and it is impossible to foresee the lengths this multitude at
bay will go to in order to escape famine, they and their children."--In
1789 white bread proves to be wanting throughout France.
*****
NOTES:
[Footnote 5301: Théron de Montaugé, 102, 113. In the Toulousain ten
parishes out of fifty have schools.--In Gascony, says the ass. prov. of
Auch (p. 24), "most of the rural districts are without schoolmasters
or parsonages."--In 1778, the post between Paris and Toulouse runs only
three times a week; that of Toulouse by way of Alby, Rodez, etc., twice
a week; for Beaumont, Saint-Girons, etc., once a week. "In the country,"
says Théron de Montaugé, "one may be said to live in solitude and
exile." In 1789 the Paris post reaches Besançon three times a week.
(Arthur Young, I. 257).]
[Footnote 5302: One of the Marquis de Mirabeau's expressions.]
[Footnote 5303: Archives nationales, G. 300, letter of an excise
director at Coulommiers, Aug. 13, 1781.]
[Footnote 5304: D'Argenson, VI. 425 (June 16, 1751).]
[Footnote 5305: De Montlosier, I. 102, 146.]
[Footnote 5306: Théron de Montaugé, 102.]
[Footnote 5307: Monsieur Nicolas, I. 448.]
[Footnote 5308: "Tableaux de la Révolution," by Schmidt, II. 7 (report
by the agent Perriere who lived in Auvergne.)]
[Footnote 5309: Gouverneur Morris, II. 69, April 29, 1789.]
[Footnote 5310: Mercier, "Tableau de Paris," XII. 83.]
[Footnote 5311: De Vaublanc, 209.]
[Footnote 5312: Mandrin, (Louis) (Saint Étienne-de--Saint-Geoirs, Isère,
1724--Valence, 1755). French smuggler who, after 1750, was active over
an enormous territory with the support of the population; hunted down
by the army, caught, condemned to death to be broken alive on the wheel.
(SR.)]
[Footnote 5313: Arthur Young, I. 283 (Aug. 13, 1789); I. 289 (Aug. 19,
1789).]
[Footnote 5314: Archives nationales, H, 274. Letters respectively of
M. de Caraman (March 18 and April 12, 1789); M. d'Eymar de Montmegran
(April 2); M. de la Tour (March 30). "The sovereign's greatest benefit
is interpreted in the strangest manner by an ignorant populace."]
[Footnote 5315: Doniol, "Hist. Des classes rurales," 495. (Letter of
Aug. 3, 1789, to M. de Clermont-Tonnerre).]
[Footnote 5316: Archives nationales, H. 1453. (Letter of Aug. 3, 1789,
to M. de Clermont-Tonnere).]
[Footnote 5317: "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. Prov. D'Orléanais," p. 296.
"Distrusts still prevails throughout the rural districts. . . Your
first orders for departmental assemblies only awakened suspicion in
certain quarters."]
[Footnote 5318: "Tableau de Paris," XII. 186.]
[Footnote 5319: Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, I. 158, (1788); I. 183 (1789).]
[Footnote 5320: Archives nationals, H. 723. (Letter of M. de Caumartin,
intendant at Besançon, Dec. 5, 1788).]
[Footnote 5321: D'Argenson, March 13, 1752.]
[Footnote 5322: "Corresp.," of Métra, V, 179 (November 22, 1777).]
[Footnote 5323: Beugnot, I. 142. "No inhabitant of the barony of
Choiseul mingled with any of the bands composed of the patriots of
Montigny, smugglers and outcasts of the neighborhood."--See, on the
poachers of the day, "Les deux amis de Bourbonne," by Diderot.]
[Footnote 5324: De Calonne, "Mémoires presentés à l'ass. des notables,"
No. 8.--Necker, "De l'Administration des Finances," I. 195.]
[Footnote 5325: Letrosne, "De l'Administration des Finances," 59.]
[Footnote 5326: Archives nationales, H. 426. (Mémoires of the
farmers-general, Jan. 13, 1781, Sept. 15, 1782). H, 614. (Letter of M.
de Coetlosquet, April 25, 1777). H, 1431. Report by the farmers-general,
March 9, 1787.]
[Footnote 5327: Archives nationales, H, 1453. Letter of the Baron de
Bezenval, June 19, 1789.]
[Footnote 5328: "Mandrin," by Paul Simian, passim.--"Histoire de
Beaume," by Rossignol, p. 453.--"Mandrin," by Ch. Jarrin (1875). Major
Fisher, who attacks and disperses the gang, writes that the affair is
urgent since, "higher to the North near Forez, one can find two or
three hundred vagrants who only wait for a chance to unite with them."
(p.47.)]
[Footnote 5329: Mercier, XI. 116.]
[Footnote 5330: See above, book I. p. 55.]
[Footnote 5331: Letrosne, ibid. (1779), p. 539.]
[Footnote 5332: Archives nationales, F16, 965, and H, 892. (Ordinance of
August 4 1764; a circular of instructions of July 20, 1767; a letter of
a police lieutenant of Toulouse, September 21, 1787).]
[Footnote 5333: Archives nationales, H, 724; H, 554; F4 2397; F16
965.--Letters of the jailers of Carcassonne (June 22, 1789); of Béziers
(July 19, 1786); of Nimes (July 1, 1786); of the intendant, M. d'Aine
(March 19, 1786).]
[Footnote 5334: Archives nationales, H, 554. (Letter of M. de Bertrand,
intendant of Rennes, August 7, 1785).]
[Footnote 5335: Archives nationales, H, 426. (Remonstrances, Feb.
1783).--H, 554. (Letter of M. de Bertrand, Aug. 17, 1785).]
[Footnote 5336: Archives nationales, H, 614 (Mémoire by René de
Hauteville, parliamentary advocate, Saint-Brieuc, Dec. 25, 1776.)]
[Footnote 5337: "Process-verbaux de l'ass. Prov. de Soissonnais" (1787)
p. 457.]
[Footnote 5338: Archives nationales, H, 616 (A letter of M. De Boves,
intendant of Rennes, April 23, 1774).]
[Footnote 5339: Périn, "La Jeunesse de Robespierre," 301. (Doléances des
parroisses rurales en 1789).]
[Footnote 5340: Hippeau, "Le Gouvern. de Normandie," VII. 147-177
(1789).--Boivin-Champeaux, "Notice hist. sur la Révolution dans le
département de l'Eure," p. 83 (1789).]
[Footnote 5341: Théron de Montaugé, p. 87. (Letter of the prior of the
convent, March, 1789).]
[Footnote 5342: "Procès-verbaux de l'Ass. prov. de Lyonnais,"
p.57.--Archives nationales, F4, 2073. Memorandum of Jan. 24, 1788.
"Charitable assistance is very limited, the provincial authorities
providing no resources for such accidents."]
[Footnote 5343: Levasseur, "La France industrielle," 119.--In 1862,
the population being almost triple (1 696 000) there are but 90 000
paupers.]
[Footnote 5344: Albert Babeau, "Hist. de Troyes," I. 91. (Letter of the
mayor Huez, July 30, 1788).]
[Footnote 5345: Floquet, VII, 506.]
[Footnote 5346: Archives nationales, H, 1453. (Letter of M. de
Sainte-Suzanne, April 29, 1789).]
[Footnote 5347: Arthur Young, I. 256.]
[Footnote 5348: "Correspond. secrèt inédite," from 1777 to 1792,
published by M. de Lescure, II. 351 (May 8, 1789). Cf. C. Desmoulins,
"La Lanterne," of 100 rioters arrested at Lyons 96 were branded.]
[Footnote 5349: De Bezenval, II. 344, 350.--Dussault, "La Prise de la
Bastille," 352.--Marmontel, II, ch. XIV, 249.--Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, I.
177, 188.]
[Footnote 5350: Mercier, I. 32; VI. 15; X. 179; XI. 59; XII. 83.--Arthur
Young, I. 122.]
[Footnote 5351: In the original, pain de Gonesse,--bread, made in a
village of this name near Paris, and renowned for its whiteness.--TR.]
[Footnote 5352: "Dialogues sur le commerce des blés," by Galiani (1770).
"If the strong of the markets are content, no misfortune will happen to
the administration. The great conspire and rebel; the bourgeois murmurs
and lives a celibate; peasants and artisans despair and go away; porters
get up riots."]