Meanwhile, other officials, those of the excise, descend into the cellar. None are more formidable, nor who more eagerly seize on pretexts for delinquency[5234]. "Let a citizen charitably bestow a bottle of wine on a poor feeble creature and he is liable to prosecution and to excessive penalties. . . . The poor invalid that may interest his curate in the begging of a bottle of wine for him will undergo a trial, ruining not alone the unfortunate man that obtains it, but again the benefactor who gave it to him. This is not a fancied story." By virtue of the right of deficient revenue the clerks may, at any hour, take an inventory of wine on hand, even the stores of a vineyard proprietor, indicate what he may consume, tax him for the rest and for the surplus quantity already drunk, the ferme thus associating itself with the wine-producer and claiming its portion of his production.—In a vine-yard at Epernay[5235] on four casks of wine, the average product of one arpent, and worth six hundred francs, it levies, at first, thirty francs, and then, after the sale of the four casks, seventy five francs additionally. Naturally, "the inhabitants resort to the shrewdest and best planned artifices to escape" such potent rights. But the clerks are alert, watchful, and well-informed, and they pounce down unexpectedly on every suspected domicile; their instructions prescribe frequent inspections and exact registries "enabling them to see at a glance the condition of the cellar of each inhabitant."[5236]—The manufacturer having paid up, the merchant now has his turn. The latter, on sending the four casks to the consumer—again pays seventy-five francs to the ferme. The wine is dispatched and the ferme prescribes the roads by which it must go; should others be taken it is confiscated, and at every step on the way some payment must be made. "A boat laden with wine from Languedoc,[5237] Dauphiny or Roussillon, ascending the Rhone and descending the Loire to reach Paris, through the Briare canal, pays on the way, leaving out charges on the Rhone, from thirty-five to forty kinds of duty, not comprising the charges on entering Paris." It pays these "at fifteen or sixteen places, the multiplied payments obliging the carriers to devote twelve or fifteen days more to the passage than they otherwise would if their duties could be paid at one bureau."—The charges on the routes by water are particularly heavy. "From Pontarlier to Lyons there are twenty-five or thirty tolls; from Lyons to Aigues-Mortes there are others, so that whatever costs ten sous in Burgundy, amounts to fifteen and eighteen sous at Lyons, and to over twenty-five sous at Aigues-Mortes."—The wine at last reaches the barriers of the city where it is to be drunk. Here it pays an octroi[5238] of forty-seven francs per hogshead.—Entering Paris it goes into the tapster's or innkeeper's cellar where it again pays from thirty to forty francs for the duty on selling it at retail; at Rethel the duty is from fifty to sixty francs per puncheon, Rheims gauge.—The total is exorbitant. "At Rennes,[5239] the dues and duties on a hogshead (or barrel) of Bordeaux wine, together with a fifth over and above the tax, local charges, eight sous per pound and the octroi, amount to more than seventy-two livres exclusive of the purchase money; to which must be added the expenses and duties advanced by the Rennes merchant and which he recovers from the purchaser, Bordeaux drayage, freight, insurance, tolls of the flood-gate, entrance duty into the town, hospital dues, fees of gaugers, brokers and inspectors. The total outlay for the tapster who sells a barrel of wine amounts to two hundred livres." We may imagine whether, at this price, the people of Rennes drink it, while these charges fall on the wine-grower, since, if consumers do not purchase, he is unable to sell.

Accordingly, among the small growers, he is the most to be pitied; according to the testimony of Arthur Young, wine-grower and misery are two synonymous terms. The crop often fails, "every doubtful crop ruining the man without capital." In Burgundy, in Berry, in Soisonnais, in the Trois-Eveche's, in Champagne,[5240] I find in every report that he lacks bread and lives on alms. In Champagne, the syndics of Bar-sur-Aube write[5241] that the inhabitants, to escape duties, have more than once emptied their wine into the river, the provincial assembly declaring that "in the greater portion of the province the slightest augmentation of duties would cause the cultivators to desert the soil."—Such is the history of wine under the ancient regime. From the producer who grows to the tapster who sells, what extortions and what vexations! As to the salt-tax, according to the comptroller-general,[5242] this annually produces 4,000 domiciliary seizures, 3,400 imprisonments, 500 sentences to flogging, exile and the galleys.—

If ever two taxes were well combined, not only to despoil, but also to irritate the peasantry, the poor and the people, here they were.



VI. Burdens And Exemptions.

Why taxation is so burdensome.—Exemptions and privileges.

Evidently the burden of taxation forms the chief cause of misery; hence an accumulated, deep-seated hatred against the fisc and its agents, receivers, store-house keepers, excise officials, customs officers and clerks.—But why is taxation so burdensome? As far as the communes which annually plead in detail against certain gentlemen to subject them to the taille are concerned, there is no doubt. What renders the charge oppressive is the fact that the strongest and those best able to bear taxation succeed in evading it, the prime cause of misery being the vastness of the exemptions[5243].

Let us look at each of these exemptions, one tax after another.—In the first place, not only are nobles and ecclesiastics exempt from the personal taille but again, as we have already seen, they are exempt from the cultivator's taille, through cultivating their domains themselves or by a steward. In Auvergne,[5244] in the single election-district of Clermont, fifty parishes are enumerated in which, owing to this arrangement, every estate of a privileged person is exempt, the taille falling wholly on those subject to it. Furthermore, it suffices for a privileged person to maintain that his farmer is only a steward, which is the case in Poitou in several parishes, the subdelegate and the elu not daring to look into the matter too closely. In this way the privileged classes escape the taille, they and their property, including their farms.—Now, the taille, ever augmenting, is that which provides, through its special delegations, such a vast number of new offices. A man of the Third-Estate has merely to run through the history of its periodical increase to see how it alone, or almost alone, paid and is paying[5245] for the construction of bridges, roads, canals and courts of justice, for the purchase of offices, for the establishment and support of houses of refuge, insane asylums, nurseries, post-houses for horses, fencing and riding schools, for paving and sweeping Paris, for salaries of lieutenants-general, governors, and provincial commanders, for the fees of bailiffs, seneschals and vice-bailiffs, for the salaries of financial and election officials and of commissioners dispatched to the provinces, for those of the police of the watch and I know not how many other purposes.—In the provinces which hold assemblies, where the taille would seem to be more justly apportioned, the like inequality is found. In Burgundy[5246] the expenses of the police, of public festivities, of keeping horses, all sums appropriated to the courses of lectures on chemistry, botany, anatomy and parturition, to the encouragement of the arts, to subscriptions to the chancellorship, to franking letters, to presents given to the chiefs and subalterns of commands, to salaries of officials of the provincial assemblies, to the ministerial secretaryship, to expenses of levying taxes and even alms, in short, 1,800,000 livres are spent in the public service at the charge of the Third-Estate, the two higher orders not paying a cent.

In the second place, with respect to the poll-tax, originally distributed among twenty-two classes and intended to bear equally on all according to fortunes, we know that, from the first, the clergy buy themselves off; and, as to the nobles, they manage so well as to have their tax reduced proportionately with its increase at the expense of the Third-Estate. A count or a marquis, an intendant or a master of requests, with 40,000 livres income, who, according to the tariff of 1695,[5247] should pay from 1,700 to 2,500 livres, pays only 400 livres, while a bourgeois with 6,000 livres income, and who, according to the same tariff; should pay 70 livres, pays 720. The poll-tax of the privileged individual is thus diminished three-quarters or five-sixths, while that of the taille-payer has increased tenfold. In the Ile-de-France,[5248] on an income of 240 livres, the taille-payer pays twenty-one livres eight sous, and the nobles three livres, and the intendant himself states that he taxes the nobles only an eightieth of their revenue; that of Orleanais taxes them only a hundredth, while, on the other hand, those subject to the taille are assessed one-eleventh.—If other privileged parties are added to the nobles, such as officers of justice, employee's of the fermes, and exempted townsmen, a group is formed embracing nearly everybody rich or well-off and whose revenue certainly greatly surpasses that of those who are subject to the taille. Now, the budgets of the provincial assemblies inform us how much each province levies on each of the two groups: in the Lyonnais district those subject to the taille pay 898,000 livres, the privileged, 190,000; in the Ile-de-France, the former pay 2,689,000 livres and the latter 232,000; in the generalship of Alencon, the former pay 1,067,000 livres and the latter 122,000; in Champagne, the former pay 1,377,000 livres, and the latter 199,000; in Haute-Guyenne, the former pay 1,268,000 livres, and the latter 61,000; in the generalship of Auch, the former pay 797,000 livres, the privileged 21,000; in Auvergne the former pay 1,753,000 livres and the latter 86,000; in short, summing up the total of ten provinces, 11,636,000 livres paid by the poor group and 1,450,000 livres by the rich group, the latter paying eight times less than it ought to pay.

With respect to the vingtiemes, the disproportion is less, the precise amounts not being attainable; we may nevertheless assume that the assessment of the privileged class is about one-half of what it should be. "In 1772," says[5249] M. de Calonne, "it was admitted that the vingtiemes were not carried to their full value. False declarations, counterfeit leases, too favorable conditions granted to almost all the wealthy proprietors gave rise to inequalities and countless errors. A verification of 4,902 parishes shows that the product of the two vingtiemes amounting to 54,000,000 should have amounted to 81,000,000." A seigniorial domain which, according to its own return of income, should pay 2,400 livres, pays only 1,216. The case is much worse with the princes of the blood; we have seen that their domains are exempt and pay only 188,000 livres instead of 2,400,000. Under this system, which crushes the weak to relieve the strong, the more capable one is of contributing, the less one contributes.—The same story characterizes the fourth and last direct taxation, namely, the tax substituted for the corvee. This tax, attached, at first, to the vingtiemes and consequently extending to all proprietors, through an act of the Council is attached to the taille and, consequently, bears on those the most burdened[5250]. Now this tax amounts to an extra of one-quarter added to the principal of the taille, of which one example may be cited, that of Champagne, where, on every 100 livres income the sum of six livres five sous devolves on the taille-payer. "Thus," says the provincial assembly, "every road used by active commerce, by the multiplied coursing of the rich, is repaired wholly by the contributions of the poor."—As these figures spread out before the eye we involuntarily recur to the two animals in the fable, the horse and the mule traveling together on the same road; the horse, by right, may prance along as he pleases; hence his load is gradually transferred to the mule, the beast of burden, which finally sinks beneath the extra load.

Not only, in the corps of tax-payers, are the privileged disburdened to the detriment of the taxable, but again, in the corps of the taxable, the rich are relieved to the injury of the poor, to such an extent that the heaviest portion of the load finally falls on the most indigent and most laborious class, on the small proprietor cultivating his own field, on the simple artisan with nothing but his tools and his hands, and, in general, on the inhabitants of villages. In the first place, in the matter of taxes, a number of the towns are "abonnees," or free. Compiegne, for the taille and its accessories, with 1,671 firesides, pays only 8,000 francs, whilst one of the villages in its neighborhood, Canly, with 148 firesides, pays 4,475 francs[5251]. In the poll-tax, Versailles, Saint-Germain, Beauvais, Etampes, Pontoise, Saint-Denis, Compiegne, Fontainebleau, taxed in the aggregate at 169,000 livres, are two-thirds exempt, contributing but little more than one franc, instead of three francs ten sous, per head of the population; at Versailles it is still less, since for 70,000 inhabitants the poll-tax amounts to only 51,600 francs[5252]. Besides, in any event, on the apportionment of a tax, the bourgeois of the town is favored above his rural neighbors. Accordingly, "the inhabitants of the country, who depend on the town and are comprehended in its functions, are treated with a rigor of which it would be difficult to form an idea. . . . Town influence is constantly throwing the burden on those who are trying to be relieved of it, the richest of citizens paying less taille than the most miserable of the peasant farmers[5253]." Hence, "the horror of the taille depopulates the rural districts, concentrating in the towns all the talents and all the capital[5254]." Outside of the towns there is the same differences. Each year, the elus and their collectors, exercising arbitrary power, fix the taille of the parish and of each inhabitant. In these ignorant and partial hands the scales are not held by equity but by self-interest, local hatreds, the desire for revenge, the necessity of favoring some friend, relative, neighbor, protector, or patron, some powerful or some dangerous person. The intendant of Moulins, on visiting his generalship, finds "people of influence paying nothing, while the poor are over-charged." That of Dijon writes that "the basis of apportionment is arbitrary, to such an extent that the people of the province must not be allowed to suffer any longer."[5255] In the generalship of Rouen "some parishes pay over four sous the livre and others scarcely one sou."[5256] "For three years past that I have lived in the country," writes a lady of the same district, "I have remarked that most of the wealthy proprietors are the least pressed; they are selected to make the apportionment, and the people are always abused."[5257]—"I live on an estate ten leagues from Paris," wrote d'Argenson, "where it was desired to assess the taille proportionately, but only injustice has been the outcome since the seigniors made use of their influence to relieve their own tenants." [5258] Besides, in addition to those who, through favor, diminish their taille, there are others who buy themselves off entirely. An intendant, visiting the subdelegation of Bar-sur-Seine, observes" that the rich cultivators succeed in obtaining petty commissions in connection with the king's household and enjoy the privileges attached to these, which throws the burden of taxation on the others."[5259] "One of the leading causes of our prodigious taxation," says the provincial assembly of Auvergne, "is the inconceivable number of the privileged, which daily increases through traffic in and the assignment of offices; cases occur in which these have ennobled six families in less than twenty years." Should this abuse continue, "in a hundred years every tax-payer the most capable of supporting taxation will be ennobled."[5260] Observe, moreover, that an infinity of offices and functions, without conferring nobility, exempt their titularies from the personal taille and reduce their poll-tax to the fortieth of their income; at first, all public functionaries, administrative or judicial, and next all employments in the salt-department, in the customs, in the post-office, in the royal domains, and in the excise.[5261] "There are few parishes," writes an intendant, "in which these employees are not found, while several contain as many as two or three."[5262] A postmaster is exempt from the taille, in all his possessions and offices, and even on his farms to the extent of a hundred arpents. The notaries of Angouleme are exempt from the corvee, from collections, and the lodging of soldiers, while neither their sons or chief clerks can be drafted in the militia. On closely examining the great fiscal net in administrative correspondence, we detect at every step some meshes through which, with a bit of effort and cunning, all the big and average-sized fish escape; the small fry alone remain at the bottom of the scoop. A surgeon not an apothecary, a man of good family forty-five years old, in commerce, but living with his parent and in a province with a written code, escapes the collector. The same immunity is extended to the begging agents of the monks of "la Merci" and "L'Etroite Observance." Throughout the South and the East individuals in easy circumstances purchase this commission of beggar for a "louis," or for ten crowns, and, putting three livres in a cup, go about presenting it in this or that parish:[5263] ten of the inhabitants of a small mountain village and five inhabitants in the little village of Treignac obtain their discharge in this fashion. Consequently, "the collections fall on the poor, always powerless and often insolvent," the privileged who effect the ruin of the tax-payer causing the deficiencies of the treasury.



VII. Municipal Taxation.

The octrois of towns.—The poor the greatest sufferers.

One word more to complete the picture. People seek shelter in the towns and, indeed, compared with the country, the towns are a refuge. But misery accompanies the poor, for, on the one hand, they are involved in debt, and, on the other, the closed circles administering municipal affairs impose taxation on the poor. The towns being oppressed by the fisc, they in their turn oppress the people by passing to them the load which the king had imposed. Seven times in twenty-eight years[5264] he withdraws and re-sells the right of appointing their municipal officers, and, to get rid of "this enormous financial burden," the towns double their octrois. At present, although liberated, they still make payment; the annual charge has become a perpetual charge; never does the fisc release its hold; once beginning to suck it continues to suck. "Hence, in Brittany," says an intendant, "not a town is there whose expenses are not greater than its revenue."[5265] They are unable to mend their pavements, and repair their streets, "the approaches to them being almost impracticable." What could they do for self-support, obliged, as they are, to pay over again after having already paid? Their augmented octrois, in 1748, ought to furnish during a period of eleven years a total of 606,000 livres; but, the eleven years having lapsed, the tax authorities, in spite of having been paid, still maintains its exigencies, and to such an extent that, in 1774, they have contributed 2,071,052 livres, the provisional octroi being still maintained.—Now, this exorbitant octroi bears heavily everywhere on the most indispensable necessities, the artisan being more heavily burdened than the bourgeois. In Paris, as we have seen above, wine pays forty-seven livres a hogshead entrance duty which, at the present standard of value, must be doubled. "A turbot, taken on the coast at Harfleur and brought by post, pays an entrance duty of eleven times its value, the people of the capital therefore being condemned to dispense with fish from the sea."[5266] At the gates of Paris, in the little parish of Aubervilliers, I find "excessive duties on hay, straw, seeds, tallow, candles, eggs, sugar, fish, faggots and firewood."[5267] Compiegne pays the whole amount of its taille by means of a tax on beverages and cattle[5268]. "In Toul and in Verdun the taxes are so onerous that but few consent to remain in the town, except those kept there by their offices and by old habits."[5269] At Coulommiers, "the merchants and the people are so severely taxed they dread undertaking any enterprise." Popular hatred everywhere is profound against octroi, barrier and clerk. The bourgeois oligarchy everywhere first cares for itself before caring for those it governs. At Nevers and at Moulins,[5270] "all rich persons find means to escape their turn to collect taxes by belonging to different commissions or through their influence with the elus, to such an extent that the collectors of Nevers, of the present and preceding year, might be mistaken for real beggars; there is hardly any small village whose tax collectors are solvent, since the tenant farmers (metayers) have had to be appointed." At Angers, "independent of presents and candles, which annually consume 2,172 livres, the public pence are employed and wasted in clandestine outlays according to the fancy of the municipal officers." In Provence, where the communities are free to tax themselves and where they might be expected to show some consideration for the poor, "most of the towns, and notably Aix, Marseilles and Toulon,[5271] pay their impositions," local and general, "exclusively by the tax called the "piquet." This is a tax "on all species of flour belonging to and consumed on the territory;" for example, of 254,897 livres, which Toulon expends, the piquet furnishes 233,405. Thus the taxation falls wholly on the people, while the bishop, the marquis, the president, the merchant of importance pay less on their dinner of delicate fish and becaficos than the caulker or porter on his two pounds of bread rubbed with a piece of garlic! Bread in this country is already too dear! And the quality is so poor that Malouet, the intendant of the marine, refuses to let his workmen eat it!

"Sire," said M. de la Fare, bishop of Nancy, from his pulpit, May 4th, 1789, "Sire, the people over which you reign has given unmistakable proofs of its patience. . . . They are martyrs in whom life seems to have been allowed to remain to enable them to suffer the longer."



VIII. Complaints In The Registers [5272].

"I am miserable because too much is taken from me. Too much is taken from me because not enough is taken from the privileged. Not only do the privileged force me to pay in their place, but, again, they previously deduct from my earnings their ecclesiastic and feudal dues. When, out of my income of 100 francs, I have parted with fifty-three francs, and more, to the collector, I am obliged again to give fourteen francs to the seignior, also more than fourteen for tithes,[5273] and, out of the remaining eighteen or nineteen francs, I have additionally to satisfy the excise men. I alone, a poor man, pay two governments, one the old government, local and now absent, useless, inconvenient and humiliating, and active only through annoyances, exemptions and taxes; and the other, recent, centralized, everywhere present, which, taking upon itself all functions, has vast needs, and makes my meager shoulders support its enormous weight."

These, in precise terms, are the vague ideas beginning to ferment in the popular brain and encountered on every page of the records of the States-General.

"Would to God," says a Normandy village,[5274] "the monarch might take into his own hands the defense of the miserable citizen pelted and oppressed by clerks, seigniors, justiciary and clergy!"

"Sire," writes a village in Champagne,[5275] "the only message to us on your part is a demand for money. We were led to believe that this might cease, but every year the demand comes for more. We do not hold you responsible for this because we love you, but those whom you employ, who better know how to manage their own affairs than yours. We believed that you were deceived by them and we, in our chagrin, said to ourselves, If our good king only knew of this!. . . We are crushed down with every species of taxation; thus far we have given you a part of our bread, and, should this continue, we shall be in want. . . . Could you see the miserable tenements in which we live, the poor food we eat, you would feel for us; this would prove to you better than words that we can support this no longer and that it must be lessened. . . . That which grieves us is that those who possess the most, pay the least. We pay the tailles and for our implements, while the ecclesiastics and nobles who own the best land pay nothing. Why do the rich pay the least and the poor the most? Should not each pay according to his ability? Sire, we entreat that things may be so arranged, for that is just. . . . Did we dare, we should undertake to plant the slopes with vines; but we are so persecuted by the clerks of the excise we would rather pull up those already planted; the wine that we could make would all go to them, scarcely any of it remaining for ourselves. These exactions are a great scourge and, to escape them, we would rather let the ground lie waste. . . . Relieve us of all these extortions and of the excisemen; we are great sufferers through all these devices; now is the time to change them; never shall we be happy as long as these last. We entreat all this of you, Sire, along with others of your subjects as wearied as ourselves. . . . We would entreat yet more but you cannot do all at one time."

Imposts and privileges, in the really popular registers, are the two enemies against which complaints everywhere arise[5276].

"We are overwhelmed by demands for subsidies,. . . we are burdened with taxes beyond our strength,. . . we do not feel able to support any more, we perish, overpowered by the sacrifices demanded of us. Labor is taxed while indolence is exempt. . . . Feudalism is the most disastrous of abuses, the evils it causes surpassing those of hail and lightning. . . . Subsistence is impossible if three-quarters of the crops are to be taken for field-rents, terrage, etc. . . . The proprietor has a fourth part, the decimateur a twelfth, the harvester a twelfth, taxation a tenth, not counting the depredations of vast quantities of game which devour the growing crops: nothing is left for the poor cultivator but pain and sorrow."

Why should the Third-Estate alone pay for roads on which the nobles and the clergy drive in their carriages? Why are the poor alone subject to militia draft? Why does "the subdelegate cause only the defenseless and the unprotected to be drafted?" Why does it suffice to be the servant of a privileged person to escape this service? Destroy those dove-cotes, formerly only small pigeon-pens and which now contain as many as 5,000 pairs. Abolish the barbarous rights of "motte, quevaise and domaine congeable[5277] under which more than 500,000 persons still suffer in Lower Brittany." "You have in your armies, Sire, more than 30,000 Franche-Comte serfs;" should one of these become an officer and be pensioned out of the service he would be obliged to return to and live in the hut in which he was born, otherwise; at his death, the seignior will take his pittance. Let there be no more absentee prelates, nor abbes-commendatory. "The present deficit is not to be paid by us but by the bishops and beneficiaries; deprive the princes of the church of two-thirds of their revenues." "Let feudalism be abolished. Man, the peasant especially, is tyrannically bowed down to the impoverished ground on which he lies exhausted. . . . There is no freedom, no prosperity, no happiness where the soil is enthralled. . . . Let the lord's dues, and other odious taxes not feudal, be abolished, a thousand times returned to the privileged. Let feudalism content itself with its iron scepter without adding the poniard of the revenue speculator."[5278]

Here, and for some time before this, it is not the Countryman who speaks but the procureur, the lawyer, who places professional metaphors and theories at his service. But the lawyer has simply translated the countryman's sentiments into literary dialect.

*****

NOTES:

[Footnote 5201: "Collection des economistes," II. 832. See a tabular statement by Beaudan.]

[Footnote 5202: "Ephemerides du citoyen," IX. 15; an article by M. de Butre, 1767.]

[Footnote 5203: "Collection des economistes," I. 551, 562.]

[Footnote 5204: "Proces-verbaux de l'assemblee provinciale de Champagne" (1787), p. 240.]

[Footnote 5205: Cf., "Notice historique sur la Revolution dans le departement de l'Eure," by Boivin-Champeaux, p. 37.—A register of grievances of the parish of Epreville; on 100 francs income the Treasury takes 22 for the taille, 16 for collaterals, 15 for the poll-tax, 11 for the vingtiemes, total 67 livres.]

[Footnote 5206: "Proces-verbaux de l'assemblee provinciale de Ile-de-France" (1787), p. 131.]

[Footnote 5207: "Procex-verbaux de l'ass. prov de la Haute-Guyenne" (1784), II. 17, 40, 47.]

[Footnote 5208: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. d'Auvergne" (1787), p. 253.—Doleances, by Gautier de Biauzat, member of the council elected by the provincial assembly of Auvergne. (1788), p.3.]

[Footnote 5209: See note 5 at the end of the volume.]

[Footnote 5210: "Theron de Montauge," p. 109 (1763). Wages at this time are from 7 to 12 sous a day during the summer.]

[Footnote 5211: Archives nationales, proces-verbaux and registers of the States-General, V. 59, p. 6. Memorandum to M. Necker from M. d'Orgeux, honorary councilor to the Parliament of Bourgogne, 25 Oct. 1788..]

[Footnote 5212: Ibid. H, 1418. A letter of the intendant of Limoges, Feb. 26, 1784.]

[Footnote 5213: Turgot, II. 259.]

[Footnote 5214: Archives nationales, H, 426 (remonstrances of the Parliament of Brittany, Feb. 1783).]

[Footnote 5215: Mercier; XI. 59; X. 262.]

[Footnote 5216: Archives nationales, H, 1422, a letter by M d'Aine, intendant of Limoges (February 17, 1782) one by the intendant of Moulins (April, 1779); the trial of the community of Mollon (Bordelais), and the tables of its collectors.]

[Footnote 5217: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. d'Auvergne," p. 266.]

[Footnote 5218: Albert Babeau, "Histoire de Troyes," I. 72]

[Footnote 5219: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Berry" (1778), I. pp.72, 80.]

[Footnote 5220: De Tocqueville, 187.]

[Footnote 5221: Archives nationales, H, 1417. (A letter of M. de Cypierre, intendant at Orleans, April 17, 1765).]

[Footnote 5222: "Traite de Population," 2d part, p.26.]

[Footnote 5223: Archives nationales, H, 1417. (A letter of M. de Cypierre, intendant at Orleans, April 17, 1765).]

[Footnote 5224: Ibid. H, 1418. (Letter of May 28, 1784).]

[Footnote 5225: Ibid. (Letter of the intendant of Tours, June 15, 1765.)]

[Footnote 5226: Archives Nationales, H, 1417. A report by Raudon, receiver of tailles in the election of Laon, January, 1764.]

[Footnote 5227: "Procex-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Berry" (1778), I. p.72.]

[Footnote 5228: Champfort, 93.]

[Footnote 5229: "Procex-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Berry," I. 77.]

[Footnote 5230: Arthur Young, II. 205.]

[Footnote 5231: "Proces-verbaux of the ass. prov. of the generalship of Rouen" (1787), p.271.]

[Footnote 5232: Letrosne (1779). "De l'administration provinciale et de Ia reforme de l'impot," pp. 39 to 262 and 138.—Archives nationales, H. 138 (1782). Cahier de Bugey, "Salt costs a person living in the countryside purchasing it from the retailers from 15 to 17 sous a pound, according to the way of measuring it."]

[Footnote 5233: Floquet, VI. 367 (May 10, 1760).]

[Footnote 5234: Boivin-Champeaux, p.44. (Cahiers of Bray and of Gamaches).]

[Footnote 5235: Arthur Young, II. 175-178.]

[Footnote 5236: Archives nationales, G, 300; G, 319. (Registers and instructions of various local directors of the Excise to their successors).]

[Footnote 5237: Letrosne, ibid. 523.]

[Footnote 5238: Octroi: a toll or tax levied at the gates of a city on articles brought in. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5239: Archives Nationales, H, 426 (Papers of the Parliament of Brittany, February, 1783).]

[Footnote 5240: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Soissonnais" (1787), p.45.—Archives nationales, H, 1515 (Remonstrances of the Parliament of Metz, 1768). "The class of indigents form more than twelve-thirteenths of the whole number of villages of laborers and generally those of the wine-growers." Ibid. G, 319 (Tableau des directions of Chateaudon and Issoudun).]

[Footnote 5241: Albert Babeau, I. 89. p. 21.]

[Footnote 5242: "Memoires," presented to the Assembly of Notables, by M. de Calonne (1787), p.67.]

[Footnote 5243: Here we are at the root of the reason why democratically elected politicians and their administrative staffs are today taxed even though such taxation is only a paper-exercise adding costs to the cost of government administration. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5244: Gautier de Bianzat, "Doleances," 193, 225. "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Poitou" (1787), p.99.]

[Footnote 5245: Gautier de Bianzat, ibid..]

[Footnote 5246: Archives nationales, the proces-verbaux and cahiers of the States-General, V. 59. P. 6. (Letter of M. Orgeux to M. Necker), V. 27. p. 560-573. (Cahiers of the Third-Estate of Arnay-le-Duc)]

[Footnote 5247: In these figures the rise of the money standard has been kept in mind, the silver "marc," worth 59 francs in 1965, being worth 49 francs during the last half of the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 5248: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Ile-de-France," 132, 158; de l'Orleanais, 96, 387.]

[Footnote 5249: "Memoire," presented to the Assembly of Notables (1787), p. 1.—See note 2 at the end of the volume, on the estate of Blet.]

[Footnote 5250: "Proces-verbeaux de l'ass. prov. d'Alsace" (1787), p. 116;"—of Champagne," 192. (According to a declaration of June 2, 1787, the tax substituted for the corvee may be extended to one-sixth of the taille, with accessory taxes and the poll-tax combined). "De la generalite d'Alenccon," 179; "—du Berry," I. 218.]

[Footnote 5251: Archives nationales, G, 322 (Memorandum on the excise dues of Compiegne and its neighborhood, 1786)]

[Footnote 5252: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de l'Ile-de-France," p. 104.]

[Footnote 5253: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Berry, I. 85, II. 91. —de l'Orleanais, p. 225." "Arbitrariness, injustice, inequality, are inseparable from the taille when any change of collector takes place."]

[Footnote 5254: "Archives Nationales," H. 615. Letter of M. de Lagourda, a noble from Bretagne, to M. Necker, dated December 4, 1780: "You are always taxing the useful and necessary people who decrease in numbers all the time: these are the workers of the land. The countryside has become deserted and no one will any longer plow the land. I testify to God and to you, Sir, that we have lost more than a third of our budding wheat of the last harvest because we did not have the necessary man-power do to the work."]

[Footnote 5255: Ibid. 1149. (letter of M. de Reverseau, March 16, 1781); H, 200 (letter of M. Amelot, Nov. 2, 1784).]

[Footnote 5256: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de la generalite de Rouen," p.91.]

[Footnote 5257: Hippeau, VI. 22 (1788).]

[Footnote 5258: D'Argenson. VI. 37.]

[Footnote 5259: Archives nationales, H. 200 (Memoir of M. Amelot, 1785).]

[Footnote 5260: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. d'Auvergne," 253.]

[Footnote 5261: Boivin-Champeaux, "Doleances de la parvisse de Tilleul-Lambert" (Eure). "Numbers of privileged characters, Messieurs of the elections, Messieurs the post-masters, Messieurs the presidents and other attaches of the salt-warehouse, every individual possessing extensive property pays but a third or a half of the taxes they ought to pay."]

[Footnote 5262: De Tocqueville, 385.—"Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Lyonnais," p. 56]

[Footnote 5263: Archives nationales, H, 1422. (Letters of M. d'Aine, intendant, also of the receiver for the election of Tulle, February 23, 1783).]

[Footnote 5264: De Tocqueville, 64, 363.]

[Footnote 5265: Archives nationales, H, 612, 614. (Letters of M. de la Bove, September 11, and Dec. 2, 1774; June 28, 1777).]

[Footnote 5266: Mercier, II. 62.]

[Footnote 5267: "Grievances" of the parish of Aubervilliers.]

[Footnote 5268: Archives nationales, G, 300; G, 322 ("Memoires" on the excise duties).]

[Footnote 5269: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. prov. des Trois-Eveches p. 442.]

[Footnote 5270: Archives nationales, H, 1422 (Letter of the intendant of Moulins, April 1779).]

[Footnote 5271: Archives nationales, H. 1312 (Letters of M. D'Antheman procureur-general of the excise court (May 19, 1783), and of the Archbishop of Aix (June 15, 1783).)—Provence produced wheat only sufficient for seven and a half months' consumption.]

[Footnote 5272: Abbreviation for the "cahier des doleances", in English 'register of grieviances', brought with them by the representatives of the people to the great gathering in Paris of the "States-Generaux" in 1789. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5273: The feudal dues may be estimated at a seventh of the net income and the dime also at a seventh. These are the figures given by the ass. prov. of Haute-Guyenne (Proces-verbaux, p. 47).—Isolated instances, in other provinces, indicate similar results. The dime ranges from a tenth to the thirteenth of the gross product, and commonly the tenth. I regard the average as about the fourteenth, and as one-half of the gross product must be deducted for expenses of cultivation, it amounts to one-seventh. Letrosne says a fifth and even a quarter.]

[Footnote 5274: Boivin-Champeaux, 72.]

[Footnote 5275: Grievances of the community of Culmon (Election de Langres.)]

[Footnote 5276: Boivin-Champeaux, 34, 36, 41, 48.—Perin ("Doleances des paroisses rurales de l'Artuis," 301, 308).—Archives nationales, proces-verbaux and cahiers of the States-Generaux, vol. XVII. P. 12 (Letter of the inhabitants of Dracy-le Viteux).]

[Footnote 5277: Motte: a mound indicative of Seigniorial dominion; quevaise; the right of forcing a resident to remain on his property under penalty of forfeiture; domaine congeable; property held subject to capricious ejection. (TR)]

[Footnote 5278: Prud'homme, "Resume des cahiers," III. passim, and especially from 317 to 340.]



CHAPTER III. INTELLECTUAL STATE OF THE PEOPLE.



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 Retit 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 Vigee-Lebrun,[5319] on going to Romainville to visit Marshal de Segur, 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-Comte, 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 regime 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 Besancon, 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 Argentre,[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 Bagueres 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-a-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: Theron de Montauge, 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 Theron de Montauge, "one may be said to live in solitude and exile." In 1789 the Paris post reaches Besancon 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: Theron de Montauge, 102.]

[Footnote 5307: Monsieur Nicolas, I. 448.]

[Footnote 5308: "Tableaux de la Revolution," 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 Etienne-de—Saint-Geoirs, Isere, 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: "Proces-verbaux de l'ass. Prov. D'Orleanais," 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. Vigee-Lebrun, I. 158, (1788); I. 183 (1789).]

[Footnote 5320: Archives nationals, H. 723. (Letter of M. de Caumartin, intendant at Besancon, Dec. 5, 1788).]

[Footnote 5321: D'Argenson, March 13, 1752.]

[Footnote 5322: "Corresp.," of Metra, 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, "Memoires presentes a 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. (Memoires 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 Beziers (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 (Memoire by Rene 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: Perin, "La Jeunesse de Robespierre," 301. (Doleances des parroisses rurales en 1789).]

[Footnote 5340: Hippeau, "Le Gouvern. de Normandie," VII. 147-177 (1789).—Boivin-Champeaux, "Notice hist. sur la Revolution dans le departement de l'Eure," p. 83 (1789).]

[Footnote 5341: Theron de Montauge, p. 87. (Letter of the prior of the convent, March, 1789).]

[Footnote 5342: "Proces-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. secret inedite," 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. Vigee-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 bles," 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."]



CHAPTER IV. THE ARMED FORCES.



I.

Military force declines.—How the army is recruited.—How the soldier is treated.

Against universal sedition where is force?—The measures and dispositions which govern the 150,000 men who maintain order are the same as those ruling the 26 millions people subject to it. We find here the same abuses, disaffection, and other causes for the dissolution of the nation which, in their turn, will dissolve the army.

Of the 90 millions of pay[5401] which the army annually costs the treasury, 46 millions are for officers and only 44 millions for soldiers, and we are already aware that a new ordinance reserves ranks of all kinds for verified nobles. In no direction is this inequality, against which public opinion rebels so vigorously, more apparent. On the one hand, authority, honors, money, leisure, good-living, social enjoyments, and plays in private, for the minority. On the other hand, for the majority, subjection, dejection, fatigue, a forced or betrayed enlistment, no hope of promotion, pay at six sous a day,[5402] a narrow cot for two, bread fit for dogs, and, for several years, kicks like those bestowed on a dog.[5403] On the one hand, a nobility of high estate, and, on the other, the lowest of the populace. One might say that this was specially designed for contrast and to intensify irritation. "The insignificant pay of the soldier," says an economist, "the way in which he is dressed, lodged and fed, his utter dependence, would render it cruelty to take any other than a man of the lower class."[5404] Indeed, he is sought for only in the lowest layers of society. Not only are nobles and the bourgeoisie exempt from conscription, but again the employees of the administration, of the fermes and of public works, "all gamekeepers and forest-rangers, the hired domestics and valets of ecclesiastics, of communities, of religious establishments, of the gentry and of nobles,"[5405] and even of the bourgeoisie living in grand style, and still better, the sons of cultivators in easy circumstances, and, in general, all possessing influence or any species of protector. There remains, accordingly, for the militia none but the poorest class, and they do not willingly enter it. On the contrary, the service is hateful to them; they conceal themselves in the forests where they have to be pursued by armed men: in a certain canton which, three years later, furnishes in one day from fifty to one hundred volunteers, the young men cut off their thumbs to escape the draft.[5406] To this scum of society is added the sweepings of the depots and of the jails. Among the vagabonds that fill these, after winnowing out those able to make their families known or to obtain sponsors, "there are none left," says an intendant, "but those who are entirely unknown or dangerous, out of which those regarded as the least vicious are selected and efforts are made to place these in the army."[5407]—The last of its affluents is the half-forced, half-voluntary enlistment by which the ranks are for the most part filled, the human waste of large towns, like adventurers, discharged apprentices, young reprobates turned out of doors, and people without homes or steady occupation. The recruiting agent who is paid so much a head for his recruits and so much an inch on their stature above five feet, "holds his court in a tavern, treating everyone" promoting his merchandise:

"Come, boys, soup, fish, meat and salad is what you get to eat in the regiment;" nothing else, "I don't deceive you—pie and Arbois wine are the extras."[5408]

He pours the wine, pays the bill and, if need be, yields his mistress. "After a few days debauchery, the young libertine, with no money to pay his debts, is obliged to sell himself, while the laborer, transformed into soldier, begins to drill under the lash."—Strange recruits these, for the protection of society, all selected from the class which will attack it, down-trodden peasants, imprisoned vagabonds, social outcasts, poor fellows in debt, disheartened, excited and easily tempted, who, according to circumstances, become at one time rioters, and at another soldiers.—Which lot is preferable? The bread the soldier eats is not more abundant than that of the prisoner, while poorer in quality; for the bran is taken out of the bread which the locked-up vagabond eats, and left in the bread which is eaten by the soldier who locks him up[5409]. In this state of things the soldier ought not to mediate on his lot, and yet this is just what his officers incite him to do. They also have become politicians and fault-finders. Some years before the Revolution[5410] "disputes occurred" in the army, "discussions and complaints, and, the new ideas fermenting in their heads, a correspondence was established between two regiments. Written information was obtained from Paris, authorized by the Minister of War, which cost, I believe, twelve louis per annum. It soon took a philosophic turn, embracing dissertations, criticisms of the ministry, and of the government, desirable changes and, therefore, the more diffused." Sergeants like Hoche, and fencing-masters like Augereau, certainly often read this news, carelessly left lying on the tables, and commented on it during the evening in their soldier quarters. Discontent is of ancient date, and already, at the end of the late reign, grievous words are heard. At a banquet given by a prince of the blood,[5411] with a table set for a hundred guests under an immense tent and served by grenadiers, the odor these diffused upset the prince's delicate nose. "These worthy fellows," said he, a little too loud, "smell strong of the stocking." One of the grenadiers bluntly responded, "Because we haven't got any," which "was followed by profound silence." During the ensuring years irritation smolders and augments; the soldiers of Rochambeau have fought side by side with the free militia of America, and they keep this in mind. In 1788,[5412] Marshal de Vaux, previous to the insurrection in Dauphiny, writes to minister that "it is impossible to rely on the troops," while four months after the opening of the States-General 16,000 deserters roaming around Paris leads the revolts instead of suppressing them.[5413]



II.

The social organization is dissolved.—No central rallying point.—Inertia of the provinces.—Ascendancy of Paris.

Once this barrier has disappeared, no other embankment remains and the inundation spreads all over France like over an immense plain. With other nations in like circumstances, some obstacles have been encountered; elevations have existed, centers of refuge, old constructions in which, in the universal fright, a portion of the population could find shelter. Here, the first crisis sweeps away all that remains, each individual of the twenty-six scattered millions standing alone by himself. The administrations of Richelieu and Louis XIV. had been a long time at work insensibly destroying the natural groupings which, when suddenly dissolved, unite and form over again of their own accord. Except in Vendee, I find no place, nor any class, in which a good many men, having confidence in a few men, are able, in the hour of danger, to rally around these and form a compact body. Neither provincial nor municipal patriotism any longer exists. The inferior clergy are hostile to the prelates, the gentry of the province to the nobility of the court, the vassal to the seignior, the peasant to the townsman, the urban population to the municipal oligarchy, corporation to corporation, parish to parish, neighbor to neighbor. All are separated by their privileges and their jealousies, by the consciousness of having been imposed on, or frustrated, for the advantage of another. The journeyman tailor is embittered against his foreman for preventing him from doing a day's work in private houses, hairdressers against their employers for the like reason, the pastry-cook against the baker who prevents him from baking the pies of housekeepers, the village spinner against the town spinners who wish to break him up, the rural wine-growers against the bourgeois who, in the circle of seven leagues, strives to have their vines pulled up,[5414] the village against the neighboring village whose reduction of taxation has ruined it, the overtaxed peasant against the under taxed peasant, one-half of a parish against its collectors, who, to its detriment, have favored the other half.

"The nation," says Turgot, mournfully,[5415] "is a society composed of different orders badly united and of a people whose members have few mutual liens, nobody, consequently, caring for any interest but his own. Nowhere is there any sign of an interest in common. Towns and villages maintain no more relation with each other than the districts to which they are attached; they are even unable to agree together with a view to carry out public improvements of great importance to them."

The central power for a hundred and fifty years rules through its division of power. Men have been kept separate, prevented from acting in concert, the work being so successful that they no longer understand each other, each class ignoring the other class, each forming of the other a chimerical picture, each bestowing on the other the hues of its own imagination, one composing an idyll, the other framing a melodrama, one imagining peasants as sentimental swains, the other convinced that the nobles are horrible tyrants.—Through this mutual misconception and this secular isolation, the French lose the habit, the art and the faculty for acting in an entire body. They are no longer capable of spontaneous agreement and collective action. No one, in the moment of danger, dares rely on his neighbors or on his equals. No one knows where to turn to obtain a guide. "A man willing to be responsible for the smallest district cannot be found; and, more than this, one man able to answer for another man[5416]." Utter and irremediable disorder is at hand. The Utopia of the theorists has been accomplished, the savage condition has recommenced. Individuals now stand in by themselves; everyone reverting back to his original feebleness, while his possessions and his life are at the mercy of the first band that comes along. He has nothing within him to control him but the sheep-like habit of being led, of awaiting an impulsion, of turning towards the accustomed center, towards Paris, from which his orders have always arrived. Arthur Young[5417] is struck with this mechanical movement. Political ignorance and docility are everywhere complete. He, a foreigner, conveys the news of Alsace into Burgundy: the insurrection there had been terrible, the populace having sacked the city-hall at Strasbourg, of which not a word was known at Dijon; "yet it is nine days since it happened; had it been nineteen I question if they would more than have received the intelligence." There are no newspapers in the cafes; no local centers of information, of resolution, of action. The province submits to events at the capital; "people dare not move; they dare not even form an opinion before Paris speaks."—This is what Monarchical centralization leads to. It has deprived the groups of their cohesion and the individual of his motivational drive. Only human dust remains, and this, whirling about and gathered together in massive force, is blindly driven along by the wind.[5418]



III.

Direction of the current.—The people led by lawyers.— Theories and piques the sole surviving forces.—Suicide of the Ancient regime.

We are all well aware from which side the gale comes, and, to assure ourselves, we have merely to see how the reports of the Third-Estate are made up. The peasant is led by the man of the law, the petty attorney of the rural districts, the envious advocate and theorist. This one insists, in the report, on a statement being made in writing and at length of his local and personal grievances, his protest against taxes and deductions, his request to have his dog free of the clog, and his desire to own a gun to use against the wolves[5419]. Another one, who suggests and directs, envelopes all this in the language of the Rights of Man and that of the circular of Sieyes.

"For two months," writes a commandant in the South,[5420] "inferior judges and lawyers, with which both town and country swarm, with a view to their election to the States-General, have been racing after the members of the Third-Estate, under the pretext of standing by them and of giving them information. . . They have striven to make them believe that, in the States-General, they alone would be masters and regulate all the affairs of the kingdom; that the Third-Estate, in selecting its deputies among men of the robe, would secure the might and the right to take the lead, to abolish nobility and to cancel all its rights and privileges; that nobility would no longer be hereditary; that all citizens, in deserving it, would be entitled to claim it; that, if the people elected them, they would have accorded to the Third-Estate whatever it desired, because the curates, belonging to the Third-Estate, having agreed to separate from the higher clergy and unite with them, the nobles and the clergy, united together, would have but one vote against two of the Third-Estate. . . . If the third—Estate had chosen sensible townspeople or merchants they would have combined without difficulty with the other two orders. But the assemblies of the bailiwicks and other districts were stuffed with men of the robe who had absorbed all opinions and striven to take precedence of the others, each, in his own behalf, intriguing and conspiring to be appointed a deputy."

"In Touraine," writes the intendant,[5421] "most of the votes have been bespoken or begged for. Trusty agents, at the moment of voting, placed filled-in ballots in the hands of the voters, and put in their way, on reaching the taverns, every document and suggestion calculated to excite their imaginations and determine their choice for the gentry of the bar."