These explosions are isolated in the western, central and southern provinces; the conflagration, however, is universal in the east. On a strip of ground from thirty to fifty leagues broad, extending from the extreme north down to Provence. Alsace, Franche-Comte, Burgundy, Maconnais, Beaujolais, Auvergne, Viennois, Dauphiny, the whole of this territory resembles a continuous mine which explodes at the same time. The first column of flame which shoots up is on the frontiers of Alsace and Franche-Comte, in the vicinity of Belfort and Vesoul, a feudal district, in which the peasant, over-burdened with taxes, bears the heavier yoke with greater impatience. An instinctive argument is going on in his mind without his knowing it. "The good Assembly and the good King want us to be happy, suppose we help them! They say that the King has already relieved us of the taxes, suppose we relieve ourselves of paying rents! Down with the nobles! They are no better than the tax-collectors!"—On the 16th of July, the chateau of Sancy, belonging to the Princesses de Beaufremont, is sacked, and on the 18th those of Lure, Bithaine, and Molans.[1335] On the 29th, an accident which occurs with some fire-works at a popular festival at the house of M. de Mesmay, leads the lower class to believe that the invitation extended to them was a trap, and that there was a desire to get rid of them by treachery.[1336] Seized with rage they set fire to the chateau, and during the following week[1337] destroy three abbeys, ruin eleven chateaux and pillage others. "All records are destroyed, the registers and court-rolls are carried off; and the deposits violated."—Starting from this spot, "the hurricane of insurrection" stretches over the whole of Alsace from Huningue to Landau.[1338] The insurgents display placards, signed Louis, stating that for a certain lapse of time they shall be permitted to exercise justice themselves, and, in Sundgau, a well-dressed weaver, decorated with a blue belt, passes for a prince, the King's second son. They begin by falling on the Jews, their hereditary leeches; they sack their dwellings, divide their money among themselves, and hunt them down like so many fallow-deer. At Bale alone, it is said that twelve hundred of these unfortunate fugitives arrived with their families.—The distance between the Jew creditor and the Christian proprietor is not great, and this is soon cleared. Remiremont is only saved by a detachment of dragoons. Eight hundred men attack the chateau of Uberbruenn. The abbey of Neubourg is taken by storm. At Guebwiller, on the 31st of July, five hundred peasants, subjects of the abbey of Murbach, make a descent on the abbot's palace and on the house of the canons. Cupboards, chests, beds, windows, mirrors, frames, even the tiles of the roof and the hinges of the casements are hacked to pieces: "They kindle fires on the beautiful inlaid floors of the apartments, and there burn up the library and the title-deeds." The abbot's superb carriage is so broken up that not a wheel remains entire. "Wine streams through the cellars. One cask of sixteen hundred measures is half lost; the plate and the linen are carried off."—Society is evidently being overthrown, while with the power, property is changing hands.

These are their very words. In Franche-Comte[1339] the inhabitants of eight communes come and declare to the Bernardins of Grace-Dieu and of Lieu-Croissant "that, being of the Third-Estate, it is time now for the people to rule over abbots and monks, considering that the domination of the latter has lasted too long," and thereupon they carry off all the titles to property and to rentals belonging to the abbey in their commune. In Upper Dauphiny, during the destruction of M. de Murat's chateau, a man named Ferreol struck the furniture with a big stick, exclaiming, "Hey, so much for you, Murat; you have been master a good while, now it's our turn!"[1340] Those who rifle houses, and steal like highway robbers, think that they are defending a cause, and reply to the challenge, "Who goes there?" "We are for the brigand Third-Estate!"—Everywhere the belief prevails that they are clothed with authority, and they conduct themselves like a conquering horde under the orders of an absent general. At Remiremont and at Luxeuil they produce an edict, stating that "all this brigandage, pillage, and destruction" is permitted. In Dauphiny, the leaders of the bands say that they possess the King's orders. In Auvergne, "they follow imperative orders, being advised that such is his Majesty's will." Nowhere do we see that an insurgent village exercises personal vengeance against its lord. If the people fire on the nobles they encounter, it is not through personal hatred. They are destroying the class, and do not pursue individuals. They detest feudal privileges, holders of charters, the cursed parchments by virtue of which they are made to pay, but not the nobleman who, when he resides at home, is of humane intentions, compassionate, and even often beneficent. At Luxeuil, the abbot, who is forced with uplifted ax to sign a relinquishment of his seignorial rights over twenty-three estates, has dwelt among them for forty-six years, and has been wholly devoted to them.[1341] In the canton of Cremieu, "where the havoc is immense," all the nobles, write the municipal officers, are "patriots and benevolent." In Dauphiny, the engineers, magistrates, and prelates, whose chateaux are sacked, were the first to espouse the cause of the people and of public liberties against the ministers. In Auvergne, the peasants themselves "manifest a good deal of repugnance to act in this way against such kind masters." But it must be done; the only concession which can be made in consideration of the kindness which had been extended to them is, not to burn the chateau of the ladies of Vanes, who had been so charitable; but they burn all their title-deeds, and torture the business agent at three different times by fire, to force him to deliver a document which he does not possess; they then only withdraw him from the fire half-broiled, because the ladies, on their knees, implore mercy for him. They are like the soldiers on a campaign who execute orders with docility, for which necessity is the only plea, and who, without regarding themselves as brigands, commit acts of brigandage.

But here the situation is more tragic, for it is war in the midst of peace, a war of the brutal and barbaric multitude against the highly cultivated, well-disposed and confiding, who had not anticipated anything of the kind, who had not even dreamt of defending themselves, and who had no protection. The Comte de Courtivron, with his family, was staying at the watering-place of Luxeuil with his uncle, the Abbe of Clermont-Tonnerre, an old man of seventy years. On the 19th of July, fifty peasants from Fougerolle break into and demolish everything in the houses of an usher and a collector of the excise. Thereupon the mayor of the place intimates to the nobles and magistrates who are taking the waters, that they had better leave the house in twenty-four hours, as "he had been advised of an intention to burn the houses in which they were staying," and he did not wish to have Luxeuil exposed to this danger on account of their presence there. The following day, the guard, as obliging as the mayor, allows the band to enter the town and to force the abbey: the usual events follow, renunciations are extorted, records and cellars are ransacked, plate and other effects are stolen. M. de Courtivron escaping with his uncle during the night, the alarm bell is sounded and they are pursued, and with difficulty obtain refuge in Plombieres. The bourgeoisie of Plombieres, however, for fear of compromising themselves, oblige them to depart. On the road two hundred insurgents threaten to kill their horses and to smash their carriage, and they only find safety at last at Porentruy, outside of France. On his return, M. de Courtivron is shot at by the band which has just pillaged the abbey of Lure, and they shout out at him as he passes, "Let's massacre the nobles!" Meanwhile, the chateau of Vauvilliers, to which his sick wife had been carried, is devastated from top to bottom; the mob search for her everywhere, and she only escapes by hiding herself in a hay-loft. Both are anxious to fly into Burgundy, but word is sent them that at Dijon "the nobles are blockaded by the people," and that, in the country, they threaten to set their houses on fire.—There is no asylum to be had, either in their own homes nor in the homes of others, nor in places along the roads, fugitives being stopped in all the small villages and market-towns. In Dauphiny[1342] "the Abbess of St. Pierre de Lyon, one of the nuns, M. de Perrotin, M. de Bellegarde, the Marquis de la Tour-du-Pin, and the Chevalier de Moidieu, are arrested at Champier by the armed population, led to the Cote Saint-Andre, confined in the town-hall, whence they send to Grenoble for assistance," and, to have them released, the Grenoble Committee is obliged to send commissioners. Their only refuge is in the large cities, where some semblance of a precarious order exists, and in the ranks of the City Guards, which march from Lyons, Dijon, and Grenoble, to keep the inundation down. Throughout the country scattered chateaux are swallowed up by the popular tide, and, as the feudal rights are often in plebeian hands, it insensibly rises beyond its first overflow.—There is no limit to an insurrection against property. This one extends from abbeys and chateaux to the "houses of the bourgeoisie."[1343] The grudge at first was confined to the holders of charters; now it is extended to all who possess anything. Well-to-do farmers and priests abandon their parishes and fly to the towns. Travelers are put to ransom. Thieves, robbers, and returned convicts, at the head of armed bands, seize whatever they can lay their hands on. Cupidity becomes inflamed by such examples; on domains which are deserted and in a state of confusion, where there is nothing to indicate a master's presence, all seems to lapse to the first comer. A small farmer of the neighborhood has carried away wine and returns the following day in search of hay. All the furniture of a chateau in Dauphin is removed, even to the hinges of the doors, by a large reinforcement of carts.—" It is the war of the poor against the rich," says a deputy, "and, on the 3rd of August, the Committee on Reports declares to the National Assembly "that no kind of property has been spared." In Franche-Comte, "nearly forty chateaux and seignorial mansions have been pillaged or burnt."[1344] From Lancers to Gray about three out of five chateaux are sacked. In Dauphin twenty-seven are burned or destroyed; five in the small district of Viennese, and, besides these, all the monasteries—nine at least in Auvergne, seventy-two, it is said, in Maconnais and Beaujolais, without counting those of Alsace. On the 31st of July, Lally-Tollendal, on entering the tribune, has his hands full of letters of distress, with a list of thirty-six chateaux burnt, demolished, or pillaged, in one province, and the details of still worse violence against persons:[1345]

"in Languedoc, M. de Barras, cut to pieces in the presence of his wife who is about to be confined, and who is dead in consequence; in Normandy, a paralytic gentleman left on a burning pile and taken off from it with his hands burnt; in Franche-Comte, Madame de Bathilly compelled, with an ax over her head, to give up her title-deeds and even her estate; Madame de Listenay forced to do the same, with a pitchfork at her neck and her two daughters in a swoon at her feet; Comte de Montjustin, with his wife, having a pistol at his throat for three hours; and both dragged from their carriage to be thrown into a pond, where they are saved by a passing regiment of soldiers; Baron de Montjustin, one of the twenty-two popular noblemen, suspended for an hour in a well, listening to a discussion whether he shall be dropped down or whether he should die in some other way; the Chevalier d'Ambly, torn from his chateau and dragged naked into the village, placed on a dung-heap after having his eyebrows and all his hair pulled out, while the crowd kept on dancing around him."

In the midst of a disintegrated society, under the semblance only of a government, it is manifest that an invasion is under way, an invasion of barbarians which will complete by terror that which it has begun by violence, and which, like the invasions of the Normans in the tenth and eleventh centuries, ends in the conquest and dispossession of an entire class. In vain the National Guard and the other troops that remain loyal succeed in stemming the first torrent; in vain does the Assembly hollow out a bed for it and strive to bank it in by fixed boundaries. The decrees of the 4th of August and the regulations which follow are but so many spiders' webs stretched across a torrent. The peasants, moreover, putting their own interpretation on the decrees, convert the new laws into authority for continuing in their course or beginning over again. No more rents, however legitimate, however legal!

"Yesterday,"[1346] writes a gentleman of Auvergne, we were notified that the fruit-tithe (percieres) would no longer be paid, and that the example of other provinces was only being followed which no longer, even by royal order, pay tithes." In Franche-Comte "numerous communities are satisfied that they no longer owe anything either to the King or to their lords. . . . The villages divide amongst themselves the fields and woods belonging to the nobles."—

It must be noted that charter-holding and feudal titles are still intact in three-fourths of France, that it is the interest of the peasant to ensure their disappearance, and that he is always armed. To secure a new outbreak of jacqueries, it is only necessary that central control, already thrown into disorder, should be withdrawn. This is the work of Versailles and of Paris; and there, at Paris as well as at Versailles, some, through lack of foresight and infatuation, and others, through blindness and indecision—the latter through weakness and the former through violence—all are laboring to accomplish it.

*****

[Footnote 1301: Dusaulx, 374. "I remarked that if there were a few among the people at that time who dared commit crime, there were several who wished it, and that every one endured it."—" Archives Nationales," DXXIX, 3. (Letter of the municipal authorities of Cremieu, Dauphiny, November 3, 1789.) "The care taken to lead them first to the cellars and to intoxicate them, can alone give a conception of the incredible excesses of rage to which they gave themselves up in the sacking and burning of the chateaux."]

[Footnote 1302: Mercure de France, January 4, 1792. ("Revue politique de l'annee 1791," by Mallet du Pan.)]

[Footnote 1303: Albert Babeau, I. 206. (Letter of the deputy Camuzet de Belombre, August 22, 1789.) The executive power is absolutely gone to-day."—Gouverneur Morris, letter of July 31, 1789: "This country is now as near in a state of anarchy as it is possible for a community to be without breaking up."]

[Footnote 1304: "Archives Nationales," H. 1453. Letter of M. Amelot, July 24th; H. 784, of M. de Langeron, October 16th and 18th.—KK. 1105. correspondence of M. de Thiard, October 7th and 30th, September 4th.—Floquet, VII. 527, 555.—Guadet, "Histoire des Girondins" (July 29, 1789).]

[Footnote 1305: M. de Rochambeau, "Memoires," I. 353 (July 18th).—Sauzay, "Histoire de la Persecution Revolutionnaire dans le Departement de Doubs," I. 128 (July 19th.)—"Archives Nationales," F7, 3253. (Letter of the deputies of the provincial commission of Alsace, September 8th.) D. XXIX. I. note of M. de Latour-du-Pin, October 28, 1789.—Letter of M. de Langeron, September 3rd; of Breitman, garde-marteau, Val Saint-Amarin (Upper Alsace), July 26th.]

[Footnote 1306: Leonce de Lavergne, 197. (Letter of the intermediate commission of Poitou, the last month in 1789.)—Cf. Brissot (Le patriote francais, August, 1789). "General insubordination prevails in the provinces because the restraints of executive power are no longer felt. What were but lately the guarantees of that power? The intendants, tribunals, and the army. The intendants are gone, the tribunals are silent, and the army is against the executive power and on the side of the people. Liberty is not a nourishment for unprepared stomachs."]

[Footnote 1307: "Archives Nationales," D. XXIX. I. (Letter of the clergy, consuls, presidial-councillors and principal merchants of Puy-en-Velay, September 16, 1789.)—H. 1453. (letter of the Intendant or Alencon, July 18th). "I must not leave you in ignorance of the multiplied outbreaks we have in all parts of my jurisdiction. The impunity with which they flatter themselves, because the judges are afraid of irritating the people by examples of severity, only emboldens them. Mischief-makers, confounded with honest folks, spread false reports about particular persons whom they accuse of concealing grain, or of not belonging to the Third-Estate, and, under this pretext, they pillage their houses, taking whatever they can find, the owners only avoiding death by flight."]

[Footnote 1308: A body of magistrates forming one of the lower tribunals.]

[Footnote 1309: "Archives Nationales," H. 942. (Observations of M. de Ballainvilliers, October 30, 1789.)]

[Footnote 1310: "Archives Nationales," D, XXIX. 1. Letter of the municipal assembly of Louviers, the end of August, 1789.—Letter of the communal assembly of Saint-Bris (bailiwick of Auxerre), September 25th.—Letter of the municipal officers of Ricey-Haut, near Bar-sur-Seine, August 25th; of the Chevalier d'Allouville, September 8th.]

[Footnote 1311: "Archives Nationales," D, XXIX. I. Letter of M. Briand-Delessart (Angouleme, August 1st).—Of M. Bret, Lieutenant-General of the provostship of Mardogne, September 5th.—Of the Chevalier de Castellas (Auvergue), September 15th (relating to the night between the 2nd and 3rd of August).—Madame Campan, II. 65.]

[Footnote 1312: Arthur Young, "Voyages in France," July 24th and 31st, August 13th and 19th.]

[Footnote 1313: De Bouille, 108.—"Archives Nationales," KK. 1105. Correspondence of M. deThiard, September 20, 1789 (apropos of one hundred guns given to the town of Saint-Brieuc). "They are not of the slightest use, but this passion for arms is a temporary epidemic which must be allowed to subside of itself. People are determined to believe in brigands and in enemies, whereas neither exist."—September 25th, "Vanity alone impels them, and the pride of having cannon is their sole motive."]

[Footnote 1314: "Archives Nationales," H. 1453. Letters of M. Amelot, July 17th and 24th. "Several wealthy private persons of the town (Auxonne) have been put to ransom by this band, of which the largest portion consists of ruffians."—Letter of nine cultivators of Breteuil (Picardy) July 23rd (their granaries were pillaged up to the last grain the previous evening). "They threaten to pillage our crops and set our barns on fire as soon as they are full. M. Tassard, the notary, has been visited in his house by the populace, and his life has been threatened." Letter of Moreau, Procureur du Roi at the Senechal's Court at Bar-le-Duc, September 15, 1789, D, XXIX, 1. "On the 27th of July the people rose and most cruelly assassinated a merchant trading in wheat. On the 27th and 28th his house and that of another were sacked," etc.]

[Footnote 1315: Chronicle of Dominick Schmutz ("Revue d'Alsace," V. III. 3rd series). These are his own expressions: Gesindel, Lumpen-gesindel.—De Rochambeau, "Memoires," I. 353.—Arthur Young (an eye-witness), July 21st.—Of Dampmartin (eye-witness), I. 105. M. de Rochambeau shows the usual indecision and want of vigor: whilst the mob are pillaging houses and throwing things out of the windows, he passes in front of his regiments (8,000 men) drawn up for action, and says, "My friends, my good friends, you see what is going on. How horrible! Alas! these are your papers, your titles and those of your parents." The soldiers smile at this sentimental prattle.]

[Footnote 1316: Dumouriez (an eye-witness), book III. ch. 3.—The trial was begun and judgment given by twelve lawyers and an assessor, whom the people, in arms, had themselves appointed.—Hippeau, IV. 382.]

[Footnote 1317: "Archives Nationales," F7 3248. (Letter of the mayor, M. Poussiaude de Thierri, September 11th.)]

[Footnote 1318: Floquet, VII. 551.]

[Footnote 1319: De Goncourt, "La Societe francaise pendant la Revolution," 37.]

[Footnote 1320: "Archives Nationales," D. XXIX. 1. Letter of the officers of the bailiwick of Dole, August 24th.—Sauzay I. 128.]

[Footnote 1321: There is a similar occurrence at Strasbourg, a few days after the sacking of the town-hall. The municipality having given each man of the garrison twenty sous, the soldiers abandon their post, set the prisoners free at the Pont-Couvert, feast publicly in the streets with the women taken out of the penitentiary, and force innkeepers and the keepers of drinking-places to give up their provisions. The shops are all closed, and, for twenty-four hours, the officers are not obeyed. (De Dampmartin, I. 105.)]

[Footnote 1322: Albert Babeau, I. 187-273.—Moniteur, II. 379. (Extract from the provost's verdict of November 27, 1789.)]

[Footnote 1323: Moniteur, ibid. Picard, the principal murderer, confessed "that he had made him suffer a great deal; that the said sieur Huez did not die until they came near the Chaudron Inn; that he nevertheless intended to make him suffer more by stabbing him in the neck at the corner of each street, (and) by contriving it so that he might do it often, as long as there was life in him; that the day on which M. Huez died yielded him ten francs, together with the neck-buckle of M. Hues, found on him when he was arrested in his flight."]

[Footnote 1324: Mercure de France,, September 26, 1789. Letters of the officers of the Bourbon regiment and of members of the general committee of Caen.—Floquet, VII. 545.]

[Footnote 1325: "Archives Nationales," H. 1453.—Ibid. D. XXIX. I. Note of M. de la Tour-du-Pin, October 28th.]

[Footnote 1326: Decree, February 5, 1789, enforced May 1st following.]

[Footnote 1327: "Archives Nationales," D. XXIX. I. Letter of the count de Montausier, August 8th, with notes by M. Paulian, director of the excise (an admirable letter, modest and liberal, and ending by demanding a pardon for people led astray).—H. 1453. Letter of the attorney of the election district of Falaise, July 17th, etc.—Moniteur, I. 303, 387, 505 (sessions of August 7th and 27th and of September 23rd). "The royal revenues are diminishing steadily."—Buchez and Roux, III. 219 (session of October 24, 1789). Discourse of a deputation from Anjou: "Sixty thousand men are armed; the barriers have been destroyed, the clerks' horses have been sold by auction; the employees have been told to withdraw from the province within eight days. The inhabitants have declared that they will not pay taxes so long as the salt-tax exists.]

[Footnote 1328: "Archives Nationales," F7 3253 (Letter of September 8, 1789).]

[Footnote 1329: Arthur Young, September 30th. "It is being said that every rusty gun in Provence is at work, killing all sorts of birds; the shot has fallen five or six times in my chaise and about my ears."—Beugnot, I.142.—"Archives Nationales," D. XXIX. I. Letter of the Chevalier d'Allonville, September 8, 1789 (Near Bar-sur-Aube). "The peasants go in armed bands into the woods belonging to the Abbey of Trois-Fontaines, which they cut down. They saw up the oaks and transport them on wagons to Pont-Saint-Dizier, where they sell them. In other places they fish in the ponds and break the embankments."]

[Footnote 1330: "Archives Nationales," D. XXIX. 1. Letter of the assessor of the police of Saint-Flour, October 3, 1789. On the 31st of July, a rumor is spread that the brigands are coming. On the 1st of August the peasants arm themselves. "They amuse themselves by drinking, awaiting the arrival of the brigands; the excitement increases to such an extent as to make them believe that M. le Comte d'Espinchal had arrived in disguise the evening before at Massiac, that he was the author of the troubles disturbing the province at this time, and that he was concealed in his chateau." On the strength of this shots are fired into the windows, and there are searches, etc.]

[Footnote 1331: "Archives Nationales," D, XXIX, I, Letter of Etienne Fermier, Naveinne, September 18th (it is possible that the author, for the sake of caution, took a fictitious name).—The manuscript correspondence of M. Boulle, deputy of Pontivy, to his constituents, is a type of this declamatory and incendiary writing.—Letter of the consuls, priests, and merchants of Puy-en-Velay, September 16th.—" The Ancient Regime," p. 396.]

[Footnote 1332: "Archives Nationales," D. XXIX. 1. Letter of M. Despretz-Montpezat, a former artillery officer, July 24th (with several other signatures). On the same day the alarm bell is sounded In fifty villages on the rumor spreading that 7,000 brigands, English and Breton, were invading the country.]

[Footnote 1333: "Archives Nationales," D. XXIX. I. Letter of Briand-Delessart, August 1st (domiciliary visits to the Carmelites of Angouleme where it is pretended that Mme. de Polignac has just arrived.—Beugnot, I. 140.—Arthur Young, July 20th, etc.—Buchez and Roux, IV. 166. Letter of Mamers, July 24th; of Mans, July 26th.]

[Footnote 1334: Montjoie, ch. LXXII, p. 93 (according to acts of legal procedure). There was a soldier in the band who had served under M. de Montesson and who wanted to avenge himself for the punishments he had undergone in the regiment.]

[Footnote 1335: Mercure de France, August 20th (Letter from Vesoul, August 13th).]

[Footnote 1336: M. de Memmay proved his innocence later on, and was rehabilitated by a public decision after two years' proceedings (session of June 4, 1791; Mercure of June 11th).]

[Footnote 1337: Journal des Debats et Decrets, I. 258. (Letter of the municipality of Vesoul, July 22nd.—Discourse of M. de Toulougeon, July 29th.)]

[Footnote 1338: De Rochambeau, "Memoires," I. 353.—"Archives Nationales," F7, 3253. (Letter of M. de Rochamheau, August 4th.)—Chronicle of Schmutz (ibid. ), p. 284. "Archives Nationales," D. XXIX. I. (Letter of Mme. Ferrette, of Remiremont, August 9th.)]

[Footnote 1339: Sauzay, I. 180. (Letters of monks, July 22nd and 26th.)]

[Footnote 1340: "Archives Nationales," D. XXIX. I. (Letter of M. de Bergeron, attorney to the presidial of Valence, August 28th, with the details of the verdict stated.) Official report of the militia of Lyons, sent to the president of the National Assembly, August 10th. (Expedition to Serriere, in Dauphiny, July 31st.)]

[Footnote 1341: Letter of the Count of Courtivron, deputy substitute (an eye-witness).—"Archives Nationales," D. XXIX. I. Letter of the municipal officers of Cremieu (Dauphiny), November 3rd. Letter of the Vicomte de Carbonniere (Auvergne), August 3rd.—Arthur Young, July 30th (Dijon) says, apropos of a noble family which escaped almost naked from its burning chateau, "they were esteemed by the neighbors; their virtues ought to have commanded the love of the poor, for whose resentment there was no cause."]

[Footnote 1342: "Archives Nationales," XXIX. I. (Letter of the commission of the States of Dauphiny, July 31st.)]

[Footnote 1343: "Desastres du Maconnais," by Puthod de la Maison-Rouge (August, 1789). "Ravages du Maconnais."—Arthur Young, July 27th.—Buchez and Roux, IV. 215, 214.—Mercure de France, September 12, 1789. (Letter by a volunteer of Orleans.) "On the 15th of August, eighty-eight ruffians, calling themselves reapers, present themselves at Bascon, in Beauce, and, the next day, at a chateau in the neighborhood, where they demand within an hour the head of the son of the lord of the manor, M. Tassin, who can only redeem himself by a contribution of 1,600 livres and the pillaging of his cellars.]

[Footnote 1344: Letter of the Count de Courtivron.—Arthur Young, July 31st.—Buchez and Roux, II. 243.—Mercure de France, August 15, 1789 (sitting of the 8th, discourse of a deputy from Dauphine.)—Mermet, "Histoire de la Ville de Vienne," 445—" Archives Nationales," ibid. (Letter of the commission of the States of Dauphiny, July 31st.)—"The list of burnt or devastated chateaux is immense." The committee already cites sixteen of them.—Puthod de la Maison-Rouge, ibid.: "Were all devastated places to be mentioned, it would be necessary to cite the whole province" (Letter from Macon). "They have not the less destroyed most of the chateaux and bourgeois dwellings, either burning them and or else tearing them down."]

[Footnote 1345: Lally-Tollendal, "Second Letter to my Constituents," 104.]

[Footnote 1346: Doniol, "La Revolution et la Feodalite," p.60 (a few days after the 4th of August).—"Archives Nationales," H. 784. Letters of M. de Langeron, military commander at Besancon, October 16th and 18th.—Ibid. , D. XXIX. I. Letter of the same, September 3rd.—Arthur Young (in Provence, at the house of Baron de la Tour-d'Aignes). "The baron is an enormous sufferer by the Revolution; a great extent of country which belonged in absolute right to his ancestors, has been granted for quit-rents, ceus, and other feudal payments, so that there is no comparison between the lands retained and those thus granted by his family. . . . The solid payments which the Assembly have declared to be redeemable are every hour falling to nothing, without a shadow of recompense. . . The situation of the nobility in this country is pitiable; they are under apprehensions that nothing will be left them, but simply such houses as the mob allows to stand unburned; that the small farmers will retain their farms without paying the landlord his half of the produce; and that, in case of such a refusal, there is actually neither law nor authority in the country to prevent it. This chateau, splendid even in ruins, with the fortune and lives of the owners, is at the mercy of an armed rabble."]



CHAPTER IV. PARIS.



I.—Paris.

Powerlessness and discords of the authorities.—The people, king.

The powerlessness, indeed, of the heads of the Government, and the lack of discipline among all its subordinates, are much greater in the capital than in the provinces.—Paris possesses a mayor, Bailly; but "from the first day, and in the easiest manner possible,"[1401] his municipal council, that is to say, "the assembly of the representatives of the commune, has accustomed itself to carry on the government alone, overlooking him entirely." There is a central administration, the municipal council, presided over by the mayor; but, "at this time, authority is everywhere except where the preponderating authority should be; the districts have delegated it and at the same time retained it;" each of them acts as if it were alone and supreme.—There are secondary powers, the district-committees, each with its president, its clerk, its offices, and commissioners; but the mobs of the street march on without awaiting their orders; while the people, shouting under their" windows, impose their will on them;—in short, says Bailly again, "everybody knew how to command, but nobody knew how to obey."

"Imagine," writes Loustalot[1402] himself; "a man whose feet, hands, and limbs possessed each its own intelligence and will, whose one leg would wish to walk when the other one wanted to rest, whose throat would close when the stomach demanded food, whose mouth would sing when the eyelids were weighed down with sleep; and you will have a striking picture of the condition of things in the capital"

There are "sixty Republics"[1403] in Paris; each district is an independent, isolated power, which receives no order without criticizing it, always in disagreement and often in conflict with the central authority or with the other districts. It receives denunciations, orders domiciliary visits, sends deputations to the National Assembly, passes resolutions, posts its bills, not only in its own quarter but throughout the city, and sometimes even extends its jurisdiction outside of Paris. Everything comes within its province, and particularly that which ought not to do so.—On the 18th of July, the district of Petits-Augustins[1404] "decrees in its own name the establishment of justices of the peace," under the title of tribunes, and proceeds at once to elect its own, nominating the actor Mole. On the 30th, that of the Oratoire annuls the amnesty which the representatives of the commune in the Hotel-de-Ville had granted, and orders two of its members to go to a distance of thirty leagues to arrest M. de Bezenval. On the 19th of August, that of Nazareth issues commissions to seize and bring to Paris the arms deposited in strong places. From the beginning each assembly sent to the Arsenal in its own name, and "obtained as many cartridges and as much powder as it desired." Others claim the right of keeping a watchful eye over the Hotel-de-Ville and of reprimanding the National Assembly. The Oratoire decides that the representatives of the commune shall be invited to deliberate in public. Saint-Nicholas des Champs deliberates on the veto and begs the Assembly to suspend its vote.—It is a strange spectacle, that of these various authorities each contradicting and destroying the other. To-day the Hotel-de-Ville appropriates five loads of cloth which have been dispatched by the Government, and the district of Saint-Gervais opposes the decision of the Hotel-de-Ville. To-morrow Versailles intercepts grain destined for Paris, while Paris threatens, if it is not restored, to march on Versailles. I omit the incidents that are ridiculous:[1405] anarchy in its essence is both tragic and grotesque, and, in this universal breaking up of things, the capital, like the kingdom, resembles a bear-garden when it does not resemble a Babel.

But behind all these discordant authorities the real sovereign, who is the mob, is very soon apparent.—On the 15th of July it undertakes the demolition of the Bastille of its own accord, and this popular act is sanctioned; for it is necessary that appearances should be kept up; even to give orders after the blow is dealt, and to follow when it is impossible to lead.[1406] A short time after this the collection of the octroi at the barriers is ordered to be resumed; forty armed individuals, however, present themselves in their district and say, that if guards are placed at the octroi stations, "they will resist force with force, and even make use of their cannon."—On the false rumor that arms are concealed in the Abbey of Montmartre, the abbess, Madame de Montmorency, is accused of treachery, and twenty thousand persons invade the monastery.—The commander of the National Guard and the mayor are constantly expecting a riot; they hardly dare absent themselves a day to attend the King fete at Versailles. As soon as the multitude can assemble in the streets, an explosion is imminent. "On rainy days," says Bailly, "I was quite at my ease."—It is under this constant pressure that the Government is carried on; and the elect of the people, the most esteemed magistrates, those who are in best repute, are at the mercy of the throng who clamor at their doors. In the district of St. Roch,[1407] after many useless refusals, the General Assembly, notwithstanding all the reproaches of its conscience and the resistance of its reason, is obliged to open letters addressed to Monsieur, to the Duke of Orleans, and to the Ministers of War, of Foreign Affairs, and of the Marine. In the committee on subsistence, M. Serreau, who is indispensable and who is confirmed by a public proclamation, is denounced, threatened, and constrained to leave Paris. M. de la Salle, one of the strongest patriots among the nobles, is on the point of being murdered for having signed an order for the transport of gunpowder;[1408] the multitude, in pursuit of him, attach a rope to the nearest street-lamp, ransack the Hotel-de-Ville, force every door, mount into the belfry, and seek for the traitor even under the carpet of the bureau and between the legs of the electors, and are only stayed in their course by the arrival of the National Guard.

The people not only sentence but they execute, and, as is always the case, blindly. At Saint-Denis, Chatel, the mayor's lieutenant, whose duty it is to distribute flour, had reduced the price of bread at his own expense: on the 3rd of August his house is forced open at two o'clock in the morning, and he takes refuge in a steeple; the mob follow him, cut his throat and drag his head along the streets.—Not only do the people execute, but they pardon—and with equal discernment. On the 11th of August, at Versailles, as a parricide is about to be broken on the wheel, the crowd demand his release, fly at the executioner, and set the man free.[1409] Veritably this is sovereign power like that of the oriental sovereign who arbitrarily awards life or death! A woman who protests against this scandalous pardon is seized and comes near being hung; for the new monarch considers as a crime whatever is offensive to his new majesty. Again, he receives public and humble homage. The Prime Minister, on imploring the pardon of M. de Bezenval at the Hotel-de-Ville, in the presence of the electors and of the public, has put it in appropriate words:

"It is before the most unknown, the obscurest citizen of Paris that I prostrate myself; at whose feet I kneel."

A few days before this, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and at Poissy, the deputies of the National Assembly not only kneel down in words, but actually, and for a long time, on the pavement in the street, and stretch forth their hands, weeping, to save two lives of which only one is granted to them.—Behold the monarch by these brilliant signs! Already do the young, who are eager imitators of all actions that are in fashion, ape them in miniature; during the month which follows the murder of Berthier and Foulon, Bailly is informed that the gamins in the streets are parading about with the heads of two cats stuck on the ends of two poles.[1410]



II.—The distress of the people.

The dearth and the lack of work.—How men of executive ability are recruited.

A pitiable monarch, whose recognized sovereignty leaves him more miserable than he was before! Bread is always scarce, and before the baker's doors the row of waiting people does not diminish. In vain Bailly passes his nights with the committee on supplies; they are always in a state of terrible anxiety. Every morning for two months there is only one or two days' supply of flour, and often, in the evening, there is not enough for the following morning.[1411] The life of the capital depends on a convoy which is ten, fifteen, twenty leagues off; and which may never arrive: one convoy of twenty carts is pillaged on the 18th of July, on the Rouen road; another, on the 4th of August, in the vicinity of Louviers. Were it not for Salis' Swiss regiment, which, from the 14th of July to the end of September, marches day and night as an escort, not a boat-load of grain would reach Paris from Rouen.[1412]—The commissaries charged with making purchases or with supervising the expeditions are in danger of their lives. Those who are sent to provinces are seized, and a column of four hundred men with cannon has to be dispatched to deliver them. The one who is sent to Rouen learns that he will be hung if he dares to enter the place. At Mantes a mob surrounds his cabriolet, the people regarding whoever comes there for the purpose of carrying away grain as a public pest; he escapes with difficulty out of a back door and returns on foot to Paris.—From the very beginning, according to a universal rule, the fear of a short supply helps to augment the famine. Every one lays in a stock for several days; on one occasion sixteen loaves of four pounds each are found in an old woman's garret. The bakings, consequently, which are estimated according to the quantity needed for a single day, become inadequate, and the last of those who wait at the bakers' shops for bread return home empty-handed.—On the other hand the appropriations made by the city and the State to diminish the price of bread simply serve to lengthen the rows of those who wait for it; the countrymen flock in thither, and return home loaded to their villages. At Saint-Denis, bread having been reduced to two sous the pound, none is left for the inhabitants. To this constant anxiety add that of unemployment. Not only is there no certainty of there being bread at the bakers' during the coming week, but many know that they will not have money in the coming week with which to buy bread. Now that security has disappeared and the rights of property are shaken, work is wanting. The rich, deprived of their feudal dues, and, in addition thereto of their rents, have reduced their expenditure; many of them, threatened by the committee of investigation, exposed to domiciliary visits, and liable to be informed against by their servants, have emigrated. In the month of September M. Necker laments the delivery of six thousand passports in fifteen days to the wealthiest inhabitants. In the month of October ladies of high rank, refugees in Rome, send word that their domestics should be discharged and their daughters placed in convents. Before the end of 1789 there are so many fugitives in Switzerland that a house, it is said, brings in more rent than it is worth as capital. With this first emigration, which is that of the chief spendthrifts, the Count d'Artois, Prince de Conti, Duc de Bourbon, and so many others, the opulent foreigners have left, and, at the head of them, the Duchesse de l'Infantado, who spent 800,000 livres a year. There are only three Englishmen in Paris.

It used to be a city of luxury, it was the European hot-house of costly and refined pleasures, but once the glass was broken then the delicate plants perish, their lovers leave, and there is no employment now for the innumerable hands which cultivated them. Fortunate are they who at the relief works obtain a miserable sum by handling a pick-axe! "I saw," says Bailly, "mercers, jewellers, and merchants implore the favor of being employed at twenty sous the day." Enumerate, if you can, in one or two recognized callings, the hands which are doing nothing:[1413] 1,200 hair-dressers keep about 6,000 journeymen; 2,000 others follow the same calling in private-houses; 6,000 lackeys do but little else than this work. The body of tailors is composed of 2,800 masters, who have under them 5,000 workmen. "Add to these the number privately employed—the refugees in privileged places like the abbeys of Saint-Germain and Saint-Marcel, the vast enclosure of the Temple, that of Saint-John the Lateran, and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and you will find at least 12,000 persons cutting, fitting, and sewing." How many in these two groups are now idle! How many others are walking the streets, such as upholsterers, lace-makers, embroiderers, fan-makers, gilders, carnage-makers, binders, engravers, and all the other producers of Parisian nick-nacks! For those who are still at work how many days are lost at the doors of bakers' shops and in patrolling as National Guards! Gatherings are formed in spite of the prohibitions of the Hotel-de-Ville,[1414] and the crowd openly discuss their miserable condition: 3,000 journeymen-tailors near the Colonnade, as many journeymen-shoemakers in the Place Louis XV., the journeymen-hairdressers in the Champs-Elysees, 4,000 domestics without places on the approaches to the Louvre,—and their propositions are on a level with their intelligence. Servants demand the expulsion from Paris of the Savoyards who enter into competition with them. Journeymen-tailors demand that a day's wages be fixed at forty sous, and that the old-clothes dealers shall not be allowed to make new ones. The journeymen-shoemakers declare that those who make shoes below the fixed price shall be driven out of the kingdom. Each of these irritated and agitated crowds contains the germ of an outbreak—and, in truth, these germs are found on every pavement in Paris: at the relief works, which at Montmartre collect 17,000 paupers; in the Market, where the bakers want to hang the flour commissioners, and at the doors of the bakers, of whom two, on the 14th of September and on the 5th of October, are conducted to the lamp post and barely escape with their lives.—In this suffering, mendicant crowd, enterprising men become more numerous every day: they consist of deserters, and from every regiment; they reach Paris in bands, often 250 in one day. There, "caressed and fed to the top of their bent,"[1415] having received from the National Assembly 50 livres each, maintained by the King in the enjoyment of their advance-money, entertained by the districts, of which one alone incurs a debt of 14,000 livres for wine and sausages furnished to them, "they accustom themselves to greater expense," to greater license, and are followed by their companions. "During the night of the 31st of July the French Guards on duty at Versailles abandon the custody of the King and betake themselves to Paris, without their officers, but with their arms and baggage," that "they may take part in the cheer which the city of Paris extends to their regiment." At the beginning of September, 16,000 deserters of this stamp are counted.[1416] Now, among those who commit murder these are in the first rank; and this is not surprising when we take the least account of their antecedents, education, and habits. It was a soldier of the "Royal Croat" who tore out the heart of Berthier. They were three soldiers of the regiment of Provence who forced the house of Chatel at Saint-Denis, and dragged his head through the streets. It is Swiss soldiers who, at Passy, knock down the commissioners of police with their guns. Their headquarters are at the Palais-Royal, amongst women whose instruments they are, and amongst agitators from whom they receive the word of command. Henceforth, all depends on this word, and we have only to contemplate the new popular leaders to know what it will be.



III.—The new popular leaders.

Their ascendancy.—Their education.—Their sentiments. —Their situation.—Their councils.—Their denunciations.

Administrators and members of district assemblies, agitators of barracks, coffee-houses, clubs and public thoroughfares, writers of pamphlets, penny-a-liners are multiplying as fast as buzzing insects are hatched on a sultry night. After the 14th of July thousands of jobs have become available for released ambitions; "attorneys, notaries' clerks, artists, merchants, shopkeepers, comedians and especially advocates;[1417] each wants to be either an officer, a director, a councillor, or a minister of the new reign; while journals, which are established by dozens,[1418] form a permanent tribune, where speakers come to court the people to their personal advantage." Philosophy, fallen into such hands, seems to parody itself; and nothing equals its emptiness, unless it be its mischievousness and success. Lawyers, in the sixty assembly districts, roll out the high-sounding dogmas of the revolutionary catechism. This or that one, passing from the question of a party wall to the constitution of empires, becomes the improvised legislator, so much the more inexhaustible and the more applauded as his flow of words, showered upon his hearers, proves to them that every capacity and every right are naturally and legitimately theirs.

"When that man opened his mouth," says a cold-blooded witness, "we were sure of being inundated with quotations and maxims, often apropos of street lamp posts, or of the stall of a herb-dealer. His stentorian voice made the vaults ring; and after he had spoken for two hours, and his breath was completely exhausted, the admiring and enthusiastic shouts which greeted him amounted almost to frenzy. Thus the orator fancied himself a Mirabeau, while the spectators imagined themselves the Constituent Assembly, deciding the fate of France."

The journals and pamphlets are written in the same style. Every brain is filled with the fumes of conceit and of big words; the leader of the crowd is he who raves the most, and he guides the wild enthusiasm which he increases.

Let us consider the most popular of these chiefs; they are the green or the dry fruit of literature, and of the bar. The newspaper is the stall which every morning offers them for sale, and if they suit the overexcited public it is simply owing to their acid or bitter flavor. Their empty, unpracticed minds are wholly void of political conceptions; they have no capacity or practical experience. Desmoulins is twenty-nine years of age, Loustalot twenty-seven, and their intellectual ballast consists of college reminiscences, souvenirs of the law schools, and the common-places picked up in the houses of Raynal and his associates. As to Brissot and Marat, who are ostentatious humanitarians, their knowledge of France and of foreign countries consists in what they have seen through the dormer windows of their garrets, and through utopian spectacles. In minds like these, empty or led astray, the Contrat-Social could not fail to become a gospel; for it reduces political science to a strict application of an elementary axiom which relieves them of all study, and hands society over to the caprice of the people, or, in other words, delivers it into their own hands.—Hence they demolish all that remains of social institutions, and push on equalization until everything is brought down to the same level.

"With my principles," writes Desmoulins,[1419] "is associated the satisfaction of putting myself where I belong, of showing my strength to those who have despised me, of lowering to my level all whom fortune has placed above me: my motto is that of all honest people: 'No superiors!'"

Thus, under the great name of Liberty, each vain spirit seeks its revenge and finds its nourishment. What is sweeter and more natural than to justify passion by theory, to be factious in the belief that this is patriotism, and to cloak the interests of ambition with the interests of humanity?

Let us picture to ourselves these directors of public opinion as they were three months earlier: Desmoulins, a briefless barrister, living in furnished lodgings with petty debts, and on a few louis extracted from his relations. Loustalot, still more unknown, was admitted the previous year to the Parliament of Bordeaux, and has landed at Paris in search of a career. Danton, another second-rate lawyer, coming out of a hovel in Champagne, borrowed the money to pay his expenses, while his stinted household is kept up only by means of a louis which is given to him weekly by his father-in-law, who is a coffee-house keeper. Brissot, a strolling Bohemian, formerly employee of literary pirates, has roamed over the world for fifteen years, without bringing back with him either from England or America anything but a coat out at elbows and false ideas; and, finally, Marat; a writer that has been hissed, an abortive scholar and philosopher, a misrepresenter of his own experiences, caught by the natural philosopher Charles in the act of committing a scientific fraud, and fallen from the top of his inordinate ambition to the subordinate post of doctor in the stables of the Comte d'Artois.—At the present time, Danton, President of the Cordeliers, can arrest any one he pleases in his district, and his violent gestures and thundering voice secure to him, till something better turns up, the government of his section of the city. A word of Marat's has just caused Major Belzunce at Caen to be assassinated. Desmoulins announces, with a smile of triumph, that "a large section of the capital regards him as one among the principal instigators of the Revolution, and that many even go so far as to say that he is the author of it." Is it to be supposed that, borne so high by such a sudden jerk of fortune, they wish to put on the drag and again descend? and is it not clear that they will aid with all their might the revolt which hoists them towards the loftiest summits?—Moreover, the brain reels at a height like this; suddenly launched in the air and feeling as if everything was tottering around them, they utter exclamations of indignation and terror, they see plots on all sides, imagine invisible cords pulling in an opposite direction, and they call upon the people to cut them. With the full weight of their inexperience, incapacity, and improvidence, of their fears, credulity, and dogmatic obstinacy, they urge on popular attacks, and their newspaper articles or discourses are all summed up in the following phrases:

"Fellow-citizens, you, the people of the lower class, you who listen to me, you have enemies in the Court and the aristocracy. The Hotel-de-Ville and the National Assembly are your servants. Seize your enemies with a strong hand, and hang them, and let your servants know that they must quicken their steps!"

Desmoulins styles himself "District-attorney of the gallows,"[1420] and if he at all regrets the murders of Foulon and Berthier, it is because this too expeditious judgment has allowed the proofs of conspiracy to perish, thereby saving a number of traitors: he himself mentions twenty of them haphazard, and little does he care whether he makes mistakes.

"We are in the dark, and it is well that faithful dogs should bark, even at all who pass by, so that there may be no fear of robbers."

From this time forth Marat[1421] denounces the King, the ministers, the administration, the bench, the bar, the financial system and the academies, all as "suspicious;" at all events the people only suffer on their account.

"The Government is monopolizing grain, to make us to pay through the nose for a poisonous bread."

The Government, again, through a new conspiracy is about to blockade Paris, so as to starve it with greater ease. Utterances of this kind, at such a time, are firebrands thrown upon fear and hunger to kindle the flames of rage and cruelty. To this frightened and fasting crowd the agitators and newspaper writers continue to repeat that it must act, and act alongside of the authorities, and, if need be, against them. In other words, We will do as we please; we are the sole legitimate masters;

"in a well-constituted government, the people as a body are the real sovereign: our delegates are appointed only to execute our orders; what right has the clay to rebel against the potter?"

On the strength of such principles, the tumultuous club which occupies the Palais-Royal substitutes itself for the Assembly at Versailles. Has it not all the titles for this office? The Palais-Royal "saved the nation" on the 12th and 13th of July. The Palais-Royal, "through its spokesmen and pamphlets," has made everybody and even the soldiers "philosophers." It is the house of patriotism, "the rendezvous of the select among the patriotic," whether provincials or Parisians, of all who possess the right of suffrage, and who cannot or will not exercise it in their own district. "It saves time to come to the Palais-Royal. There is no need there of appealing to the President for the right to speak, or to wait one's time for a couple of hours. The orator proposes his motion, and, if it finds supporters, mounts a chair. If he is applauded, it is put into proper shape. If he is hissed, he goes away. This was the way of the Romans." Behold the veritable National Assembly! It is superior to the other semi-feudal affair, encumbered with "six hundred deputies of the clergy and nobility," who are so many intruders and who "should be sent out into the galleries."—Hence the pure Assembly rules the impure Assembly, and "the Cafe Foy lays claim to the government of France."



IV.—Intervention by the popular leaders with the Government.

Their pressure on the Assembly.

On the 30th of July, the harlequin who led the insurrection at Rouen having been arrested, "it is openly proposed at the Palais Royal[1422] to go in a body and demand his release."—On the 1st of August, Thouret, whom the moderate party of the Assembly have just made President, is obliged to resign; the Palais-Royal threatens to send a band and murder him along with those who voted for him, and lists of proscriptions, in which several of the deputies are inscribed, begin to be circulated.—From this time forth, on all great questions-the abolition of the feudal system, the suppression of tithes, a declaration of the rights of man, the dispute about the Chambers, the King's power of veto,[1423] the pressure from without inclines the balance: in this way the Declaration of Rights, which is rejected in secret session by twenty-eight bureaus out of thirty, is forced through by the tribunes in a public sitting and passed by a majority.—Just as before the 14th of July, and to a still greater extent, two kinds of compulsion influence the votes, and it is always the ruling faction which employs both its hands to throttle its opponents. On the one hand this faction takes post on the galleries in knots composed nearly always of the same persons, "five or six hundred permanent actors," who yell according to understood signals and at the word of command.[1424] Many of these are French Guards, in civilian clothes, and who relieve each other: previously they have asked of their favorite deputy "at what hour they must come, whether all goes on well, and whether he is satisfied with those fools of parsons (calotins) and the aristocrats." Others consist of low women under the command of Theroigne de Mericourt, a virago courtesan, who assigns them their positions and gives them the signal for hooting or for applause. Publicly and in full session, on the occasion of the debate on the veto, "the deputies are applauded or insulted by the galleries according as they utter the word 'suspensive,' or the word 'indefinite.' "Threats," (says one of them) "circulated; I heard them on all sides around me." These threats are repeated on going out: "Valets dismissed by their masters, deserters, and women in rags," threaten the refractory with the lamp post, "and thrust their fists in their faces. In the hall itself, and much more accurately than before the 14th of July, their names are taken down, and the lists, handed over to the populace," travel to the Palais-Royal, from where they are dispatched in correspondence and in newspapers to the provinces.[1425]—Thus we see the second means of compulsion; each deputy is answerable for his vote, at Paris, with his own life, and, in the province, with those of his family. Members of the former Third-Estate avow that they abandon the idea of two Chambers, because "they are not disposed to get their wives' and children's throats cut." On the 30th of August, Saint-Hurugue, the most noisy of the Palais-Royal barkers, marches off to Versailles, at the head of 1,500 men, to complete the conversion of the Assembly. This garden club indeed, from the heights of its great learning, integrity, and immaculate reputation, decides that the ignorant, corrupt, and doubtful deputies must be got rid of." That they are such cannot be questioned, because they defend the royal sanction; there are over 600 and more, 120 are deputies of the communes, who must be expelled to begin with, and then must be brought to judgment.[1426] In the meantime they are informed, as well as the Bishop of Langres, President of the National Assembly, that "15,000 men are ready to light up their chateaux and in particular yours, sir." To avoid all mistake, the secretaries of the Assembly are informed in writing that '2,000 letters" will be sent into the provinces to denounce to the people the conduct of the malignant deputies: "Your houses are held as a surety for your opinions: keep this in mind, and save yourselves!" At last, on the morning of the 1st of August, five deputations from the Palais-Royal, one of them led by Loustalot, march in turn to the Hotel-de-Ville, insisting that the drums should be beaten and the citizens be called together for the purpose of changing the deputies, or their instructions, and of ordering the National Assembly to suspend its discussion on the veto until the districts and provinces could give expression to their will: the people, in effect, alone being sovereign, and alone competent, always has the right to dismiss or instruct anew its servants, the deputies. On the following day, August 2nd, to make matters plainer, new delegates from the same Palais-Royal suit gestures to words; they place two fingers on their throats, on being introduced before the representatives of the commune, as a hint that, if the latter do not obey, they will be hung.

After this it is vain for the National Assembly to make any show of indignation, to declare that it despises threats, and to protest its independence; the impression is already produced. "More than 300 members of the communes," says Mounier, "had decided to support the absolute veto." At the end of ten days most of these had gone over, several of them through attachment to the King, because they were afraid of "a general uprising," and "were not willing to jeopardize the lives of the royal family." But concessions like these only provoke fresh extortions. The politicians of the street now know by experience the effect of brutal violence on legal authority. Emboldened by success and by impunity, they reckon up their strength and the weakness of the latter. One blow more, and they are undisputed masters. Besides, the issue is already apparent to clear-sighted men. When the agitators of the public thoroughfares, and the porters at the street-corners, convinced of their superior wisdom, impose decrees by the strength of their lungs, of their fists, and of their pikes, at that moment experience, knowledge, good sense, cool-blood, genius, and judgment, disappear from human affairs, and things revert back to chaos. Mirabeau, in favor of the veto for life, saw the crowd imploring him with tears in their eyes to change his opinion:

"Monsieur le Comte, if the King obtains this veto, what will be the use of a National Assembly? We shall all be slaves "[1427]

Outbursts of this description are not to be resisted, and all is lost. Already, near the end of September, the remark applies which Mirabeau makes to the Comte de la Marck:

"Yes, all is lost; the King and Queen will be swept away, and you will see the populace trampling on their lifeless bodies."

Eight days after this, on the 5th and 6th of October, it breaks out against both King and Queen, against the National Assembly and the Government, against all government present and to come; the violent party which rules in Paris obtains possession of the chiefs of France to hold them under strict surveillance, and to justify its intermittent outrages by one permanent outrage.



V.—The 5th and 6th of October.

Once more, two different currents combine into one torrent to hurry the crowd onward to a common end.—On the one hand are the cravings of the stomach, and women excited by the famine:

"Now that bread cannot be had in Paris, let us go to Versailles and demand it there; once we have the King, Queen, and Dauphin in the midst of us, they will be obliged to feed us;" we will bring back "the Baker, the Bakeress, and the Baker's boy." —On the other hand, there is fanaticism, and men who are pushed on by the need to dominate.

"Now that our chiefs yonder disobey us,—let us go and make them obey us forthwith; the King is quibbling over the Constitution and the Rights of Man—make him approve them; his guards refuse to wear our cockade—make them accept it; they want to carry him off to Metz—make him come to Paris, here, under our eyes and in our hands, he, and the lame Assembly too, will march straight on, and quickly, whether they like it or not, and always on the right road."—Under this confluence of ideas the expedition is arranged.[1428] Ten days before this, it is publicly alluded to at Versailles. On the 4th of October, at Paris, a woman proposes it at the Palais-Royal; Danton roars at the Cordeliers; Marat, "alone, makes as much noise as the four trumpets on the Day of Judgment." Loustalot writes that a second revolutionary paroxysm is necessary." "The day passes," says Desmoulins, "in holding councils at the Palais-Royal, and in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, on the ends of the bridges, and on the quays... in pulling off the cockades of but one color.... These are torn off and trampled under foot with threats of the lamp post, in case of fresh offense; a soldier who is trying to refasten his, changes his mind on seeing a hundred sticks raised against him."[1429] These are the premonitory symptoms of a crisis; a huge ulcer has formed in this feverish, suffering body, and it is about to break.

But, as is usually the case, it is a purulent concentration of the most poisonous passions and the foulest motives. The vilest of men and women were engaged in it. Money was freely distributed. Was it done by intriguing subalterns who, playing upon the aspirations of the Duke of Orleans, extracted millions from him under the pretext of making him lieutenant-general of the kingdom? Or is it due to the fanatics who, from the end of April, clubbed together to debauch the soldiery, and stir up a body of ruffians for the purpose of leveling and destroying everything around them?[1430] There are always Machiavellis of the highways and of houses of ill-fame ready to excite the foul and the vile of both sexes. On the first day that the Flemish regiment goes into garrison at Versailles an attempt is made to corrupt it with money and women. Sixty abandoned women are sent from Paris for this purpose, while the French Guards come and treat their new comrades. The latter have been treated at the Palais-Royal, while three of them, at Versailles, exclaim, showing some crown pieces of six livres, "What a pleasure it is to go to Paris! one always comes back with money!" In this way, resistance is overcome beforehand. As to the attack, women are to be the advanced guard, because the soldiers will scruple to fire at them; their ranks, however, will be reinforced by a number of men disguised as women. On looking closely at them they are easily recognized, notwithstanding their rouge, by their badly-shaven beards, and by their voices and gait.[1431] No difficulty has been found in obtaining men and women among the prostitutes of the Palais-Royal and the military deserters who serve them as bullies. It is probable that the former lent their lovers the cast-off dresses they had to spare. At night all will meet again at the common rendezvous, on the benches of the National Assembly, where they are quite as much at home as in their own houses.[1432]—In any event, the first band which marches out is of this stamp, displaying the finery and the gaiety of the profession; "most of them young, dressed in white, with powdered hair and a sprightly air;" many of them "laughing, singing, and drinking," as they would do at setting out for a picnic in the country. Three or four of them are known by name—one brandishing a sword, and another, the notorious Theroigne. Madeleine Chabry Louison, who is selected to address the King, is a pretty grisette who sells flowers, and, no doubt, something else, at the Palais-Royal. Some appear to belong to the first rank in their calling, and to have tact and the manners of society—suppose, for instance, that Champfort and Laclos sent their mistresses. To these must be added washerwomen, beggars, bare-footed women, and fishwomen, enlisted for several days before and paid accordingly. This is the first nucleus, and it keeps on growing; for, by compulsion or consent, the troop incorporates into it, as it passes along, all the women it encounters—seamstresses, portresses, housekeepers, and even respectable females, whose dwellings are entered with threats of cutting off their hair if they do not fall in. To these must be added vagrants, street-rovers, ruffians and robbers—the lees of Paris, which accumulate and come to the surface every time agitation occurs: they are to be found already at the first hour, behind the troop of women at the Hotel-de-Ville. Others are to follow during the evening and in the night. Others are waiting at Versailles. Many, both at Paris and Versailles, are under pay: one, in a dirty whitish vest, chinks gold and silver coin in his hand.—Such is the foul scum which, both in front and in the rear, rolls along with the popular tide; whatever is done to stem the torrent, it widens out and will leave its mark at every stage of its overflow.

The first troop, consisting of four or five hundred women, begin operations by forcing the guard of the Hotel-de-Ville, which is unwilling to make use of its bayonets. They spread through the rooms and try to burn all the written documents they can find, declaring that there has been nothing but scribbling since the Revolution began.[1433] A crowd of men follow after them, bursting open doors, and pillaging the magazine of arms. Two hundred thousand francs in Treasury notes are stolen or disappear; several of the ruffians set fire to the building, while others hang an abbe. The abbe is cut down, and the fire extinguished only just in time: such are the interludes of the popular drama. In the meantime, the crowd of women increases on the Place de Greve, always with the same unceasing cry, "Bread!" and "To Versailles!" One of the conquerors of the Bastille; the usher Maillard, offers himself as a leader. He is accepted, and taps his drum; on leaving Paris, he has seven or eight thousand women with him, and, in addition, some hundreds of men; by dint of remonstrances, he succeeds in maintaining some kind of order amongst this rabble as far as Versailles.—But it is a rabble notwithstanding, and consequently so much brute force, at once anarchical and imperious. On the one hand, each, and the worst among them, does what he pleases—which will be quite evident this very evening. On the other hand, its ponderous mass crushes all authority and overrides all rules and regulations—which is at once apparent on reaching Versailles.—Admitted into the Assembly, at first in small numbers, the women crowd against the door, push in with a rush, fill the galleries, then the hall, the men along with them, armed with clubs, halberds, and pikes, all pell-mell, side by side with the deputies, taking possession of their benches, voting along with them, and gathering about the President, who, surrounded, threatened, and insulted, finally abandons the position, while his chair is taken by a woman.[1434] A fishwoman commands in a gallery, and about a hundred women around her shout or keep silence at her bidding, while she interrupts and abuses the deputies:

"Who is that speaker there? Silence that blabbermouth; he does not know what he is talking about. The question is how to get bread. Let papa Mirabeau speak—we want to hear him."

A decree on subsistence having been passed, the leaders demand something in addition; they must be allowed to enter all places where they suspect any monopolizing to be going on, and the price of "bread must be fixed at six sous the four pounds, and meat at six sous per pound."

"You must not think that we are children to be played with. We are ready to strike. Do as you are bidden."

All their political injunctions emanate from this central idea. And further:

"Send back the Flemish regiment—it is a thousand men more to feed, and they take bread out of our mouths."—"Punish the aristocrats, who hinder the bakers from baking." "Down with the skull-cap; the priests are the cause of our trouble!"—"Monsieur Mounier, why did you advocate that villainous veto? Beware of the lamp post!"

Under this pressure, a deputation of the Assembly, with the President at its head, sets out on foot, in the mud, through the rain, and watched by a howling escort of women and men armed with pikes: after five hours of waiting and entreaty, it wrings from the King, besides the decree on subsistence, about which there was no difficulty, the acceptance, pure and simple, of the Declaration of Rights, and his sanction to the constitutional articles.—Such is the independence of the King and the Assembly.[1435] Thus are the new principles of justice established, the grand outlines of the Constitution, the abstract axioms of political truth under the dictatorship of a crowd which extorts not only blindly, but which is half-conscious of its blindness.

"Monsieur le President," some among the women say to Mounier, who returns with the Royal sanction, "will it be of any real use to us? will it give poor folks bread in Paris?"

Meanwhile, the scum has been bubbling up around the chateau; and the abandoned women subsidized in Paris are pursuing their calling.[1436] They slip through into the lines of the regiment drawn on the square, in spite of the sentinels. Theroigne, in an Amazonian red vest, distributes money among them.

"Side with us," some say to the men; "we shall soon beat the King's Guards, strip off their fine coats and sell them."

Others lie sprawling on the ground, alluring the soldiers, and make such offers as to lead one of them to exclaim, "We are going to have a jolly time of it!" Before the day is over, the regiment is seduced; the women have, according to their own idea, acted for a good motive. When a political idea finds its way into such heads, instead of ennobling them, it becomes degraded there; its only effect is to let loose vices which a remnant of modesty still keeps in subjection, and full play is given to luxurious or ferocious instincts under cover of the public good.—The passions, moreover, become intensified through their mutual interaction; crowds, clamor, disorder, longings, and fasting, end in a state of frenzy, from which nothing can issue but dizzy madness and rage.—This frenzy began to show itself on the way. Already, on setting out, a woman had exclaimed,

"We shall bring back the Queen's head on the end of a pike!"[1437]

On reaching the Sevres bridge others added,

"Let us cut her throat, and make cockades of her entrails!"

Rain is falling; they are cold, tired, and hungry, and get nothing to eat but a bit of bread, distributed at a late hour, and with difficulty, on the Place d'Armes. One of the bands cuts up a slaughtered horse, roasts it, and consumes it half raw, after the manner of savages. It is not surprising that, under the names of patriotism and "justice," savage ideas spring up in their minds against "members of the National Assembly who are not with the principles of the people," against "the Bishop of Langres, Mounier, and the rest." One man in a ragged old red coat declares that "he must have the head of the Abbe Maury to play nine-pins with." But it is especially against the Queen, who is a woman, and in sight, that the feminine imagination is the most aroused.

"She alone is the cause of the evils we endure.... she must be killed, and quartered." —Night advances; there are acts of violence, and violence engenders violence.

"How glad I should be," says one man, "if I could only lay my hand on that she-devil, and strike off her head on the first curbstone!"

Towards morning, some cry out,

"Where is that cursed cat? We must eat her heart out... We'll take off her head, cut her heart out, and fry her liver!" —With the first murders the appetite for blood has been awakened; the women from Paris say that "they have brought tubs to carry away the stumps of the Royal Guards," and at these words others clap their hands. Some of the riffraff of the crowd examine the rope of the lamp post in the court of the National Assembly, and judging it not to be sufficiently strong, are desirous of supplying its place with another "to hang the Archbishop of Paris, Maury, and d'Espremenil."—This murderous, carnivorous rage penetrates even among those whose duty it is to maintain order, one of the National Guard being heard to say that "the body-guards must be killed to the last man, and their hearts torn out for a breakfast."

Finally, towards midnight, the National Guard of Paris arrives; but it only adds one insurrection to another, for it has likewise mutinied against its chiefs.[1438]

"If M. de Lafayette is not disposed to accompany us," says one of the grenadiers, "we will take an old grenadier for our commander."

Having come to this decision, they sought the general at the Hotel-de-Ville, and the delegates of six of the companies made their instructions known to him.

"General, we do not believe that you are a traitor, but we think that the Government is betraying us.... The committee on subsistence is deceiving us, and must be removed. We want to go to Versailles to exterminate the body-guard and the Flemish regiment who have trampled on the national cockade. If the King of France is too feeble to wear his crown, let him take it off; we will crown his son and things will go better."

In vain Lafayette refuses, and harangues them on the Place de Greve; in vain he resists for hours, now addressing them and now imposing silence. Armed bands, coming from the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, swell the crowd; they take aim at him; others prepare the lamp-post. He then dismounts and endeavors to return to the Hotel-de-Ville, but his grenadiers bar the way:

"Morbleu, General, you will stay with us; you will not abandon us!"

Being their chief it is pretty plain that he must follow them; which is also the sentiment of the representatives of the commune at the Hotel-de-Ville, who send him their authorization, and even the order to march, "seeing that it is impossible for him to refuse."

Fifteen thousand men thus reach Versailles, and in front of and along with them thousands of ruffians, protected by the darkness. On this side the National Guard of Versailles, posted around the chateau, together with the people of Versailles, who bar the way against vehicles, have closed up every outlet.[1439] The King is prisoner in his own palace, he and his, with his ministers and his court, and with no defense. For, with his usual optimism, he has confided the outer posts of the chateau to Lafayette's soldiers, and, through a humanitarian obstinacy which he is to maintain up to the last,[1440] he has forbidden his own guards to fire on the crowd, so that they are only there for show. With common right in his favor, the law, and the oath which Lafayette had just obliged his troops to renew, what could he have to fear? What could be more effective with the people than trust in them and prudence? And by playing the sheep one is sure of taming brutes!

From five o'clock in the morning they prowl around the palace-railings. Lafayette, exhausted with fatigue, has taken an hour's repose,[1441] which hour suffices for them.[1442] A populace armed with pikes and clubs, men and women, surrounds a squad of eighty-eight National Guards, forces them to fire on the King's Guards, bursts open a door, seizes two of the guards and chops their heads off. The executioner, who is a studio model, with a heavy beard, stretches out his blood-stained hands and glories in the act; and so great is the effect on the National Guard that they move off; through sensibility, in order not to witness such sights: such is the resistance! In the meantime the crowd invade the staircases, beat down and trample on the guards they encounter, and burst open the doors with imprecations against the Queen. The Queen runs off; just in time, in her underclothes; she takes refuge with the King and the rest of the royal family, who have in vain barricaded themselves in the oeil-de-Boeuf, a door of which is broken in: here they stand, awaiting death, when Lafayette arrives with his grenadiers and saves all that can be saved—their lives, and nothing more. For, from the crowd huddled in the marble court the shout rises, "To Paris with the King!" a command to which the King submits.

Now that the great hostage is in their hands, will they deign to accept the second one? This is doubtful. On the Queen approaching the balcony with her son and daughter, a howl arises of "No children!" They want to have her alone in the sights of their guns, and she understands that. At this moment M. de Lafayette, throwing the shield of his popularity over her, appears on the balcony at her side and respectfully kisses her hand. The reaction is instantaneous in this over-excited crowd. Both the men and especially the women, in such a state of nervous tension, readily jump from one extreme to another, rage bordering on tears. A portress, who is a companion of Maillard's,[1443] imagines that she hears Lafayette promise in the Queen's name "to love her people and be as much attached to them as Jesus Christ to his Church." People sob and embrace each other; the grenadiers shift their caps to the heads of the body-guard. Everything will be fine: "the people have won their King back."—Nothing is to be done now but to rejoice; and the cortege moves on. The royal family and a hundred deputies, in carriages, form the center, and then comes the artillery, with a number of women bestriding the cannons; next, a convoy of flour. Round about are the King's Guards, each with a National Guard mounted behind him; then comes the National Guard of Paris, and after them men with pikes and women on foot, on horseback, in cabs, and on carts; in front is a band bearing two severed heads on the ends of two poles, which halts at a hairdresser's, in Sevres, to have these heads powdered and curled;[1444] they are made to bow by way of salutation, and are daubed all over with cream; there are jokes and shouts of laughter; the people stop to eat and drink on the road, and oblige the guards to clink glasses with them; they shout and fire salvos of musketry; men and women hold each other's hands and sing and dance about in the mud.—Such is the new fraternity: a funeral procession of legal and legitimate authorities, a triumph of brutality over intelligence, a murderous and political Mardi-gras, a formidable masquerade which, preceded by the insignia of death, drags along with it the heads of France, the King, the ministers, and the deputies, that it may constrain them to rule to until according to its frenzy, that it may hold them under its them pikes until it is pleased to slaughter them.



VI.—The Government and the nation in the hands of the revolutionary party.

This time there can be no mistake: the Reign of Terror is fully and firmly established. On this very day the mob stops a vehicle, in which it hopes to find M. de Virieu, and declares, on searching it, that "they are looking for the deputy to massacre him, as well as others of whom they have a list."[1445] Two days afterwards the Abbe Gregoire tells the National Assembly that not a day passes without ecclesiastics being insulted in Paris, and pursued with "horrible threats." Malouet is advised that "as soon as guns are distributed among the militia, the first use made of them will be to get rid of those deputies who are bad citizens," and among others of the Abbe Maury. "The moment I stepped out into the streets," writes Mounier, "I was publicly followed. It was a crime to be seen in my company. Wherever I happened to go, along with two or three of my companions, it was stated that an assembly of aristocrats was forming. I had become such an object of terror that they threatened to set fire to a country-house where I had passed twenty-four hours; and, to relieve their minds, a promise had to be given that neither myself nor my friends should be again received into it." In one week five or six hundred deputies have their passports[1446] made out, and hold themselves ready to depart. During the following month one hundred and twenty give in their resignations, or no longer appear in the Assembly. Mounier, Lally-Tollendal, the Bishop of Langres, and others besides, quit Paris, and afterwards France. Mallet du Pan writes, "Opinion now dictates its judgment with steel in hand. Believe or die is the anathema which vehement spirits pronounce, and this in the name of Liberty. Moderation has become a crime." After the 7th of October, Mirabeau says to the Comte de la Marck: