which was not ready, and in a week, trundling wheelbarrows and handling the pick-ax as equals and comrades, all voluntarily yoked in the same service, converted a flat surface into a valley between two hills. – At Strasbourg, General Luckner, commander-in-chief, worked a whole afternoon in his shirt-sleeves just like the commonest laborer. The confederates are fed, housed, and have their expenses paid everywhere on all the roads. At Paris the publicans and keepers of furnished houses lower their prices of their own accord, and do not think of robbing their new guests. “The districts,” moreover, “feast the provincials to their heart’s content.[6] There are meals every day for from twelve to fifteen hundred people.” Provincials and Parisians, soldiers and bourgeois, seated and mingled together, drink each other’s health and embrace. The soldiers, especially, and the inferior officers are surrounded, welcomed, and entertained to such an extent that they lose their heads, their health, and more besides. One “old trooper, who had been over fifty years in the service, died on the way home, used up with cordials and excess of pleasure.” In short, the joy is excessive, as it should be on the great day when the wish of an entire century is accomplished. – Behold ideal felicity, as displayed in the books and illustrations of the time! The natural man buried underneath an artificial civilization is disinterred, and again appears as in early days, as in Tahiti, as in philosophic and literary pastorals, as in bucolic and mythological operas, confiding, affectionate, and happy. “The sight of all these beings again restored to the sweet sentiments of primitive brotherhood is an exquisite delight almost too great for the soul to support,” and the Frenchman, more light-hearted and far more childlike than he is to-day, gives himself up unrestrainedly to his social, sympathetic, and generous instincts. Whatever the imagination of the day offers him to increase his emotions, all the classical, rhetorical, and dramatic material at his command, are employed for the embellishment of his festival. Already wildly enthusiastic, he is anxious to increase his enthusiasm. – At Lyons, the fifty thousand confederates from the south range themselves in line of battle around an artificial rock, fifty feet high, covered with shrubs, and surmounted by a Temple of Concord in which stands a huge statue of Liberty; the steps of the rock are decked with flags, and a solemn mass precedes the administration of the oath. – At Paris, an alter dedicated to the nation is erected in the middle of the Champ de Mars, which is transformed into a colossal circus. The regular troops and the federations of the departments stand in position around it, the King being in front with the Queen and the dauphin, while near them are the princes and princesses in a gallery, and the members of the National Assembly in an amphitheater; two hundred priests, draped in their albs and with tricolored belts, officiate around Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun; three hundred drums and twelve hundred musicians all play at once; forty piece of cannon are discharged at one volley, and four hundred thousand cheers go up as if from one threat. Never was such an effort made to intoxicate the senses and strain the nerves beyond their powers of endurance! – The moral machine is made to vibrate to the same and even to a greater extent. For more than a year past, harangues, proclamations, addresses, newspapers and events have daily added one degree more to the pressure. On this occasion, thousands of speeches, multiplied by myriads of newspapers, carry the enthusiasm to the highest pitch. Declamation foams and rolls along in a steady stream of rhetoric everywhere throughout France.[7] In this state of excitement the difference between magniloquence and sincerity, between the false and the true, between show and substance, is no longer distinguishable. The Federation becomes an opera which is seriously played in the open street – children have parts assigned them in it; it occurs to no one that they are puppets, and that the words taken for an expression of the heart are simply memorized speeches that have been put into their mouths. At Besançon, on the return of the confederates, hundreds of “youthful citizens” from twelve to fourteen years of age,[8] in the national uniform, “with sword in hand,” march up to the standard of Liberty. Three little girls from eleven to thirteen years old and two little boy of nine years each pronounce “a discourse full of fire and breathing nothing but patriotism;” after which, a young lady of fourteen, raising her voice and pointing to the flag, harangues in turn the crowd, the deputies, the National Guard, the mayor, and the commander of the troops, the scene ending with a ball. This is the universal finale – men and women, children and adults, common people and men of the world, chiefs and subordinates, all, everywhere, frisk about as in the last act of a pastoral drama. At Paris, – writes an eye- witness, “I saw chevaliers of Saint-Louis and chaplains dancing in the street with people belonging to their department.”[9] At the Champ de Mars, on the day of the Federation, notwithstanding that rain was falling in torrents, “the first arrivals began to dance, and those who came after them, joining in, formed a circle which soon spread over a portion of the Champ de Mars. . . .Three hundred thousand spectators kept time with their hands.” On the following days dancing is kept up on the Champ de Mars and in the streets, and there is drinking and carousing; “there was a ball with refreshments at the Corn-Exchange, and on the site of the Bastille.” – At Tours, where fifty-two detachments from the neighboring provinces are collected, about four o’clock in the afternoon,[10] through an irresistible outburst of insane gaiety, “the officers, inferior officers, and soldiers, pell-mell, race through the streets, some with saber in hand and others dancing and shouting ‘Vive le Roi!’ ‘Vive la Nation!’ flinging up their hats and compelling every one they met to join in the dance. One of the canons of the cathedral, who happens to be passing quietly along, has a grenadier’s cap put on his head,” and is dragged into the circle, and after him two monks; “they are often embraced,” and then allowed to depart. The carriages of the mayor and the Marquise de Montausier arrive; people mount up behind, get inside, and seat themselves in front, as many as can find room, and force the coachmen to parade through the principal streets in this fashion. There is no malice in it, nothing but sport and the overflow of spirits. “Nobody was maltreated or insulted, although almost every one was drunk.” – Nevertheless, there is one bad symptom: the soldiers of the Anjou regiment leave their barracks the following day and “pass the whole night abroad, no one being able to hinder them.” And there is another of still graver aspect; at Orleans, after the companies of the National Militia had danced on the square in the evening, “a large number of volunteers marched in procession through the town with drums, shouting out with all their might that the aristocracy must be destroyed, and that priests and aristocrats should be strung up to the lamp post. They enter a suspected coffee-house, drive out the inmates with insults, lay hands on a gentleman who is supposed not to have cried out as correctly and as lustily as themselves, and come near to hanging him.[11] – Such is the fruit of the philosophy and the attitudes of the eighteenth century. Men believed that, for the organization of a perfect society and the permanent establishment of freedom, justice, and happiness on earth, an inspiration of sentiments and an act of the will would suffice. The inspiration came and the act was fulfilled; they have been carried away, delighted, affected and out of their minds. Now comes the reaction, when they have to fall back upon themselves. The effort has succeeded in accomplishing all that it could accomplish, namely, a deluge of emotional demonstrations and slogans, a verbal and not a real contract ostentatious fraternity skin-deep, a well-meaning masquerade, an outpouring of feeling evaporating through its own pageantry – in short, an agreeable carnival of a day’s duration.
The reason is that in the human mind there are two strata. One superficial, of which men are conscious, the other deep down, of which they are unconscious.[12] The former unstable and vacillating like shifting sand, the latter stable and fixed like a solid rock, to which their caprices and agitation never descend. The latter alone determines the general inclination of the soil, the main current of human activity necessarily following the bent thus prepared for it. – Certainly embraces have been interchanged and oaths have been taken; but after, as before the ceremony, men are just what many centuries of administrative thralldom and one century of political literature have made them. Their ignorance and presumption, their prejudices, hatreds, and distrusts, their inveterate intellectual and emotional habits are still preserved. They are human, and their stomachs need to be filled daily. They have imagination, and, if bread be scarce, they fear that they may not get enough of it. They prefer to keep their money rather than to give it away. For this reason they spurn the claims which the State and individuals have upon them as much as possible. They avoid paying their debts. They willingly lay their hands on public property which is badly protected; finally they are disposed to regard gendarmes and proprietors as detrimental, and all the more so because this has been repeated to them over and over again, day after day, for a whole year. – On the other hand there is no change in the situation of things. They are ever living in a disorganized community, under an impracticable constitution, the passions which sap public order being only the more stimulated by the semblance of fraternity under which they seemed to be allayed. Men cannot be persuaded with impunity that the millennium has come, for they will want to enjoy it immediately, and will tolerate no deception practiced on their expectations. In this violent state, fired by boundless expectations, all their whims appear reasonable and all their opinions rational. They are no longer able to find faults with or control themselves. In their brain, overflowing with emotions and enthusiasm, there is no room but for one intense, absorbing, fixed idea. Each is confident and over-confident in his own opinion; all become impassioned, imperious, and intractable. Having assumed that all obstacles are taken out of the way, they grow indignant at each obstacle they actually encounter. Whatever it may be, they shatter it on the instant, and their over-excited imagination covers with the fine name of patriotism their natural appetite for despotism and domination.
France, accordingly, in the three years which follow the taking of the Bastille, presents a strange spectacle. In the words we find charity and in the laws symmetry; while the actual events present a spectacle of disorder and violence. Afar, is the reign of philosophy; close up is the chaos of the Carlovingian era.
“Foreigners,” remarks an observer,[13] “are not aware that, with a great extension of political rights, the liberty of the individual is in law reduced to nothing, while in practice it is subject to the caprice of sixty thousand constitutional assemblies; that no citizen enjoys any protection against the annoyances of these popular assemblies; that, according to the opinions which they entertain of persons and things, they act in one place in one way and in another place in another way. Here, a department, acting for itself and without referring elsewhere, puts an embargo on vessels, while another orders the expulsion of a military detachment essential for the security of places devastated by ruffians; and the minister, who responds to the demands of those interested, replies: ‘Such are the orders of the department.’ Elsewhere are administrative bodies which, the moment the Assembly decrees relief of consciences and the freedom of nonjuring priests, order the latter out of their homes within 24 hours. Always in advance of or lagging behind the laws; alternately bold and cowardly; daring all things when seconded by public license, and daring nothing to repress it; eager to abuse their momentary authority against the weak in order to acquire titles to popularity in the future; incapable of maintaining order except at the expense of public safety and tranquility; entangled in the reins of their new and complex administration, adding the fury of passion to incapacity and inexperience; such are, for the most part, the men sprung from nothing, void of ideas and drunk with pretension, on whom now rests responsibility for public powers and resources, the interest of security, and the foundations of the power of government. In all sections of the nation, in every branch of the administration, in every report, we detect the confusion of authorities, the uncertainty of obedience, the dissolution of all restraints, the absence of all resources, the deplorable complication of enervated springs, without any of the means of real power, and, for their sole support, laws which, in supposing France to be peopled with men without vices or passions, abandon humanity to its primitive state of independence.”
A few months after this, in the beginning of 1792, Malouet sums up all in one phrase:
“It is the Government of Algiers without the Dey.”
II.
Independence of the municipalities. – The causes of their initiative. – Sentiment of danger.- Issy-l’Evêque in 1789. – Exalted pride. – Brittany in 1790.- Usurpations of the municipalities. – Capture of the citadels. – Violence increased against their commanders. – Stoppage of convoys.- Powerlessness of the Directories and the ministers. – Marseilles in 1790.
Things could not work otherwise. For, before the 6th of October, and the King’s captivity in Paris, the Government had already been destroyed. Now, through the successive decrees of the Assembly, it is legally done away with, and each local group is left to itself. – The intendants have fled, military commanders are not obeyed, the bailiwicks dare hold no courts, the parliaments are suspended, and seven months elapse before the district and department administrations are elected, a year before the new judgeships are instituted, while afterwards, as well as before, the real power is in the hands of the communes. – The commune must arm itself, appoint its own chiefs, provide its own supplies, protect itself against brigands, and feed its own poor. It has to sell its national property, install the constitutional priest, and, amidst so many eager passions and injured interest, accomplish the transformation by which a new society replaces the ancient one. It alone has to ward off the perpetual and constantly reviving dangers which assail it or which it imagines. These are great, and it exaggerates them. It is inexperienced and alarmed. It is not surprising that, in the exercise of its extemporized power, it should pass beyond its natural or legal limit, and without being aware of it, overstep the metaphysical line which the Constitution defines between its rights and the rights of the State. Neither hunger, fear, rage, nor any of the popular passions can wait; there is no time to refer to Paris. Action is necessary, immediate action, and, with the means at hand, they must save themselves as well as they can. This or that mayor of a village is soon to find himself a general and a legislator. This or that petty town is to give itself a charter like Laon or Vezelay in the twelfth century. “On the 6th of October, 1789,[14] near Autun, the market-town of Issy-l’Evêque declares itself an independent State. The parish assembly is convoked by the priest, M. Carion, who is appointed member of the administrative committee and of the new military staff. In full session he secures the adoption of a complete code, political, judiciary, penal and military, consisting of sixty articles. Nothing is overlooked; we find ordinances concerning
“the town police, the laying out of streets and public squares, the repairs of prisons, the road taxes and price of grain, the administration of justice, fines, confiscations, and the diet of the National Guards.”
He is a provincial Solon,[15] zealous for the public welfare, and a man of executive power, he expounds his ordinances from the pulpit, and threatens the refractory. He passes decrees and renders judgments in the town-hall: outside the town limits, at the head of the National Guard, saber in hand, he will enforce his own decisions. He causes it to be decided that, on the written order of the committee, every citizen may be imprisoned. He imposes and collects taxes; he has boundary walls torn down; he goes in person to the houses of cultivators and makes requisitions for grain; he seizes the convoys which have not deposited their quote in his own richly stored granaries. One day, preceded by a drummer, he marches outside the walls, makes proclamation of “his agrarian laws,” and proceeds at once to the partition of the territory, and, by virtue of the ancient communal or church property rights, to assign to himself a portion of it. All this is done in public and consciously, the notary and the scrivener being called in to draw up the official record of his acts; he is satisfied that human society has come to an end, and that each local group has the right to begin over again and apply in its own way the Constitution which it has accorded to itself without reference to anybody else. – This man, undoubtedly, talks too loudly, an proceeds too quickly; and first the bailiwick, next the Châtelet, and afterwards the National Assembly temporarily put a stop to his proceedings; but his principle is a popular one, and the forty thousand communes of France are about to act like so many distinct republics, under the sentimental and constantly more powerless reprimands of the central authority.
Excited and invigorated by a new sentiment, men now abandon themselves to the proud consciousness of their own power and independence. Nowhere is greater satisfaction found than among the new local chiefs, the municipal officers and commanders of the National Guard, for never before has such supreme authority and such great dignity fallen upon men previously so submissive and so insignificant. – Formerly the subordinates of an intendant or sub- delegate, appointed, maintained, and ill-used by him, kept aloof from transactions of any importance, unable to defend themselves except by humble protestations against the aggravation of taxation, concerned with precedence and the conflicts of etiquette,[16] plain townspeople or peasants who never dreamt of interfering in military matters, henceforth become sovereigns in all military and civil affairs. This or that mayor or syndic of a little town or parish, a petty bourgeois or villager in a blouse, whom the intendant or military commander could imprison at will, now orders a gentleman, a captain of dragoons, to march or stand still, and the captain stands still or marches at his command. On the same bourgeois or villager depends the safety of the neighboring chateau, of the large land- owner and his family, of the prelate, and of all the prominent personages of the district. in order that they may be out of harm’s way he must protect them; they will be pillaged if, in case of insurrection, he does not send troops and the National Guard to their assistance. It is he who, lending or refusing public force to the collection of their rents, gives them or deprives them of the means of living. He accordingly rules, and on the sole condition of ruling according to the wishes of his equals, the vociferous multitude, the restless, dominant mob which has elected him. – In the towns, especially, and notably in the large towns, the contrast between what he was and what he is immense, since to the plenitude of his power is added the extent of his jurisdiction. Judge of the effect on his brain in cities like those of Marseilles, Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen and Lyons, where he holds in his hand the lives and property of eighty or a hundred thousand men. And the more as, amid the municipal officers of the towns, three-quarters of them, prosecutors or lawyers, are imbued with the new dogmas, and are persuaded that in themselves alone, the directly elected of the people, is vested all legitimate authority. Bewildered by their recent elevation, distrustful as upstarts, in revolt against all ancient or rival powers, they are additionally alarmed by their imagination and ignorance, their minds being vaguely disturbed by the contrast between their role in the past and their present role: anxious on their own account, they find no security but in abuse and use of power. The municipalities, on the strength of the reports emanating from the coffee-houses, decide that the ministry are traitors. With an obstinacy of conviction and a boldness of presumption alike extraordinary, they believe that they have the right to act without and against their orders, and against the orders of the National Assembly itself, as if, in the now disintegrated France, each municipality constituted the nation.
Thus, if the armed force of the country is now obedient to any body, it is to them and to them alone, and not only the National Guard, but also the regular troops which, placed under the orders of municipalities by a decree of the National Assembly,[17] will comply with no other. Military commanders in the provinces, after September, 1787, declare themselves powerless; when they and the municipality give orders, it is only those of the municipality which the troops recognize. “However pressing may be the necessity for moving the troops where their presence is required, they are stopped by the resistance of the village committee.”[18] “Without any reasonable motive,” writes the commander of the forces in Brittany, “Vannes and Auray made opposition to the detachment which I thought it prudent to send to Belle-Ile, to replace another one . . . The Government cannot move without encountering obstacles. . . . The Minister of War no longer has the direction of the army. . . . No orders are executed. . . Every one wants to command, and no one to obey. . . How could the King, the Government, or the Minister of War send troops where they are wanted if the towns believe that they have the right to countermand the orders given to the regiments and change their destination? “-And it is still worse, for, “on the false supposition of brigands and conspiracies which do not exist,[19] the towns and villages make demands on me for arms and even cannon. . . The whole of Brittany will soon be in a frightful belligerent state on this account, for, having no real enemies, they will turn their arms against each other.” – This is of no consequence. The panic is an “epidemic.” People are determined to believe in “brigands and enemies.” At Nantes, the assertion is constantly repeated that the Spaniards are going to land, that the French regiments are going to make an attack, that an army of brigands is approaching, that the castle is threatened, that it is threatening, and that it contains too many engines of war. The commandant of the province writes in vain to the mayor to reassure him, and to explain to him that “the municipality, being master of the chateau, is likewise master of its magazine. Why then should it entertain fear about that which is in its own possession? Why should any surprise be manifested at an arsenal containing arms and gunpowder? ” – Nothing is of any effect. The chateau is invaded; two hundred workmen set to work to demolish the fortifications; they listen only to their fears, and cannot exercise too great precaution. However inoffensive the citadels may be, they are held to be dangerous; however accommodating the commanders may be, they are regarded with suspicion. The people chafe against the bridle, relaxed and slack as it is. It is broken and cast aside, that it may not be used again when occasion requires. Each municipal body, each company of the National Guard, wants to reign on its own plot of ground out of the way of any foreign control; and this is what is called liberty. Its adversary, therefore, is the central power. This must be disarmed for fear that it may interpose. On all sides, with a sure and persistent instinct, through the capture of fortresses, the pillage of arsenals, the seduction of the soldiery, and the expulsion of generals, the municipality ensures its omnipotence by guaranteeing itself beforehand against all repression.
At Brest the municipal authorities insist that a naval officer shall be surrendered to the people, and on the refusal of the King’s lieutenant to give him up, the permanent committee orders the National Guard to load its guns.[20] At Nantes the municipal body refuses to recognize M. d’Hervilly, sent to take command of a camp, and the towns of the province write to declare that they will suffer no other than the federated troops on their territory. At Lille the permanent committee insists that the military authorities shall place the keys of the town in its keeping every evening, and, a few months after this, the National Guard, joined by mutinous soldiers, seize the citadel and the person of Livarot, its commander. At Toulon the commander of the arsenal, M. de Rioms, and several naval officers, are put in the dungeon. At Montpellier the citadel is surprised, and the club writes to the National Assembly to demand its demolition. At Valence, the commandant, M. de Voisin, on taking measures of defense, is massacred, and henceforth the municipality issues all orders to the garrison. At Bastia, Colonel de Rully falls under a shower of bullets, and the National Guard takes possession of the citadel and the powder magazine. These are not passing outbursts: at the end of two years the same insubordinate spirit is apparent everywhere.[21] In vain do the commissioners of the National Assembly seek to transfer the Nassau regiment from Metz. Sedan refuses to receive it; while Thionville declares that, if it comes, she will blow up the bridges, and Sarrebuis threatens, if it approaches, that it will open fire on it. At Caen neither the municipality nor the directory dares enforce the law which assigns the castle to the troops of the line; the National Guard refuses to leave it, and forbids the director of the artillery to inspect the munitions. – In this state of things a Government subsists in name but not in fact, for it no longer possesses the means of enforcing obedience. Each commune arrogates to itself the right of suspending or preventing the execution of the simplest and most urgent orders. Arnay-le-Duc, in spite of passports and legal injunctions, persists in retaining Mesdames; Arcis-sur-Aube retains Necker, and Montigny is about to retain M. Caillard, Ambassador of France.[22] – In the month of June, 1791, a convoy of eighty thousand crowns of six livres sets out from Paris for Switzerland; this is a repayment by the French Government to that of Soleure; the date of payment is fixed, the itinerary marked out; all the necessary documents are provided; it is important that it should arrive on the day when the bill falls due. But they have counted without the municipalities and the National Guards. Arrested at Bar-sur-Aube, it is only at the end of a month, and on a decree of the National Assembly, that the convoy can resume. its march. At Belfort it is seized again, and it still remains there in the month of November. In vain has the directory of the Bas-Rhin ordered its release; the Belfort municipality paid no attention to the order. In vain the same directory dispatches a commissioner, who is near being cut to pieces. The personal interference of General Luckner, with the strong arm, is necessary, before the convoy can pass the frontier, after five months of delay.[23] In the month of July 1791, a French vessel on the way from Rouen to Caudebec, said to be loaded with kegs of gold and silver, is stopped. On the examination being made, it has a right to leave; its papers are all correct, and the department enjoins the district to respect the law. The district, however, replies that it is impossible, since “all the municipalities on the banks of the Seine have armed and are awaiting the passing of the vessel,” and the National Assembly itself is obliged to pass a decree that the vessel shall be discharged.
If the rebellion of the small communes is of this stamp, what must be that of the larger ones?[24] The departments and districts summon the municipality in vain; it disobeys or pays no attention to the summons.
“Since the session began,” writes the directory of Saône-et-Loire; “the municipality of Maçon has taken no step in relation to us which has not been an encroachment. It has not uttered a word, which has not been an insult. It has not entered upon a deliberation which has not been an outrage.”
“If the regiment of Aunis is not ordered here immediately,” writes the directory of Calvados, “if prompt and efficient measures are not taken to provide us with an armed force, we shall abandon a post which we can not longer hold due to insubordination, license, contempt for all the authorities. We shall in this case be unable to perform the duties which were imposed upon us.”
The directory of the Bouches-du-Rhone, on being attacked, flies before the bayonets of Marseilles. The members of the directory of Gers, in conflict with the municipality of Auch, are almost beaten to death. As to the ministers, who are distrusted by virtue of their office, they are still less respected than the directories, They are constantly denounced to the Assembly, while the municipalities send back their dispatches without deigning to open them,[25] and, towards the end of 1791, their increasing powerlessness ends in complete annihilation. We can judge of this by one example. In the month of December 1791, Limoges is not allowed to carry away the grain, which it had just purchased in Indre, a force of sixty horsemen being necessary to protect its transportation. The directory of Indre at once calls upon the ministers to furnish them with this small troop.[26] After trying for three weeks, the minister replies that it is out of his power; he has knocked at all doors in vain. “I have pointed out one way,” he says, “to the deputies of your department in the National Assembly, namely, to withdraw the 20th regiment of cavalry from Orleans, and I have recommended them to broach the matter to the deputies of Loiret.” The answer is still delayed: the deputies of the two departments have to come to an agreement, for, otherwise, the minister dares not displace sixty men to protect a convoy of grain. It is plain enough that there is no longer any executive power. There is no longer a central authority. There is no longer a France, but merely so many disintegrated and independent communes, like Orleans and Limoges, which, through their representatives, carry on negotiations with each other, one to secure itself from a deficiency of troops, and the other to secure itself from a want of bread.
Let us consider this general dissolution on the spot, and take up a case in detail. On the 18th of January 1790, the new municipal authorities of Marseilles enter upon their duties. As is generally the case, the majority of the electors have had nothing to do with the balloting. The mayor, Martin, having been elected by only an eighth of the active citizens.[27] If, however, the dominant minority is a small one, it is resolute and not inclined to stop at trifles. “Scarcely is it organized,”[28] when it sends deputies to the King to have him withdraw his troops from Marseilles. The King, always weak and accommodating, finally consents; and, the orders to march being prepared, the municipality is duly advised of them. But the municipality will tolerate no delay, and immediately “draws up, prints, and issues a denunciation to the National Assembly” against the commandant and the two ministers who, according to it, are guilty of having forged or suppressed the King’s orders. In the meantime it equips and fortifies itself as for a combat. At its first establishment the municipality broke up the bourgeois guard, which was too great a lover of order, and organized a National Guard, in which those who have no property are soon to be admitted. “Daily additions are made to its military apparatus;[29] entrenchments and barricades at the Hôtel-de-Ville, are increasing, the artillery is increased; the town is filled with the excitement of a military camp in the immediate presence of an enemy.” Thus, in possession of force, it makes use of it, and in the first place against justice. — A popular insurrection had been suppressed in the month of August 1789, and the three principal leaders, Rebecqui, Pascal, and Granet, had been imprisoned in the Chateau d’If. They are the friends of the municipal authorities, and they must be set free. At the demand of this body the affair is taken out of the hands of the grand-prévôt and put into those of the sénéchaussée, the former, meanwhile, together with his councilors, undergoing punishment for having performed their duty. The municipality, on its own authority, forbids them from further exercise of their functions. They are publicly denounced, “threatened with poniards, the scaffold, and every species of assassination.” [30] No printer dares publish their defense, for fear of “municipal annoyances.” It is not long before the royal procureur and a councillor are reduced to seeking refuge in Fort Saint-Jean, while the grand-prévôt after having resisted a little longer, leaves Marseilles in order to save his life. As to the three imprisoned men, the municipal authorities visit them in a body and demand their provisional release. One of them having made his escape, they refuse to give the commandant the order for his re-arrest. The other two triumphantly leave the chateau on the 11th of April, escorted by eight hundred National Guards. They go, for form’s sake, to the prisons of the sénéchaussée but the next day are set at liberty, and further prosecution ceases. As an offset to this, M. d’Ambert, colonel in the Royal Marine, guilty of expressing himself too warmly against the National Guard, although acquitted by the tribunal before which he was brought, can be set at liberty only in secret and under the protection of two thousand soldiers. The populace want to burn the house of the criminal lieutenant that dared absolve him. The magistrate himself is in danger, and is forced to take refuge in the house of the military commander.[31] Meanwhile, printed and written papers, insulting libels by the municipal body and the club, the seditious or violent discussions of the district assemblies, and a lot of pamphlets, are freely distributed among the people and the soldiers: the latter are purposely stirred up in advance against their chiefs. – – In vain are the officers mild, conciliatory, and cautious. In vain does the commander-in-chief depart with a portion of the troops. The object now is to dislodge the regiment occupying the three forts. The club sets the ball in motion, and, forcibly or otherwise, the will of the people must be carried out. On the 29th of April, two actors, supported by fifty volunteers, surprise a sentinel and get possession of Notre-Dame de la Garde. On the same day, six thousand National Guards invest the forts of Saint-Jean and Saint-Nicolas. The municipal authorities, summoned to respect the fortresses, reply by demanding the opening of the gates to the National Guard, that it may do duty jointly with the soldiers. The commandants hesitate, refer to the law, and demand time to consult their superiors. A second requisition, more urgent, is made; the commandants are held responsible for the disturbances they provoke by their refusal. If they resist they are declared promoters of civil war.[32] They accordingly yield and sign a capitulation. One among them, the Chevalier de Beausset, major in Fort Saint-Jean, is opposed to this, and refuses his signature. On the following day he is seized as he is about to enter the Hôtel-de-Ville, and massacred, his head being borne about on the end of a pike, while the band of assassins, the soldiers, and the rabble dance about and shout over his remains. – ” It is a sad accident,” writes the municipality.[33] How does it happen that, “after having thus far merited and obtained all praise, a Beausset, whom we were unable to protect against the decrees of Providence, should sully our laurels? Having had nothing to do with this tragic affair, it is not for us to prosecute the authors of it.” Moreover, he was “culpable . . .. rebellious, condemned by public opinion, and Providence itself seems to have abandoned him to the irrevocable decrees of its vengeance.” – As to the taking of the forts, nothing is more legitimate. “These places were in the hands of the enemies of the State, while now they are in the hands of the defenders of the Constitution of the empire. Woe to whoever would take them from us again, to convert them into a focus of counter-revolution ” – M. de Miran, commandant of the province, has, it is true, made a demand for them. But, “is it not somewhat pitiable to see the requisition of a Sieur de Miran, made in the name of the King he betrays, to surrender to his Majesty’s troops places which, henceforth in our hands, guarantee public security to the nation, to the law, and to the King?” In vain does the King, at the request of the National Assembly,[34] order the municipality to restore the forts to the commandants, and to make the National Guards leave them. The municipal authorities become indignant, and resist. According to them the wrong is all on the side of the commandant and the ministers. It is the commandants who, “with the threatening equipment of their citadels, their stores of provisions and of artillery, are disturbers of the public peace. What does the minister mean by driving the national troops out of the forts, in order to entrust their guardianship to foreign troops? His object is apparent in this plan . . . . he wants to kindle civil war.” – “All the misfortunes of Marseilles originate in the secret under-standing existing between the ministers and the enemies of the State.” The municipal corps is at last obliged to evacuate the forts, but it is determined not to give them up. The day following that on which it receives the decree of the National Assembly, it conceives the design of demolishing them. On the 17th of May, two hundred laborers, paid in advance, begin the work of destruction. To save appearances the municipal body betakes itself at eleven o’clock in the morning to the different localities, and orders them to stop. But, on its departure, the laborers keep on; and, at six o’clock in the evening, a resolution is passed that, “to prevent the entire demolition of the citadel, it is deemed advisable to authorize only that of the part overlooking the town.” On the 18th of May the Jacobin club, at once agent, accomplice, and councilor of the municipal body, compels private individuals to contribute something towards defraying the expenses of the demolition. It “sends round to every house, and to the syndics of all corporations, exacting their quotas, and making all citizens subscribe a document by which they appear to sanction the action of the municipal body, and to express their thanks to it. People had to sign it, pay, and keep silent. Woe to any one that refused !” On the 20th of May the municipal body presumes to write to the Assembly, that “this threatening citadel, this odious monument of a stupendous despotism, is about to disappear.” To justify its disobedience, it takes occasion to remark, “that the love of country is the most powerful and most enduring of an empire’s ramparts.” On the 28th of May it secures the performance in two theaters of a piece representing the capture of the forts of Marseilles, for the benefit of the men engaged in their demolition. Meanwhile, it has summoned the Paris Jacobins to its support; it has proposed to invite the Lyons federation and all the municipalities of the kingdom to denounce the minister. It has forced M. de Miran, threatened with death and watched by a party in ambush on the road, to quit Aix, and then demands his recall.[35] Only on the 6th of June does it decide, at the express command of the National Assembly, to suspend the almost completed demolition. – ?Authorities to which obedience is due could not be treated more insolently. The end, however, is attained; there is no longer a citadel, and the troops have departed; the regiment commanded by Ernest alone remains, to be tampered with, insulted, and then sent off. It is ordered to Aix, and the National Guard of Marseilles will go there to disarm and disband it. Henceforth the municipal body has full sway. It “observes only those laws which suit it, makes others to its own liking, and, in short, governs in the most despotic and arbitrary manner.”[36] And not only at Marseilles, but throughout the department where, under no authority but its own, it undertakes armed expeditions and makes raids and sudden attacks.
III.
Independent Assemblies. – Why they took the initiative. – The people in council. – Powerlessness of the municipalities. – the violence to which they are subject. – Aix in 1790. – Government disobeyed and perverted everywhere.
Were it but possible for the dissolution to stop here! But each commune is far from being a tranquil little state under the rule of a body of respected magistrates. The same causes which render municipalities rebellious against the central authority render individuals rebellious against local authority. They also feel that they are in danger and want to provide for their own safety. They also, in virtue of the Constitution and of circumstances, believe themselves appointed to save the country. They also consider themselves qualified to judge for themselves on all points and entitled to carry out their judgments with their own hands. The shopkeeper, workman or peasant, at once elector and National Guard, furnished with his vote and a musket, suddenly becomes the equal and master of his superiors; instead of obeying, he commands, while all who see him again after some years’ absence, find that “in his demeanor and manner all is changed.” “There was great agitation everywhere,”[37] says M. de Ségur; “I noticed groups of men talking earnestly in the streets and on the squares. The sound of the drum struck my ear in the villages, while I was astonished at the great number of armed men I encountered in the little towns. On interrogating various persons among the lower classes they would reply with a proud look and in a bold and confident tone. I observed everywhere the effect of those sentiments of equality and liberty which had then become such violent passions.” – Thus exalted in their own eyes they believed themselves qualified to take the lead in everything, not only in local affairs, but also in general matters. France is to be governed by them; by virtue of the Constitution they arrogate to themselves the right, and, by dint of ignorance, attribute to themselves the capacity, to govern it. A torrent of new, shapeless, and disproportionate ideas have taken possession of their brains in the space of a few months. Vast interests about which they have never thought, have to be considered. Government, royalty, the church, creeds, foreign powers, internal and external dangers, what is occurring at Paris and at Coblentz, the insurrection in the Low Countries, the acts of the cabinets of London, Vienna, Madrid, Berlin; and, of all this, they inform themselves as they best can. An officer,[38] who traverses France at this time, narrates that at the post-stations they made him wait for horses until he had “given them details. The peasants stopped my carriage in the middle of the road and overwhelmed me with questions. At Autun, I was obliged, in spite of the cold, to talk out of a window opening upon the square and tell what I knew about the Assembly.” – These on-dits are all changed and amplified in passing from mouth to mouth. They finally become circumstantial stories adapted to the caliber of the minds they pass into and to the dominant passion that propagates them. Trace the effect of these fables in the house of a peasant or fish-woman in an outlying village or a populous suburb, on brutish or almost brutal minds, especially when they are lively, heated, and over-excited – the effect is tremendous. For, in minds of this stamp, belief is at once converted into action, and into rude and destructive action. It is an acquired self-control, reflection, and culture which interposes between belief and action the solicitude for social interests, the observance of forms and respect for the law. These restraints are all wanting in the new sovereign. He does not know how to stop and will not suffer himself to be stopped. Why so many delays when the peril is urgent? What is the use of observing formalities when the safety of the people is at stake? What is there sacred in the law when it protects public enemies? What is more pernicious than passive deference and patient waiting under timid or blind officials? What can be more just than to do one’s self justice at once and on the spot? – Precipitation and passion, in their eyes, are both duties and merits. One day “the militia of Lorient decide upon marching to Versailles and to Paris without considering how they are to get over the ground or what they will do on their arrival.”[39] Were the central government within reach they would lay their hands on it. In default of this they substitute themselves for it on their own territory, and exercise its functions with a full conviction of right, principally those of gendarme, judge, and executioner.
During the month of October, 1789, at Paris, after the assassination of the baker François, the leading murderer, who is a porter at the grain depot, declares “that he wanted to avenge the nation.” It is quite probable that this declaration is sincere. In his mind, assassination is one of the forms of patriotism, and it does not take long for his way of thinking to become prevalent. In ordinary times, social and political ideas slumber in uncultured minds in the shape of vague antipathies, restrained aspirations, and fleeting desires. Behold them aroused – energetic, imperious, stubborn, and unbridled. Objection or opposition is not to be tolerated; dissent, with them, is a sure sign of treachery. – Apropos of the nonjuring priests,[40] five hundred and twenty-seven of the National Guards of Arras write, “that no one could doubt their iniquity without being suspected of being their accomplices. . . . Should the whole town combine and express a contrary opinion, it would simply show that it is filled with enemies of the Constitution;” and forthwith, in spite of the law and the remonstrances of the authorities, they insist on the closing of the churches. At Boulogne-sur-Mer, an English vessel having shipped a quantity of poultry, game, and eggs, “the National Guards, of their own authority,” go on board and remove the cargo. On the strength of this, the accommodating municipal body approves of the act, declares the cargo confiscated, orders it to be sold, and awards one-half of the proceeds to the National Guards and the other half to charitable purposes. The concession is a vain one, for the National Guards consider that one- half is too little, “insult and threaten the municipal officers,” and immediately proceed to divide the booty in kind, each one going home with a share of stolen hams and chickens.[41] The magistrates must necessarily keep quiet with the guns of those they govern pointed at them. – Sometimes, and it is generally the case, they are timid, and do not try to resist. At Douai,[42] the municipal officers, on being summoned three times to proclaim martial law, refuse, and end by avowing that they dare not unfold the red flag: “Were we to take this course we should all be sacrificed on the spot.” Neither the troops nor the National Guards, in fact, are to be relied on. In this universal state of apathy the field is open to savages, and a dealer in wheat is hung. – Sometimes the administrative corps tries to resist, but in the end it has to succumb to violence. “For more than six hours,” writes one of the members of the district of Etampes,[43] “we were closed in by bayonets leveled at us and with pistols at our breasts ; and they were obliged to sign a dismissal of the troops which had arrived to protect the market. At present “we are all away from Etampes; there is no longer a district or a municipality;” almost all have handed in their resignations, or are to return for that purpose. – Sometimes, and this is the rarest case,[44] the officials do their duty to the end, and perish. In this same town, six months later, Simoneau, the mayor, having refused to cut down the price of wheat, is beaten with iron-pointed sticks, and his corpse is riddled with balls by the murderers. – Municipal bodies must take heed how they undertake to stem the torrent; the, slightest opposition will soon be at the expense of their lives. In Touraine,[45] “as the publication of the tax-rolls takes place, riots break out against the municipal authorities; they are forced to surrender the rolls they have drawn up, and their papers are torn up.” And still more, “they kill, they assassinate the municipal authorities.” In that large commune men and women “beat and kick them with their fists and sabots. . . . The mayor is laid up after it, and the procureur of the commune died between nine and ten o’clock in the morning. Véteau, a municipal officer, received the last sacrament this morning ;” the rest have fled, being constantly threatened with death and incendiarism. They do not, consequently, return, and “no one now will take the office of either mayor or administrator.” – The outrages which the municipalities thus commit against their superiors are committed against themselves. The National Guards, the mob, the controlling faction, arrogating to themselves in the commune the same violent sovereignty which the commune pretends to exercise against the State.
I should never finish if I undertook to enumerate the outbreaks in which the magistrates are constrained to tolerate or to sanction popular usurpations, to shut up churches, to drive off or imprison priests, to suppress octrois, tax grain, and allow clerks; bakers, corn-dealers, ecclesiastics, nobles, and officers to be hung, beaten to death, or to have their throats cut. Ninety-four thick files of records in the national archives are filled with these acts of violence, and do not contain two-thirds of them. It is worth while to take in detail one case more, a special one, and one that is authentic, which serves as a specimen, and which presents a foreshortened image of France during one tranquil year. At Aix, in the month of December, 1790,[46] in Opposition to the two Jacobin clubs, a club had been organized, had complied with all the formalities, and, like the ” Club des Monarchiens” at Paris, claimed the same right of meeting as the others. But here, as at Paris, the Jacobins recognize no rights but for themselves alone, and refuse to admit their adversaries to the privileges of the law. Moreover, alarming rumors are circulated. A person who has arrived from Nice states that he had “heard that there were twenty thousand men between Turin and Nice, under the pay of the emigrants, and that at Nice a neuvaine[47] was held in Saint François-de-Paule to pray God to enlighten the French.” A counter-revolution is certainly under way. Some of the aristocrats have stated “with an air of triumph, that the National Guard and municipalities are a mere toy, and that this sort of thing will not last long.” One of the leading members of the new club, M. de Guiraitiand, an old officer of seventy-eight years, makes speeches in public against the National Assembly, tries to enlist artisans in his party, “affects to wear a white button on his hat fastened by pins with their points jutting out,” and, as it is stated, he has given to several mercers a large order for white cockades. In reality, on examination, not one is found in any shop, and all the dealers in ribbons, on being interrogated, reply that they know of no transaction of that description. But this simply proves that the culprit is a clever dissimulator, and the more dangerous because he is eager to save the country. – On the 12th of December, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the two Jacobin clubs fraternise, and pass in long procession before the place of meeting, “where some of the members, a few officers of the Lyons regiment and other individuals, are quietly engaged at play or seeing others play.” The crowd hoot, but they remain quiet. The procession passes by again, and they hoot and shout, “Down with the aristocrats to the lamp post with them! ” Two or three of the officers standing on the threshold of the door become irritated, and one of them, drawing his sword, threatens to strike a young man if he keeps on. Upon this the crowd cries out, “Guard! Help! An assassin!” and rushes at the officer, who withdraws into the house, exclaiming, “To arms!” His comrades, sword in hand, descend in order to defend the door; M. de Guiramand fires two pistol shots and receives a stab in the thigh. A shower of stones smashes in the windows, and the door is on the point of being burst open when several of the members of the club save themselves by taking to the roof. About a dozen others, most of them officers, form in line, penetrate the crowd with uplifted swords, strike and get struck, and escape, five of them being wounded. The municipality orders the doors and windows of the club- house to be walled up, sends the Lyons regiment away, decrees the arrest of seven officers and of M. de Guiramand, and all this in a few hours, with no other testimony than that of the conquerors.
But these prompt, vigorous and partial measures are not sufficient for the Jacobin club; other conspirators must be seized, and it is the club which designates them and goes to take them. – Three months before this, M. Pascalis, an advocate, on addressing along with some of his professional brethren the dissolved parliament, deplored the blindness of the people, “exalted by prerogatives of which they knew not the danger.” A man who dared talk in this way is evidently a traitor. – There is another, M. Morellet de la Roquette, who refused to join the proscribed club. His former vassals, however, had been obliged to bring an action against him to make him accept the redemption of his feudal dues; also, six years before this, his carriage, passing along the public promenade, had run over a child; he likewise is an enemy of the people. While the municipal officers are deliberating, “a few members of the club” get together and decide that M. Pascalis and M. de la Roquette must be arrested. At eleven o’clock at night eighty trustworthy National Guards, led by the president of the club, travel a league off to seize them in their beds and lodge them in the town prison. – Zeal of this kind excites some uneasiness, and if the municipality tolerates the arrests, it is because it is desirous of preventing murder. Consequently, on the following day, December 13th, it sends to Marseilles for four hundred men of the Swiss Guard commanded by Ernest, and four hundred National Guards, adding to these the National Guard of Aix, and orders this company to protect the prison against any violence. But, along with the Marseilles National Guards, there came a lot of armed people who are volunteers of disorder. On the afternoon of the 13th the first mob strives to force the prison, and the next day, fresh squads congregate around it demanding the head of M. Pascalis. The members of the club head the riot with “a crowd of unknown men from outside the town, who give orders and carry them out.” During the night the populace of Aix are tampered with, and the dikes all give way at the same moment. At the first clamors the National Guard on duty on the public promenade disband and disperse, while, as there is no signal for the assemblage of the others, notwithstanding the regulations, the general alarm is not sounded. “The largest portion of the National Guard draws off so as not to appear to authorize by its presence outrages which it has not been ordered to prevent. Peaceable Citizens are in great consternation;” each one takes to flight or shuts himself up in his house, the streets being deserted and silent. Meanwhile the prison gates are shattered with axes. The procureur-syndic of the department, who requests the commandant of the Swiss regiment to protect the prisoners, is seized, borne off, and runs the risk of losing his life. Three municipal officers in their scarves, who arrive on the ground, dare not give the order required by the commandant. At this decisive moment, when it is necessary to shed blood and kill a number of men, they obviously fear to take the responsibility; their reply is, “We have no orders to give.” – An extraordinary spectacle now presents itself in this barrack courtyard surrounding the prison. On the side of the law stand eight hundred armed men, four hundred of the “Swiss” and four hundred of the National Guard of Marseilles. They are drawn up in battle array, with guns to their shoulders, with special orders repeated the evening before at three different times by the municipal district and departmental authorities and they have the sympathies of all honest people and of most of the National Guard. But the legal indispensable phrase does not pass the lips of those who by virtue of the Constitution should utter it, and a small group of convicts are found to be sovereign. — The three municipal officers are seized in their turn under the eyes of their own soldiers who remain motionless, and “with bayonets at their breasts they sign, under constraint, the order to give up M. Pascalis to the people.” M. de la Roquette is likewise surrendered. “The only portion of the National Guard of Aix which was visible,” that is to say, the Jacobin minority, form a circle around the gate of the prison and organize themselves into a council of war. And there they stand; at once “accusers, witnesses, judges, and executioners.” A captain conducts the two victims to the public promenade where they are hung. Very soon after this old M. de Guiramand, whom the National Guard of his village have brought a prisoner to Aix, is hung in the same manner.
There is no prosecution of the assassins. The new tribunal, frightened or forestalled, has for some time back ranged itself on the popular side; its writs, consequently, are served on the oppressed, against the members of the assaulted dub. Writs of arrest, summonses to attend court, searches, seizures of correspondence, and other proceedings, rain down upon them. Three hundred witnesses are examined. Some of the arrested officers are “loaded with chains and thrust into dungeons.” Henceforth the club rules, and “makes everybody tremble.”[48] “From the 23rd to the 27th of December, more than ten thousand passports are delivered at Aix.” “If the emigrations continue,” write the commissioners, “there will be no one left at Aix but workmen without work and with no resources. Whole streets are uninhabited. . . . . As long as such crimes can be permitted with impunity fear will drive out of this town every one who has the means of living elsewhere.” – ?Many come back after the arrival of the commissioners, hoping to obtain justice and security through them. But, “if a prosecution is not ordered, we shall scarcely have departed from Aix when three or four hundred families will abandon it. . . . And what man in his senses would dare guarantee that each village will not soon have some one hung in it? . . . Country valets arrest their masters. . . . The expectation of impunity leads the inhabitants of villages to commit all sorts of depredations in the forests, which is very harmful in a region where woods are very scarce. They set up the most absurd and most unjust pretensions against rich proprietors, and the fatal rope is ever the interpreter and the signal of their will.” There is no refuge against these outrages. “The department, the districts, the municipalities, administer only in conformity with the multiplied petitions of the club.” In the sight of all, and on one solemn day, a crushing defeat has demonstrated the weakness of the government officials; and, bowed beneath the yoke of their new masters, they preserve their legal authority only on the condition that it remains at the service of the victorious party.
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Notes:
[1] Festivals approving the federation of all the National Guards in France. (SR.)
[2] See the address of the commune of Paris, June 5, 1790. “Let the most touching of all utterances be heard on this day (the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille), Frenchmen, we are brothers! Yes, brothers, freemen and with a country!” Roux et Buchez, VI. 275.
[3] Buchez and Roux, IV. 3, 309; V. 123; VI. 274, 399. – Duvergier, Collection of Laws and Decrees. Decree of June 8 and 9, 1790.
[4] For one who, like myself, has lived for years among the Moslems, the 5 daily ritual prayers all performed while turned towards Mecca, this description of the French taking of the oath, has something familiar in it. (SR.)
[5] Michelet, “Histoire de la Révolution Française,” II, 470, 474.
[6] De Ferrières, II. 91. – Albert Babeau, I. 340. (Letter addressed to the Chevalier de Poterat, July 18, 1790.) – De Dampmartin, “Evénements qui se sont passés sous mes yeux,”etc., 155.
[7] One may imagine the impression Taine’s description made upon the thousands of political science students and others in the years after this book was printed and widely sold all over Europe. (SR.)
[8] Sauzay, I. 202.
[9] Albert Babeau, ib. I, 339 – De Ferrières, II, 92.
[10] “Archives Nationales,” H. 1453, Correspondence of M. de Bercheney, May 23, 1790.
[11] “Archives Nationales,” ibid, May 13, 1790. “M. de la Rifaudière was dragged from his carriage and brought to the guard- house, which was immediately filled with people, shouting, ‘To the lamp post, the aristocrat!’ – The fact is this: after his having repeatedly shouted Vive le Roi et la Nation! They wanted him to shout Vive la Nation! alone, upon which he gave Vive la Nation tant qu’elle pourra.” – At Blois, on the day of the Federation, a mob promenades the streets with a wooden head covered with a wig, and a placard stating that the aristocrats must be decapitated.
[12] Might Freud ( 1856- 1939) have been inspired, directly or indirectly, by Taine’s observation? ‘La Révolution’ vol. I, was published in 1877 when Freud was 21 years old!! (SR.)
[13] Mercure de France, the articles by Mallet du Pan (June 18th and August 16, 1791; April 14, 1792).
[14] Moniteur, IV. 560. (sitting of June 5, 1790) report of M. Freteau. “These facts are attested by fifty witnesses.” – Cf. The number of April 19, 1791.
[15] Solon was a famous legislator who reformed Athens some 2500 years ago. (SR.)
[16] “Archives Nationales,” KK, 1105, Correspondence of M. de Thiard, military commandant in Brittany (September, 1789), “There are in every petty village three conflicting powers, the présidial, the bourgeois militia, and the permanent committee. Each is anxious to outrank the other, and, on this occasion, a scene happened to come under my eyes at Landivisiau which might have had a bloody termination, but which turned out to be simply ridiculous. A lively dispute arose between three speakers to determine which should make the first address. They appealed to me to decide. Not to offend either of the parties, I decided that all three should speak at the same time; which decision was immediately carried out.
[17] Decree of August 10-14, 1789.
[18] “Archives Nationales,” KK, 1105. Correspondence of M. de Thiard, September 21, 1789. “The troops now obey the municipalities only.” — Also July 30th, August 11, 1790.
[19] “Archives Nationales,” KK, 1105. Correspondence of 31. M. de Thiard, September 11 and 25, November 20, December 25 and 30, 1789.
[20] Buchez and Roux, V.304 (April, 1790). – “Archives Nationales,” Papers of the committee of Investigation, DXXIX. I (note of M. Latour-du-Pin, October 28, 1789) – ? Buchez and Roux, IV. 3 (December 1, 1789); IV. 390 (February, 1790); VI. 179 (April and May, 1790).
[21] Mercure de France, Report of M. Emery, sitting of July 21, 1790, Number for July 32. — “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3200. Letter of the directory of Calvados, September 26 and October 20, 1791.
[22] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3207. Letter of the minister Dumouriez, June 15, 1792. Report of M. Caillard, May 29, 1792.
[23] Mercure de France, No. for July, 1791 (sitting of the 6th); Nos. for November 5 and 26, 1791.
[24] Albert Babeau, “Histoire de Troyes,” vol. I. passim. — ” Archives Nationales,” F7, 3257. Address of the Directory of Saône- et-Loire to the National Assembly, November 1, 1790. — F7, 3200. Letter of the Directory of Calvados, November 9, 1791. — F 7, 3195. Minutes of the meeting of the municipality of Aix, March 1, 1792 (on the events of February 26th); letter of M. Villard, President of the Directory, March 20, 1792. — F7, 3220. Extracts from the deliberations of the Directory of Gers, and a letter to the King, January 28, 1792. Letter of M. Lafitau, President of the Directory, January 30. (He was dragged along by his hair and obliged to leave the town.)
[25] Mercure de France, No. for October 30, 1790.
[26] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3226. Letter of the directory of Indre to M. Cahier, minister, December 6, 1791. — Letter of M. Delessart, minister, to the directory of Indre, December 31, 1791.
[27] Fabre, “Histoire de Marseille,” II. 442. Martin had but 3,555 votes, when shortly after the National Guard numbered 24,000 men.
[28] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Letter of the minister, M. de Saint-Priest, to the President of the National Assembly, May 11, 1790.
[29] “Archives Nationales,” F7 3196. Letters of the military commandant, M. de Miran, March 6, 14, 30, 1790.
[30] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Letter of M. de Bournissac, grand-privot, March 6,1790.
[31] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Letters of M. du Miran, April 11th and 16th, and May 1, 1790.
[32] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Procés-verbal of events on the 30th of April.
[33] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Letters of the Municipality of Marseilles to the National Assembly, May 5 and 20, 1790.
[34] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Order of the king, May10. Letter of M. de Saint-Priest to the National Assembly, May 11. Decree of the National Assembly, May 12. Letter of the Municipality to the King. May 20. Letter of M. de Rubum, May 20. Note sent from Marseilles, May 31. Address of the Municipality to the President of the Friends of the Constitution, at Paris, May 5. In his narration of the taking of the forts we read the following sentence: “We arrived without hindrance in the presence of the commandant, whom we brought to an agreement by means of the influence which force, fear and reason give to persuasion.”
[35] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196, Letter of M. de Miran, May 5. — The spirit of the ruling party at Marseilles is indicated by several printed documents joined to the dossier, and, among others, by a “Requéte à Desmoulins, procureur-général de la Lanterne.” It relates to a “patriotic inkstand,” recently made out of the stones of the demolished citadel, representing a hydra with four heads, symbolizing the nobility, the clergy, the ministry and the judges. “It is from the four patriotic skulls of the hydra that the ink of proscription will he taken for the enemies of the Constitution. This inkstand, cut out of the first stone that fell in the demolition of Fort Saint-Nicolas, is dedicated to the patriotic Assembly of Marseilles. The magic art of the hero of the liberty of Marseilles, that Renaud who, under the mask of devotion, surprised the watchful sentinel of Notre-Dame de la Garde, and whose manly courage and cunning ensured the conquest of that key of the great focus of counter-revolution, has just given birth to a new trait of genius a new Deucalion, he personifies this stone which Liberty has flung from the summit of our menacing Bastilles, etc.”
[36] “Archives Nationales,” F7. 3198. Letters of the royal commissioners, April 13 and 5, 1791.
[37] De Ségur, “Memoires,” III, 482 (early in 1790).
[38] De Dampmartin, I. 184 (January, 1791).
[39] “Archives Nationales,” KK, 1105. Correspondence of M. de Thiard (October 12, 1789).
[40] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3250. Minutes from the meeting of the directory of the department. March 28, 1792. “As the ferment was at the highest point and fears were entertained that greater evils would follow, M. le Président, with painful emotion declared that he yielded and passed the unconstitutional act.” Reply of the minister, June 23: ” If the constituted authorities are thus forced to yield to the arbitrary will of a wild multitude, government no longer exists and we are in the saddest stage of anarchy. If you think it best I will propose to the King to reverse your last decision.”
[41] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3250. Letter of M. Duport, minister of justice, December 24, 1791.
[42] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3248, Report of the members of the department, finished March 18, 1792. — Buchez and Roux, IX. 240 (Report of M. Alquier).
[43] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3268. Extract from the deliberations of the directory of Seine-et-Oise, with the documents relating to the insurrection at Etampes, September 16, 1791. Letter of M. Venard, administrator of the district, September 20 — ” I shall not set foot in Etampes until the re-establishment of order and tranquility, and the first thing I shall do will be to record my resignation in the register. I am tired of making sacrifices, for ungrateful wretches.”
[44] Moniteur, March 16, 1792. — Mortimer-Ternaux, “Histoire de la Terreur” (Proceedings against the assassins of Simoneau), I. 381.
[45] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3226. Letter and memorandum of Chenantin, cultivator, November 7, 1792. Extract from the deliberations of the directory of Langeais, November 5, 1792 (sedition at Chapelle-Blanche, near Langeais, October 5, 1792).
[46] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3105. Report of the commissioners sent by the National Assembly and the King, February 23, 1791. (On the events of December 12 and 14, 1790) — Mercure de France, February 29, 5791. (Letters from Aix, and notably a letter from seven officers shut up in prison at Aix, January 30, 1791.) The oldest Jacobin Club formed in February, 1790, was entitled “(Club des vrais amis de la Constitution.” The second Jacobin club, formed in October, 1790, was “composed from the beginning of artisans and laborers from the faubourgs and suburbs.” Its title was” Société des frères anti-politiques,” or “frères vrais, justes et utiles à la patrie.” The opposition club, formed in December, 1790, bore the title, according to some, of “Les Amis du Roi, de la paix et de la religion;” according to others, “Les amis de la paix;” and finally, according to another report, “Les Défenseurs de la religion, des personnes et des proprietés.”
[47] A special series of religious services. (TR)
[48] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3195. Letters of the commissioners, March 20, February 11, May 10, 1791.
CHAPTER II. SOVEREIGNTY OF UNRESTRAINED PASSIONS.
Under these conditions when passions are freed; any determined and competent man who can gather a couple of hundred men may form a band and slip through the enlarged or weakened meshes of the net held by the passive or ineffective government. An experiment on a grand scale is about to be made on human society; owing to the slackening of the regular restraints which have maintained it, it is now possible to measure the force of the permanent instincts which attack it. They are always there even in ordinary times; we do not notice them because they are kept in check; but they are not the less energetic and effective, and, moreover, indestructible. The moment their repression ceases, their power of mischief becomes evident; just as that of the water which floats a ship, but which, at the first leak enters into it and sinks it.
I.
Old Religious Grudges – Montauban and Nîmes in 1790.
Religious passions, to begin with, are not to be kept down by federations, embraces, and effusions of fraternity. In the south, where the Protestants have been persecuted for more than a century, hatreds exist more than a century old.[1] In vain have the odious edicts which oppressed them fallen into desuetude for the past twenty years; in vain have civil rights been restored to them since 1787: The past still lives in transmitted recollections; and two groups are confronting each other, one Protestant and the other Catholic, each defiant, hostile, ready to act on the defensive, and interpreting the preparations of its adversary as a plan of attack. Under such circumstances the guns go off of their own accord. – On a sudden alarm at Uzès[2] the Catholics, two thousand in number, take possession of the bishop’s palace and the Hôtel-de-Ville; while the Protestants, numbering four hundred, assemble outside the walls on the esplanade, and pass the night under arms, each troop persuaded that the other is going to massacre it, one party summoning the Catholics of Jalès to its aid, and the other the Protestants of Gardonnenque. – There is but one way of avoiding civil war between parties in such an attitude, and that is the ascendancy of an energetic third party, impartial and on the spot. A plan to this effect, which promises well, is proposed by the military commandant of Languedoc.[3] According to him the two firebrands are, on the one hand, the bishops of Lower Languedoc, and on the other, MM. Rabaut-Saint-Etienne, father and two sons, all three being pastors. Let them be responsible “with their heads” for any mob, insurrection, or attempt to debauch the army; let a tribunal of twelve judges be selected from the municipal bodies of twelve towns, and all delinquents be brought before it; let this be the court of final appeal, and its sentence immediately executed. The system in vogue, however, is just the reverse. Both parties being organized into a body of militia, each takes care of itself, and is sure to fire on the other; and the more readily, inasmuch as the new ecclesiastical regulations, which are issued from month to month, strike like so many hammers on Catholic sensibility, and scatter showers of sparks on the primings of the already loaded guns.
At Montauban, on the 10th of May, 1790, the day of the inventory and expropriation of the religious communities,[4] the commissioners are not allowed to enter. Women in a state of frenzy lie across the thresholds of the doors, and it would be necessary to pass over their bodies; a large mob gathers around the “Cordeliers,” and a petition is signed to have the convents maintained. – The Protestants who witness this commotion become alarmed, and eighty of their National Guards march to the Hôtel-de-Ville, and take forcible possession of the guard-house which protects it. The municipal authorities order them to withdraw, which they refuse to do. Thereupon the Catholics assembled at the “Cordeliers” begin a riot, throw stones, and drive in the doors with pieces of timber, while a cry is heard that the Protestants, who have taken refuge in the guard-house, are firing from the windows. The enraged multitude immediately invade the arsenal, seize all the guns they can lay their hands on, and fire volleys on the guard-house, the effect of which is to kill five of the Protestants and wound twenty-four others. The rest are saved by a municipal officer and the police; but they are obliged to appear, two and two, before the cathedral in their shirts, and do public penance, after which they are put in prison. During the tumult political shouts have been heard: “Hurrah for the nobles! Hurrah for the aristocracy! Down with the nation! Down with the tricolor flag!” Bordeaux, regarding Montauban as in rebellion against France, dispatches fifteen hundred of its National Guard to set the prisoners free. Toulouse gives its aid to Bordeaux. The fermentation is frightful. Four thousand of the Protestants of Montauban take flight; armed cities are about to contend with each other, as formerly in Italy. It is necessary that a commissioner of the National Assembly and of the King, Mathieu Dumas, should be dispatched to harangue the people of Montauban, obtain the release of the prisoners, and re-establish order.
One month after this a more bloody affray takes place at Nîmes[5] against the Catholics. The Protestants, in fact, are but twelve thousand out of fifty-four thousand inhabitants, but the principal trade of the place is in their hands; they hold the manufactories and support thirty thousand workmen; in the elections of 1789 they furnished five out of the eight deputies. The sympathies of that time were in their favor; nobody then imagined that the dominant Church was exposed to any risk. It is to be attacked in its turn, and the two parties are seen confronting each other. – The Catholics sign a petition,[6] hunt up recruits among the market- gardeners of the suburbs, retain the white cockade, and, when this is prohibited, replace it with a red rosette, another sign of recognition. At their head is an energetic man named Froment, who has vast projects in view; but as the soil on which he treads is undermined, he cannot prevent the explosion. It takes place naturally, by chance, through the simple collision of two equally distrustful bodies; and before the final day it has commenced and recommenced twenty times, through mutual provocations and denunciations, through insults, libels, scuffles, stone-throwing, and gun-shots. – On the 13th of June, 1790, the question is which party shall furnish administrators for the district and department, and the conflict begins in relation to the elections. The Electoral Assembly is held at the guard-house of the bishop’s palace, where the Protestant dragoons and patriots have come “three times as many as usual, with loaded muskets and pistols, and with full cartridge- boxes,” and they patrol the surrounding neighborhood. On their side, the red rosettes, royalists and Catholics, complain of being threatened and “treated contemptuously” (nargués). They give notice to the gate-keeper “not to let any dragoon enter the town either on foot or mounted, at the peril of his life,” and declare that “the bishop’s quarters were not made for a guard-house.” – A mob forms, and shouting takes place under the windows; stones are thrown; the bugle of a dragoon, who sounds the roll-call, is broken and two shots are fired.[7] The dragoons immediately fire a volley, which wounds a good many people and kills seven. From this moment, firing goes on during the evening and all night, in every quarter of the town, each party believing that the other wants to exterminate it, the Protestants satisfied that it is another St. Bartholomew, and the Catholics that it is “a Michelade.”[8] There is no one to act between them. The municipality authorities, far from issuing orders, receive them: they are roughly handled, hustled and jostled about, and made to march about like servants. The patriots seize the Abbé de Belmont, a municipal officer, at the Hôtel-de-Ville, order him, on pain of death, to proclaim martial -law, and place the red flag in his hand. “March, rascal, you bastard! Hold up your flag – higher up still – you are big enough to do that!” Blows follow with the but-ends of their muskets. The poor man spits blood, but this is of no consequence; he must be in full sight at the head of the crowd, like a target, whilst his conductors prudently remain behind. Thus does he advance, exposed to bullets, holding the flag, and finally becomes the prisoner of the red rosettes, who release him, but keep his flag. There is a second march with a red flag held by a town valet, and fresh gunshots; the red rosettes capture this flag also, as well as another municipal officer. The rest of the municipal body, with a royal commissioner, take refuge in the barracks and order out the troops. Meanwhile Froment, with his three companies, posted in their towers and in the houses on the ramparts, resist to the last extremity. Daylight comes, the tocsin is sounded, the drums beat to arms, and the patriot militia of the neighborhood, the Protestants from the mountains, the rude Cévenols, arrive in crowds. The red rosettes are besieged; a Capuchin convent, from which it is pretended that they have fired, is sacked, and five of the monks are killed. Froment’s tower is demolished with cannon and taken by assault. His brother is massacred and thrown from the walls, while a Jacobin convent next to the ramparts is sacked. Towards night, all the red rosettes who have fought are slain or have fled, and there is no longer any resistance.– But the fury still lasts; the fifteen thousand rustics who have flooded the town think that they have not yet done enough. In vain are they told that the other fifteen companies of red rosettes have not moved; that the pretended aggressors “did not even put themselves in a state of defense;” that during the battle they remained at home, and that afterwards, through extra precaution, the municipal authorities had made them give up their arms. In vain does the Electoral Assembly, preceded by a white flag, march to the public square and exhort the people to keep the peace. “Under the pretext of searching suspicious houses, they pillage or destroy, and what-ever cannot be carried away is broken.” One hundred and twenty houses are sacked in Nîmes alone, while the same ravages are committed in the environs, the damage, at the end of three days, amounting to seven or eight hundred thousand livres. A number of poor creatures, workmen, merchants, old and infirm men, are massacred in their houses; some, “who have been bedridden for many years, are dragged to the sills of their doors to be shot.” Others are hung on the esplanade and at the Cours Neuf, while others have their noses, ears, feet, and hands cut off; and are hacked to pieces with sabers and scythes. Horrible stories, as is commonly the case, provoke the most atrocious acts.
A publican, who refuses to distribute anti-Catholic lists, is supposed to have a mine in his cellar filled with kegs of gunpowder and with sulfur matches all ready; he is hacked to pieces with a saber, and twenty guns are discharged into his corpse: they expose the body before his house with a long loaf of bread on his breast, and they again stab him with bayonets, saying to him: “Eat, you bastard, eat” – More than five hundred Catholics were assassinated, and many others, covered with blood, “are crowded together in the prisons, while the search for the proscribed is continued; whenever they are seen, they are fired upon like so many wolves.” Thousands of the inhabitants, accordingly, demand their passports and leave the town. The rural Catholics, meanwhile, on their side, massacre six Protestants in the environs – an old man of eighty-two years, a youth of fifteen, and a husband and his wife in their farm-house. In order to put a stop to the murderous acts, the National Guard of Montpellier have to be summoned. But the restoration of order is for the benefit of the victorious party. Three-fifths of the electors have fled; one-third of the district and departmental administrators have been appointed in their absence, and the majority of the new directories is taken from the club of patriots. It is for this reason that the prisoners are prejudged as guilty. “No bailiff of the court dares give them the benefit of his services; they are not allowed to bring forward justifying facts in evidence, while everybody knows that the judges are not impartial.”[9]
Thus do the violent measures of political and religious discord come to an end. The victor stops the mouth of the law when it is about to speak in his adversary’s behalf; and, under the legal iniquity of an administration which he has himself established, he crushes those whom the illegal force of his own strong hand has stricken down.
II.
Passion Supreme. – Dread of hunger its most acute form. – The non-circulation of grain. – Intervention and usurpations of the electoral assemblies. – The rural code in Nivernais. – The four central provinces in 1790. – Why high prices are kept up. – Anxiety and insecurity. – Stagnation of the grain market. – The departments near Paris in 1791. – The supply and price of grain regulated by force. – The mobs in 1792. – Village armies of Eure and of the lower Seine and of Aisne. – Aggravation of the disorder after August 10th. – The dictatorship of unbridled instinct. – Its practical and political expedients.
Passions of this stamp are the product of human cultivation, and break loose only within narrow bounds. Another passion exists which is neither historic nor local, but natural and universal, the most indomitable, most imperious, and most formidable of all, namely, the fear of hunger. There is no such thing with this passion as delay, or reflection, or looking beyond itself. Each commune or canton wants its bread, and a sure and unlimited supply of it. Our neighbor may provide for himself as best he can, but let us look out for ourselves first and then for other people. Each group of people, accordingly, through its own decrees, or by main force, keeps for itself whatever subsistence it possesses, or takes from others the subsistence which it does not possess. ii
At the end of 1789,[10] “Roussillon refuses aid to Languedoc; Upper Languedoc to the rest of the province, and Burgundy to Lyonnais; Dauphiny shuts herself up, and Normandy retains the wheat purchased for the relief of Paris.” At Paris, sentinels are posted at the doors of all the bakers; on the 21st of October one of the latter is hung, and his head is borne about on a pike. On the 27th of October, at Vernon, a corn-merchant named Planter, who the preceding winter had supported the poor for six leagues around, has to take his turn. At the present moment the people do not forgive him for having sent flour to Paris, and he is hung twice, but is saved through the breaking of the rope each time. — It is only by force and under an escort that it is possible to insure the arrival of grain in a town; the excited people or the National Guards constantly seize it on its passage. In Normandy the militia of Caen stops wheat on the highways which is destined for Harcourt and elsewhere.[11] In Brittany, Auray and Vannes retain the convoys for Nantes, and Lannion those for Brest. Brest having attempted to negotiate, its commissioners are seized, and, with knives at their throats, are forced to sign a renunciation, pure and simple, of the grain which they have paid for, and they are led out of Lannion and stoned on the way. Eighteen hundred men, consequently, leave Brest with four cannon, and go to recover their property with their guns loaded. These are the customs prevalent during the great famines of feudal times; and, from one end of France to the other, to say nothing of the out-breaks of the famished in the large towns, similar outrages or attempts at recovery are constantly occurring. – ” The armed population of Nantua, Saint-Claude, and Septmoncel,” says a dispatch,[12] “have again cut off provisions from the Gex region; there is no wheat coming there from any direction, all the roads being guarded. Without the aid of the government of Geneva, which is willing to lend to this region eight hundred Cuttings of wheat, we should either die of starvation or be compelled to take grain by force from the municipalities which keep it to themselves.” Narbonne starves Toulon; the navigation of the Languedoc canal is intercepted; the people on its banks repulse two companies of soldiers, burn a large building, and want to destroy the canal itself.” Boats are stopped, wagons are pillaged, bread is forcibly lowered in price, stones are thrown and guns discharged; the populace contend with the National Guard, peasants with townsmen, purchasers with dealers, artisans and laborers with farmers and land-owners, at Castelnaudary, Niort, Saint-Etienne, in Aisne, in Pas-de-Calais, and especially along the line stretching from Montbrison to Angers – that is to say, for almost the whole of the extent of the vast basin of the Loire, – such is the spectacle presented by the year 1790. – And yet the crop has not been a bad one. But there is no circulation of grain. Each petty center has formed a league for the monopoly of food; and hence the fasting of others and the convulsions of the entire body are the first effects of the unbridled freedom which the Constitution and circumstances have conferred on each local group.
“We are told to assemble, vote, and elect men that will attend to our business; let us attend to it ourselves. We have had enough of talk and hypocrisy. Bread at two sous, and let us go after wheat where it can be found!” Such is the reasoning of the peasantry, and, in Nivernais, Bourbonnais, Berri, and Touraine, electoral gatherings are the firebrands of the insurrections.[13] At Saint-Sauge, “the first work of the primary meeting is to oblige the municipal officers to fix the price of wheat under the penalty of being decapitated.” At Saint-Géran the same course is taken with regard to bread, wheat, and meat; at Châtillon-en-Bayait it is done with all supplies, and always a third or a half under the market price, without mentioning other exactions. – They come by degrees to the drafting of a tariff for all the valuables they know, proclaiming the maximum price which an article may reach, and so establishing a complete code of rural and social economy. We see in the turbulent and spasmodic wording of this instrument their dispositions and sentiments, as in a mirror.[14] It is the program of villagers. Its diverse articles, save local variations, must be executed, now one and now the other, according to the occasion, the need, and the time, and, above all, whatever concerns provisions. – The wish, as usual, is the father of the thought; the peasantry thinks that it is acting by authority: here, through a decree of the King and the National Assembly, there, by a commission directly entrusted to the Comte d’Estrées. Even before this, in the market-place of Saint- Amand, “a man jumped on a heap of wheat and cried out, ‘In the name of the King and the nation, wheat at one-half the market-price!”‘ An old officer of the Royal Grenadiers, a chevalier of the order of Saint-Louis, is reported to be marching at the head of several parishes, and promulgating ordinances in his own name and that of the King, imposing a fine of eight livres on whoever may refuse to join him. – On all sides there is a swarm of working people, and resistance is fruitless. There are too many of them, the constabulary being drowned in the flood. For, these rustic legislators are the National Guard itself, and when they vote reductions upon, or requisitions for, supplies, they enforce their demands with their guns. The municipal officials, willingly or unwillingly, must needs serve the insurgents. At Donjon the Electoral Assembly has seized the mayor of the place and threatened to kill him, or to burn his house, if he did not put the cutting of wheat at forty sous; whereupon he signs, and all the mayors with him, “under the penalty of death.” As soon as this is done the peasants, “to the sound of fifes and drums,” spread through the neighboring parishes and force the delivery of wheat at forty sous, and show such a determined spirit that the four brigades of gendarmes sent out against them think it best to retire. – Not content with taking what they want, they provide for reserve supplies; wheat is a prisoner. In Nivernais and Bourbonnais, the peasants trace a boundary line over which no sack of grain of that region must pass; in case of any infraction of this law the rope and the torch are close at hand for the delinquent. – It remains to make sure that this rule is enforced. In Berri bands of peasants visit the markets to see that their tariff is everywhere maintained. In vain are they told that they are emptying the markets; “they reply that they know how to make grain come, that they will take it from private hands, and money besides, if necessary.” In fact, the granaries and cellars belonging to a large number of persons are pillaged. Farmers are constrained to put their crops into a common granary, and the rich are put to ransom; “the nobles are compelled to contribute, and obliged to give entire domains as donations; cattle are carried off; and they want to take the lives of the proprietors,” while the towns, which defend their storehouses and markets, are openly attacked.[15] Bourbon-Lancy, Bourbon- l’Archambault, Saint-Pierre-le-Moutier, Montluçon, Saint-Amand, Chateau-Gontier, Decises, each petty community is an islet assailed by the mounting tide of rustic insurrection. The militia pass the night under arms; detachments of the National Guards of the large towns with regular troops come and garrison them. The red flag is continuously raised for eight days at Bourbon-Lancy, and cannon stand loaded and pointed in the public square. On the 24th of May an attack is made on Saint-Pierre-le-Moutier, and fusillades take place all night on both sides. On the 2nd of June, Saint-Amand, menaced by twenty-seven parishes, is saved only by the preparations it makes and by the garrison. About the same time Bourbon-Lancy is attacked by twelve parishes combined, and Chateau-Gontier by the sabotiers of the forests in the vicinity. A band of from four to five hundred villagers arrests the convoys of Saint-Amand, and forces their escorts to capitulate; another band entrenches itself in the Chateau de la Fin, and fires throughout the day on the regulars and the National Guard. – The large towns themselves are not safe. Three or four hundred rustics, led by their municipal officers, forcibly enter Tours, to compel the municipality to lower the price of corn and diminish the rate of leases. Two thousand slate-quarry-men, armed with guns, spits, and forks, force their way into Angers to obtain a reduction on bread, fire upon the guard, and are charged by the troops and the National Guard; a number remain dead in the streets, two are hung that very evening, and the red flag is displayed for eight days. “The town,” say the dispatches, “would have been pillaged and burnt had it not been for the Picardy regiment.” Fortunately, as the crop promises to be a good one, prices fall. As the Electoral Assemblies are closed, the fermentation subsides; and towards the end of the year, like a clear spell in a steady storm, the gleam of a truce appears in the civil war excited by hunger.
But the truce does not last long, as it is broken in twenty places by isolated explosions; and towards the month of July, 1791, the disturbances arising from the uncertainty of basic food supplies begin again, to cease no more. We will consider but one group in this universal state of disorder – that of the eight or ten departments which surround Paris and furnish it with supplies. These districts, Brie and Beauce, are rich wheat regions, and not only was the crop of 1790 good, but that of 1791 is ample. Information is sent to the minister from Laon[16] that, in the department of Aisne, “there is a supply of wheat for two years . . . that the barns, generally empty by the month of April, will not be so this season before July,” and, consequently, “subsistence is assured.” But this does not suffice, for the source of the evil is not in a scarcity of wheat. In order that everybody, in a vast and populous country, where the soil, cultivation, and occupations differ, may eat, it is essential that food should be attainable by the non-producers; and for it to reach them freely, without delay, solely by the natural operation of supply and demand, it is essential that there should be a police able to protect property, transactions, and transport. Just in proportion as the authority of a State becomes weakened, and in proportion as security diminishes, the distribution of subsistence becomes more and more difficult: a gendarmerie, therefore, is an indispensable wheel in the machine by which we are able to secure our daily bread. Hence it is that, in 1791, daily bread is wanting to a large number of men. Simply through the working of the Constitution, all restraints, already slackened both at the extremities and at the center, are becoming looser and more loose each day. The municipalities, which are really sovereign, repress the people more feebly, some because the latter are the bolder and themselves more timid, and others because they are more radical and always consider them in the right. The National Guard is wearied, never comes forward, or refuses to use its arms. The active citizens are disgusted, and remain at home. At Étampes,[17] where they are convoked by the commissioners of the department to take steps to re-establish some kind of order, only twenty assemble; the others excuse themselves by saying that, if the populace knew that they opposed its will, “their houses would be burnt,” and they accordingly stay away. “Thus,” write the commissioners, “the common-weal is given up to artisans and laborers whose views are limited to their own existence.” – It is, accordingly, the lower class which rules, and the information upon which it bases its decrees consists of rumors which it accepts or manufactures, to hide by an appearance of right the outrages which are due to its cupidity or to the brutalities of its hunger. At Étampes, “they have been made to believe that the grain which had been sold for supplying the departments below the Loire, is shipped at Paimbuf and taken out of the kingdom from there to be sold abroad.” In the suburbs of Rouen they imagine that grain is purposely ” engulfed in the swamps, ponds, and clay-pits.” At Laon, imbecile and Jacobin committees attribute the dearness of provisions to the avidity of the rich and the malevolence of the aristocrats according to them, “jealous millionaires grow rich at the expense of the people. They know the popular strength,” and, not daring to measure their forces with it, “in an honorable fight,” have recourse “to treachery.” To conquer the people easily they have determined to reduce them in advance by extreme suffering and by the length of their fast, and hence they monopolize “wheat, rye, and meal, soap, sugar, and brandy.”[18] – Similar reports suffice to excite a suffering crowd to acts of violence, and it must inevitably accept for its leaders and advisers those who urge it forward on the side to which it is inclined. The people always require leaders, and they are chosen wherever they can be found, at one time amongst the elite, and at another amongst the dregs. Now that the nobles are driven out, the bourgeoisie in retirement, the large cultivators under suspicion, while animal necessities exercise their blind and intermittent despotism, the appropriate popular ministers consist of adventurers and of bandits. They need not be very numerous, for in a place full of combustible matter a few firebrands suffice to start the conflagration. “About twenty, at most, can be counted in the towns of Étampes and Dourdan, men with nothing to lose and everything to gain by disturbances; they are those who always produce excitement and disorder, while other citizens afford them the means through their indifference.” Those whose names are known among the new guides of the crowd are almost all escaped convicts whose previous habits have accustomed them to blows, violence, frequently to murder, and always to contempt for the law. At Brunoy,[19] the leaders of the outbreak are “two deserters of the 18th regiment, sentenced and unpunished, who, in company with the vilest and most desperate of the parish, always go about armed and threatening.” At Étampes, “the two principal assassins of the mayor are a poacher repeatedly condemned for poaching, and an old carabiniere dismissed from his regiment with a bad record against him.”[20] Around these are artisans “without a known residence,” wandering workmen, journeymen and apprentices, vagrants and highway rovers, who flock into the towns on market-days and are always – ready for mischief when an opportunity occurs. Vagabonds, indeed, now roam about the country everywhere, all restrictions against them having ceased.
“For a year past,” write several parishes in the neighborhood of Versailles, “we have seen no gendarmes except those who come with decrees,” and hence the multiplication of “murders and brigandage ” between Étampes and Versailles, on the highways and in the country. Bands of thirteen, fifteen, twenty and twenty-two beggars rob the vineyards, enter farm-houses at night, and compel their inmates to lodge and feed them, returning in the same way every fortnight, all farms or isolated dwellings being their prey. An ecclesiastic is killed in his own house in the suburbs of Versailles, on the 26th of September, 1791, and, on the same day, a bourgeois and his wife are garroted and robbed. On the 22nd of September, near Saint-Rémi- Honoré, eight bandits ransack the dwelling of a farmer. On the 25th of September, at Villers-le-Sec, thirteen others strip another farmer, and then add with much politeness, “It is lucky for your masters that they are not here, for we would have roasted them at yonder fire.” Six similar outrages are committed by armed ruffians in dwelling-places, within a radius of from three to four leagues, accompanied with the threats of the chauffeurs.[21] “After enterprises of such force and boldness,” write the people of this region, “there is not a well-to-do man in the country who can rely upon an hour’s security in his house. Already many of our best cultivators are giving up their business, while others threaten to do the same in case these disorders continue.” – What is worse still is the fact that in these outrages most of the bandits were “in the national uniform.” The most ignorant, the poorest, and most fanatical of the National Guard thus enlist for the sake of plunder. It is so natural for men to believe in their right to that of which they feel the need, that the possessors of wheat thus become its monopolists, and the superfluity of the rich the property of the poor! This is what the peasants say who devastate the forest of Bruyères-le-Chatel: “We have neither wood, bread, nor work – necessity knows no law.”
The necessaries of life are not to be had cheap under such a system. There is too much anxiety, and property is too precarious; there are too many obstacles to commerce ; purchases, sales, shipments, arrivals and payments are too uncertain. How are goods to be stored and transported in a country where neither the central government, the local authorities, the National Guard, nor the regular troops perform their duties, and where every transaction in produce, even the most legal and the most serviceable, is subject to the caprice of a dozen villains whom the populace obey. – Wheat remains in the barn, or is secreted, or is kept waiting, and only reaches by stealth the hands of those who are rich enough to pay, not only its price, but the extra cost of the risk. Thus forced into a narrow channel, it rises to a rate which the depreciation of the assignats augments, its dearness being not only maintained, but ever on the increase. — Thereupon popular instinct invents for the cure of the evil a remedy which serves to aggravate it: henceforth, wheat must not travel; it is impounded in the canton in which it is gathered. At Laon, “the people have sworn to die rather than let their food be carried off.” At Étampes, to which the municipality of Angers dispatches an administrator of its hospital to buy two hundred and fifty sacks of flour, the commission cannot be executed, the delegate not even daring to avow for several days the object of his coming; all he can do is “to visit incognito, and at night, the different flour-dealers in the valley, who would offer to furnish the supply, but fear for their lives and dare not even leave their houses.” – The same violence is shown in the more distant circle of departments which surround the first circle. At Aubigny, in Cher,[22] grain-wagons are stopped, the district administrators are menaced; two have a price set on their heads; a portion of the National Guard sides with the mutineers. At Chaumont, in Haute- Marne, the whole of the National Guard is in a state of mutiny; a convoy of over three hundred sacks is stopped, the Hôtel-de-Ville forced, and the insurrection lasts four days; the directory of the department takes flight; and the people seize on the powder and cannons. At Douai, in the “Nord,” to save a grain-dealer, he is put in prison; the mob forces the gates, the soldiers refuse to fire, and the man is hung, while the directory of the department takes refuge in Lille. At Montreuil-sur-Mer, in Pas-de-Calais, the two leaders of the insurrection, a brazier and a horse-shoer, “Bèquelin, called Petit-Gueux,” the latter with his saber in hand, reply to the summons of the municipal authorities, that “not a grain shall go now that they are masters,” and that if they dare to make such proclamations “they will cut off their heads.” There are no means of resistance. The National Guard, when it is convoked, does not respond; the volunteers when called upon turn their muskets down, and the crowd, assembled beneath the windows, shouts out its huzzahs. So much the worse for the law when it opposes popular passion: “We will not obey it,” they say; “people make laws to please themselves.” – By way of practical illustration, at Tortes, in Seine-Inférieure, six thousand armed men belonging to the surrounding parishes form a deliberative armed body; the better to establish their rights, they bring two cannon with them fastened by ropes on a couple of carts; twenty-two companies of the National Guard, each under its own banner, march beside them, while all peaceable inhabitants are compelled to fall in “under penalty of death,” the municipal officers being at their head. This improvised parliament promulgates a complete law in relation to grain, which, as a matter of form, is sent for acceptance to the department, and to the National Assembly; and one of its articles declares that all husbandmen shall be forbidden “to sell their wheat elsewhere than on the market-places.” With no other outlet for it, wheat must be brought to the corn markets (halles), and when these are full the price must necessarily fall.
What a profound deception! Even in the granary of France wheat remains dear, and costs about one-third more than would be necessary to secure the sale of bread at two sous the pound, in conformity with the will of the people. For instance,[23] at Gonesse, Dourdan, Corbeil, Mennecy, Brunoy, Limours, Brie-Comte-Robert, and especially at Étampes and Montlhéry, the holders of grain are compelled almost weekly, through the clamors and violence of the people, to reduce prices one-third and more. It is impossible for the authorities to maintain, on their corn-exchange, the freedom of buying and selling. The regular troops have been sent off by the people beforehand. Whatever the tolerance or connivance of the soldiers may be, the people have a vague sentiment that they are not there to permit the ripping open of sacks of flour, or the seizing of farmers by the throat. To get rid of all obstacles and of being watched, they make use of the municipality itself, and force it to effect its own disarmament. The municipal officers, besieged in the town-hall, at times threatened with pistols and bayonets,[24] dispatch to the detachments they are expecting an order to turn back, and entreat the Directory not to send any more troops, for, if any come, they have been told that “they will be sorry for it.” Nowhere are there regular troops. At Étampes, the people repeat that “they are sent for and paid by the flour-dealers;” at Montlhéry, that “they merely serve to arm citizens against each other;” at Limours, that “they make grain dearer.” All pretexts seem good in this direction; the popular will is absolute, and the authorities complacently meet its decrees half-way. At Montlhéry, the municipal body orders the gendarmerie to remain at the gates of the town, which gives full play to the insurrection. – The administrators, however, are not relieved by leaving the people free to act; they are obliged to sanction their exactions by ordinances. They are taken out of the Hôtel-de-Ville, led to the marketplace, and there forthwith, under the dictation of the uproar which establishes prices, they, like simple clerks, proclaim the reduction. When, moreover, the armed rabble of a village marches forth to tyrannize over a neighboring market, it carries its mayor along with it in spite of himself, as an official instrument which belongs to it.[25] “There is no resistance against force,” writes the mayor of Vert-le-Petit; “we had to set forth immediately.” – ” They assured me,” says the Mayor of Fontenay, “that, if I did not obey them, they would hang me.” – On any municipal officer hazarding a remonstrance, they tell him that “he is getting to be an aristocrat.” Aristocrat and hung, the argument is irresistible, and all the more so because it is actually applied. At Corbeil, the procureur-syndic who tries to enforce the law is almost beaten to death, and three houses in which they try to find him are demolished. At Montlhéry, a seed merchant, accused of mixing the flour of beans (twice as dear) with wheaten flour, is massacred in his own house. At Étampes, the mayor who promulgates the law is cudgeled to death. Mobs talk of nothing but “burning and destroying,” while the farmers, abused, hooted at, forced to sell, threatened with death and robbed, run away, declaring they will never return to the market again.
Such is the first effect of popular dictatorship. Like all unintelligent forces, it operates in a direction the reverse of its intention: to dearness it adds dearth, and empties, instead of replenishing, the markets. That of Étampes often contained fifteen or sixteen hundred sacks of flour; the week following this insurrection there were, at most, sixty brought to it. At Montlhéry, where six thousand men had collected together, each one obtains for his share only a small measure, while the bakers of the town have none at all. This being the case, the enraged National Guards tell the farmers that they are coming to see them on their farms. And they really go.[26] Drums roll constantly on the roads around Montlhéry, Limours, and other large market-towns. Columns of two, three, and four hundred men are seen passing under the lead of their commandant and of the mayor whom they take along with them. They enter each farm, mount into the granaries, estimate the quantity of grain thrashed out, and force the proprietor to sign an agreement to bring it to market the following week. Sometimes, as they are hungry, they compel people to give them something to eat and drink on the spot, and it will not do to enrage them, – a farmer and his wife come near being hung in their own barn.
Their effort is useless: Wheat is impounded and hunted up in vain; it takes to the earth or slips off like a frightened animal. In vain do insurrections continue. In vain do armed mobs, in all the market-towns of the department,[27] subject grain to a forced reduction of price. Wheat becomes scarcer and dearer from month to month, rising in price from twenty-six francs to thirty-three. And because the outraged farmer “brings now a very little,” just “what is necessary to sacrifice in order to avoid threats, he sells at home, or in the inns, to the flour-dealers from Paris.” – The people, in running after abundance, have thus fallen deeper down into want: their brutality has aggravated their misery, and it is to themselves that their starvation is owing. But they are far from attributing all this to their own insubordination; the magistrates are accused; these, in the eyes of the populace, are “in league with the monopolists.” On this incline no stoppage is possible. Distress increases rage, and rage increases distress; and on this fatal declivity men are precipitated from one outrage to another.
After the month of February, 1792, such outrages are innumerable; the mobs which go in quest of grain or which cut down its price consist of armies. One of six thousand men comes to control the market of Montlhéry.[28] There are seven to eight -thousand men who invade the market-place of Verneuil, and there is an army of ten and another of twenty-five thousand men, who remain organized for ten days near Laon. One hundred and fifty parishes have sounded the tocsin, and the insurrection spreads for ten leagues around. Five boats loaded with grain are stopped, and, in spite of the orders of district, department, minister, King, and National Assembly, they refuse to surrender them. Their contents, in the meantime, are made the most of: “The municipal officers of the different parishes, assembled together, pay themselves their fees, to wit : one hundred sous per diem for the mayor, three livres for the municipal officers, two livres ten sous for the guards, two livres for the porters. They have ordered that these sums should be paid in grain, and they reduce grain, it is said, fifteen livres the sack. It is certain that they have divided it amongst themselves, and that fourteen hundred sacks have been distributed.” In vain do the commissioners of the National Assembly make speeches to them three hours in length. The discourse being finished, they deliberate, in presence of the commissioners, whether the latter shall be hung, drowned, or cut up, and their heads put on the five points of the middle of the abbey railing. On being threatened with military force, they make their dispositions accordingly. Nine hundred men who relieve each other watch day and night on the ground, in a well chosen and permanent encampment, while lookouts stationed in the belfries of the surrounding villages have only to sound the alarm to bring together twenty-five thousand men in a few hours. – So long as the Government remains on its feet it carries on the combat as well as it can; but it grows weaker from month to month, and, after the 10th of August, when it lies on the ground, the mob takes its place and becomes the universal sovereign. From this time forth not only is the law which protects provisioning powerless against the disturbers of sale and circulation, but the Assembly actually sanctions their acts, since it decrees[29] the stoppage of all proceedings commenced against them, remits sentences already passed, and sets free all who are imprisoned or in irons. Behold every administration, with merchants, proprietors, and farmers abandoned to the famished, the furious, and to robbers; henceforth food supplies are for those who are disposed and able to take them.
“You will be told,” says a petition,[30] “that we violate the law. We reply to these perfidious insinuations that the salvation of the people is the supreme law. We come in order to keep the markets supplied, and to insure an uniform price for wheat throughout the Republic. For, there is no doubt about it, the purest patriotism dies out (sic) when there is no bread to be had. . . . Resistance to oppression – yes, resistance to oppression is the most sacred of duties; is there any oppression more terrible than that of wanting bread? Undoubtedly, no . . . . Join us and ‘Ça ira, ça ira!’ We cannot end our petition better than with this patriotic air.”
This supplication was written on a drum, amidst a circle of firearms; and with such accompaniments it is equivalent to a command. – They are well aware of it, and of their own authority they often confer upon themselves not only the right but also the title. In Loire-et-Cher,[31] a band of from four to five thousand men assume the name of “Sovereign Power.” They go from one market- town to another, to Saint-Calais, Montdoubleau, Blois, Vendôme, reducing the cost of provisions, their troop increasing like a snowball – for they threaten “to burn the effects and set fire to the houses of all who are not as courageous as themselves.”
In this state of social disintegration, insurrection is a gangrene in which the healthy are infected by the morbid parts. Mobs are everywhere produced and re-produced, incessantly, large and small, like abscesses which break out side by side, and painfully irritate each other and finally combine. There are the towns against the rural districts and rural districts against the towns. On the one hand “every farmer who transports anything to the market passes (at home) for an aristocrat,[32] and becomes the horror of his fellow- citizens in the village.” On the other hand the National Guards of the towns spread themselves through the rural districts and make raids to save themselves from death by hunger.[33] It is admitted in the rural districts that each municipality has the right to isolate itself from the rest. It is admitted in the towns that each town has the right to derive its provisions from the country. It is admitted by the indigent of each commune that the commune must provide bread gratis or at a cheap rate. On the strength of this there is a shower of stones and a fusillade; department against department, district against district, canton against canton, all fight for food, and the strongest get it and keep it for themselves. – I have simply described the North, where, for the past three years, the crops are good. I have omitted the South, where trade is interrupted on the canal of the Deux Mers, where the procureur- syndic of Aude has lately been massacred for trying to secure the passage of a convoy; where the harvest has been poor; where, in many places, bread costs eight sous the pound; where, in almost every department, a bushel of wheat is sold twice as dear as in the North!
Strange phenomenon! and the most instructive of all, for in it we see down into the depths of humanity; for, as on a raft of shipwrecked beings without food, there is a reversion to a state of nature. The light tissue of habit and of rational ideas in which civilization has enveloped man, is torn asunder and is floating in rags around him; the bare arms of the savage show themselves, and they are striking out. The only guide he has for his conduct is that of primitive days, the startled instinct of a craving stomach. Henceforth that which rules in him and through him is animal necessity with its train of violent and narrow suggestions, sometimes sanguinary and sometimes grotesque. Incompetent or savage, in all respects like a Negro monarch, his sole political expedients are either the methods of a slaughter house or the dreams of a carnival. Two commissioners whom Roland, Minister of the Interior, sends to Lyons, are able to see within a few days the carnival and the slaughter-house.[34] – On the one hand the peasants, all along the road, arrest everybody; the people regard every traveler as an aristocrat who is running away – which is so much the worse for those who fall into their hands. Near Autun, four priests who, to obey the law, are betaking themselves to the frontier, are put in prison “for their own protection;” they are taken out a quarter of an hour later, and, in spite of thirty-two of the mounted police, are massacred. “Their carriage was still burning as I passed, and the corpses were stretched out not far off. Their driver was still in durance, and it was it vain that I solicited his release.” – On the other hand, at Lyons, the power has fallen into the hands of the degraded women of the streets. “They seized the central club, constituted themselves commissaries