The French Revolution (Vol.1-3). Taine Hippolyte
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"the Abbess of St. Pierre de Lyon, one of the nuns, M. de Perrotin, M. de Bellegarde, the Marquis de la Tour-du-Pin, and the Chevalier de Moidieu, are arrested at Champier by the armed population, led to the Côte Saint-André, confined in the town-hall, whence they send to Grenoble for assistance," and, to have them released, the Grenoble Committee is obliged to send commissioners. Their only refuge is in the large cities, where some semblance of a precarious order exists, and in the ranks of the City Guards, which march from Lyons, Dijon, and Grenoble, to keep the inundation down. Throughout the country scattered chateaux are swallowed up by the popular tide, and, as the feudal rights are often in plebeian hands, it insensibly rises beyond its first overflow.—There is no limit to an insurrection against property. This one extends from abbeys and chateaux to the "houses of the bourgeoisie."1343 The grudge at first was confined to the holders of charters; now it is extended to all who possess anything. Well-to-do farmers and priests abandon their parishes and fly to the towns. Travelers are put to ransom. Thieves, robbers, and returned convicts, at the head of armed bands, seize whatever they can lay their hands on. Cupidity becomes inflamed by such examples; on domains which are deserted and in a state of confusion, where there is nothing to indicate a master's presence, all seems to lapse to the first comer. A small farmer of the neighborhood has carried away wine and returns the following day in search of hay. All the furniture of a chateau in Dauphin is removed, even to the hinges of the doors, by a large reinforcement of carts.—" It is the war of the poor against the rich," says a deputy, "and, on the 3rd of August, the Committee on Reports declares to the National Assembly "that no kind of property has been spared." In Franche-Comté, "nearly forty chateaux and seignorial mansions have been pillaged or burnt."1344 From Lancers to Gray about three out of five chateaux are sacked. In Dauphin twenty-seven are burned or destroyed; five in the small district of Viennese, and, besides these, all the monasteries—nine at least in Auvergne, seventy-two, it is said, in Mâconnais and Beaujolais, without counting those of Alsace. On the 31st of July, Lally-Tollendal, on entering the tribune, has his hands full of letters of distress, with a list of thirty-six chateaux burnt, demolished, or pillaged, in one province, and the details of still worse violence against persons:1345
"in Languedoc, M. de Barras, cut to pieces in the presence of his wife who is about to be confined, and who is dead in consequence; in Normandy, a paralytic gentleman left on a burning pile and taken off from it with his hands burnt; in Franche-Comté, Madame de Bathilly compelled, with an ax over her head, to give up her title-deeds and even her estate; Madame de Listenay forced to do the same, with a pitchfork at her neck and her two daughters in a swoon at her feet; Comte de Montjustin, with his wife, having a pistol at his throat for three hours; and both dragged from their carriage to be thrown into a pond, where they are saved by a passing regiment of soldiers; Baron de Montjustin, one of the twenty-two popular noblemen, suspended for an hour in a well, listening to a discussion whether he shall be dropped down or whether he should die in some other way; the Chevalier d'Ambly, torn from his chateau and dragged naked into the village, placed on a dung-heap after having his eyebrows and all his hair pulled out, while the crowd kept on dancing around him."
In the midst of a disintegrated society, under the semblance only of a government, it is manifest that an invasion is under way, an invasion of barbarians which will complete by terror that which it has begun by violence, and which, like the invasions of the Normans in the tenth and eleventh centuries, ends in the conquest and dispossession of an entire class. In vain the National Guard and the other troops that remain loyal succeed in stemming the first torrent; in vain does the Assembly hollow out a bed for it and strive to bank it in by fixed boundaries. The decrees of the 4th of August and the regulations which follow are but so many spiders' webs stretched across a torrent. The peasants, moreover, putting their own interpretation on the decrees, convert the new laws into authority for continuing in their course or beginning over again. No more rents, however legitimate, however legal!
"Yesterday,"1346 writes a gentleman of Auvergne, we were notified that the fruit-tithe (percières) would no longer be paid, and that the example of other provinces was only being followed which no longer, even by royal order, pay tithes." In Franche-Comté "numerous communities are satisfied that they no longer owe anything either to the King or to their lords. … The villages divide amongst themselves the fields and woods belonging to the nobles."—
It must be noted that charter-holding and feudal titles are still intact in three-fourths of France, that it is the interest of the peasant to ensure their disappearance, and that he is always armed. To secure a new outbreak of jacqueries, it is only necessary that central control, already thrown into disorder, should be withdrawn. This is the work of Versailles and of Paris; and there, at Paris as well as at Versailles, some, through lack of foresight and infatuation, and others, through blindness and indecision—the latter through weakness and the former through violence—all are laboring to accomplish it.
1301 (return) [ Dusaulx, 374. "I remarked that if there were a few among the people at that time who dared commit crime, there were several who wished it, and that every one endured it."—" Archives Nationales," DXXIX, 3. (Letter of the municipal authorities of Crémieu, Dauphiny, November 3, 1789.) "The care taken to lead them first to the cellars and to intoxicate them, can alone give a conception of the incredible excesses of rage to which they gave themselves up in the sacking and burning of the chateaux."]
1302 (return) [ Mercure de France, January 4, 1792. ("Revue politique de l'année 1791," by Mallet du Pan.)]
1303 (return) [ Albert Babeau, I. 206. (Letter of the deputy Camuzet de Belombre, August 22, 1789.) The executive power is absolutely gone to-day."—Gouverneur Morris, letter of July 31, 1789: "This country is now as near in a state of anarchy as it is possible for a community to be without breaking up."]
1304 (return) [ "Archives Nationales," H. 1453. Letter of M. Amelot, July 24th; H. 784, of M. de Langeron, October 16th and 18th.—KK. 1105. correspondence of M. de Thiard, October 7th and 30th, September 4th.—Floquet, VII. 527, 555.—Guadet, "Histoire des Girondins" (July 29, 1789).]
1305 (return) [ M. de Rochambeau, "Mémoires," I. 353 (July 18th).—Sauzay, "Histoire de la Persécution Révolutionnaire dans le Département de Doubs," I. 128 (July 19th.)—"Archives Nationales," F7, 3253. (Letter of the deputies of the provincial commission of Alsace, September 8th.) D. XXIX. I. note of M. de Latour-du-Pin, October 28, 1789.—Letter of M. de Langeron, September 3rd; of Breitman, garde-marteau, Val Saint-Amarin (Upper Alsace), July 26th.]
1306 (return) [ Léonce de Lavergne, 197. (Letter of the intermediate commission of Poitou, the last month in 1789.)—Cf. Brissot (Le patriote français, August, 1789). "General insubordination prevails in the provinces because the restraints of executive power are no longer felt. What were but lately the guarantees of that power? The intendants, tribunals, and the army. The intendants are gone, the tribunals are silent, and the army is against the executive power and on the side of the people. Liberty is not a nourishment for unprepared stomachs."]
1307 (return) [ "Archives Nationales,"