The French Revolution (Vol.1-3). Taine Hippolyte
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or of the district who rules, but its municipal officers; and their sway is as omnipotent as it can be in a small independent republic. They alone have the "strong hand" with which to search the pockets of refractory tax-payers, and ensure the collection of the revenue; to seize the rioter by the throat, and protect life and property; in short, to convert the promises and menaces of the law into acts. Every armed force, the National Guard, the regulars, and the gendarmerie, must march on their requisition. They alone, among the body of administrators, are endowed with this sovereign right; all that the department or the district can do is to invite them to exercise it. It is they who proclaim martial law. Accordingly, the sword is in their hands.2318 Assisted by commissioners who are appointed by the council-general of the commune, they prepare the schedule of taxation of real and personal property, fix the quota of each tax-payer, adjust assessments, verify the registers and the collector's receipts, audit his accounts, discharge the insolvent, answer for returns and authorize prosecutions.2319 Private purses are, in this way, at their mercy, and they take from them whatever they determine to belong to the public.—With the purse and the sword in their hands they lack nothing that is necessary to make them masters, and all the more because the application of every law belongs to them; because no orders of the Assembly to the King, of the King to the ministers, of ministers to the departments, of departments to the districts, of the districts to the communes, brings about any real local result except through them; because each measure of general application undergoes their special interpretation, and can always be optionally disfigured, softened, or exaggerated according to their timidity, inertia, violence or partiality. Moreover, they are not long in discovering their strength. We see them on all sides arguing with their superiors against district, departmental, and ministerial orders, and even against the Assembly itself; alleging circumstances; lack of means, their own danger and the public safety, failing to obey, acting for themselves, openly disobeying and glorying in the act,2320 and claiming, as a right, the omnipotence which they exercise in point of fact. Those of Troyes, at the festival of the Federation, refuse to submit to the precedence of the department and claim it for themselves, as "immediate representatives of the people." Those of Brest, notwithstanding the reiterated prohibitions of their district, dispatch four hundred men and two cannon to force the submission of a neighboring commune to a cure' who has taken the oath. Those of Arnay-le-Duc arrest Mesdames (the King's aunts), in spite of their passport signed by the ministers, hold them in spite of departmental and district orders, persist in barring the way to them in spite of a special decree of the National Assembly, and send two deputies to Paris to obtain the sanction of their decision. What with arsenals pillaged, citadels invaded, convoys arrested, couriers stopped, letters intercepted, constant and increasing insubordination, usurpations without truce or measure, the municipalities arrogate to themselves every species of license on their own territory and frequently outside of it. Henceforth, forty thousand sovereign bodies exist in the kingdom. Force is placed in their hands, and they make good use of it. They make such good use of it that one of them, the commune of Paris, taking advantage of its proximity, lays siege to, mutilates, and rules the National Convention, and through it France.
III.—Municipal Kingdoms.
The Municipal bodies.—Their great task.—Their incapacity.
—Their feeble authority.—Insufficiency of their means of
action.—The role of the National Guard.—
Let us follow these municipal kings into their own domain: the burden on their shoulders is immense, and much beyond what human strength can support. All the details of executive duty are confided to them; they have not to busy themselves with a petty routine, but with a complete social system which is being taken to pieces, while another is reconstructed in its place.—They are in possession of four milliards of ecclesiastical property, real and personal, and soon there will be two and a half milliards of property belonging to the emigrants, which must be sequestered, valued, managed, inventoried, divided, sold, and the proceeds received. They have seven or eight thousand monks and thirty thousand nuns to displace, install, sanction, and provide for. They have forty-six thousand ecclesiastics, bishops, canons, curés, and vicars, to dispossess, replace, often by force, and later on to expel, intern, imprison, and support. They are obliged to discuss, trace out, teach and make public new territorial boundaries, those of the commune, of the district and of the department. They have to convoke, lodge, and protect the numerous primary and secondary Assemblies, to supervise their operations, which sometimes last for weeks. They must install those elected by them, justices of the peace, officers of the National Guard, judges, public prosecutors, curés, bishops, district and departmental administrators. They are to form new lists of tax-payers, apportion amongst themselves, according to a new system of impost, entirely new real and personal taxes, decide on claims, appoint an assessor, regularly audit his accounts and verify his books, aid him with force, use force in the collection of the excise and salt duties, which being reduced, equalized, and transformed in vain by the National Assembly, afford no returns in spite of its decrees. They are obliged to find the funds for dressing, equipping, and arming the National Guard, to step in between it and the military commanders, and to maintain concord between its diverse battalions. They have to protect forests from pillage, communal land from being invaded, to maintain the octroi, to protect former functionaries, ecclesiastics, and nobles, suspected and threatened, and, above all, to provide, no matter how, provisions for the commune which lacks food, and consequently, to raise subscriptions, negotiate purchases at a distance and even abroad, organize escorts, indemnify bakers, supply the market every week notwithstanding the dearth, the insecurity of roads, and the resistance of cultivators.—Even an absolute chief; sent from a distance and from high place, the most energetic and expert possible, supported by the best-disciplined and most obedient troops, would scarcely succeed in such an undertaking; and there is instead only a municipality which has neither the authority, the means, the experience, the capacity, nor the will.
In the country, says an orator in the tribune,2321 "the municipal officers, in twenty thousand out of forty thousand municipalities, do not know how to read or write." The curé, in effect, is excluded from such offices by law, and, save in La Vendée and the noble is excluded by public opinion. Besides, in many of the provinces, nothing but patois is spoken.2322 French, especially the philosophic and abstract phraseology of the new laws and proclamations, remains gibberish to their inhabitants. They cannot possibly understand and apply the complicated decrees and fine-spun instructions which reach them from Paris. They hurry off to the towns, get the duties of the office imposed on them explained and commented on in detail, try to comprehend, imagine they do, and then, the following week, come back again without having understood anything, either the mode of keeping state registers, the distinction between feudal rights which are abolished and those retained, the regulations they should enforce in cases of election, the limits which the law imposes as to their powers and subordination. Nothing of all this finds its way into their rude, untrained brains; instead of a peasant who has just left his oxen, there is needed here a legal adept aided by a trained clerk.—Prudential considerations must be added to their ignorance. They do not wish to make enemies for themselves in their commune, and they abstain from any positive action, especially in all tax matters. Nine months after the decree on the patriotic contribution, "twenty-eight thousand municipalities are overdue, not having (yet) returned either rolls or estimates."2323 At the end of January, 1792, "out of forty thousand nine hundred and eleven municipalities, only five thousand four hundred and forty-eight have deposited their registers; two thousand five hundred and eighty rolls only are definitive and in process of collection. A large number have not even begun their sectional statements."2324—It is much