Chapter III: Development of the ruling Passion (2)

Suspected of holding secret meetings, and called to account in his own house, has the noble at least the right to frequent a public saloon, to eat in a restaurant, and to take the fresh air in a balcony?--The Vicomte de Mirabeau, who has just dined in the Palais-Royal, stands at the window to take the air, and is recognized; there is a gathering, and the cry is soon heard, "Down with Mirabeau-Tonneau (barrel-Mirabeau)!"[3326] "Gravel is flung at him from all sides, and occasionally stones. One of the window-panes is broken by a stone. Immediately picking up the stone, he shows it to the crowd, and, at the same time, quietly places it on the sill of the window, in token of moderation." There is a loud outcry; his friends force him to withdraw inside, and Bailly, the mayor, comes in person to quiet the aggressors. In this case there are good reasons for their hatred. The gentleman whom they stone is a bon-vivant, large and fat, fond of rich epicurean Suppers; and on this account the populace imagine him to be a monster, and even worse, an ogre. With regard to these nobles, whose greatest misfortune is to be over-polished and too worldly, the over-excited imagination revives its old nursery tales.--M. de Montlosier, living in the Rue Richelieu, finds that he is watched on his way to the National Assembly. One woman especially, from thirty to thirty-two years of age, who sold meat at a stall in the Passage Saint-Guillaume, "regarded him with special attention. As soon as she saw him coming she took up a long, broad knife which she sharpened before him, casting furious looks at him." He asks his housekeeper what this means. Two children of that quarter have disappeared, carried off by gipsies, and the report is current that M. de Montlosier, the Marquis de Mirabeau, and other deputies of the "right," meet together "to hold orgies in which they eat little children."

In this state of public opinion there is no crime which is not imputed to them, no insult which is not freely bestowed on them. "Traitors, tyrants, conspirators, assassins," such is the current vocabulary of the clubs and newspapers in relation to them. "Aristocrat" signifies all this, and whoever dares to refute the calumny is himself an aristocrat.--At the Palais-Royal, it is constantly repeated that M. de Castries, in his last duel, made use of a poisoned sword, and an officer of the navy who protests against this false report is himself accused, tried on the spot, and condemned "to be shut up in the guard-house or thrown into the fountain."[3327]--The nobles must beware of defending their honor in the usual way and of meeting an insult with a challenge! At Castelnau, near Cahors,[3328] one of those who, the preceding year, marched against the incendiaries, M. de Bellud, Knight of Saint-Louis, on coming down the public square with his brother, a guardsman, is greeted with cries of "The aristocrat! to the lamp post!" His brother is in a morning coat and slippers, and not wishing to get into trouble they do not reply. A squad of the National Guard, passing by, repeats the cry, but they still remain silent. The shout continues, and M. de Bellud, after some time has elapsed, begs the captain to order his men to be quiet. He refuses, and M. de Bellud demands satisfaction outside the town. At these words the National Guards rush at M. de Bellud with fixed bayonets. His brother receives a saber-cut on the neck, while he, defending himself with his sword, slightly wounds the captain and one of the men. The two brothers, alone against the whole body, fight on, retreating to their house, in which they are blockaded. Towards seven o'clock in the evening, two or three hundred National Guards from Cahors arrive to reinforce the besiegers. The house is taken, and the guardsman, escaping across the fields, sprains his ankle and is captured. M. de Bellud, who has found his way into another house, continues to defend himself there: the house is set on fire and burnt, together with two others alongside of it. Taking refuge in a cellar he still keeps on firing. Bundles of lighted straw are thrown in at the air-holes. Almost suffocated, he springs out, kills his first assailant with a shot from one pistol, and himself with another. His head is cut off with that of his servant. The guardsman is made to kiss the two heads, and, on his demanding a glass of water, they fill his mouth with the blood which drops from the severed head of his brother. The victorious gang then set out for Cahors, with the two heads stuck on bayonets, and the guardsman in a cart. It comes to a halt before a house in which a literary circle meets, suspected by the Jacobin club. The wounded man is made to descend from the cart and is hung: his body is riddled with balls, and everything the house contains is broken up, "the furniture is thrown out of the windows, and the house pulled down."--Every popular execution is of this character, at once prompt and complete, similar to those of an Oriental monarch who, on the instant, without inquiry or trial, avenges his offended majesty, and for every offense, knows no other punishment than death. At Tulle, M. de Massy,[3329] lieutenant of the "Royal Navarre," having struck a man that insulted him, is seized in the house in which he took refuge, and, in spite of the three administrative bodies, is at once massacred.--At Brest, two anti-revolutionary caricatures having been drawn with charcoal on the walls of the military coffee-house, the excited crowd lay the blame of it on the officers; one of these, M. Patry, takes it upon himself, and, on the point of being torn to pieces, attempts to kill himself. He is disarmed, but, when the municipal authorities come to his assistance, they find him "already dead through an infinite number of wounds," and his head is borne about on the end of a pike.[3330]--

VI.--Conduct of officers.

Their self-sacrifice.--Disposition of the soldiery.
--Military outbreaks.--Spread and increase of
insubordination.--Resignation of the officers.

Much better would it be to live under an Eastern king, for he is not found everywhere, nor always furious and mad, like the populace. Nowhere are the nobles safe, neither in public nor in private life, neither in the country nor in the towns, neither associated together nor separate. Popular hostility hangs over them like a dark and threatening cloud from one end of the territory to the other, and the tempest bursts upon them in a continuous storm of vexations, outrages, calumnies, robberies, and acts of violence; here, there, and almost daily, bloody thunderbolts fall haphazard on the most inoffensive heads, on an old man asleep, on a Knight of Saint-Louis taking a walk, on a family at prayers in a church. But, in this aristocracy, crushed down in some places and attacked everywhere, the thunderbolt finds one predestined group which attracts it and on which it constantly falls, and that is the corps of officers.

VI.--Conduct of the officers.

Their self-sacrifice.--Disposition of the soldiery.
--Military outbreaks.--Spread and increase of
insubordination.--Resignation of the officers.

With the exception of a few fops, frequenters of drawing-rooms, and the court favorites who have reached a high rank through the intrigues of the antechamber, it was in this group, especially in the medium ranks, that true moral nobility was then found. Nowhere in France was there so much tried, substantial merit. A man of genius, who associated with them in his youth, rendered them this homage: many among them are men possessing "the most amiable characters and minds of the highest order."[3331] Indeed, for most of them, military service was not a career of ambition, but an obligation of birth. It was the rule in each noble family for the eldest son to enter the army, and advancement was of but little consequence. He discharged the debt of his rank; this sufficed for him, and, after twenty or thirty years of service, the order of Saint-Louis, and sometimes a meager pension, were all he had a right to expect. Amongst nine or ten thousand officers, the great majority coming from the lower and poorer class of provincial nobles, body-guards, lieutenants, captains, majors, lieutenant-colonels, and even colonels, have no other pretension. Satisfied with favors[3332] restricted to their subordinate rank, they leave the highest grades of the service to the heirs of the great families, to the courtiers or to the parvenus at Versailles, and content themselves with remaining the guardians of public order, and the brave defenders of the State. Under this system, when the heart is not depraved it becomes exalted; it is made a point of honor to serve without compensation; there is nothing but the public welfare in view, and all the more because, at this moment, it is the absorbing topic of all minds and of all literature. Nowhere has practical philosophy, that which consists in a spirit of abnegation, more deeply penetrated than among this unrecognized nobility. Under a polished, brilliant, and sometimes frivolous exterior, they have a serious soul; the old sentiment of honor is converted into one of patriotism. Set to execute the laws, with force in hand to maintain peace through fear, they feel the importance of their mission, and, for two years, fulfill its duties with extraordinary moderation, gentleness, and patience, not only at the risk of their lives, but amidst great and multiplied humiliations, through the sacrifice of their authority and self-esteem, through the subjection of their intelligent will to the dictation and incapacity of the masters imposed upon them. For a noble officer to respond to the requisitions of an extemporized bourgeois municipal body,[3333] to subordinate his competence, courage, and prudence to the blunders and alarms of five or six inexperienced, frightened, and timid attorneys, to place his energy and daring at the service of their presumption, feebleness, and lack of decision, even when their orders or refusal of orders are manifestly absurd or injurious, even when they are opposed to the previous instructions of his general or of his minister, even when they end in the plundering of a market, the burning of a chateau, the assassination of an innocent person, even when they impose upon him the obligation of witnessing crime with his sword sheathed and arms folded,[3334]--this is a hard task. It is hard for the noble officer to see independent, popular, and bourgeois troops organized in the face of his own troops, rivals and even hostile, in any case ten times as numerous and no less exacting than sensitive--hard to be expected to show them deference and extend civilities to them, to surrender to them posts, arsenals, and citadels, to treat their chiefs as equals, however ignorant or unworthy, and whatever they may be--here a lawyer, there a Capuchin, elsewhere a brewer or a shoemaker, most generally some demagogue, and, in many a town or village, some deserter or soldier drummed out of his regiment for bad conduct, perhaps one of the noble's own men, a scamp whom he has formerly discharged with the yellow cartridge, telling him to go and be hung elsewhere. It is hard for the noble officer to be publicly and daily calumniated on account of his rank and title, to be characterized as a traitor at the club and in the newspapers, to be designated by name as an object of popular suspicion and fury, to be hooted at in the streets and in the theater, to submit to the disobedience of his men, to be denounced, insulted, arrested, fleeced, hunted down and slaughtered by them and by the populace, to see before him a cruel, ignoble, and unavenged death--that of M. de Launay, murdered at Paris--that of M. de Belzunce, murdered at Caen--that of M. de Beausset, murdered at Marseilles--that of M. de Voisins, murdered at Valence--that of M. de Rully, murdered at Bastia, or that of M. de Rochetailler, murdered at Port-au-Prince.[3335] All this is endured by the officers among the nobles. Not one of the municipalities, even Jacobin, can find any pretext which will warrant the charge of disobeying orders. Through tact and deference they avoid all conflict with the National Guards. Never do they give provocation, and, even when insulted, rarely defend themselves. Their gravest faults consist of imprudent conversations, vivacious expressions and witticisms. Like good watch-dogs amongst a frightened herd which trample them under foot, or pierce them with their horns, they allow themselves to be pierced and trampled on without biting, and would remain at their post to the end were they not driven away from it.

All to no purpose: doubly suspicious as members of a proscribed class, and as heads of the army, it is against them that public distrust excites the most frequent explosions, and so much the more as the instrument they handle is singularly explosive. Recruited by volunteer enlistment "amongst a passionate, turbulent, and somewhat debauched people," the army is composed of "all that are most fiery, most turbulent, and most debauched in the nation."[3336] Add to these the sweepings of the alms-houses, and you find a good many blackguards in uniform! When we consider that the pay is small, the food bad, discipline severe, no promotion, and desertion endemic, we are no longer surprised at the general disorder: license, to such men, is too powerful a temptation. With wine, women, and money they have from the first been made turncoats, and from Paris the contagion has spread to the provinces. In Brittany,[3337] the grenadiers and chasseurs of Ile-de-France "sell their coats, their guns, and their shoes, exacting advances in order to consume it in the tavern;" fifty-six soldiers of Penthièvre "wanted to murder their officers," and it is foreseen that, left to themselves, they will soon, for lack of pay, "betake themselves to the highways, to rob and assassinate." In Euree-et-Loir, the dragoons,[3338] with saber and pistols in hand, visit the farmers' houses and take bread and money, while the foot soldiers of the "Royal-Comtois" and the dragoons of the "Colonel-Général" desert in bands in order to go to Paris, where amusement is to be had. The main thing with them is "to have a jolly time." In fact, the extensive military insurrections of the earliest date, those of Paris, Versailles, Besançon, and Strasbourg, began or ended with a revel.--Out of these depths of gross desires there has sprung up natural or legitimate ambitions. A number of soldiers, for twenty years past, have learned how to read, and think themselves qualified to be officers. One quarter of those enlisted, moreover, are young men born in good circumstances, and whom a caprice has thrown into the army. They choke in this narrow, low, dark, confined passage where the privileged by birth close up the issue, and they will march over their chiefs to secure advancement. These are the discontented, the disputants, the orators of the mess-room, and between these barrack politicians and the politicians of the street an alliance is at once formed.--Starting from the same point they march on to the same end, and the imagination which has labored to blacken the Government in the minds of the people, blackens the officers in the minds of the soldiers.

The Treasury is empty and there are arrears of pay. The towns, burdened with debt, no longer furnish their quotas of supplies; and at Orleans, with the distress of the municipality before them, the Swiss of Chateauvieux were obliged to impose on themselves a stoppage of one sou per day and per man to have wood in winter.[3339] Grain is scarce, the flour is spoilt, and the army bread, which was bad, has become worse. The administration, worm-eaten by old abuses, is deranged through the new disorder, the soldiers suffering as well through its dissolution as through their extravagance.--They think themselves robbed and they complain, at first with moderation; and justice is done to their well-founded claims. Soon they exact accounts, and these are made out for them. At Strasbourg, on these being verified before Kellermann and a commissioner of the National Assembly, it is proved that they have not been wronged out of a sou; nevertheless a gratification of six francs a head is given to them, and they cry out that they are content and have nothing more to ask for. A few months after this fresh complaints arise, and there is a new verification: an ensign, accused of embezzlement and whom they wished to hang, is tried in their presence; his accounting is tidy; none of them can cite against him a proven charge, and, once more, they remain silent. On other occasions, after hearing the reading of registers for several hours, they yawn, cease to listen, and go outside to get something to drink.--But the figures of their demands, as these have been summed up by their mess-room calculators, remain implanted in their brains; they have taken root there, and are constantly springing up without any account or refutation being able to extirpate them. No more writings nor speeches--what they want is money: 11,000 livres for the Beaune regiment, 39,500 livres for that of Forez, 44,000 livres for that of Salm, 200,000 livres for that of Chateauvieux, and similarly for the rest. So much the worse for the officers if the money-chest does not suffice for them; let them assess each other, or borrow on their note of hand from the municipality, or from the rich men of the town.--For greater security, in divers places, the soldiers take possession of the military chest and mount guard around it: it belongs to them, since they form the regiment, and, in any case, it is better that it should be in their hands than in suspected hands.--Already, on the 4th of June, 1790, the Minister of War announces to the Assembly that "the military body threatens to fall into a perfect state of anarchy." His report shows "the most incredible pretensions put forth in the most plain-spoken way--orders without force, chiefs without authority, the military chest and flags carried away, the orders of the King himself openly defied, the officers condemned, insulted, threatened, driven off; some of them even captive amidst their own troops, leading a precarious life in the midst of disgust and humiliations, and, as the climax of horror, commanders having their throat cut under the eyes and almost in the arms of their own soldiers."

It is much worse after the July Federation. Entertained, flattered, and indoctrinated at the clubs, their delegates, inferior officers and privates, return to the regiment Jacobins; and henceforth correspond with the Jacobins of Paris, "receiving their instructions and reporting to them,"[3340]--Three weeks later, the Minister of War gives notice to the National Assembly that there is no limit to the license in the army. "Couriers, the bearers of fresh complaints, are arriving constantly." In one place "a statement of the fund is demanded, and it is proposed to divide it." Elsewhere, a garrison, with drums beating, leaves the town, deposes its officers, and comes back sword in hand. Each regiment is governed by a committee of soldiers. "It is in this committee that the detention of the lieutenant-colonel of Poitou has been twice arranged; here it is that 'Royal-Champagne' conceived the insurrection" by which it refused to recognize a sub-lieutenant sent to it. "Every day the minister's cabinet is filled with soldiers who are sent as representatives to him, and who proudly come and intimate to him the will of their constituents." Finally, at Strasbourg, seven regiments, each represented by three delegates, formed a military congress. The same month, the terrible insurrection of Nancy breaks out--three regiments in revolt, the populace with them, the arsenal pillaged, three hours of furious fighting in the streets, the insurgents firing from the windows of the houses and from the cellar openings, five hundred dead among the victors, and three thousand among the vanquished.--The following month, and for six weeks,[3341] there is another insurrection, less bloody, but more extensive, better arranged and more obstinate, that of the whole squadron at Brest, a mutiny of twenty thousand men, at first against their admiral and their officers, then against the new penal code and against the National Assembly itself. The latter, after remonstrating in vain, is obliged not only not to take rigorous measures, but again to revise its laws.[3342]

From this time forth, I cannot enumerate the constant outbreaks in the fleet and in the army.--Authorized by the minister, the soldier goes to the club, where he is repeatedly told that his officers, being aristocrats, are traitors. At Dunkirk, he is additionally taught how to get rid of them. Clamors, denunciations, insults, musket-shots--these are the natural means, and they are put in practice: but there is another, recently discovered, by which an energetic officer of whom they are afraid may be driven away. Some patriotic bully is found who comes and insults him. If the officer fights and is not killed, the municipal authorities have him arraigned, and his chiefs send him off along with his seconds "in order not to disturb the harmony between the soldier and the citizen." If he declines the proposed duel, the contempt of his men obliges him to quit the regiment. In either case he is got out of the way.[3343]--They have no scruples in relation to him. Present or absent, a noble officer must certainly be plotting with his emigrant companions; and on this a story is concocted. Formerly, to prove that sacks of flour were being thrown into the river, the soldiers alleged that these sacks were tied with blue cords (cordons bleus). Now, to confirm the belief that an officer is conspiring with Coblentz, it suffices to state that he rides a white horse; a certain captain, at Strasbourg, barely escapes being cut to pieces for this crime; "the devil could not get it out of their heads that he was acting as a spy, and that the little grey-hound" which accompanies him on his rides "is used to make signals. "--One year after, at the time when the National Assembly completes its work, M. de Lameth, M. Fréteau, and M. Alquier state before it that Luckner, Rochambeau, and the most popular generals, "no longer are responsible for anything." The Auvergne regiment has driven away its officers and forms a separate society, which obeys no one. The second battalion of Beaune is on the point of setting fire to Arras. It is almost necessary to lay siege to Phalsbourg, whose garrison has mutinied. Here, "disobedience to the general's orders is formal." There "are soldiers who have to be urged to stand sentinel; whom they dare not put in confinement for discipline; who threaten to fire on their officers; who stray off the road, pillage everything, and take aim at the corporal who tries to bring them back." At Blois, a part of the regiment "has just arrived without either clothes or arms, the soldiers having sold all on the road to provide for their debauchery." One among them, delegated by his companions, proposes to the Jacobins at Paris to "de-aristocratise" the army by cashiering all the nobles. Another declares, with the applause of the club, that "seeing how the palisades of Givet are constructed, he is going to denounce the Minister of War at the tribunal of the sixth arrondissement of Paris."

It is manifest that, for noble officers, the situation is no longer tenable. After waiting patiently for twenty-three months, many of them left through conscientiousness, when the National Assembly, forcing a third oath upon them, struck out of the formula the name of the King, their born general.[3344]--Others depart at the end of the Constituent Assembly, "because they risk being hung." A large number resign at the end of 1791 and during the first months of 1792, in proportion as the new code and the new recruiting system for the army develop their results.[3345] In fact, on the one hand, through the soldiers and inferior officers having a voice in the election of their chiefs and a seat in the military courts, "there is no longer the shadow of discipline; verdicts are given from pure caprice; the soldier contracts the habit of despising his superiors, of whose punishments he has no fear, and from whom he expects no reward; the officers are paralyzed to such a degree as to become entirely superfluous personages." On the other hand, the majority of the National Volunteers are composed of "men bought by the communes" and administrative bodies, worthless characters of the street-corners, rustic vagabonds forced to march by lot or bribery,"[3346] and along with them, enthusiasts and fanatics to such an extent that, from March, 1792, from the spot of their enlistment to the frontier, their track is everywhere marked by pillage, robbery, devastation, and assassinations. Naturally, on the road and at the frontier, they denounce, drive away, imprison, or murder their officers, and especially the nobles. 3/4 And yet, in this extremity, numbers of noble officers, especially in the artillery and engineer corps, persist in remaining at their posts, some through liberal ideas, and others out of respect for their instructions; even after the 10th of August, even after the 2nd of September, even after the 21st of January, like their generals Biron, Custine, de Flers, de Broglie, and de Montesquiou, with the constant perspective of the guillotine that awaits them on leaving the battlefield and even in the ministerial offices of Carnot.

VII.--Emigration and its causes.

The first laws against the emigrants.

It is, accordingly, necessary that the officers and nobles should go away, should go abroad; and not only they, but also their families. "Gentlemen who have scarcely six hundred livres income set out on foot,"[3347] and there is no doubt as to the motive of their departure. "Whoever will impartially consider the sole and veritable causes of the emigration," says an honest man, "will find them in anarchy. If the liberty of the individual had not been daily threatened, if;" in the civil as in the military order of things, "the senseless dogma, preached by the factions, that crimes committed by the mob are the judgments of heaven, had not been put in practice, France would have preserved three fourths of her fugitives. Exposed for two years to ignominious dangers, to every species of outrage, to innumerable persecutions, to the steel of the assassin, to the firebrands of incendiaries, to the most infamous charges, 'to the denouncement of' their corrupted domestics, to domiciliary visits" prompted by the commonest street rumor, "to arbitrary imprisonment by the Committee of Inquiry," deprived of their civil rights, driven out of primary meetings, "they are held accountable for their murmurs, and punished for a sensibility which would touch the heart in a suffering criminal."--" Resistance is nowhere seen; from the prince's throne to the parsonage of the priest, the tempest has prostrated all malcontents in resignation." Abandoned "to the restless fury of the clubs, to informers, to intimidated officials, they find executioners on all sides where prudence and the safety of the State have enjoined them not even to see enemies. . . . Whoever has detested the enormities of fanaticism and of public ferocity, whoever has awarded pity to the victims heaped together under the ruins of so many legitimate rights and odious abuses, whoever, finally, has dared to raise a doubt or a complaint, has been proclaimed an enemy of the nation. After this representation of malcontents as so many conspirators, every crime committed against them has been legitimated in public opinion.[3348] The public conscience, formed by the factions and by that band of political corsairs who would be the disgrace of a barbarous nation, have considered attacks against property and towns simply as national justice, while, more than once, the news of the murder of an innocent person, or of a sentence which threatened him with death, has been welcomed with shouts of joy Two systems of natural right, two orders of justice, two standards of morality were accordingly established; by one of these it was allowable to do against one's fellow-creature, a reputed aristocrat, that which would be criminal if he were a patriot. . . . Was it foreseen that, at the end of two years, France, teeming with laws, with magistrates, with courts, with citizen-guards, bound by solemn oaths in the defense of order and the public safety, would still and continually be an arena in which wild beasts would devour unarmed men "--With all, even with old men, widows and children, it is a crime to escape from their clutches. Without distinguishing between those who fly to avoid becoming a prey, and those who arm to attack the frontier, the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies alike condemn all absentees. The Constituent Assembly[3349] trebled their real and personal taxes, and prescribed that there should be a triple lien on their rents and dues. The Legislative Assembly sequestrates, confiscates, and puts into the market their possessions, real and personal, amounting to nearly fifteen hundred millions of cash value. Let them return and place themselves under the knives of the populace; otherwise they and their posterity shall all be beggars.--At this stroke indignation overflows, and a bourgeois who is liberal and a foreigner, Mallet du Pan, exclaims,[3350] "What! twenty thousand families absolutely ignorant of the Coblentz plans and of its assemblies, twenty thousand families dispersed over the soil of Europe by the fury of clubs, by the crimes of brigands, by constant lack of security, by the stupid and cowardly inertia of petrified authorities, by the pillage of estates, by the insolence of it cohort of tyrants without bread or clothes, by assassinations and incendiarism, by the base servility of silent ministers, by the whole series of revolutionary scourges,--what' these twenty thousand desolate families, women and old men, must see their inheritances become the prey of national robbery! What! Madame Guillin, who was obliged to fly with horror from the land where monsters have burnt her dwelling, slaughtered and eaten her husband, and who live with impunity by the side of her home--shall Madame Guillin see her fortune confiscated for the benefit of the communities to which she owes her dreadful misfortunes! Shall M. de Clarac, under penalty of the same punishment, go and restore the ruins of his chateau, where an army of scoundrels failed to smother him!"--So much the worse for them if they dare not come back! They are to undergo civil death, perpetual banishment, and, in case the ban be violated, they will be given up to the guillotine. In the same case with them are others who, with still greater innocence, have left the territory, magistrates, ordinary rich people, burgesses, or peasants, Catholics, and particularly one entire class, the nonjuring clergy, from the cardinal archbishop down to the simple village vicar, all prosecuted, then despoiled, then crushed by the same popular oppression and by the same legislative oppression, each of these two persecutions exciting and aggravating the other to such an extent that, at last, the populace and the law, one the accomplice of the other, no longer leave a roof nor a piece of bread, nor an hour's safety to a gentleman or to a priest.[3351]

VIII.--Attitude of the non-juring priests.

How they become distrusted.--Illegal arrests by local
administrations.--Violence or complicity of the National
Guards.--Outrages by the populace.--Executive power in the
south.--The sixth jacquerie.--Its two causes.--Isolated
outbreaks in the north, east, and west,--General eruption in
the south and in the center.

The ruling passion flings itself on all obstacles, even those placed by itself across its own track. Through a vast usurpation the minority of non-believers, indifferent or lukewarm, has striven to impose its ecclesiastical forms on the Catholic majority, and the situation thereby created for the Catholic priest is such that unless he becomes schismatic, he cannot fail to appear as an enemy. In vain has he obeyed! He has allowed his property to be taken, he has left his parsonage, he has given the keys of the church to his successor, he has kept aloof; he does not transgress, either by omission or commission, any article of any decree. In vain does he avail himself of his legal right to abstain from taking an oath repugnant to his conscience. This alone makes him appear to refuse the civic oath in which the ecclesiastical oath is included, to reject the constitution which he accepts in full minus a parasite chapter, to conspire against the new social and political order of things which he often approves of; and to which he almost always submits.[3352] In vain does he confine himself to his special and recognized domain, the spiritual direction of things. Through this alone he resists the new legislators who pretend to furnish a spiritual guidance, for, by virtue of being orthodox, he must believe that the priest whom they elect is excommunicated, that his sacraments are vain; and, in his office as pastor, he must prevent his sheep from going to drink at an impure source. In vain might he preach to them moderation and respect. Through the mere fact that the schism is effected, its consequences unfold them selves, and the peasants will not always remain as patient as their pastor. They have known him for twenty years; he has baptized them and married them; they believe that his is the only true mass; they are not satisfied to be obliged to attend another two or three leagues away, and to leave the church, their church which their ancestors built, and where from father to son they have prayed for centuries, in the hands of a stranger, an intruder and heretic, who officiates before almost empty benches, and whom gendarmes, with guns in their hands, have installed. Assuredly, as he passes through the street, they will look upon him askance: it is not surprising that the women and children soon hoot at him, that stones are thrown at night through his windows, that in the strongly Catholic departments, Upper and Lower Rhine, Doubs and Jura, Lozère, Deux-Sêvres and Vendée, Finistère, Morbihan, and Côtes-du-Nord, he is greeted with universal desertion, and then expelled through public ill-will. It is not surprising that his mass is interrupted and that his person is threatened;[3353] that disaffection which thus far had only reached the upper class, descends to the popular strata; that, from one end of France to the other, a sullen hostility prevails against the new institutions; for now the political and social constitution is joined to the ecclesiastical constitution like an edifice to its spire, and, through this sharp pinnacle, seeks the storm even within the darkening clouds of heaven. The evil all springs out of this unskillful, gratuitous, compulsory fusion, and, consequently, from those who effected it.

But never will a victorious party admit that it has made a mistake. In its eyes the nonjuring priests are alone culpable; it is irritated against their factious conscience; and, to crush the rebellion even in the inaccessible sanctuary of personal conviction, there is no legal or brutal act of violence which it will not allow itself to commit.

Behold, accordingly, a new sport thrown open; and the game is immensely plentiful. For it comprises not only the black or gray robes, more than forty thousand priests, over thirty thousand nuns, and several thousand monks, but also the devoted orthodox, that is to say the women of the low or middle class, and, without counting provincial nobles, a majority of the serious, steady bourgeoisie, a majority of the peasantry-almost the whole population of several provinces, east, west, and in the south. A name is bestowed on them, as lately on the nobles; it is that of fanatic, which is equivalent to aristocrat, for it also designates public enemies likewise placed by it beyond the pale of the law.

Little does it matter whether the law favors them, for it is interpreted against them, arbitrarily construed and openly violated by the partial or intimidated administrative bodies which the Constitution has withdrawn from the control of the central authority and subjected to the authority of popular gatherings. From the first months of 1791, the hounding begins; the municipalities, districts, and departments themselves often take the lead in beating up the game. Six months later, the Legislative Assembly, by its decree of November 29,[3354] sounds the tally-ho, and, in spite of the King's veto, the hounds on all sides dash forward. During the month of April, 1792, forty-two departments pass against nonjuring priests "acts which are neither prescribed nor authorized by the Constitution," and, before the end of the Legislative Assembly, forty-three others will have followed in their train.--Through this series of illegal acts, without offense, without trial, non-jurors are everywhere in France expelled from their parishes, relegated to the principal town of the department or district, in some places imprisoned, put on the same footing with the emigrants, and despoiled of their property, real and personal.[3355] Nothing more is wanting against them but the general decree of deportation which is to come as soon as the Assembly can get rid of the King.

In the meantime, the National Guards, who have extorted the laws, endeavor to aggravate them in their application; and there is nothing strange in their animosity. Commerce is at a standstill, industry languishes, the artisan and shopkeeper suffer, and, in order to account for the universal discontent, it is attributed to the insubordination of the priest. Were it not for his stubbornness all would go well, since the Constitution is perfect, and he is the only one who does not accept it. But, in not accepting it, he attacks it. He, therefore, is the last obstacle in the way of public happiness; he is the scapegoat, let us drive the obnoxious creature away! And the urban militia, sometimes on its own authority, sometimes instigated by the municipal body its accomplice; is seen disturbing public worship, dispersing congregations, seizing priests by the collar, pushing them by the shoulders out of the town, and threatening them with hanging if they dare to return. At Douay,[3356] with guns in hand, they force the directory of the department to order the closing of all the oratories and chapels in hospitals and convents. At Caen, with loaded guns and with a cannon, they march forth against the neighboring parish of Verson, break into houses, gather up fifteen persons suspected of orthodoxy--canons, merchants, artisans, workmen, women, girls, old men, and the infirm--cut off their hair, strike them with the but-ends of their muskets, and lead them back to Caen fastened to the breach of the cannon; and all this because a nonjuring priest still officiated at Verson, and many pious persons from Caen attended his mass: Verson, consequently, is a focal center of counter-revolutionary gatherings. Moreover, in the houses which were broken into, the furniture was smashed, casks stove in, and the linen, money, and plate stolen, the rabble of Caen having joined the expedition.--Here, and everywhere, there is nothing to do but to let this rabble have its own way; and as it operates against the possessions, the liberty; the life, and the sense of propriety of dangerous persons, the National Militia is careful not to interfere with it. Consequently, the orthodox, both priests and believers, men and women, are now at its mercy, and, thanks to the connivance of the armed force, which refuses to interpose, the rabble satisfy on the proscribed class its customary instincts of cruelty, pillage, wantonness, and destructiveness.

Whether public or private, the order of the day is always to hinder worship, while the means employed are worthy of those who carry them out.--Here, a nonjuring priest having had the boldness to minister to a sick person, the house which he has just entered is taken by assault, and the door and windows of a house occupied by another priest are smashed.[3357] There, the lodgings of two workmen, who are accused of having had their infants baptized by a refractory priest, are sacked and nearly demolished. Elsewhere, a mob refuses to allow the body of an old curé, who had died without taking the oath, to enter the cemetery. Farther on, a church is assaulted during vespers, and everything is broken to pieces: on the following day it is the turn of a neighboring church, and, in addition, a convent of Ursuline nuns is devastated.--At Lyons, on Easter-day, 1791, as the people are leaving the six o'clock mass, a troop, armed with whips, falls upon the women.[3358] Stripped, bruised, prostrated, with their heads in the dirt, they are not left until they are bleeding and half-dead; one young girl is actually at the point of death; and this sort of outrage occurs so frequently that even ladies attending the orthodox mass in Paris dare not go out without sewing up their garments around them in the shape of drawers.--Naturally, to make the most of the prey offered to them, hunting associations are formed. These exist in Montpellier, Arles, Uzès, Alais, Nîmes, Carpentras, and in most of the towns or burgs of Gard, Vaucluse, and l'Hérault, in greater or less number according to the population of the city: some counting from ten to twelve, and others from two to three hundred determined men, of every description: among them are found "strike-hards" (tape-dur), former brigands, and escaped convicts with the brand still on their backs. Some of them oblige their members to wear a medal as a visible mark of recognition; all assume the title of executive power, and declare that they act of their own authority, and that it is necessary to "quicken the law."[3359] Their pretext is the protection of sworn priests; and for twenty months, beginning with April, 1791, they operate to this effect with heavy knotted dubs garnished with iron points," without counting sabers and bayonets. Generally, their expeditions are nocturnal. Suddenly, the houses of "citizens suspected of a want of patriotism," of nonjuring ecclesiastics, of the monks of the Christian school, are invaded; everything is broken or stolen, and the owner is ordered to leave the place in twenty-four hours: sometimes, doubtless through an excess of precaution, he is beaten to death on the spot. Besides this, the band also works by day in the streets, lashes the women, enters the churches saber in hand, and drives the nonjuring priest from the altar. All of this is done with the connivance and in the sight of the paralyzed or complaisant authorities, by a sort of occult and complementary government, which not only supplies what is missing in the ecclesiastical law, but also searches the pockets of private individuals.--At Nîmes, under the leadership of a patriotic dancing-master, not content with "decreeing proscriptions, killing, scourging, and often murdering," these new champions of the Gallican Church undertake to reanimate the zeal of those liable to contribution. A subscription having been proposed for the support of the families of the volunteers about to depart, the executive power takes upon itself to revise the list of offerings: it arbitrarily taxes those who have not given, or who, in its opinion, have given too little some "poor workmen fifty livres, others two hundred, three hundred, nine hundred, and a thousand, under penalty of wrecked houses and severe treatment." Elsewhere, the volunteers of Baux and other communes near Tarascon help themselves freely, and, "under the pretext that they are to march for the defense of the country, levy enormous contributions on proprietors," on one four thousand, and on another five thousand livres. In default of payment, they carry away all the grain on one farm, even to the reserve seed, threatening to make havoc with everything, and even to burn, in case of complaint, so that the owners dare not say a word, while the attorney-general of the neighboring department, afraid on his own account, begs that his denunciation may be kept secret.--From the slums of the towns the jacquerie has spread into the rural districts. This is the sixth and the most extensive seen for three years.[3360]

Two spurs impel the peasant on.--On the one hand he is frightened by the clash of arms, and the repeated announcements of an approaching invasion. The clubs and the newspapers since the declaration of Pilnitz, and the Orators in the Legislative Assembly for four months past, have kept him alarmed with their trumpet-blasts, and he urges on his oxen in the furrow with cries of "Woa, Prussia!" to one, and to the other, "Gee up, Austria!" Austria and Prussia, foreign kings and nobles in league with the emigrant nobles, are going to return in force to re-establish the salt-tax, the excise, feudal-dues, tithes, and to retake national property already sold and re-sold, with the aid of the gentry who have not left, or who have returned, and the connivance of non-juring priests who declare the sale sacrilegious and refuse to absolve the purchasers.--On the other hand, Holy Week is drawing near, and for the past year qualms of conscience have disturbed the purchasers. Up to March 24, 1791, the sales of national property had amounted to only 180 millions; but, the Assembly having prolonged the date of payment and facilitated further sales in detail, the temptation proves too strong for the peasant; stockings and buried pots are all emptied of their savings. In seven months the peasant has bought to the amount of 1,346 millions,[3361] and finally possesses in full and complete ownership the morsel of land which he has coveted for so many years, and sometimes an unexpected plot, a wood, a mill, or a meadow. At the present time he has to settle accounts with the church, and, if the pecuniary settlement is postponed, the Catholic settlement comes on the appointed day. According to immemorial tradition he is obliged to take the communion at Easter,[3362] his wife also, and likewise his mother; and if he, exceptionally, does not think this of consequence, they do. Moreover, he requires the sacraments for his old sick father, his new-born child, and for his other child of an age to be confirmed. Now, communion, baptism, confession, all the sacraments, to be of good quality, must proceed from a safe source, just as is the case with flour and coin; there is only too much counterfeit money now in the world, and the sworn priests are daily losing credit, like the assignats. There is no other course to pursue, consequently, but to resort to the non-juror, who is the only one able to give valid absolutions. And it so happens that he not only refuses this, but he is said to be inimical to the whole new order of things.--In this dilemma the peasant falls back upon his usual resource, the strength of his arms; he seizes the priest by the throat, as formerly his lord, and extorts an acquittance for his sins as formerly for his feudal dues. At the very least he strives to constrain the non-jurors to swear, to close their separatist churches, and bring the entire canton to the same uniform faith.--Occasionally also he avenges himself against the partisans of the non-jurors, against chateaux and houses of the opulent, against the nobles and the rich, against proprietors of every class. Occasionally, likewise, as, since the amnesty of September, 1791, the prisons have been emptied, as one-half of the courts are not yet installed,[3363] as there has been no police for thirty months, the common robbers, bandits, and vagrants, who swarm about without repression or surveillance, join the mob and fill their pockets.