Chapter I: The Oppressed (1)

I. Revolutionary Destruction.

Magnitude of revolutionary destructiveness.--The four ways
of effecting it.--Expulsion from the country through forced
emigration and legal banishment.--Number of those expelled.
--Privation of liberty.--Different sorts of imprisonment.
--Number and situation of those imprisoned.--Murders after
being tried, or without trial.--Number of those guillotined
or shot after trial.--Indication of the number of other
lives destroyed.--Necessity and plan for wider destruction.
--Spoliation.--Its extent.--Squandering.--Utter losses.--Ruin
of individuals and the State.--The Notables the most
oppressed.

The object of the Jacobin, first of all, is the destruction of his adversaries, avowed or presumed, probable or possible. Four violent measures concur, together or in turn, to bring about the physical or social extermination of all Frenchmen who no longer belong to the sect or the party.

The first operation consists in expelling them from the territory.--Since 1789, they have been chased off through a forced emigration; handed over to jacqueries, or popular uprisings, in the country, and to insurrections in the cities,[4101] defenseless and not allowed to defend themselves, three-fourths of them have left France, simply to escape popular brutalities against which neither the law nor the government afforded them any protection. According as the law and the administration, in becoming more Jacobin, became more hostile to them, so did they leave in greater crowds. After the 10th of August and 2nd of September, the flight necessarily was more general; for, henceforth, if any one persisted in remaining after that date it was with the almost positive certainty that he would be consigned to a prison, to await a massacre or the guillotine. About the same time, the law added to the fugitive the banished, all unsworn priests, almost an entire class consisting of nearly 40 000 persons.[4102] It is calculated that, on issuing from the reign of Terror, the total number of fugitives and banished) amounted to 150 000[4103] the list would have been still larger, had not the frontier been guarded by patrols and one had to cross it at the risk of one's life; and yet, many do risk their lives in attempting to cross it, in disguise, wandering about at night, in mid-winter, exposed to gunshots, determined to escape cost what it will, into Switzerland, Italy, or Germany, and even into Hungary, in quest of security and the right of praying to God as one pleases.[4104]--If any exiled or deported person ventures to return, he is tracked like a wild beast, and, as soon as taken, he is guillotined.[4105] For example, M. de Choiseul, and other unfortunates, wrecked and cast ashore on the coast of Normandy, are not sufficiently protected by the law of nations. They are brought before a military commission; saved temporarily through public commiseration, they remain in prison until the First Consul intervenes between them and the homicidal law and consents, through favor, to deport them to the Dutch frontier.--If they have taken up arms against the Republic they are cut off from humanity; a Pandour[4106] taken prisoner is treated as a man; an émigré made prisoner is treated like a wolf--they shoot him on the spot. In some cases, even the pettiest legal formalities are dispensed with. "When I am lucky enough to catch 'em," writes Gen. Vandamme, "I do not trouble the military commission to try them. They are already tried--my saber and pistols do their business."[4107]

The second operation consists in depriving "suspects" of their liberty, of which deprivation there are several degrees; there are various ways of getting hold of people.--Sometimes, the "suspect" is "adjourned," that is to say, the order of arrest is simply suspended; he lives under a perpetual menace that is generally fulfilled; he never knows in the morning that he will not sleep in a prison that night. Sometimes, he is put on the limits of his commune. Sometimes, he is confined to his house with or without guards, and, in the former case, he is obliged to pay them. Again, finally, and which occurs most frequently, he is shut up in this or that common jail.--In the single department of Doubs, twelve hundred men and women are "adjourned;" three hundred put on the limits of the commune, fifteen hundred confined to their houses, and twenty two hundred imprisoned.[4108] In Paris, thirty-six such prisons and more than "violins", or temporary jails, soon filled by the revolutionary committees, do not suffice for the service.[4109] It is estimated that, in France, not counting more than 40,000 provisional jails, twelve hundred prisons, full and running over, contain each more than two hundred inmates.[4110] At Paris, notwithstanding the daily void created by the guillotine, the number of the imprisoned on Floréal 9, year II., amounts to 7,840; and, on Messidor 25 following, notwithstanding the large batches of 50 and 60 persons led in one day, and every day, to the scaffold, the number is still 7,502.[4111] There are more than one thousand persons in the prisons of Arras, more than one thousand five hundred in those of Toulouse, more than three thousand in those of Strasbourg, and more than thirteen thousand in those of Nantes. In the two departments alone of Bouches du-Rhône and Vaucluse, Representative Maignet, who is on the spot, reports from 12,000 to 15,000 arrests.[4112] "A little before Thermidor," says Representative Beaulieu, "the number of incarcerated arose to nearly 400,000, as is apparent on the lists and registers then before the Committee of General Security."[4113]--Among these poor creatures, there are children, and not alone in the prisons of Nantes where the revolutionary searches have collected the whole of the rural population; in the prisons of Arras, among twenty similar cases, I find a coal-dealer and his wife with their seven sons and daughters, from seventeen down to six years of age; a widow with her four children from nineteen down to twelve years of age; another noble widow with her nine children, from seventeen down to three years of age, and six children, without father or mother, from twenty-three down to nine years of age.[4114]--These prisoners of State were treated, almost everywhere, worse than robbers and assassins under the ancient régime. They began by subjecting them to rapiotage, that is to say, stripping them naked or, at best, feeling their bodies under their shirts; women and young girls fainted away under this examination, formerly confined to convicts on entering the bagnio.[4115]--Frequently, before consigning them to their dungeons or shutting them up in their cells, they would be left two or three nights pell-mell in a lower hall on benches, or in the court on the pavement, "without beds or straw." "The feelings are wounded in all directions, every point of sensibility, so to say, being played upon. They are deprived one after the other of their property, assignats, furniture, and food, of daylight and lamp-light, of the assistance which their wants and infirmities demand, of a knowledge of public events, of all communication, either immediate or written, with fathers, sons and husbands."[4116] They are obliged to pay for their lodgings, their keepers, and for what they eat; they are robbed at their very doors of the supplies they send for outside; they are compelled to eat at a mess-table; they are furnished with scant and nauseous food, "spoilt codfish, putrid herrings and meat, rotten vegetables, all this accompanied with a mug of Seine water colored red with some drug or other."[4117] They starve them, bully them, and vex them purposely as if they meant to exhaust their patience and drive them into a revolt, so as to get rid of them in a mass, or, at least, to justify the increasing rapid strokes of the guillotine. They are huddled together in tens, twenties and thirties, in one room at La Force, "eight in a chamber, fourteen feet square," where all the beds touch, and many overlap each other, where two out of the eight inmates are obliged to sleep on the floor, where vermin swarm, where the closed sky-lights, the standing tub, and the crowding together of bodies poisons the atmosphere.--In many places, the proportion of the sick and dying is greater than in the hold of a slave-ship. "Of ninety individuals with whom I was shut up two months ago," writes a prisoner at Strasbourg, "sixty-six were taken to the hospital in the space of eight days."[4118] In the prisons of Nantes, 3000 out 13,000 prisoners die of typhoid fever and of the rot in two months.[4119] 400 priests[4120] confined on a vessel between decks, in the roadstead of Aix, stowed on top of each other, wasted with hunger, eaten up by vermin, suffocated for lack of air, half-frozen, beaten, mocked at, and constantly threatened with death, suffer still more than Negroes in a slave-hold; for, through interest in his freight, the captain of the slaver tries to keep his human consignment in good health, whilst, through revolutionary fanaticism, the crew of the Aix vessel detests its cargo of "black-frocks" and would gladly send them to the bottom.--According to this system, which, up to Thermidor 9, grows worse and worse, imprisonment becomes a torture, oftentimes mortal, slower and more painful than the guillotine, and to such an extent that, to escape it, Champfort opens his veins and Condorcet swallows poison.[4121]The third expedient consists of murder, with or without trial.--178 tribunals, of which 40 are ambulatory, pronounce in every part of the territory sentences of death which are immediately executed on the spot.[4122] Between April 6, 1793, and Thermidor 9, year II., (July 27th, 1794) that of Paris has 2,625 persons guillotined,[4123] while the provincial judges do as much work as the Paris judges. In the small town of Orange alone, they guillotine 331 persons. In the single town of Arras they have 299 men and 93 women guillotined. At Nantes, the revolutionary tribunals and military committees have, on the average, 100 persons a day guillotined, or shot, in all 1,971. In the city of Lyons the revolutionary committee admit 1,684, while Cadillot, one of Robespierre's correspondents, advises him of 6,000.[4124]--The statement of these murders is not complete, but 17,000 have been enumerated,[4125] "most of them effected without any formality, evidence or direct charge," among others the murder of "more than 1200 women, several of whom were octogenarians and infirm;"[4126] particularly the murder of 60 women or young girls, condemned to death, say the warrants, for having attended the services of unsworn priests, or for having neglected the services of a sworn priest.

"The accused, ranged in order, were condemned at sight. Hundreds of death-sentences took about a minute per head. Children of seven, five and four years of age, were tried. A father was condemned for the son, and the son for the father. A dog was sentenced to death. A parrot was brought forward as a witness. Numbers of accused persons whose sentences could not be written out were executed."

At Angers, the sentences of over four hundred men and three hundred and sixty women, executed for the purpose of relieving the prisons, were mentioned on the registers simply by the letters S or G (shot or guillotined).[4127] At Paris, as in the provinces, the slightest pretext[4128] served to constitute a crime. The daughter of the celebrated painter, Joseph Vernet,[4129] was guillotined for being a " receiver," for having kept fifty pounds of candles in her house, distributed among the employees of La Muette by the liquidators of the civil list. Young de Maillé,[4130] aged sixteen years, was guillotined as a conspirator, "for having thrown a rotten herring in the face of his jailer, who had served it to him to eat." Madame de Puy-Verin was guillotined as "guilty" because she had not taken away from her deaf, blind and senile husband a bag of card-counters, marked with the royal effigy.--In default of any pretext,[4131] there was the supposition of a conspiracy; blank lists were given to paid emissaries, who undertook to search the various prisons and select the requisite number of heads; they wrote names down on them according to their fancy, and these provided the batches for the guillotine.

"As for myself," said the juryman Vilate, "I am never embarrassed. I am always convinced. In a revolution, all who appear before this tribunal ought to be condemned."--

At Marseilles, the Brutus Commission,[4132] "sentencing without public prosecutor or jurymen, sent to the prisons for those it wished to put to death. After having demanded their names, professions and wealth they were sent down to a cart standing at the door of the Palais de Justice; the judges then stepped out on the balcony and pronounced the death-sentence." The same proceedings took place at Cambrai, Arras, Nantes, Le Mans, Bordeaux, Nîmes, Lyons, Strasbourg, and elsewhere.--Evidently, the judicial comedy is simply a parade; they make use of it as one of the respectable means, among others less respectable, to exterminate people whose opinions are not what they should be, or who belong to the proscribed classes;[4133] Samson, at Paris, and his colleagues in the provinces, the execution-platoons of Lyons and Nantes, are simply the collaborators of murderers properly so called, while legal massacres complete other massacres pure and simple.

Of this latter description, the fusillades of Toulon come first, where the number of those who are shot largely surpasses one thousand;[4134] next the great drownings of Nantes, in which 4,800 men, women and children perished,[4135] the other drownings, for which no figures may be given;[4136] then the countless popular murders committed in France between July 14, 1789, and August 10, 1792; the massacre of one 1,300 prisoners in Paris, in September, 1792; the long train of assassinations which, in July, August and September, 1789, extends over the entire territory; finally, the dispatch of the prisoners, either shot or sabered, without trial at Lyons and in the West. Even excepting those who had died fighting or who, taken with arms in their hands, were shot down or sabered on the spot, there were 10,000 persons slaughtered without trial in the province of Anjou alone:[4137] accordingly, the instructions of the Committee of Public Safety, also the written orders of Carrier and Francastel, direct generals to "bleed freely" the insurgent districts,[4138] and spare not a life: it is estimated that, in the eleven western departments, the dead of both sexes and of all ages exceeded 400,000.[4139]--Considering the program and principles of the Jacobin sect this is no great number; they might have killed a good many more. But time was wanting; during their short reign they did what they could with the instrument in their hands. Look at their machine, the gradual construction of its parts, the successive stages of its operation from its starting up to Thermidor 9, and see how limited the period of its operation was. Organized March 30 and April 6, 1793, the Revolutionary Committees and the Revolutionary Tribunal had but seventeen months in which to do their work. They did not drive ahead with all their might until after the fall of the Girondists, and especially after September, 1763 that is to say for a period of eleven months. Its loose wheels were not screwed up and the whole was not in running order under the impulse of the central motor until after December, 1793, that is to say during eight months. Perfected by the law of Prairial 22, it works for the past two months, faster and better than before, with an energy and rapidity that increase from week to week.--At that date, and even before it, the theorists have taken the bearings of their destinies and accepted the conditions of their undertaking. Being sectarians, they have a faith, and as orthodoxy tolerates no heresy, and as the conversion of heretics is never sincere or durable, heresy can be suppressed only by suppressing heretics. "It is only the dead," said Barère, Messidor 16, "who never return." On the 2nd and 3rd of Thermidor,[4140] the Committee of Public Safety sends to Fouquier-Tinville a list of four hundred and seventy-eight accused persons with orders "to bring the parties named to trial at once." Baudot and Jean Bon St. Andre, Carrier, Antonelle and Guifroy, had already estimated the lives to be taken at several millions and, according to Collot d' Herbois, who had a lively imagination, "the political perspiration should go on freely, and not stop until from twelve to fifteen million Frenchmen had been destroyed."[4141]

To make amends, in the fourth and last division of their work, that is to say, in spoliation, they went to the last extreme: they did all that could be done to ruin individuals, families and the State; whatever could be taken, they took.--The Constituent and Legislative Assemblies had, on their side, begun the business by abolishing tithes and all feudal rights without indemnity, and by confiscating all ecclesiastical property; the Jacobin operators continue and complete the job; we have seen by what decrees and with what hostility against collective and individual property, whether they attribute to the State the possession of all corporations whatever, even laic, such as colleges, schools and scientific or literary societies, hospitals and communes, or whether they despoil individuals, indirectly through assignats and the maximum, or directly through the forced loan, revolutionary taxes,[4142] seizures of gold and silver coin, requisitions of common useful utensils,[4143] sequestrations of prisoners' property, confiscations of the possessions of emigrants and exiles and of those deported or condemned to death. No capital invested in real or personal property, no income in money or produce, whatever its source, whether leases, mortgages, private credits, pensions, agricultural, industrial or commercial gains, the fruits of economy or labor, from the farmers', the manufacturers' and the merchant's stores to the robes, coats, shirts and shoes, even to the beds and bed-rooms of private individuals--nothing escapes their rapacious grasp: in the country, they carry off even seed reserved for planting; at Strasbourg and in the Upper Rhine, all kitchen utensils; in Auvergne and elsewhere, even the shepherd's pots. Every object of value, even those not in public use, comes under requisition: for instance,[4144] the Revolutionary Committee of Bayonne seizes a lot of "cotton cloth and muslin," under the pretext of making "breeches for the country's defenders." On useful objects being taken it is not always certain that they will be utilized; between their seizure and putting them to service, robbery and waste intervene. At Strasbourg,[4145] on a requisition being threatened by the representatives, the inhabitants strip themselves and, in a few days, bring to the municipality "6,879 coats, breeches and vests, 4,767 pairs of stockings, 16,921 pairs of shoes, 863 pairs of boots, 1351 cloaks, 20,518 shirts, 4,524 hats, 523 pairs of gaiters, 143 skin vests, 2,673, 900 blankets, besides 29 quintals of lint, 21 quintals of old linen, and a large number of other articles."

But "most of these articles remain piled up in the storehouses, part of them rotten, or eaten by rats, the rest being abandoned to the first-comer.... The end of spoliation was attained."--Utter loss to individuals and no gain, or the minimum of a gain, to the State. Such is the net result of the revolutionary government. After having laid its hand on three-fifths of the landed property of France; after having wrested from communities and individuals from ten to twelve billions of real and personal estate; after having increased, through assignats and territorial warrants, the public debt, which was not five billions in 1789, to more than fifty billions;[4146] no longer able to pay its employees; reduced to supporting its armies as well as itself by forced contributions on conquered territories, it ends in bankruptcy; it repudiates two-thirds of its debt, and its credit is so low that the remaining third which it has consolidated and guaranteed afresh, loses eighty-three per cent. the very next day. In its hands, the State has itself suffered as much as the private individuals.--Of the latter, more than 1 200 000 have suffered physically: several millions, all who owned anything, great or small, have suffered through their property.[4147] But, in this multitude of the oppressed, it is the notables who are chiefly aimed at and who, in their possessions as well as in their persons, have suffered the most.

II. The Value of Notables in Society.

Various kinds and degrees of Notables in 1789.--The great
social staff.--Men of the world.--Their breeding.--Their
intellectual culture.--Their humanity and philanthropy.
--Their moral temper.--Practical men.--Where recruited,--Their
qualifications.--Their active benevolence.--Scarcity of them
and their worth to a community.

On estimating the value of a forest you begin by dividing its vegetation into two classes; on the one hand the full-grown trees, the large or medium-sized oaks, beeches and aspens, and, on the other, the saplings and the undergrowth. In like manner, in estimating society, you divide the individuals composing it into two groups, one consisting of its notables of every kind and degree, and the other, of the common run of men. If the forest is an old one and has not been too badly managed, nearly the whole of its secular growth is found in its clusters of full-grown trees. Nearly all the useful wood is to be found in the mature forest. A few thousand large handsome trees and the three or four hundred thousand saplings, young and old, of the reserve, contain more useful and valuable wood than the twenty or thirty millions shrubs, bushes and heathers put together. It is the same in a community which has existed for a long time under a tolerably strict system of justice and police; almost the entire gain of a secular civilization is found concentrated in its notables, which, taking it all in all, was the state of French society in 1789.[4148]

Let us first consider the most prominent personages.--It is certain, that, among the aristocracy, the wealthiest and most conspicuous families had ceased to render services proportionate to the cost of their maintenance. Most of the seigniors and ladies of the Court, the worldly bishops, abbés, and parliamentarians of the drawing-room, knew but little more than how to solicit with address, make a graceful parade of themselves and spend lavishly. An ill-understood system of culture had diverted them from their natural avocations, and converted them into showy and agreeable specimens of vegetation, often hollow, blighted, sapless and over-pruned, besides being very costly, over-manured and too freely watered; and the skillful gardening which shaped, grouped and arranged them in artificial forms and bouquets, rendered their fruit abortive that flowers might be multiplied.--But the flowers were exquisite, and even in a moralist's eyes, such flowering counts for something. On the side of civility, good-breeding and deportment, the manners and customs of high life had reached a degree of perfection, which never, in France or elsewhere, had been attained before, and which has never since been revived;[4149] and of all the arts through which men have emancipated themselves from primitive coarseness, that which teaches them mutual consideration is, perhaps, the most precious. The observance of this, not alone in the drawing-room, but in the family, in business, in the street, with regard to relatives, inferiors, servants and strangers, gives dignity, as well as a charm, to human intercourse. Delicate regard for what is proper becomes a habit, an instinct, a second nature, which nature, superimposed on the original nature, is the best, inasmuch as the internal code which governs each detail of action and speech, prescribes the standard of behavior and respect for oneself, as well as respect and refined behavior towards others.--To this merit, add mental culture. Never was there an aristocracy so interested in general ideas and refinement of expression; it was even too much so; literary and philosophical preoccupation excluded all others of the positive and practical order; they talked, instead of acting. But, in this limited circle of speculative reason and of pure literary forms, it excelled; writings and how to write furnished the ordinary entertainment of polite society; every idea uttered by a thinker caused excitement in the drawing-room: the talent and style of authors were shaped by its taste;[4150] it was in the drawing-rooms that Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert, the Encyclopedists, great and little, Beaumarchais, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Champfort, and Rivarol, involuntarily sought listeners and found them, not merely admirers and entertainers, but friends, protectors, patrons, benefactors and followers.--Under the instruction of the masters, the disciples had become philanthropists; moreover, the amenities of manners developed in all souls compassion and benevolence: "Nothing was more dreaded by opulent men than to be regarded as insensitive."[4151] They concerned themselves with children, with the poor, with the peasantry, setting their wits to work to afford them relief; their zeal was aroused against oppression, their pity was excited for every misfortune. Even those whose duties compelled them to be rigid tempered their rigidity with explanations or concessions.

"Ten years before the Revolution," says Roederer,[4152] "the criminal courts of France were no longer like before.... Their attitude had changed.. . All the young magistrates, and this I can bear witness to, for I was one myself, pronounced judgments more in accordance with the principles of Beccaria,[4153] than according to law."--

As to the men in authority, military administrators and commandants, it was impossible to be more patient, more mindful of human blood. Their qualities turned also here into defects, for, through excess of humanity, they were unable to maintain order, as is evident when facing the insurrections that took place between 1789 and 1792. Even with the force in their own hands, amidst gross insults and extreme dangers, they dreaded to make use of it; they could not bring themselves to repressing brutes, rascals and maniacs: following the example of Louis XVI., they considered themselves as shepherds of the people, and let themselves be trampled upon rather than fire upon their flock.--In reality, they had noble, and even generous and big hearts: in the bailiwick assemblies, in March, 1789, long before the night of August 4, they voluntarily surrendered every pecuniary privilege; under severe trials, their courage, heightened by polished manners, adds even to their heroism, elegance, tact and gaiety. The most corrupt, a Duke of Orleans, the most frivolous and the most blasé, a Duc de Biron, meet death with stoical coolness and disdain.[4154] Delicate women who complain of a draught in their drawing-rooms, make no complaint of a straw mattress in a damp, gloomy dungeon, where they sleep in their clothes so that they may not wake up stiffened, and they come down into the court of the Conciergerie with their accustomed cheerfulness. Men and women, in prison, dress themselves as formerly, with the same care, that they may meet and talk together with the same grace and spirit, in a corridor with an iron grating within a step of the revolutionary Tribunal, and on the eve of the scaffold.[4155]--This moral temper is evidently of the rarest; if it errs on either side it is on that of being too refined, bad for use, good for ornament.

And yet, in the upper class there were associated with two or three thousand idlers amongst a frivolous aristocracy, as many serious men, who, to their drawing-room experience, added experience in business. Almost all who held office or had been in the service, were of this number, either ambassadors, general officers or former ministers, from Marshal de Brogue down to Machaut and Malesherbes; resident bishops, like Monseigneur de Durfort, at Besançon;[4156] vicars-general and canons who really governed their dioceses on the spot; prelates, like those in Provence, Languedoc and Brittany, who, by right, had seats in the provincial "Etats", agents and representatives of the clergy at Paris; heads of Orders and Congregations; the chief and lieutenant commandants of the seventeen military departments, intendants of each generalité head-clerks of each ministry, magistrates of each parliament, farmers-general, collectors-general, and, more particularly in each province, the dignitaries and local proprietors of the two first orders, and all leading manufacturers, merchants, ship-owners, bankers and prominent bourgeois; in short, that élite of the nobles, clergy, and Third Estate, which, from 1778 to 1789, constituted the twenty-one provincial assemblies, and which certainly formed in France the great social staff.--Not that they were superior politicians: for in those days there were none, scarcely a few hundred competent men, almost all of them being specialists. Nevertheless, it was in these few men that nearly the entire political capacity, information and common sense of France was to be found. Outside of their heads the other twenty-six millions of brains contained but little else than dangerous and barren formulas; as they alone had commanded, negotiated, deliberated and governed, they were the only ones who understood men and things tolerably well, and, consequently, the only ones who were not completely disqualified for their management. In the provincial Assemblies they were seen originating and conducting the most important reforms; they had devoted themselves to these effectively and conscientiously, with as much equity and patriotism as intelligence and thoroughness; most of the heads and sub-heads of the leading public and private branches of the service, guided by philosophy and supported by current opinion for twenty years, had likewise given evidence of active benevolence.[4157]--Nothing is more precious than men of this stamp, for they are the life and soul of their respective branches of service, and are not to be replaced in one lot, at a given moment, by persons of equal merit. In diplomacy, in the finances, in judicature, in administration, in extensive commerce and large manufacturing, a practical, governing capacity is not created in a day; affairs in all these are too vast and too complicated; there are too many diverse interests to take into account, too many near and remote contingencies to foresee; lacking a knowledge of technical details, it is difficult to grasp the whole; one tries to make short work of it, one shatters right and left and ends with the sword, obliged to fall back on systematic brutality to complete the work of audacious bungling. Except in war, where apprenticeship takes less time than elsewhere, ten years of preparatory education plus ten years of practical experience are required for the good government of men and the management of capital assets. Add to this, against the temptations of power which are strong, a stability of character established through professional honor, and, if it so happens, by family traditions.

After having directed financial matters for two years, Cambon[4158] is not yet aware that the functions of the fermiers-généraux of indirect taxes differ from those of the receveurs-géneraux of direct taxes;[4159] accordingly, he includes, or allows to be included, the forty-eight receveurs in the decree which sends the sixty fermiers before the revolutionary Tribunal, that is to say, to the guillotine; and, in fact, all of them would have been sent there had not a man familiar with the business, Gaudin, Commissioner of the Treasury, heard the decree proclaimed in the street and run to explain to the Committee on Finances that "there was nothing in common" between the two groups of outlaws; that the fermiers were holders of leases on probable profits while the receveurs were paid functionaries at a fixed salary, and the crimes of the former, proved or not proved, were not imputable to the latter. Great astonishment on the part of these improvised financiers!"They make an outcry," says Gaudin, "and assert that I am mistaken. I insist, and repeat what I have told the President, Cambon; I affirm on says to one of the members, 'Since that is so, go to the bureau of procès-verbaux and scratch out the term receveurs-généraux from the decree passed this morning.' my honor and offer to furnish them the proof of it; finally, they are satisfied and the President "--Such are the gross blunders committed by interlopers, and even carried out, when not warned and restrained by veterans in the service. Cambon, accordingly, in spite of the Jacobins, retains in his bureaux all whom he can among veteran officials. If Carnot manages the war well, it is owing to his being himself an educated officer and to maintaining in their positions d'Arcon, d'Obenheim, de Grimoard, de Montalembert and Marescot, all eminent men bequeathed to him by the ancient régime.[4160] Reduced, before the 9th of Thermidor, to perfect nullity, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not again to become useful and active until the professional diplomats, Miot, Colchen, Otto and Reinhart,[4161] resume their ascendancy and influence. It is a professional diplomat, Barthélemy, who, after the 9th of Thermidor, really directs the foreign policy of the Convention, and brings about the peace of Basle.

III. The three classes of Notables.

The Nobility.--Its physical and moral preparation through
feats of arms.--The military spirit.--High character.
--Conduct of officers in 1789-1792.--Service for which these
nobles were adapted.

Three classes, the nobles, the clergy and the bourgeoisie, provided this superior élite, and, compared with the rest of the nation, they themselves formed an élite.--Thirty thousand gentlemen, scattered through the provinces, had been brought up from infancy to the profession of arms; generally poor, they lived on their rural estates without luxuries, comforts or curiosity, in the society of wood-rangers and game-keepers, frugally and with rustic habits, in the open air, in such a way as to ensure robust constitutions. A child, at six years of age, mounted a horse; he followed the hounds, and hardened himself against inclemencies;[4162] afterwards, in the academies, he rendered his limbs supple by exercise and obtained that rugged health which is necessary for living under a tent and following a campaign. From early childhood, he was imbued with a military spirit; his father and uncles at table talked of nothing but their perils in war and feats of arms; his imagination took fire; he got accustomed to looking upon their pursuits as the only ones worthy of a man of rank and feeling, and he plunged ahead with a precocity which we no longer comprehend. I have read many records of the service of gentlemen who were assassinated, guillotined or emigrés; they nearly always began their careers before the age of sixteen, often at fourteen, thirteen and eleven.[4163] M. des Echerolles,[4164] captain in the Poitou regiment, had brought along with him into the army his only son, aged nine, and a dozen little cousins of the same age. Those children fought like old soldiers; one of them had his leg fractured by a ball; young des Echerolles received a saber stroke which cut away his cheek from the ear to the upper lip, and he was wounded seven times; still young, he received the cross of St. Louis. To serve the State, seek conflict and expose one's life, seemed an obligation of their rank, a hereditary debt; out of nine or ten thousand officers who discharged this debt most of them cared only for this and looked for nothing beyond. Without fortune and without influence, they had renounced promotion, fully aware that the higher ranks were reserved for the heirs of great families and the courtiers at Versailles. After serving fifteen or twenty years, they returned home with a captain's commission and the cross of St. Louis, sometimes with a small pension, contented with having done their duty and conscious of their own honor. On the approach of the Revolution, this old spirit, illumined by the new ideas, became an almost civic virtue:[4165] we have seen how they behaved between 1789 and 1792, their moderation, their forbearance, their sacrifice of self-love, their abnegation and their stoical impassability, their dislike to strike, the coolness with which they persisted in receiving without returning blows, and in maintaining, if not public order, at least the last semblance of it. Patriots as much as soldiers, through birth, education and conviction, they formed a natural, special nursery, eminently worthy of preserving, inasmuch as it furnished society with ready-made instruments for defense, internally against rascals and brutes, and externally against the enemy. Less calm in disposition and more given to pleasure than the rural nobles of Prussia, under slacker discipline and in the midst of greater worldliness, but more genial, more courteous and more liberal-minded, the twenty-six thousand noble families of France upheld in their sons the traditions and prejudices, the habits and aptitudes, those energies of body, heart and mind[4166] through which the Prussian "junkers" were able to constitute the Prussian army, organize the German army and make Germany the first power of Europe.

IV. The Clergy.

Where recruited.--Professional inducements.--Independence of
ecclesiastics.--Their substantial merits.--Their theoretical
and practical information.--Their distribution over the
territory.--Utility of their office.--Their conduct in
1790-1800.--Their courage, their capacity for self-sacrifice.

Likewise in the Church where nearly all its staff, the whole of the lower and middle-class clergy, curés, vicars, canons and collegiate chaplains, teachers or directors of schools, colleges and seminaries, more than sixty-five thousand ecclesiastics, formed a healthy, well organized body, worthily fulfilling its duties.

"I do not know," says de Tocqueville,[4167] "all in all, and notwithstanding the vices of some of its members, if there ever was in the world a more remarkable clergy than the Catholic clergy of France when the Revolution took them by surprise, more enlightened, more national, less entrenched behind their private virtues, better endowed with public virtues, and, at the same time, more strong in the faith. ... I began the study of the old social system full of prejudices against them; I finish it full of respect for them."

And first, which is a great point, most of the incumbents in the town parishes, in the three hundred collegial churches, in the small canonicates of the cathedral chapters, belonged to better families than at the present day.[4168] Children were then more numerous, not merely among the peasants, but among the inferior nobles and the upper bourgeoisie; each family, accordingly, was glad to have one of its sons take orders, and no constraint was necessary to bring this about. The ecclesiastical profession then had attractions which it no longer possesses; it had none of the inconveniences incident to it at the present time. A priest was not exposed to democratic distrust and hostility; he was sure of a bow from the laborer in the street as well as from the peasant in the country; he was on an equal footing with the local bourgeoisie, almost one of the family, and among the first; he could count on passing his life in a permanent situation, honorably and serenely, in the midst of popular deference and enjoying the good will of the public.--On the other hand, he was not bridled as in our day. A priest was not a functionary salaried by the State; his pay, like his private income, earmarked and put aside beforehand, furnished through special appropriations, through local taxes, out of a distinct treasury, could never be withheld on account of a préfect's report, or through ministerial caprice, or be constantly menaced by budget difficulties and the ill-will of the civil powers. In relation to his ecclesiastical superiors he was respectful but independent. The bishop in his diocese was not what he has become since the Concordat, an absolute sovereign free to appoint and remove at will nine curés out of ten. In three vacancies out of four, and often in fourteen out of fifteen,[4169] it was not the bishop who made the appointment; the new incumbent was designated sometimes by the cathedral chapter or corporation; again, by a collegial church or corporation; again, by the metropolitan canon or by the abbé or prior, the patron of the place; again, by the seignior whose ancestors had founded or endowed the Church; in certain cases by the Pope, and, occasionally, by the King or commune. Powers were limited through this multiplicity and inter-crossing of authorities. Moreover, the canon or curé being once appointed he possessed guarantees; he could not be arbitrarily dismissed; in most cases, his removal or suspension required a previous trial according to prescribed formalities, accompanied with an examination, pleadings, and arguments before the officialité or ecclesiastical court. He was, in fact, permanently placed, and very generally his personal merit sufficed to keep him in his place.--For, if the highest positions were bestowed according to birth and favor, the intermediate positions were reserved to correct habits and attainments. Many canons and vicars-general, and almost all the curés in the towns were doctors of divinity or of canon law, while ecclesiastical studies, very thorough, had occupied eight or nine years of their youth.[4170] Although the method was out of date, much was learned at the Sorbonne and St. Sulpice; at the very least, one became a good logician through prolonged and scientific intellectual gymnastics. "My dear Abbé," said Turgot, smiling, to Morellet, "it is only you and I who have taken our degree who can reason closely." Their theological drill, indeed, was about as valuable as our philosophical drill; if it expanded the mind less, it supplied this better with applicable concepts; less exciting, it was more fruitful. In the Sorbonne of the nineteenth century, the studies consist of the speculative systems of a few isolated, divergent intellects who have exercised no authority over the multitude, while in the Sorbonne of the eighteenth century, the studies consisted of the creed, morality, discipline, history and canons of a Church which had already existed seventeen centuries and which, comprising one hundred and fifty millions of souls, still sways one-half of the civilized world.--To a theoretical education add practical education. A curé and with still more reason, a canon, an archdeacon, a bishop, was not a passing stranger, endowed by the State, wearing a surplice, as little belonging to his age through his ministry as through his dress, and wholly confined to his spiritual functions: he managed the revenues of his dotation, he granted leases, made repairs, built, and interested himself in the probabilities of the crops, in the construction of a highway or canal, while his experiences in these matters were equal to those of any lay proprietor. Moreover, being one of a small proprietary corporation, that is to say, a chapter or local vestry, and one of a great proprietary corporation of the diocese and Church of France, he took part directly or indirectly in important temporal affairs, in assemblies, in deliberations, in collective expenditures, in the establishment of a local budget and of a general budget, and hence, in public and administrative matters, his competence was analogous and almost equal to that of a mayor, sub-delegate, farmer-general or intendant. In addition to this he was liberal: never has the French clergy been more earnestly so, from the latest curés back to the first archbishops.[4171]--Lastly, remark the distribution of the clergy over the territory. There was a curé or vicar in the smallest of the forty thousand villages. In thousands of small, poor, remote communes, he was the only man who could readily read and write; none other than he in many of the larger rural communes,[4172] except the resident seignior and some man of the law or half-way schoolmaster, was at all learned.[4173] Actually, for a man who had finished his studies and knowing Latin, to consent, for six hundred francs or three hundred francs a year, to live isolated, and a celibate, almost in indigence, amongst rustics and the poor, he must be a priest; the quality of his office makes him resigned to the discomforts of his situation. A preacher of the Word, a professor of morality, a minister of Charity, a guide and dispenser of spiritual life, he taught a theory of the world, at once consoling and self-denying, which he enforced with a cult, and this cult was the only one adapted to his flock; manifestly, the French, especially those devoted to manual and hard labor, could not regard this world as ideal, except through his formulas; history, the supreme judge, had on this point rendered its verdict without appeal; no heresy, no schism, not the Reformation nor Jansenism, had prevailed against hereditary faith; through infinitely multiplied and deeply penetrating roots this faith suited national customs, temperament, and peculiar social imagination and sensibility. Possessing the heart, the intellect, and even the senses, through fixed, immemorial traditions and habits, it had become an unconscious, almost corporeal necessity, and the Catholic orthodox curé, in communion with the Pope, was about as indispensable to the village as the public fountain; he also quenched thirst, the thirst of the soul; without him, the inhabitants could find no drinkable water. And, if we keep human weaknesses in mind, it may be said that nobleness of character in the clergy corresponded with nobleness of profession; in all points no one could dispute their capacity for self-sacrifice, for they willingly suffered for what they believed to be the truth. If, in 1790, a number of priests took the oath to the civil constitution of the clergy, it was with reservations, or because they deemed the oath licit; but, after the dismissal of the bishops and the Pope's disapprobation, many of them withdrew it at the risk of their lives, so as not to fall into schism; they fell back into the ranks and gave themselves up voluntarily to the brutality of the crowd and the rigors of the law. Moreover, and from the start, notwithstanding threats and temptations, two-thirds of the clergy would not take the oath; in the highest ranks, among the mundane ecclesiastics whose skepticism and laxity were notorious, honor, in default of faith, maintained the same spirit; nearly the whole of them, great and small, had subordinated their interests, welfare and security to the maintenance of their dignity or to scruples of conscience. They had allowed themselves to be stripped of everything; they let themselves be exiled, imprisoned, tortured and made martyrs of, like the Christians of the primitive church; through their invincible meekness, they were going, like the primitive Christians, to exhaust the rage of their executioners, wear out persecutions, transform opinion and compel the admission, even with those who survived in the eighteenth century, that they were true, deserving and courageous men.

V. The Bourgeoisie.

Where recruited.--Difference between the functionary of the
ancient regime and the modern functionary.--Appointments
seen as Property.--Guilds.--Independence and security of
office-holders.--Their ambitions are limited and satisfied.
--Fixed habits, seriousness and integrity.--Ambition to
secure esteem.--Intellectual culture.--Liberal ideas.
--Respectability and public zeal.--Conduct of the bourgeoisie
in 1789-1791.