Hippolyte Taine - The French Revolution (Vol.1-3)

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Entry of vagabonds.—The number of paupers.

INDEED it is in the center that the convulsive shocks are strongest. Nothing is lacking to aggravate the insurrection—neither the liveliest provocation to stimulate it, nor the most numerous bands to carry it out. The environs of Paris all furnish recruits for it; nowhere are there so many miserable wretches, so many of the famished, and so many rebellious beings. Robberies of grain take place everywhere—at Orleans, at Cosne, at Rambouillet, at Jouy, at Pont-Saint-Maxence, at Bray-sur-Seine, at Sens, at Nangis. 1201Wheat flour is so scarce at Meudon, that every purchaser is ordered to buy at the same time an equal quantity of barley. At Viroflay, thirty women, with a rear-guard of men, stop on the main road vehicles, which they suppose to be loaded with grain. At Montlhéry stones and clubs disperse seven brigades of the police. An immense throng of eight thousand persons, women and men, provided with bags, fall upon the grain exposed for sale. They force the delivery to them of wheat worth 40 francs at 24 francs, pillaging the half of it and conveying it off without payment. "The constabulary is disheartened," writes the sub-delegate; "the determination of the people is wonderful; I am frightened at what I have seen and heard."—After the 13th of July, 1788, the day of the hail-storm, despair seized the peasantry; well disposed as the proprietors may have been, it was impossible to assist them. "Not a workshop is open; 1202the noblemen and the bourgeois, obliged to grant delays in the payment of their incomes, can give no work." Accordingly, "the famished people are on the point of risking life for life," and, publicly and boldly, they seek food wherever it can be found. At Conflans-Saint-Honorine, Eragny, Neuville, Chenevières, at Cergy, Pontoise, Ile-Adam, Presle, and Beaumont, men, women, and children, the hole parish, range the country, set snares, and destroy the burrows. "The rumor is current that the Government, informed of the damage done by the game to cultivators, allows its destruction … and really the hares ravaged about a fifth of the crop. At first an arrest is made of nine of these poachers; but they are released, "taking circumstances into account." Consequently, for two months, there is a slaughter on the property of the Prince de Conti and of the Ambassador Mercy d'Argenteau; in default of bread they eat rabbits.—Along with the abuse of property they are led, by a natural impulse, to attack property itself. Near Saint-Denis the woods belonging to the abbey are devastated. "The farmers of the neighborhood carry away loads of wood, drawn by four and five horses;" the inhabitants of the villages of Ville-Parisis, Tremblay, Vert-Galant, Villepinte, sell it publicly, and threaten the wood-rangers with a beating. On the 15th of June the damage is already estimated at 60,000 livres.—It makes little difference whether the proprietor has been benevolent, like M. de Talaru, 1203who had supported the poor on his estate at Issy the preceding winter. The peasants destroy the dike which conducts water to his communal mill; condemned by the parliament to restore it, they declare that not only will they not obey. Should M. de Talaru try to rebuild it they will return with three hundred armed men, and tear it away the second time.

For those who are most compromised Paris is the nearest refuge. For the poorest and most exasperated, the door of nomadic life stands wide open. Bands rise up around the capital, just as in countries where human society has not yet been formed, or has ceased to exist. During the first two weeks of May 1204near Villejuif a band of five or six hundred vagabonds strive to force Bicêtre and approach Saint-Cloud. They arrive from thirty, forty, and sixty leagues off, from Champagne, from Lorraine, from the whole circuit of country devastated by the hailstorm. All hover around Paris and are there engulfed as in a sewer, the unfortunate along with criminals, some to find work, others to beg and to rove about under the injurious prompting of hunger and the rumors of the public thoroughfares. During the last days of April, 1205the clerks at the tollhouses note the entrance of "a frightful number of poorly clad men of sinister aspect." During the first days of May a change in the appearance of the crowd is remarked. There mingle in it "a number of foreigners, from all countries, most of them in rags, armed with big sticks, and whose very aspect announces what is to be feared from them." Already, before this final influx, the public sink is full to overflowing. Think of the extraordinary and rapid increase of population in Paris, the multitude of artisans brought there by recent demolition and constructions. Think of all the craftsmen whom the stagnation of manufactures, the augmentation of octrois, the rigor of winter, and the dearness of bread have reduced to extreme distress. Remember that in 1786 "two hundred thousand persons are counted whose property, all told, has not the intrinsic worth of fifty crowns." Remember that, from time immemorial, these have been at war with the city watchmen. Remember that in 1789 there are twenty thousand poachers in the capital and that, to provide them with work, it is found necessary to establish national workshops. Remember "that twelve thousand are kept uselessly occupied digging on the hill of Montmartre, and paid twenty sous per day. Remember that the wharves and quays are covered with them, that the Hôtel-de-Ville is invested by them, and that, around the palace, they seem to be a reproach to the inactivity of disarmed justice." Daily they grow bitter and excited around the doors of the bakeries, where, kept waiting a long time, they are not sure of obtaining bread. You can imagine the fury and the force with which they will storm any obstacle to which their attention may be directed.

Table of Contents

Excitement of the press and of opinion.—The people make

their choice.

Such an obstacle has been pointed out to them during the last two years, it is the Ministry, the Court, the Government, in short the entire ancient régime. Whoever protests against it in favor of the people is sure to be followed as far, and perhaps even farther, than he chooses to lead.—The moment the Parliament of a large city refuses to register fiscal edicts it finds a riot at its service. On the 7th of June 1788, at Grenoble, tiles rain down on the heads of the soldiery, and the military force is powerless. At Rennes, to put down the rebellious city, an army and after this a permanent camp of four regiments of infantry and two of cavalry, under the command of a Marshal of France, is required. 1206—The following year, when the Parliaments now side with the privileged class, the disturbances again begin, but this time against the Parliaments. In February 1789, at Besançon and at Aix, the magistrates are hooted at, chased in the streets, besieged in the town hall, and obliged to conceal themselves or take to flight.—If such is the disposition in the provincial capitals, what must it be in the capital of the kingdom? For a start, in the month of August, 1788, after the dismissal of Brienne and Lamoignon, the mob, collected on the Place Dauphine, constitutes itself judge, burns both ministers in effigy, disperses the watch, and resists the troops: no sedition, as bloody as this, had been seen for a century. Two days later, the riot bursts out a second time; the people are seized with a resolve to go and burn the residences of the two ministers and that of Dubois, the lieutenant of police.—Clearly a new ferment has been infused among the ignorant and brutal masses, and the new ideas are producing their effect. They have for a long time imperceptibly been filtering downwards from layer to layer After having gained over the aristocracy, the whole of the lettered portion of the Third-Estate, the lawyers, the schools, all the young, they have insinuated themselves drop by drop and by a thousand fissures into the class which supports itself by the labor of its own hands. Noblemen, at their toilettes, have scoffed at Christianity, and affirmed the rights of man before their valets, hairdressers, purveyors, and all those that are in attendance upon them. Men of letters, lawyers, and attorneys have repeated, in the bitterest tone, the same diatribes and the same theories in the coffee-houses and in the restaurants, on the promenades and in all public places. They have spoken out before the lower class as if it were not present, and, from all this eloquence poured out without precaution, some bubbles besprinkle the brain of the artisan, the publican, the messenger, the shopkeeper, and the soldier.