The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface
• Book Fifth: Establishment of the Revolutionary Government
• Chapter I
• Book Sixth: the Jacobin Programme
• Chapter I
• Chapter Ii
• Book Seventh: the Governors
• Chapter I
• Chapter Ii
• Chapter Iii
• Book VIII: The Governed
• Chapter I
• Chapter Ii
• Book IX: The End of Therevolutionary Government
• Chapter I

CHAPTER II

I

Suppose a man forced to walk with his feet in the air and his head downward. By using extremely energetic measures he might, for a while, be made to maintain this unwholesome attitude, and certainly at the expense of a bruised or broken skull; it is very probable, moreover, that he would use his feet convulsively and kick terribly. But it is certain that if this course were persisted in, the man would experience intolerable pain and finally sink down; the blood would stop circulating and suffocation would ensue; the trunk and limbs would suffer as much as the head, and the feet would become numb and inert. Such is about the history of France under its Jacobin pedagogues; their rigid theory and persistent brutality impose on the nation an attitude against nature; consequently she suffers, and each day suffers more and more; the paralysis increases; the functions get out of order and cease to act, while the last and principal one,1 the most urgent, namely, physical support and the daily nourishment of the living individual, is so badly accomplished, against so many obstacles, interruptions, uncertainties, and deficiencies, that the patient, reduced to extreme want, asks if tomorrow will not be worse than today, and whether his semistarvation will not end in complete starvation.

Nothing, apparently, is simpler, and yet really more complex, than the physiological process by which, in the organised body, the proper restorative food flows regularly to the spot where it is needed, among the innumerably diverse and distant cells. In like manner, nothing is simpler at the first glance, and yet more complex, than the economical process by which, in the social organism, subsistences and other articles of prime necessity, flow of themselves to all points of the territory where they are needed and within reach of each consumer. It is owing to this that, in the social body as in the organised body, the terminal act presupposes many others anterior to and coördinate with it, a series of elaborations, a succession of metamorphoses, one elimination and transportation after another, mostly invisible and obscure, but all indispensable, and all of them carried out by infinitely delicate organs, so delicate that, under the slightest pressure, they get out of order, so dependent on each other that an injury to one affects the operations of the rest, and thus suppresses or perverts the final result to which, nearly or remotely, they all contribute.

Consider, for a moment, these precious economical organs and their mode of operation. In any tolerably civilised community that has lasted for any length of time, they consist, first in rank, of those who possess wealth arising from the accumulation of old and recent savings, that is to say, those who possess any sort of security, large or small, in money, in notes, or in kind, whatever its form, whether in lands, buildings or factories, in canals, shipping or machinery, in cattle or tools, as well as in every species of merchandise or produce. And see what use they make of these: each person, reserving what he needs for daily consumption, devotes his available surplus to some enterprise, the capitalist his ready money, the real-estate owner his land and tenements, the farmer his cattle, seed, and farming implements, the manufacturer his mills and raw material, the common-carrier his vessels, vehicles, and horses, the trader his warehouses and stock of goods for the year, and the retailer his shop and supplies for a fortnight, to which everybody, the agriculturist, merchant, and manufacturer, necessarily adds his cash on hand, the deposits in his bank for paying the monthly salaries of his clerks, and at the end of the week, the wages of his workmen. Otherwise, it would be impossible to till the soil, to build, to fabricate, to transport, to sell; however useful the work might be, it could not be perfected, or even begun, without a preliminary outlay in money or in kind; in every enterprise, the crop presupposes labor and seed-planting; if I want to dig a well I am obliged to hire a pick and the arms to wield it, or, in other terms, to make certain advances. But these advances are made only on two conditions: first, that he who makes them is able to make them, that is to say, that he is the possessor of an available surplus; and next, being the owner of this surplus, that he desires to make them, with this proviso that he may gain instead of losing by the operation. If I am wholly or partially ruined, if my tenants and farmers do not pay their rent,2 if my lands or goods do not bring half their value in the market, if the net proceeds of my possessions are threatened with confiscation or pillage, not only have I fewer securities to dispose of, but, again, I become more and more uneasy about the future; over and above my immediate consumption I have to provide for a prospective consumption; I add to my reserve stores especially of coin and provisions; I hold on to the remnant of my securities for myself and those who belong to me; they are no longer available and I can no longer make loans or enter upon my enterprise. And, on the other hand, if the loan or enterprise, instead of bringing me a profit, brings me loss; if the law is powerless or fails to do me justice and adds extra to ordinary risks; if my work once perfected is to become the prey of the government, of brigands, or of whoever pleases to seize it; if I am compelled to surrender my wares and merchandise at one-half their cost; if I cannot produce, put in store, transport, or sell except by renouncing all profit and with the certainty of not getting back my advances, I will no longer make loans or enter upon any undertaking whatever.

Such is the disposition and situation of people able to make advances in anarchical times, when the State falters and no longer performs its customary service, when property is no longer adequately protected by the public force, when jacqueries overspread the country and insurrections break out in the towns, when chateaux are sacked, archives burnt, shops broken into, provisions carried off and transportation is arrested, when rents and leases are no longer paid, when the courts dare no longer convict, when the constable no longer dares serve a warrant, when the gendarmerie holds back, when the police fails to act, when repeated amnesties shield robbers and incendiaries, when a revolution brings into local and central power dishonest and impoverished adventurers hostile to every one that possesses property of any kind. Such is the disposition and situation of all possessors of advances in socialistic times; when the usurping State, instead of protecting private property, destroys or seizes it; when it takes for itself the property of many of the great corporations; when it suppresses legally established credits without indemnity; when, by dint of expenditure and the burdens this creates, it becomes insolvent; when, through its paper-money and forced circulation, it annuls indebtedness in the hands of the creditor, and allows the debtor to go scot free; when it arbitrarily seizes current capital; when it makes forced loans and requisitions; when its tax on productions surpasses the cost of production and on merchandise the profit on its sale; when it constrains the manufacturer to manufacture at a loss and the merchant to sell at a loss; when its principles, judged by its acts, indicate a progression from partial to a universal confiscation. Through a certain affiliation, every phase of evil engenders the evil which follows, as may be said of a poison the effects of which spread or strike in, each function, affected by the derangement of one contiguous to it, becoming disturbed in its turn. The perils, mutilation, and suppression of property diminish available securities more and more, also the courage that risks them, that is to say, the mode of, and disposition to, make advances; through a lack of advances, useful enterprises languish, die out or are not undertaken; consequently, the production, supply, and sale of indispensable articles slacken, become interrupted, and cease altogether. There is less soap and sugar and fewer candles at the grocery, less wood and coal in the wood-yard, fewer oxen and sheep in the markets, less meat at the butcher’s, less grain and flour at the corn-exchange, and less bread at the bakeries. As articles of prime necessity are scarce they become dear; as people contend for them their dearness increases; the rich man ruins himself in the struggle to get hold of them, while the poor man never gets any, the first of all necessities becoming unattainable.

II

Such is the misery existing in France at the moment of the completion of the Jacobin conquest, and of which the Jacobins are the authors; for, for the past four years, they have waged systematic war against property. From below, they have provoked, excused and amnestied, or tolerated and authorised, all the popular attacks on property,3 countless insurrections, seven successive jacqueries, some of them so extensive as to cover eight or ten departments at the same time, the last one let loose on all France, that is to say, universal and lasting brigandage, the arbitrary rule of paupers, vagabonds, and ruffians; every species of robbery, from a refusal to pay rents and leases to the sacking of chateaux and ordinary domiciles, even to the pillage of markets and granaries, free scope to mobs which, under a political pretext, tax and ransom the “suspects” of all classes at pleasure, not alone the noble and the rich but the peaceable farmer and well-to-do artisan, in short, reverting back to the state of nature, to the dominion of appetites and lusts, and to a savage, primitive life in the forests. Only a short time before, in the month of February, 1793, through Marat’s recommendation, and with the connivance of the Jacobin municipality, the Paris riff-raff had broken into twelve hundred groceries and divided on the spot, either gratis or at the price it fixed, sugar, soap, brandy, and coffee. From above, they had undertaken, carried out, and multiplied the worst assaults on property, vast spoliations of every sort—the suppression of hundreds of millions of incomes and the confiscation of billions of capital; the abolition without indemnity of tithes and quitrents; the expropriation of the property of the clergy, of emigrés, that of the order of Malta, that of the pious, charitable, and educational associations and endowments, even laic; seizures of plate, of the sacred vessels and precious ornaments of the churches. And, since they are in power, others still more vast; after August 10, their newspapers in Paris and their commissioners in the departments,4 preached “the agrarian law, the holding of all property in common, the levelling of fortunes, the right of each fraction of the sovereignty” to help itself by force to all food and investments at the expense of the owner, to hunt down the rich, proscribe “land-owners, leading merchants, financiers, and all men in possession of whatever is superfluous.” Rousseau’s dogma that “the fruit belongs to everybody and the soil to no one” is established at an early date as a maxim of State in the Convention, while in the deliberations of the sovereign assembly socialism, openly avowed, becomes ascendant, and, afterwards, supreme. According to Robespierre,5 “whatever is essential to preserve life is common property to society at large; only the excess may be given up to individuals and surrendered to commercial enterprise.” With still greater solemnity, the pontiff of the sect, in the Declaration of Rights which, unanimously adopted by the all-powerful Jacobin club, is to serve as the corner-stone of the new institutions, pens the following formulae big with their consequences:6 “Society must provide for the support of all its members. The aid required by indigence is a debt of the rich to the poor. The right of property is limited,” and applies “only to that portion which the law guarantees. Every ownership, any trade, which bears prejudicially on the existence of our fellow-creatures is necessarily illicit and immoral.” The sense of this is clear, and yet more: the Jacobin populace, having decided that the possession of, and trade in, groceries was prejudicial to its existence, the grocers’ monopoly is, therefore, immoral and illicit, and consequently, it pillages their shops. Under the rule of the populace and of the “Mountain,” the Convention applies the theory, seizes capital wherever it can be found, and notifies the poor, in its name, “that they will find in the pocket-books of the rich whatever they need to supply their wants.”7

Over and above these striking and direct attacks, an indirect and secret attack, but still more significant, slowly undermines the basis of all present and future property. State affairs are everybody’s affairs, and, when the State ruins itself, everybody is ruined along with it. For, it is the country’s greatest debtor and its greatest creditor, while there is no debtor so free of seizure and no creditor so absorbing, since, making the laws and possessing the force, it can, firstly, repudiate indebtedness and send away the fund-holder with empty hands, and next, increase taxation and empty the taxpayer’s pocket of his last penny. There is no greater menace to private fortunes than the bad administration of the public fortune. Now, under the pressure of Jacobin principles and of the Jacobin faction, the trustees of France have administered as if they purposely meant to ruin their ward; every known means for wasting a fortune have been brought into play by them. In the first place, they have deprived him of three-fourths of his income. To please the people and enforce the theory, the taxes on articles consumed, on salt, with the excise subsidies and the octroi duties on liquors, meat, tobacco, leather, and gunpowder, have been abolished, while the new imposts substituted for the old ones, slowly fixed, badly apportioned and raised with difficulty have brought in no returns; on the 1st of February, 1793,8 the Treasury had received on the real and personal taxation of 1791, but one hundred and fifty millions instead of three hundred millions; on the same taxes for 1792, instead of three hundred millions it had obtained nothing at all. At this date, and during the four years of the Revolution, the total arrears of taxation amounted to six hundred and thirty-two millions—a bad debt that can hardly be recovered, and, in fact, it is already reduced one-half, since, even if the debtor could and was disposed to pay, he would pay in assignats, which, at this time, were at a discount of fifty per cent. In the second place, the new managers had quadrupled the public expenditure.9 What with the equipment and excursions of the National Guards, federations, patriotic festivals, and parades, the writing, printing, and publication of innumerable documents, reimbursements for suppressed offices, the installation of new administrations, aid to the indigent and to its charity workshops, purchases of grain, indemnities to millers and bakers, it was under the necessity of providing for the cost of the universal demolition and reconstruction. Now, the State had, for the most part, defrayed all these expenses. At the end of April, 1793, it had already advanced to the city of Paris alone, one hundred and ten million francs, while the Commune, insolvent, kept constantly extorting fresh millions.10 By the side of this gulf, the Jacobins had dug another, larger still, that of the war. For the first half of the year 1793 they threw into this pit first, one hundred and forty millions, then one hundred and sixty millions, and then one hundred and ninety million francs; in the second six months of 1793 the war and subsistences swallowed up three hundred million francs per month, and the more they threw into the two gulfs the deeper they became.11

Naturally, when there is no collecting a revenue and expenses go on increasing, one is obliged to borrow on one’s resources, and piecemeal, as long as these last. Naturally, when ready money is not to be had on the market, one draws notes and tries to put them in circulation; one pays tradesmen with written promises in the future, and thus exhausts one’s credit. Such is paper-money and the assignats, the third and most efficient way for wasting a fortune and which the Jacobins did not fail to make the most of. Under the Constituent Assembly, through a remnant of good sense and good faith, efforts were at first made to guarantee the fulfillment of written promises; the holders of assignats were almost secured by a first mortgage on the national possessions, which had been given to them coupled with an engagement not to raise more money on this guarantee, as well as not to issue any more assignats.12 But they did not keep faith. They rendered the security afforded by this mortgage inoperative and, as all chances of repayment disappeared, its value declined. Then, on the 27th of April, 1792, according to the report of Cambon, there begins an unlimited issue; according to the Jacobin financiers, nothing more is necessary to provide for the war than to turn the wheel and grind out promises to pay: in June, 1793, assignats to the amount of four billion three hundred and twenty millions have already been manufactured, and everybody sees that the mill must grind faster. This is why the guarantee, vainly increased, no longer suffices for the monstrous, disproportionate mortgage; it exceeds all limits, covers nothing, and sinks through its own weight. At Paris, the assignat of one hundred francs is worth in specie, in the month of June, 1791, eighty-five francs, in January, 1792, only sixty-six francs, in March, 1792, only fifty-three francs; rising in value at the end of the Legislative Assembly, owing to fresh confiscations, it falls back to fifty-five francs in January, 1793, to forty-seven francs in April, to forty francs in June, to thirty-three francs in July.13 Thus are the creditors of the State defrauded of a third, one-half, and two-thirds of their investment, and not alone the creditors of the State but every other creditor, since every debtor has the right to discharge his obligations by paying his debts in assignats. Enumerate, if possible, all who are defrauded of private claims, all money-lenders, and stock-holders who have invested in any private enterprise, either manufacturing or mercantile, those who have loaned money on contracts of longer or shorter date, all sellers of real-estate, with stipulations in their deeds for more or less remote payment, all land-owners who have leased their grounds or buildings for a term of years, all holders of annuities on private bond or on an estate, all manufacturers, merchants and farmers who have sold their wares, goods, and produce on time, all clerks on yearly salaries, and even all other employees, underlings, servants, and workmen receiving fixed salaries for a specified term. There is not one of these persons whose capital, or income payable in assignats, is not at once crippled in proportion to the decline in value of assignats, so that not only the State falls into bankruptcy but likewise every creditor in France, legally bankrupt along with it through its fault.

In such a situation how can any enterprise be commenced or maintained? Who dares take a risk, especially when disbursements are large and returns remote? Who dares lend on long credits? If loans are still made they are not for a year but for a month, while the interest which, before the Revolution was six, five, or even four per cent. per annum, is now “two per cent. a month on securities.” It soon runs up higher and, at Paris and Strasbourg we see it rising, as in India and the Barbary States, to four, five, six, and even seven per cent. a month.14 What holder of raw material, or of manufactured goods, would dare make entries on his books as usual and allow his customer the indispensable credit of three months? What large manufacturer would presume to make goods up, what wholesale merchant would care to make shipments, what man of wealth or with a competence would build, drain, and construct dams and dykes, repair, or even maintain them with the positive certainty of delays in getting back only one-half his advances and with the increasing certainty of getting nothing? Large establishments fail from year to year in all directions; after the ruin of the nobles and the departure of wealthy foreigners, every craft dependent on luxurious tastes, those of Paris and Lyons, which are the standard for Europe, all the manufactories of rich stuffs, and furniture, and other artistic, elegant, and fashionable articles; after the insurrection of the blacks in St. Domingo, and other troubles in the West Indies, the great colonial trade and remarkable prosperity of Nantes and Bordeaux, including all the industrial enterprises by which the production, transportation, and circulation of cotton, sugar, and coffee were affected;15 after the declaration of war with England, the shipping interest; after the declaration of war with all Europe, the commerce of the continent.16 Failure after failure, an universal crash, utter cessation of extensively organised and productive labor: instead of productive industries, I see none now but destructive industries, those of the agricultural and commercial vermin, those of brokers and speculators who dismantle mansions and abbeys, and who demolish chateaux and churches so as to sell the materials as cheap as dirt, who bargain away national possessions, so as to make a profit on the transaction. Imagine the mischief a temporary owner, steeped in debt, needy and urged on by the maturity of his engagements, can and must do to an estate held under a precarious title and of suspicious acquirement, which he has no idea of keeping, and from which, meanwhile, he derives every possible benefit:17 not only does he put no spokes in the mill-wheel, no stones in the dyke, no tiles on the roof, but he buys no manure, exhausts the soil, devastates the forest, alienates the fields, and dismembers the entire farm, damaging the ground and the stock of tools and injuring the dwelling by selling its mirrors, lead and iron, and oftentimes the window-shutters and doors; he turns all into cash, no matter how, at the expense of the domain, which he leaves in a run-down condition, unfurnished, and for a long time unproductive. In like manner, the communal possessions, ravaged, pillaged, and then pieced out and divided off, are so many organisms which are sacrificed for the immediate relief of the village poor, but of course to the detriment of their future productiveness and an abundant yield.18 Alone, amongst these millions of men who have stopped working, or work the wrong way, the petty cultivator labors to advantage; free of taxes, of tithes, and of feudal imposts, possessing a scrap of ground which he has obtained for almost nothing or without stretching his purse-strings, he works in good spirits;19 he is sure that henceforth his crop will no longer be eaten up by the levies of the seignior, of the décimateur, and of the King, that it will belong to him, that it will be wholly his, and that the worse the famine in the towns, the dearer he will sell his produce. Hence, he has ploughed more vigorously than ever; he has even cleared waste ground; getting the soil gratis, or nearly so, and having to make but few advances, having no other use for his advances, consisting of seed, manure, the work of his cattle and of his own hands, he has planted, reaped, and raised grain with the greatest energy. Perhaps other articles of consumption will be scarce; it may be that, owing to the ruin of other branches of industry, it will be hard to get dry-goods, shoes, sugar, soap, oil, candles, wine, and brandy; it may happen that, owing to the bungling way in which agricultural transformations have been effected, all produce of the secondary order, meat, vegetables, butter, and eggs, may become scarce. In any event, French aliment par excellence is on hand, standing in the field or stored in sheafs in the barns; in 1792 and 1793, and even in 1794, there is enough grain in France to provide every French inhabitant with his daily bread.20

But that is not enough. In order that each Frenchman may obtain his bit of bread every day, it is still essential that grain should reach the markets in sufficient quantities, and that the bakers should every day have enough flour to make all the bread that is required; moreover, the bread offered for sale in the bakeries should not exceed the price which the majority of consumers can afford to pay. Now, in fact, through a forced result of the new system, neither of these conditions is fulfilled. In the first place, wheat, and hence bread, is too dear. Even at the old rate, these would still be too dear for the innumerable empty or half-empty purses, after so many attacks on property, industry, and trade, now that so many hundreds of workmen and employees are out of work, now that so many land-owners and bourgeois receive no rents, now that incomes, profits, wages, and salaries have diminished by hundreds of thousands. But wheat, and, consequently, bread, has not remained at old rates. Instead of a sack of wheat being worth in Paris fifty francs in February, 1793, it is worth sixty-five francs; in May, 1793, one hundred francs and then one hundred and fifty; and hence bread, in Paris, early in 1793, instead of being three sous the pound, costs six sous, in many of the southern departments seven and eight sous, and in other places ten and twelve sous.21 The reason is, that, since August 10, 1792, after the King’s fall and the wrenching away of the ancient keystone of the arch which still kept the loosened stones of the social edifice in place, the frightened peasant would no longer part with his produce; he determined not to take assignats, not to let his grain go for anything but ringing coin. To exchange good wheat for bad, dirty paper rags seemed to him a trick, and justly so, for, on going to town every month he found that the dealers gave him less merchandise for these rags. A hoarder, and so distrustful, he must have good, old fashioned crowns, of the old stamp, so as to lay them away in a jar or old woollen stocking; give him specie or he will keep his grain. For he is not, as formerly, obliged to part with it as soon as it is cut, to pay taxes and rent; the bailiff and sheriff are no longer there to distrain him; in these times of disorder and demagogism, under impotent or partial authorities, neither the public nor the private creditor has the power to compel payment, while the spurs which formerly impelled the farmer to seek the nearest market are blunted or broken. He therefore stays away, and he has excellent reasons for so doing. Vagabonds and the needy stand by the roadside and at the entrances of the towns to stop and pillage the loaded carts; in the markets and on the open square, women cut open bags of grain with their scissors and empty them, or the municipality, forced to do it by the crowd, fixes the price at a reduced rate.22 The larger a town is the greater the difficulty in supplying its market; for its subsistences are drawn from a distance; each department, each canton, each village keeps its own grain for itself by means of legal requisitions or by brutal force; it is impossible for wholesale dealers in grain to make bargains; they are styled monopolists, and the mob, breaking into their storehouses, hangs them out of preference.23 As the government, accordingly, has proclaimed their speculations “crimes,” it is going to interdict their trade and substitute itself for them.24 But this substitution only increases the penury still more; in vain do the towns force collections, tax their rich men, raise money on loan, and burden themselves beyond their resources;25 they only make the matter worse. When the municipality of Paris expends twelve thousand francs a day for the sale of flour at a low price in the markets, it keeps away the flour-dealers, who cannot deliver flour at such low figures; the result is that there is not flour enough in the market for the six hundred thousand mouths in Paris; when it expends seventy-five thousand francs daily to indemnify the bakers, it attracts the outside population, which rushes into Paris to get bread cheap, and for the seven hundred thousand mouths of Paris and the suburbs combined, the bakers have not an adequate supply. Whoever comes late finds the shop empty; consequently, everybody tries to get there earlier and earlier, at dawn, before daybreak, and then five or six hours before daybreak. In February, 1793, long lines of people are already waiting at the bakers’ door, these lines growing longer and longer in April, while in June they are enormously long.26 Naturally, for lack of bread, people fall back on other aliments, which also grow dearer; add to this the various contrivances and effects of Jacobin politics which still further increase the dearness of food of all sorts, and also of every other necessary article: for instance, the extremely bad condition of the roads, which renders transportation slower and more costly; the prohibition of the export of coin and hence the obtaining of food from abroad; the decree which obliges each industrial or commercial association, at present or to come, to “pay annually into the national treasury one-quarter of the amount of its dividends”; the revolt in Vendée, which deprives Paris of six hundred oxen a week; the feeding of the armies, which takes one-half of the cattle brought to the Poissy market; shutting off the sea and the continent, which ruins manufacturers and extensive commercial operations; the insurrections in Bordeaux, Marseilles, and the South, which still further raise the price of groceries, sugar, soap, oil, candles, wine, and brandy.27 Early in 1793, a pound of beef in France is worth on the average, instead of six sous twenty sous; in May, at Paris, brandy which, six months before, cost thirty-five sous, costs ninety-four sous; in July, a pound of veal, instead of five sous, costs twenty-two sous. Sugar, from twenty sous, advances to four francs ten sous; a candle costs seven sous. France, pushed on by the Jacobins, approaches the depths of misery, entering the first circle of its Inferno; other circles follow down deeper and deeper, narrower still and yet more sombre; under Jacobin impulsion is she to descend to the lowest?

III

It is evident that when nutrition in the social organism goes on slowly and is interrupted in some places, it is owing to the derangement of one of the inmost fibres of the economical machine. It is evident that this fibre consists of the sentiment by which man holds on to his property, fears to risk it, refuses to depreciate it, and tries to increase it. It is evident that, in man as he actually is, as now fashioned, this intense, tenacious sentiment, always on the alert and active, is the magazine of inward energy which provides for three-fourths, almost the whole, of that sustained effort, that extreme cautiousness, that determined perseverance which leads the individual to undergo privation, to contrive and to exert himself, to turn to profitable account the labor of his hands, brain, and capital, and to produce, save, and create for himself and for others various resources and comforts.28 Thus far, this sentiment has been only partially affected, and the injury has been confined to the well-to-do and wealthy class; hence, only one-half of his useful energy has been destroyed, and the services of the well-to-do and wealthy class have been only specially dispensed with; but little else than the labor of the capitalist, proprietor, and man of enterprise has been suppressed, that far-reaching, combined, comprehensive labor, the products of which consist of objects of luxury and comfort, abundant supplies always on hand, and the ready and spontaneous distribution of indispensable commodities. There remains to crush out what is left of this laborious and nutritive fibre; the remnant of useful energy has to be destroyed down to its extirpation among the people; there must be a suppression, as far as possible, of all manual, rude labor on a small scale, and of its rudimentary fruits; the discouragement of the insignificant shopkeeper, mechanic and ploughman must be effected; the corner-grocer must be prevented from selling his sugar and candles, and the cobbler from mending shoes: the miller must think of giving up his mill and the wagoner of abandoning his cart; the farmer must be convinced that the best thing he can do is to get rid of his horses, eat his pork himself,29 let his oxen famish and leave his crops to rot on the ground. The Jacobins are to do all this, for it is the inevitable result of the theory that they have proclaimed and which they apply. According to this theory the stern, strong, deep-seated instinct through which the individual stubbornly holds on to what he has, to what he makes for himself and for those that belong to him, is just the unwholesome fibre that must be rooted out or paralysed at any cost; its true name is “egoism, incivism,” and its operations consist of outrages on the community, which is the sole legitimate proprietor of property and products, and, yet more, of all persons and services. Body and soul, all belongs to the State, nothing to individuals, and, if need be, the State has the right to take not only lands and capital, but, again, to claim and tax at whatever rate it pleases all corn and cattle, all vehicles and the animals that draw them, all candles and sugar; it has the right to appropriate to itself and tax at whatever rate it pleases, the labor of shoemaker, tailor, miller, wagoner, ploughman, reaper, and thrasher. The seizure of men and things is universal, and the new sovereigns do their best at it; for, in practice, necessity urges them on; insurrection thunders at their door; their supporters, all crackbrains with empty stomachs, the poor and the idle, and the Parisian populace, listen to no reason and blindly insist on things haphazard; they are bound to satisfy their patrons at once, to issue one on top of the other all the decrees they call for, even when impracticable and mischievous; to starve the provinces so as to feed the city, to starve the former tomorrow so as to feed the latter today. Subject to the clamors and menaces of the street they despatch things rapidly; they cease to care for the future, the present being all that concerns them; they take and take forcibly; they uphold violence by brutality, they support robbery with murder; they expropriate persons by categories and appropriate objects by categories, and after the rich they despoil the poor. During fourteen months the revolutionary government thus keeps both hands at work, one hand completing the confiscation of property, large and medium, and the other proceeding to the entire abolition of property on a small scale.

Against large or medium properties it suffices to extend and aggravate the decrees already passed. The spoliation of the last of existing corporations must be effected: the government confiscates the possessions of hospitals, communes, and all scientific or literary associations.30 There is the spoliation of State credits and all other credits: it issues in fourteen months five billions one million of assignats, often one billion four hundred millions and two billions at a time, under one decree, and thus condemns itself to complete future bankruptcy; it calls in the one billion five hundred million of assignats bearing the royal stamp (à face royale) and thus arbitrarily converts and reduces the public debt on the Grand Ledger, which is already, in fact, a partial and declared bankruptcy. Six months imprisonment for whoever refuses to accept assignats at par, twenty years in irons if the offence is repeated and the guillotine if there is an incivique intention or act, which suffices for all other creditors.31 The spoliation of individuals, a forced loan of a billion on the rich, requisitions for coin against assignats at par, seizures of plate and jewels in private houses, revolutionary taxes so numerous as not only to exhaust the capital, but likewise the credit, of the person taxed,32 and the resumption by the State of the public domain pledged to private individuals for the past three centuries: how many years of labor are requisite to bring together again so much available capital, to reconstruct in France and to refill the private reservoirs in which all the accumulated savings will flow out, like a power-giving mill-stream, on the great wheel of general enterprise? Take into account, moreover, the enterprises which are directly destroyed, root and branch, by revolutionary executions, enforced against the manufacturers and traders of Lyons, Marseilles, and Bordeaux, proscribed in a mass,33 guillotined, imprisoned, or put to flight, their factories stopped, their storehouses put under sequestration, with their stocks of brandy, soap, silk, muslins, leather, paper, serges, cloth, canvas, cordage, and the rest; the same at Nantes under Carrier, at Strasbourg under Saint-Just, and everywhere else.34 “Commerce is annihilated,” writes a Swiss merchant,35 from Paris, and the government, one would say, tries systematically to render it impossible. On the 27th of June, 1793, the Convention closes the Bourse; on the 15th of April, 1794, it suppresses “financial associations” and “prohibits all bankers, merchants and other persons from organising any establishment of the said character under any pretext or title whatsoever.” On the 8th of September, 1793, the Commune places seals “in all the counting-houses of bankers, stock-brokers, agents and silver-dealers,”36 and locks up their owners; as a favor, considering that they are obliged to pay the drafts drawn on them, they are let out, but provisionally, and on condition that they remain under arrest at home, “under the guard of two good citizens,” at their own expense. Such is the case in Paris and in other cities, not alone with prominent merchants, but likewise with notaries and lawyers, with whom funds are on deposit and who manage estates; a sans-culotte with his pike stands in their cabinet whilst they write, and he accompanies them in the street when they call on their clients. Imagine the state of a notary’s office or a counting-room under a system of this sort! The master of it winds up his business as soon as he can, no matter how, makes no new engagements, and does as little as possible. Still more inactive than he, his colleagues, condemned to an indefinite listlessness, under lock and key in the common prison, no longer attend to their business. There is a general, total paralysis of those natural organs which, in economic life, produce, elaborate, receive, store, preserve, exchange, and transmit in gross masses; and which, on the reverse side, hamper, throttle, or consume all the lesser subordinate organs to which the superior ones no longer provide outlets, intermediary agencies or aliment.

It is now the turn of the lowly. Whatever their sufferings may be they are to do their work as in healthy epochs, and they must do it perforce. The Convention, pursuing its accustomed rigid logical course with its usual shortsightedness, lays on them its violent and inept hands; they are trodden down, trampled upon and mauled for the purpose of curing them. Farmers are forbidden to sell their produce except in the markets, and obliged to bring to these a quota of so many sacks per week, and accompanied with military raids which compel them to furnish their quotas.37 Shopkeepers are ordered “to expose for sale, daily and publicly, all goods and provisions of prime necessity” that they have on hand, while a maximum price is established, above which no one shall sell “bread, flour and grain, vegetables and fruits, wine, vinegar, cider, beer and brandy, fresh meat, salt meat, pork, cattle, dried, salted, smoked or pickled fish, butter, honey, sugar, sweet-oil, lamp-oil, candles, firewood, charcoal and other coal, salt, soap, soda, potash, leather, iron, steel, castings, lead, brass, hemp, linen, woollens, canvas and woven stuffs, sabots, shoes and tobacco.” Whoever keeps on hand more than he consumes is a monopolist and commits a capital crime; the penalty, very severe, is imprisonment or the pillory, for whoever sells above the established price:38 such are the simple and direct expedients of the revolutionary government, and such is the character of its inventive faculty, like that of the savage who hews down a tree to get at its fruit. For, after the first application of the maximum the shopkeeper is no longer able to carry on business; his customers, attracted by the sudden depreciation in price of his wares, flock to his shop and empty it in a few days;39 having sold his goods for half what they cost him,40 he has got back only one-half of his advances; therefore, he can only one-half renew his assortment, less than a half, since he has not paid his bills, and his credit is declining, the representatives on mission having taken all his coin, plate, and assignats. Hence, during the following month, buyers find on his unfurnished counters nothing but scraps and refuse.

In like manner, after the proclamation of the maximum,41 the peasant refuses to bring his produce to market, while the revolutionary army is not everywhere on hand to take it from him by force: he leaves his crop unthrashed as long as he can, and complains of not finding the men to thrash it. If necessary, he hides it or feeds it out to his animals. He often barters it away for wood, for a side of bacon or in payment for a day’s work. At night, he carts it off six leagues to a neighboring district, where the local maximum is fixed at a higher rate. He knows who, in his own vicinity, still has specie in his pocket and he underhandedly supplies him with his stores. He especially conceals his superabundance and, as formerly, plays the sufferer. He is on good terms with the village authorities, with the mayor and national agent who are as interested as he is in evading the law, and, on a bribe being necessary, he gives it. At last, he allows himself to be sued, and his property attached; he goes to prison and tires the authorities out with his obstinacy. Hence, from week to week, less flour and grain and fewer cattle come to market, while meat becomes scarcer at the butcher’s, and bread at the baker’s. Having thus paralysed the lesser organs of supply and demand the Jacobins now have only to paralyse labor itself, the skilled hands, the active and vigorous arms. To do this, it suffices to substitute for the independent private workshop, the compulsory national workshop, piece-work for work by the day, the attentive, energetic workman who minds his business and expects to earn money, for the littleness and laxity of the workman picked up here and there, poorly paid and paid even when he botches and strolls about. This is what the Jacobins do by forcibly commanding the services of all sorts of laborers,42 “all who help handle, transport and retail produce and articles of prime necessity,” “country people who usually get in the crops,” and, more particularly, thrashers, reapers, carters, raftsmen, and also shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths, and the rest. At every point of the social organism, the same principle is applied with the same result. Substitute everywhere an external, artificial, and mechanical constraint for the inward, natural, and animating stimulant, and you get nothing but an universal atrophy; deprive people of the fruits of their labor, and yet more, force them to produce by fear, confiscate their time, their painstaking efforts and their persons, reduce them to the condition of fellahs, create in them the sentiments of fellahs, and you will have nothing but the labor and productions of fellahs, that is to say, a minimum of labor and production, and hence, insufficient supplies for sustaining a very dense population, which, multiplied through a superior and more productive civilisation, will not long subsist under a barbarous, inferior, and unproductive régime. When this systematic and complete expropriation terminates we see the final result of the system, no longer a dearth, but famine, famine on a large scale, and the destruction of lives by millions. Among the Jacobins,43 some of the maddest who are clearsighted, on account of their fury, Guffroy, Antonelle, Jean Bon St.-André, Collot d’Herbois, foresee the consequences and accept them along with the principle; others, who avoid seeing it, are only the more determined in the application of it, while all together work with all their might to aggravate the misery of which the lamentable spectacle is so vainly exposed under their eyes.

IV

Collot d’Herbois wrote from Lyons on November 6, 1793: “There is not two days’ supply of provisions here.” On the following day: “The present population of Lyons is one hundred and thirty thousand souls at least, and there is not sufficient subsistence for three days.” Again the day after: “Our situation in relation to food is deplorable.” Then, the next day: “Famine is beginning.”44 Near by, in the Montbrison district, in February, 1794, “there is no food or provisions left for the people”; all has been taken by requisition and carried off, even seed for planting, so that the fields lie fallow.45 At Marseilles, “since the maximum, everything is lacking; even the fishermen no longer go out (on the sea) so that there is no supply of fish to live on.”46 At Cahors, in spite of multiplied requisitions, the Directory of Lot and Representative Taillefer47 state that “the inhabitants, for more than eight days, are reduced wholly to maslin bread composed of one-fifth of wheat and the rest of barley, barley-malt, and millet.” At Nismes,48 to make the grain supply last, which is giving out, the bakers and all private persons are ordered not to bolt meal, but to leave the bran in it and knead and bake the “dough such as it is.” At Grenoble,49 “the bakers have stopped baking; the country people no longer bring wheat in; the dealers hide away their goods, or put them in the hands of neighborly officials, or send them off.” “It goes from bad to worse,” write the agents of Huningue;50 “one might say even, that they would give this or that article to their cattle rather than sell it in conformity with the tax.” The inhabitants of towns are everywhere put on rations, and so small a ration as to scarcely keep them from dying with hunger. “Since my arrival in Tarbes,” writes another agent,51 “every person is limited to half a pound of bread a day, composed one-third of wheat and two-thirds of corn meal.” The next day after the fête in honor of the tyrant’s death there was absolutely none at all. “A half-pound of bread is also allowed at Evreux,52 “and even this is obtained with a good deal of trouble, many being obliged to go into the country and get it from the farmers with coin.” And even “they have got very little bread, flour or wheat, for they have been obliged to bring what they had to Evreux for the armies and for Paris.”

It is worse at Rouen and at Bordeaux: at Rouen, in Brumaire, the inhabitants have only one-quarter of a pound per head per diem of bread; at Bordeaux, “for the past three months,” says the agent,53 “the people sleep at the doors of the bakeries, to pay high for bread which they often do not get. … There has been no baking done today, and tomorrow only half a loaf will be given to each person. This bread is made of oats and beans. … On days that there is none, beans, chestnuts, and rice are distributed in very small quantities,” four ounces of bread, five of rice or chestnuts. “I, who tell you this, have already eaten eight or ten meals without bread; I would gladly do without it if I could get potatoes in place of it, but these, too, cannot be had.” Five months later, fasting still continues, and it lasts until after the reign of Terror, not alone in the town, but throughout the department. “In the district of Cadillac,” says Tallien,54 “absolute dearth prevails; the citizens of the rural districts contend with each other for the grass in the fields; I have eaten bread made of dog-grass.” Haggard and worn out, the peasant, with his pallid wife and children, resorts to the marsh to dig roots, while there is scarcely enough strength in his arms to hold the plough. The same spectacle is visible in places which produce but little grain, or where the granaries have been emptied by the revolutionary drafts. “In many of the Indre districts,” writes the representative on missions,55 “food is wanting absolutely. Even in some of the communes, many of the inhabitants are reduced to a frightful state of want, feeding on acorns, bran and other unhealthy food. … The districts of Châtre and Argenton, especially, will be reduced to starvation unless they are promptly relieved. … The cultivation of the ground is abandoned; most of the persons in the jurisdiction wander about the neighboring departments in search of food.” And it is doubtful whether they find it. In the department of Cher, “the butchers can no longer slaughter; the dealers’ stores are all empty.” In Allier, “the slaughter-houses and markets are deserted, every species of vegetable and aliment having disappeared; the inns are closed.” In one of the Lozère districts, composed of five cantons, of which one produces an extra quantity of rye, the people live on requisitions imposed on Gard and the Upper Loire; the extortions of the representatives in these two departments “were distributed among the municipalities, and by these to the most indigent: many entire families, many of the poor and even of the rich, suffered for want of bread during six or eight days, and this frequently.56 Nevertheless they do not riot; they merely supplicate and stretch forth their hands “with tears in their eyes.” Such is the diet and submission of the stomach in the provinces. Paris is less patient. For this reason, all the rest is sacrificed to it,57 not merely the public funds, the Treasury from which it gets one or two millions per week,58 but whole districts are starved for its benefit, six departments providing grain, twenty-six departments providing pork,59 at the rate of the maximum, through requisitions, through the prospect of imprisonment and of the scaffold in case of refusal or concealment, under the predatory bayonets of the revolutionary army. The capital, above all, has to be fed. Let us see, under this system of partiality, how people live in Paris and what they feed on.

“Frightful crowds” at the doors of the bakeries, then at the doors of the butchers and grocers, then at the markets for butter, eggs, fish, and vegetables, and then on the quay for wine, firewood, and charcoal—such is the steady refrain of the police reports.60 And this lasts uninterruptedly during the fourteen months of revolutionary government: long lines of people waiting in turn for bread, meat, oil, soap, and candles, “queues for milk, for butter, for wood, for charcoal, queues everywhere!”61 “There was one queue beginning at the door of a grocery in the Petit-Carreau stretching half-way up the rue Montorgueil.”62 These queues form at three o’clock in the morning, one o’clock, and at midnight, increasing from hour to hour. Picture to yourself, reader, the file of wretched men and women sleeping on the pavement when the weather is fine63 and when not fine, standing up on stiff tottering legs; above all in winter, “the rain pouring on their backs,” and their feet in the snow, for so many weary hours in dark, foul, dimly lighted streets strewed with garbage; for, for want of oil, one-half of the the street lamps are extinguished, and for lack of money, there is no repavement, no more sweeping, the offal being piled up against the walls.64 The crowd draggles along through it, likewise, nasty, tattered and torn, people with shoes full of holes, because the shoemakers do no more work for their customers, and in dirty shirts, because no more soap can be had to wash with, while, morally as well as physically, all these forlorn beings elbowing each other render themselves still fouler. Promiscuousness, contact, weariness, waiting, and darkness afford free play to the grosser instincts; especially in summer, natural bestiality and Parisian mischievousness have full play.65 “Lewd women” pursue their calling standing in the row; it is an interlude for them; “their provoking expressions, their immoderate laughter,” is heard some distance off and they find it a convenient place: two steps aside, on the flank of the row, are “half-open doors and dark alleys” which invite a confab; many of these women who have brought their mattresses “sleep there and commit untold abominations.” What an example for the wives and daughters of steady workmen, for honest servants who hear and see! “Men stop at each row and choose their dulcinea, while others, less shameless, pounce on the women like bulls and kiss them one after the other.” Are not these the fraternal kisses of patriotic Jacobins? Do not Mayor Pache’s wife and daughter go to the clubs and kiss drunken sans-culottes? And what says the guard? It has enough to do to restrain another blind and deaf animal instinct, aroused as it is by suffering, anticipation, and deception.

On approaching each butcher’s stall before it opens “the porters, bending under the weight of a side of beef, quicken their steps so as not to be assailed by the crowd which presses against them, seeming to devour the raw meat with their eyes.” They force a passage, enter the shop in the rear, and it seems as if the time for distributing the meat had come; the gendarmes, spurring their horses to a gallop, scatter the groups that are too dense; “rascals, in pay of the Commune,” range the women in files, two and two, “shivering” in the cold morning air of December and January, awaiting their turn. Beforehand, however, the butcher, according to law, sets aside the portion for the hospitals, for pregnant women and others who are confined, for nurses, and besides, notwithstanding the law, he sets aside another portion for the revolutionary committee of the section, for the assistant commissioner and superintendent, for the pachas and semipachas of the quarter, and finally for his rich customers who pay him extra.66 To this end, “porters with broad shoulders form an impenetrable rampart in front of the shop and carry away whole oxen”; after this is over, the women find the shop stripped, while many, “after wasting their time for four mortal hours,” go away empty handed. With this prospect before them the daily assemblages get to be uneasy and the waves rise; nobody, except those at the head of the row, is sure of his pittance; those that are behind regard enviously and with suppressed anger the person ahead of them. First come outcries, then jeerings, and then scuffling; the women rival the men in struggling and in profanity,67 and they hustle each other. The line suddenly breaks; each rushes to get ahead of the other; the foremost place belongs to the most robust and the most brutal, and to secure it they have to trample down their neighbors.

There are fisticuffs every day.68 When an assemblage remains quiet the spectators take notice of it. In general “they fight,69 snatch bread out of each other’s hands; those who cannot get any forcing whoever gets a loaf weighing four pounds to share it in small pieces. The women yell frightfully. … Children sent by their parents are beaten,” while the weak are pitched into the gutter. “In distributing the meanest portions of food70 it is force which decides,” the strength of loins and arms; “a number of women this morning came near losing their lives in trying to get four ounces of butter.” More sensitive and more violent than men, “they do not, or will not, listen to reason,71 they pounce down like harpies” on the market-wagons; they thrash the drivers, strew the vegetables and butter on the ground, tumble over each other and are suffocated through the impetuosity of the assault; some, “trampled upon, almost crushed, are carried off half-dead.” Everybody for himself. Empty stomachs feel that, to get anything, it is important to get ahead, not to await for the distribution, the unloading, or even the arrival of the supplies. “A boat laden with wine having been signalled, the crowd rushed on board to pillage it and the boat sunk,” probably along with a good many of its invaders.72 Other gatherings at the barriers stop the peasants’ wagons and take their produce before they reach the markets. Outside the barriers, children and women throw stones at the milkmen, forcing them to get down from their carts and distribute milk on the spot. Still further out, one or two leagues off on the highways, gangs from Paris go at night to intercept and seize the supplies intended for Paris. “This morning,” says a watchman, “all the Faubourg St. Antoine scattered itself along the Vincennes road and pillaged whatever was on the way to the city; some paid, while others carried off without paying. … The unfortunate peasants swore that they would not fetch anything more,” the dearth thus increasing through the efforts to escape it.

In vain the government makes its requisitions for Paris as if in a state of siege, and fixes the quantity of grain on paper which each department, district, canton, and commune, must send to the capital. Naturally, each department, district, canton, and commune strives to retain its own supplies, for charity begins at home.73 Especially in a village, the mayor and members of a municipality, themselves cultivators, are lukewarm when the commune is to be starved for the benefit of the capital; they declare a less return of grain than there really is; they allege reasons and pretexts; they mystify or suborn the commissioner on subsistences, who is a stranger, incompetent and needy; they make him drink and eat, and, now and then, fill his pocket-book; he slips over the accounts, he gives the village receipts on furnishing three-quarters or a half of the demand, often in spoilt or mixed grain or poor flour, while those who have no rusty wheat get it of their neighbors; instead of parting with a hundred quintals they part with fifty, while the quantity of grain in the Paris markets is not only insufficient, but the grain blackens or sprouts and the flour grows musty. In vain the government makes clerks and depositaries of butchers and grocers, allowing them five or ten per cent. profit on retail sales of the food it supplies them with at wholesale, and thus creates in Paris, at the expense of all France, an artificial decline. Naturally, the bread74 which, thanks to the State, costs three sous in Paris, is furtively carried out of Paris into the suburbs, where six sous are obtained for it; there is the same furtive leakage for other food furnished by the State on the same conditions to other dealers; the tax is a burden which forces them to go outside their shops; food finds its level like water, not alone outside of Paris, but in Paris itself. Naturally, “the grocers peddle their goods” secretly, “sugar, candles, soap, butter, dried vegetables, meat-pies, and the rest,” amongst private houses, in which these articles are bought at any price. Naturally, the butcher keeps his large pieces of beef and choice morsels for the large eating-houses, and for rich customers who pay him whatever profit he asks. Naturally, whoever is in authority, or has the power, uses it to supply himself first, largely, and in preference; we have seen the levies of the revolutionary committees, superintendents and agents; as soon as rations are allotted to all mouths, each potentate will have several rations delivered for his mouth alone; in the meantime75 the patriots who guard the barriers appropriate all provisions that arrive, and the next morning, should any scolding appear in the orders of the day, it is but slight.

Such are the two results of the system: not only is the food which is supplied to Paris scant and poor, but the regular consumers of it, those who take their turn to get it, obtain but a small portion, and that the worst.76 A certain inspector, on going to the corn-market for a sample of flour, writes “that it cannot be called flour;77 it is ground bran,” and not a nutritive substance; the bakers are forced to take it, the markets containing for the most part no other supply than this flour.” Again, three weeks later, “Food is still very scarce and poor in quality. The bread is disagreeable to the taste and produces maladies with which many citizens are suffering, like dysentery and other inflammatory ailments.” The same report, three months later in Nivose: “Complaints are constantly made of the poor quality of flour, which, it is said, makes a good many people ill; it causes severe pain in the intestines, accompanied with a slow fever.” In Ventose, “the scarcity of every article is extremely great,”78 especially of meat. Some women in the Place Maubert, pass six hours in a line waiting for it, and do not get the quarter of a pound; in many stalls there is none at all, not “an ounce” being obtainable to make broth for the sick. Workmen do not get it in their shops and do without their soup; they live on “bread and salted herrings.” A great many people groan over “not having eaten bread for a fortnight”; women say that “they have not had a dish of meat and vegetables (pot-au-feu) for a month.” Meanwhile “vegetables are astonishingly scarce and excessively dear … two sous for a miserable carrot, and as much for two small leeks”; out of two thousand women who wait at the central market for a distribution of beans, only six hundred receive any; potatoes increase in price in one week from two to three francs a bushel, and oatmeal and ground peas triple in price. “The grocers have no more brown sugar, even for the sick,” and sell candles and soap only by the half-pound. A fortnight later candles are wholly wanting in certain quarters, except in the section storehouse, which is almost empty, each person being allowed only one; a good many households go to rest at sundown for lack of lights and do not cook any dinner for lack of coal. Eggs, especially, are “honored as invisible divinities,” while the absent butter “is a god.”79 “If this lasts,” say the workmen, “we shall have to cut each other’s throats, since there is nothing left to live on.”80 “Sick women,81 children in their cradles, lie outstretched in the sun, in the very heart of Paris, in rue Vivienne, on the Pont-Royal, and remain there “late in the night, demanding alms of the passers-by.” “One is constantly stopped by beggars of both sexes, most of them healthy and strong,” begging, they say, for lack of work. Without counting the feeble and the infirm who are unable to stand in a line, whose sufferings are visible, who gradually waste away and die without a murmur at home, “one encounters in the streets and markets” only famished and eager visages, “an immense crowd of citizens running and dashing against each other,” crying out and weeping, “everywhere presenting an image of despair.”82

V

If this penury exists, say the Jacobins, it is owing to the decrees against monopoly, and sales above the maximum not being executed according to the letter of the law; the egoism of the cultivator and the cupidity of dealers are not restrained by fear; delinquents escape too frequently from the legal penalty. Let us enforce this penalty rigorously; let us augment the punishment against them and their instruments; let us screw up the machine and give them a new wrench. A new estimate and verification of the food-supply takes place, domiciliary perquisitions, seizures of special stores regarded as too ample,83 limited rations for each consumer, a common and obligatory mess-table for all prisoners, brown, égalité bread, mostly of bran, for every mouth that can chew, prohibition of the making of any other kind, confiscation of bolters and sieves,84 the “individual,” personal responsibility of every administrator who allows the people he rules to resist or escape furnishing the supplies demanded, the sequestration of his property, imprisonment, fines, the pillory, and the guillotine to hurry up requisitions, or stop free trading—every terrifying engine is driven to the utmost against the farmers and cultivators of the soil.

After April, 1794,85 crowds of this class are seen filling the prisons to overflowing; the Revolution has struck them also. They stroll about in the court-yard, and wander through the corridors with a sad, stupified expression, no longer comprehending the way things are going on in the world. In vain are efforts made to explain to them that “their crops are national property and that they are simply its depositaries”;86 never had this new principle entered into, nor will it enter, their rude brains; always, through habit and instinct, will they work against it. Let them be spared the temptation. Let us relieve them from, and, in fact, take their crops; let the State in France become the sole depositary and distributor of grain; let it solely buy and sell grain at a fixed rate. Consequently, at Paris,87 the Committee of Public Safety first puts “in requisition all the oats that can be found in the Republic; every holder of oats is required to deposit his stock on hand within eight days, in the storehouse indicated by the district administration” at the maximum price; otherwise he is “ ‘suspect’ and must be punished as such.” In the meantime, through still more comprehensive orders issued in the provinces, Paganel in the department of Tarn, and Dartigoyte in those of Gers and the Upper-Garonne,88 enjoin each commune to establish public granaries. “All citizens are ordered to bring in whatever produce they possess in grain, flour, wheat, maslin, rye, barley, oats, millet, buckwheat” at the maximum rate; nobody shall keep on hand more than one month’s supply, fifty pounds of flour or wheat for each person; in this way, the State, which holds in its hands the keys of the storehouses, may “carry out the salutary equalisation of subsistences” between department and department, district and district, commune and commune, individual and individual. A storekeeper will look after each of these well-filled granaries; the municipality will itself deliver rations and, moreover, “take suitable steps to see that beans and vegetables, as they mature, be economically distributed under its supervision,” at so much per head, and always at the rate of the maximum. Otherwise, dismissal, imprisonment and prosecution “in the extraordinary criminal tribunal.” This being accomplished, and the fruits of labor duly allotted, there remains only the allotment of labor itself. To effect this, Maignet,89 in Vaucluse, and in the Bouches-du-Rhone, prescribes for each municipality the immediate formation of two lists, one of day-laborers and the other of proprietors; “all proprietors in need of a cultivator by the day,” are to appear and ask for one at the municipality, which will assign the applicant as many as he wants, “in order on the list,” with a card for himself and numbers for the designated parties. The laborer who does not enter his name on the list, or who exacts more than the maximum wages, is to be sentenced to the pillory with two years in irons. The same sentence with the addition of a fine of three hundred livres, is for every proprietor who employs any laborer not on the list or who pays more than the maximum rate of wages. After this, nothing more is necessary, in practice, than to draw up and keep in sight the new registries of names and figures made by the members of thirty thousand municipal boards, who cannot keep accounts and who scarcely know how to read and write; build a vast public granary, or put in requisition three or four barns in each commune, in which half dried and mixed grain may rot; pay two hundred thousand incorruptible storekeepers and measurers who will not divert anything from the depots for their friends or themselves; add to the thirty-five thousand employees of the Committee on Subsistences,90 five hundred thousand municipal scribes disposed to quit their trades or ploughs for the purpose of making daily distributions gratuitously; but more precisely, to maintain four or five millions of perfect gendarmes, one in each family, living with it, to help along the purchases, sales, and transactions of each day and to verify at night the contents of the locker—in short, to set one-half of the French people as spies on the other half. These are the conditions which secure the production and distribution of food, and which suffice for the institution throughout France of a conscription of labor and the captivity of grain.

Unfortunately, the peasant does not understand this theory, but he understands business; he makes close calculations, and the positive, patent, vulgar facts on which he reasons lead to other conclusions.91 “In Messidor last they took all my last years’ oats, at fourteen francs in assignats, and, in Thermidor, they are going to take all this year’s oats, at eleven francs in assignats. At this rate I shall not sow at all. Besides, I do not need any for myself, as they have taken my horses for the army-wagons. To raise rye and wheat, as much of it as formerly, is also working at a loss; I will raise no more than the little I want for myself, and again, I suppose that this will be put in requisition, even my supplies for the year! I had rather let my fields lie fallow. Just see now, they are taking all the live three-months’ pigs! Luckily, I killed mine beforehand and it is now in the pork-barrel. But they are going to claim all salt provisions like the rest. The new grabbers are worse than the old ones. Six months more, and we shall all die of hunger. It is better to cross one’s arms at once and go to prison; there, at least, we shall be fed and not have to work.” In effect, they allow themselves to be imprisoned, the best of the small cultivators and proprietors by thousands, and Lindet,92 at the head of the Commission on Subsistences, speaks with dismay of the ground being no longer tilled, of cattle in France being no more abundant than the year before, and of nothing to be had to cut this year.

For a strange thing has happened, unheard of in Europe, almost incredible to any one familiar with the French peasant and his love of work. This field which he has ploughed, manured, harrowed, and reaped with his own hands, its precious crop, the crop that belongs to him and on which he has feasted his eyes for seven months, now that it is ripe, he will not take the trouble to gather it; it would be bothering himself for some one else; as the crop that he sees there is for the government, let the government defray the final cost of getting it in; let it do the harvesting, the reaping, the putting it in sheaves, the carting, and the thrashing in the barn. Thereupon, the representatives on mission exclaim, each shouting in a louder or lower key, according to his character. “Many of the cultivators,” writes Dartigoyte,93 “affect a supreme indifference for this splendid crop. One must have seen it, as I have, to believe how great the neglect of the wheat is in certain parts, how it is smothered by the grass. … Draft, if the case requires it, a certain number of inhabitants in this or that commune to work in another one. … Every man who refuses to work, except on the ‘decade’ day, must be punished as an ill-disposed citizen, as a royalist.” “Generous friends of nature,” writes Ferry,94 “introduce amongst you, perpetuate around you, the habit of working in common, and begin with the present crop. Do not spare either indolent women or indolent men, those social parasites, many of whom you doubtless have in your midst. What! allow lazy men and lazy women where we are! Where should we find a Republican police? … Immediately on the reception of this present order the municipal officers of each commune will convoke all citoyennes in the Temple of the Eternal and urge them, in the name of the law, to devote themselves to the labors of harvesting. Those women who fail in this patriotic duty, shall be excluded from the assemblies, from the national festivals, while all good citoyennes are requested to repel them from their homes. All good citizens are requested to give to this rural festivity that sentimental character which befits it.” And the programme is carried out, now in idyllic shape and now under compulsion. Around Avignon,95 the commanding officer, the battalions of volunteers, and patriotic ladies, “the wives and daughters of patriots,” inscribe themselves as harvesters. Around Arles, “the municipality drafts all the inhabitants; patrols are sent into the country to compel all who are engaged on other work to leave it and do the harvesting.” The Convention, on its side, orders96 the release, “provisionally, of all ploughmen, day-laborers, reapers, and professional artisans and brewers, in the country and in the market-towns and communes, the population of which is not over twelve hundred inhabitants, and who are confined as ‘suspects.’ ” In other terms, physical necessity has imposed silence on the inept theory; above all things, the crop must be harvested, and indispensable arms be restored to the field of labor. The governors of France are compelled to put on the brake, if only for an instant, at the last moment, at sight of the yawning abyss, of approaching and actual famine; France was then gliding into it, and, if not engulphed, it is simply a miracle.

Four fortunate circumstances, at the last hour, concur to keep her suspended on the hither brink of the precipice. The winter chances to be exceptionally mild.97 The vegetables which make up for the absence of bread and meat provide food for April and May, while the remarkably fine harvest, almost spontaneous, is three weeks in advance. Another, and the second piece of good fortune, consists in the great convoy from America, one hundred and sixteen vessels loaded with grain, which reached Brest on the 8th of June, 1794, in spite of English cruisers, thanks to the sacrifice of the fleet that protected it and which, eight days previously, had succumbed in its behalf. The third stroke of fortune is the entry of a victorious army into the enemies’ country and feeding itself through foreign requisitions, in Belgium, in the Palatinate and on the frontier provinces of Italy and Spain. Finally, most fortunate of all, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon, the Paris commune and the theorist Jacobins, are guillotined on the 23rd of July, and with them falls despotic socialism; henceforth, the Jacobin edifice crumbles, owing to great crevices in its walls. The maximum, in fact, is no longer maintained, while the Convention, at the end of December, 1794, legally abolishes it; the farmers now sell as they please and at two prices, according as they are paid in assignats or coin; their hope, confidence, and courage are restored; in October and November, 1794, they voluntarily do their own ploughing and planting, and still more gladly will they gather in their own crops in July, 1795. Nevertheless, we can judge by the discouragement into which they had been plunged by four months of the system, the utter prostration into which they would have fallen had the system lasted an indefinite time. It is very probable that cultivation at the end of one or two years would have proved unproductive or have ceased altogether. Already, subject to every sort of exhortation and threat, the peasant had remained inert, apparently deaf and insensible, like an overloaded beast of burden which, so often struck, grows obstinate or sinks down and refuses to move. It is evident that he would have never stirred again could Saint-Just, holding him by the throat, have bound him hand and foot, as he had done at Strasbourg, in the multiplied knots of his Spartan Utopia; we should have seen what labor and the stagnation it produces comes to, when managed through State manoeuvres by administrative mannikins and humanitarian automatons. This experiment had been tried in China, in the eleventh century, and according to principles, long and regularly, by a well-manipulated and omnipotent State, on the most industrious and soberest people in the world, and men died in myriads like flies. If the French, at the end of 1794 and during the following years did not die like flies, it was because the Jacobin system was relaxed too soon.

VI

But, if the Jacobin system, in spite of its surviving founders, gradually relaxes after Thermidor; if the main ligature tied around the man’s neck, broke just as the man was strangling, the others that still bind him hold him tight, except as they are loosened in places; and, as it is, some of the straps, terribly stiffened, sink deeper and deeper into his flesh. In the first place, the requisitions continue: there is no other way of provisioning the armies and the cities; the gendarme is always on the road, compelling each village to contribute its portion of grain, and at the legal rate. The refractory are subject to keepers, confiscations, fines, and imprisonment; they are confined and kept in the district lock-ups “at their own expense,” men and women, twenty-two on Pluviose 17, year III., in the district of Bar-sur-Aube; forty-five, Germinal 7, in the district of Troyes; forty-five, the same day, in the district of Nogent-sur-Seine, and twenty others, eight days later, in the same district, in the commune of Traine alone.98 The condition of the cultivator is certainly not an easy one, while public authority, aided by the public force, extorts from him all it can at a rate of its own; moreover, it will soon exact from him one-half of his contributions in kind, and, it must be noted, that at this time, the direct contributions alone absorb twelve and thirteen sous on the franc of the revenue. Nevertheless, under this condition, which is that of laborers in a Mussulman country, the French peasant, like the Syrian or Tunisian peasant, can keep himself alive; for, through the abolition of the maximum, private transactions are now free, and, to indemnify himself on this side, he sells to private individuals and even to towns,99 by agreement, on understood terms, and as dear as he pleases; all the dearer because through the legal requisitions the towns are half empty, and there are fewer sacks of grain for a larger number of purchasers; hence his losses by the government are more than made up by his gains on private parties; he gains in the end, and that is why he persists in farming.

The weight, however, of which he relieves himself falls upon the overburdened buyer, and this weight, already excessive, goes on increasing, through another effect of the revolutionary institution, until it becomes ten-fold and even a hundred-fold. The only money, in fact, which private individuals possess melts away in their hands, and, so to say, destroys itself. When the guillotine stops working, the assignat, losing its official value, falls to its real value. In August, 1794, the loss on it is sixty-six per cent., in October, seventy-two per cent., in December, seventy-eight per cent., in January, 1795, eighty-one per cent., and after that date the constant issues of enormous amounts, five hundred millions, then a billion, a billion and a half, and, finally, two billions a month, hastens its depreciation.100 The greater the depreciation of the assignats the greater the amount the government is obliged to issue to provide for its expenses, and the more it issues the more it causes their depreciation, so that the decline which increases the issue increases the depreciation, until, finally, the assignat comes down to nothing. On March 11, 1795, the louis d’or brings two hundred and five francs in assignats, May 11, four hundred francs, June 12, one thousand francs, in the month of October, one thousand seven hundred francs, November 13, two thousand eight hundred and fifty francs, November 21, three thousand francs, and six months later, nineteen thousand francs. Accordingly, an assignat of one hundred francs is worth in June, 1795, four francs, in August three francs, in November fifteen sous, in December ten sous, and then five sous. Naturally, all provisions rise proportionately in price. A pound of bread in Paris, January 2, 1796, costs fifty francs, a pound of meat sixty francs, a pound of candles one hundred and eighty francs, a bushel of potatoes two hundred francs, a bottle of wine one hundred francs. The reader may imagine, if he can, the distress of people with small incomes, pensioners and employees, mechanics and artisans in the towns out of work,101 in brief, all who have nothing but a small package of assignats to live on, and who have nothing to do, whose indispensable wants are not directly supplied by the labor of their own hands in producing wine, candles, meat, potatoes, and bread.

Immediately after the abolition of the maximum,102 the cry of hunger increases. From month to month its accents become more painful and vehement in proportion to the increased dearness of provisions, especially in the summer of 1795, as the harvesting draws near, when the granaries, filled by the crop of 1794, are getting empty. And these hungering cries go up by millions: for a good many of the departments in France do not produce sufficient grain for home consumption, this being the case in fertile wheat departments, and likewise in certain districts; cries also go up from the large and small towns, while in each village numbers of peasants fast because they have no land to provide them with food, or because they lack strength, health, employment, and wages. “For a fortnight past,” writes a municipal body in Seine-et-Marne,103 “at least two hundred citizens in our commune are without bread, grain, and flour; they have had no other food than bran and vegetables. We see with sorrow children deprived of nourishment, their nurses without milk, unable to suckle them; old men falling down through inanition, and young men in the fields too weak to stand up to their work.” And other communes in the district “are about in the same condition.” The same spectacle is visible throughout the Ile-de-France, Normandy, and in Picardy. Around Dieppe, in the country,104 entire communes support themselves on herbs and bran. “Citizen representatives,” write the administrators, “we can no longer maintain ourselves. Our fellow-citizens reproach us with having despoiled them of their grain in favor of the large communes.” “All means of subsistence are exhausted,” writes the district of Louviers,105 “we are reduced here for a month past to eating bran bread and boiled herbs, and even this rude food is getting scarce. Bear in mind that we have seventy-one thousand people to govern, at this very time subject to all the horrors of famine, a large number of them having already perished, some with hunger and others with diseases engendered by the poor food they live on.” In the Caen district,106 “the unripe peas, horse-peas, beans, and green barley and rye are attacked”; mothers and children go after these in the fields in default of other food; “other vegetables in the gardens are already consumed; furniture, the comforts of the well-to-do class, have become the prey of the farming egoist; having nothing more to sell they consequently have nothing with which to obtain a morsel of bread.” “It is impossible,” writes the representative on mission, “to wait for the crop without further aid. As long as bran lasted the people ate that; none can now be found and despair is at its height. I have not seen the sun since I came. The harvest will be a month behind. What shall we do? What will become of us?” “In Picardy,” writes the Beauvais district, “the great majority of people in the rural communes overrun the woods” to find mushrooms, berries, and wild fruits.107 “They think themselves lucky,” says the Bapaume district, “if they can get a share of the food of animals.” “In many communes,” the district of Vervier reports, “the inhabitants are reduced to living on herbage.” “Many families, entire communes,” reports the Laon commissary, “have been without bread two or three months and live on bran or herbs. … Mothers of families, children, old men, pregnant women, come to the (members of the) Directory for bread and often faint in their arms.”

And yet, great as the famine is in the country it is worse in the towns; and the proof of it is that the starving people flock into the country to find whatever they can to live on, no matter how, and, generally speaking, in vain. “Three-quarters of our fellow-citizens,” writes the Rozoy municipality,108 “are forced to quit work and overrun the country here and there, among the farmers, to obtain bread for specie, and with more entreaty than the poorest wretches; for the most part, they return with tears in their eyes at not being able to find, not merely a bushel of wheat, but a pound of bread.” “Yesterday,” writes the Montreuil-sur-Mer municipality,109 “more than two hundred of our citizens set out to beg in the country,” and, when they get nothing, they steal. “Bands of brigands110 spread through the country and pillage all dwellings anywise remote. … Grain, flour, bread, cattle, poultry, stuffs, etc., all come in play; our terrified shepherds are no longer willing to sleep in their sheep-pens and are leaving us.” The most timid dig carrots at night or, during the day, gather dandelions; but their town stomachs cannot digest this aliment. “Lately,” writes the procureur-syndic of St. Germain,111 “the corpse of a father of a family, found in the fields with his mouth still filled with the grass he had striven to chew, exasperates and arouses the spirit of the poor creatures awaiting a similar fate.”

How, then, do people in the towns live? In small towns or scattered villages, each municipality, using what gendarmes it has, makes legal requisitions in its vicinity, and sometimes the commune obtains from the government a charitable gift of wheat, oats, rice, or assignats. But the quantity of grain it receives is so small, one asks how it is that, after two months, six months, or a year of such a system, one-half of its inhabitants are not in the grave-yard. I suppose that many of them live on what they raise in their gardens, or on their small farms; others are helped by their relations, neighbors, and companions; in any event, it is clear that the human machine is very resistant, and a few mouthfuls suffice to keep it going a long time. At Ervy,112 in Aube, “not a grain of wheat has been brought in the last two market-days.” “Tomorrow,113 Prairial 25, in Bapaume, the chief town of the district, there will be only two bushels of flour left (for food of any sort).” “At Boulogne-sur-Mer, for the past ten days, there has been distributed to each person only three pounds of bad barley, or maslin, without knowing whether we can again distribute this miserable ration next decade.” Out of sixteen hundred inhabitants in Brionne, “twelve hundred and sixty114 are reduced to the small portion of wheat they receive at the market, and which, unfortunately, for too long a time, has been reduced from eight to three ounces of wheat for each person, every eight days.” For three months past, in Seine-et-Marne,115 in “the commune of Meaux, that of Laferté, Lagny, Daumartin, and other principal towns of the canton, they have had only half-a-pound per head, for each day, of bad bread.” In Seine-et-Oise, “citizens of the neighborhood of Paris and even of Versailles116 state that they are reduced to four ounces of bread.” At St. Denis,117 with a population of six thousand, “a large part of the inhabitants, worn out with suffering, betake themselves to the charity depots. Workmen, especially, cannot do their work for lack of food. A good many women, mothers and nurses, have been found in their houses unconscious, without any sign of life in them, and many have died with their infants at their breasts.” Even in a larger and less forsaken town, St. Germain,118 the misery surpasses all that one can imagine. “Half-a-pound of flour for each inhabitant,” not daily, but at long intervals; “bread at fifteen and sixteen francs the pound and all other provisions at the same rate; a people which is sinking, losing hope and perishing. Yesterday, for the fête of the 9th of Thermidor, not a sign of rejoicing; on the contrary, symptoms of general and profound depression, tottering spectres in the streets, mournful shrieks of ravaging hunger or shouts of rage, almost every one, driven to the last extremity of misery, welcoming death as a boon.”

Such is the aspect of these huge artificial agglomerations, where the soil, made sterile by habitation, bears only stones, and where twenty, thirty, fifty, and a hundred thousand suffering stomachs have to obtain from ten, twenty, and thirty leagues off their first and last mouthful of food. Within these close pens long lines of human sheep huddle together every day bleating and trembling around almost empty troughs, and only through extraordinary efforts do the shepherds daily succeed in providing them with a little nourishment. The central government, strenuously appealed to, enlarges or defines the circle of their requisitions; it authorises them to borrow, to tax themselves; it lends or gives to them millions of assignats;119 frequently, in cases of extreme want, it allows them to take so much grain or rice from its storehouses, for a week’s supply. But, in truth, this sort of life is not living, it is only not dying. For one half, and more than one half of the inhabitants simply subsist on rations of bread obtained by long waiting for it at the end of a string of people and delivered at a reduced price. What rations and what bread! “It seems,” says the municipality of Troyes, “that120 the country has anathematised the towns. Formerly, the finest grain was brought to market; the farmer kept the inferior quality and consumed it at home. Now it is the reverse, and this is carried still further, for, not only do we receive no wheat whatever, but the farmers give us sprouted barley and rye, which they reserve for our commune; the farmer who has none arranges with those who have, so as to buy it and deliver it in town, and sell his good wheat elsewhere. Half a pound per day and per head, in Pluviose, to the thirteen thousand or fourteen thousand indigent in Troyes; then a quarter of a pound, and, finally, two ounces with a little rice and some dried vegetables, “which feeble resource is going to fail us.”121 Half a pound in Pluviose, to the twenty thousand needy in Amiens, which ration is only nominal, for “it often happens that each individual gets only four ounces, while the distribution has repeatedly failed three days in succession,” and this continues; six months later, Fructidor 7, Amiens has but sixty-nine quintals of flour in its market storehouse, “an insufficient quantity for distribution this very day; tomorrow, it will be impossible to make any distribution at all, and the day after tomorrow the needy population of this commune will be brought down to absolute famine.” “Complete desperation!” There are already “many suicides.”122 At other times, rage predominates and there are riots. At Evreux,123 Germinal 21, a riot breaks out, owing to the delivery of only two pounds of flour per head and per week, and because three days before, only a pound and a half was delivered. There is a riot at Deippe,124 Prairial 14 and 15, because “the people are reduced here to three or four ounces of bread.” There is another at Vervins, Prairial 9, because the municipality which obtains bread at a cost of seven and eight francs a pound, raises the price from twenty-five to fifty sous. At Lille, an insurrection breaks out Messidor 4, because the municipality, paying nine francs for bread, can give it to the poor only for about twenty and thirty sous. Lyons, in Nivose, remains without bread “for five full days.”125 At Chartres, Thermidor 15,126 the distribution of bread for a month is only eight ounces a day, and there is not enough to keep this up until the 20th of Thermidor. On the fifteenth of Fructidor, La Rochelle writes that “its public distributions, reduced to seven or eight ounces of bread, are on the point of failing entirely.” For four months, at Painboeuf, the ration is but the quarter of a pound of bread.127 And the same at Nantes, which has eighty-two thousand inhabitants and swarms with the wretched; “the distribution never exceeded four ounces a day,” and that only for the past year. The same at Rouen, which contains sixty thousand inhabitants; and, in addition, within the past fortnight the distribution has failed three times; in other reports, those who are well-off suffer more than the indigent because they take no part in the communal distribution, “all resources for obtaining food being, so to say, interdicted to them.” Five ounces of bread per diem for four months is the allowance to the forty thousand inhabitants of Caen and its district.128 A great many in the town, as well as in the country, live on bran and wild herbs.” At the end of Prairial, “there is not a bushel of grain in the town storehouses, while the requisitions, enforced in the most rigorous and imposing style, produce nothing or next to nothing.” Misery augments from week to week: “it is impossible to form any idea of it; the people of Caen live on brown bread and the blood of cattle. … Every countenance bears traces of the famine. … Faces are of livid hue. … It is impossible to await the new crop, until the end of Fructidor.” Such are the exclamations everywhere. The object now, indeed, is to cross the narrowest and most terrible defile; a fortnight more of absolute fasting and hundreds of thousands of lives would be sacrificed.129 At this moment the government half opens the doors of its storehouses; it lends a few sacks of flour on condition of repayment—for example, at Cherbourg a few hundreds of quintals of oats; by means of oat bread, the poor can subsist until the coming harvest. But above all, it doubles its guard and shows its bayonets. At Nancy, a traveller sees130 “more than three thousand persons soliciting in vain for a few pounds of flour.” They are dispersed with the butt-ends of muskets. Thus are the peasantry taught patriotism and the townspeople patience. Physical constraint exercised on all in the name of all; this is the only procedure which an arbitrary socialism can resort to for the distribution of food and to discipline starvation.

VII

All that an absolute government can do for supplying the capital with food is undertaken and carried out by this one, for here is its seat, and one more degree of dearth in Paris would overthrow it. Each week, on reading the daily reports of its agents,131 it finds itself on the verge of explosion; twice, in Germinal and Prairial, a popular outbreak does overthrow it for a few hours, and, if it maintains itself, it is on the condition of either giving the needy a piece of bread or the hope of getting it. Consequently, military posts are established around Paris, eighteen leagues off, on all the highways—permanent patrols in correspondence with each other to urge on the wagoners and draft relays of horses on the spot; escorts despatched from Paris to meet convoys;132 requisitions of “all carts and all horses whatever to effect transportation in preference to any other work or service”; all communes traversed by a highway are ordered to put rubbish and litter on the bad spots and spread dirt the whole way, so that the horses may drag their loads in spite of the slippery road; the national agents are ordered to draft the necessary number of men to break the ice around the water-mills;133 a requisition is made for “all the barley throughout the length and breadth of the Republic”; this must be utilised by means of “the amalgam134 for making bread,” while the brewers are forbidden to use barley in the manufacture of beer; the starchmakers are forbidden to convert potatoes into starch, with penalty of death against all offenders “as destroyers of alimentary produce”; the breweries and starch-factories135 are to be closed until further notice. Paris must have grain, no matter of what kind, no matter how, and at any cost, not merely in the following week, but tomorrow, this very day, because hunger chews and swallows everything, and it will not wait. Once the grain is obtained, a price must be fixed which people can pay. Now, the difference between the selling and cost price is enormous; it keeps on increasing as the assignat declines and it is the government which pays this. “You furnish bread at three sous,” said Dubois-Crancé, Floréal 16,136 “and it costs you four francs. Paris consumes eight thousand quintals of meal daily, which expenditure alone amounts to one billion two hundred millions per annum.” Seven months later, when a bag of flour brings thirteen thousand francs, the same expenditure reaches five hundred and forty-six millions per month. Under the ancient régime, Paris, although overgrown, continued to be an useful organism; if it absorbed much, it elaborated more; its productiveness compensated for what it consumed, and, every year, instead of exhausting the public treasury it poured seventy-seven millions into it. The new régime has converted it into a monstrous canker in the very heart of France, a devouring parasite which, through its six hundred thousand leeches, drains its surroundings for a distance of forty leagues, consumes one-half the annual revenue of the State, and yet still remains emaciated in spite of the sacrifices made by the treasury it depletes and the exhaustion of the provinces which supply it with food.

Always the same alimentary system, the same long lines of people waiting at, and before, dawn in every quarter of Paris, in the dark, for a long time, and often to no purpose, subject to the brutalities of the strong and the outrages of the licentious! On the 9th of Thermidor, the daily trot of the multitude in quest of food has lasted uninterruptedly for seventeen months, accompanied with outrages of the worst kind because there is less terror and less submissiveness, with more obstinacy because provisions at free sale are dearer, with greater privation because the ration distributed is smaller, and with more sombre despair because each household, having consumed its stores, has nothing of its own to make up for the insufficiencies of public charity. To cap the climax, the winter of 1794–1795 is so cold137 that the Seine freezes and people cross the Loire on foot; rafts no longer arrive and, to obtain fire-wood, it is necessary “to cut down trees at Boulogne, Vincennes, Verrières, St. Cloud, Meudon and two other forests in the vicinity.” Fuel costs “four hundred francs per cord of wood, forty sous for a bushel of charcoal, twenty sous for a small basket. The necessitous are seen in the streets sawing the wood of their bedsteads to cook with and to keep from freezing.” On the resumption of transportation by water amongst the cakes of ice “rafts are sold as fast as the raftsmen can haul the wood out of the water, the people being obliged to pass three nights at the landing to get it, each in turn according to his number.” There are “two thousand persons at least, Pluviose 3, at the Louviers landing,” each with his card allowing him four sticks at fifteen sous each. Naturally, there is pulling, hauling, tumult, and a rush; “the dealers take to flight for fear, and the inspectors come near being murdered”; they get away along with the police commissioner and “the public helps itself.” Likewise, the following day, there is “an abominable pillage;” the gendarmes and soldiers placed there to maintain order, “make a rush for the wood and carry it away the same as the crowd.” Bear in mind that on this day the thermometer is sixteen degrees below zero, that one hundred, two hundred other lines of people likewise stand waiting at the doors of bakers and butchers, enduring the same cold, and that they have already endured it and will yet endure it a month and more. Words are wanting to describe the sufferings of these long lines of motionless beings, during the night, at daybreak, standing there five or six hours, with the blast driving through their rags and their feet freezing. Ventose is beginning, and the ration of bread is reduced to a pound and a half;138 Ventose ends, and the ration of bread, kept at a pound and a half for the three hundred and twenty-four laborers, falls to one pound; in fact, a great many get none at all, many only a half and a quarter of a pound. Germinal follows and the Committee of Public Safety, finding that its magazines are giving out, limits all rations to a quarter of a pound. Thereupon, on the 12th of Germinal, an insurrection of workmen and women breaks out; the Convention is invaded and liberated by military force, Paris is declared in a state of siege and the government, again in the saddle, tightens the reins. Thenceforth, the ration of meat served out every four or five days, is a quarter of a pound; bread averages every day, sometimes five, sometimes six, and sometimes seven ounces, at long intervals eight ounces, often three, two, and one ounce and a half, or even none at all; while this bread, black and “making mischief,” becomes more and more worthless and detestable.139 People who are well-off live on potatoes, but only for them, for, in the middle of Germinal, these cost fifteen francs the bushel and, towards the end, twenty francs; towards the end of Messidor, forty-five francs; in the first month of the Directory, one hundred and eighty francs, and then two hundred and eighty-four francs, whilst other produce goes up at the same rates. After the abolition of the maximum the evil springs not from a lack of provisions, but from their dearness. The shops are well-supplied. Whoever comes with a full purse gets what he wants.140 Those who were once wealthy, all proprietors and large fundholders, may have a meal on handing over their bundles of assignats, on withdrawing their last louis from its hiding-place, on selling their jewelry, clocks, furniture, and clothes; but every tradesman and broker, the lucky, all experienced robbers who spend four hundred, one thousand, three thousand, then five thousand francs for their dinner, revel in the great eating establishments on fine wines and exquisite cheer; the burden of the scarcity is transferred to other shoulders. At present, the class which suffers, and which suffers beyond all bounds of patience, is that of employees and people with small incomes,141 the crowd of workmen, the city plebeians, the low Parisian populace which lives from day to day, which is Jacobin at heart, which made the Revolution in order to better itself, which finds itself worse off, which gets up one insurrection more on the 1st of Prairial, which forcibly enters the Tuileries yelling “Bread and the Constitution of ’93,” which installs itself as sovereign in the Convention, which murders the Representative Féraud, which decrees a return to Terror, but which, put down by the National Guard, disarmed, and forced back into lasting obedience, has only to submit to the consequences of its outrages, the socialism it has instituted and the economical system it has organised.

Owing to the workmen of Paris having been usurpers and tyrants they are now beggars. Owing to the ruin brought on proprietors and capitalists by them, individuals can no longer employ them. Owing to the ruin they have brought on the Treasury, the State can provide them with only the semblance of charity, and hence, while all are compelled to go hungry, a great many die, and many commit suicide. Germinal 6, “Section of the Observatory,”142 at the distribution, “forty-one persons had been without bread; several pregnant women desired immediate confinement so as to destroy their infants; others asked for knives to stab themselves.” Germinal 8, “a large number of persons who had passed the night at the doors of the bakeries were obliged to leave without getting any bread.” Germinal 24, “the police commissioner of the Arsenal section states that many become ill for lack of food, and that he buries quite a number. … The same day, he has heard of five or six citizens, who, finding themselves without bread, and unable to get other food, throw themselves into the Seine.” Germinal 27, “the women say that they feel so furious and are in such despair on account of hunger and want that they must inevitably commit some act of violence. … In the section of ‘Les Amis de la Patrie,’ one-half have no bread. … Three persons tumbled down through weakness on the Boulevard du Temple.” Floréal 2, “most of the workmen in the ‘République’ section are leaving Paris on account of the scarcity of bread.” Floréal 5, “eighteen out of twenty-four inspectors state that patience is exhausted and that things are coming to an end.” Floréal 14, “the distribution is always unsatisfactory on account of the four-ounce ration; two thirds of the citizens do without it. One woman, on seeing the excitement of her husband and her four children who had been without bread for two days, trailed through the gutter tearing her hair and striking her head; she then got up in a state of fury and attempted to drown herself.” Floréal 20, “all exclaim that they cannot live on three ounces of bread, and, again, of such bad quality. Mothers and pregnant women fall down with weakness.” Floréal 21, “the inspectors state that they encounter many persons in the streets who have fallen through feebleness and inanition.” Floréal 23, “a citoyenne who had no bread for her child tied it to her side and jumped into the river. Yesterday, an individual named Mottez, in despair through want, cut his throat.” Floréal 25, “several persons, deprived of any means of existence, gave up in complete discouragement, and fell down with weakness and exhaustion. … In the ‘Gravilliers’ section, two men were found dead with inanition. … The peace officers report the decease of several citizens; one cut his throat, while another was found dead in his bed.” Floréal 28, “numbers of people sink down for lack of something to eat; yesterday, a man was found dead and others exhausted through want.” Prairial 24, “Inspector Laignier states that the indigent are compelled to seek nourishment in the piles of garbage on the corners.” Messidor I,143 “the said Picard fell through weakness at ten o’clock in the morning in the rue de la Loi, and was only brought to at seven o’clock in the evening; he was carried to the hospital on a hand-barrow.” Messidor 11, “There is a report that the number of people trying to drown themselves is so great that the nets at St. Cloud scarcely suffice to drag them out of the water.” Messidor 19, “A man was found on the corner of a street just dead with hunger.” Messidor 27, “At four o’clock in the afternoon, Place Maubert, a man named Marcelin, employed in the Jardin des Plantes, fell down through starvation and died while assistance was being given to him.” On the previous evening, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, a laborer on the Pont-au-Change, says: “I have eaten nothing all day”; another replies: “I have not been home because I have nothing to give to my wife and children, dying with hunger.” About the same date, a friend of Mallet-Dupan writes to him “that he is daily witness to people amongst the lower classes dying of inanition in the streets; others, and principally women, have nothing but garbage to live on, scraps of refuse vegetables and the blood running out of the slaughter houses. Laborers, generally, work on short time on account of their lack of strength and of their exhaustion for want of food.”144 Thus ends the rule of the Convention. Well has it looked out for the interests of the poor! According to the reports of its own inspectors, “famished stomachs on all sides cry vengeance, beat to arms and sound the tocsin of alarm.145 … Those who have to dwell daily on the sacrifices they make to keep themselves alive declare that there is no hope except in death.”

Are they going to be relieved by the new government which the Convention imposes on them with thunders of artillery and in which it perpetuates itself?146 Brumaire 28, “Most of the workmen in the ‘Temple’ and ‘Gravilliers’ sections have done no work for want of bread.” Brumaire 24, “Citizens of all classes refuse to mount guard because they have nothing to eat.” Brumaire 25, “In the ‘Gravilliers’ section the women say that they have sold all that they possessed, while others, in the ‘Faubourg-Antoine’ section, declare that it would be better to be shot down.” Brumaire 30, “A woman beside herself came and asked a baker to kill her children as she had nothing to give them to eat.” Frimaire 1, 2, 3, and 4, “In many of the sections bread is given out only in the evening, in others at one o’clock in the morning, and of very poor quality. … Several sections yesterday had no bread.” Frimaire 7, the inspectors declare that “the hospitals soon will not be vast enough to hold the sick and the wretched.” Frimaire 14, “At the central market a woman nursing her child sunk down with inanition.” A few days before this, “a man fell down from weakness, on his way to Bourg l’Abbé.” “All our reports,” say the district administrators, “resound with shrieks of despair.” People are infatuated; “it seems to us that a crazy spirit prevails universally—we often encounter people in the street who, although alone, gesticulate and talk to themselves aloud.” “How many times,” writes a Swiss traveller,147 who lived in Paris during the latter half of 1795, “how often have I chanced to encounter men sinking through starvation, scarcely able to stand up against a post, or else down on the ground and unable to get up for want of strength!” A journalist states that he saw “within ten minutes, along the street, seven poor creatures fall on account of hunger, a child die on its mother’s breast which was dry of milk, and a woman struggling with a dog near a sewer to get a bone away from him.”148 Meissner never leaves his hotel without filling his pockets with pieces of the national bread. “This bread,” he says, “which the poor would formerly have despised, I found accepted with the liveliest gratitude, and by well-educated persons”; the lady who contended with the dog for the bone was “a former nun, without either parents or friends and everywhere repulsed.” “I still hear with a shudder,” says Meissner, “the weak, melancholy voice of a well-dressed woman who stopped me in the rue du Bac, to tell me in accents indicative both of shame and despair: ‘Ah, Sir, do help me! I am not an outcast. I have some talent—you may have seen some of my works in the salon. I have had nothing to eat for two days and I am crazy for want of food.’ ” Again, in June, 1796, the inspectors state that despair and despondency have reached the highest point, only one cry being heard—misery! … Our reports all teem with groans and complaints. … Pallor and suffering are stamped on all faces. … Each day presents a sadder and more melancholy aspect.” And repeatedly,149 they sum up their scattered observations in a general statement: “A mournful silence, the deepest distress on every countenance; the most intense hatred of the government in general developed in all conversations; contempt for all existing authority; an insolent luxuriousness, insulting to the wretchedness of the poor rentiers who expire with hunger in their garrets, no longer possessing the courage to crawl to the Treasury and get the wherewithal to prolong their misery for a few days; the worthy father of a family daily deciding what article of furniture he will sell to make up for what is lacking in his wages that he may buy a half-pound of bread; every sort of provision increasing in price sixty times an hour; the smallest business dependent on the fall of assignats; intriguers of all parties overthrowing each other only to get offices; the intoxicated soldier boasting of the services he has rendered and is to render, and abandoning himself shamelessly to every sort of debauchery; commercial houses transformed into dens of thieves; rascals become traders and traders become rascals; the most sordid cupidity and a mortal egoism—such is the picture presented by Paris.”150

One group is wanting in this picture, that of the governors who preside over this wretchedness, which group remains in the background; one might say that it was so designed and composed by some great artist, a lover of contrasts, an inexorable logician, whose invisible hand traces human character unvaryingly, and whose mournful irony unfailingly depicts side by side, in strong relief, the grotesqueness of folly and the seriousness of death. How many perished on account of this misery? Probably more than a million persons.151 Try to take in at a glance the extraordinary spectacle presented on twenty-six thousand square leagues of territory, the immense multitude of the starving in town and country, the long lines of women for three years waiting for bread in all the cities, this or that town of twenty-three thousand souls in which one-third of the population dies in the hospitals in three months, the crowds of paupers at the poor-houses, the file of poor wretches entering and the file of coffins going out, the asylums deprived of their property, overcrowded with the sick, unable to feed the multitude of foundlings pining away in their cradles the very first week, their little faces in wrinkles like those of old men, the malady of want aggravating all other maladies, the long suffering of a persistent vitality amidst pain and which refuses to succumb, the final death-rattle in a garret or in a ditch—and contrast with this the small, powerful, triumphant group of Jacobins which, knowing where to make a good stand, is determined to stay there at any cost. About ten o’clock in the morning,152 Cambacérès, president of the Committee of Public Safety, is seen entering its hall in the Pavillon de l’Egalité. That large, cautious and shrewd personage who, later on, is to become archchancellor of the Empire and famous for his epicurean inventions and other peculiar tastes revived from antiquity, is the man. Scarcely seated, he orders an ample pot-au-feu to be placed on the chimney hearth and, on the table, “fine wine and fine white bread; three articles,” says a guest, “not to be found elsewhere in all Paris.” Between twelve and two o’clock, his colleagues enter the room in turn, take a plate of soup and a slice of meat, swallow some wine, and then proceed, each to his bureau, to receive his coterie, giving this one an office and compelling another to pay up, looking all the time after his own special interests; at this moment, especially, towards the close of the Convention, there are no public interests, all interests being private and personal. In the mean time, the deputy in charge of subsistences, Roux de la Haute Marne, an unfrocked Benedictine, formerly a terrorist in the provinces, subsequently the protégé and employee of Fouché, with whom he is to be associated in the police department, keeps the throng of women in check which daily resorts to the Tuileries to beg for bread. He is well adapted for this duty, being tall, chubby, ornamental, and with vigorous lungs. He has taken his office in the right place, in the attic of the palace, at the top of long, narrow and steep stairs, so that the line of women stretching up between the two walls, piled one above the other, necessarily becomes immovable. With the exception of the two or three at the front, no one has her hands free to grab the haranguer by the throat and close the oratorical stop-cock. He can spout his tirades accordingly with impunity, and for an indefinite time. On one occasion, his sonorous jabber rattles away uninterruptedly from the top to the bottom of the staircase, from nine o’clock in the morning to five o’clock in the afternoon. Under such a voluble shower, his hearers become weary and end by going home. About nine or ten o’clock in the evening, the Committee of Public Safety reassembles, but not to discuss business. Danton and Larevellière preach in vain; each is too egoistic and too worn-out; they let the rein slacken on Cambacérès. As to him, he would rather keep quiet and drag the cart no longer; but there are two things necessary which he must provide for on pain of death. “It will not do,” says he in plaintive tones, “to keep on printing the assignats at night which we want for the next day. If that lasts, ma foi, we run the risk of being strung up at a lantern. … Go and find Hourier-Eloi, as he has charge of the finances, and tell him that we entreat him to keep us a-going for a fortnight or eighteen days longer, when the executive Directory will come in and do what it pleases.” “But food—shall we have enough for tomorrow?” “Aha, I don’t know—I’ll send for our colleague Roux, who will post us on that point.” Roux enters, the official spokesman, the fat, jovial tamer of the popular dog. “Well, Roux, how do we stand about supplying Paris with food?” “The supply, citizen President, is just as abundant as ever, two ounces per head—at least for most of the sections.” “Go to the devil with your abundant supply! You’ll have our heads off!” All remain silent, for this possible dénouement sets them to thinking. Then, one of them exclaims: “President, are there any refreshments provided for us? After working so hard for so many days we need something to strengthen us!” “Why, yes; there is a good calf’s-tongue, a large turbot, a large piece of pie and some other things.” They cheer up, begin to eat and drink champagne, and indulge in drolleries. About eleven or twelve o’clock the members of other Committees come in; signatures are affixed to their various decrees, on trust, without reading them over. They, in their turn, sit down at the table and the conclave of sovereign bellies digests without giving itself further trouble about the millions of stomachs that are empty.

BOOK IX

The End of theRevolutionary Government

[1. ]On the other more complicated functions, such as the maintenance of roads, canals, harbors, public buildings, lighting, cleanliness, hygiene, superior secondary and primary education, hospitals, and other asylums, highway security, the suppression of robbery and kindred crimes, the destruction of wolves, etc., see Rocquain, “Etat de la France au 18 Brumaire,” and the “Statistiques des Départements,” published by the préfets, from years IX. to XIII.—These branches of the service were almost entirely overthrown; the reader will see the practical results of their suppression in the documents referred to.

[2. ]“St. John de Crêvecoeur,” by Robert de Crêvecoeur, p. 216. (Letter of Mdlle. de Gouves, July, 1800.) “We are negotiating for the payment of, at least, the arrearages since 1789 on the Arras property.” (M. de Gouves and his sisters had not emigrated, and yet they had had no income from their property for ten years.)

[3. ]Cf. “The Revolution,” vol. i., 254–261, 311–352; vol. ii., 234–272.

[4. ]Cf. “The Revolution,” ii., 273–276.

[5. ]Buchez et Roux, xxii., 178. (Speech by Robespierre in the Convention, December 2, 1792.)—Mallet-Dupan, “Mémoires,” i., 400. About the same date, “a deputation from the department of Gard expressly demands a sum of two hundred and fifty millions, as indemnity to the cultivator, for grain which it calls national property.” This fearful sum of two hundred and fifty millions, they add, is only a fictive advance, placing at its disposal real and purely national wealth, not belonging in full ownership to any distinct member of the social body any more than the pernicious metals minted as current coin.”

[6. ]Buchez et Roux, xxvi., 95. (Declaration of Rights presented in the Jacobin Club, April 21, 1793.)

[7. ]Decrees in every commune establishing a tax on the rich in order to render the price of bread proportionate to wages, also in each large city to raise an army of paid sans-culottes, that will keep aristocrats under their pikes, April 5–7.—Decree ordering the forced loan of a billion on the rich, May 20–25.—Buchez et Roux, xxv., 156. (Speech by Charles, March 27.—Gorsas, “Courrier des Départments,” No. for May 15, 1793. (Speech by Simon in the club at Annecy.)—Speech by Guffroy at Chartres, and of Chalier and associates at Lyons, etc.

[8. ]Report by Minister Claviéres, February 1, 1793, p. 27.—Cf. Report of M. de Montesquiou, September, 9, 1791, p. 47. “During the first twenty-six months of the Revolution the taxes brought in three hundred and fifty-six millions less than they should naturally have done.”—There is the same deficit in the receipts of the towns, especially on account of the abolition of the octroi. Paris, under this head, loses ten millions per annum.

[9. ]Report by Cambon, Pluviose 3, year III. “The Revolution and the war have cost in four years five thousand three hundred and fifty millions above the ordinary expenses.” (Cambon, in his estimates, purposely exaggerates ordinary expenses of the monarchy. According to Necker’s budget, the expenditure in 1759 was fixed at five hundred and thirty-one millions and not, as Cambon states, seven hundred millions. This raises the expenses of the Revolution and of the war to seven thousand one hundred and twenty-one millions for the four and a half years, and hence to one thousand five hundred and eighty-one millions per annum, that is to say, to triple the ordinary expenses.) The expenses of the cities are therefore exaggerated like those of the State and for the same reasons.

[10. ]Schmidt, “Pariser Zustände,” i. 93, 96. “During the first half of the year 1789 there were seventeen thousand men at twenty sous a day in the national workshops at Montmartre. In 1790, there were nineteen thousand. In 1791, thirty-one thousand costing sixty thousand francs a day. In 1790, the State expends seventy-five millions for maintaining the price of bread in Paris at eleven sous for four pounds.—Ibid., 113. During the first six months of 1793 the State pays the Paris bakers about seventy-five thousand francs a day to keep bread at three sous the pound.

[11. ]Ibid., i., 139–144.

[12. ]Decree of September 27, 1790. “The circulation of assignats shall not extend beyond one billion two hundred millions. … Those which are paid in shall be destroyed and there shall be no other creation or emission of them, without a decree of the Corps Legislatif, always subject to this condition that they shall not exceed the value of the national possessions nor obtain a circulation above one billion two hundred millions.

[13. ]Schmidt, ibid., i., 104, 138, 144.

[14. ]Felix Rocquain, “L’Etat de la France au 18 Brumaire,” p. 240. (Report by Lacuée, year IX.)—Reports by préfets under the Consulate. (Reports of Laumont, préfet of the Lower-Rhine, year X.; of Colchen, préfet of the Moselle, year XI., etc.)—Schmidt, “Pariser Zustände,” iii., 205. (“The rate of interest during the Revolution was from four to five per cent. per month; in 1796 from six to eight per cent. per month, the lowest rate being two per cent. per month with security.”)

[15. ]Arthur Young, “Voyage en France,” ii., 360. (Fr. translation.) “I regard Bordeaux as richer and more commercial than any city in England except London.”

[16. ]Ibid., ii., 357. The statistics of exports in France in 1787 give three hundred and forty-nine millions, and imports three hundred and forty millions (leaving out Lorraine, Alsace, the three Evéchés, and the West Indies).—Ibid., 360. In 1786 the importations from the West Indies amounted to one hundred and seventy-four millions, of which St. Domingo furnished one hundred and thirty-one millions; the exports to the West Indies amounted to sixty-four millions, of which St. Domingo had forty-four millions. These exchanges were effected by five hundred and sixty-nine vessels carrying one hundered and sixty-two thousand tons, of which Bordeaux provided two hundred and forty-six vessels, carrying seventy-five thousand tons.—On the ruin of manufactures cf. the reports of préfets in the year X., with details from each department.—Arthur Young (ii., 444) states that the Revolution affected manufactures more seriously than any other branch of industry.

[17. ]Reports of préfets. (Orme, year IX.) “The purchasers have speculated on the profits for the time being, and have exhausted their resources. Many of them have destroyed all the plantations, all the enclosures and even the fruit trees.”—Felix Rocquain, ibid., 116. (Report by Fourcroy on Brittany.) “The condition of rural structures everywhere demands considerable capital. But no advances, based on any lasting state of things, can be made.”—Ibid., 236. (Report of Lacuée on the departments around Paris.) “The doubtful owners of national possessions cultivate badly and let things largely go to ruin.”

[18. ]Reports by préfets, years X. and XI. In general, the effect of the partition of communal possessions was disastrous, especially pasture and mountain grounds.—(Doubs.) “The partition of the communal property has contributed, in all the communes, rather to the complete ruin of the poor than to any amelioration of their fate.”—(Lozére.) “The partition of the communal property by the law of June 10, 1792, has proved very injurious to cultivation.” These partitions were numerous. (Moselle.) “Out of six hundred and eighty-six communes, one hundred and seven have divided per capitum, five hundred and seventy-nine by families, and one hundred and nineteen have remained intact.”

[19. ]Ibid. (Moselle.) Births largely increase in 1792. “But this is an exceptional year. All kinds of abuses, paper-money, the nonpayment of taxes and claims, the partition in the communes, the sale for nothing of national possessions, has spread so much comfort among the people that the poorer classes, who are the most numerous, have had no dread of increasing their families, to which they hope some day to leave their fields and render them happy.”

[20. ]Mallet-Dupan, “Mémoires,” ii., 29. (February 1, 1794.) “The late crop in France was generally good, and, in some provinces, it was above the average. … I have seen the statements of two returns made from twenty-seven departments; they declare an excess of fifteen, twenty, thirty, and thirty-five thousand bushels of grain. There is no real dearth.”

[21. ]Schmidt, ibid., i., 110, and following pages.—Buchez et Roux, xx., 416. (Speeches of Lequinio, November 27, 1792.)—Moniteur, xvii., 2. (Letter by Clement, Puy-de-Dome, June 15, 1793.) “For the past fifteen days bread has been worth sixteen and eighteen sous the pound. There is the most frightful distress in our mountains. The government distributes one-eighth of a bushel to each person, everybody being obliged to wait two days to take his turn. One woman was smothered and several were wounded.”

[22. ]Cf. “La Revolution,” i., 208; ii., 294, 205, 230.—Buchez et Roux, xx., 431. (Report of Lecointe-Puyraveau, Nov. 30, 1792.) (Mobs of four, five, and six thousand men in the departments of Eure-et-Loire, Eure, Orme, Calvados, Indre-et-Loire, Loiret, and Sarthe cut down the prices of produce. The three delegates of the Convention disposed to interfere have their lives saved only on condition of announcing the rate dictated to them.—Ibid., 409. (Letter of Roland, Nov. 27, 1792.)—xxi., 198. (Another letter by Roland, Dec. 6, 1792.) “All convoys are stopped at Lissy, la Ferté, Milan, la Ferté-sous-Jouarre. … Carts loaded with wheat going to Paris have been forced to go back near Lonjumeau and near Meaux.”

[23. ]Archives Nationales, F7, 3,265. (Letter of David, cultivator, and administrator of the department of Seine-Inférieure, Oct. 11, 1792; letter of the special committee of Rouen, Oct. 22; letter of the delegates of the executive power, Oct. 20, etc.) “Reports from all quarters state that the farmers who drive to market are considered and treated in their parishes as aristocrats. … Each department keeps to itself: they mutually repel each other.”

[24. ]Buchez et Roux, xx., 409. (Letter of Roland, Nov. 27, 1792.) “The circulation of grain has for a long time encountered the greatest obstacles; scarcely a citizen now dares to do that business.”—Ibid., 417. (Speech by Lequinio.) “The monopoly of wheat by land-owners and farmers is almost universal. Fright is the cause of it. … And where does this fear come from? From the general agitation, and threats, with the bad treatment in many places of the farmers, land-owners, and traffickers in wheat known as bladiers.”—Decrees of Sep. 16, 1792, and May 4, 1793.

[25. ]Buchez et Roux, xix. (Report by Cambon, Sep. 22, 1792.) “The taxes no longer reach the public treasury, because they are used for purchasing grain in the departments.” Ibid., xix., 29. (Speech by Cambon, Oct. 12, 1792.) “You can bear witness in your departments to the sacrifices which well-to-do people have been obliged to make in helping the poor class. In many of the towns extra taxes have been laid for the purchase of grain and for a thousand other helpful measures.”

[26. ]Buchez et Roux, xx., 409. (Letter of Roland, Nov. 29, 1792.)—xxi., 199. (Deliberations of the provisional executive council, Sep. 3, 1792.)—Dauban, “La Demagogie en 1793,” p. 64. (Diary kept by Beaulieu.)—Ibid., 150.)

[27. ]Schmidt, i., 110–130.—Decrees against the export of coin or ingots, Sep. 5 and 15, 1792.—Decree on stocks or bonds payable to bearer, Aug. 14, 1792.

[28. ]It is probable that disinterested motives, pure love for one’s neighbor, for humanity, for country, do not form a hundredth part of the total energy that produces human activity. It must not be forgotten that the actions of men are alloyed with motives of a lower order, such as love of fame, the desire of self-admiration and of self-approval, fear of punishment and hope of reward beyond the grave, all of these being interested motives, and without which disinterested motives would be inoperative excepting in two or three souls among ten thousand.

[29. ]Archives Nationales, D., 55, I., file 2. (Letter by Joffroy, national agent in the district of Bar-sur-Aube, Germinal 5, year III.) “Most of the farmers, to escape the requisition, have sold their horses and replaced them with oxen.”—Memoirs (in ms.) of M. Dufort de Cheverney (communicated by M. Robert de Crêvecoeur). In June, 1793, “the requisitions fall like hail, every week, on wheat, hay, straw, oats, etc.,” all at prices fixed by the contractors, who make deductions, postpone and pay with difficulty. Then come requisitions for hogs. “This was depriving all the country folks of what they lived on.” As the requisitions called for live hogs, there was a hog St. Bartholomew. Everybody killed his pig and salted it down.” (Environs of Blois.) In relation to refusing to gather in crops, see further on.—Dauban, “Paris in 1794,” p. 229. (Ventose 24, general orders by Henriot.) “Citizen Guillon being on duty outside the walls, saw with sorrow that citizens were cutting their wheat to feed rabbits with.”

[30. ]Decree of Messidor 23, year II., on the consolidation with the national domain of the assets and liabilities of hospitals and other charitable institutions. (See reports of préfets on the effect of this law, on the ruin of the hospitals, on the misery of the sick, of foundlings, and the infirm, from years IX. to XIII.)—Decrees of August 8 and 12, 1793, and July 24, 1794, on academies and literary societies.—Decree of August 24, 1793, § 29, on the assets and liabilities of communes.

[31. ]Schmidt, i., 144. (Two billions September 27, 1793; one billion four hundred millions June 19, 1794.)—Decree of August 24, September 13, 1793, on the conversion of title-deeds and the formation of the Grand Ledger.—Decrees of July 31, August 30 and September 5, on calling in the assignats à face royale.—Decrees of August 1 and September 5, 1793, on the refusal to accept assignats at par.

[32. ]Archives Nationales, F7, 4,421. (Documents on the revolutionary taxes organised at Troyes, Brumaire 11, year II.) Three hundred and seventy-three persons are taxed, especially manufacturers, merchants, and land-owners; the minimum of the tax is one hundred francs, the maximum fifty thousand francs, the total being one million seven hundred and sixty-two thousand seven hundred francs. Seventy-six petitions attached to the papers show exactly the situation of things in relation to trade, manufactures, and property, the state of fortunes and credit of the upper and lower bourgeois class.

[33. ]Mallet-Dupan, “Mémoires,” ii., 17. “I have seen the thirty-second list of emigrés at Marseilles, merely of those whose possessions have been confiscated and sold; there are twelve thousand of them, and the lists were not finished.”—Reports of préfets. (Var by Fanchet, year IX.) “The emigration of 1793 throws upon Leghorn and the whole Italian coast a very large number of Marseilles and Toulon traders. These men, generally industrious, have established (there) more than one hundred and sixty soap factories and opened a market for the oil of this region. This event may be likened to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.”—Cf. the reports on the departments of the Rhone, Aude, Lot, and Garonne, Lower Pyrenees, Orme, etc.

[34. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vol. 332. (Letter of Désgranges, Bordeaux, Brumaire 12, year II.) “Nobody here talks about trade any more than if it had never existed.”

[35. ]Dr. Jaïn, “Choix de documents et lettres privées trouvées dans des papiers de famille,” p. 144. (Letter of Gédéon Jaïn, banker at Paris, November 18, 1793.) “Business carried on with difficulty and at a great risk occasion frequent and serious losses, credit and resources being almost nothing.”

[36. ]Archives Nationales, F7, 2,475. (Letters of Thullier, procureur-syndic of the Paris department, September 7 and 10, 1793.—Report by a member of the Piques section, September 8 and 10, 1793.—Cf. the petitions of traders and lawyers imprisoned at Troyes, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, etc.—Archives Nationales, AF., II., 271. Letter of Francastel: “At least three thousand monopolist aristocrats have been arrested at Nantes … and this is not the last purification.”

[37. ]Decrees of May 4, 15, 19, 20 and 23, and of August 30, 1793.—Decrees of July 26, August 15, September 11, 1793, and February 24, 1794.—Camille Boursier, “Essai sur la Terreur en Anjou,” p. 254. (Letter of Buissart to his friend Maximilian Robespierre, Arras, Pluviose 14, year II.) “We are dying with starvation in the midst of abundance; I think that the mercantile aristocracy ought to be killed out like the nobles and priests. The communes, under the favor of a storehouse of food and goods must alone be allowed to trade. This idea, well carried out, can be realised; then, the benefits of trade will turn to the advantage of the Republic, that is to say, to the advantage of buyer and seller.”

[38. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 49. (Documents on the levy of revolutionary taxes, Belfort, Brumaire 30, year II.) “Verneur, sr., taxed at ten thousand livres, for having withheld goods deposited with him by his sister, in order to save them from the coming taxation.” Campardon, i., 292. (Judgments of the revolutionary commission at Strasbourg.)—“The head-clerk in Hecht’s apothecary shop is accused of selling two ounces of rhubarb and manna at fifty-four sous; Hecht, the proprietor, is condemned to a fine of fifteen thousand livres. Madeleine Meyer, at Rosheim, a retailer, is accused of selling a candle for ten sous and is condemned to a fine of one thousand livres, payable in three days. Braun, butcher and bar-keeper, accused of having sold a glass of wine for twenty sous, is condemned to a fine of forty thousand francs, to be imprisoned until this is paid, and to exposure in the pillory before his own house for four hours, with this inscription: debaser of the national currency.”—“Recueil de Pieces, etc., at Strasbourg,” (supplement, pp. 21, 30, 64). “Marie Ursule Schnellen and Marie Schultzmann, servant, accused of monopolising milk. The former is sentenced to the pillory for one day under a placard, monopoliser of milk, and to hold in one hand the money and, in the other, the milk-pot; the other, a servant with citizen Benner … he, the said Benner, is sentenced to a fine of three hundred livres, payable in three days.” “Dorothy Franz, convicted of having sold two heads of salad at twenty sous, and of thus having depreciated the value of assignats, is sentenced to a fine of three thousand livres, imprisonment for six weeks and exposure in the pillory for two hours.”—Ibid., i., 18. “A grocer, accused of having sold sugar-candy at lower than the rate, although not comprised in the list, is sentenced to one hundred thousand livres fine and imprisonment until peace is declared.”—Orders by Saint-Just and Lebas, Nivose 3, year II. “The criminal court of the department of the Lower-Rhine is ordered to destroy the house of any one convicted of having made sales below the rates fixed by the maximum,” consequently, the house of one Schauer, a furrier, is torn down, Nivose 7.

[39. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vol. 322. (Letter by Haupt, Belfort, Brumaire 3, year II.) “On my arrival here, I found the law of the maximum promulgated and in operation … (but) the necessary steps have not been taken to prevent a new monopoly by the rustics, who have flocked in to the shops of the dealers, carried off all their goods and created a factitious dearth.”

[40. ]Archives Nationales, F7, 4,421. (Petitions of merchants and shopkeepers at Troyes in relation to the revolutionary tax, especially of hatters, linen, cotton and woollen manufacturers, weavers, and grocers. There is generally a loss of one-half, and sometimes of three-fourths of the purchase money.)

[41. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vol. 330. (Letter of Brutus, Marseilles, Nivose 6, year II.) “Since the maximum everything is wanting at Marseilles.”—Ibid. (Letter by Soligny and Gosse, Thionville, Nivose 5, year II.) “No peasant is willing to bring anything to market. … They go off six leagues to get a better price and thus the communes which they once supplied are famishing. … According as they are paid in specie or assignats the difference often amounts to two hundred per cent., and nearly always to one hundred per cent.”—“Un Séjour en France,” pp. 188–189.—Archives Nationales, D., § I., file 2. (Letter of Representative Albert, Germinal 19, year II., and of Joffroy, national agent, district of Bar-sur-l Aube, Germinal 5, year III. “The municipalities have always got themselves exempted from the requisitions, which all fall on the farmers and proprietors unable to satisfy them. … The allotment among the tax-payers is made with the most revolting inequality. … Partiality through connections of relatives and of friendship.”

[42. ]Decrees of September 29, 1793 (articles 8 and 9); of May 4 and 20, and June 26, 1794.—Archives Nationales, AF., II., 68–72. (Orders of the Committee of Public Safety, Prairial 26, year II.) “The horses and wagons of coal peddlers, the drivers accustomed to taking to Paris by law a portion of the supply of coal used in baking in the department of Seine-et-Marne, are drafted until the 1st of Brumaire next, for the transportation of coal to Paris. During this time they cannot be drafted for any other service.” (A good many orders in relation to subsistences and articles of prime necessity may be found in these files, mostly in the handwriting of Robert Lindet.)

[43. ]Cf. “The Revolution,” ii., 69.—Dauban, “Paris en 1794.” (Report by Pouvoyeur, March 15, 1794.) “A report has been long circulated that all the aged were to be slaughtered; there is not a place where this falsehood is not uttered.”

[44. ]Archives Nationales, F7, 4,435, file 10, letters of Collot d’Herbois, Brumaire 17 and 19, year II.—De Martel, “Fouché,” 340, 341. Letters of Collot d’Herbois, November 7 and 9, 1793.

[45. ]De Martel, ibid., 462. (Proclamation by Javogues, Pluviose 13, year II.)

[46. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vol. 330. (Letter of Brutus, political agent, Nivose 6.)

[47. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 116. (Orders of Taillefer and Marat-Valette, and Deliberations of the Directory of Lot, Brumaire 20, year II.)

[48. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vol. 331. (Letter of the agent Bertrand, Frimaire 3.)

[49. ]Ibid., vol. 1332. (Letter of the agent Chépy, Brumaire 2.)

[50. ]Ibid., vol. 1411. (Letter of Blessmann and Hauser, Brumaire 30.)—Ibid. (Letter of Haupt, Belfort, Brumaire 29.) “I believe that Marat’s advice should be followed here and a hundred scaffolds be erected; there are not guillotines enough to cut off the heads of the monopolists. I shall do what I can to have the pleasure of seeing one of these d—— b—— play hot cockles.”

[51. ]Ibid., vol. 333. (Letter of Garrigues, Pluviose 16.)

[52. ]“Souvenirs et Journal d’un Bourgeois d’Evreux,” pp. 83–85. (June and July 1794.)—Ibid., at Nantes.—Dauban, “Paris en 1794,” p. 194, March 4.

[53. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vols. 331 and 332. (Letters of Désgranges, Frimaire 3 and 8 and 10.) “Many of the peasants have eaten no bread for a fortnight. Most of them no longer work.” Buchez et Roux, xviii., 346. (Session of the Convention, Brumaire 14, speech by Legendre.)

[54. ]Moniteur, xix., 671. (Speech by Tallien, March 12, 1794.) Buchez et Roux, xxxii., 423. (Letter of Jullien, June 15, 1794.)

[55. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 111. (Letters of Michaud, Chateauroux, Pluviose 18 and 19, year II.)

[56. ]Dauban, “Paris en 1794,” 410, 492, 498. (Letters from the national agent of the district of Sancoins, Thermidor 9, year II.; from the Directory of Allier, Thermidor 9; from the national agent of the district of Villefort, Thermidor 9.)—Gouverneur Morris, April 10, 1794, says in a letter to Washington that the famine in many places is extremely severe. Men really die of starvation who have the means to buy bread if they could only get it.

[57. ]Volney, “Voyage en Orient,” ii., 344. “When Constantinople lacks food twenty provinces are starved for its supply.”

[58. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 46, 68. (Decree of Committee of Public Safety.) The Treasury pays over to the city of Paris for subsistence, on Aug. 1, 1793, two millions, August 14, three, and 27, one million; September 8, 16, and 13, one million each, and so on. One million each on Frimaire 10 and 17, two each on the 22d and 26th: Nivose 17, two and 26, two; Pluviose 5, two and 20, one; Ventose 7, one and 24, two; Germinal 7, two and 15, two. Between August 7, 1793 and Germinal 19, year II., the Treasury paid over to Paris, thirty-one millions.

[59. ]Ibid., AF., II., 68. Decrees of Brumaire 14, Nivose 7 and Germinal 22 on the departments assigned to the supply of Paris.—Buchez et Roux, xxviii., 489. (Speech by Danton in Jacobin club, Aug. 28, 1793.) “I constantly asserted that it was necessary to give all to the mayor of Paris if he exacted it to feed its inhabitants. … Let us sacrifice one hundred and ten millions and save Paris and through it, the Republic.”

[60. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vols. 1410 and 1411. Reports of June 20 and 21, 1793, July 21, 22, 28, 29 and 31, and every day of the months of August and September, 1793. Schmidt, “Tableaux de la Révolution Française,” vol. II., passim.—Dauban, “Paris in 1794” (especially throughout Ventose, year II.)—Archives Nationales, F7, 3,1167. (Reports for Nivose, year II.)

[61. ]Dauban, “Paris en 1794,” 138. (Report of Ventose 2.)

[62. ]Mercier, “Paris Pendant la Révolution,” i., 355.

[63. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, 1411. (Reports of August 1 and 2, 1763.) “At one o’clock in the morning, we were surprised to find men and women lying along the sides of the houses patiently waiting for the shops to open.”—Dauban, 231. (Report of Ventose 24.) To obtain the lights of a hog, at the slaughter-house near the Jardin des Plantes, at the rate of three francs ten sous, instead of thirty sous as formerly, women “were lying on the ground with little baskets by their side and waiting four and five hours.”

[64. ]Archives Nationales, F7, 3,1167. (Reports of Nivose 9 and 28.) “The streets of Paris are always abominable; they are certainly afraid to use those brooms.” Dauban, 120. (Ventose 9.) “The rue St. Anne is blocked up with manure. In that part of it near the Rue Louvois, heaps of this stretch along the walls for the past fortnight.”

[65. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vol. 1411. (Reports of August 9, 1793.)—Mercier, i., 353.—Dauban, 530. (Reports of Fructidor 27, year II.) “There are always great gatherings at the coal depots. They begin at midnight, one, two o’clock in the morning. Many of the habitués take advantage of the obscurity and commit all sorts of indecencies.”

[66. ]Schmidt, “Tableaux de la Révolution Française,” ii., 155. (Reports of Ventose 25.)—Dauban, 188. (Reports of Ventose 19.)—Ibid., 69. (Reports of Ventose 2.) Ibid., 126. (Reports of Ventose 10.)—Archives Nationales, F7, 3,1167. (Reports of Nivose 28, year II.) The women “denounce the butchers and pork-sellers who pay no attention to the maximum law, giving only the poorest meat to the poor.”—Ibid. (Reports of Nivose 6.) “It is frightful to see what the butchers give the people.”

[67. ]Mercier, ibid., 363. “The women struggled with all their might against the men and contracted the habit of swearing. The last on the row knew how to worm themselves up to the head of it.”—Buchez et Roux, xxviii., 364. (“Journal de la Montague,” July 28, 1793.) “One citizen was killed on Sunday, July 21, one of the Gravilliers (club) in trying to hold on to a six-pound loaf of bread which he had just secured for himself and family. Another had a cut on his arm the same day in the Rue Froid-Manteau. A pregnant woman was wounded and her child died in her womb.”

[68. ]Dauban, 256. (Reports of Ventose 27.) Market of Faubourg St. Antoine. “On ne se f—— pas de coups de poing depuis deux on trois jours.”

[69. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vol. 1410. (Reports of August 6 and 7, 1793.)

[70. ]Dauban, 144. (Reports of Ventose 19.)

[71. ]Dauban, 199. (Reports of Ventose 19.)—Dauban, “La Demagogie en 1793,” p. 470. “Scarcely had the peasants arrived when harpies in women’s clothes attacked them and carried off their goods. … Yesterday, a peasant was beaten for wanting to sell his food at the maximum rate.” (October 19, 1793.)—Dauban, “Paris en 1794,” 144, 173, 199. (Reports of Ventose 13, 17 and 19.)—Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vol. 1410. (Reports of June 26 and 27, 1793.) Wagons and boats are pillaged for candles and soap.

[72. ]Dauban, 45. (Reports of Pluviose 17.)—222. (Reports of Ventose 23.)—160. (Reports of Ventose 15.)—340. (Reports of Germinal 28.)—87. (Reports of Ventose 5.)

[73. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 116. (Order of Paganel, Castres, Pluviose 6 and 7, year II. “The steps taken to obtain returns of food have not fulfilled the object. … The statements made are either false or inexact.”) Cf., for details, the correspondence of the other representatives on mission.—Dauban, “Paris en 1794,” 190. (Speech by Fouquier-Tinville in the Convention, Ventose 19.) “The mayor of Pont St. Maxence has dared to say that ‘when Paris sends us sugar we will then see about letting her have our eggs and butter.’ ”

[74. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vol. 1411. (Reports of August 7 and 8, 1793.) “Seven thousand five hundred pounds of bread, about to be taken out, have been stopped at the barriers.”—Dauban, 45. (Orders of the day, Pluviose 17.) Lamps are set up at all the posts, “especially at la Grève and Passy, so as to light up the river and see that no eatables pass outside.”—Mercier, i., 355.—Dauban, 181. (Reports of Ventose 18.)—210. (Reports of Ventose 21.)—190. Speech by Fouquier, Ventose 19.) “The butchers in Paris who cannot sell above the maximum carry the meat they buy to the Sèvres butchers and sell it at any price they please.”—257. (Reports of Ventose 27.) “You see, about ten o’clock in the evening, aristocrats and other egoists coming to the dealers who supply Egalité’s mansion (the Duke of Orleans) and buy chickens and turkeys which they carefully conceal under their overcoats.”

[75. ]Dauban, 255. (Orders of the day by Henriot, Ventose 27.) “I have to request my brethren in arms not to take any rations whatever. This little deprivation will silence the malevolent who seek every opportunity to humble us.”—Ibid., 359. “On Floréal 29, between five and six o’clock in the morning, a patrol of about fifteen men of the Bonnet-Rouge section, commanded by a sort of commissary, stop subsistences on the Orleans road and take them to their section.”

[76. ]Dauban, 341. (Letter of the Commissioner on Subsistences, Germinal 23.) “The supplies are stolen under the people’s eyes, or what they get is of inferior quality.” The commissioner is surprised to find that, having provided so much, so little reaches the consumers.

[77. ]Archives des Affaires Étrangérès, vol. 1411. (Reports of August 11–12 and 31, and Sept. 1, 1793.)—Archives Nationales, F7, 3,1167. (Reports of Nivose 7 and 12, year II.)

[78. ]Dauban, “Paris en 1794,” 60, 68, 69, 71, 82, 93, 216, 231.—Schmidt, “Tableaux de Paris,” 187, 190.—Archives Nationales, F7, 3,1167. (Report of Leharivel, Nivose 7.)—The gunsmiths employed by the government likewise state that they have for a long time had nothing to eat but bread and cheese.

[79. ]Dauban, 231. (Report of Perriére, Ventose 24.) “Butter of which they make a god.”

[80. ]Ibid., 68. (Report of Ventose 2.)

[81. ]Archives Nationales, F7, 3,1167, (Report of Nivose 28.)—Dauban, 144. (Report of Nivose 14.)

[82. ]Dauban, 81. (Report of Latour-Lamontagne, Ventose 4.)

[83. ]“Souvenirs et Journal d’un Bourgeois d’Evreux,” 83. “Friday, June 15, 1794, a proclamation is made that all who have any provisions in their houses, wheat, barley, rye, flour and even bread, must declare them within twenty-four hours under penalty of being regarded as an enemy of the country and declared ‘suspect,’ put under arrest and tried by the courts.”—Schmidt, “Tableaux de la Révolution Française,” ii., 214. A seizure is made at Passy of two pigs and forty pounds of butter, six bushels of beans, etc., in the domicile of citizen Lucet who had laid in supplies for sixteen persons of his own household.

[84. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 68. Orders of the Committee of Public Safety, Pluviose 23, referring to the law of Brumaire 25, forbidding the extraction of more than fifteen pounds of bran from a quintal of flour. Order directing the removal of bolters from bakeries and mills; he who keeps or conceals these on his property “shall be treated as ‘suspect’ and put under arrest until peace is declared.”—Berryat Saint-Prix, 357, 362. At Toulouse, three persons are condemned to death for monopoly. At Montpelier, a baker, two dealers and a merchant are guillotined for having invoiced, concealed and kept “a certain quantity of gingerbread cakes intended solely for consumption by antirevolutionists.”

[85. ]“Un Séjour en France” (April 22, 1794).

[86. ]Ludovic Sciout, iv., 236. (Proclamation of the representatives on mission in Finisterre.) “Magistrates of the people tell all farmers and owners of land that their crops belong to the nation and that they are simply its depositaries.”—Archives Nationales, AF., II., 92. (Orders by Bô, representative in Cautal, Pluviose 8.) “Whereas, as all citizens in a Republic form one family … all those who refuse to assist their brethren and neighbors under the specious pretext that they have not sufficient supplies must be regarded as ‘suspect’ citizens.”

[87. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 68. (Orders of the Committee of Public Safety, Prairial 28.) The maximum price is fourteen francs the quintal; after Messidor 30, it is not to be more than eleven francs.

[88. ]Ibid., AF., II., 116 and 106, orders of Paganel, Castres, Pluviose 6 and 7. Orders of Dartigoyte, Floréal 23, 25, and 29.

[89. ]Ibid., AF., II., 147. (Orders of Maignet, Avignon, Prairial 2.)

[90. ]Moniteur, xxiii., 397. (Speech by Dubois-Crancé, May 5, 1795.) “The Committee on Commerce (and Supplies) had thirty-five thousand employees in its service.”

[91. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 68. (Orders of the Committee of Public Safety, Prairial 28.)—Decree of Messidor 8, year II. “All kinds of grain and the hay of the present crop are required by the government.”—A new estimate is made, each farmer being obliged to state the amount of his crop; verification, confiscation in case of inaccurate declarations, and orders to thrash out the sheaves.—Dauban, 490. (Letter of the national agent of Villefort, Thermidor 19.) Calculations and the reasoning of farmers with a view to avoid sowing and planting: “Not so much on account of the lack of hands as not to ruin oneself by sowing and raising an expensive crop which, they say, affords them small returns when they sell their grain at so low a price.”—Archives Nationales, AF., II., 106. (Letter of the national agent in Gers and Haute-Garonne, Floréal 25.) “They say here, that as soon as the crop is gathered, all the grain will be taken away, without leaving anything to live on. It is stated that all salt provisions are going to be taken and the agriculturists reduced to the horrors of a famine.”

[92. ]Moniteur, xxii., 21. (Speech by Lindet, September 7, 1794.) “We have long feared that the ground would not be tilled, that the meadows would be covered with cattle while the proprietors and farmers were kept in prison.” Archives Nationales, D., § 1, No. I. (Letter from the district of Bar-sur-Seine, Ventose 14, year III.) “The maximum causes the concealment of grain. The quit-claims ruined the consumers and rendered them desperate. How many wretches, indeed, have been arrested, attacked, confiscated, fined, and ruined for having gone off fifteen or twenty leagues to get grain with which to feed their wives and children?”

[93. ]AF., II., 106. (Circular by Dartigoyte, Floréal 25.) “You must apply this rule, that is, make the municipal officers responsible for the noncultivation of the soil.” “If any citizen allows himself a different kind of bread, other than that which all the cultivators and laborers in the commune use, I shall have him brought before the courts conjointly with the municipality as being the first culprit guilty of having tolerated it. … Reduce, if necessary, three-fourths of the bread allowed to nonlaboring citizens because muscadins and muscadines have resources and, besides, lead an idle life.”

[94. ]AF., II., 111. (Letters of Ferry, Bourges, Messidor 23, to his “brethren in the popular club,” and “to the citoyennes (women) of Indre-et-Cher.”)

[95. ]Moniteur, xxi., 171. (Letter from Avignon, Messidor 9, and letter of the Jacobins of Arles.)

[96. ]Moniteur, xxi., 184. (Decree of Messidor 21.)

[97. ]Gouverneur Morris. (Correspondence with Washington. Letters of March 27 and April 10, 1794.) He says that there is no record of such an early spring. Rye has headed out and clover is in flower. It is astonishing to see apricots in April as large as pigeons’ eggs. In the south, where the dearth is most severe, he has good reason to believe that the ground is supplying the inhabitants with food. A frost like that of the year before in the month of May (1793) would help the famine more than all the armies and fleets in Europe.

[98. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 73. (Letter by the Directory of Calvados, Prairial 26, year III.) “We have not a grain of wheat in store, and the prisons are full of cultivators.”—Archives Nationales, D., § 1, file No. 3. (Warrants of arrest issued by Representative Albert, Pluviose 19, year III., Germinal 7 and 16.)—On the details of the difficulties and annoyances attending the requisitions, cf. this file and the five preceding or following files. (Letter of the National agent, district of Nogent-sur-Seine, Germinal 13.) “I have had summoned before the district court a great many cultivators and proprietors who are in arrears in furnishing the requisitions made on them by their respective municipalities. … A large majority declared that they were unable to furnish in full even if their seed were taken. The court ordered the confiscation of the said grain with a fine equal to the value of the quantity demanded of those called upon. … It is now my duty to execute the sentence. But, I must observe to you, that if you do not reduce the fine, many of them will be reduced to despair. Hence I await your answer so that I may act accordingly.”—(Another letter from the same agent, Germinal 9.) “It is impossible to supply the market of Villarceaux; seven communes under requisition prevented it through the district of Sozannes which constantly keeps an armed force there to carry grain away as soon as thrashed.”—It is interesting to remark the inquisitorial sentimentality of the official agents and the low stage of culture. (Procès-verbal of the Magincourt municipality, Ventose 7.) Of course I am obliged to correct the spelling so as to render it intelligible. “The said Croiset, gendarme, went with the national agent into the houses of citizens in arrears, of whom, amongst those in arrears, nobody refused but Jean Mauchin, whom we could not keep from talking against him, seeing that he is wholly egoist and only wants for himself. He declared to us that, if, the day before his harvesting he had any left, he would share it with the citizens that needed it. … Alas, yes, how could one refrain from shutting up such an egoist who wants only for himself to the detriment of his fellow-citizens? A proof of the truth is that he feeds in his house three dogs, at least one hundred and fifty chickens and even pigeons, which uses up a lot of grain, enough to hinder the satisfaction of all the requisitions. He might do without dogs, as his court is enclosed; he might likewise content himself with thirty chickens and then be able to satisfy the requisitions.” This document is signed “Bertrand, agen.” Mauchin, on the strength of it, is incarcerated at Troyes “at his own expense.”

[99. ]Ibid. Letter from the district of Bar-sur-Seine, Ventose 14, year III. Since the abolition of the maximum, “the inhabitants travel thirty and forty leagues to purchase wheat.”—(Letter from the municipality of Troyes, Ventose 15.) “According to the price of grain, which we keep on buying, by agreement, bread will cost fifteen sous (the pound) next decade.”

[100. ]Schmidt, “Parisir Zustande,” 145–220. The reopening of the Bourse, April 25, 1795; ibid., 322, ii., 105.—“Memoirs of Theobald Wolf,” vol. i., p. 200 (February 3, 1796). At Havre, the louis d’or is then worth five thousand francs, and the ecu of six francs in proportion. At Paris (February 12), the louis d’ or is worth six thousand five hundred: a dinner for two persons at the Palais Royal costs one thousand five hundred francs.—Mayer (“Frankreich in 1796.”) He gives a dinner for ten persons which costs three hundred thousand francs in assignats. At this rate a cab ride costs one thousand francs, and by the hour six thousand francs.

[101. ]“Correspondance de Mallet-Dupan avec la cour de Vienne,” i., 253 (July 18, 1795). “It is not the same now as in the early days of the Revolution, which then bore heavily only on certain classes of society; now, everybody feels the scourge, hourly, in every department of civil life. Goods and provisions advance daily (in price) in much greater proportion than the decline in assignats. … Paris is really a city of furnishing shops. … The immense competition for these objects raises all goods twenty-five per cent. a week. … It is the same with provisions. A sack of wheat weighing three quintals is now worth nine thousand francs, a pound of beef thirty-six francs, a pair of shoes one hundred francs. It is impossible for artisans to raise their wages proportionately with such a large and rapid increase.”—Cf. “Diary of Lord Malmesbury,” iii., 290 (October 27, 1796). After 1795, the gains of the peasants, land-owners, and producers are very large; from 1792 to 1796 they accumulate and hide away most of the current coin. They were courageous enough and smart enough to protect their hoard against the violence of the revolutionary government; “hence, at the time of the depreciation of assignats, they bought land extraordinarily cheap.” In 1796 they cultivate and produce largely.

[102. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 72. (Letter of the administrators of the district of Montpelier to the Convention, Messidor 26, year II.) “Your decree of Nivose 4 last, suppressed the maximum, which step, provoked by justice and the maximum, did not have the effect you anticipated.” The dearth ceases, but there is a prodigious increase in prices, the farmer selling his wheat at from four hundred and seventy to six hundred and seventy francs the quintal.

[103. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 71. (Deliberations of the commune of Champs, canton of Lagny, Prairial 22, year III. Letter of the procureur-syndic of Meaux, Messidor 3. Letter of the municipality of Rozoy, Seine-et-Marne, Messidor 4.)—Ibid., AF., II., 74. (Letter of the municipality of Emérainville, endorsed by the Directory of Meaux, Messidor 14.) “The commune can procure only oat-bread for its inhabitants, and, again, they have to go a long way to get this. This food, of so poor a quality, far from strengthening the citizen accustomed to agricultural labor, disheartens him and makes him ill, the result being that the hay cannot be got in in good time for lack of hands.”—At Champs, “the crop of hay is ready for mowing, but, for want of food, the laborers cannot do the work.”

[104. ]Ibid., AF., II., 73. (Letter from the Directory of the district of Dieppe, Prairial 22.)

[105. ]Ibid. (Letter of the administrators of the district of Louviers, Prairial 26.)

[106. ]Ibid. (Letter of the procureur-syndic of the Caen district, Caen, Messidor 23.—Letter of Representative Porcher to the Committee of Public Safety, Messidor 26.—Letter of the same, Prairial 24. “The condition of this department seemed to me frightful. … The privations of the department with respect to subsistence cannot be over-stated to you; the evil is at its height.”

[107. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 74. (Letter of the Beauvais administrators, Prairial 15.—Letter of the Bapaume administrator, Prairial 24.—Letter of the Vervier administrator, Messidor 7.—Letter of the commissary sent by the district of Laon, Messidor.)—Cf., ibid., letter from the Abbeville district, Prairial 11. “The quintal of wheat is sold at one thousand assignats, or rather, the farmers will not take assignats any more, grain not to be had for anything but coin, and, as most people have none to give they are hard-hearted enough to demand of one his clothes, and of another his furniture, etc.”

[108. ]Ibid., AF., II., 71. (Letter of the Rozoy municipality. Seine-et-Marne, Messidor 4, year III.) A bushel of wheat in the vicinity of Rozoy brings three hundred francs.

[109. ]Ibid., AF., II., 74. (Letter of the Montreuil-sur-Mer municipality, Prairial 29.)

[110. ]Ibid. (Letter of the Vervins administrators, Prairial 11, Letter of the commune of La Chapelle-sur-Somme, Prairial 24.)

[111. ]Ibid., AF., II., 70 (Letter of the procureur-syndic of the district of St. Germain, Thermidor 10.) This file, which depicts the situation of the communes around Paris, is specially heartrending and terrible. Among other instances of the misery of workmen the following petition of the men employed on the Marly water-works may be given, Messidor 28. “The workmen and employees on the machine at Marly beg leave to present to you the wretched state to which they are reduced by the dearness of provisions. Their moderate wages, which at the most have reached only five livres twelve sous, and again, for four months past, having received but two francs sixteen sous, no longer provide them with half-a-pound of bread, since it costs fifteen and sixteen francs per pound. We poor people have not been wanting in courage nor patience, hoping that times would mend. We have been reduced to selling most of our effects and to eating bread made of bran of which a sample is herewith sent, and which distresses us very much (nous incommode beaucoup); most of us are ill and those who are not so are in a very feeble state.”—Schmidt, “Tableaux de Paris,” Thermidor 9. “Peasants on the market square complain bitterly of being robbed in the fields and on the road, and even of having their sacks (of grain) plundered.”

[112. ]Archives Nationales, D., § 1, file 2. (Letter of the Ervy municipality, Floréal 17, year III.) “The indifference of the egoist farmers in the country is at its height; they pay no respect whatever to the laws, killing the poor by refusing to sell, or unwilling to sell their grain at a price they can pay.”—(It would be necessary to copy the whole of this file to show the alimentary state of the departments.)

[113. ]Ibid., AF., II., 74. (Letter of the district administrators of Bapaume, Prairial 24.—Letter of the municipality of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Prairial 24.)

[114. ]Ibid., AF., II., 73. (Letter of the municipality of Brionne, district of Bernay, Prairial 7.) The farmers do not bring in their wheat because they sell it elsewhere at the rate of fifteen hundred and two thousand francs the sack of three hundred and thirty pounds.

[115. ]Ibid., AF., II., 71. (Letter of the procureur-syndic of the district of Meaux, Messidor 2.) “Their fate is shared by many of the rural communes” and the whole district has been reduced to this dearth “to increase the resources of Paris and the armies.”

[116. ]Schmidt, “Tableaux de Paris.” (Reports of the Police, Pluviose 6, year III.)—Ibid., Germinal 16. “A letter from the department of Drome states that they are dying of hunger there, bread selling at three francs the pound.”

[117. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 70. (Deliberations of the Council-general of Franciade, Thermidor 9, year III.)

[118. ]Ibid. (Letter of the procureur-syndic of the district of St. Germain, Thermidor 10.)—Delécluze, “Souvenirs de Soixante Années,” p. 10. (The Delécluze family live in Mendon in 1794 and for most of 1795. M. Delécluze, senior, and his son go to Meaux and obtain of a farmer a bag of good flour weighing three hundred and twenty-five pounds for about ten louis d’or and fetch it home, taking the greatest pains to keep it concealed. Both father and son “after having covered the precious sack with hay and straw in the bottom of the cart, follow it on foot at some distance as the peasant drives along.” Madame Delécluze kneads the bread herself and bakes it.

[119. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 74. The following shows some of the municipal expenditures. (Deliberations of the commune of Annecy, Thermidor 8, year III.) “Amount received by the commune from the government, one million two hundred thousand francs. Fraternal subscriptions, four hundred thousand francs. Forced loan, two million four hundred thousand francs. Amount arising from grain granted by the government, but not paid for, four hundred thousand francs.” (Letter from the municipality of Lille, Fructidor 7.) “The deficit, at the time we took hold of the government, which, owing to the difference between the price of grain bought and the price obtained for bread distributed among the necessitous, had amounted to two million two hundred seventy thousand and twenty-three francs, so increased in Thermidor as to amount to eight million three hundred twelve thousand and nine hundred fifty-six francs.” Consequently, the towns ruin themselves with indebtedness to an incredible extent.—Archives Nationales, AF., II., 72. (Letter of the municipality of Tours, Vendémiaire 19, year IV.) Tours has not sufficient money with which to buy oil for its street-lamps and which are no longer lit at night. A decree is passed to enable the agent for subsistences at Paris to supply its commissaries with twenty quintals of oil which, for three hundred and forty lamps, keeps one hundred agoing up to Germinal 1. The same at Toulouse. (Report of Destrene, Moniteur, June 24, 1798.) On November 26, 1794, Bordeaux is unable to pay seventy-two francs for thirty barrels of water to wash the guillotine. (Granier de Cassagnac, i., 13. Extract from the archives of Bordeaux.) Bordeaux is authorised to sell one thousand casks of wine which had formerly been taken on requisition by the government, the town to pay for them at the rate at which the Republic bought them and to sell them as dear as possible in the way of regular trade. The proceeds are to be employed in providing subsistence for its inhabitants. (Archives Nationales, AF., II., 72, orders of Vendémiaire 4, year IV.)—As to aid furnished by the assignats granted to towns and departments cf. the same files; four hundred thousand francs to Poitiers, Pluviose 18, four millions to Lyons, Pluviose 17, three millions a month to Nantes, after Thermidor 14, ten millions to the department of Hérault in Frimaire and Pluviose, etc.

[120. ]Archives Nationales, II., § 1, file 2. (Deliberations of the Commune of Troyes, Ventose 15, year III.)—“Un Séjour en France.” (Amiens, May 9, 1795.) “As we had obtained a few six franc crowns and were able to get a small supply of wheat. … Mr. D—— and the servants eat bread made of three-fourths bran and one-fourth flour. … When we bake it we carefully close the doors, paying no attention to the door-bell, and allow no visitor to come in until every trace of the operation is gone. … The distribution now consists of a mixture of sprouted wheat, peas, rye, etc., which scarcely resembles bread.” (April 12.) “The distribution of bread (then) was a quarter of a pound a day. Many of those who in other respects were well-off, got nothing at all.”

[121. ]Ibid. (Letters of the municipality of Troyes, Ventose 15, year III., and Germinal 6.) Letter of the three deputies, sent by the municipality to Paris, Pluviose, year III. (no date.)

[122. ]“Un Séjour en France” (Amiens, Jan. 30, 1795.) Archives Nationales, AF., II., 74. (Deliberation of the Commune of Amiens, Thermidor 8, and Fructidor 7, year III.)

[123. ]“Souvenirs et Journal d’un Bourgeois d’Evreux,” p. 97. (The women stop carts loaded with wheat, keep them all night, stone and wound Representative Bersusès, and succeed in getting, each, eight pounds of wheat.)

[124. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 73. (Letter of the municipality of Dieppe, Prairial 22.)—AF., II., 74. (Letter of the municipality of Vervins, Messidor 7. Letter of the municipality of Lille, Fructidor 7.)

[125. ]“Correspondence de Mallet-Dupan avec la Cour de Vienne,” i., 90. Ibid., 131. One month later a quintal of flour at Lyons is worth two hundred francs and a pound of bread forty-five sous.

[126. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 13. (Letter of the deputies extraordinary of the three administrative bodies of Chartres, Thermidor 15: “In the name of this commune dying of hunger.”)—“The inhabitants of Chartres have not even been allowed to receive their rents in grain; all has been poured into the government storehouses.”

[127. ]Ibid. (Petition of the commune of La Rochelle, Fructidor 25, that of Painboeuf, Fructidor 9, that of the municipality of Nantes, Thermidor 14, that of Rouen, Fructidor 1.)—Ibid., AF., II., 72. (Letter of the commune of Bayonne, Fructidor 1.) “Penury of subsistences for more than two years. … The municipality, the past six months, is under the cruel necessity of reducing its subjects to half-a-pound of corn-bread per day … at the rate of twenty-five sous the pound, although the pound costs over five francs.” After the suppression of the maximum it loses about twenty-five thousand francs per day.

[128. ]Ibid. (Letter of Representative Porcher, Caen, Prairial 24, Messidor 3 and 26. Letter of the municipality of Caen, Messidor 3.)

[129. ]Ibid. AF., II., 71. (Letter of the municipality of Auxerre, Messidor 19.) “We have kept alive thus far through all sorts of expedients as if by miracle. It has required incalculable efforts, great expenditure, and really supernatural means to accomplish it. But there is still one month between this and the end of Thermidor. How are we going to live! Our people, the majority of whom are farmers and artisans, are rationed at half-a-pound a day for each person and this will last but ten or twelve days at most.”

[130. ]Meissner, “Voyage à Paris,” 339. “There was not a morsel of bread in our inn. I went myself to five or six bakeries and pastry shops and found them all stripped.” He finds in the last one about a dozen of small Savoy biscuits for which he pays fifteen francs.—See, for the military proceedings of the government in relation to bread, the orders of the Committee of Public Safety, most of them by the hand of Lindet, AF., II., 68–74.

[131. ]Schmidt, “Tableaux de Paris,” vols. ii. and iii., passim.

[132. ]Archives Nationales, AF., II., 68. (Orders of Ventose 20, year III.; Germinal 19 and 20; Messidor 8, etc.)

[133. ]Ibid. Orders of Nivose 5 and 22.

[134. ]Meal composed of every species of grain and bran.

[135. ]Ibid. Orders of Pluviose 19, Ventose 5, Floréal 4 and 24. (The fourteen brewers which the Republic keeps agoing for itself at Dunkirk are excepted.)—The proceedings are the same in relation to other necessary articles—returns demanded of nuts, rape-seed, and other seeds or fruits producing oil, also the hoofs of cattle and sheep, with requisitions for every other article entering into the manufacture of oil, and orders to keep oil-mills agoing. “All administrative bodies will see that the butchers remove the fat from their meat before offering it for sale, that they do not themselves make candles out of it, and that they do not sell it to soap-factories, etc.”—(Orders of Vendémiaire 28, year III.) “The executive committee will collect eight hundred yoke of oxen and distribute them among the dealers in hay in order to transport wood and coal from the woods and collieries to the yards. They will distribute proportionately eight hundred sets of wheels and harness. The wagoners will be paid and guarded the same as military convoys, and drafted as required. To feed the oxen, the district administrators will take by preemption the necessary fields and pasturages, etc.” (Orders of Pluviose 10, year III.)

[136. ]Moniteur, xxiv., 397.—Schmidt, “Tableaux de Paris.” (Reports of Frimaire 16, year IV.) “Citizens in the departments wonder how it is that Paris costs them five hundred and forty six millions per month merely for bread when they are starving. This isolation of Paris, for which all the benefits of the Revolution are exclusively reserved, has the worst effect on the public mind.”—Meissner, 345.

[137. ]Mercier, “Paris Pendant la Révolution,” i., 355–357.—Schmidt, “Pariser Zustande,” i., 224. (The Seine is frozen over on November 23 and January 23, the thermometer standing at sixteen degrees (Centigrade) below zero.)—Schmidt, “Tableaux de Paris.” (Reports of the Police, Pluviose 2, 3, and 4.)

[138. ]Schmidt, “Pariser Zustande,” i., 228, and following pages. (February 25, the distribution of bread is reduced to one and one-half pounds per person; March 17, to one and one-half pounds for workmen and one pound for others. Final reduction to one-quarter of a pound, March 31.)—Ibid., 251, for ulterior rates.—Dufort de Cheverney, (MS. Mémoires, August, 1795.) M. de Cheverney takes up his quarters at the old Louvre with his friend Sedaine. “I had assisted them with food all I could: they owned to me that, without this, they would have died of starvation notwithstanding their means.”

[139. ]Schmidt, “Tableaux de Paris.” (Reports of Germinal 15 and 27, and Messidor 28, year III., Brumaire 14 and Frimaire 23, year IV.)—Ibid. (Germinal 15, year III.) Butter is at eight francs the pound, eggs seven francs for four ounces.—Ibid. (Messidor 19), bread is at sixteen francs the pound (Messidor 28), butter at fourteen francs the pound (Brumaire 29), flour at fourteen thousand francs the bag of three hundred and twenty-five pounds.

[140. ]Ibid. (Report of Germinal 12, year III.) “The eating houses and pastry-cooks are better supplied than ever.”—“Mémoires (manuscript) of M. de Cheverney.” “My sister-in-law, with more than forty thousand livres income, registered in the ‘Grand Ledger,’ was reduced to cultivating her garden, assisted by her two chambermaids. M. de Richebourg, formerly intendant-general of the Post-Office, had to sell at one time a clock and at another time a wardrobe to live on. ‘My friends,’ he said to us one day, ‘I have been obliged to put my clock in the pot.’ ”—Schmidt. (Report of Frimaire 17, year IV.) “A frequenter of the Stock-Exchange sells a louis at five thousand francs. He dines for one thousand francs and loudly exclaims: ‘I have dined at four francs ten sous. They are really superb, these assignats! I couldn’t have dined so well formerly at twelve francs.’ ”

[141. ]Schmidt. (Reports of Frimaire 9, year IV.) “The reports depict to us the sad condition of those who, with small incomes and having sold their clothes, are selling their furniture, being, so to say, at their last piece; and, soon without anything, are reduced to the last extremity by committing suicide.”—Ibid., Frimaire 2, “The rentier is ruined, not being able to buy food. Employees are all in the same situation.”—Naturally, the condition of employees and rentiers grows worse with the depreciation of assignats. Here are house-keeping accounts at the end of 1795. (Letter of Beaumarchais’ sister Julie to his wife, December, 1794. “Beaumarchais et son temps,” by De Loménie, p. 486.) “When you gave me those four thousand francs (assignats), my dear friend, my heart went pit-a-pat. I thought that I should go crazy with such a fortune. I put them in my pocket at once and talked about other things so as to get the idea out of my mind. On returning to the house, get some wood and provisions as quick as possible before prices go higher! Dupont (the old domestic) started off and did his best. But the scales fell from my eyes on seeing the cost of food for a month—four thousand two hundred and seventy-five francs!

“When I think of this royal outlay, as you call it, which makes me spend from eighteen thousand to twenty thousand francs for nothing, I wish the devil had the system. … Ten thousand francs which I have scattered about the past fortnight, alarm and trouble me so much that I do not know how to calculate my income in this way. In three days the difference (in the value of assignats) has sent wood up from four thousand two hundred to six thousand five hundred francs, and extras in proportion, so that, as I wrote you, a load piled up and put away costs me seven thousand one hundred francs. Every week now, the pot-au-feu and other meats for ragouts, without any butter, eggs, and other details, cost from seven to eight hundred francs. Washing also goes up so fast that eight thousand francs do not suffice. All this puts me out of humor, while in all this expenditure I declare on my honor (je jure par la sainte vérité de mon coeur) that for two years I have indulged no fancy of my own or spent anything except on household expenses. Nevertheless, I have urgent need of some things for which I should require piles of assignats.”—We see by Beaumarchais’ correspondence that one of his friends travels around in the environs of Paris to find bread. “It is said here (he writes from Soizy, June 5, 1795) that flour may be had at Briare. If this were so I would bargain with a reliable man there to carry it to you by water-carriage between Briare and Paris. … In the mean time I do not despair of finding a loaf.”—Letter of a friend of Beaumarchais: “This letter costs you at least one hundred francs, including paper, pen, ink, and lamp-oil. For economy’s sake I write it in your house.”

[142. ]Cf. Schmidt, “Tableaux de Paris,” vols. ii. and iii. (Reports of the Police, at the dates designated.)

[143. ]Dauban, “Paris en 1794,” pp. 562, 568, 572.

[144. ]Mallet-Dupan, “Correspondance avec la cour de Vionne,” i., 254. (July 18, 1795.)

[145 ]Schmidt, ibid. (Report of Fructidor 3, year III.)

[146. ]Schmidt, ibid., vols. ii, and iii. (Reports of the police at the dates designated.)

[147. ]Meissner, “Voyage à Paris,” 132. Ibid., 104. “Bread is made with coarse, sticky black flour, because they put in potatoes, beans, Indian corn and millet, and moreover it is badly baked.”—Granier de Cassagnac, “Histoire du Directoire,” i., 51. (Letter of M. Andot to the author.) “There were three-quarter pound days, one-half pound, and one-quarter pound days and many at two ounces. I was a child of twelve and used to go and wait four hours in the morning in a line, rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. There was a fourth part of bran in the bread, which was very tender and very soft … and it contained one-fourth overplus of water. I brought back eight ounces of bread a day for the four persons in our household.”

[148. ]Dauban, 386.

[149. ]Schmidt, ibid. (Reports of Brumaire 24, and Frimaire 13, year IV.)

[150. ]This state of misery is prolonged far beyond this epoch in Paris and the provinces. Cf. Schmidt, “Tableaux de Paris,” vol. iii.—Felix Rocquain, “L’Etat de la France au 18e Brumaire,” p. 156. (Report by Fourcroy, Nivose 5, year IX.) Convoys of grain fail to reach Brest because the English are masters at sea, while the roads on land are impassable. “We are assured that the people of Brest have long been on half-rations and perhaps on quarter-rations.”

[151. ]It is difficult to arrive at even approximative figures, but the following statements will render the idea clear. 1. Wherever I have compared the mortality of the Revolution with that of the ancient régime I have found the former greater than the latter, even in those parts of France not devastated by the civil war; and the increase of this mortality is enormous, especially in years II. and III.—At Rheims, the average mortality from 1780 to 1789 is one thousand three hundred and fifty, which, for a population of thirty-two thousand five hundred and ninety-seven (1790), gives forty-one deaths per annum to every thousand inhabitants. In the year II., on thirty thousand seven hundred and three inhabitants there are one thousand eight hundred and fifty-six deaths, and in year III., one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six, which gives for each of the two years sixty-four deaths to every thousand persons; the increase is twenty-three deaths a year, that is to say more than one-half above the ordinary rate. (Statistics communicated by M. Jadart, archiviste at Rheims.)—At Limoges, the yearly average of mortality previous to 1789 was eight hundred and twenty-five to twenty thousand inhabitants, or at the rate of forty-one to a thousand. From January 1, 1792, to September 22, 1794, there are three thousand four hundred forty-nine deaths, that is to say, a yearly average of sixty-three deaths to one thousand inhabitants, that is to say, twenty-two extra per annum, while the mortality bears mostly on the poor, for out of two thousand and seventy-three persons who die between January 17, 1793, and September 22, 1794, over one-half, eleven hundred, die in the hospital.—(Louis Guibert, “Ancien registre des paroisses de Limoges,” pp. 40, 45, 47.)—At Poitiers, in year IX., the population is eighteen thousand two hundred and twenty-three, and the average mortality of the past ten years was seven hundred and twenty-four per annum. But in year II., there are two thousand and ninety-four deaths, and in year III. two thousand and thirty-two, largely in the hospitals; thus, even on comparing the average mortality of the ten years of the Revolution with the mortality of years II. and III., it has almost trebled the average rate.—The same applies to Loudens, where the average death-rate being one hundred and fifty-one, in year II., it rises to four hundred and twenty-five. Instead of the triple for Chatellerault, it is double, where, the average rate being two hundred and sixty-two, the death-rate rises to four hundred and eighty-two, principally in the military hospitals. (“Statistique de la Vienne,” by Cochan, préfet, year X.)—At Niort, population eleven thousand, the annual mortality of the ten years preceding 1793 averaged four hundred and twenty-three, or thirty-eight per thousand. In year II., there are one thousand eight hundred and seventy-two, or one hundred and seventy per thousand inhabitants, the number being more than quadrupled. In year III., there are eleven hundred and twenty-two deaths, or one hundred and two per thousand inhabitants, which is almost the triple. (“Statistique des Deux-Sèvres,” by Dupin, préfet, 2d memorial Thermidor, year IX.)—At Strasbourg (“Recueil des Pièces Authentiques,” etc., vol. i., p. 32. Declaration of the Municipality); “twice as many died last year (year II.) as during any of the preceding years.”—According to these figures and the details we have read, the annual mortality during years II. and III. and most of year IV., may be estimated as having increased one-half extra. Now, previous to 1789, according to Moheau and Necker (Peuchet, “Statistique élémentaire de la France,” 1805, p. 239), the yearly mortality in France was one person to every thirty, that is to say, eight hundred sixty-six thousand six hundred and sixty-six deaths to a population of twenty-six millions. One-half in addition to this for two and a half years gives, consequently, one million and eighty thousand deaths. 2. During the whole of the Directory episode, privation lasted and the rate of mortality rose very high, especially for sick children, the infirm and the aged, because the Convention had confiscated the possessions of the hospitals and public charity was almost null. For example, at Lyons, “The Asylums having been deprived of sisters of charity during years II., III., and IV., and most of year V., the children gathered into them could neither be fed nor suckled and the number that perished was frightful.” (“Statistique du Rhone,” by Vernier, préfet, year X.)—In Necker’s time, there were about eight hundred asylums, hospitals, and charitable institutions, with one hundred thousand or one hundred and ten thousand inmates. (Peuchet, ibid., 256.) For lack of care and food they die in myriads, especially foundlings, the number of which increases enormously: in 1790, the figures do not exceed twenty-three thousand; in year IX., the number surpasses sixty-two thousand (Peuchet, 260): “It is a ‘perfect deluge,’ ” say the reports; in the department of Aisne, there are one thousand and ninety-seven instead of four hundred; in that of Lot-et-Garonne, fifteen hundred (Statistiques des préfets de l’Aisne, Gers, Lot-et-Garonne), and they are born only to die; in that of Eure, after a few months, it is six out of seven; at Lyons, seven hundred and ninety-two out of eight hundred and twenty (Statistique des Préfets du Rhone et de l’Eure). At Marseilles, it is six hundred out of six hundred and eighteen; at Toulon, one hundred and one out of one hundred and four; in the average, nineteen out of twenty. (Rocquain, “Etat de France au 18e Brumaire,” p. 33. Report of François de Nantes.) At Troyes, out of one hundred and sixty-four brought in in year IV., one hundred and thirty-four die; out of one hundred and forty-seven received in year VII., one hundred and thirty-six die. (Albert Babeau, ii., 452.) At Paris, in year IV., out of three thousand one hundred and twenty-two infants received two thousand nine hundred and seven perish. (Moniteur, year V., No. 231.)—The sick perish the same. “At Toulon, only seven pounds of meat are given each day to eighty patients; I saw in the Civil Asylum,” says François de Nantes, “a woman who had just undergone a surgical operation to whom they gave for a restorative a dozen beans on a wooden platter.” (Ibid., 16, 31, and passim, especially for Bordeaux, Caen, Alençon, St. Lô, etc.)—As to beggars, these are innumerable: in year IX., it is estimated that there are three or four thousand by department, at least three hundred thousand in France. “In the four Brittany departments one can truly say that a third of the population live at the expense of the other two-thirds, either by stealing from them or through compelling assistance.” (Rocquain, preface, lxi., and “Report by Barbé-Marbois,” p. 93.)

3. In year IX., the Conseils-generaux are called upon to ascertain whether the departments have increased or diminished in population since 1789. (“Analyse des procès-verbaux des Conseils-Generaux de l’an XI.”) Out of fifty-eight which reply, thirty-seven state that the population with them has diminished; twelve, that it has increased; nine, that it remains stationary. Of the twenty-two others, thirteen attribute the maintenance or increase of population, at least for the most part, to the multiplication of early marriages in order to avoid conscription and to the large number of natural children.—Consequently, the average rate of population is kept up not through preserving life, but through the substitution of new lives for the old ones that are sacrificed. Bordeaux, nevertheless, lost one-tenth of its population, Angers one-eighth, Pau one-seventh, Chambéry one-fourth, Rennes one-third; in the departments where the war was carried on, Argenton-le-Chateau lost two-thirds of its population, Bressuire fell from three thousand to six hundred and thirty inhabitants; Lyons, after the siege, fell from a population of one hundred and forty thousand to eighty thousand. (“Analyse des procès-verbaux des Conseils-Generaux” and “Statistiques des Préfets.”)

[152. ]Lareveillère-Lepeaux, “Mémoires,” i., 248. (He belongs to the Committee and is an eye-witness.)