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

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СКАЧАТЬ may do, more good than harm is done, for through it the body stands erect, marches on and guides its steps. Without it there is no organized deliberate action, serviceable to the whole body. In it alone do we find the comprehensive views, knowledge of the members of which it consists and of their aims, an idea of outward relationships, full and accurate information, in short, the superior intelligence which conceives what is best for the common interests, and adapts means to ends. If it falters and is no longer obeyed, if it is forced and pushed from without by a violent pressure, it ceases to control public affairs, and the social organization retrogrades by many steps. Through the dissolution of society, and the isolation of individuals, each man returns to his original feeble state, while power is vested in passing aggregates that like whirlwinds spring up from the human dust.—One may divine how this power, which the most competent find it difficult to apply properly, is exercised by bands of men springing out of nowhere. It is a matter of supplies, of their possessions, price and distribution. It is a matter of taxes, its proportion, apportionment and collection; of private property, its varieties, rights, and limitations It is a problem of public authority, its allocation and its limits; of all those delicate cogwheels which, working into each other, constitute the great economic, social, and political machine. Each band in its own canton lays its rude hands on the wheels within its reach. They wrench or break them haphazardly, under the impulse of the moment, heedless and indifferent to consequences, even when the reaction of to-morrow crushes them in the ruin that they cause to day. Thus do unchained Negroes, each pulling and hauling his own way, undertake to manage a ship of which they have just obtained mastery.—In such a state of things white men are hardly worth more than black ones. For, not only is the band, whose aim is violence, composed of those who are most destitute, most wildly enthusiastic, and most inclined to destructiveness and to license. But also, as this band tumultuously carries out its violent action, each individual the most brutal, the most irrational, and most corrupt, descends lower than himself, even to the darkness, the madness, and the savagery of the dregs of society. In fact, a man who in the interchange of blows, would resist the excitement of murder, and not use his strength like a savage, must be familiar with arms. He must be accustomed to danger, be cool-blooded, alive to the sentiment of honor, and above all, sensitive to that stern military code which, to the imagination of the soldier, ever holds out to him the provost's gibbet to which he is sure to rise, should he strike one blow too many. Should all these restraints, inward as well as outward, be wanting, the man plunges into insurrection. He is a novice in the acts of violence, which he carries out. He has no fear of the law, because he abolishes it. The action begun carries him further than he intended to go. Peril and resistance exasperate his anger. He catches the fever from contact with those who are fevered, and follows robbers who have become his comrades.1301 Add to this the clamors, the drunkenness, the spectacle of destruction, the nervous tremor of the body strained beyond its powers of endurance, and we can comprehend how, from the peasant, the laborer, and the bourgeois, pacified and tamed by an old civilization, we see all of a sudden spring forth the barbarian. Or still worse, the primitive animal, the grinning, sanguinary, wanton baboon, who giggles while he slays, and gambols over the ruin he has accomplished. Such is the actual government to which France is given up, and after eighteen months' experience, the best qualified, most judicious and profoundest observer of the Revolution will find nothing to compare it to but the invasion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century.1302 "The Huns, the Heruli, the Vandals, and the Goths will come neither from the north nor from the Black Sea; they are in our very midst."

II.—The provinces

       Table of Contents

      Destruction of old Authorities.—Inadequacy of new

       Authorities

When in a building the principal beam gives way, cracks follow and multiply, and the secondary joists fall in one by one for lack of the prop, which supported them. In a similar manner the authority of the King being broken, all the powers, which he delegated, fall to the ground.1303 Intendants, parliaments, military commands, grand provosts, administrative, judicial, and police functionaries in every province, and of every branch of the service, who maintain order and protect property, taught by the murder of M. de Launey, the imprisonment of M. de Besenval, the flight of Marshal de Broglie, the assassinations of Foullon and Bertier, know what it costs should they try to perform their duties. Should it be forgotten local insurrections intervene, and keep them in mind of it.

The officer in command in Burgundy is a prisoner at Dijon, with a guard at his door; and he is not allowed to speak with any one without permission, and without the presence of witnesses.1304 The Commandant of Caen is besieged in the old palace and capitulates. The Commandant of Bordeaux surrenders Château-Trompette with its guns and equipment. The Commandant at Metz, who remains firm, suffers the insults and the orders of the populace. The Commandant of Brittany wanders about his province "like a vagabond," while at Rennes his people, furniture, and plate are kept as pledges. As soon as he sets foot in Normandy he is surrounded, and a sentinel is placed at his door.—The Intendant of Besançon takes to flight; that of Rouen sees his dwelling sacked from top to bottom, and escapes amid the shouts of a mob demanding his head.—At Rennes, the Dean of the Parliament is arrested, maltreated, kept in his room with a guard over him, and then, although ill, sent out of the town under an escort.—At Strasbourg "thirty-six houses of magistrates are marked for pillage."1305—At Besançon, the President of the Parliament is constrained to let out of prison the insurgents arrested in a late out-break, and to publicly burn the whole of the papers belonging to the prosecution.—In Alsace, since the beginning of the troubles, the provosts were obliged to fly, the bailiffs and manorial judges hid themselves, the forest-inspectors ran away, and the houses of the guards were demolished. One man, sixty years of age, is outrageously beaten and marched about the village, the people, meanwhile, pulling out his hair; nothing remains of his dwelling but the walls and a portion of the roof. All his furniture and effects are broken up, burnt or stolen. He is forced to sign, along with his wife, an act by which he binds himself to refund all penalties inflicted by him, and to abandon all claims for damages for the injuries to which he has just been subjected.—In Franche-Comté the authorities dare not condemn delinquents, and the police do not arrest them; the military commandant writes that "crimes of every kind are on the increase, and that he has no means of punishing them." Insubordination is permanent in all the provinces; one of the provincial commissions states with sadness:

"When all powers are in confusion and annihilated, when public force no longer exists, when all ties are sundered, when every individual considers himself relieved from all kinds of obligation, when public authority no longer dares make itself felt, and it is a crime to have been clothed with it, what can be expected of our efforts to restore order?"1306

      All that remains of this great demolished State is forty thousand groups of people, each separated and isolated, in towns and small market villages where municipal bodies, elected committees, and improvised National Guards strive to prevent the worst excesses.—But these local chiefs are novices; they are human, and they are timid. Chosen by acclamation they believe in popular rights; in the midst of riots they feel themselves in danger. Hence, they generally obey the crowd.

      "Rarely," says one of the provincial commissions reports, "do the municipal authorities issue a summons; they allow the greatest excesses rather than enter upon prosecutions for which, sooner or later, they may be held responsible by their fellow-citizens. … Municipal bodies have no longer the power to resist anything."

Especially in the rural districts the mayor or syndic, who is a farmer, makes it his first aim to make no enemies, and would resign his place if СКАЧАТЬ