The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

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III.

Destructive impulses. - The object of blind rage. - Distrust of
natural leaders. - Suspicion of them changed into hatred. -
Disposition of the people in 1789.

This owing to the absence of leaders and in the absence of
organization, a mob is simply a herd. Its mistrust of its natural
leaders, of the great, of the wealthy, of persons in office and
clothed with authority, is inveterate and incurable. Vainly do these
wish it well and do it good; it has no faith in their humanity or
disinterestedness. It has been too down-trodden; it entertains
prejudices against every measure proceeding from them, even the most
liberal and the most beneficial. "At the mere mention of the new
assemblies," says a provincial commission in 1787,[17] "we heard a
workman exclaim, 'What, more new extortioners!' " Superiors of every
kind are suspected, and from suspicion to hostility the road is not
long. In 1788[18] Mercier declares that "insubordination has been
manifest for some years, especially among the trades. . . . Formerly,
on entering a printing-office the men took off their hats. Now they
content themselves with staring and leering at you; scarcely have you
crossed threshold when you yourself more lightly spoken of than if you
were one of them." The same attitude is taken by the peasants in the
environment of Paris; Madame Vigée-Lebrun,[19] on going to Romainville
to visit Marshal de Ségur, remarks: "Not only do they not remove their
hats but they regard us insolently; some of them even threatened us
with clubs." In March and April following this, her guests arrive at
her concert in consternation. "In the morning, at the promenade of
Longchamps, the populace, assembled at the barrier of l'Etoile,
insulted the people passing by in carriages in the grossest manner;
some of the wretches on the footsteps exclaiming: 'Next year you shall
be behind the carriage and we inside.' " At the close of the year
1788, the stream becomes a torrent and the torrent a cataract. An
intendant[20] writes that, in his province, the government must
decide, and in the popular sense, to separate from privileged classes,
abandon old forms and give the Third-Estate a double vote. The clergy
and the nobles are detested, and their supremacy is a yoke. "Last
July," he says, "the old States-General would have been received with
pleasure and there would have been few obstacles to its formation.
During the past five months minds have become enlightened; respective
interests have been discussed, and leagues formed. You have been kept
in ignorance of the fermentation which is at its height among all
classes of the Third-Estate, and a spark will kindle the
conflagration. If the king's decision should be favorable to the first
two orders a general insurrection will occur throughout the provinces,
600,000 men in arms and the horrors of the Jacquerie." The word is
spoken and the reality is coming. An insurrectionary multitude
rejecting its natural leaders must elect or submit to others. It is
like an army which, entering on a campaign, finding itself without
officers; the vacancies are for the boldest, most violent, those most
oppressed by the previous rule, and who, leading the advance, shouting
"forward" and thus form the leading groups. In 1789, the bands are
ready; for, below the suffering people there is yet another people
which suffers yet more, whose insurrection is permanent, and which,
repressed, persecuted, and obscure, only awaits an opportunity to come
out of its hiding-place and openly give their passions free vent.

IV.

Insurrectionary leaders and recruits. - Poachers. - Smugglers and
dealers in contraband salt. - Bandits. - Beggars and vagabonds. -
Advent of brigands. - The people of Paris.

Vagrants, recalcitrants of all kinds, fugitives of the law or the
police, beggars, cripples, foul, filthy, haggard and savage, they are
bred by the social injustice of the system, and around every one of
the social wounds these swarm like vermin. - Four hundred
captaincies protects vast quantities of game feeding on the crops
under the eyes of owners of the land, transforming these into
thousands of poachers, the more dangerous since they are armed, and
defy the most terrible laws. Already in 1752[21] are seen around Paris
"gatherings of fifty or sixty, all fully armed and acting as if on
regular foraging campaigns, with the infantry at the center and the
cavalry on the wings. . . . They live in the forests where they have
created a fortified and guarded area and paying exactly for what they
take to live on." In 1777[22], at Sens in Burgundy, the public
attorney, M. Terray, hunting on his own property with two officers,
meets a gang of poachers who fire on the game under their eyes, and
soon afterwards fire on them. Terray is wounded and one of the
officers has his coat pierced; guards arrive, but the poachers stand
firm and repel them; dragoons are sent for and the poachers kill of
these, along with three horses, and are attacked with sabers; four of
them are brought to the ground and seven are captured.-Reports of the
States-General show that every year, in each extensive forest, murders
occur, sometimes at the hands of a poacher, and again, and the most
frequently, by the shot of a gamekeeper. - It is a continuous warfare
at home; every vast domain thus harbors its rebels, provided with
powder and ball and knowing how to use them.

Other recruits for rioting are found among smugglers and in
dealers in contraband salt[23]. A tax, as soon as it becomes
exorbitant, invites fraud, and raises up a population of delinquents
against its army of clerks. The number of such defrauders may be seen
when we consider the number of custom officers: twelve hundred leagues
of interior custom districts are guarded by 50,000 men, of which
23,000 are soldiers in civilian dress[24]. "In the principal provinces
of the salt-tax and in the provinces of the five great tax leasing
administrations (fermes), for four leagues (ten miles) on either side
of the prohibited line," cultivation is abandoned; everybody is either
a customs official or a smuggler[25]. The more excessive the tax the
higher the premium offered to the violators of the law; at every place
on the boundaries of Brittany with Normandy, Maine and Anjou, four
pence per pound added to the salt-tax multiplies beyond any conception
the already enormous number of contraband dealers. "Numerous bands of
men,[26] armed with frettes, or long sticks pointed with iron, and
often with pistols or guns, attempt to force a passage. "A multitude
of women and of children, quite young, cross the brigades boundaries
or, on the other side, troops of dogs are brought there, kept closed
up for a certain time without food or drink, then loaded with salt and
now turned loose so that they, driven by hunger, immediately bring
their cargo back to their masters."-Vagabonds, outlaws, the famished,
sniff this lucrative occupation from afar and run to it like so many
packs of hounds. "The outskirts of Brittany are filled with a
population of emigrants, mostly outcast from their own districts, who,
after a year's registered stay, may enjoy the privileges of the
Bretons: their occupation is limited to collecting piles of salt to
re-sell to the contraband dealers." We might imagine them, as in a
flash of lightening, as a long line of restless nomads, nocturnal and
pursued, an entire tribe, male and female, of unsociable prowlers,
familiar with to underhand tricks, toughened by hard weather, ragged,
"nearly all infected by persistent scabies," and I find similar bodies
in the vicinity of Morlaix, Lorient, and other ports on the frontiers
of other provinces and on the frontiers of the kingdom. From 1783 to
1787, in Quercy, two allied bands of smugglers, sixty and eighty each,
defraud the revenue of 40,000 of tobacco, kill two customs officers,
and, with their guns, defend their stores in the mountains; to
suppress them soldiers are needed, which their military commander will
not furnish. In 1789,[27] a large troop of smugglers carry on
operations permanently on the frontiers of Maine and Anjou; the
military commander writes that "their chief is an intelligent and
formidable bandit, who already has under him fifty-five men, he will,
due to misery and rebellion soon have a corps;" it would, as we are
unable to take him by force, be best, if some of his men could be
turned and made to hand him over to us. These are the means resorted
to in regions where brigandage is endemic. - Here, indeed, as in
Calabria, the people are on the side of the brigands against the
gendarmes. The exploits of Mandrin in 1754,[28] may be remembered: his
company of sixty men who bring in contraband goods and ransom only the
clerks, his expedition, lasting nearly a year, across Franche-Comté,
Lyonnais, Bourbonnais, Auvergne and Burgundy, the twenty-seven towns
he enters making no resistance, delivering prisoners and making sale
of his merchandise. To overcome him a camp had to be formed at Valance
and 2,000 men sent against him; he was taken through treachery, and
still at the present day certain families are proud of their
relationship to him, declaring him a liberator. - No symptom is more
alarming: on the enemies of the law being preferred by the people to
its defenders, society disintegrates and the worms begin to work. -
Add to these the veritable brigands, assassins and robbers. "In
1782,[29] the provost's court of Montargis is engaged on the trial of
Hulin and two hundred of his accomplices who, for ten years, by means
of joint enterprises, have desolated a portion of the kingdom." -
Mercier enumerates in France "an army of more than 10,000 brigands and
vagabonds" against which the police, composed of 3,756 men, is always
on the march. "Complaints are daily made," says the provincial
assembly of Haute-Guyenne, "that there is no police in the country."
The absentee seignior pays no attention to this matter; his judges and
officials take good care not to operate gratuitously against an
insolvent criminal, the result is that "his estates become the refuge
of all the rascals of the area."[30] - Every abuse thus carries with
it a risk, both due to misplaced carelessness as well as excessive
rigor, to relaxed feudalism as well as to harsh monarchy. All the
institutions appear to work together to breed and or tolerate the
troublemakers, preparing, outside the social defenses, the men of
action who will carry it by storm.

But the total effect of all this is yet more damaging, for, out of
the vast numbers of workers it ruins it forms beggars unwilling to
work, dangerous sluggards going about begging and extorting bread from
peasants who have not too much for themselves. "The vagabonds about
the country," says Letrosne,[31] "are a terrible pest; they are like
an enemy's force which, distributed over the territory, obtains a
living as it pleases, levying veritable contributions. . . . They are
constantly roving around the country, examining the approaches to
houses, and informing themselves about their inmates and of their
habits.- Woe to those supposed to have money! . . . What numbers of
highway robberies and what burglaries! What numbers of travelers
assassinated, and houses and doors broken into! What assassinations of
curates, farmers and widows, tormented to discover money and
afterwards killed! Twenty-five years anterior (page 384/284) to the
Revolution it was not infrequent to see fifteen or twenty of these
"invade a farm-house to sleep there, intimidating the farmers and
exacting whatever they pleased." In 1764, the government takes
measures against them which indicate the magnitude of the evil[32].

"Are held to be vagabonds and vagrants, and condemned as such,
those who, for a preceding term of six months, shall have exercised no
trade or profession, and who, having no occupation or means of
subsistence, can procure no persons worthy of confidence to attest and
verify their habits and mode of life. . . . The intent of His Majesty
is not merely to arrest vagabonds traversing the country but, again,
all mendicants whatsoever who, without occupations, may be regarded as
suspected of vagabondage."

The penalty for able-bodied men is three years in the galleys; in
case of a second conviction, nine years; and for a third, imprisonment
for life. Under the age of sixteen, they are put in an institution. "A
mendicant who has made himself liable to arrest by the police," says
the circular, "is not to be released except under the most positive
assurance that he will no longer beg; this course will be followed
only in case of persons worthy of confidence and solvent guaranteeing
the mendicant, and engaging to provide him with employment or to
support him, and they shall indicate the means by which they are to
prevent him from begging." This being furnished, the special
authorization of the intendant must be obtained in addition. By virtue
of this law, 50,000 beggars are said to have been arrested at once,
and, as the ordinary hospitals and prisons were not large enough to
contain them, jails had to be constructed. Up to the end of the
ancient régime this measure is carried out with occasional
intermissions: in Languedoc, in 1768, arrests were still made of 433
in six months, and, in 1785, 205 in four months[33]. A little before
this time 300 were confined in the depot of Besançon, 500 in that of
Rennes and 650 in that of Saint Denis. It cost the king a million a
year to support them, and God knows how they were bedded and fed!
Water, straw, bread, and two ounces of salted grease, the whole at an
expense of five sous a day; and, as the price of provisions for twenty
years back had increased more than a third, the keeper who had them in
charge was obliged to make them fast or ruin himself. - With
respect to the mode of filling the depots, the police are Turks in
their treatment of the lower class; they strike into the heap, their
broom bruising as many as they sweep out. According to the ordinance
of 1778, writes an intendant,[34]

"the police must arrest not only beggars and vagabonds whom they
encounter but, again, those denounced as such or as suspected persons.
The citizen, the most irreproachable in his conduct and the least open
to suspicion of vagabondage, is not sure of not being shut up in the
depot, as his freedom depends on a policeman who is constantly liable
to be deceived by a false denunciation or corrupted by a bribe. I have
seen in the depot at Rennes several husbands arrested solely through
the denunciation of their wives, and as many women through that of
their husbands; several children by the first wife at the solicitation
of their step-mothers; many female domestics pregnant by the masters
they served, shut up at their instigation, and girls in the same
situation at the instance of their seducers; children denounced by
their fathers, and fathers denounced by their children; all without
the slightest evidence of vagabondage or mendicity. . . . No decision
of the provost's court exists restoring the incarcerated to their
liberty, notwithstanding the infinite number arrested unjustly."

Suppose that a human intendant, like this one, sets them at
liberty: there they are in the streets, without a penny, beggars
through the action of a law which proscribes mendicity and which adds
to the wretched it prosecutes the wretched it creates, still more
embittered and corrupt in body and in soul.

"It nearly always happens," says the same intendant, "that the
prisoners, arrested twenty-five or thirty leagues from the depot, are
not confined there until three or four months after their arrest, and
sometimes longer. Meanwhile, they are transferred from brigade to
brigade, in the prisons found along the road, where they remain until
the number increases sufficiently to form a convoy. Men and women are
confined in the same prison, the result of which is, the females not
pregnant on entering it are always so on their arrival at the depot.
The prisons are generally unhealthy; frequently, the majority of the
prisoners are sick on leaving it;"

and many become rascals on coming in contact with rascals.-Moral
contagion and physical contagion, the ulcer thus increasing through
the remedy, centers of repression becoming centers of corruption.

And yet with all its rigors the law does not attain its ends.

"Our towns," says the parliament of Brittany,[35] "are so filled
with beggars it seems as if the measures taken to suppress mendicity
only increase it." - "The principal highways," writes the
intendant, "are infested with dangerous vagabonds and vagrants, actual
beggars, which the police do not arrest, either through negligence or
because their interference is not provoked by special solicitations."

What would be done with them if they were arrested? They are too
many, and there is no place to put them. And, moreover, how prevent
people who live on alms from demanding alms? The effect, undoubtedly,
is lamentable but inevitable. Poverty, to a certain extent, is a slow
gangrene in which the morbid parts consume the healthy parts, the man
scarcely able to subsist being eaten up alive by the man who has
nothing to live on.

"The peasant is ruined, perishing, the victim of oppression by the
multitude of the poor that lay waste the country and take refuge in
the towns. Hence the mobs so prejudicial to public safety, that crowd
of smugglers and vagrants, that large body of men who have become
robbers and assassins, solely because they lack bread. This gives but
a faint idea of the disorders I have seen with my own eyes[36]. The
poverty of the rural districts, excessive in itself, becomes yet more
so through the disturbances it engenders; we have not to seek
elsewhere for frightful sources of mendicity and for all the
vices."[37]

Of what avail are palliatives or violent proceedings against an
evil which is in the blood, and which belongs to the very constitution
of the social organism? What police force could effect anything in a
parish in which one-quarter or one-third of its inhabitants have
nothing to eat but that which they beg from door to door? At
Argentré,[38] in Brittany, "a town without trade or industry, out of
2,300 inhabitants, more than one-half are anything else but well-off,
and over 500 are reduced to beggary." At Dainville, in Artois, "out of
130 houses sixty are on the poor-list."[39] In Normandy, according to
statements made by the curates, "of 900 parishioners in Saint-Malo,
three-quarters can barely live and the rest are in poverty." "Of 1,500
inhabitants in Saint-Patrice, 400 live on alms." Of 500 inhabitants in
Saint-Laurent three-quarters live on alms." At Marboef, says a report,
"of 500 persons inhabiting our parish, 100 are reduced to mendicity,
and besides these, thirty or forty a day come to us from neighboring
parishes."[40] At Bolbone in Languedoc[41] daily at the convent gate
is "general almsgiving to 300 or 400 poor people, independent of that
for the aged and the sick, which is more numerously attended." At
Lyons, in 1787, "30,000 workmen depend on public charity for
subsistence;" at Rennes, in 1788, after an inundation, "two-thirds of
the inhabitants are in a state of destitution;"[42] at Paris, out of
650,000 inhabitants, the census of 1791 counts 118,784 as
indigent.[43] - Let frost or hail come, as in 1788, let a crop fail,
let bread cost four sous a pound, and let a workman in the charity-
workshops earn only twelve sous a day,[44] can one imagine that
people will resign themselves to death by starvation? Around Rouen,
during the winter of 1788, the forests are pillaged in open day, the
woods at Baguères are wholly cut away, the fallen trees are publicly
sold by the marauders[45]. Both the famished and the marauders go
together, necessity making itself the accomplice of crime. From
province to province we can follow up their tracks: four months later,
in the vicinity of Etampes, fifteen brigands break into four
farmhouses during the night, while the farmers, threatened by
incendiaries, are obliged to give, one three hundred francs, another
five hundred, all the money, probably, they have in their coffers[46].
"Robbers, convicts, the worthless of every species," are to form the
advance guard of insurrections and lead the peasantry to the extreme
of violence[47]. After the sack of the Reveillon house in Paris it is
remarked that "of the forty ringleaders arrested, there was scarcely
one who was not an old offender, and either flogged or branded."[48]
In every revolution the dregs of society come to the surface. Never
had these been visible before; like badgers in the woods, or rats in
the sewers, they had remained in their burrows or in their holes. They
issue from these in swarms, and suddenly, in Paris, what figures![49]
"Never had any like them been seen in daylight. . . Where do they come
from? Who has brought them out of their obscure hiding places? . . .
strangers from everywhere, armed with clubs, ragged, . . . some almost
naked, others oddly dressed" in incongruous patches and "frightful to
look at," constitute the riotous chiefs or their subordinates, at six
francs per head, behind which the people are to march.

"At Paris," says Mercier,[50] "the people are weak, pallid,
diminutive, stunted," maltreated, "and, apparently, a class apart from
other classes in the country. The rich and the great who possess
equipages, enjoy the privilege of crushing them or of mutilating them
in the streets. . . There is no convenience for pedestrians, no side-
walks. Hundred victims die annually under the carriage wheels." "I
saw," says Arthur Young, "a poor child run over and probably killed,
and have been myself several times been covered from head to toe with
the water from the gutter. Should young (English) noblemen drive along
London streets without sidewalks, in the same manner as their equals
in Paris, they would speedily and justly get very well thrashed and
rolled in the gutter."

Mercier grows uneasy in the face of the immense populace:

"In Paris there are, probably, 200,000 persons with no property
intrinsically worth fifty crowns, and yet the city subsists!"

Order, consequently, is maintained only through fear and by force,
owing to the soldiery of the watch who are called tristes-à-patte by
the crowd. "This nick name enrages this species of militia, who then
deal heavier blows around them, wounding indiscriminately all they
encounter. The low class is always ready to make war on them because
it has never been fairly treated by them." In fact, "a squad of the
guard often scatters, with no trouble, crowds of five or six hundred
men, at first greatly excited, but melting away in the twinkling of an
eye, after the soldiery have distributed a few blows and handcuffed
two or three of the ringleaders." - Nevertheless, "were the people
of Paris abandoned to their true inclinations, did they not feel the
horse and foot guards behind them, the commissary and policeman, there
would be no limits to their disorder. The populace, delivered from its
customary restraint, would give itself up to violence of so cruel a
stamp as not to know when to stop. . . As long as white bread
lasts,[51] the commotion will not prove general; the flour market[52]
must interest itself in the matter, if the women are to remain
tranquil. . . Should white bread be wanting for two market days in
succession, the uprising would be universal, and it is impossible to
foresee the lengths this multitude at bay will go to in order to
escape famine, they and their children." -In 1789 white bread proves
to be wanting throughout France.

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Notes:

[1] Théron de Montaugé, 102, 113. In the Toulousain ten parishes
out of fifty have schools. - In Gascony, says the ass. prov. of Auch
(p. 24), "most of the rural districts are without schoolmasters or
parsonages." - In 1778, the post between Paris and Toulouse runs only
three times a week; that of Toulouse by way of Alby, Rodez, etc.,
twice a week; for Beaumont, Saint-Girons, etc., once a week. "In the
country," says Théron de Montaugé, "one may be said to live in
solitude and exile." In 1789 the Paris post reaches Besançon three
times a week. (Arthur Young, I. 257).

[2] One of the Marquis de Mirabeau's expressions.

[3] Archives nationales, G. 300, letter of an excise director at
Coulommiers, Aug. 13, 1781.

[4] D'Argenson, VI. 425 (June 16, 1751).

[5] De Montlosier, I. 102, 146.

[6] Théron de Montaugé, 102.

[7] Monsieur Nicolas, I. 448.

[8] "Tableaux de la Révolution," by Schmidt, II. 7 (report by the
agent Perriere who lived in Auvergne.)

[9] Gouverneur Morris, II. 69, April 29, 1789.

[10] Mercier, "Tableau de Paris," XII. 83.

[11] De Vaublanc, 209.

[12] Mandrin, (Louis) (Saint Étienne-de- Saint-Geoirs, Isère, 1724
- Valence, 1755). French smuggler who, after 1750, was active over an
enormous territory with the support of the population; hunted down by
the army, caught, condemned to death to be broken alive on the wheel.
(SR.)