The Ancient Regime Part 39

"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,[5335] "are so filled with beggars it seems as if the measures taken to suppress mendicity only increase it."--"The princ.i.p.al 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, peris.h.i.+ng, the victim of oppression by the mult.i.tude 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 a.s.sa.s.sins, solely because they lack bread. This gives but a faint idea of the disorders I have seen with my own eyes[5336]. 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."[5337]

Of what avail are palliatives or violent proceedings against an evil which is in the blood, and which belongs to the very const.i.tution 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 Argentre,[5338] 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."[5339] In Normandy, according to statements made by the curates, "of 900 paris.h.i.+oners 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."[5340]

At Bolbone in Languedoc[5341] 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 dest.i.tution;"[5342] at Paris, out of 650,000 inhabitants, the census of 1791 counts 118,784 as indigent.[5343]--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,[5344] 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 Bagueres are wholly cut away, the fallen trees are publicly sold by the marauders[5345]. 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[5346].

"Robbers, convicts, the worthless of every species," are to form the advance guard of insurrections and lead the peasantry to the extreme of violence[5347]. 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."[5348] 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![5349] "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,"

const.i.tute the riotous chiefs or their subordinates, at six francs per head, behind which the people are to march.

"At Paris," says Mercier,[5350] "the people are weak, pallid, diminutive, stunted," maltreated, "and, apparently, a cla.s.s apart from other cla.s.ses in the country. The rich and the great who possess equipages, enjoy the privilege of crus.h.i.+ng 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) n.o.blemen 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-a-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 cla.s.s 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,[5351] the commotion will not prove general; the flour market[5352] 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 mult.i.tude at bay will go to in order to escape famine, they and their children."--In 1789 white bread proves to be wanting throughout France.

NOTES:

[Footnote 5301: Theron de Montauge, 102, 113. In the Toulousain ten parishes out of fifty have schools.--In Gascony, says the a.s.s. 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 Theron de Montauge, "one may be said to live in solitude and exile." In 1789 the Paris post reaches Besancon three times a week.

(Arthur Young, I. 257).]

[Footnote 5302: One of the Marquis de Mirabeau's expressions.]

[Footnote 5303: Archives nationales, G. 300, letter of an excise director at Coulommiers, Aug. 13, 1781.]

[Footnote 5304: D'Argenson, VI. 425 (June 16, 1751).]

[Footnote 5305: De Montlosier, I. 102, 146.]

[Footnote 5306: Theron de Montauge, 102.]

[Footnote 5307: Monsieur Nicolas, I. 448.]

[Footnote 5308: "Tableaux de la Revolution," by Schmidt, II. 7 (report by the agent Perriere who lived in Auvergne.)]

[Footnote 5309: Gouverneur Morris, II. 69, April 29, 1789.]

[Footnote 5310: Mercier, "Tableau de Paris," XII. 83.]

[Footnote 5311: De Vaublanc, 209.]

[Footnote 5312: Mandrin, (Louis) (Saint etienne-de--Saint-Geoirs, Isere, 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.)]

[Footnote 5313: Arthur Young, I. 283 (Aug. 13, 1789); I. 289 (Aug. 19, 1789).]

[Footnote 5314: Archives nationales, H, 274. Letters respectively of M. de Caraman (March 18 and April 12, 1789); M. d'Eymar de Montmegran (April 2); M. de la Tour (March 30). "The sovereign's greatest benefit is interpreted in the strangest manner by an ignorant populace."]

[Footnote 5315: Doniol, "Hist. Des cla.s.ses rurales," 495. (Letter of Aug. 3, 1789, to M. de Clermont-Tonnerre).]

[Footnote 5316: Archives nationales, H. 1453. (Letter of Aug. 3, 1789, to M. de Clermont-Tonnere).]

[Footnote 5317: "Proces-verbaux de l'a.s.s. Prov. D'Orleanais," p. 296.

"Distrusts still prevails throughout the rural districts. . . Your first orders for departmental a.s.semblies only awakened suspicion in certain quarters."]

[Footnote 5318: "Tableau de Paris," XII. 186.]

[Footnote 5319: Mme. Vigee-Lebrun, I. 158, (1788); I. 183 (1789).]

[Footnote 5320: Archives nationals, H. 723. (Letter of M. de Caumartin, intendant at Besancon, Dec. 5, 1788).]

[Footnote 5321: D'Argenson, March 13, 1752.]

[Footnote 5322: "Corresp.," of Metra, V, 179 (November 22, 1777).]

[Footnote 5323: Beugnot, I. 142. "No inhabitant of the barony of Choiseul mingled with any of the bands composed of the patriots of Montigny, smugglers and outcasts of the neighborhood."--See, on the poachers of the day, "Les deux amis de Bourbonne," by Diderot.]

[Footnote 5324: De Calonne, "Memoires presentes a l'a.s.s. des notables,"

No. 8.--Necker, "De l'Administration des Finances," I. 195.]

[Footnote 5325: Letrosne, "De l'Administration des Finances," 59.]

[Footnote 5326: Archives nationales, H. 426. (Memoires of the farmers-general, Jan. 13, 1781, Sept. 15, 1782). H, 614. (Letter of M.

de Coetlosquet, April 25, 1777). H, 1431. Report by the farmers-general, March 9, 1787.]

[Footnote 5327: Archives nationales, H, 1453. Letter of the Baron de Bezenval, June 19, 1789.]

[Footnote 5328: "Mandrin," by Paul Simian, pa.s.sim.--"Histoire de Beaume," by Rossignol, p. 453.--"Mandrin," by Ch. Jarrin (1875). Major Fisher, who attacks and disperses the gang, writes that the affair is urgent since, "higher to the North near Forez, one can find two or three hundred vagrants who only wait for a chance to unite with them."

(p.47.)]

[Footnote 5329: Mercier, XI. 116.]