II.—The Assembly hostile to the oppressed and favoring oppressors.
Decrees against the nobles and clergy.—Amnesty for
deserters, convicts, and bandits.—Anarchical and leveling
maxims.
In vain do the honest men of the Assembly protest against this scandal and this overthrow. The Assembly, guided and forced by the Jacobins, will only amend the law to damn the oppressed and to authorize their oppressors.—Without making any distinction between armed assemblages at Coblentz, which it had a right to punish, and refugees, three times as numerous, old men, women and children, so many indifferent and inoffensive people, not merely nobles but plebeians,[2312] who left the soil only to escape popular outrages, it confiscates the property of all emigrants and orders this to be sold.[2313] Through the new restriction of the passport, those who remain are tied to their domiciles, their freedom of movement, even in the interior, being subject to the decision of each Jacobin municipality.[2314] It completes their ruin by depriving them without indemnity of all income from their real estate, of all the seignorial rights which the Constituent Assembly had declared to be legitimate.[2315] It abolishes, as far as it can, their history and their past, by burning in the public depots their genealogical titles.[2316]—To all unsworn ecclesiastics, two-thirds of the French clergy, it withholds bread, the small pension allowed them for food, which is the ransom of their confiscated possessions;[2317] it declares them "suspected of revolt against the law and of bad intentions against the country;" it subjects them to special surveillance; it authorizes their expulsion without trial by local rulers in case of disturbances; it decrees that in such cases they shall be banished.[2318] It suppresses "all secular congregations of men and women ecclesiastic or laic, even those wholly devoted to hospital service will take away from 600,000 children the means of learning to read and write."[2319] It lays injunctions on their dress; it places episcopal palaces in the market for sale, also the buildings still occupied by monks and nuns.[2320] It welcomes with rounds of applause a married priest who introduces his wife to the Assembly.—Not only is the Assembly destructive but it is insulting; the authors of each decree passed by it add to its thunderbolt the rattling hail of their own abuse and slander.
"Children," says a deputy, "have the poison of aristocracy and fanaticism injected into them by the congregations."[2321]
"Purge the rural districts of the vermin which is devouring them!"—"Everybody knows," says Isnard, "that the priest is as cowardly as he is vindictive... Let these pestiferous fellows be sent back to Roman and Italian lazarettos.. What religion is that which, in its nature, is unsocial and rebellious in principle?"
Whether unsworn, whether immigrants actually or in feeling, "large proprietors, rich merchants, false conservatives,"[2322] are all outspoken conspirators or concealed enemies. All public disasters are imputed to them. "The cause of the troubles," says Brissot,[2323] "which lay waste the colonies, is the infernal vanity of the whites who have three times violated an engagement which they have three times sworn to maintain." Scarcity of work and short crops are accounted for through their cunning malevolence.
"A large number of rich men, "says François de Nantes,[2324] "allow their property to run down and their fields to lie fallow, so as to enjoy seeing the suffering of the people."
France is divided into two parties, on the one hand, the aristocracy to which is attributed every vice, and, on the other hand, the people on whom is conferred every virtue.[2325]
"The defense of liberty," says Lamarque,[2326] "is basely abandoned every day by the rich and by the former nobility, who put on the mask of patriotism only to cheat us. It is not in this class, but only in that of citizens who are disdainfully called the people, that we find pure beings, those ardent souls really worthy of liberty."—One step more and everything will be permitted to the virtuous against the wicked; if misfortune befalls the aristocrats so much the worse for them. Those officers who are stoned, M. de la Jaille and others, "wouldn't they do better not to deserve being sacrificed to popular fury?"[2327] Isnard exclaims in the tribune, "it is the long-continued immunity enjoyed by criminals which has rendered the people executioners. Yes, an angry people, like an angry God, is only too often the terrible supplement of silent laws."[2328]—In other words crimes are justified and assassinations still provoked against those who have been assassinated for the past two years.
By a forced conclusion, if the victims are criminals, their executioners are honest, and the Assembly, which rigorously proceeds against the former, reserves all its indulgence for the latter. It reinstates the numerous deserters who abandoned their flags previous to the 1st of January, 1789;[2329] it allows them three sous per league mileage, and brings them back to their homes or to their regiments to become, along with their brethren whose desertion is more recent, either leaders or recruits for the mob. It releases from the galleys the forty Swiss guards of Chateauroux whom their own cantons desired to have kept there; it permits these "martyrs to Liberty" to promenade the streets of Paris in a triumphal car;[2330] it admits them to the bar of the house, and, taking a formal vote on it, extends to them the honors of the session.[2331] Finally, as if it were their special business to let loose on the public the most ferocious and foulest of the rabble, it amnesties Jourdan, Mainvielle, Duprat, and Raphel, fugitive convicts, jail-birds, the condottieri of all lands assuming the title of "the brave brigands of Avignon," and who, for eighteen months, have pillaged and plundered the Comtat[2332]; it stops the trial, almost over, of the Glacière butchers; it tolerates the return of these as victors,[2333] and their installation by their own act in the places of the fugitive magistrates, allowing Avignon to be treated as a conquered city, and, henceforth, to become their prey and their booty. This is a willful restoration of the vermin to the social body, and, in this feverish body, nothing is overlooked that will increase the fever. The most anarchical and deleterious maxims emanate, like miasma, from the Assembly benches. The reduction of things to an absolute level is adopted as a principle; "equality of rights," says Lamarque,[2334] "is to be maintained only by tending steadily to an equality of fortunes;" this theory is practically applied on all sides since the proletariat is pillaging all who own property.—"Let the communal possessions be partitioned among the citizens of the surrounding villages," says François de Nantes, "in an inverse ratio to their fortunes, and let him who has the least inheritance take the largest share in the divisions."[2335] Conceive the effect of this motion read at evening to peasants who are at this very moment claiming their lord's forest for their commune. M. Corneille prohibits any tax to be levied for the public treasury on the wages of manual labor, because nature, and not society, gives us the "right to live."[2336] On the other hand, he confers on the public treasury the right of taking the whole of an income, because it is society, and not nature, which institutes public funds; hence, according to him, the poor majority must be relieved of all taxation, and all taxes must fall on the rich minority. The system is well-timed and the argument apt for convincing indigent or straitened tax-payers, namely, the refractory majority, that its taxes are just, and that it should not refuse to be taxed.—
"Under the reign of liberty," says President Daverhoult,[2337] "the people have the right to insist not merely on subsistence, but again on plenty and happiness."[2338]
Accordingly, being in a state of poverty they have been betrayed.—"Elevated to the height achieved by the French people," says another president, "it looks down upon the tempests under its feet."[2339] The tempest is at hand and bursts over its head. War, like a black cloud, rises above the horizon, overspreads the sky, thunders and wraps France filled with explosive materials in a circle of lightening, and it is the Assembly which, through the greatest of its mistakes, draws down the bolt on the nation's head.