VII. Principle of socialist Equality.
All superiorities of rank are illegitimate.—Bearing of this
principle.—Incivique benefits and enjoyments.—How
revolutionary laws reach the lower class.—Whole populations
affected in a mass.—proportion of the lowly in the
proscription lists. How the revolutionary laws specially
affect those who are prominent among the people.
Not that the ravages which they make stop there! The principle extended far beyond that. The fundamental rule, according to Jacobin maxims, is that every public or private advantage which any citizen enjoys and which is not enjoyed by another citizen, is illegitimate.—On Ventôse 19, year II., Henriot, general in command, having surrounded the Palais Royal and made a sweep of "suspects," renders an account of his expedition as follows:[4187] "One hundred and thirty muscadins have been arrested.... These gentlemen are transferred to the Petits-Pêres. Being well-fed and plump, they cannot be sans-culottes." Henriot was right, for, to live well is incivique. Whoever lays in stores of provisions is criminal, even if he has gone a good ways for them, even if he has not overpaid the butcher of his quarter, even if he has not diminished by an ounce of meat the ration of his neighbor; when he is found out, he is punished and his hoard confiscated. "A citizen[4188] had a little pig brought to him from a place six leagues from Paris, and killed it at once. Three hours afterwards, the pig was seized by commissioners and distributed among the people, without the owner getting a bit of it;" moreover, the said owner "was imprisoned."—He is a monopolist! To Jacobin people, to empty stomachs, there is no greater crime; this misdeed, to their imaginations, explains the arrest of Hébert, their favorite: "It is said at the Halle (the covered Paris market)[4189] that he has monopolized a brother of the order of Saint-Antoine[4190] as well as a pot of twenty-five pounds of Brittany butter," which is enough; they immediately and "unanimously consign Père Duchesne to the guillotine." (Note that the Père Duchesne, founded by Hébert, was the most radical and revolutionary journal. (SR.)—Of all privileges, accordingly, that of having a supply of food is the most offensive; "it is now necessary for one who has two dishes to give one of them to him who has none;"[4191] every man who manages to eat more than another is a robber; for, in the first place, he robs the community, the sole legitimate owner of aliments, and next, he robs, and personally, all who have less to eat than he has.
The same rule applies to other things of which the possession is either agreeable or useful: in an equalizing social system, that now established, every article of food possessed by one individual to the exclusion of others, is a dish abstracted from the common table and held by him to another's detriment. On the strength of this, the theorists who govern agree with the reigning ragamuffins. Whoever has two good coats is an aristocrat, for there are many who have only one poor one.[4192] Whoever has good shoes is an aristocrat, for many wear wooden ones, and others go barefoot. Whoever owns and rents lodgings is an aristocrat, for others, his tenants, instead of receiving money, pay it out. The tenant who furnishes his own rooms is an aristocrat, for many lodge in boarding-houses and others sleep in the open air. Whoever possesses capital is an aristocrat, even the smallest amount in money or in kind, a field, a roof over his head, half-a-dozen silver spoons given to him by his parents on his wedding-day, an old woollen stocking into which twenty or thirty crowns have been dropped one by one, all one's savings, whatever has been laid by or economized, a petty assortment of eatables or merchandise, one's crop for the year and stock of groceries, especially if, disliking to give them up and letting his dissatisfaction be seen, he, through revolutionary taxation and requisitions, through the maximum and the confiscation of the precious metals, is constrained to surrender his small savings gratis, or at half their value.—Fundamentally, it is only those who have nothing of their own that are held to be patriots, those who live from day to day,[4193] "the wretched," the poor, vagabonds, and the famished; the humblest laborer, the least instructed, the most ill at his ease, is treated as criminal, as an enemy, as soon as he is suspected of having some resources; in vain does he show his scarified or callous hands; he escapes neither spoliation, the prison, nor the guillotine. At Troyes, a poor shop-girl who had set up a small business on borrowed money, but who is ruined by a bankruptcy and completely so by the maximum, infirm, and consuming piecemeal the rest of her stock, is taxed five hundred livres.[4194] In the villages of Alsace, an order is issued to arrest the five, six or seven richest persons in the commune, even if there are no rich; consequently, they seize the least poor, simply because they are so; for instance, at Heiligenberg, six "farmers" one of whom is a day-laborer, "or journey-man," "suspect," says the register of the jail, "because he is comfortably off."[4195] On this account nowhere are there so many "suspects" as among the people; the shop, the farm and the work-room harbor more aristocrats than the rectory and the chateau. In effect, according to the Jacobins,[4196] "nearly all farmers are aristocrats;" "the merchants are all essentially anti-revolutionary,"[4197] and especially all dealers in articles of prime necessity, wine-merchants, bakers and butchers; the latter especially are open "conspirators," enemies "of the interior," and "whose aristocracy is insupportable." Such, already, among the lower class of people, are the many delinquents who are punished.
But there are still more of them to punish, for, besides the crime of not being destitute, of possessing some property, of withholding articles necessary for existence, there is the crime of aristocracy, necessarily so called, namely, repugnance to, lack of zeal, or even indifference for the established régime, regret for the old one, relationship or intercourse with a condemned or imprisoned émigré of the upper class, services rendered to some outlaw, the resort to some priest; now, numbers of poor farmers, mechanics, domestics and women servants, have committed this crime;[4198] and in many provinces and in many of the large cities nearly the whole of the laboring population commits it and persists in it; such is the case, according to Jacobin reports, in Alsace, Franche-Comté, Provence, Vaucluse, Anjou, Poitou, Vendée, Brittany, Picardie and Flanders, and in Marseilles, Bordeaux and Lyons. In Lyons alone, writes Collot d'Herbois, "there are sixty thousand persons who never will become republicans. They should be dealt with, that is made redundant, and prudently distributed all over the surface of the Republic."[4199]—Finally, add to the persons of the lower class, prosecuted on public grounds, those who are prosecuted on private grounds. Among peasants in the same village, workmen of the same trade and shopkeepers in the same quarter, there is always envy, enmities and spites; those who are Jacobins become local pashas and are able to gratify local jealousies with impunity, something they never fail to do.[41100]
Hence, on the lists of the guillotined, the incarcerated and of emigrés, the men and women of inferior condition are in much greater number, far greater than their companions of the superior and middle classes all put together. Out of 12,000 condemned to death whose rank and professions have been ascertained, 7,545[41101] are peasants, cultivators, ploughmen, workmen of various sorts, innkeepers, wine-dealers, soldiers and sailors, domestics, women, young girls, servants and seamstresses. Out of 1,900 emigrés from Doubs, nearly 1,100 belong to the lower class. Towards the month of April, 1794, all the prisons in France overflow with farmers;[41102] in the Paris prisons alone, two months before Thermidor 9, there are 2 000 of them.[41103] Without mentioning the eleven western departments in which four or five hundred square leagues of territory are devastated and twenty towns and one thousand eight hundred villages destroyed,[41104] where the avowed purpose of the Jacobin policy is a systematic and total destruction of the country, man and beast, buildings, crops, and even trees, there are cantons and even provinces where the entire rural and working population is arrested or put to flight. In the Pyrenees, the old Basque populations "torn from their natal soil, crowded into the churches with no means of subsistence but that of charity," in the middle of winter, so that sixteen hundred of those incarcerated die "mostly of cold and hunger;"[41105] at Bédouin, a town of two thousand souls, in which a tree of liberty is cut down by some unknown persons, four hundred and thirty-three houses are demolished or burned, sixteen persons guillotined and forty-seven shot, while the rest of the inhabitants are driven out, reduced to living like vagabonds on the mountain, or in holes which they dig in the ground;[41106] in Alsace, fifty thousand farmers who, in the winter of 1793, take refuge with their wives and children on the other side of the Rhine.[41107] In short, the revolutionary operation is a complete prostration of people of all classes, the trunks as well as the saplings being felled, and often in such a way as to clear the ground entirely.
But in this ruthless felling, however, the notables of the people, making all due allowances, suffer more than the ordinary people. It is obvious that the Jacobin wood-chopper persecutes, insistently and selectively, the veterans of labor and savings, the large cultivators who from father to son and for many generations have possessed the same farm, the master-craftsmen whose shops are well stocked and who have good customers, the respectable, well-patronized retailers, who owe nothing; the village-syndics and trades-syndics, all those showing more deeply and visibly than the rest of their class, the five or six blazes which summon the ax. They are better off, better provided with desirable comforts and conveniences, which is of itself an offense against equality. Having accumulated a small hoard, a few pieces of plate, sometimes a few crowns,[41108] a store of linen and clothes, a stock of provisions or goods, they do not willingly submit to being plundered, which is the offense of egoism. Being egoists, it is presumed that they are hostile to the system of fraternity, at least indifferent to it, as well as lukewarm towards the Republic, that is to say, Moderates, which is the worst offense of all.[41109] Being the foremost of their class, they are haughty like the nobles or the bourgeois and regard themselves as superior to a poor man, to a vagabond, to a genuine sans-culotte, the fourth and most inexcusable of all offenses. Moreover, from the fact of their superior condition, they have contracted familiarities and formed connections with the proscribed class; the farmer, the intendant, the overseer is often attached to his noble proprietor or patron;[41110] many of the farmers, shopkeepers and craftsmen belonging to old families are considered as affiliated with the bourgeoisie or the clergy,[41111] through a son or brother who has risen a degree in trade, or by some industrial pursuit, or who, having completed his studies, has become a curé or lawyer, or else through some daughter, or well-married sister, or through one who has become a nun: now, this relation, ally, friend or comrade of a "suspect "is himself a "suspect,"—the last anti-revolutionary and decisive barrier. Sober and well-behaved persons, having prospered or maintained themselves under the ancient régime, must naturally cherish respect for former institutions; they must involuntarily retain a deep feeling of veneration for the King, and especially for religion; they are devout Catholics, and therefore are chagrined to see the churches shut up, worship prohibited and ecclesiastics persecuted, and would again be glad to go to Mass, honor Easter, and have an orthodox curé who could administer to them available sacraments, a baptism, an absolution, a marriage-rite, a genuine extreme unction.[41112]—Under all these headings, they have made personal enemies of the rascals who hold office; on all these grounds, they are struck down; what was once meritorious with them is now disgraceful. Thus, the principal swath consists of the élite of the people, selected from amongst the people itself; it is against the "subordinate aristocracy," those most capable of doing and conducting manual labor, the most creditable workmen, through their activity, frugality and good habits, that the Revolution, in its rigor against the inferior class, rages with the greatest fury.