"Come, boys, soup, fish, meat and salad is what you get to eat in the regiment;" nothing else, "I don't deceive you—pie and Arbois wine are the extras."[5408]
He pours the wine, pays the bill and, if need be, yields his mistress. "After a few days debauchery, the young libertine, with no money to pay his debts, is obliged to sell himself, while the laborer, transformed into soldier, begins to drill under the lash."—Strange recruits these, for the protection of society, all selected from the class which will attack it, down-trodden peasants, imprisoned vagabonds, social outcasts, poor fellows in debt, disheartened, excited and easily tempted, who, according to circumstances, become at one time rioters, and at another soldiers.—Which lot is preferable? The bread the soldier eats is not more abundant than that of the prisoner, while poorer in quality; for the bran is taken out of the bread which the locked-up vagabond eats, and left in the bread which is eaten by the soldier who locks him up[5409]. In this state of things the soldier ought not to mediate on his lot, and yet this is just what his officers incite him to do. They also have become politicians and fault-finders. Some years before the Revolution[5410] "disputes occurred" in the army, "discussions and complaints, and, the new ideas fermenting in their heads, a correspondence was established between two regiments. Written information was obtained from Paris, authorized by the Minister of War, which cost, I believe, twelve louis per annum. It soon took a philosophic turn, embracing dissertations, criticisms of the ministry, and of the government, desirable changes and, therefore, the more diffused." Sergeants like Hoche, and fencing-masters like Augereau, certainly often read this news, carelessly left lying on the tables, and commented on it during the evening in their soldier quarters. Discontent is of ancient date, and already, at the end of the late reign, grievous words are heard. At a banquet given by a prince of the blood,[5411] with a table set for a hundred guests under an immense tent and served by grenadiers, the odor these diffused upset the prince's delicate nose. "These worthy fellows," said he, a little too loud, "smell strong of the stocking." One of the grenadiers bluntly responded, "Because we haven't got any," which "was followed by profound silence." During the ensuring years irritation smolders and augments; the soldiers of Rochambeau have fought side by side with the free militia of America, and they keep this in mind. In 1788,[5412] Marshal de Vaux, previous to the insurrection in Dauphiny, writes to minister that "it is impossible to rely on the troops," while four months after the opening of the States-General 16,000 deserters roaming around Paris leads the revolts instead of suppressing them.[5413]
II. The social organization is dissolved
The social organization is dissolved.—No central rallying
point.—Inertia of the provinces.—Ascendancy of Paris.
Once this barrier has disappeared, no other embankment remains and the inundation spreads all over France like over an immense plain. With other nations in like circumstances, some obstacles have been encountered; elevations have existed, centers of refuge, old constructions in which, in the universal fright, a portion of the population could find shelter. Here, the first crisis sweeps away all that remains, each individual of the twenty-six scattered millions standing alone by himself. The administrations of Richelieu and Louis XIV. had been a long time at work insensibly destroying the natural groupings which, when suddenly dissolved, unite and form over again of their own accord. Except in Vendée, I find no place, nor any class, in which a good many men, having confidence in a few men, are able, in the hour of danger, to rally around these and form a compact body. Neither provincial nor municipal patriotism any longer exists. The inferior clergy are hostile to the prelates, the gentry of the province to the nobility of the court, the vassal to the seignior, the peasant to the townsman, the urban population to the municipal oligarchy, corporation to corporation, parish to parish, neighbor to neighbor. All are separated by their privileges and their jealousies, by the consciousness of having been imposed on, or frustrated, for the advantage of another. The journeyman tailor is embittered against his foreman for preventing him from doing a day's work in private houses, hairdressers against their employers for the like reason, the pastry-cook against the baker who prevents him from baking the pies of housekeepers, the village spinner against the town spinners who wish to break him up, the rural wine-growers against the bourgeois who, in the circle of seven leagues, strives to have their vines pulled up,[5414] the village against the neighboring village whose reduction of taxation has ruined it, the overtaxed peasant against the under taxed peasant, one-half of a parish against its collectors, who, to its detriment, have favored the other half.
"The nation," says Turgot, mournfully,[5415] "is a society composed of different orders badly united and of a people whose members have few mutual liens, nobody, consequently, caring for any interest but his own. Nowhere is there any sign of an interest in common. Towns and villages maintain no more relation with each other than the districts to which they are attached; they are even unable to agree together with a view to carry out public improvements of great importance to them."
The central power for a hundred and fifty years rules through its division of power. Men have been kept separate, prevented from acting in concert, the work being so successful that they no longer understand each other, each class ignoring the other class, each forming of the other a chimerical picture, each bestowing on the other the hues of its own imagination, one composing an idyll, the other framing a melodrama, one imagining peasants as sentimental swains, the other convinced that the nobles are horrible tyrants.—Through this mutual misconception and this secular isolation, the French lose the habit, the art and the faculty for acting in an entire body. They are no longer capable of spontaneous agreement and collective action. No one, in the moment of danger, dares rely on his neighbors or on his equals. No one knows where to turn to obtain a guide. "A man willing to be responsible for the smallest district cannot be found; and, more than this, one man able to answer for another man[5416]." Utter and irremediable disorder is at hand. The Utopia of the theorists has been accomplished, the savage condition has recommenced. Individuals now stand in by themselves; everyone reverting back to his original feebleness, while his possessions and his life are at the mercy of the first band that comes along. He has nothing within him to control him but the sheep-like habit of being led, of awaiting an impulsion, of turning towards the accustomed center, towards Paris, from which his orders have always arrived. Arthur Young[5417] is struck with this mechanical movement. Political ignorance and docility are everywhere complete. He, a foreigner, conveys the news of Alsace into Burgundy: the insurrection there had been terrible, the populace having sacked the city-hall at Strasbourg, of which not a word was known at Dijon; "yet it is nine days since it happened; had it been nineteen I question if they would more than have received the intelligence." There are no newspapers in the cafés; no local centers of information, of resolution, of action. The province submits to events at the capital; "people dare not move; they dare not even form an opinion before Paris speaks."—This is what Monarchical centralization leads to. It has deprived the groups of their cohesion and the individual of his motivational drive. Only human dust remains, and this, whirling about and gathered together in massive force, is blindly driven along by the wind.[5418]