An historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the French Revolution; and the effect it has produced in Europe

by Mary Wollstonecraft

[16]. Lally-Tolendal said of La Fayette, at this time, that ‘he spoke of liberty as he had defended it.’

[17]. The supplying of Paris with provision always depended on a nice arrangement of circumstances, capable of being controlled by the government of the state. It is not like London, and other great cities, the local position of which was previously pointed out by nature, and of which the welfare depends on the great and perpetual movements of commerce, which they themselves regulate. To cut off the provision from London, you must block up the port, and interdict in an open manner an intercourse, on which the wealth of the nation in a great measure depends. Paris, on the contrary, might be famished in a few days by a secret order of the court. All the people of the place would feel the effect, and no person be able to ascertain the cause. These considerations render it easy to account for the continued scarcity of provision in Paris during the summer of 1789. No person can doubt, but the court viewed the revolution with horrour; and that, among the measures which they took to prevent it, they would not overlook so obvious an expedient, as that of cutting off the supplies from the capital; as they supposed the people would lay the blame on the new order of things, and thus be disgusted with the revolution.

[18]. The lamp-posts, which are only to be found in squares, and places where there are not two rows of houses, are much more substantial than in England.

[19]. ‘In August 1778,’ says Lally-Tolendal, ‘the laws were overturned; and twenty-five millions of men without justice or judges;—the public treasury without funds, and without resource;—the sovereign authority was usurped by the ministers;—and the people without any other hope than the states-general;—yet without confidence in the promise of the king.’

And, Mounier also gives a similar sketch. ‘We have not a fixed or complete form of government—we have not a constitution, because all the powers are confounded—because no boundary is traced out.—The judicial power is not even separated from the legislative.—Authority is dispersed; it’s various parts are always in opposition; and amidst their perpetual shocks the rights of the lower class of citizens are betrayed.—The laws are openly despised, or rather we are not agreed what ought to be called laws.’

[20]. In the Bastille, it is true, were found but seven prisoners.—Yet, it ought to be remarked, that three of them had lost their reason—that, when the secrets of the prison-house were laid open, men started with horrour from the inspection of instruments of torture, that appeared to be almost worn out by the exercise of tyranny—and that citizens were afraid even for a moment to enter the noisome dungeons, in which their fellow creatures had been confined for years.

[21]. The cruelties of the half civilized romans, combined with their unnatural vices, even when literature and the arts were most cultivated, prove, that humanity is the offspring of the understanding, and that the progress of the sciences alone can make men wiser and happier.

[22]. Mirabeau appears to have been continually hurt by the want of dignity in the assembly.—By the inconsistency, which made them stalk as heroes one moment, with a true theatrical stride, and the next cringe with the flexible backs of habitual slaves.

[23]. ‘Let us compare,’ he further adds, ‘the number of innocents sacrificed by mistake, by the sanguinary maxims of the courts of criminal judicature, and the ministerial vengeance exercised secretly in the dungeons of Vincennes, and in the cells of the Bastille, with the sudden and impetuous vengeance of the multitude, and then decide on which side barbarity appears. At the moment when the hell created by tyranny for the torment of it’s victims opens itself to the public eye; at the moment when all the citizens have been permitted to descend into those gloomy caves, to poize the chains of their friends, of their defenders; at the moment when the registers of those iniquitous archives are fallen into all hands; it is necessary, that the people should be essentially good, or this manifestation of the atrocities of ministers would have rendered them as cruel as themselves!’

[24]. These members seem to have formed a just estimate of the french character.