he people are on
the side of the brigands against the gendarmes. The exploits of Mandrin
in 1754,[5328] may be remembered: his company of sixty men who bring
in contraband goods and ransom only the clerks, his expedition, lasting
nearly a year, across Franche-Comte, Lyonnais, Bourbonnais, Auvergne
and Burgundy, the twenty-seven towns he enters making no resistance,
delivering prisoners and making sale of his merchandise. To overcome him
a camp had to be formed at Valance and 2,000 men sent against him;
he was taken through treachery, and still at the present day certain
families are proud of their relationship to him, declaring him a
liberator.--No symptom is more alarming: on the enemies of the law being
preferred by the people to its defenders, society disintegrates and the
worms begin to work.--Add to these the veritable brigands, assassins and
robbers. "In 1782,[5329] the provost's court of Montargis is engaged
on the trial of Hulin and two hundred of his accomplices who, for ten
years, by means of joint enterprises, have desolated a portion of the
kingdom."--Mercier enumerates in France "an army of more than 10,000
brigands and vagabonds" against which the police, composed of 3,756 men,
is always on the march. "Complaints are daily made," says the provincial
assembly of Haute-Guyenne, "that there is no police in the country."
The absentee seignior pays no attention to this matter; his judges
and officials take good care not to operate gratuitously against an
insolvent criminal, the result is that "his estates become the refuge of
all the rascals of the area."[5330]--Every abuse thus carries with it a
risk, both due to misplaced carelessness as well as excessive rigor,
to relaxed feudalism as well as to harsh monarchy. All the institutions
appear to work together to breed and or tolerate the troublemakers,
preparing, outside the social defenses, the men of action who will carry
it by storm.

But the total effect of all this is yet more damaging, for, out of the
vast numbers of workers it ruins it forms beggars unwilling to work,
dangerous sluggards going about begging and extorting bread from
peasants who have not too much for themselves. "The vagabonds about the
country," says Letrosne,[5331] "are a terrible pest; they are like an
enemy's force which, distributed over the territory, obtains a living as
it pleases, levying veritable contributions. . . . They are constantly
roving around the country, examining the ap