0,000 inhabitants
there are 100,000 of the poor, of which 60,000 have flocked in from
the departments;[2309] among them are 30,000 needy artisans from the
national workshops, discharged and sent home in the preceding month of
June, but who, returning three months later, are again swallowed up in
the great sink of vagabondage, hurling their floating mass against
the crazy edifice of public authority and furnishing the forces
of sedition.--At Paris, and in the provinces, disobedience exists
throughout the hierarchy. Directories countermand ministerial orders.
Here, municipalities brave the commands of their Directory; there,
communities order around their mayor with a drawn sword. Elsewhere,
soldiers and sailors put their officers under arrest. The accused insult
the judge on the bench and force him to cancel his verdict; mobs tax or
plunder wheat in the market; National Guards prevent its distribution,
or seize it in the storehouses. There is no security for property,
lives, or consciences. The majority of Frenchmen are deprived of their
right to worship in their own faith, and of voting at the elections.
There is no safety, day or night, for the elite of the nation, for
ecclesiastics and the gentry, for army and navy officers, for rich
merchants and large landed proprietors; no protection in the courts, no
income from public funds; denunciations abound, expulsions, banishments
to the interior, attacks on private houses; there is no right of
free assemblage, even to enforce the law under the orders of legal
authorities.[2310] Opposed to this, and in contrast with it, is the
privilege and immunity of a sect formed into a political corporation,
"which extends its filiations over the whole kingdom, and even abroad;
which has its own treasury, its committees, and its by-laws; which rules
the government, which judges justice,"[2311] and which, from the capital
to the hamlet, usurps or directs the administration. Liberty, equality,
and the majesty of the law exist nowhere, except in words. Of the three
thousand decrees given birth to by the Constituent Assembly, the most
lauded, those the best set off by a philosophic baptism, form a mass of
stillborn abortions of which France is the burying-ground. That which
really subsists underneath the false appearances of right, proclaimed
and sworn to over and over again, is, on the one hand, an oppression of
the upper and cultivated classes, from which all the rights of man are
withdraw