e victims are criminals, their executioners
are honest, and the Assembly, which rigorously proceeds against the
former, reserves all its indulgence for the latter. It reinstates the
numerous deserters who abandoned their flags previous to the 1st of
January, 1789;[2329] it allows them three sous per league mileage, and
brings them back to their homes or to their regiments to become, along
with their brethren whose desertion is more recent, either leaders
or recruits for the mob. It releases from the galleys the forty Swiss
guards of Chateauroux whom their own cantons desired to have kept there;
it permits these "martyrs to Liberty" to promenade the streets of Paris
in a triumphal car;[2330] it admits them to the bar of the house,
and, taking a formal vote on it, extends to them the honors of the
session.[2331] Finally, as if it were their special business to let
loose on the public the most ferocious and foulest of the rabble, it
amnesties Jourdan, Mainvielle, Duprat, and Raphel, fugitive convicts,
jail-birds, the condottieri of all lands assuming the title of "the
brave brigands of Avignon," and who, for eighteen months, have pillaged
and plundered the Comtat[2332]; it stops the trial, almost over, of the
Glaciere butchers; it tolerates the return of these as victors,[2333]
and their installation by their own act in the places of the fugitive
magistrates, allowing Avignon to be treated as a conquered city, and,
henceforth, to become their prey and their booty. This is a willful
restoration of the vermin to the social body, and, in this feverish
body, nothing is overlooked that will increase the fever. The most
anarchical and deleterious maxims emanate, like miasma, from the
Assembly benches. The reduction of things to an absolute level is
adopted as a principle; "equality of rights," says Lamarque,[2334] "is
to be maintained only by tending steadily to an equality of fortunes;"
this theory is practically applied on all sides since the proletariat
is pillaging all who own property.--"Let the communal possessions
be partitioned among the citizens of the surrounding villages," says
Francois de Nantes, "in an inverse ratio to their fortunes, and let
him who has the least inheritance take the largest share in the
divisions."[2335] Conceive the effect of this motion read at evening to
peasants who are at this very moment claiming their lord's forest for
their commune. M. Corneille prohibits any tax to be levied for the
public