practically suppressed, beer at two pennies a pot, wine at six, pigeons
in their meat-safes, game on their turn-spits, the wood of the national
forests in their lofts, the gendarmerie timid, the police absent, in
many places the crops all theirs, the owner not daring to claim his
share, the judge avoiding condemning them, the constable refusing to
serve papers on them, privileges restored in their favor, the public
authorities cringing to the crowds and yielding to their exactions,
remaining quiet or unarmed in the face of their misdeeds, their outrages
excused or tolerated, their superior good sense and deep feeling lauded
in thousands of speeches, the jacket and the blouse considered as
symbols of patriotism, and supremacy in the State claimed for the
sans-culottes[2378] in the name their merits and their virtues.--And now
the overthrow of all this is announced to them, a league against them of
foreign kings, the emigrants in arms, an invasion imminent, the Croats
and Pandours in the field, hordes of mercenaries and barbarians crowding
down on them again to put them in chains.--From the workshop to the
cottage there rolls along a formidable outburst of anger, accompanied
with national songs, denouncing the plots of tyrants and summoning the
people to arms.[2379] This is the second wave of the Revolution, fast
swelling and roaring, less general than the first, since it bears along
with it but little more than the lower class, but higher and much more
destructive.

Not only, indeed, is the mass now launched forth coarse and crude, but
a new sentiment animates it, the force of which is incalculable, that of
plebeian pride, that of the poor man, the subject, who, suddenly
erect after ages of debasement, relishes, far beyond his hopes and
unstintedly, the delights of equality, independence, and dominion.
"Fifteen millions white Negroes," says Mallet du Pan,[2380] worse fed,
more miserable than those of St. Domingo, like them rebelled and freed
from all authority by their revolt, accustomed like them, through thirty
months of license, to ruling over all that is left of their former
masters, proud like them of the restoration of their caste and exulting
in their horny hands. One may imagine their transports of rage on
hearing the trumpet-blast which awakens them, showing them on the
horizon the returning planters, bringing with them new whips and heavier
manacles?--Nothing is more distrustful than such a sentiment in
such b