ry brigandage. The reigning dogma,
weakening authority in the magistrates' hands, and the clubs, "which
cover the department," have spread the fermentation of anarchy
everywhere. "Administrators, judges, municipal officers, all who are
invested with any authority, and who have the courage to use it in
forcing respect for law, are one by one denounced by public opinion as
enemies of the constitution and of liberty; because, people say, they
talk of nothing but the law, as if they did not know that the will of
the people makes the law, and that we are the people."[3210] This is the
real principle; here, as at Paris, it instantly begets its consequences.
"In many of these clubs nothing is discussed but the plundering of
estates and cutting off the heads of aristocrats. And who are designated
by this infamous title? In the cities, the great traders and rich
proprietors; in the country, those whom we call the bourgeois;
everywhere, all peaceable citizens, the friends of order, who wish to
enjoy, under the shadow of the protecting law, the blessings of the
Constitution. Such was the rage of their denunciations that in one of
these clubs a good and brave peasant was denounced as an aristocrat;
the whole of his aristocracy consisting in his having said to those who
plundered the chateau of their seigneur, already mentioned, that they
would not enjoy in peace the fruits of their crime."--Here is the
Jacobin programme of Paris in advance, namely, the division of the
French into two classes, the spoliation of one, the despotism of the
other; the destruction of the well-to-do, orderly and honest under the
dictation of those who are not so.

Here, as in Paris, the programme is carried out step by step. At
Beausset, near Toulon, a man named Vidal, captain of the National Guard,
"twice set at liberty by virtue of two consecutive amnesties,"[3211]
punishes not resistance merely, but even murmurs, with death. Two old
men, one of them a notary, the other a turner, having complained of him
to the public prosecutor, the general alarm is beaten, a gathering of
armed men is formed in the street, and the complainants are clubbed,
riddled with balls, and their bodies thrown into a pit. Many of their
friends are wounded, others take to flight; seven houses are sacked,
and the municipality, "either overawed or in complicity," makes no
interference until all is over. There is no way of pursuing the guilty
ones; the foreman of the jury, who goes,