s.--Multiplication and increasing decline of
Assignats. The classes who have to bear the burden.--Famine
and misery during year III, and the first half of year IV.
--In the country.--In the small towns.--In large towns and
cities.

But, if the Jacobin system, in spite of its surviving founders,
gradually relaxes after Thermidor; if the main ligature tied around the
man's neck, broke just as the man was strangling, the others that still
bind him hold him tight, except as they are loosened in places; and, as
it is, some of the straps, terribly stiffened, sink deeper and deeper
into his flesh.--In the first place, the requisitions continue there is
no other way of provisioning the armies and the cities; the gendarme is
always on the road, compelling each village to contribute its portion
of grain, and at the legal rate. The refractory are subject to keepers,
confiscations, fines and imprisonment; they are confined and kept in the
district lock ups "at their own expense," men and women, twenty two on
Pluviose 17, year III., in the district of Bar-sur-Aube; forty five,
Germinal 7, in the district of Troyes; forty-five, the same day, in the
district of Nogent-sur-Seine, and twenty others, eight days later, in
the same district, in the commune of Traine alone.[4299]--The condition
of the cultivator is certainly not an easy one, while public authority,
aided by the public force, extorts from him all it can at a rate of its
own; moreover, it will soon exact from him one half of his contributions
in kind, and, it must be noted, that at this time, the direct
contributions alone absorb twelve and thirteen sous on the franc of the
revenue. Nevertheless, under this condition, which is that of laborers
in a Muslim country, the French peasant, like the Syrian or Tunisian
peasant, can keep himself alive; for, through the abolition of the
"maximum," private transactions are now free, and, to indemnify himself
on this side, he sells to private individuals and even to towns,[42100]
by agreement, on understood terms, and as dear as he pleases; all the
dearer because through the legal requisitions the towns are half empty,
and there are fewer sacks of grain for a larger number of purchasers;
hence his losses by the government are more than made up by his gains
on private parties; he gains in the end, and that is why he persists in
farming.

The weight, however, of which he relieves himself falls upon the
overburdened bu