of an administrator.--Remark that, without counting
the Belgian departments, where an extensive insurrection is under way
and spreading, more than one-half of the territory falls under the
operation of this law. for, out of the eighty-six departments of
France,[51105] properly so called, forty-five are at this moment,
according to the terms of the decree,[51106] "declared to be in a
state of civil uprising." Actually, in these departments, according to
official reports, armed mobs of conscripts are resisting the authorities
charged with recruiting them, bands of two hundred, three hundred and
eight hundred men overrun the country, troops of brigands force open
the prisons, assassinate the gendarmes and set their inmates free; the
tax-collectors are robbed, killed or maimed, municipal officers slain,
proprietors ransomed, estates devastated, and diligences stopped on the
highways." Now, in all these cases, in all the departments, cantons or
communes, three classes of persons, at first the relations and allies
of the emigres, next the former nobles and ennobled, and finally the
"fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers of persons who, without
being ex-nobles or relations of emigres," nevertheless form a part of
the bands or mobs, are declared "personally and civilly responsible" for
the violent acts committed. Even when these acts are only "imminent,"
the administration of the department must, in its report, give a list
of all the men and women who are responsible; these are to be taken as
"hostages," and kept in confinement at their own expense in the local
jail. If they escape, they must be put on the same footing as emigres,
that is to say punished with death. If any damage is sustained, they
are to pay costs; if any murder is committed or abduction effected,
four amongst them must be deported. Observe, moreover, that the local
authorities are obliged, under severe penalties, to execute the law at
once. Note that, at this date, they are ultra Jacobin, since to inscribe
on the list of hostages, not a noble or a bourgeois, but an honest
peasant or respectable artisan, it suffices for these local sovereigns
to designate his son or grandson, who might either be absent, fugitive
or dead, as being "notoriously "insurgent or refractory. The fortunes,
liberties and lives of every individual in easy circumstances are thus
legally surrendered to the despotism, cupidity and hostility of the
levelers in office.--Contemporari