her. Out of 12,000 condemned to death whose rank and professions
have been ascertained, 7,545[41101] are peasants, cultivators,
ploughmen, workmen of various sorts, innkeepers, wine-dealers, soldiers
and sailors, domestics, women, young girls, servants and seamstresses.
Out of 1,900 emigres from Doubs, nearly 1,100 belong to the lower class.
Towards the month of April, 1794, all the prisons in France overflow
with farmers;[41102] in the Paris prisons alone, two months before
Thermidor 9, there are 2 000 of them.[41103] Without mentioning the
eleven western departments in which four or five hundred square leagues
of territory are devastated and twenty towns and one thousand eight
hundred villages destroyed,[41104] where the avowed purpose of the
Jacobin policy is a systematic and total destruction of the country, man
and beast, buildings, crops, and even trees, there are cantons and even
provinces where the entire rural and working population is arrested or
put to flight. In the Pyrenees, the old Basque populations "torn from
their natal soil, crowded into the churches with no means of subsistence
but that of charity," in the middle of winter, so that sixteen hundred
of those incarcerated die "mostly of cold and hunger;"[41105] at
Bedouin, a town of two thousand souls, in which a tree of liberty is cut
down by some unknown persons, four hundred and thirty-three houses are
demolished or burned, sixteen persons guillotined and forty-seven shot,
while the rest of the inhabitants are driven out, reduced to living
like vagabonds on the mountain, or in holes which they dig in the
ground;[41106] in Alsace, fifty thousand farmers who, in the winter of
1793, take refuge with their wives and children on the other side of
the Rhine.[41107] In short, the revolutionary operation is a complete
prostration of people of all classes, the trunks as well as the saplings
being felled, and often in such a way as to clear the ground entirely.

But in this ruthless felling, however, the notables of the people,
making all due allowances, suffer more than the ordinary people. It
is obvious that the Jacobin wood-chopper persecutes, insistently and
selectively, the veterans of labor and savings, the large cultivators
who from father to son and for many generations have possessed the same
farm, the master-craftsmen whose shops are well stocked and who have
good customers, the respectable, well-patronized retailers, who owe
nothing; the village-syndi