In every important insurrection there are similar evil-doers and vagabonds, enemies of the law, savage, prowling desperadoes, who, like wolves, roam about wherever they scent a prey. It is they who serve as the directors and executioners of public or private malice. Near Usès twenty-five masked men, with guns and clubs, enter the house of a notary, fire a pistol at him, beat him, wreck the premises, and burn his register along with the title-deeds and papers which he has in keeping for the count of Rouvres: seven of them are arrested, but the people are on their side, and fall on the constabulary and free them – They are known by their acts, by their love of destruction for the sake of destruction, by their foreign accent, by their savage faces and their rags. Some of them come from Paris to Rouen, and, for four days, the town is at their mercy; the stores are forced open, train wagons are discharged, wheat is wasted, and convents and seminaries are put to ransom; they invade the dwelling of the attorney-general, who has begun proceedings against them, and want to tear him to pieces; they break his mirrors and his furniture, leave the premises laden with booty, and go into the town and its outskirts to pillage the manufactories and break up or burn all the machinery. – Henceforth these constitute the new leaders for in every mob it is the boldest and last scrupulous who march ahead and set the example of insurrection. The example is contagious: the beginning was the craving for bread, the end is murder and incendiarism; the savagery which is unchained adding its unlimited violence to the limited revolt of necessity.[1]
Taine, The French Revolution (1878)[1] Hippolyte Taine, The French Revolution, Vol. I, tr. John
Durand (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), pp. 17, 18. This is the second volume to Taine’s
unfinished life’s work, The Origins of
Contemporary France, begun in 1876.
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