The French Revolution (Vol.1-3). Taine Hippolyte

      3278 (return) [ "Archives Nationales," F7. 3204. Letters from M. de Saint-Victour, September 25, October 2 and 10, 1791.—Letter from the steward of his estate, September 18.]

      CHAPTER III. Development of the ruling Passion.

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I.—Attitude of the nobles. Their moderate resistance.

       Table of Contents

      If popular passion ended in murder it was not because resistance was great or violent. On the contrary, never did an aristocracy undergo dispossession with so much patience, or employ less force in the defense of its prerogatives, or even of its property. To speak with exactness, the class in question receives blows without returning them, and when it does take up arms, it is always with the bourgeois and the National Guard, at the request of the magistrates, in conformity with the law, and for the protection of persons and property. The nobles try to avoid being either killed or robbed, nothing more: for nearly three years they raise no political banner. In the towns where they exert the most influence and which are denounced as rebellious, for ex-ample in Mende and Arles, their opposition is limited to the suppression of riots, the restraining of the common people, and ensuring respect for the law, It is not the new order of things against which they conspire, but against brutal disorder.—At Mende," says the municipal body,3301 "we had the honor of being the first to furnish the contributions of 1790. We supplied the place of our bishop and installed his successor without disturbance, and without the assistance of any foreign force. … We dispersed the members of a cathedral body to which we were attached by the ties of blood and friendship; we dismissed all, from the bishop down to the children of the choir. We had but three communities of mendicant monks, and all three have been suppressed. We have sold all national possessions without exception."—The commander of their gendarmerie is, in fact, an old member of the body-guard, while the superior officers of the National Guard are gentlemen, or belong to the order of Saint-Louis. It is very evident that, if they defend themselves against Jacobins, they are not insurgent against the National Assembly.—In Arles,3302 which has put down its populace, which has armed itself, which has shut its gates, and which passes for a focus of royalist conspiracy, the commissioners sent by the King and by the National Assembly, men of discretion and of consideration, find nothing, after a month's investigation, but submission to the decrees and zeal for the public welfare.

      "Such," they say, "are the men who have been calumniated because, cherishing the Constitution, they hold fanaticism, demagogues and anarchy, in horror. If the citizens had not roused themselves when the moment of danger arrived, they would have been slaughtered like their neighbors (of Avignon). It is this insurrection against crime which the brigands have slandered." If their gates were shut it was because "the National Guard of Marseilles, the same which behaved so badly in the Comtat, flocked there under the pretext of maintaining liberty and of forestalling the counter-revolution, but, in reality, to village the town."

      Vive la Nation! Vive la Loi! Vive le Roi were the only cries heard at the very quiet and orderly elections that had just taken place.