All the religious or seignorial
chateaux and mansions in France are in this plight, along with their
furniture, and likewise most of the fine bourgeois mansions, together
with a large number of minor residences, well-furnished and supplied
through provincial economy; besides these, nearly every warehouse and
store belonging to large manufacturers and leading commercial houses;
all this forms colossal spoil, such as was never seen before,
consisting of objects one likes to possess, gathered in vast lots,
which lots are distributed by hundreds of thousands over the twenty-
six thousand square miles of territory. There are no owners for this
property but the nation, an indeterminate, invisible personage; no
barrier other than so many seals exists between the spoils and the
despoilers, that is to say, so many strips of paper held fast by two
ill-applied and indistinct stamps. Bear in mind, too, that the
guardians of the spoil are the sans-culottes who have made a conquest
of it; that they are poor; that such a profusion of useful or precious
objects makes them feel the bareness of their homes all the more; that
their wives would like to lay in a stock of furniture; moreover, has
it not held out to them from the beginning of the Revolution, that
"forty-thousand mansions, palaces and chateaux, two-thirds of the
property of France, would be the reward of their valor?"[124] At this
very moment, does not the representative on mission authorize their
greed? Are not Albitte and Collot d'Herbois at Lyons, Fouch? at
Nevers, Javogues at Montbrison, proclaiming that the possessions of
anti-revolutionaries and a surplus of riches form "the patrimony of
the sans-culottes?"[125] Do they not read in the proclamations of
Monestier,[126] that the peasants "before leaving home may survey and
measure off the immense estates of their seigneurs, choose, for
example, on their return, whatever they want to add to their farm .
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