Prev | Current Page 563 | Next

Taine, Hippolyte, 1828-1893

"The French Revolution - Volume 3"

" - In Provence, where things are more advanced and corruption
is greater than elsewhere, where the purport and aims of the
Revolution were comprehended at the start, it is still worse. Nowhere
did Jacobin rulers display their real character more openly, and
nowhere, from 1789 to 1799, was this character so well maintained. At
Toulon, the demagogues in the year V., as in the year II., are[137]
"former workmen and clerks in the Arsenal who had become 'bosses' by
acting as informers and through terrorism, getting property for
nothing, or at an insignificant price, and plotting sales of national
possessions, petty traders from all quarters with stocks of goods
acquired in all sorts of ways, through robberies, through purchases of
stolen goods from servants and employees in the civil, war and navy
departments, and through abandoned or bought-up claims; in a word, men
who, having run away from other communes, pass their days in coffee-
houses and their nights in houses of ill-fame." - At Draguignan,
Brignolles, Vidauban, Fr?jus, at Marseilles, after Thermidor, the
intermittent returns to Terrorism always restore the same quarries of
the justiciary and the police to office.


Pages:
551 552 553 554 555 556 557 558 559 560 561 562 563 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574 575