Being sectarians,
they have a faith, and as orthodoxy tolerates no heresy, and as the
conversion of heretics is never sincere or durable, heresy can be
suppressed only by suppressing heretics. "It is only the dead," said
Bar?re, Messidor 16, "who never return." On the 2nd and 3rd of
Thermidor,[40] the Committee of Public Safety sends to Fouquier-
Tinville a list of four hundred and seventy-eight accused persons with
orders "to bring the parties named to trial at once." Baudot and Jean
Bon St. Andre, Carrier, Antonelle and Guifroy, had already estimated
the lives to be taken at several millions and, according to Collot d'
Herbois, who had a lively imagination, "the political perspiration
should go on freely, and not stop until from twelve to fifteen million
Frenchmen had been destroyed."[41]
To make amends, in the fourth and last division of their work, that is
to say, in spoliation, they went to the last extreme: they did all
that could be done to ruin individuals, families and the State;
whatever could be taken, they took. - The Constituent and Legislative
Assemblies had, on their side, begun the business by abolishing tithes
and all feudal rights without indemnity, and by confiscating all
ecclesiastical property; the Jacobin operators continue and complete
the job; we have seen by what decrees and with what hostility against
collective and individual property, whether they attribute to the
State the possession of all corporations whatever, even laic, such as
colleges, schools and scientific or literary societies, hospitals and
communes, or whether they despoil individuals, indirectly through
assignats and the maximum, or directly through the forced loan,
revolutionary taxes,[42] seizures of gold and silver coin,
requisitions of common useful utensils,[43] sequestrations of
prisoners' property, confiscations of the possessions of emigrants and
exiles and of those deported or condemned to death.
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