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Taine, Hippolyte, 1828-1893

"The French Revolution - Volume 3"

. . . These gentlemen are
transferred to the Petits-P?res. Being well-fed and plump, they
cannot be sans-culottes." Henriot was right, for, to live well is
incivique. Whoever lays in stores of provisions is criminal, even if
he has gone a good ways for them, even if he has not overpaid the
butcher of his quarter, even if he has not diminished by an ounce of
meat the ration of his neighbor; when he is found out, he is punished
and his hoard confiscated. "A citizen[88] had a little pig brought to
him from a place six leagues from Paris, and killed it at once. Three
hours afterwards, the pig was seized by commissioners and distributed
among the people, without the owner getting a bit of it;" moreover,
the said owner "was imprisoned." - He is a monopolist! To Jacobin
people, to empty stomachs, there is no greater crime; this misdeed, to
their imaginations, explains the arrest of H?bert, their favorite: "It
is said at the Halle (the covered Paris market)[89] that he has
monopolized a brother of the order of Saint-Antoine[90] as well as a
pot of twenty-five pounds of Brittany butter," which is enough; they
immediately and "unanimously consign P?re Duchesne to the guillotine.


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