Among peasants in the same village, workmen of the
same trade and shopkeepers in the same quarter, there is always envy,
enmities and spites; those who are Jacobins become local pashas and
are able to gratify local jealousies with impunity, something they
never fail to do.[100]
Hence, on the lists of the guillotined, the incarcerated and of
emigr?s, the men and women of inferior condition are in much greater
number, far greater than their companions of the superior and middle
classes all put together. Out of 12,000 condemned to death whose rank
and professions have been ascertained, 7,545[101] are peasants,
cultivators, ploughmen, workmen of various sorts, innkeepers, wine-
dealers, soldiers and sailors, domestics, women, young girls, servants
and seamstresses. Out of 1,900 emigr?s from Doubs, nearly 1,100
belong to the lower class. Towards the month of April, 1794, all the
prisons in France overflow with farmers;[102] in the Paris prisons
alone, two months before Thermidor 9, there are 2 000 of them.[103]
Without mentioning the eleven western departments in which four or
five hundred square leagues of territory are devastated and twenty
towns and one thousand eight hundred villages destroyed,[104] where
the avowed purpose of the Jacobin policy is a systematic and total
destruction of the country, man and beast, buildings, crops, and even
trees, there are cantons and even provinces where the entire rural and
working population is arrested or put to flight.
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