In the Pyrenees, the
old Basque populations "torn from their natal soil, crowded into the
churches with no means of subsistence but that of charity," in the
middle of winter, so that sixteen hundred of those incarcerated die
"mostly of cold and hunger;"[105] at B?douin, a town of two thousand
souls, in which a tree of liberty is cut down by some unknown persons,
four hundred and thirty-three houses are demolished or burned, sixteen
persons guillotined and forty-seven shot, while the rest of the
inhabitants are driven out, reduced to living like vagabonds on the
mountain, or in holes which they dig in the ground;[106] in Alsace,
fifty thousand farmers who, in the winter of 1793, take refuge with
their wives and children on the other side of the Rhine.[107] In
short, the revolutionary operation is a complete prostration of people
of all classes, the trunks as well as the saplings being felled, and
often in such a way as to clear the ground entirely.
But in this ruthless felling, however, the notables of the people,
making all due allowances, suffer more than the ordinary people. It
is obvious that the Jacobin wood-chopper persecutes, insistently and
selectively, the veterans of labor and savings, the large cultivators
who from father to son and for many generations have possessed the
same farm, the master-craftsmen whose shops are well stocked and who
have good customers, the respectable, well-patronized retailers, who
owe nothing; the village-syndics and trades-syndics, all those showing
more deeply and visibly than the rest of their class, the five or six
blazes which summon the ax.
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