It
also calls in the 1,500 million of assignats bearing the royal stamp
(? face royale) and thus arbitrarily converts and reduces the public
debt on the Grand Ledger, which is already, in fact, a partial and
declared bankruptcy. Six months imprisonment for whoever refuses to
accept assignats at par, twenty years in irons if the offence is
repeated and the guillotine if there is an incivique intention or act,
which suffices for all other creditors.[32]
The spoliation of individuals, a forced loan of a billion on the rich,
requisitions for coin against assignats at par, seizures of plate and
jewels in private houses, revolutionary taxes so numerous as not only
to exhaust the capital, but likewise the credit, of the person
taxed,[33] and the resumption by the State of the public domain
pledged to private individuals for the past three centuries. How many
years of labor are requisite to bring together again so much available
capital, to reconstruct in France and to refill once again those
private reservoirs which are to contain the accumulated savings
essential for the out-flow required to drive the great wheel of each
general enterprise? Take into account, moreover, the enterprises which
are directly destroyed, root and branch, by revolutionary executions,
enforced against the manufacturers and traders of Lyons, Marseilles
and Bordeaux, proscribed in a mass,[34] guillotined, imprisoned, or
put to flight, their factories stopped, their storehouses put under
sequestration, with their stocks of brandy, soap, silk, muslins,
leather, paper, serges, cloth, canvas, cordage and the rest; the same
at Nantes under Carrier, at Strasbourg under Saint-Just, and
everywhere else.
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