victims for arrest and the scaffold; and the annual charge for them was 591,000,000 fr., or nearly £24,000,000 sterling. Between the military defenders and the civil servants of the government, almost all the active and resolute men in France, and the whole of the depraved and abandoned ones, were in the pay of the dictators, and the whole starving energy of the country fed on the spoils of its defenceless opulence: a terrible system, drawing after it the total dissolution of society; capable of being executed only by the most audacious wickedness, but never likely, when it is attempted, of failing, for a time at least, of success. This system produced astonishing effects for a limited period, just as an individual who, in a few years, squanders a great fortune, outshines all those who live wholly on the fruits of their industry. But the inevitable period of weakness soon arrives; the maniac who exerts his demoniac strength cannot in the end withstand the steady efforts of intelligence. The career of extravagance is in general short; bankruptcy arrests alike the waste of improvidence and the fleeting splendour which attends it. landed property in the kingdom, which of these individuals received three francs arose from the decrees of the Conven-a-day as his wages for seeking out tion against the emigrants, clergy, and persons convicted at the Revolutionary Tribunals; and the unbounded issue of assignats on the security of the national domains. These great measures, which no government could have attempted except during the fervour of a revolution, mutually, though for a brief period, upheld each other, and perpetuated the revolutionary system by the important interests which were made to depend on its continuance. The immense levy of soldiers drew off almost all the ardent and energetic spirits, and not only furnished bread to the multitudes whom the closing of all pacific employments had deprived of subsistence, but let off in immense channels the inflamed and diseased blood of the nation; the confiscation of the land placed funds worth above £700,000,000 sterling at the disposal of the government, which they were enabled to squander with boundless profusion in the maintenance of the revolutionary regime at home, and the contest with its enemies abroad; the extraordinary issue of paper, to the amount ultimately of £350,000,000, always enabled the treasury to liquidate the demands upon it, and interested every holder of property in the kingdom in the support of the national domains, the only security on which it rested. During the unparalleled and almost demoniac energy produced by the sudden operation of these powerful causes, France was unconquerable; and it was their combined operation which brought it triumphant through that violent and unprecedented crisis. 55. Cambon, the minister of finance, in August 1793, made an important and astonishing revelation of the length to which the issue of assignats had been carried under the Reign of Terror. The national expenses had exceeded 300,000,000 of francs, or above £12,000,000 a-month; the receipts of the treasury, during the disorder which prevailed, never reached a fourth part of that sum ; and there was no mode of 54. Europe has had too much reason supplying the deficiency but by an into become acquainted with the military cessant issue of paper money. power developed by France during this quantity in circulation on the 15th eventful period; but the civil force August 1793 amounted to 3,775,846,033 exerted by the dictators within their livres, or £151,000,000; the quantity own dominions, though less generally issued since the commencement of the known, was perhaps still more remark- Revolution had been no less than able. Forty-eight thousand revolution- 5,100,000,000 francs, or £204,000,000 ary committees were soon established sterling. This system continued during in the Republic, being one in each the whole Reign of Terror, and procommune, and embracing above 500,000 duced a total confusion of property of members, all the most resolute and de- every sort. All the persons employed termined of the Jacobin party. Each | by government, both in the civil and The military departments, were paid in the paper currency at par; but as it rapidly fell, from the enormous quantity in circulation, to a tenth part, and soon a twentieth of its value, the pay received was merely nominal, and those in the receipt of the largest apparent incomes were in want of the common necessaries of life. Pichegru, at the head of the army of the north, with a nominal pay of four thousand francs a-month, was in the actual receipt on the Rhine, in 1795, of only two hundred francs, or £8 sterling in gold or silver a smaller sum than the pay of an English lieutenant; and Hoche, the commander of a hundred thousand men, the army of La Vendée, besought the government to send him a horse, as he was unable to purchase one, and the military requisitions had exhausted all those in the country where he commanded. If such was the condition of the superior, it may be imagined what was the situation of the inferior officers and private soldiers. While in their own country, and deprived of the resource of foreign plunder, they were literally starving; and the necessity of conquest was felt as strongly, to enable them to live on the spoils of their enemies, as to avert the sword of desolation from the frontiers of France. paid in paper, than if paid in the precious metals. It is needless to say that this forced attempt to sustain the value of the assignats proved totally nugatory; and the consequences soon became fatal to many classes of persons. Debtors of every description hastened to discharge their obligations; and the creditors, compelled to accept paper at par, which was not worth a fifth or tenth, at last not a hundredth, of its nominal value, were defrauded of nearly the whole of their property. But their outcries were speedily drowned in the shout of the far more numerous body of debtors liberated from their demands. These transports, however, were of short duration, and the labouring classes from the very first were ruined beyond redemption. Their wages, in consequence of the total destruction of credit, general decline of consumption, and universal stagnation of industry, had by no means risen in proportion to this fall in the value of the assignats, and they found themselves miserably off for the necessaries of life; while the farmers, raising the price of their provisions in proportion to the fall in the value of paper, soon elevated them beyond the reach of the labouring poor. This state of things, so opposite to what they had been led to 56. This constant and increasing de- expect as the result of a revolution, preciation of the assignats produced its excited the most vehement discontent natural and unavoidable effect in an among the working classes; they asunprecedented enhancement of the price cribed it all, as is always the case in of provisions and all the articles of hu- similar circumstances, to the efforts of man consumption. The assignats were aristocrats and forestallers, and demandnot absorbed in the purchase of the na-ed with loud cries that they should be tional domains, because the holders led out to the guillotine. were distrustful of the security of the revolutionary title, which they could alone receive; and as their issue continued at the rate of £10,000,000 sterling a-month, of course the market became gorged, and the value of these securities rapidly declined. Though this depreciation was unavoidable, the Convention endeavoured to arrest it, and enacted the punishment of six years in irons against any who should exchange any quantity of silver or gold for a greater nominal value of assignats; or should ask a larger price for any articles of merchandise, if the price was 57. It became then absolutely necessary to have recourse to a maximum: powerful as the Committee of Public Salvation was, a longer continuance of the public discontents would have endangered its existence. Corn, indeed, was not wanting; but the farmers, dreading the tumult and violence of the markets, and unwilling to part with their produce at the nominal value of the assignats, refused to bring it to the towns. To such a pitch did this evil arise in the beginning of May 1793, that the Convention was forced to issue a decree, compelling the farmers and ner. reservoirs by which their industry is maintained. During the perils and chances of a revolution, the tendency to gambling of every sort prodigiously increased. Men who had the sword of Damocles continually suspended over their heads, sought to make the most of the numerous chances of making of the assignats, and the boundless profusion of articles of luxury, brought into the market by the ruin of their owners, naturally occasioned. So enor grain-merchants to declare what stock | tendency to turn from the people the they had in their possession, and to bring it to the public markets at a price fixed by each commune. Domiciliary visits were authorised, to inspect the stock of each holder of corn, and false returns were punished by a forfeiture of the whole. In addition to this, the distribution of bread by the bakers was provided for in the most minute man-money which the rapid issue and fall No one could obtain it without producing a carte de sûreté, issued by the revolutionary committees; and on that carte was inscribed the number of his family, and the quantity to be de-mous did these evils become that on livered to each member. Finally, to put an end to the scandalous scenes which generally took place at the bakers' doors, it was enacted that every bread shop should have a rope attached to it; each person, as he arrived, was obliged to take it in his hand, and remain quietly there till all before him were served. But in the struggles of discontent and famine, the cord was frequently broken, fierce conflicts ensued, and nothing but a prompt interposition of military force was able to restore tranquillity. To such minute and vexatious regulations are governments reduced when they once violate the freedom of human action; and to such a load of fetters do the people in the end subject themselves, when they give way to the insane passion for democratic power. 58. All the other articles of subsistence as well as corn speedily rose with the increased issue of the assignats, and the people persisted in ascribing to forestallers the natural consequences of a depreciated circulation. Frightful tumults in consequence arose; the boats which descended the Seine with groceries, fruits, and wood, were seized and plundered. Terrified at the continual recurrence of these disorders, the capitalists declined investing their money in purchases of any sort; and the shares in foreign mercantile companies rose rapidly from the increased demand for them, as the only investment affording a tolerable degree of security another striking proof of the disastrous influence of the disorders consequent on popular ambition, and their 26th July 1793 the forestalling of provisions was declared a capital crime; and the penalty of death was in like manner extended to all those who retained articles of subsistence without bringing them to daily sale, or who did not, within eight days from the publication of the decree, make a declaration to the municipal officers of their district, of the amount of provisions, including wine and oil, they had on hand, with a specification of the proportions in which they were going to bring them to market. 59. The bourse of Paris was crowded with bankers, revolutionists, ci-devant priests, ruined nobles, and adventurers of every description, who sometimes made enormous gains, and passed a life of debauchery with actresses, operadancers, and abandoned women of every description, whom the dissolution of society had brought in contact with those who had risen for the moment on the wheels of fortune. Such was the universal profligacy of manners, arising from the dread of popular jealousy, that almost all the members of the Convention lived publicly with mistresses, who became possessed of much of their influence in the state. To have done otherwise would have exposed them to the blasting suspicion of being Christians and Royalists. This prevailing profligacy appeared in the most striking manner in the great number of divorces which took place during this calamitous period of French history. They were owing partly to marriage being now declared a civil contract, which might be dissolved at any time at the pleasure of the contracting parties; partly to the irreligion and lax morality of the age; and partly to the dreadful uncertainty of life, and the thirst for immediate enjoyment, which had seized all classes from that uncertainty. From these combined causes, the morality of the age, as measured by the relations of the sexes, sank lower in revolutionary France than it had ever done in modern Europe; and the number of divorces,* in the first burst of social regeneration, exceeded what had been known in Rome under the despotism of the Cæsars. So far did the universal fervour and the license of passion proceed, that it led to the institution of clubs for women, where political subjects of all sorts were discussed with all the vehemence and impassioned feeling which characterise the softer sex. One of these female clubs was held in a hall adjoining that of the Jacobins, and speedily became the favourite resort of the most noted actresses and courtesans in Paris. One of the former, named Rose Lacombe, acquired great celebrity by her fearless demeanour, her beauty, and ardent declamations in favour of republican principles. The disorders consequent on these female assemblies, which had six thousand members, at length became so flagrant, that they attracted the notice of the Convention and municipality. Chaumette had the address to persuade the female patriots who had forced their way into the hall of the municipality, that they had mistaken the real theatre of their power, and that, instead of aiming at dividing the government of the state with men, they would do better to acquire an undivided dominion by ruling the men. The female clubs were soon after closed by order of the Convention. 60. Nor was the state of the prisons in Paris and over France a less extraordinary and memorable monument of the Reign of Terror. When the Girondists were overthrown, on the 31st May 1793, the number of prisoners in the different jails of Paris was about 1150; but, before three months of the Reign of Terror had elapsed, their number was doubled, and it gradually rose to an average of six, seven, and at last eight thousand, constantly in captivity in the metropolis alone. The whole prisons in the capital being filled by this prodigious crowd, the castle of Vincennes was surveyed with a view to additional accommodation, and the Jacobins boasted it could contain six or seven thousand more. The official bulletins, published weekly, of the number of prisoners in the jails of Paris, is one of the most interesting monuments of the Revolution, and Leveaux's Journal de la Montagne, the Jacobin organ of Paris, set up on the 2d June 1793, has at least done one service to humanity by having preserved the dismal record. It is equalled only by the catalogue of the executions, which, long averaging from seven to ten, at length rose to forty and fifty, and, on the fall of Robespierre, had * The following Table-one of the most curious records of the Revolution-compiled from the Moniteur of the dates under mentioned, shows the marriages and divorces in Paris during part of the Reign of Terror : The marriages and divorces-or "état civil," as it is called-are published very irregularly in the Moniteur. ↑ "Nature,' said Chaumette, has said to man, Be a man; to woman, Be a woman, and you will become the divinity of life. Imprudent women, who wish to act the part of men! are you not already well enough off? You sway all our senses. Your despotism is that of love, and consequently of nature.' At these words the women pulled off the red cap.”— LAMARTINE, Histoire des Girondins, vii. 355. "Repair to Vincennes. Six or seven thousand prisoners might be quartered there."Note de PAYAN; Papiers trouvés chez ROBESPIERRE, ii. 403. at times reached eighty a-day. Apply latter stages had risen to three hundred these numbers to the remainder of thousand, of whom, for a month before France, which, considering the enor- the fall of Robespierre, from two to three mous accumulation of prisoners at thousand were daily put to death by the Lyons, Toulon, and La Vendée, and the guillotine;-at least a hundred times the revolutionary tribunals at work in al- number of prisoners, and a thousand most every considerable town, espe- times the number of executions, that, cially Nantes, Toulon, Bordeaux, Lyons, since the atrocious era of the revocation Strassburg, and Arras, seems not be- of the Edict of Nantes, had disgraced yond the bounds of probability, and the worst period of the monarchy.* call the population of Paris 650,000, or about a fortieth part of the whole population of France, which at that period contained about 26,000,000 souls,-and we shall arrive at the result, that at the commencement of the Reign of Terror, the number of persons in jail, almost all for political offences, was over all France forty-five thousand, and in its 61. The forced requisitions of horses, ammunition, provisions, and stores of every sort from the people, soon proved the source of infinite and most vexatious burdens. In August 1793, eighteen commissioners were nominated by the Convention, with powers to require from the primary assemblies, in every part of France, unlimited supplies of Immense as these numbers are, we have the authority of an unexceptionable witness for the fact, that, during the last five months of the period, they were in reality at least 1000 greater every week than these returns exhibit.-Déposition de LECOINTRE; Procès de FOUQUIER-TINVILLE, No. XV.-One reason of this was, that from the date of the decree in June 1794, directing state prisoners from the departments in many cases to be forwarded to Paris, the prisoners in the Conciergerie, one of the largest jails in that city, to which these foreign detachments were sent, were not included in the returns, and "Le séjour de votre potentat, railles Que ces proscriptions comblent de funérailles; -Sertorius. Act jji, scene 2. |