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* we have abandoned their persons and possessions to the claims and rancor of local jacqueries; * we have reduced them to emigration; * we imprison them if they stay at home; * we guillotine them if they return.
The jacqueries of the middle ages are renewed. Various districts of country, in which poverty has reached its climax, break into universal insurrection. It is a war levied by those who have nothing against those who have something. To have coin in the pocket, is to be the enemy. The cry is: Down with the rich; take all they have got, and divide the plunder amongst us.
They are a great popular movement, and every great popular movement, whatever may be its cause and object, always sets free the spirit of liberty from its final precipitate. New things spring into life every day. Here opens the stormy period of the Jacqueries, Pragueries, and Leagues. Authority wavers, unity is divided.
Such is the disposition and situation of people able to make advances in anarchical times, when the State falters and no longer performs its customary service, when property is no longer adequately protected by the public force, when jacqueries overspread the country and insurrections break out in the towns, when chateaux are sacked, archives burnt, shops broken into, provisions carried off and transportation is brought to a halt, when rents and leases are no longer paid, when the courts dare no longer convict, when the constable no longer dares serve a warrant, when the gendarmerie holds back, when the police fails to act, when repeated amnesties shield robbers and incendiaries, when a revolution brings into local and central power dishonest and impoverished adventurers hostile to every one that possesses property of any kind.
The estrangement of so many cities from the land necessarily drew them into a policy hostile to the land, which became more and more evident in the times of Edward the Third, the French Jacqueries, the Hussite wars, and the Peasant War in Germany. On the other hand, a commercial policy involved them in distant enterprises.
Then, in Wat Tyler's insurrections, in Munster Anabaptisms, in Jacqueries, they proved themselves to be masses, if nothing better, striking for awhile, by the mere weight of numbers, blows terrible, though aimless soon to be dispersed and slain in their turn by a disciplined and compact aristocracy.
Direct attacks. Jacqueries, effective confiscations and proclamation of the socialist creed. Indirect attacks. Bad administration of the public funds. Transformation of taxation and insignificance of the returns. Increased expenditures. The War-budget and subsistence after 1793. Paper money. Enormous issues of it. Credit of the Assignats run down.
From below, they have provoked, excused, amnestied, or tolerated and authorized all the popular attacks on property, countless insurrections, seven successive jacqueries, some of them so extensive as to cover eight or ten departments at the same time.
The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing. Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful commotions which were formerly called jacqueries, beside which purely political agitations are the merest child's play, which are no longer the conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the revolt of discomfort against comfort. Then everything crumbles.
Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people. It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenth century, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut short. The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed with the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed the door of ill and opened the door of good.
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