Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The French Revolution - Volume 1 by Hippolyte Taine
page 82 of 535 (15%)
soon as he sets foot in Normandy he is surrounded, and a sentinel is
placed at his door. -- The Intendant of Besançon takes to flight;
that of Rouen sees his dwelling sacked from top to bottom, and
escapes amid the shouts of a mob demanding his head. - At Rennes,
the Dean of the Parliament is arrested, maltreated, kept in his room
with a guard over him, and then, although ill, sent out of the town
under an escort. -- At Strasbourg "thirty-six houses of magistrates
are marked for pillage."[5] -- At Besançon, the President of the
Parliament is constrained to let out of prison the insurgents
arrested in a late out-break, and to publicly burn the whole of the
papers belonging to the prosecution. - In Alsace, since the
beginning of the troubles, the provosts were obliged to fly, the
bailiffs and manorial judges hid themselves, the forest-inspectors
ran away, and the houses of the guards were demolished. One man,
sixty years of age, is outrageously beaten and marched about the
village, the people, meanwhile, pulling out his hair; nothing
remains of his dwelling but the walls and a portion of the roof.
All his furniture and effects are broken up, burnt or stolen. He is
forced to sign, along with his wife, an act by which he binds
himself to refund all penalties inflicted by him, and to abandon all
claims for damages for the injuries to which he has just been
subjected. -- In Franche-Comté the authorities dare not condemn
delinquents, and the police do not arrest them; the military
commandant writes that "crimes of every kind are on the increase,
and that he has no means of punishing them." Insubordination is
permanent in all the provinces; one of the provincial commissions
states with sadness:

"When all powers are in confusion and annihilated, when public
force no longer exists, when all ties are sundered, when every
DigitalOcean Referral Badge