purchase it, insisted that all the merchants who were endeavoring to
save something of their little property by refusing to sell their
goods for the wretched currency with which France was flooded, should
be punished with death; the women of the markets and the hangers-on of
the Jacobin Club called loudly for a law "to equalize the value of
paper money and silver coin." It was also demanded that a tax be laid
especially on the rich, to the amount of four hundred million
_francs_, to buy bread. Marat declared loudly that the people, by
hanging shopkeepers and plundering stores, could easily remove the
trouble. The result was that on the 28th of February, 1793, at eight
o'clock in the evening, a mob of men and women in disguise began
plundering the stores and shops of Paris. At first they demanded only
bread; soon they insisted on coffee and rice and sugar; at last they
seized everything on which they could lay their hands--cloth,
clothing, groceries and luxuries of every kind. Two hundred such
places were plundered. This was endured for six hours and finally
order was restored only by a grant of seven million _francs_ to buy
off the mob. The new political economy was beginning to bear, its
fruits luxuriantly. A gaudy growth of it appeared at the City Hall of
Paris when, in response to the complaints of the plundered merchants,
Roux declared, in the midst of great applause, that "shopkeepers were
only giving back to the people what they had hitherto robbed them of."

The mob having thus been bought off by concessions and appeased by
oratory, the government gained time to think, and now came a series of
amazing expedients,--and yet all perfectly logical.

Three of these have gained in French history an evil pre-eminence, and
first of the three was the Forced Loan.