第820章

At Evreux,[124] Germinal 21, a riot breaks out, owing to the delivery of only two pounds of flour per head and per week, and because three days before, only a pound and a half was delivered. There is a riot at Dieppe,[125] Prairial 14 and 15, because "the people are reduced here to three or four ounces of bread." There is another at Vervins, Prairial 9, because the municipality which obtains bread at a cost of seven and eight francs a pound, raises the price from twenty-five to fifty sous. At Lille, an insurrection breaks out Messidor 4, because the municipality, paying nine francs for bread, can give it to the poor only for about twenty and thirty sous. - Lyons, during the month of Niv?se, remains without bread "for five full days."[126] At Chartres, Thermidor 15,[127] the distribution of bread for a month is only eight ounces a day, and there is not enough to keep this up until the 20th of Thermidor. On the fifteenth of Fructidor, La Rochelle writes that "its public distributions, reduced to seven or eight ounces of bread, are on the point of failing entirely." For four months, at Painb?uf, the ration is but the quarter of a pound of bread.[128] And the same at Nantes, which has eighty-two thousand inhabitants and swarms with the wretched; "the distribution never exceeded four ounces a day," and that only for the past year. The same at Rouen, which contains sixty thousand inhabitants; and, in addition, within the past fortnight the distribution has failed three times. In other reports, those who are well-off suffer more than the indigent because they take no part in the communal distribution, "all resources for obtaining food being, so to say, interdicted to them." -Five ounces of bread per diem for four months is the allowance to the forty thousand inhabitants of Caen and its district.[129] A great many in the town, as well as in the country, live on bran and wild herbs." At the end of Prairial, "there is not a bushel of grain in the town storehouses, while the requisitions, enforced in the most rigorous and imposing style, produce nothing or next to nothing."Misery augments from week to week: "it is impossible to form any idea of it; the people of Caen live on brown bread and the blood of cattle.

. . . Every countenance bears traces of the famine. . . Faces are of livid hue. . . . It is impossible to await the new crop, until the end of Fructidor." - Such are the exclamations everywhere.

The object now, indeed, is to cross the narrowest and most terrible defile; a fortnight more of absolute fasting and hundreds of thousands of lives would be sacrificed.[130] At this moment the government half opens the doors of its storehouses; it lends a few sacks of flour on condition of re-payment, - for example, at Cherbourg a few hundreds of quintals of oats; by means of oat bread, the poor can subsist until the coming harvest. But above all, it doubles its guard and shows its bayonets. At Nancy, a traveler sees[131] "more than three thousand persons soliciting in vain for a few pounds of flour." They are dispersed with the butt-ends of muskets. - Thus are the peasantry taught patriotism and the townspeople patience. Physical constraint exercised on all in the name of all; this is the only procedure which an arbitrary socialism can resort to for the distribution of food and to discipline starvation.

VII. Misery at Paris.

Famine and misery at Paris. - Steps taken by the government to feed the capital. - Monthly cost to the Treasury. - Cold and hunger in the winter of 1794-1795. - Quality of the bread. - Daily rations diminished. - Suffering, especially of the populace. - Excessive physical suffering, despair, suicides, and deaths from exhaustion in 1795. - Government dinners and suppers. - Number of lives lost through want and war. - Socialism as applied, and its effects on comfort, well-being and mortality.

Anything that a totalitarian government may do to ensure that the capital is supplied with food is undertaken and carried out by this one, for here is its seat, and one more degree of dearth in Paris would overthrow it. Each week, on reading the daily reports of its agents,[132] it finds itself on the verge of explosion; twice, in Germinal and Prairial, a popular outbreak does overthrow it for a few hours, and, if it maintains itself, it is on the condition of either giving the needy a piece of bread or the hope of getting it.

Consequently, military posts are spaced out around Paris, up to eighteen leagues off, on all the highways; permanent patrols in correspondence with each other to urge on the wagoners and draft relays of horses on the spot. Escorts dispatched from Paris to meet convoys;[133] requisition "all the carts and all the horses whatever to effect transportation in preference to any other work or service."All communes traversed by a highway are ordered to put rubble and manure on the bad spots and cover the whole way with a layer of soil, so that the horses may drag their loads in spite of the slippery road.