Neither labor nor consumption could be resumed for want of circulation; usury reigned on the ruins of society.
The alternations of high prices and the depreciation of commodities finally crushed the people.

Provision riots broke out among them, and even in the army.

Manufactures were languishing or suspended; forced mendicity was preying upon the cities.

The fields were deserted, the lands fallow for lack of instruments, for lack of manure, for lack of cattle; the houses were falling to ruin.

Monarchical France seemed ready to expire with its aged king."[78] Thus it was in France, with a population of nineteen millions at that time to the eight millions of all the British Islands; with a land vastly more fertile and productive; before the great days, too, of coal and iron.