To speak badly means to speak badly of the people.
What has Reveillon said?
Nobody knows, but popular imagination with its terrible powers of invention and precision, readily fabricates or welcomes a murderous phrase.

He said that "a working-man with a wife and children could live on fifteen sous a day." Such a man is a traitor, and must be disposed of at once; "all his belongings must be put to fire and sword." The rumor, it must be noted, is false.[1212] Reveillon pays his poorest workman twenty-five sous a day, he provides work for three hundred and fifty, and, in spite of a dull season the previous winter, he kept all on at the same rate of wages.

He himself was once a workman, and obtained a medal for his inventions, and is benevolent and respected by all respectable persons .-- All this avails nothing; bands of vagabonds and foreigners, who have just passed through the barriers, do not look so closely into matters, while the Journeymen, the carters, the cobblers, the masons, the braziers, and the stone-cutters whom they go to solicit in their lodgings are just as ignorant as they are.

When irritation has accumulated, it breaks out haphazardly.
Just at this time the clergy of Paris renounce their privileges in way of imposts,[1213] and the people, taking friends for adversaries, add in their invectives the name of the clergy to that of Reveillon.

During the whole of the day, and also during the leisure of Sunday, the fermentation increases; on Monday the 27th, another day of idleness and drunkenness, the bands begin to move.