As soon as he sets foot in Normandy he is surrounded, and a sentinel is placed at his door .-- The Intendant of Besancon 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."[1305]--At Besancon, 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-Comte 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 individual considers himself relieved from all kinds of obligation, when public authority no longer dares make itself felt, and it is a crime to have been clothed with it, what can be expected of our efforts to restore order ?"[1306] All that remains of this great demolished State is forty thousand groups of people, each separated and isolated, in towns and small market villages where municipal bodies, elected committees, and improvised National Guards strive to prevent the worst excesses .-- But these local chiefs are novices; they are human, and they are timid.

Chosen by acclamation they believe in popular rights; in the midst of riots they feel themselves in danger.

Hence, they generally obey the crowd.
"Rarely," says one of the provincial commissions reports, "do the municipal authorities issue a summons; they allow the greatest excesses rather than enter upon prosecutions for which, sooner or later, they may be held responsible by their fellow-citizens.