[The Origins of Contemporary France Volume 3 (of 6) by Hippolyte A. Taine]@TWC D-Link bookThe Origins of Contemporary France Volume 3 (of 6) CHAPTER III 3/70
Directories countermand ministerial orders. Here, municipalities brave the commands of their Directory; there, communities order around their mayor with a drawn sword.
Elsewhere, soldiers and sailors put their officers under arrest.
The accused insult the judge on the bench and force him to cancel his verdict; mobs tax or plunder wheat in the market; National Guards prevent its distribution, or seize it in the storehouses.
There is no security for property, lives, or consciences.
The majority of Frenchmen are deprived of their right to worship in their own faith, and of voting at the elections. There is no safety, day or night, for the elite of the nation, for ecclesiastics and the gentry, for army and navy officers, for rich merchants and large landed proprietors; no protection in the courts, no income from public funds; denunciations abound, expulsions, banishments to the interior, attacks on private houses; there is no right of free assemblage, even to enforce the law under the orders of legal authorities.[2310] Opposed to this, and in contrast with it, is the privilege and immunity of a sect formed into a political corporation, "which extends its filiations over the whole kingdom, and even abroad; which has its own treasury, its committees, and its by-laws; which rules the government, which judges justice,"[2311] and which, from the capital to the hamlet, usurps or directs the administration.
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