Liberty, equality, and the majesty of the law exist nowhere, except in words.

Of the three thousand decrees given birth to by the Constituent Assembly, the most lauded, those the best set off by a philosophic baptism, form a mass of stillborn abortions of which France is the burying-ground.

That which really subsists underneath the false appearances of right, proclaimed and sworn to over and over again, is, on the one hand, an oppression of the upper and cultivated classes, from which all the rights of man are withdrawn, and, on the other hand, the tyranny of the fanatical and brutal rabble which assumes to itself all the rights of sovereignty.
II .-- The Assembly hostile to the oppressed and favoring oppressors.
Decrees against the nobles and clergy .-- Amnesty for deserters, convicts, and bandits .-- Anarchical and leveling maxims.
In vain do the honest men of the Assembly protest against this scandal and this overthrow.

The Assembly, guided and forced by the Jacobins, will only amend the law to damn the oppressed and to authorize their oppressors .-- Without making any distinction between armed assemblages at Coblentz, which it had a right to punish, and refugees, three times as numerous, old men, women and children, so many indifferent and inoffensive people, not merely nobles but plebeians,[2312] who left the soil only to escape popular outrages, it confiscates the property of all emigrants and orders this to be sold.[2313] Through the new restriction of the passport, those who remain are tied to their domiciles, their freedom of movement, even in the interior, being subject to the decision of each Jacobin municipality.[2314] It completes their ruin by depriving them without indemnity of all income from their real estate, of all the seignorial rights which the Constituent Assembly had declared to be legitimate.[2315] It abolishes, as far as it can, their history and their past, by burning in the public depots their genealogical titles.[2316]--To all unsworn ecclesiastics, two-thirds of the French clergy, it withholds bread, the small pension allowed them for food, which is the ransom of their confiscated possessions;[2317] it declares them "suspected of revolt against the law and of bad intentions against the country;" it subjects them to special surveillance; it authorizes their expulsion without trial by local rulers in case of disturbances; it decrees that in such cases they shall be banished.[2318] It suppresses "all secular congregations of men and women ecclesiastic or laic, even those wholly devoted to hospital service will take away from 600,000 children the means of learning to read and write."[2319] It lays injunctions on their dress; it places episcopal palaces in the market for sale, also the buildings still occupied by monks and nuns.[2320] It welcomes with rounds of applause a married priest who introduces his wife to the Assembly .-- Not only is the Assembly destructive but it is insulting; the authors of each decree passed by it add to its thunderbolt the rattling hail of their own abuse and slander.
"Children," says a deputy, "have the poison of aristocracy and fanaticism injected into them by the congregations."[2321] "Purge the rural districts of the vermin which is devouring them!"-- "Everybody knows," says Isnard, "that the priest is as cowardly as he is vindictive...

Let these pestiferous fellows be sent back to Roman and Italian lazarettos..