[The Origins of Contemporary France<br> Volume 4 (of 6) by Hippolyte A. Taine]@TWC D-Link book
The Origins of Contemporary France
Volume 4 (of 6)

CHAPTER I
14/88

The question involved is truth.

We are its guardians, its champions, its ministers, and never did the servants of truth apply force with such minute detail and such effect to the extirpation of error.
V.Equality and Inequality.
Social inequality .-- Malice of the aristocratic race.
-- Measures against the King and Nobles .-- Malice of the aristocracy of wealth .-- Measures against landowners, capitalists and people with incomes .-- Destruction of large fortunes .-- Measures taken to prevent the large fortunes in reconstituting themselves.
Next to superstition there is another monster to be destroyed, and, also here it was the Constituent Assembly that had begun the assault.

But it had also, through lack of courage or of logic, it stopped, after two or three feeble blows: * Banning of heraldic insignia, titles of nobility and territorial names; * abolition, without indemnity, of all the dues belonging to the seigneur by right of his former proprietorship over persons; * abolition of the permission to purchase other feudal rights at a price agreed upon, * limitation of royal power.

This was little enough.

When it concerns usurpers and tyrants they must be treated in another fashion; for their privilege is, of itself, an outrage on the rights of man.


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