Scaramouche The Kingmaker by Rafael Sabatini

Author:Rafael Sabatini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction
Publisher: gwbooks
Published: 2010-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXV

THE INTERDICT

Life in Paris was becoming uncomfortable. The results of government by Utopian ideals began to make themselves felt. In the words of Saint-Just, "misery had given birth to the Revolution, and misery might destroy it". The immediate cause lay in the fact that, again to quote the fidus Achates of Robespierre, "the multitude which had recently been living upon the superfluities of luxury and by the vices of another class", found itself without means of subsistence.

In less revolutionary language this means that the vast mass of the people which found employment so long as there was a wealthy nobility to employ it, was now, under the beneficent rule of equality, unemployed and faced with destitution. Not only were these unfortunates without the means to purchase food, but food itself was becoming difficult to purchase. The farmers were becoming increasingly reluctant to market their produce, in exchange for paper money which was daily depreciating in value.

For this depreciation, partly resulting from the flood of assignats in which the country was submerged, the Convention denounced the forgers who were at work. The Convention beheld in them the agents of the foreign despots who sought by these means to push the Nation into bankruptcy. This was, of course, a gross exaggeration; it possessed nevertheless some slight basis of truth. We do know of the activities of that printing-press at Charonne, and of the reckless prodigality with which de Batz was putting in circulation the beautiful paper money manufactured there by the extraordinarily skilful Balthazar Roussel. De Batz served two purposes at once: directly, he corrupted by means of this inexhaustible wealth those members of the government whom he found corruptible: indirectly, he increased the flood of forgeries that was so seriously embarrassing the Convention and diluting the shrunken resources of the Nation.

Saint-Just had a crack-brained notion of relieving matters by using grain as currency. Thus he felt that the agriculturists might be induced to part with it in exchange for other substances. But agriculturists, being by the very nature of their activities self-supporting, the scheme, otherwise impracticable, held little promise of success and was never put into execution. Industry and manufacture languished. Conscription was absorbing some seven hundred and fifty thousand men into its fourteen armies. But apart from this there was little employment to be found. The tanneries were idle, iron and wool were almost as scarce as bread. What little was produced barely sufficed for home consumption, so that nothing was left for export, and consequently the foreign exchanges rose steadily against France.

To the physical depression arising out of this came in the early days of that July of 1793, style esclave, Messidor of the Year 2 by the calendar of Liberty One and Indivisible, a moral depression resulting from the disasters to French arms, despite the unparalleled masses which conscription had enrolled.

And when on the anniversary that year of the fall of the Bastille came the assassination of the popular idol Marat by a young woman concerned to avenge the unfortunate Girondins, Paris went mad with rage.

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