in 1788, let a crop fail, let bread cost four sous a pound, and let a workman in the charity-workshops earn only twelve sous a day,[44] can one imagine that people will resign themselves to death by starvation?  Around Rouen, during the winter of 1788, the forests are pillaged in open day, the woods at Baguères are wholly cut away, the fallen trees are publicly sold by the marauders[45].  Both the famished and the marauders go together, necessity making itself the accomplice of crime.  From province to province we can follow up their tracks:  four months later, in the vicinity of Etampes, fifteen brigands break into four farmhouses during the night, while the farmers, threatened by incendiaries, are obliged to give, one three hundred francs, another five hundred, all the money, probably, they have in their coffers[46].  “Robbers, convicts, the worthless of every species,” are to form the advance guard of insurrections and lead the peasantry to the extreme of violence[47].  After the sack of the Reveillon house in Paris it is remarked that “of the forty ringleaders arrested, there was scarcely one who was not an old offender, and either flogged or branded."[48] In every revolution the dregs of society come to the surface.  Never had these been visible before; like badgers in the woods, or rats in the sewers, they had remained in their burrows or in their holes.  They issue from these in swarms, and suddenly, in Paris, what figures![49] “Never had any like them been seen in daylight. . .  Where do they come from?  Who has brought them out of their obscure hiding places? . . . strangers from everywhere, armed with clubs, ragged, . . . some almost naked, others oddly dressed” in incongruous patches and “frightful to look at,” constitute the riotous chiefs or their subordinates, at six francs per head, behind which the people are to march.

“At Paris,” says Mercier,[50] “the people are weak, pallid, diminutive, stunted,” maltreated, “and, apparently, a class apart from other classes in the country.  The rich and the great who possess equipages, enjoy the privilege of crushing them or of mutilating them in the streets. . .  There is no convenience for pedestrians, no side-walks.  Hundred victims die annually under the carriage wheels.”  “I saw,” says Arthur Young, “a poor child run over and probably killed, and have been myself several times been covered from head to toe with the water from the gutter.  Should young (English) noblemen drive along London streets without sidewalks, in the same manner as their equals in Paris, they would speedily and justly get very well thrashed and rolled in the gutter.”

Mercier grows uneasy in the face of the immense populace: 

“In Paris there are, probably, 200,000 persons with no property intrinsically worth fifty crowns, and yet the city subsists!”