ntinued
long to be parts of the Empire; and we shall see hereafter what that
implies. The peasants of Eastern France rose up in arms to overthrow
the ancient institutions of society, which the peasants of the West
gave their lives to restore.

Rumours of all this desolation soon penetrated to the Assembly, and on
August 3 it was officially reported that property was at the mercy of
gangs of brigands, that no castle, no convent, no farm-house was safe.
A committee moved to declare that no pretext could justify the
refusal to pay the same feudal dues as before. Duport proposed that
the motion be sent back to the Bureaux. The Assembly came to no
conclusion. In truth, the thing proposed was impossible. The Commons,
who now prevailed, could not, after sitting three months, re-impose,
even provisionally, burdens which were odious, which their
Instructions condemned, and which they all knew to be incapable of
defence. There had been time to provide: the crisis now found them
unprepared. The Court advised the nobles that nothing could save them
but a speedy surrender. They also were informed, by Barere; that some
of his friends intended to move the abolition of fiscal and feudal
privilege. They replied that they would do it themselves. Virieu, who
afterwards disappeared in a sortie, during the siege of Lyons, said to
a friend: "There are only two means of calming an excited populace,
kindness and force. We have no force; we hope to succeed by kindness."
They knew that precious time had been lost, and they resolved that the
surrender should be so ample as to be meritorious. It was to be not
the redress of practical grievances, but the complete establishment of
the new principle, equality.

At a conference held on the evening of August 3 it was agreed that the
self-sacrifice of the ancient aristocracy of France, and the
institution in its place of a society absolutely democratic, should be
made by the Duke d'Aiguillon, the owner of vast domains, who was about
to forfeit several thousands a year. But on August 4 the first to
speak was Noailles; then d'Aiguillon, followed by a deputy from
Brittany. You cannot repress violence, said the Breton, unless you
remove the injustice which is the cause of it. If you mean to proclaim
the Rights of Man, begin with those which are most flagrantly
violated. They proposed that rights abandoned to the State should be
ceded unconditionally, and that rights abandoned to the people should
be give