I. Intellectual incapacity

     Intellectual incapacity.—How ideas are transformed into
     marvelous stories.

To comprehend their actions we ought now to look into the condition of their minds, to know the current train of their ideas, their mode of thinking. But is it really essential to draw this portrait, and are not the details of their mental condition we have just presented sufficient? We shall obtain a knowledge of them later, and through their actions, when, in Touraine, they knock a mayor and his assistant, chosen by themselves, senseless with kicks from their wooden shoes, because, in obeying the national Assembly, these two unfortunate men prepared a table of taxes; or when at Troyes, they drag through the streets and tear to pieces the venerable magistrate who was nourishing them at that very moment, and who had just dictated his testament in their favor. Take the still rude brain of a contemporary peasant and deprive it of the ideas which, for eighty years past, have entered it by so many channels, through the primary school of each village, through the return home of the conscript after seven years' service, through the prodigious multiplication of books, newspapers, roads, railroads, foreign travel and every other species of communication.5301 Try to imagine the peasant of the eighteenth century, penned and shut up from father to son in his hamlet, without parish highways, deprived of news, with no instruction but the Sunday sermon, continuously worrying about his daily bread and the taxes, "with his wretched, dried-up aspect,"5302 not daring to repair his house, always persecuted, distrustful, his mind contracted and stinted, so to say, by misery. His condition is almost that of his ox or his ass, while his ideas are those of his condition. He has been a long time stolid; "he lacks even instinct,"5303 mechanically and fixedly regarding the ground on which he drags along his hereditary plow. In 1751, d'Argenson wrote in his journal:

"nothing in the news from the court affects them; the reign is indifferent to them. . . . . the distance between the capital and the province daily widens. . . . Here they are ignorant of the striking occurrences that most impressed us at Paris. . . .The inhabitants of the country side are merely poverty-stricken slaves, draft cattle under a yoke, moving on as they are goaded, caring for nothing and embarrassed by nothing, provided they can eat and sleep at regular hours."

They make no complaints, "they do not even dream of complaining;"5304 their wretchedness seems to them natural like winter or hail. Their minds, like their agriculture, still belong to the middle ages. In the environment of Toulouse,5305 to ascertain who committed a robbery, to cure a man or a sick animal, they resort to a sorcerer, who divines this by means of a sieve. The countryman fully believes in ghosts and, on All Saints' eve, he lays the cloth for the dead.—In Auvergne, at the outbreak the Revolution, on a contagious fever making its appearance, M. de Montlosier, declared to be a sorcerer, is the cause of it, and two hundred men assemble together to demolish his dwelling. Their religious belief is on the same level.5306 "Their priests drink with them and sell them absolution. On Sundays, at the sermon, they put up lieutenancies and sub-lieutenancies (among the saints) for sale: so much for a lieutenant's place under St. Peter!—If the peasant hesitates in his bid, an eulogy of St. Peter at once begins, and then our peasants run it up fast enough."—To intellects in a primitive state, barren of ideas and crowded with images, idols on earth are as essential as idols in heaven. "No doubt whatever existed in my mind," says Rétit de la Bretonne,5307 "of the power of the king to compel any man to bestow his wife or daughter on me, and my village (Sacy, in Burgundy) thought as I did."5308 There is no room in minds of this description for abstract conceptions, for any idea of social order; they are submissive to it and that is all. "The mass of the people," writes Governor in 1789, "have no religion but that of their priests, no law but that of those above them, no morality but that of self-interest; these are the beings who, led on by drunken curates, are now on the high road to liberty, and the first use they make of it is to rebel on all sides because there is dearth."5309

How could things be otherwise? Every idea, previous to taking root in their brain, must possess a legendary form, as absurd as it is simple, adapted to their experiences, their faculties, their fears and their aspirations. Once planted in this uncultivated and fertile soil it vegetates and becomes transformed, developing into gross excrescences, somber foliage and poisonous fruit. The more monstrous the greater its vigor, clinging to the slightest of probabilities and tenacious against the most certain of demonstrations. Under Louis XV, in an arrest of vagabonds, a few children having been carried off willfully or by mistake, the rumor spreads that the king takes baths in blood to restore his exhausted functions, and, so true does this seem to be, the women, horrified through their maternal instincts, join in the riot; a policeman is seized and knocked down, and, on his demanding a confessor, a woman in the crowd, picking up a stone, cries out that he must not have time to go to heaven, and smashes his head with it, believing that she is performing an act of justice5310. Under Louis XVI evidence is presented to the people that there is no scarcity: in 1789, 5311 an officer, listening to the conversation of his soldiers, hears them state "with full belief that the princes and courtiers, with a view to starve Paris out, are throwing flour into the Seine." Turning to a quarter-master he asks him how he can possibly believe such an absurd story. "Lieutenant," he replies, "'tis time—the bags were tied with blue strings (cordons bleus)." To them this is a sufficient reason, and no argument could convince them to the contrary. Thus, among the dregs of society, foul and horrible romances are forged, in connection the famine and the Bastille, in which Louis XVI., the queen Marie Antoinette, the Comte d'Artois, Madame de Lamballe, the Polignacs, the revenue farmers, the seigniors and ladies of high rank are portrayed as vampires and ghouls. I have seen many editions of these in the pamphlets of the day, in the engravings not exhibited, and among popular prints and illustrations, the latter the most effective, since they appeal to the eye. They surpass the stories of Mandrin5312 and Cartouche, being exactly suitable for men whose literature consists of the popular laments of Mandrin and Cartouche.