A region such as this in England would be rich, not in historic ruins and historic recollections alone, but in ancient strongholds of feudal power converted gradually, through the gradual progress of a strong and steadfast race, into stately modern homes. It would have its Warwick Castle and its Charlecote, its Guy's Cliff and its Stoneleigh, as well as its Kenilworth.
But in the great houses and the châteaux, of which there is no lack in the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, there is little now that is historic, save their names and their sites. They are standing witnesses to the essentially criminal and senseless character of the Revolution of 1789. The _Jacqueries_ which Arthur Young found raging all over France during that year of ill omen were not much less brutal and they were much more inexcusable than the _Jacqueries_ of 1357 for which the Comte de Foix and the Captal de Buch exacted the stern vengeance chronicled by Froissart. They were the cause and not the consequence of that emigration of the landed classes which contributed so much to the downfall of law and order in France.
They were one of the justifying causes, not one of the excusable consequences, of the armed coalitions of the Continent against Revolutionary France. Pétion and the other scoundrels in Paris who stirred them up were doubtless 'political' criminals, to adopt a distinction without a difference much in favour in our times. But the peasants who took an active part in these crimes were simply brigands and assassins. They murdered men, they tortured women and children, they pillaged houses, while the King of France and Navarre was assembling the States-General to reform the abuses of the government. France was at peace with all the world. It was the fashion at Versailles and in the drawing-rooms of Paris to fall into spasms of sentimental emotion over periwinkles and over peasants--to rave about the instinctive nobility of human nature and the inherent Rights of Man. Never was any country in the world in less danger of being trampled under foot by 'tyrants and oppressors' than was France in 1789, when of a sudden, all over the kingdom, the peasants, who were about to be liberated and crowned with flowers, rose like wolves upon the landholders who were to liberate and to crown them--burst by night into defenceless châteaux, dragged tender women and young children out of their beds, and drove them out into the world penniless and to starve, demolished all the valuables they could not carry away, wrecked the buildings, burned the pictures, the works of art, and the libraries.