7543. REVOLUTION (French), Riots.—[continued].
Hitherto no acts of
popular violence had been produced by the
struggle for political reformation. Little riots,
on ordinary incidents, had taken place, as at
other times, in different parts of the kingdom,
in which some lives, perhaps a dozen or twenty,
had been lost; but in the month of April, 1788,
a more serious one occurred in Paris, unconnected,
indeed, with the revolutionary principle,
but making part of the history of the day. The
Faubourg St. Antoiné is a quarter of the city
inhabited entirely by the class of day laborers
and journeymen in every line. A rumor was
spread among them, that a great paper manufacturer,
of the name of Reveillon, had proposed,
on some occasion, that their wages should
be lowered to fifteen sous a day. Inflamed at
once into rage, and without inquiring into its
truth, they flew to his house in vast numbers,
destroyed everything in it, and in his magazines
and workshops, without secreting, however,
a pin's worth to themselves, and were continuing
this work of devastation, when the
regular troops were called in. Admonitions being
disregarded, they were of necessity fired on,
and a regular action ensued, in which about
one hundred and twenty of them were killed,
before the rest would disperse. There had
rarely passed a year without such a riot, in
some part or other of the Kingdom; and this is
distinguished only as contemporary with the
Revolution, although not produced by it.—
Autobiography. Washington ed. i, 89.
Ford ed., i, 124.
(1821)
