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Travels in France
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General SummaryDURING the years 1787, 1788, and 1789 Arthur Young, an Englishman of means, leisure, and intelligence, made three extended journeys in France. Young, who was much interested in the improvement of farming methods, went to France particularly to study the agricultural situation there, but his observant eyes did not miss many aspects of the economic and political conditions prevailing at the outbreak of the Revolution. His Travels is therefore a book of considerable historical interest, from the sidelights it throws on the life and manners of the French people under the Old Régime.
101. Defective Administration of Justice2
Take the road to Lourdes, where is a castle on a rock, garrisoned
for the mere purpose of keeping state prisoners, sent
hither by lettres de cachet. Seven or eight are known to be here
at present; thirty have been here at a time; and many for life.
They were torn by the hand of jealous tyranny from the bosom
of domestic comfort; from wives, children, friends, and hurried
for crimes unknown to themselves — more probably for virtues
to languish in this detested abode of misery and die of despair.
Oh, liberty! liberty! — and yet this is the mildest government
of any considerable country in Europe, our own excepted. The
dispensations of Providence seem to have permitted the human
race to exist only as the prey of tyrants, as it has made pigeons
for the prey of hawks.
I was sorry to see, at the village, a pillory erected, to which a
chain and heavy iron collar are fastened, as a mark of the lordly
arrogance of the nobility and the slavery of the people. I asked
why it was not burned, with the horror it merited? The question
did not excite the surprise I expected, and which it would
have done before the French Revolution.1 This led to a conversation,
by which I learned that in the High Savoy there
are no seigneurs, and the people are generally at their ease;
possessing little properties, and the land in spite of nature almost
as valuable as in the lower country, where the people are poor
and ill at their ease. I demanded why? "Because there are
seigneurs everywhere." What a vice is it, and even a curse,
that the gentry, instead of being the cherishers and benefactors
of their poor neighbors, should thus, by the abomination of feudal
rights, prove mere tyrants. Will nothing but revolutions, which
cause their chateaux to be burnt, induce them to give to reason
and humanity what will be extorted by violence and commotion?
2 Young, , pp. 60, 278–279.
1 This entry in Young’s journal is under date December 24, 1789.
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Chicago:
"Defective Administration of Justice," Travels in France in Readings in Modern European History, ed. Webster, Hutton (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1926), 213. Original Sources, accessed July 3, 2025, http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=D2GXXVUUGH2PIFA.
MLA:
. "Defective Administration of Justice." Travels in France, in Readings in Modern European History, edited by Webster, Hutton, Boston, D.C. Heath, 1926, page 213. Original Sources. 3 Jul. 2025. http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=D2GXXVUUGH2PIFA.
Harvard:
, 'Defective Administration of Justice' in Travels in France. cited in 1926, Readings in Modern European History, ed. , D.C. Heath, Boston, pp.213. Original Sources, retrieved 3 July 2025, from http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=D2GXXVUUGH2PIFA.
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