"What is going on in this valley is spreading more or less throughout France; it is the outcome of the hopes which the upheaval of 1789 caused to infiltrate, if I may use that expression, the minds of the peasantry, the sons of the soil.

The Revolution affected certain localities more than others.

This side of Burgundy, nearest to Paris, is one of those places where the revolutionary ideas spread like the overrunning of the Franks by the Gauls.

Historically, the peasants are still on the morrow of the Jacquerie; that defeat is burnt in upon their brain.

They have long forgotten the facts which have now passed into the condition of an instinctive idea.