The government next wreaked its vengeance on a master of language, the rustic simplicity of whose satiric pamphlets proved an effective offensive weapon.
Paul Louis Courier, born in Paris in 1773, was one of the cleverest writers of the age. From his father, a rich bourgeois who in his youth had narrowly escaped being murdered because he had had an amour with a lady of rank, he inherited a burning hatred of the indolent and haughty aristocracy. At the age of twenty he entered an artillery regiment and served in the campaigns of the Revolution, but they only gave him a loathing of war. From his earliest youth literature had had a strong attraction for him, especially ancient literature, which he studied as a philologist. In 1795 he left his regiment, which was then besieging Mainz, without permission, and occupied himself with translating Latin authors. In 1798 we find him again in the army, in Italy; presently he is studying in Paris; then he returns to Italy in command of a squadron of artillery. He keeps quiet during the Empire, and after its fall lives the life of an agriculturist and Hellenist on his farm in Touraine.
It was the persecution by the victorious clerical party of every countryman, however insignificant, in whom they detected an enemy, which induced Paul Louis Courier to appear before the public as an author. In 1816 he wrote a _Petition to the Two Chambers_, employing for the first time that plain, shrewd rustic style which, with the purest Greek models in view, he was so successful in acquiring. In simple, clear, always moderate language he tells of the injuries inflicted by clerically disposed provincial tyrants upon unfortunate peasants guilty of not having taken off their hats to a priest or of having "spoken ill of the government." He confesses that there is probably a good foundation for the accusations, since in his part of the country the priests are not popular, and very few people know what the _government_ is. Then he shows how imprisonment for six months without a proper trial, and misery, sickness, and death brought upon the children and other relatives of the prisoners, are the punishment for perfectly trifling offences. Forty gendarmes are sent to a village directly it falls under the suspicion of "Bonapartism"; the suspected persons are taken naked from their beds and fettered like criminals. "They are carried off; their relations, their children would have followed them, if it had been permitted by authority. _Authority_, Messieurs! that is the great word in France.... Everywhere we see inscribed: _Not reasons, authority_. It is true that this authority is not the authority of the councils or of the fathers of the church, much less of the law; but it is the authority of the gendarmes, and that is as good as any other."