The freedom of commerce is the right to use and to make use of, and not the right to tyrannize and prevent use. Those goods necessary to all should b… - Jacques Roux

For the last four years the rich alone have profited from the advantages of the Revolution. The merchant aristocracy, more terrible than that of the noble and sacerdotal aristocracy, has made a cruel game of invading individual fortunes and the treasury of the republic; we still don’t know what will be the term of their exactions, for the price of merchandise rises in a frightful manner, from morning to evening. Citizen Representatives, it is time that the combat unto death that the egoist carries out against the hardest working class of society come to an end. Pronounce against speculators and monopolists: either they’ll obey your decrees or they won’t. In the first hypothesis you will have saved the fatherland; in the second case you will still have saved the fatherland, for we will have been able to identify and strike the bloodsuckers of the people.

When France fought under kings and for kings it was intrepid and great; today when it fights for the people, for freedom, for the triumph of laws of its making; today, when it only takes out its sword at the call of justice, it must only sheath it at the song of victory, let us carry the pride of Spartans and the courage of Brutus as a tribute to the fatherland. Let our weapons be, not the honor that allied itself to crime, as among the nobles, but the love of equality and the hatred of tyrants. He who dies for the liberty of his country, lives eternally in glory. There is no destiny as glorious as that of crushing despotism, that of smashing, pulverizing, and annihilating those illustrious brigands, those decorated cowards who want to master us with so much pride and cruelty.

Freedom is nothing but a vain phantom when one class of men can starve another with impunity. Equality is nothing but a vain phantom when the rich, through monopoly, exercise the right of life or death over their like. The republic is nothing but a vain phantom when the counter-revolution can operate every day through the price of commodities, which three quarters of all citizens cannot afford without shedding tears.