The example set by Paris was immediately followed in the provinces. At Strasbourg, Lyons, Dijon, Troyes, Besançon, Rouen, Caen, all over the country, spontaneous risings occurred, directed against the authorities or practices of the Ancien Régime, and often accompanied by violence and bloodshed. The people, stimulated by the pressure of famine and by the feverish excitement of the time, and believing that the hour of their deliverance had come, determined to deliver themselves. In different places the outbreak took a hundred different forms. In garrison cities the people, imitating the Parisians, attacked the nearest fortress or castle, and, as in Paris, the troops generally fraternised with the assailants. In some quarters popular indignation was directed against the tax-offices and custom-houses, in some against the local magistrates, in some against the tithes, in some against the newly-introduced machinery, in some against the Jews, in most against corn-dealers and all concerned in trafficking in grain. In the towns the distressed workmen rose against the bourgeois, and against the unjust economic system, which had long rendered their condition unbearable. In the country districts the peasants rose against the iniquities of feudalism, and burned the monasteries and châteaux, where the court-rolls, the records of their hated liabilities, were kept. No doubt, with the desire to redress abuses there mingled, in the minds of an ignorant and embittered peasantry, a great deal of ferocity and crime. In many places indiscriminate war was declared against all kinds of property, and the outbreak took the form of a struggle between rich and poor. But the most notable features of the revolutionary movement were, first, its universality, and secondly, the powerlessness of the authorities to confront or to suppress it. Everywhere the agents of the administration collapsed. The Intendants, the law-courts, the police, completely paralysed, abdicated or disappeared, and the inhabitants of town and country alike, recognising the helplessness of the Government, gave way to an inevitable panic.