The rebel ranks had no real rearguard enforcers. By this point, even the organizers had begun to doubt themselves.
Seeing that no one was stopping them, more and more people turned and fled. The rebel formation began to collapse, but the French Army was in no hurry to pursue.
The Kingdom of Sardinia's troops were still nearby, and they would never let those rebels go. Every one of them was a military merit waiting to be claimed.
The French Army was not so rigid-minded. Their mission was merely to suppress the rebellion; the mopping-up was naturally for the Sardinian troops to handle themselves.
The French Army had more important things to do: loot. They could be called highly professional in that regard. They had done the same all along the way.
First, officers from high society selected the targets, then the soldiers followed their directions and began systematic plundering.
The French Army's main targets were former palaces and aristocratic estates, as well as libraries and museums.
Looting museums was easy enough to understand—antiques were worth a great deal of money. But looting libraries left many people scratching their heads.
There was, in fact, something deeply counterintuitive about it. Modern people lived in an age of information explosion and had extremely cheap ways of searching for information.
Yet in the nineteenth century, an ancient book or a map recording precise information could be worth a fortune. Even a single crucial map of a region could decide the outcome of a war.
After all, there was no satellite navigation then. Much of the time, armies could only march by the maps in their hands, their guides, and the instincts of their commanders.
As for their value to technology and cultural inheritance, such considerations seemed far too weightless when people were looting for