The French Revolution - Volume 1

I.-Government by gangs in times of anarchy.

Case where anarchy is recent and suddenly brought on.-The

band that succeeds the fallen government and its

administrative tools.

The worst feature of anarchy is not so much the absence of the overthrown government as the rise of new governments of an inferior grade. In every state which breaks up, new groups will form to conquer and become sovereign: it was so in Gaul on the fall of the Roman empire, also under the latest of Charlemagne's successors; the same state of things exists now (1875) in Rumania and in Mexico. Adventurers, gangsters, corrupted or downgraded men, social outcasts, men overwhelmed with debts and lost to honor, vagabonds, deserters, dissolute troopers, born enemies of work, of subordination, and of the law, unite to break the worm-eaten barriers which still surround the sheep-like masses; and as they are unscrupulous, they slaughter on all occasions. On this foundation their authority rests; each in turn reigns in its own area, and their government, in keeping with its brutal masters, consists in robbery and murder; nothing else can be looked for from barbarians and brigands.

But never are they so dangerous as when, in a great State recently fallen, a sudden revolution places the central power in their hands; for they then regard themselves as the legitimate inheritors of the shattered government, and, under this title, they undertake to manage the commonwealth. Now in times of anarchy the ruling power does not proceed from above, but from below; and the chiefs, therefore, who would remain such, are obliged to follow the blind impulsion of their flock.3101 Hence the important and dominant personage, the one whose ideas prevail, the veritable successor of Richelieu and of Louis XIV. is here the subordinate Jacobin, the pillar of the club, the maker of motions, the street rioter, Panis Sergent, Hébert, Varlet, Henriot, Maillard, Fournier, Lazowski, or, still lower in the scale, the Marseilles "rough," the Faubourg gunner, the drinking market-porter who elaborates his political conceptions in the interval between his hiccups.3102-For information he has the rumors circulating in the streets which tell of a traitor to each house, and for confirmed knowledge the club slogans inciting him to rule over the vast machine. A machinery so vast and complicated, a whole assembly of entangled services ramifying in innumerable offices, with so much apparatus of special import, so delicate as to require constant adaptation to changing circumstances, diplomacy, finances, justice, army administration-all this surpasses his limited comprehension; a bottle cannot be made to contain the bulk of a hogshead.3103 In his narrow brain, perverted and turned topsy-turvy by the disproportionate notions put into it, only one idea suited to his gross instincts and aptitudes finds a place there, and that is the desire to kill his enemies; and these are also the State's enemies, however open or concealed, present or future, probable or even possible. He carries this savagery and bewilderment into politics, and hence the evil arising from his government. Simply a brigand, he would have murdered only to rob, and his murders would have been restricted. As representing the State, he undertakes wholesale massacres, of which he has the means ready at hand.-For he has not yet had time enough to take apart the old administrative implements; at all events the minor wheels, gendarmes, jailers, employees, book-keepers, and accountants, are always in their places and under control. There can be no resistance on the part of those arrested; accustomed to the protection of the laws and to peaceable ways and times, they have never relied on defending themselves nor ever could imagine that any one could be so summarily slain. As to the mass, rendered incapable of any effort of its own by ancient centralization, it remains inert and passive and lets things go their own way.-Hence, during many long, successive days, without being hurried or impeded, with official papers quite correct and accounts in perfect order, a massacre can be carried out with the same impunity and as methodically as cleaning the streets or clubbing stray dogs.3104

II.-The development of the ideas of killings in the mass of the party.

The morning after August 10.-The tribunal of August 17.

-The funereal fête of August 27.-The prison plot.

Let us trace the progress of the homicidal idea in the mass of the party. It lies at the very bottom of the revolutionary creed. Collot d'Herbois, two months after this, aptly says in the Jacobin tribune: "The second of September is the great article in the credo of our freedom."3105 It is peculiar to the Jacobin to consider himself as a legitimate sovereign, and to treat his adversaries not as belligerents, but as criminals. They are guilty of lèse-nation; they are outlaws, fit to be killed at all times and places, and deserve extinction, even when no longer able or in a condition do any harm.-Consequently, on the 10th of August the Swiss Guards, who do not fire a gun and who surrender, the wounded lying on the ground, their surgeons, the palace domestics, are killed; and worse still, persons like M. de Clermont-Tonnerre who pass quietly along the street. All this is now called in official phraseology the justice of the people.-On the 11th the Swiss Guards, collected in the Feuillants building, come near being massacred; the mob on the outside of it demand their heads;3106 "it conceives the project of visiting all the prisons in Paris to take out the prisoners and administer prompt justice on them."-On the 12th in the markets "diverse groups of the low class call Pétion a scoundrel," because "he saved the Swiss in the Palais Bourbon"; accordingly, "he and the Swiss must be hung to-day."-In these minds turned topsy-turvy the actual, palpable truth gives way to its opposite; "the attack was not begun by them; the order to sound the tocsin came from the palace; it is the palace which was besieging the nation, and not the nation which was besieging the palace."3107 The vanquished "are the assassins of the people," caught in the act; and on the 14th of August the Federates demand a court-martial "to avenge the death of their comrades."3108 And even a court-martial will not answer. "It is not sufficient to mete out punishment for crimes committed on the 10th of August, but the vengeance of the people must be extended to all conspirators;" to that "Lafayette, who probably was not in Paris, but who may have been there;" to all the ministers, generals, judges, and other officials guilty of maintaining legal order wherever it had been maintained, and of not having recognized the Jacobin government before it came into being. Let them be brought before, not the ordinary courts, which are not to be trusted because they belong to the defunct régime, but before a specially organized tribunal, a sort of "chambre ardente,"3109 elected by the sections, that is to say, by a Jacobin minority. These improvised judges must give judgment on conviction, without appeal; there must be no preliminary examinations, no interval of time between arrest and execution, no dilatory and protective formalities. And above all, the Assembly must be expeditious in passing the decree; "otherwise," it is informed by a delegate from the Commune,3110 "the tocsin will be rung at midnight and the general alarm sounded; for the people are tired of waiting to be avenged. Look out lest they do themselves justice!-A moment later, new threats and with an advanced deadline. "If the juries are not ready to act in two or three hours great misfortunes will overtake Paris."

Even if the new tribunal, set up on the spot, is quick, guillotining three innocent persons in five days; it does not move fast enough. On the 23rd of August one of the sections declares to the Commune in furious language that the people themselves, "wearied and indignant" with so many delays, mean to force open the prisons and massacre the inmates.3111-Not only do the sections harass the judges, but they force the accused into their presence: a deputation from the Commune and the Federates summons the Assembly "to transfer the criminals at Orleans to Paris to undergo the penalty of their heinous crimes". "Otherwise," says the speaker, "we will not answer for the vengeance of the people."3112 And in a still more imperative manner:

"You have heard and you know that insurrection is a sacred duty," a sacred duty towards and against all: towards the Assembly if it refuses, and towards the tribunal if it acquits. They dash at their prey contrary to all legislative and judicial formalities, like a kite across the web of a spider, while nothing detach them from their fixed ideas. On the acquittal of M. Luce de Montmorin3113 the gross audience, mistaking him for his cousin the former minister of Louis XVI., break out in murmurs. The president tries to enforce silence, which increases the uproar, and M. de Montmorin is in danger. On this the president, discovering a side issue, announces that one of the jurors is related to the accused, and that in such a case a new jury must be impaneled and a new trial take place; that the matter will be inquired into, and meanwhile the prisoner will be returned to the Conciergerie prison. Thereupon he takes M. de Montmorin by the arm and leads him out of the court-room, amidst the yells of the audience and not without risks to himself; in the outside court a soldier of the National Guard strikes at him with a saber, and the following day the court is obliged to authorize eight delegates from the audience to go and see with their own eyes that M. de Montmorin is really in prison.

At the moment of his acquittal a tragic remark is heard:

"You discharge him to-day and in two weeks he will cut our throats!"

Fear is evidently an adjunct of hatred. The Jacobin rabble is vaguely conscious of their inferior numbers, of their usurpation, of their danger, which increases in proportion as Brunswick draws near. They feel that they live above a mine, and if the mine should explode!-Since they think that their adversaries are scoundrels they feel they are capable of a dirty trick, of a plot, of a massacre. As they themselves have never behaved in any other way, they cannot conceive anything else. Through an inevitable inversion of thought, they impute to others the murderous intentions obscurely wrought out in the dark recesses of their own disturbed brains.-On the 27th of August, after the funeral procession gotten up by Sergent expressly to excite popular resentment, their suspicions, at once specific and guided, begin to take the form of certainty. Ten "commemorative" banners,3114 each borne by a volunteer on horseback, have paraded before all eyes the long list of massacres "by the court and its agents":

1. the massacre at Nancy,

2. the massacre at N?mes,

3. the massacre at Montauban,

4. the massacre at Avignon,

5. the massacre at La Chapelle,

6. the massacre at Carpentras,

7. the massacre of the Champ de Mars, etc.

Faced with such displays, doubts and misgivings are out of the question. To the women in the galleries, to the frequenters of the clubs, and to pikemen in the suburbs it is from now beyond any doubt proved that the aristocrats are habitual killers.

And on the other side there is another sign equally alarming "This lugubrious ceremony, which ought to inspire by turns both reflection and indignation,... did not generally produce that effect." The National Guard in uniform, who came "apparently to make up for not appearing on the day of action," did not behave themselves with civic propriety, but, on the contrary, put on "an air of inattention and even of noisy gaiety"; they come out of curiosity, like so many Parisian onlookers, and are much more numerous than the sans-culottes with their pikes.3115 The latter could count themselves and plainly see that they are just a minority, and a very small one, and that their rage finds no echo. The organizers and their stooges are the only ones to call for speedy sentencing and for death-penalties. A foreigner, a good observer, who questions the shop-keepers of whom he makes purchases, the tradesmen he knows, and the company he finds in the coffee-houses, writes that he never had "seen any symptom of a sanguinary disposition except in the galleries of the National Assembly and at the Jacobin Club," but then the galleries are full of paid "applauders,' especially "females, who are more noisy and to be had cheaper than males." At the Jacobin Club are "the leaders, who dread a turnaround or who have resentments to gratify3116": thus the only enragés are the leaders and the populace of the suburbs.-Lost in the crowd of this vast city, in the face of a National Guard still armed and three times their own number, confronting an indifferent or discontented bourgeoisie, the patriots are alarmed. In this state of anxiety a feverish imagination, exasperated by the waiting, involuntarily gives birth to imaginings passionately accepted as truths. All that is now required is an incident in order to put the final touch to complete the legend, the germ of which has unwittingly grown in their minds.

On the 1st of September a poor wagoner, Jean Julien,3117 condemned to twelve years in irons, has been exposed in the pillory. After two hours he becomes furious, probably on account of the jeers of the bystanders. With the coarseness of people of his kind he has vented his impotent rage by abuse, he has unbuttoned and exposed himself to the public, and has naturally chosen expressions which would appear most offensive to the people looking at him:

"Hurrah for the King! Hurrah for the Queen! Hurra for Lafayette! To hell with the nation!"

It is also natural that he missed being torn to pieces. He was at once led away to the Conciergerie prison, and sentenced on the spot to be guillotined as soon as possible, for being a promoter of sedition in connection with the conspiracy of August the 10th.-The conspiracy, accordingly, is still in existence. It is so declared by the tribunal, which makes no declaration without evidence. Jean Julien has certainly confessed; now what has he revealed?-On the following day, like a crop of poisonous mushrooms, the growth of a single night, the story obtains general credence. "Jean Julien has declared that all the prisons in Paris thought as he did, that there would soon be fine times, that the prisoners were armed, and that as soon as the volunteers cleared out they would be let loose on all Paris."3118 The streets are full of anxious faces. "One says that Verdun had been betrayed like Longwy. Others shook their heads and said it was the traitors within Paris and not the declared enemies on the frontier that were to be feared."3119 On the following day the story grows: "There are royalist officers and soldiers hidden away in Paris and in the outskirts. They are going to open the prisons, arm the prisoners, set the King and his family free, put the patriots in Paris to death, also the wives and children of those in the army... Isn't it natural for men to look after the safety of their wives and children, and to use the only efficient means to arrest the assassin's dagger."3120-The working-class inferno has been stirred up, now it's up to the contractors of public revolt to fan and direct the flames.

III. Terror is their Salvation.

Rise of the homicidal idea among the leaders.-Their

situation.-The powers they seize.-Their pillage.-The

risks they run-Terror is their rescue.

They have been fanning the flames for a long time. Already, on the 11th of August, the new Commune had announced, in a proclamation,3121 that "the guilty should perish on the scaffold," while its threatening deputations force the national Assembly into the immediate institution of a bloody tribunal. Carried into power by brutal force, it must perish if it does not maintain itself, and this can be done only through terror.-Let us pause and consider this unusual situation. Installed in the H?tel-de-ville by a nightly surprise attack, about one hundred strangers, delegated by a party which thinks or asserts itself to be the peoples' delegates, have overthrown one of the two great powers of the State, mangled and enslaved the other, and now rule in a capital of 700,000 souls, by the grace of eight or ten thousand fanatics and cut-throats. Never did a radical change promote men from so low a point and raise so high! The basest of newspaper scribblers, penny-a-liners out of the gutters, bar-room oracles, unfrocked monks and priests, the refuse of the literary guild, of the bar, and of the clergy, carpenters, turners, grocers, locksmiths, shoemakers, common laborers, many with no profession at all, strolling politicians and 3122public brawlers, who, like the sellers of counterfeit wares, have speculated for the past three years on popular credulity. There were among them a number of men in bad repute, of doubtful honesty or of proven dishonesty, who, in their youth led shiftless lives. They are still besmirched with old slime, they were put outside the pale of useful labor by their vices, driven out of inferior stations even into prohibited occupations, bruised by the perilous leap, with consciences distorted like the muscles of a tight-rope dancer. Were it not for the Revolution, they would still grovel in their native filth, awaiting prison or forced labor to which they were destined. Can one imagine their growing intoxication as they drink deep draughts from the bottomless cup of absolute power?-For it is absolute power which they demand and which they exercise.3123 Raised by a special delegation above the regular authorities, they put up with these only as subordinates, and tolerate none among them who may become their rivals. Consequently, they reduce the Legislative body simply to the function of editor and herald of their decrees; they have forced the new department electors to "abjure their title," to confine themselves to tax assessments, while they lay their ignorant hands daily on every other service, on the finances, the army, supplies, the administration, justice, at the risk of breaking the administrative wheels or of interrupting their action.

One day they summon the Minister of War before them, or, for lack of one, his chief clerk; another day they keep the whole body of officials in his department in arrest for two hours, under the pretext of finding a suspected printer.3124 At one time they affix seals on the funds devoted to extraordinary expenses; at another time they do away with the commission on supplies; at another they meddle with the course of justice, either to aggravate proceedings or to impede the execution of sentences rendered.3125 There is no principle, no law, no regulation, no verdict, no public man or establishment that is not subject to the risk of their arbitrariness.-And, as they have laid hands on power, they do the same with money. Not only do they extort from the Assembly 850,000 francs a months, with arrears from the 1st of January, 1792, more than six millions in all, to defray the expenses of their military police, which means to pay their bands,3126 but again, "invested with the municipal scarf," they seize, "in the public establishment belonging to the nation, all furniture, and whatever is of most value." "In one building alone, they carry off the value of 100,000 crowns."3127 Elsewhere, in the hands of the treasurer of the civil list, they appropriate to themselves, a box of jewels, other precious objects, and 340, 000 francs.3128 Their commissioners bring in from Chantilly three wagons each drawn by three horses "loaded with the spoils of M. de Condé," and they undertake "removing the contents of the houses of the émigrés."3129 They confiscate in the churches of Paris "the crucifixes, music-stands, bells, railings, and every object in bronze or of iron, chandeliers, cups, vases, reliquaries, statues, every article of plate," as well "on the altars as in the sacristies,"3130 and we can imagine the enormous booty obtained; to cart away the silver plate belonging to the single church of Madeleine-de-la-ville required a vehicle drawn by four horses.-Now they use all this money, so freely seized, as freely as they do power itself. One fills his pockets in the Tuileries without the slightest concern; another, in the Garde-Meuble, rummages secretaries, and carries off a wardrobe with its contents.3131 We have already seen that in the depositories of the Commune "most of the seals are broken," that enormous sums in plate, in jewels, in gold and silver coin have disappeared. Future inquests and accounts will charge on the Committee of Supervision, "abstractions, dilapidations, and embezzlements," in short, "a mass of violations and breaches of trust."-When one is king, one easily mistakes the money-drawer of the State for the drawer in which one keeps one's own money.

Unfortunately, this full possession of public power and the public funds holds only by a slender thread. Let the evicted and outraged majority dare, as subsequently at Lyons, Marseilles, and Toulon, to Return to the section assemblies and revoke the false mandate which they have arrogated to themselves through fraud and force, and, on the instance, they again become, through the sovereign will of the people, and by virtue of their own deed, what they really are, usurpers, extortioners, and robbers, there is no middle course for them between a dictatorship and the galleys.-The mind, before such an alternative, unless extraordinarily well-balanced, loses its equilibrium; they have no difficulty in deluding themselves with the idea that the State is menaced in their persons, and, in postulating the rule, that all is allowable for them, even massacre. Has not Bazire stated in the tribune that, against the enemies of the nation, "all means are fair justifiable? Has not another deputy, Jean Debry, proposed the formation of a body of 1,200 volunteers, who "will sacrifice themselves," as formerly the assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain, in "attacking tyrants, hand to hand, individually," as well as generals?3132 Have we not seen Merlin de Thionville insisting that "the wives and children of the émigrés should be kept as hostages," and declared responsible, or, in other words, ready for slaughter if their relatives continue their attacks?3133

That is all that is left to do, since all the other measures have proved insufficient.-In vain has the Commune decreed the arrest of journalists belonging to the opposite party, and distributed their printing machinery amongst patriotic printers.3134 In vain has it declared the members of the Sainte-Chapelle club, the National Guards who have sworn allegiance to Lafayette, the signers of the petition of 8,000, and of that of 20,000, disqualified for any service whatever.3135 In vain has it multiplied domiciliary visits, even to the residence and carriages of the Venetian ambassador. In vain, through insulting and repeated examinations, does it keep at its bar, under the hootings and death-cries of its tribunes, the most honorable and most illustrious men, Lavoisier, Dupont de Nemours, the eminent surgeon Desault, the most harmless and most refined ladies, Madame de Tourzel, Mademoiselle de Tourzel, and the Princesse de Lamballe.3136 In vain, after a profusion of arrests during twenty days, it envelopes all Paris inside one cast of its net for a nocturnal search3137during which,

1. the barriers are closed and doubly guarded,

2. sentinels are on the quays and boats stationed on the Seine to prevent escape by water,

3. the city is divided beforehand into circumscriptions, and for each section, a list of suspected persons,

4. the circulation of vehicles is stopped,

5. every citizen is ordered to stay at home,

6. the silence of death reigns after six o'clock in the evening, and then,

7. in each street, a patrol of sixty pikemen, seven hundred squads of sans-culottes, all working at the same time, and with their usual brutality,

8. doors are burst in with pile drivers,

9. wardrobes are picked by locksmiths,

10. walls are sounded by masons,

11. cellars are searched even to digging in the ground,

12. papers are seized,

13. arms are confiscated,

14. three thousand persons are arrested and led off;3138 priests, old men, the infirm, the sick.

The action lasts from ten in the evening to five o'clock in the morning, the same as in a city taken by assault, the screams of women rudely treated, the cries of prisoners compelled to march, the oaths of the guards, cursing and drinking at each grog-shop; never was there such an universal, methodical execution, so well calculated to suppress all inclination for resistance in the silence of general stupefaction.

And yet, at this very moment, there are those who act in good faith in the sections and in the Assembly, and who rebel at being under such masters. A deputation from the Lombards section, and another from the Corn-market, come to the Assembly and protest against the Commune's usurpations.3139 Choudieu, the Montagnard, denounces its blatant corrupt practices. Cambon, a stern financier, will no longer consent to have his accounts tampered with by thieving tricksters.3140 The Assembly at last seems to have recovered itself. It extends its protection to Géray, the journalist, against whom the new pashas had issued a warrant; it summons to its own bar the signers of the warrant, and orders them to confine themselves in future to the exact limits of the law which they transgress. Better still, it dissolves the interloping Council, and substitutes for it ninety-six delegates, to be elected by the sections in twenty-four hours. And, even still better, it orders an account to be rendered within two days of the objects it has seized, and the return of all gold or silver articles to the Treasury. Quashed, and summoned to disgorge their booty, the autocrats of the H?tel-de-ville come in vain to the Assembly in force on the following day3141 to extort from it a repeal of its decrees; the Assembly, in spite of their threats and those of their satellites, stands its ground.-So much the worse for the stubborn; if they are not disposed to regard the flash of the saber, they will feel its sharp edge and point. The Commune, on the motion of Manuel, decides that, so long as public danger continues, they will stay where they are; it adopts an address by Robespierre to "restore sovereign power to the people," which means to fill the streets with armed bands;3142 it collects together its brigands by giving them the ownership of all that they stole on the 10th of August.3143 The session, prolonged into the night, does not terminate until one o'clock in the morning. Sunday has come and there is no time to lose, for, in a few hours, the sections, by virtue of the decree of the National Assembly, and following the example of the Temple section the evening before, may revoke the pretended representatives at the H?tel-de-ville. To remain at the H?tel-de-ville, and to be elected to the convention, demands on the part of the leaders some striking action, and this they require that very day.-That day is the second of September.

IV.-Date of the determination of this.-The actors and their parts.

Marat.-Danton.-The Commune.-Its co-operators.-Harmony of

dispositions and readiness of operation.

Since the 23rd of August their resolution is taken.3144 They have arranged in their minds a plan of the massacre, and each one, little by little, spontaneously, according to his aptitudes, takes the part that suits him or is assigned to him.

Marat, foremost among them all, is the proposer and preacher of the operation, which, for him, is a perfectly natural one. It is the epitome of his political system: a dictator or tribune, with full power to slay, and with no other power but that; a good master executioner, responsible, and "tied hand and foot"; this is his program for a government since July the 14th, 1789, and he does not blush at it: "so much the worse for those who are not on a level with it!"3145 He appreciated the character of the Revolution from the first, not through genius, but sympathetically, he himself being equally as one-sided and monstrous; crazy with suspicion and beset with a homicidal mania for the past three years, reduced to one idea through mental impoverishment, that of murder, having lost the faculty for even the lowest order of reasoning, the poorest of journalists, save for pikemen and Billingsgate market-women, so monotonous in his constant paroxysms that the regular reading of his journal is like listening to hoarse cries from the cells of a madhouse.3146 From the 19th of August he excites people to attack the prisons. "The wisest and best course to pursue," he says, "is to go armed to the Abbaye, drag out the traitors, especially the Swiss officers and their accomplices, and put them to the sword. What folly it is to give them a trial! That is already done. You have massacred the soldiers, why should you spare the officers, ten times guiltier?"-Also, two days later, his brain teeming with an executioner's fancies, insisting that "the soldiers deserved a thousand deaths. As to the officers, they should be drawn and quartered, like Louis Capet and his tools of the Manège."3147-On the strength of this the Commune adopts him as its official editor, assigns him a tribune in its assembly room, entrusts him to report its acts, and soon puts him on its supervisory or executive committee.

A fanatic of this stamp, however, is good for nothing but as a mouthpiece or instigator; he may, at best, figure in the end among the subordinate managers.-The chief of the enterprise,3148 Danton, is of another species, and of another stature, a veritable leader of men: Through his past career and actual position, through his popular cynicism, ways and language, through his capacity for taking the initiative and for command, through his excessive corporeal and intellectual vigor, through his physical ascendancy due to his ardent, absorbing will, he is well calculated for his terrible office.-He alone of the Commune has become Minister, and there is no one but him to shelter the violations of the Commune under the protection or under the passivity of the central authority.-He alone of the Commune and of the ministry is able to push things through and harmonize action in the pell-mell of the revolutionary chaos; both in the councils of the ministry which he governs, as he formerly governed at the H?tel-de ville. In the constant uproar of incoherent discussions,3149 athwart "propositions ex abrupto, among shouts, swearing, and the going and coming of questioning petitioners," he is seen mastering his new colleagues with his "stentorian voice, his gestures of an athlete, his fearful threats," taking upon himself their duties, dictating to them what and whom he chooses, "fetching in commissions already drawn up," taking charge of everything, "making propositions, arrests, and proclamations, issuing brevets," and drawing millions out of the public treasury, casting a sop to his dogs in the Cordeliers and the Commune, "to one 20,000 francs, and to another 10,000," "for the Revolution, and on account of their patriotism,"-such is a summary report of his doings. Thus gorged, the pack of hungry "brawlers" and grasping intriguers, the whole serviceable force of the sections and of the clubs, is in his hands. One is strong in times of anarchy at the head of such a herd. Indeed, during the months of August and September, Danton was king, and, later on, he may well say of the 2d of September, as he did of the 10th of August, "I did it!"3150

Not that he is naturally vindictive or sanguinary: on the contrary, with a butcher's temperament, he has a man's heart, and, at the risk of compromising himself, against the wills of Marat and Robespierre, he will, by-and-by, save his political adversaries, Duport, Brissot, and the Girondists, the old party of the "Right."3151 Not that he is blinded by fear, enmities, or the theory; furious as a clubbist, he has the clear-sightedness of the politician; he is not the dupe of the sonorous phrases he utters, he knows the value of the rogues he employs;3152 he has no illusions about men or things, about other people or about himself; if he slays, it is with a full consciousness of what he is doing, of his party, of the situation, of the revolution, while the crude expressions which, in the tones of his bull's voice, he flings out as he passes along, are but a vivid statement of the precise truth "We are the rabble! We spring from the gutters!" With the normal principles of mankind, "we should soon get back into them. We can only rule through fear!"3153 "The Parisians are so many j... f...; a river of blood must flow between them and the émigrés."3154 The tocsin about to be rung is not a signal of alarm, but a charge on the enemies of the country... What is necessary to overcome them? Boldness, boldness, always boldness!3155 I have brought my mother here, seventy years of age; I have sent for my children, and they came last night. Before the Prussians enter Paris, I want my family to die with me. Let twenty thousand torches be applied, and Paris instantly reduced to ashes!"3156 "We must maintain ourselves in Paris at all hazards. Republicans are in an extreme minority, and, for fighting, we can rely only on them. The rest of France is devoted to royalty. The royalists must be terrified!"3157-It is he who, on the 28th of August, obtains from the Assembly the great domiciliary visit, by which the Commune fills the prisons. It is he who, on the 2d of September, to paralyze the resistance of honest people, causes the penalty of death to be decreed against whoever, "directly or indirectly shall, in any manner whatsoever, refuse to execute, or who shall interfere with the orders issued, or with the measures of the executive power." It is he who, on that day, informs the journalist Prudhomme of the pretended prison plot, and who, the second day after, sends his secretary, Camille Desmoulins, to falsify the report of the massacres,3158 It is he who, on the 3rd of September, at the office of the Minister of Justice, before the battalion officers and the heads of the service, before Lacroix, president of the Assembly, and Pétion, mayor of Paris, before Clavières, Servan, Monge, Lebrun, and the entire Executive Council, except Roland, reduces at one stroke the head men of the government to the position of passive accomplices, replying to a man of feeling, who rises to stay the slaughter, "Sit down-it was necessary!"3159 It is he who, the same day, dispatches the circular, countersigned by him, by which the Committee of Supervision announces the massacre, and invites "their brethren of the departments" to follow the example of Paris.3160 It is he who, on the 10th of September, "not as Minister of Justice, but as Minister of the People," is to congratulate and thank the slaughterers of Versailles.3161-After the 10th of August, through Billaud-Varennes, his former secretary, through Fabre d'Eglantine, his Keeper of the Seals, through Tallien, secretary of the Commune and his most trusty henchman, he is present at all deliberations in the H?tel-de-ville, and, at the last hour, is careful to put on the Committee of Supervision one of his own men, the head clerk, Desforges.3162-Not only was the reaping-machine constructed under his own eye, and with his assent, but, again, when it is put in motion, he holds the handle, so as to guide the scythe.

He is right; if he did not sometimes put on the brake, it would go to pieces through its own action. Introduced into the Committee as professor of political blood-letting, Marat, stubbornly following out a fixed idea, cuts down deep, much below the designated line; warrants of arrest were already out against thirty deputies, Brissot's papers were rummaged, Roland's house was surrounded, while Duport, seized in a neighboring department, is deposed in the slaughterhouse. The latter is saved with the utmost difficulty; many a blow is necessary before he can be wrested from the maniac who had seized him. With a surgeon like Marat, and medics like the four or five hundred leaders of the Commune and of the sections, it is not essential to guide the knife; it is a foregone conclusion that the amputation will be extensive. Their names speak for themselves: in the Commune, Manuel, the syndic-attorney; and his two deputies Hébert and Billaud-Varennes, Huguenin, Lhuillier, M.-J. Chénier, Audoin, Léonard Bourdon, Boula and Truchon, presidents in succession. In the Commune and the sections, Panis, Sergent, Tallien, Rossignol, Chaumette, Fabre d'Eglantine, Pache, Hassenfratz, the cobbler Simon, and the printer Momoro. From the National Guard, the commanding-general, Santerre, and the battalion commander Henriot, and, lower down, the common herd of district demagogues, Danton's, Hébert's, or Robespierre's side kicks, guillotined later on with their file-leaders, in brief, the flower of the future terrorists.3163-Today they are taking their first steps in blood, each with their own attitude and motives:

* Chénier denounced as a member of the Sainte-Chapelle club, in danger because he is among the suspected;3164

* Manuel, poor, excitable, bewildered, carried away, and afterwards shuddering at the sight of his own work;

* Santerre, a fine circumspect figure-head, who, on the 2nd of September, under pretense of watching the baggage, climbs on the seat of a landau standing on the street, where he remains a couple of hours, to avoid doing his duty as commanding-general;3165

* Panis, president of the Committee of Supervision, a good subordinate, his born disciple and bootlicker, an admirer of Robespierre's whom he proposes for the dictatorship, as well as of Marat, whom he extols as a prophet;3166

* Henriot, Hébert, and Rossignol, simple evil-doers in uniform or in their scarves;

* Collot d'Herbois, a stage poetaster, whose theatrical imagination delights in a combination of melodramatic horrors;3167

* Billaud-Varennes, a former oratorian monk, irascible and gloomy, as cool before a murder as an inquisitor at an auto-da-fé;

finally, the wily Robespierre, pushing others without committing himself, never signing his name, giving no orders, haranguing a great deal, always advising, showing himself everywhere, getting ready to reign, and suddenly, at the last moment, pouncing like a cat on his prey, and trying to slaughter his rivals, the Girondists.3168

Up to this time, in slaughtering or having it done, it was always as insurrectionists in the street; now, it is in places of imprisonment, as magistrates and functionaries, according to the registers of a lock-up, after proofs of identity and on snap judgments, by paid executioners, in the name of public security, methodically, and in cool blood, almost with the same regularity as subsequently under "the revolutionary government." September, indeed, is the beginning of it, a summary and a model; they will not do it differently or better than during the best days of the guillotine. Only, as they are as yet poorly supplied with tools, they are obliged to use pikes instead of the guillotine, and, as decency has not entirely disappeared, the chiefs conceal themselves behind maneuvers. Nevertheless, we can track them, take them in the act, and we have their signatures; they planned commanded, and conducted the operation. On the 30th of August, the Commune decided that the sections should try accused persons, and, on the 2nd of September, five trusted sections reply to it by resolving that the accused shall be murdered.3169 The same day, September 2, Marat takes his place on the Committee of Supervision. The same day, September 2, Panis and Sergent sign the commissions of "their comrades," Maillard and associates, for the Abbaye, and "order them to judge," that is to say, kill the prisoners.3170 The same and the following days, at La Force, three members of the Commune, Hébert, Monneuse, and Rossignol, preside in turn over the assassin court.3171 The same day, a commissar of the Committee of Supervision comes and demands a dozen men of the Sans-Culottes section to help massacre the priests of Saint Firmin.3172 The same day, a commissar of the Commune visits the different prisons during the slaughter, and finds that "things are going on well in all of them."3173 The same day, at five o'clock in the afternoon, Billaud-Varennes, deputy-attorney for the Commune, "in his well-known puce-colored coat and black perruque," walking over the corpses, says to the Abbaye butchers: "Fellow-citizens, you are immolating your enemies, you are performing your duty." He returns during the night, highly commends them, and confirms the promise of the "agreed wages." On the following any at noon, he again returns, congratulates them more warmly, allows each one twenty francs, and urges them to keep on.3174-In the mean time, Santerre, summoned to the general staff headquarters by Roland, hypocritically deplores his voluntary inability, and persists in not giving the orders, without which the National Guard cannot move.3175 At the sections, the presidents, Chénier, Ceyrat, Boula, Momoro, Collot d'Herbois, dispatch or take their victims back under pikes. At the Commune, the council-general votes 12,000 francs, to be taken from the dead, to defray the expenses of the operation.3176 In the Committee of Supervision, Marat sends off dispatches to spread murder through the departments.-It is evident that the leaders and their subordinates are unanimous, each at his post and in the service he performs; through the spontaneous co-operation of the whole party, the command from above meets the impulse from below;3177 both unite in a common murderous disposition, the work being done with the more precision in proportion to its being easily done.-Jailers have received orders to open the prison doors, and give themselves no concern. Through an excess of precaution, the knives and forks of the prisoners have been taken away from them.3178 One by one, on their names being called, they will march out like oxen in a slaughter-house, while about twenty butchers to each prison, from to two to three hundred in all,3179 will suffice to do the work.

V. Abasement and Stupor.

Common workers.-Their numbers.-Their condition.-Their

sentiments.-Effect of murder on the murderers.-Their

degradation.-Their insensibility.

Two kinds of men make up the recruits, and it is especially on their crude brains that we have to admire the effect of the revolutionary dogma.

First, there are the Federates of the South, lusty fellows, former soldiers or old bandits, deserters, bohemians, and scoundrels of all lands and from every source, who, after finishing their work at Marseilles and Avignon, have come to Paris to begin over again. "Triple nom de Dieu!" exclaims one of them, "I didn't come a hundred and eighty leagues to restrain myself from sticking a hundred and eighty heads on the end of my pike!"3180 Accordingly, they form in themselves a special, permanent, resident body, allowing no one to divert them from their adopted occupation. "They turn a deaf ear to the excitements of spurious patriotism";3181 they are not going to be sent off to the frontier. Their post is at the capital; they have sworn "to defend liberty"; neither before nor after September make them deviate from this end. When, after having drawn money on every treasury and under every pretext, they at last consent to leave Paris, it is only on the condition that they return to Marseilles. Their operations are limited to the interior of France, and only against political adversaries. But their zeal in this field is only the greater; it is their band which, first of all, takes the twenty-four priests from the town hall, and, on the way, begins the massacre with their own hands.3182

Then there are the "enragés" of the Paris proletariat, a few of them clerks or shopkeepers, most of them artisans of all the trades; locksmiths, masons, butchers, wheelwrights, tailors, shoemakers, waggoners, especially dockers working in the harbor, market-porters, and, above all, journeymen and apprentices of all kinds, in short, manual workers on the bottom of the social ladder.3183 Among these we find beasts of prey, murderers by instinct, or simple robbers.3184 Others who, like one of the disciples of Abbé Sicard, whom he loves and venerates, confess that they never stirred except under constraint.3185 Others are simple machines, who let themselves be driven: for instance the local forwarding agent, a good sort of man, but who, dragged along, plied with liquor, and then made crazy, kills twenty priests for his share, and dies at the end of the month, still drinking, unable to sleep, frothing at the mouth and trembling in every limb.3186 And finally the few, who, with good intentions, are carried away by the bloody whirlwind, and, struck by the grace of Revolution, become converted to the religion of murder. One of them a certain Grapin, deputized by his section to save two prisoners, seats himself alongside of Maillard, sits in judgment at his side during sixty-three hours, and demands a certificate from him.3187 The majority, however, entertain the same opinions as the cook, who, after taking the Bastille, finding himself on the spot and having cut off M. de Launay's head, regards it as a "patriotic" action, and deems himself worthy of a "medal for having destroyed a monster." These people are not common criminals, but well-disposed persons living in the vicinity, who, seeing a public service established in their neighborhood,3188 issue from their homes to give a hand; their degree of probity is about the same as we find nowadays among people of the same condition in life.

At the outset, especially, no one considers filling his pockets. At the Abbaye prison, they come honorably and place on the table in the room of the civil committee the purses and jewels of the dead.3189 If they appropriate anything to themselves, it is shoes to cover their naked feet, and then only after asking permission. As to pay, all rough work deserves it, and, moreover, between them and their recruiters, the answer is obvious. With nothing but their own hands to rely on, they cannot work for nothing,3190 and, as the work is hard, they ought to be paid double time. They require six francs a day, besides their meals and as much wine as they want. One caterer alone furnished the men at the Abbaye with 346 pints:3191 when working incessantly day and night with a task like that of sewer-cleaners and miners, nothing else will keep their courage up.-Food and wages must be paid for by the nation; the work is done for the nation, and, naturally, on interposing formalities, they get out of temper and betake themselves to Roland, to the City treasurer, to the section committees, to the Committee of Supervision,3192 murmuring, threatening, and showing their bloody pikes. That is the evidence of having done their work well. They boast of it to Pétion, impress upon him how "just and attentive" they were,3193 their discernment, the time given to the work, so many days and so many hours; they ask only for what is "due to them"; when the treasurer, on paying them, demands their names, they give them without the slightest hesitation. Those who escort a dismissed prisoner; masons, hairdressers, federates, require no recompense but "something to drink"; "we do not carry on this business for money," they say; "here is your friend; he promised us a glass of brandy, which we will take and then go back to our work."3194-Outside of their business they possess the expansive cordiality and ready sensitivity of the Parisian workman. At the Abbaye, a federate,3195 on learning that the prisoners had been kept without water for twenty-six hours, wanted to "exterminate" the turnkey for his negligence, and would have done it if "the prisoners themselves had not pleaded for him." On the acquittal of a prisoner, the guards and the butchers, everybody, embraces him with enthusiasm; Weber is greeted again and again for more than a hundred yards; they cheer to excess. Each wants to escort the prisoner; the cab of Mathon de la Varenne is invaded; "they perch themselves on the driver's seat, at the doors, on top, and behind."3196-A few even display strange fits of tact. Two of the butchers, still covered with blood, who lead the chevalier de Bertrand home, insist on going up stairs with him to witness the joy of his family; after their terrible task they need the relaxation of tender emotion. On entering, they wait discreetly in the drawing-room until the ladies have been prepared; the happiness of which they are witnesses melts them; they remain some time, refuse money, expressing their gratitude and depart.3197-Still more extraordinary are the vestiges of innate politeness. A market-porter desirous of embracing a discharged prisoner, first asks his permission. Old "hags," who had just clapped their hands at the slaughtering, stop the guards "violently" as they hurry Weber along, in white silk stockings, across pools of blood: "Hey, guard, look out, you are making Monsieur walk in the gutter!"3198 In short, they display the permanent qualities of their race and class; they seem to be neither above nor below the average of their brethren, Most of them, probably, would never have done anything very monstrous had a rigid police, like that which maintains order in ordinary times, kept them in their shops or at home in their lodgings or in their tap-rooms.

But, in their own eyes, they are so many kings; "sovereignty is committed to their hands,"3199 their powers are unlimited; whoever doubts this is a traitor, and is properly punished; he must be put out of the way; while, for royal councillors, they take maniacs and rascals, who, through monomania or calculation, have preach all that to them: just like a Negro king surrounded by white slave-dealers, who urge him into raids, and by black sorcerers, who prompt him to massacre. How could such a man with such guides, and in such an office, be retarded by the formalities of justice, or by the distinctions of equity? Equity and justice are the elaborate products of civilization, while he is merely a political savage. In vain are the innocent recommended to his mercy!

"Look here, citizen,31100 do you, too, want to put us to sleep? Suppose that those cursed Prussian and Austrian beggars were in Paris, would they pick out the guilty? Wouldn't they strike right and left, the same as the Swiss did on the 10th of August? Very well, I can't make speeches, but I don't put anybody to sleep. I say, I am the father of a family-I have a wife and five children that I mean to leave here for the section to look after, while I go and fight the enemy. But I have no intention that while I am gone these villains here in prison, and other villains who would come and let them out, should cut the throats of my wife and children. I have three boys who I hope will some day be more useful to their country than those rascals you want to save. Anyhow, all that can be done is to let 'em out and give them arms, and we will fight 'em on an equal footing. Whether I die here or on the frontiers, scoundrels would kill me all the same, and I will sell my life dearly. But, whether it is done by me or by someone else, the prison shall be cleaned out of those cursed beggars, there, now!" At this a general cry is heard: "He's right! No mercy! Let us go in!"

All that the crowd assent to is an improvised tribunal, the reading of the jailer's register, and prompt judgment; condemnation and slaughter must follow, according to the famous Commune, which simplifies things-There is another simplification still more formidable, which is the condemnation and slaughter by categories. Any title suffices, Swiss, priest, officer, or servant of the King, "the 'worms' on the civil list"; wherever a lot of priests or Swiss are found, it is not worth while to have a trial, the throats of the lot can be slit.-Reduced to this, the operation is adapted to the operators; the arms of the new sovereign are as strong as his mind is weak, and, through an inevitable adaptation, he degrades his work to the level of his faculties.

His work, in its turn, degrades and perverts him. No man, and especially a man of the people, rendered pacific by an old civilization, can, with impunity, become at one stroke both sovereign and executioner. In vain does he work himself up against the condemned and heap insults on them to augment his fury;31101 I he is dimly conscious of committing a great crime, and his soul, like that of Macbeth, "is full of scorpions." Through a terrible tightening up, he hardens himself against the inborn, hereditary impulses of humanity; these resist while he becomes exasperated, and, to stifle them, there is no other way but to "gorge himself on horrors,"31102 by adding murder to murder. For murder, especially as he practices it, that is to say, with a naked sword on defense-less people, introduces into his animal and moral machine two extraordinary and disproportionate emotions which unsettle it, on the one hand, a sensation of omnipotence exercised uncontrolled, unimpeded, without danger, on human life, on throbbing flesh31103 and, on the other hand, an interest in bloody and diversified death, accompanied with an ever new series of contortions and exclamations;31104 formerly, in the Roman circus, one could not tear one's self away from it; the spectacle once seen, the spectator always returned to see it again. Just at this time each prison court is a circus, and what makes it worse is that the spectators are likewise actors.-Thus, for them, two fiery liquids mingle together in one draught. To moral intoxication is added physical intoxication, wine in profusion, bumpers at every pause, revelry over corpses; and we see rising out of this unnatural creature the demon of Dante, at once brutal and refined, not merely a destroyer, but, again, an executioner, instigator and calculator of suffering, and radiant and joyous over the evil it accomplishes.

They are merry; they dance around each new corpse, and sing the carmagnole;31105 they arouse the people of the quarter "to amuse them," and that they may have their share of "the fine fête."31106 Benches are arranged for "gentlemen" and others for "ladies": the latter, with greater curiosity, are additionally anxious to contemplate at their ease "the aristocrats" already slain; consequently, lights are required, and one is placed on the breast of each corpse.-Meanwhile, the slaughter continues, and is carried to perfection. A butcher at the Abbaye31107 complains that "the aristocrats die too quick, and that those only who strike first have the pleasure of it"; henceforth they are to be struck with the backs of the swords only, and made to run between two rows of their butchers, like soldiers formerly running a gauntlet. If there happens to be well-known person, it is agreed to take more care in prolonging the torment. At La Force, the Federates who come for M. de Rulhières swear "with frightful imprecations that they will cut the head of anyone daring to end his sufferings with a thrust of his pike"; the first thing is to strip him naked, and then, for half an hour, with the flat of their sabers, they cut and slash him until he drips with blood and is "skinned to his entrails."-All the monstrous instincts who grovels chained up in the dregs of the human heart, not only cruelty with its bared fangs,31108 but also the slimier desires, unite in fury against women whose noble or infamous repute makes them conspicuous; against Madame de Lamballe, the Queen's friend; against Madame Desrues, widow of the famous poisoner; against the flower-girl of the Palais-Royal, who, two years before, had mutilated her lover, a French guardsman, in a fit of jealousy. Ferocity here is associated with lewdness to add debasement to torture, while life is violated through outrages on modesty. In Madame de Lamballe, killed too quickly, the libidinous butchers could outrage only a corpse, but for the widow,31109 and especially the flower-girl, they revive, like so many Neros, the fire-circle of the Iroquois.31110-From the Iroquois to the cannibal, the gulf is small, and some of them jump across it. At the Abbaye, an old soldier named Damiens, buries his saber in the side of the adjutant-general la Leu, thrusts his hand into the opening, tears out the heart "and puts it to his mouth as if to eat it"; "the blood," says an eye-witness, "trickled from his mouth and formed a sort of mustache for him."31111 At La Force, Madame de Lamballe is carved up. What Charlot, the wig-maker, who carried her head did, I to it, should not be described. I merely state that another wretch, in the Rue Saint-Antoine, bore off her heart and "ate it."31112

They kill and they drink, and drink and kill again. Weariness comes and stupor begins. One of them, a wheelwright's apprentice, has dispatched sixteen for his share; another "has labored so hard at this merchandise as to leave the blade of his saber sticking in it"; "I was more tired," says a Federate, "with two hours pulling limbs to pieces, right and left, than any mason who for two days has been plastering a wall."31113 The first excitement is gone, and now they strike automatically.31114 Some of them fall asleep stretched out on benches. Others, huddled together, sleep off the fumes of their wine, removed on one side. The exhalation from the carnage is so strong that the president of the civil committee faints in his chair,31115 the fumes of the tavern blending with those from the charnel-house. A heavy, dull state of torpor gradually overcomes their clouded brains, the last glimmerings of reason dying out one by one, like the smoky lights on the already cold breasts of the corpses lying around them. Through the stupor spreading over the faces of butchers and cannibals, we see appearing that of the idiot. It is the revolutionary idiot, in which all conceptions, save two, have vanished, two fixed, rudimentary, and mechanical ideas, one destruction and the other that of public safety. With no others in his empty head, these blend together through an irresistible attraction, and the effect proceeding from their contact may be imagined. "Is there anything else to do?" asks one of these butchers in the deserted court.-"If there is no more to do," reply a couple of women at the gate, "you will have to think of something,"31116 and, naturally, this is done.

As the prisons are to be cleaned out, it is as well to clean them all out, and do it at once. After the Swiss, priests, the aristocrats, and the "white-skinned gentlemen," there remain convicts and those confined through the ordinary channels of justice, robbers, assassins, and those sentenced to the galleys in the Conciergerie, in the Chatelet, and in the Tour St. Bernard, with branded women, vagabonds, old beggars, and boys confined in Bicêtre and the Salpétrière. They are good for nothing, cost something to feed,31117 and, probably, cherish evil designs. At the Salpétrière, for example, the wife of Desrues, the poisoner, is, assuredly, like himself, "cunning, wicked, and capable of anything"; she must be furious at being in prison; if she could, she would set fire to Paris; she must have said so; she did say it31118-one more sweep of the broom.-This time, as the job is more foul, the broom is wielded by fouler hands; among those who seize the handle are the frequenters of jails. The butchers at the Abbaye prison, especially towards the close, had already committed thefts;31119 here, at the Chatelet and the Conciergerie prisons, they carry away "everything which seems to them suitable," even to the clothes of the dead, prison sheets and coverlids, even the small savings of the jailers, and, besides this, they enlist their cronies. "Out of 36 prisoners set free, many were assassins and robbers, the killers attached them to their group. There were also 75 women, confined in part for larceny, who promised to faithfully serve their liberators." Later on, indeed, these are to become, at the Jacobin and Cordeliers clubs, the tricoteuses (knitters) who fill their tribunes.31120-At the Salpétrière prison, "all the pimps of Paris, former spies,... libertines, the rascals of France and all Europe, prepare beforehand for the operation," and rape alternates with massacre.31121-Thus far, at least, slaughter has been seasoned with robbery, and the grossness of eating and drinking; at Bicétre, however, it is crude butchery, the carnivorous instinct alone satisfying itself. Among other prisoners are 43 youths of the lowest class, from 17 to 19 years of age, placed there for correction by their parents, or by those to whom they are bound;31122 one need only look at them to see that they are genuine Parisian scamps, the apprentices of vice and misery, the future recruits for the reigning band, and these the band falls on, beating them to death with clubs. At this age life is tenacious, and, no life being harder to take, it requires extra efforts to dispatch them. "In that corner," said a jailer, "they made a mountain of their bodies. The next day, when they were to be buried, the sight was enough to break one's heart. One of them looked as if he were sleeping like one of God's angels, but the rest were horribly mutilated."31123-Here, man has sunk below himself, down into the lowest strata of the animal kingdom, lower that the wolf; for wolves do not strangle their young.

VI. Jacobin Massacre.

Effect of the massacre on the public.-General dejection and

the dissolution of society.-The ascendancy of the Jacobins

assured in Paris.-The men of September upheld in the

Commune and elected to the Convention.

There are six days and five nights of uninterrupted butchery,31124 171 murders at the Abbaye, 169 at La Force, 223 at the Chatelet, 328 at the Consciergerie, 73 at the Tour-Saint-Bernard, 120 at the Carmelites, 79 at Saint Firmin, 170 at Bicêtre, 35 at the Salpétrière; among the dead,31125 250 priests, 3 bishops or archbishops, general officers, magistrates, one former minister, one royal princess, belonging to the best names in France, and, on the other side, one Negro, several working class women, kids, convicts, and poor old men: What man now, little or big, does not feel himself threatened?-And all the more because the band has grown larger. Fournier, Lazowski, and Bécard, the chiefs of robbers and assassins, return from Orleans with fifteen hundred cut-throats.31126 One the way they kill M. de Brissac, M. de Lessart, and 42 others accused of lése-nation, whom they wrested from their judges' hands, and then, by the way of surplus, "following the example of Paris," twenty-one prisoners taken from the Versailles prisons. At Paris the Minister of Justice thanks them, the Commune congratulates them, and the sections feast them and embrace them.31127-Can anybody doubt that they were ready to begin again? Can a step be taken in or out of Paris without being subject to their oppression or encountering their despotism? Should one leave the city, sentinels of their species are posted at the barriers and on the section committees in continuous session. Malouet, led before that of Roule,31128 sees before him a pandemonium of fanatics, at least a hundred individuals in the same room, the suspected, those denouncing them, collaborators, attendants, a long, green table in the center, covered with swords and daggers, with the committee around it, "twenty patriots with their shirt sleeves rolled up, some holding pistols and others pens," signing warrants of arrest, "quarreling with and threatening each other, all talking at once, and shouting: Traitor!-Conspirator!-Off to prison with him!-Guillotine him!-and behind these, a crowd of spectators, pell-mell, yelling, and gesticulating" like wild beasts pressed against each other in the same cage, showing their teeth and trying to spring at each other. "One of the most excited, brandishing his saber in order to strike an antagonist, stopped on seeing me, and exclaimed, 'There's Malouet!'-The other, however, less occupied with me than with his enemy, took advantage of the opportunity, and with a blow of his club, knocked him down." Malouet had a close shave, in Paris escapes take place by such accidents.-If one remains in the city, one is beset with lugubrious fears by,

1. the hurrying step of squads of men in each street, leading the suspected to prison or before the committee;

2. around each prison the crowds that have come "to see the disasters";

3. in the court of the Abaye the cry of the auctioneer selling the clothes of the dead;

4. the rumbling of carts on the pavement bearing away 1,300 corpses;

5. the songs of the women mounted aloft on the carts, beating time on the naked bodies.31129

Is there a man who, after one of these encounters, does not see himself in imagination before the green table of the section committee, after this, in prison with sabers over his head, and then in the cart in the midst of the bloody pile?

Courage falters before a vision like this. All the journals approve, palliate, or keep silent; nobody dares offer resistance.31130 Property as well as lives belong to whoever wants to take them. At the barriers, at the markets, on the boulevard of the Temple, thieves, decked with the tricolor ribbon, stop people as they pass along, seize whatever they carry, and, under the pretext that jewels should be deposited on the altars of Patriotism, take purses, watches, rings, and other articles, so rudely that women who are not quick enough, have the lobes of their ears torn in unhooking their earrings31131. Others, installed in the cellars of the Tuileries, sell the nation's wine and oil for their own profit. Others, again, given their liberty eight days before by the people, scent out a bigger job by finding their way into the Garde-meuble and stealing diamonds to the value of thirty millions.31132

Like a man struck on the head with a mallet, Paris, felled to the ground, lets things go; the authors of the massacre have fully attained their ends. The faction has fast hold of power, and will maintain its hold. Neither in the Legislative Assembly nor in the Convention will the aims of the Girondins be successful against its tenacious usurpation. It has proved by a striking example that it is capable of anything, and boasts of it; it is still armed, it stands there ever prepared and anonymous on its murderous basis, with its speedy modes of operation, its own group of fanatical agents and bravos, with Maillard and Fournier, with its cannon and its pikes. All that does not live within it lives only through its favor from day to day, through its good will. Everybody knows that. The Assembly no longer thinks of dislodging people who meet decrees of expulsion with massacre; it is no longer a question of auditing their accounts, or of keeping them within the confines of the law. Their dictatorship is not to be disputed, and their purification continue. From four to five hundred new prisoners, arrested within eleven days, by order of the municipality, by the sections, and by this or that individual Jacobin, are crowded into cells still dripping with blood, and the report is spread that, on the 20th of September, the prisons will be emptied by a second massacre.31133-Let the Convention, if it pleases, pompously install itself as sovereign, and grind out decrees-it makes no difference; regular or irregular, the government still marches on in the hands of those who hold the sword.31134 The Jacobins, through sudden terror, have maintained their illegal authority; through a prolongation of terror they are going to establish their legal authority. A forced suffrage is going to put them in office at the H?tel-de-ville, in the tribunals, in the National Guard, in the sections, and in the various administrations, while they have already elected to the Convention, Marat, Danton, Fabre d'Eglantine, Camille Desmoulins, Manuel, Billaud-Varennes, Panis, Sergent, Collot d'Herbois, Robespierre, Legendre, Osselin, Fréron, David, Robert, Lavicourterie, in short, the instigators, leaders and accomplices of the massacre.31135 Nothing that could force or falsify voting is omitted.31136 In the first place the presence of the people is imposed on the electoral assembly, and, to this end, it is transferred to the large hall of the Jacobin club, under the pressure of the Jacobin galleries. As a second precaution, every opponent is excluded from voting, every Constitutionalist, every former member of the monarchical club, of the Feuillants, and of the Sainte-Chapelle club, of the Feuillants, and of the Sainte-Chapelle club, every signer of the petition of the 20,000, or of that of the 8,000, and, on the sections protesting against this, their protest is thrown out on the ground of its being the fruit of "an intrigue." Finally, at each balloting, each elector's vote is called out, which ensures the right vote beforehand, the warnings he has received being very explicit.31137 On the 2nd of September, during the first meeting of the electoral body, held at the bishop's palace, the Marseilles troop, 500 yards away, came and took the twenty-four priests from the town-hall, and, on the way, hacked them to pieces on the Pont-Neuf. Throughout the evening and all night the agents of the municipality carried on their work at the Abbaye, at the Carmelites, and at La Force, and, on the 3rd of September, on the electoral assembly transferring itself to the Jacobin club, it passed over the Pont-au-Change between two rows of corpses, which the slaughterers had brought there from the Chatelet and the Conciergerie prisons.

* * *

3101 (return)

[ Thierry, son of Clovis, unwilling to take part in an expedition of his brothers into Burgundy, was told by his men: "If thou art unwilling to march into Burgundy with thy brothers, we will leave thee and follow them in thy place."-Clotaire, another of his sons, disposed to make peace with the Saxons, "the angry Francs rush upon him, revile him, and threaten to kill him if he declines to accompany them. Upon which he puts himself at their head."]

3102 (return)

[ Social condition and degree of culture are often indicated orthographically.-Granier de Cassagnac, II..480. Bécard, commanding the expedition which brought back the prisoners from Orleans, signs himself: "Bécard, commandant congointement aveque M. Fournier generalle. "-"Archives Nationales," F7, 4426. Letter of Chemin, commissioner of the Gravilliers section, to Santerre, Aug.11, 1792. "Mois Charles Chemin commissaire... fait part à Monsieur Santaire générale de la troupe parisiene que le nommé Hingray cavaliers de la gendarmeris nationalle.. me délarés qu'ille sestes trouvés aux jourduis 11 aoux avec une home attachés à la cours aux Equris; quille lui aves dis quiere 800 home a peupres des sidevant garde du roy étes tous près a fondre sure Paris pour donaire du sécour a naux rébelle et a signer avec moi la presante."]

3103 (return)

[ On the 19th of March, 1871, I met in the Rue de Varennes a man with two guns on his shoulder who had taken part in the pillage of the Ecole d'Etat-major and was on his way home. I said to him: "But this is civil war, and you will let the Prussians in Paris."-"I'd rather have the Prussians than Thiers. Thiers is Prussian on the inside!"]

3104 (return)

[ Today, 115 years after these words were written, we have seen others, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, etc following in the Jacobin's footsteps. Nobles, Bourgeois, Jews and other undesirables have been methodically put away. The sheeplike majority did not read Taine or did not profit from his warnings while most of the great tyrants learned from him or from the events he described (SR.)]

3105 (return)

[ Moniteur, Nov. 14, 1792.]

3106 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 4426. Letter of the police administrators, Aug. 11. Declaration of Delaunay, Aug. 12.]

3107 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XVII. 59 (session of Aug. 12) Speech by Leprieur at the bar of the house.]

3108 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XVII. 47.-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 31. Speech by Robespierre at the bar of the Assembly in the name of the commune, Aug. 15.]

3109 (return)

[ Brissot, in his report on Robespierre's petition.-The names of the principal judges elected show its character: Fouquier-Tinville, Osselin, Coffinhal.]

3110 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XVII.91 (Aug. 17).]

3111 (return)

[ Stated by Pétion in his speech (Moniteur, Nov. 10, 1792).]

3112 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XVII. 116 (session of Aug. 23).]

3113 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 461.-Moore, I. 273 (Aug. 31).]

3114 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XVII. 267 (article by Prudhomme in the "Révolutions de Paris").]

3115 (return)

[ "Les Révolutions de Paris," Ibid., "A number of sans-culottes were there with their pikes; but these were largely outnumbered by the multitude of uniforms of the various battalions."-Moore, Aug, 31: "At present the inhabitants of the faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau are all that is felt of the sovereign people in Paris."]

3116 (return)

[ More, Aug. 26.]

3117 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 471. Indictment against Jean-Julien.-In referring to M. Mortimer-Ternaux we do so because, like a true critic, he cites authentic and frequently unedited documents.]

3118 (return)

[ Rétif de la Bretonne, "les Nuits de Paris," 11th night, p. 372.]

3119 (return)

[ Moore, Sept. 2.]

3120 (return)

[ Moore, Sept. 3.-Buchez et Roux, XVI. 159 (narrative by Tallien).-Official report of the Paris commune, Sept. 4 (in the collection of Barrière and Berville, the volume entitled "Mémoires sur les journées de Septembre"). The commune adopts and expands the fable, probably invented by it. Prudhomme well says that the story of the prison plot, so scandalously circulated during the Reign of Terror, appears for the first time on the 2d of September. The same report was spread through the rural districts. At Gennevilliers, a peasant while lamenting the massacres, said to Malouet: "It is, too, a terrible thing for the aristocrats to want to kill all the people by blowing up the city" (Malouet, II. 244).]

3121 (return)

[ Official reports of the commune, Aug. 11.]

3122 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 446. List of the section commissioners sitting at the H?tel-de-ville, Aug. 10, before 9 o'clock in the morning.]

3123 (return)

[ Official reports of the commune, Aug. 21. "Considering that, to ensure public safety and liberty, the council-general of the commune required all the power delegated to it by the people, at the time it was compelled to resume the exercise of its rights," sends a deputation to the National Assembly to insist that "the new department be converted, pure and simple, into a tax-commissioners' office."-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 25. Speech of Robespierre in the name of the commune: "After the people have saved the country, after decreeing a National Convention to replace you, what remains for you to do but to gratify their wishes?... The people, forced to see to its own salvation, has provided for this through its delegates... It is essential that those chosen by itself for its magistrates should enjoy the plenary powers befitting the sovereign."]

3124 (return)

[ Official reports of the commune, Aug. 10.-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 155. Letter of the Minister Servan, Aug. 30.-Ibid., 149.-Ibid., 148. The commission on supplies having been broken up by the commune, Roland, the Minister of the Interior, begs the Assembly to act promptly, for "he will no longer be responsible for the supplies of Paris."]

3125 (return)

[ Official reports of the commune, Aug. 21. A resolution requiring that, on trials for lésé-nation, those who appear for the defendants should be provided with a certificate of their integrity, issued by their assembled section, and that the interviews between them and the accused be public.-Ibid., Aug.17, a resolution to suspend the execution of the two assassins of mayor Simonneau, condemned to death by the tribunal of Seine-et-Oise.]

3126 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 11. Decree of Aug.11.]

3127 (return)

[ Prudhomme, "Révolutions de Paris" (number for Sep. 22).. Report by Roland to the National Assembly (Sept. 16, at 9 o'clock in the morning).]

3128 (return)

[ Madame Roland, "Mémoires," II. 414 (Ed. Barrière et Berville). Report by Roland Oct. 29. The seizure in question tool place Aug.27.]

3129 (return)

[ "Mémoirs sur les journées de Septembre" (Ed. Barrière et Berville, pp. 307-322). List of sums paid by the treasurer of the commune.-See, on the prolongation of this plundering, Roland's report, Oct. 29, of money, plate, and assignats taken from the Senlis Hospital (Sept. 13), the Hotel de Coigny emptied, and sale of furniture in the Hotel d'Egmont, etc.]

3130 (return)

[ Official reports of the commune, Aug. 17 and 20.-List of sums paid by the treasurer of the commune, p. 321.-On the 28th of August a "Saint-Roch in silver is brought to the bar of the National Assembly."]

3131 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 150, 161, 511.-Report by Roland, Oct. 29. P. 414.]

3132 (return)

[ Moniteur.514, 542 (sessions of Aug. 23 and 26).]

3133 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 99 (sessions of Aug.15 and 23). "Procès-verbaux de la Commune," Aug. 18, a resolution to obtain a law authorizing the commune "to collect together with wives and children of the émigrés in places of security, and to make use of the former convents for this purpose."]

3134 (return)

[ "Procès-verbaux de la Commune," Aug. 12.-Ibid., Aug. 18. Not being able to find M. Geoffrey, the journalist, the commune "passes a resolution that seals be affixed to Madame Geoffroy's domicile and that she be placed in arrest until her husband appears to release her."]

3135 (return)

[ "Procès-verbaux de la Commune." Aug.17 and 18. Another resolution, again demanding of the National Assembly a list of the signers for publication.]

3136 (return)

[ "Procès-verbaux de la Commune," Aug. 18, 19, 20.-On the 20th of August the commune summons before it and examines the Venetian Ambassador. "A citizen claims to be heard against the ambassador, and states that several carriages went out of Paris in his name. The name of this citizen is Chevalier, a horse-shoer's assistant... The Council decrees that honorable mention be made of the affidavits brought forward in the accusation." On the tone of these examinations read Weber ("Mémoires," II. 245), who narrates his own.]

3137 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XVII. 215. Narration by Peltier.-In spite of the orders of the National Assembly the affair is repeated on the following day, and it lasts from the 19th to the 31st of August, in the evening.-Moore, Aug.31. The stupid, sheep-like vanity of the bourgeois enlisted as a gendarme for the sans-culottes is here well depicted. The keeper of the H?tel Meurice, where Moore and Lord Lauderdale put up, was on guard and on the chase the night before: "He talked a good deal of the fatigue he had undergone, and hinted a little of the dangers to which he had been exposed in the course of this severe duty. Being asked if he had been successful in his search after suspected persons-'Yes my lord, infinitely; our battalion arrested four priests.' He could not have looked more lofty if he had taken the Duke of Brunswick,"]

3138 (return)

[ According to Roederer, the number arrested amounted to from 5,000 to 6,000 persons.]

3139 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III.147, 148, Aug.28 and 29.-Ibid., 176. Other sections complain of the Commune with some bitterness.-Buchez et Roux, XVII. 358.-"Procès-verbaux de la Commune," Sept. 1. "The section of the Temple sends a deputation which declares that by virtue of a decree of the National Assembly it withdraws its powers entrusted to the commissioners elected by it to the council-general."]

3140 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 154 (session of Aug. 30).]

3141 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 171 (session of Aug. 31).-Ibid., 208.--On the following day, Sept. 1, at the instigation of Danton, Thuriot obtains from the National Assembly an ambiguous decree which seems to allow the members of the commune to keep their places, provisionally at least, at the Hotel-de-ville.]

3142 (return)

[ "Procès-verbaux de la Commune," Sept. 1.]

3143 (return)

[ "Procès-verbaux de la Commune," Sept. 1. "It is resolved that whatever effects fell into the hands of the citizens who fought for liberty and equality on the 10th of August shall remain in their possession; M. Tallien, secretary-general, is therefore authorized to return a gold watch to M. Lecomte, a gendarme."]

3144 (return)

[ Four circumstances, simultaneous and in full agreement with each other, indicate this date: 1. On the 23d of August the council-general resolves "that a tribune shall be arranged in the chamber for a journalist (M. Marat), whose duty it shall be to conduct a journal giving the acts passed and what goes on in the commune" ("Procès-verbaux de la Commune," Aug.23) 2. On the same day, "on the motion of a member with a view to separate the prisoners of lése-nation from those of the nurse's hospital and others of the same stamp in the different prisons, the council has adopted this measure" (Granier de Cassagnac, II. 100). 3. The same day the commune applauds the deputies of a section, which "in warm terms" denounce before it the tardiness of justice and declare to it that the people will "immolate" the prisoners in their prisons (Moniteur, Nov. 10, 1793, Narrative of Pétion). The same day it sends a deputation to the Assembly to order a transfer of the Orleans prisoners to Paris (Buchez et Roux, XVII. 116). The next day, in spite of the prohibitions of the Assembly, It sends Fournier and his band to Orleans (Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 364), and each knows beforehand that Fournier is commissioned to kill them on the way. (Balleydier, "Histoire politique et militaire du people de Lyon," I.79. Letter of Laussel, dated at Paris, Aug.28): "Our volunteers are at Orleans for the past two or three days to bring the anti-revolutionary prisoners here, who are treated too well there." On the day of Fournier's departure (Aug. 24) Moore observes in the Palais Royal and at the Tuileries "a greater number than usual of stump-speakers of the populace, hired for the purpose of inspiring the people with a horror of monarchy."]

3145 (return)

[ Moniteur, Sept. 25,1792, speech by Marat in the Convention.]

3146 (return)

[ See his two journals, "L'Ami du people" and the "Journal de la Républic Fran?aise," especially for July and October 1792.-The number for August 16 is headed: "Development of the vile plot of the court to destroy all patriots with fire and sword."-That of August 19: "The infamous conscript Fathers of the Circus, betraying the people and trying to delay the conviction of traitors until Mottié arrives, is marching with his army on Paris to destroy all patriots!"-That of Aug. 21: "The rotters of the Assembly, the perfidious accomplices of Mottié arranging for flight... The conscript Fathers, the assassins of patriots at Nancy, the Champ de Mars and in the Tuileries, etc."-All this was yelled out daily every morning by those who hawked these journals through the streets.]

3147 (return)

[ Ami du Peuple, Aug.19 and 21.]

3148 (return)

[ "Lettres autographs de Madame Roland," published by Madame Bancal des Issarts, Sept. 9. "Danton leads all; Robespierre is his puppet; Marat holds his torch and dagger."]

3149 (return)

[ Madame Roland "Mémoires," II. 19 (note by Roland).-Ibid., 21, 23, 24. Monge says: "Danton wants to have it so; if I refuse he will denounce me to the Commune and at the Cordeliers, and have me hung." Fournier's commission to Orleans was all in order, Roland probably having signed it unawares, like those of the commissioners sent into the departments by the executive council (Cf. Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 368.)]

3150 (return)

[ The person who gives me the following had it from the king, Louis Philippe, then an officer in Kellerman's corps: On the evening of the battle of Valmy the young officer is sent to Paris to carry the news. On his arrival (Sept. 22 or 23. 1792) he learns that he is removed from his post and appointed governor of Strasbourg. He goes to Servan's house, Minister of War, and at first they refuse to let him in. Servan is unwell and in bed, with the ministers in his room. The young man states that he comes from the army and is the bearer of dispatches. He is admitted, and finds, indeed, Servan in bed with various personages around him, and he announces the victory.-They question him and he gives the details.-He then complains of having been displaced, and, stating that he is too young to command with any authority at Strasbourg, requests to be reinstated with the army in the field. "Impossible," replies Servan; "your place is given to another." Thereupon one of the personages present, with a peculiar visage and a rough voice, takes him aside and says to him: "Servan is a fool! Come and see me to-morrow and I will arrange the matter." "Who are you?" "I am Danton, the Minister of Justice."-The next day he calls on Danton, who tells him: "It is all right; you shall have your post back-not under Kellerman, however, but under Dumouriez; are you content?" The young man, delighted, thanks him. Danton resumes: "Let me give you one piece of advice before you go: You have talent and will succeed. But get rid of one fault. You talk too much. You have been in Paris twenty-four hours, and already you have repeatedly criticized the affair of September. I know this; I have been informed of it" "But that was a massacre; how can one help calling it horrible?" "I did it," replies Danton, "The Parisians are all so many j-f-. A river of blood had to flow between them and the émigrés. You are too young to understand these matters. Return to the army; it is the only place nowadays for a young man like you and of your rank. You have a future before you; but mind this-keep your mouth shut!"]

3151 (return)

[ Hua, 167.. Narrative by his guest, the physician Lambry, an intimate friend of Danton ultra-fanatical and member of a committee in which the question came up whether the members of the "Right" should likewise be put out of the way. "Danton had energetically repelled this sanguinary proposal. 'Everybody knows,' he said, 'that I do not shrink from a criminal act when necessary; but I disdain to commit a useless one."']

3152 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, Iv. 437. Danton exclaims, in relation to the hot-headed commissioners sent by him into the department: "Eh! damn it, do you suppose that we would send you young ladies?"]

3153 (return)

[ Philippe de Ségur, "Mémoires,"I.12. Danton, in a conversation with his father, a few weeks after the 2nd of September.]

3154 (return)

[ See above, narrative of the king, louis Philippe.]

3155 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, xvii. 347. The words of Danton in the National Assembly, Sept. 2nd a little before two o'clock, just as the tocsin and cannon gave the signal of alarm agreed upon. Already on the 31st of August, Tailien, his faithful ally, had told the National Assembly: "We have arrested the priests who make so much trouble. They are in confinement in a certain domicile, and in a few days the soil of liberty will be purged of their presence."]

3156 (return)

[ Meillan, "Mémoires," 325 (Ed. Barrière et Berville). Speech by Fabre d'Eglantine at the Jacobin Club, sent around among the affiliated clubs, May 1, 1793.]

3157 (return)

[ Robinet, "Procès des Dantonistes," 39, 45 (words of Danton in the committee on general defense).-Madame Roland, "Mémoires," II. 30. On the 2nd of September Grandpré ordered to report to the Minister of the Interior on the state of the prisons, waits for Danton as he leaves the council and tells him his fears. "Danton, irritated by the description, exclaims in his bellowing way, suiting his word to the action. 'I don't give a damn about the prisoners! Let them take care of themselves! And he proceeded on in an angry mood. This took place in the second ante-room, in the presence of twenty persons."-Arnault, II. 101. About the time of the September massacres "Danton, in the presence of one of my friends, replied to someone that urged him to use his authority in stopping the spilling of blood: 'Isn't it time for the people to take their revenge?' "]

3158 (return)

[ Prudhomme, "Crimes de la Révolution," iv. 90. On the 2nd of September, at the alarm given by the tocsin and cannon, Prudhomme calls on Danton at his house for information. Danton gives him the agreed story and adds: "The people, who are now aroused and know what to do, want to administer justice themselves on the nasty imprisoned persons."-Camille Desmoulins enters: "Look here," says Danton, "Prudhomme has come to ask what is going to be done?"-"Didn't you tell him that the innocent would not be confounded with the guilty? All those that are demanded by their Sections will be given up."-On the 4th, Desmoulins calls at the office of the journal and says to the editors: "Well, everything has gone off in the most perfect order. The people even set free a good many aristocrats against whom there was no direct proof. I trust that you will state all this exactly, because the Journal des Révolutions is the compass of public opinion."]

3159 (return)

[ Prudhomme, "Crimes de la Révolution," IV. 123. According to the statements of Théophile Mandar, vice-president of a section, witness and actor in the scene; he authorizes Prudhomme to mention his name.--Afterwards, in the next room, Mandar proposes to Pétion and Robespierre to attend the Assembly the next day and protest against the massacre; if necessary, the Assembly may appoint a director for one day. "Take care not to do that," replied Robespierre; "Brissot would be the dictator."-Pétion says nothing. "The ministers were in perfect agreement to let the massacres continue."]

3160 (return)

[ Madame Roland, II. 37.-"Angers et le départment de Maine-et-Loire de 1787 à 1830," by Blordier Langlois. Appended to the circular was a printed address bearing the title of Compte rendu au peuple souverain, "countersigned by the Minister of Justice and with the Minister's seal on the package," and addressed to the Jacobin Clubs of the departments, that they, too, might preach massacre.]

3161 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 391, 398.-Warned by Alquier, president of the criminal court of Versailles, of the danger to which the Orleans prisoners were exposed, Danton replied: "What is that to you? That affair does not concern you. Mind your own business, and do not meddle with things outside of it!"-"But, Monsieur, the law says that prisoners must be protected."-"What do you care? Some among them are great criminals, and nobody knows yet how the people will regard them and how far their indignation will carry them." Alquier wished to pursue the matter, but Danton turned his back on him]

3162 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 217]

3163 (return)

[ Madame Roland, "Lettres autographes, etc.," Sept. 5, 1792. "We are here under the knives of Marat and Robespierre. These fellows are striving to excite the people and turn them against the National Assembly and the council. They have organized a Star Chamber and they have a small army under pay, aided by what they found or stole in the palace and elsewhere, or by supplies purchased by Danton, who is underhandedly the chieftain of this horde."-Dusaulx, "Mémoires," 441. "On the following day (Sept. 3) I went to see one of the most estimated personalities at this epoch. 'You know,' said I to him, 'what is going on?'-'Very well; but keep quiet; it will soon be over. A little more blood is still necessary.'-I saw others who explained themselves much more definitely. "-Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 445.]

3164 (return)

[ Madame Roland, "Lettres autographes, etc.," Sept. 5, 1792. "We are here under the knives of Marat and Robespierre. These fellows are striving to excite the people and turn them against the National Assembly and the council. They have organized a Star Chamber and they have a small army under pay, aided by what they found or stole in the palace and elsewhere, or by supplies purchased by Danton, who is underhandedly the chieftain of this horde."-Dusaulx, "Mémoires," 441. "On the following day (Sept. 3) I went to see one of the most estimated personalities at this epoch. 'You know,' said I to him, 'what is going on?'-'Very well; but keep quiet; it will soon be over. A little more blood is still necessary.'-I saw others who explained themselves much more definitely. "-Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 445.]

3165 (return)

[ Madame de Sta?l, "Considérations sur la Révolution Fran?aise," 3rd part, ch. X.]

3166 (return)

[ Prudhomme, "Les Révolutions de Paris" (number for Sept. 22). At one of the last sessions of the commune "M. Panis spoke of Marat as of a prophet, another Siméon Stylite. 'Marat,' said he, 'remained six weeks sitting on one thigh in a dungeon.' "-Barbaroux, 64.]

3167 (return)

[ Weber, II. 348. Collot dwells at length, "in cool-blooded gaiety," on the murder of Madame de Lamballe and on the abominations to which her corpse was subjected. "He added, with a sigh of regret, that if he had been consulted he would have had the head of Madame de Lamballe served in a covered dish for the queen's supper."]

3168 (return)

[ On the part played by Robespierre and his presence constantly at the Commune see Granier de Cassagnac, II. 55.-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 205. Speech by Robespierre at the commune, Sept. 1: "No one dares name the traitors. Well, I give their names for the safety of the people: I denounce the libertycide Brissot, the Girondist factionists, the rascally commission of the Twenty-One in the National Assembly; I denounce them for having sold France to Brunswick, and for having taken in advance the reward for their dastardly act." On the 2nd of September he repeats his denunciation, and consequently on that day warrants are issued by the committee of supervision against thirty deputies and against Brissot and Roland (Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 216, 247).]

3169 (return)

[ "Procès-verbaux de la Commune," Aug. 30.-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 217 (resolutions of the sections Poissonnière and Luxembourg).-Granier de Cassagnac, II. 104 (adhesion of the sections Mauconseil, Louvre, and Quinze-Vingt).]

3170 (return)

[ Granier de Cassagnac, II. 156.]

3171 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 265.-Granier de Cassagnac, XII. 402. (The other five judges were also members of the commune.)]

3172 (return)

[ Granier de Cassagnac, II. 313. Register of the General Assembly of the sans-culottes, section, Sept. 2.-"Mémoires sur les journées de Septembre," 151 (declaration of Jourdan).]

3173 (return)

[ "Mémoires sur les journées de Septembre," narrative of Abbé Sicard, 111.]

3174 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XVIII. 109, 178. ("La vérite tout entière," by Méhée, Jr.)-Narrative of Abbé Sicard, 132, 134.]

3175 (return)

[ Granier de Cassagnac, II. 92, 93.-On the presence and complicity of Santerre. Ibid, 89-99.]

3176 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 277 and 299 (Sept. 3).-Granier de Cassagnac, II. 257. A commissary of the section of the Quatre-Nations states in his report that "the section authorized them to pay expenses out of the affair."-Declaration of Jourdan, 151.-Lavalette, "Mémoires," I. 91. The initiative of the commune is further proved by the following detail: "Towards five o'clock (Sept. 2) city officials on horseback, carrying a flag, rode through the streets crying: 'To arms! To arms!' They added: 'The enemy is coming; you are all lost; the city will be burnt and given up to pillage. Have no fear of the traitors or conspirators behind your backs. They are in the hands of the patriots, and before you leave the thunderbolt of national justice will fall on them!"-Buchez et Roux, XXVIII. 105. Letter of Chevalier Saint-Dizier, member of the first committee of supervision, Sept. 10. "Marat, Duplain, Fréron, etc., generally do no more in their supervision of things than wreak private vengeance... Marat states openly that 40,000 heads must still be knocked off to ensure the success of the revolution."]

3177 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XVIII. 146. "Ma Résurrection," by Mathon de la Varenne. "The evening before half-intoxicated women said publicly on the Feuillants terrace: 'To-morrow is the day when their souls will be turned inside out in the prisons."]

3178 (return)

[ "Mémoires sur les journées de Septembre. Mon agonie," by Journiac de Saint-Méard.-Madame de la Fausse-Landry, 72. The 29th of August she obtained permission to join her uncle in prison: "M. Sergent and others told me that I was acting imprudently; that the prisons were not safe."]

3179 (return)

[ Granier de Cassagnac,-II. 27. According to Roch Marcandier their number "did not exceed 300." According to Louvet there were "200, and perhaps not that number." According to Brissot, the massacres were committed by about "a hundred unknown brigands."-Pétion, at La Force (Ibid., 75), on September 6, finds only about a dozen executioners. According to Madame Roland (II. 35), "there were not fifteen at the Abbaye." Lavalette the first day finds only about fifty killers at the La Force prison.]

3180 (return)

[ Mathon de la Varenne, ibid., 137.]

3181 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XVII. 183 (session of the Jacobin Club, Aug. 27). Speech by a federate from Tarn.-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 126.]

3182 (return)

[ Sicard, 80.-Méhée, 187.-Weber, II. 279.-Cf., in Journiac de Saint-Méard, his conversation with a Proven?al.-Rétif de la Bretonne, "Les Nuits de Paris," 375. "About 2 o'clock in the morning (Sept. 3) I heard a troop of cannibals passing under my window, none of whom appeared to have the Parisian accent; they were all strangers."]

3183 (return)

[ Granier de Cassagnac, II. 164, 502.-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 530.-Maillard's assessors at the Abbaye were a watchmaker living in the Rue Childebert, a fruit-dealer in the Rue Mazarine, a keeper of a public house in the Rue du Four-Saint-Germain, a journeyman hatter in the Rue Sainte-Marguerite, and two others whose occupation is not mentioned.-On the composition of the tribunal at La Force, Cf. Journiac de Saint-Méard, 120, and Weber, II. 261.]

3184 (return)

[ Granier de Cassagnac, II. 507 (on Damiens), 513 (on L'empereur).-Meillan, 388 (on Laforet and his wife, old-clothes dealers on the Quai du Louvre, who on the 31st of May prepare for a second blow, and calculate this time on having for their share the pillaging of fifty houses).]

3185 (return)

[ Sicard, 98]

3186 (return)

[ De Ferrières (Ed. Berville et Barrière), III. 486.-Rétif de la Bretonne, 381. At the end of the Rue des Ballets a prisoner had just been killed, while the next one slipped through the railing and escaped. "A man not belonging to the butchers, but one of those thoughtless machines of which there are so many, interposed his pike and stopped him... The poor fellow was arrested by his pursuers and massacred. The pikeman coolly said to us: 'I couldn't know they wanted to kill him.'"]

3187 (return)

[ Granier de Cassagnac, II. 511.]

3188 (return)

[ The judges and slaughterers at the Abbaye, discovered in the trial of the year IV., almost all lived in the neighborhood, in the rues Dauphine, de Nevers, Guégénaud, de Bussy, Childebert, Taranne, de l'Ego?t, du Vieux Colombier, de l'Echaudé-Saint-Benoit, du Four-Saint-Germain, etc.]

3189 (return)

[ Sicard, 86, 87, 101.-Jourdan, 123. "The president of the committee of supervision replied to me that these were very honest persons; that on the previous evening or the evening before that, one of them, in a shirt and wooden shoes, presented himself before their committee all covered with blood, bringing with him in his hat twenty-five louis in gold, which he had found on the person of a man he had killed."-Another instance of probity may be found in the "Procès-verbaux du conseil-général de la Commune de Versailles," 367, 371.-On the following day, Sept. 3, robberies commence and go on increasing.]

3190 (return)

[ Méhée, 179. "'Would you believe that I have earned only twenty-four francs?' said a baker's boy armed with a club. 'I killed more than forty for my share.'"]

3191 (return)

[ Granier de Cassagnac. II. 153.-Cf. Ibid., 202-209, details on the meals of the workmen and on the more delicate repast of Maillard and his assistants.]

3192 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 175-176.-Granier de Cassagnac. II. 84.--Jourdan, 222.-Méhée, 179. "At midnight they came back swearing, cursing, and foaming with rage, threatening to cut the throats of the committee in a body if they were not instantly paid."]

3193 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 320. Speech by Pétion on the charges preferred against Robespierre.]

3194 (return)

[ Mathon de la Varenne, 156.-Journiac de Saint-Méard, 129.-Moore, 267.]

3195 (return)

[ Journiac de Saint-Méard, 115.]

3196 (return)

[ Weber, II. 265.-Journiac de Saint-Méard, 129.-Mathon de la Varenne, 155.]

3197 (return)

[ Moore, 267.-Cf. Malouet, II. 240. Malouet, on the evening of Sept. 1, was at his sister-in-law's; there is a domiciliary visit at midnight; she faints on hearing the patrol mount the stairs. "I begged them not to enter the drawing-room, so as not to disturb the poor sufferer. The sight of a woman in a swoon and pleasing in appearance affected them, and they at once withdrew, leaving me alone with her."-Beaulieu, "Essais," I. 108. (Regarding the two Abbaye butchers he meets in the house of Journiac-de-Saint-Méard, and who chat with him while issuing him with a safe-conduct): "What struck me was to detect generous sentiments through their ferocity, those of men determined to protect any one whose cause they adopted."]

3198 (return)

[ Weber, II. 265, 348.]

3199 (return)

[ Sicard, 101. Billaud-Varennes, addressing the slaughterers.-Ibid.75. "Greater power," replied a member of the committee of supervision, "what are you thinking of? To give you greater power would be limiting those you have already. Have you forgotten that you are sovereigns? That the sovereignty of the people is confided to you, and that you are now in full exercise of it?"]

31100 (return)

[ Méhée, 171.]

31101 (return)

[ Sicard, 81. At the beginning the Marseilles men themselves were averse to striking the disarmed, and exclaimed to the crowd: "Here, take our swords and pikes and kill the monsters!"]

31102 (return)

[ Macbeth by Shakespeare: "I have supped full with horrors."]

31103 (return)

[ Observe children drowning a dog or killing a snake. Tenacity of life irritates them, as if it were a rebellion against their despotism, the effect of which is to render them only the more violent against their victim.]

31104 (return)

[ One may recall to mind the effect of bull-fights, also the irresistible fascination which Saint-Augustin experienced on first hearing the death-cry of a gladiator in the amphitheater.]

31105 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 131. Trial of the September actors; the judge's summing up. "The third and forty-sixth witnesses stated that they saw Monneuse (member of the commune) go to and come from la Force, express his delight at those sad events that had just occurred, acting very immorally in relation thereto, adding that there was violin playing in his presence, and that his colleague danced."-Sicard, 88.]

31106 (return)

[ Sicard, 87, 91. This expression by a wine-merchant, who wants the custom of the murderers.-Granier de Cassagnac, II. 197-200. The original bills for wine, straw, and lights have been found.]

31107 (return)

[ Sicard, 91.-Maton de la Varenne, 150.]

31108 (return)

[ Mathon de la Varenne, 154. A man from the suburbs said to him (Mathon is an advocate): "All right, Monsieur Fine-skin; I shall treat myself to a glass of your blood."]

31109 (return)

[ Rétif de la Bretonne, "Les Nuits de Paris," 9th night, p.388. "She screamed horribly, whilst the brigands amused themselves with their disgraceful acts. Her body even after death was not exempt. These people had heard that she had been beautiful."]

31110 (return)

[ Prudhomme, "Les Révolutions de Paris," number for Sept. 8, 1792. "The people subjected the flower-girl of the Palais-Royal to the law of retaliation."-Granier de Cassagnac, II. 329. According to the bulletin of the revolutionary tribunal, number for Sept. 3.-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 291. Deposition of the caretaker's office of the Conciergerie prison.-Buchez et Roux, XVII.198. "Histoire des hommes de proi," by Roch Marcandier.]

31111 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux III, 257. Trial of the September murderers; deposition of Roussel.-Ib., 628.]

31112 (return)

[ Deposition of the woman Millet, ibid., 63.-Weber, II. 350.--Roch Marcandier, 197, 198.-Rétif de la Bretonne, 381.]

31113 (return)

[ Deposition of the woman Millet, ibid., 63.-Weber, II. 350.--Roch Marcandier, 197, 198.-Rétif de la Bretonne, 381.]

31114 (return)

[ On this mechanical and murderous action Cf: Dusaulx, "Mémoires," 440. He addresses the bystanders in favor of the prisoners, and, affected by his words, they hold out their hands to him. "But before this the executioners had struck me on the cheeks with the points of their pikes, from which hung pieces of flesh. Others wanted to cut off my head, which would have been done if two gendarmes had not kept them back."]

31115 (return)

[ Jourdan, 219.]

31116 (return)

[ Méhée, 179.]

31117 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 558. The same idea is found among the federates and Parisians composing the company of the Egalité, which brought the Orleans prisoners to Versailles and then murdered them. They explain their conduct by saying that they "hoped to put an end to the excessive expenditure to which the French empire was subject through the prolonged detention of conspirators."]

31118 (return)

[ Rétif de la Bretonne, 388.]

31119 (return)

[ Méhée, 177.]

31120 (return)

[ Prudhomme, "Les Crimes de la Révolution." III. 272.]

31121 (return)

[ Rétif de la Bretonne, 388. There were two sorts of women at the Salpétrière, those who were banded and young girls brought in the prison. Hence the two alternatives.]

31122 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 295. See list of names, ages, and occupations.]

31123 (return)

[ Barthélemy Maurice, "Histoire politique and anecdotique des prisons de la Seine," 329.]

31124 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 295. See list of names, ages, and occupations.]

31125 (return)

[ The Encyclopedia "QUID" (ROBERT LAFONT, PARIS 1998) advises us that the number of victims killed with "cold steel and clubs" etc total 1395 persons. The total number of French victims due to the Revolution is considered to be between 600,000 and 800,000 dead. (SR)]

31126 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 399, 592, 602-606.-"Procès-verbal des 8, 9, 10 Septembre, extrait des registres de la municipalité de Versailles." (In the "Mémoires sur les journées de Septembre"), p. 358 and following pages.-Granier de Cassagnac, II. 483. Bonnet's exploit at Orleans, pointed out to Fournier, Sept. I. Fournier replies: "In God's name, I am not to be ordered; when the bloody beggars have had their heads cut off the trial may be held later!"]

31127 (return)

[ Roch Marcandier, 210. Speech by Lazowski to the section of Finistère, fauborg Saint-Marceau. Lazowski had, in addition, set free the assassins of the mayor of Etampes, and laid their manacles on the bureau table.]

31128 (return)

[ Malouet, II. 243 (Sept. 2).-Moniteur, XIII. 48 (session of Sept. 27, 1792). We see in the speech of Panis that analogous scenes took place in the committee of supervision. "Imagine our situation. We were surrounded by citizens irritated against the treachery of the court. We were told: 'Here is an aristocrat who is going to fly; you must stop him, or your yourselves are traitors!' Pistols were pointed at us and we found ourselves obliged to sign warrants, not so much for our own safety as for that of the persons denounced."]

31129 (return)

[ Granier de Cassagnac, II. 258.-Prudhomme, "Les Crimes de la Révolution," III. 272.-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 631.-De Ferrière, III. 391.-(The expression quoted was recorded by Rétif de la Bretonne.)]

31130 (return)

[ That is how to do it, must any anarchist or hopeful revolutionary have thought, upon reading Taine's livid description.-But also: "Do not let the bourgeois read this, it might scare them and make our task more difficult." (SR).]

31131 (return)

[ Moniteur, XIII. 698, 698 (numbers for Sept. 15 and 16). Ibid., Letter of Roland, 701; of Pétion, 711.-Buchez et Roux, XVIII. 33. 34.-Prudhomme's journal contains an engraving of this subject (Sept. 14)-"An Englishman admitted to the bar of the house denounces to the National Assembly a robbery committed in a house occupied by him at Chaillot by two bailiffs and their satellites. The robbery consisted of twelve louis, five guineas, five thousand pounds in assignats, and several other objects." The courts before which he appeared did not dare take up his case (Buchez et Roux, XVII. P. 1, Sept. 18).]

31132 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XVII. 461.-Prudhomme, "Les Révolutions de Paris," number for Sept. 22, 1792.]

31133 (return)

[ Moniteur, XIII. 711 (session of Sept. 16). Letter of Roland to the National Assembly.-Buchez et Roux, XVIII. 42.-Moniteur, XIII. 731 (session of Sept. 17). Speech by Pétion: "Yesterday there was some talk of again visiting the prisons, and particularly the Conciergerie."]

31134 (return)

[ Perhaps Mao read this and later coined his famous slogan "that all political power emanates from the barrels of guns." (SR).]

31135 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," II. 58 to 76. Official reports of the Paris electoral assembly.-Robespierre is elected the twelfth (Sept. 5), then Danton and Collot d'Herbois (Sept. 6) then Manuel and Billaud-Varennes (Sept. 7), next C. Desmoulins (Sept. 8), Marat (Sept. 9) etc.-Mortimer-Ternaux, IV. 35 (act passed by the commune at the instigation of Robespierre for the regulation of electoral operations).-Louvet, "Mémoires." Louvet, in the electoral assembly asks to be heard on the candidacy of Marat, but is unsuccessful. "On going out I was surrounded by those men with big clubs and sabers by whom the future dictator was always attended, Robespierre's body-guard. They threatened me and told me in very concise terms: 'Before long you shall have your turn. This is the freedom of that assembly in which one declared his vote under a dagger pointed at him."']

31136 (return)

[ In reading this all socialist and communists and other potential manipulators of democracy would have taken and will continue to take note. Once the hidden combination can manage to invest all the different, in theory opponent, parties with their own men, an eternal control by a hidden mafia can now take place. (SR).]

31137 (return)

[ Such procedures set a precedence for 200 years of 'guided democracy' in many trade unions and elsewhere. (SR).]

THE EPIDEMIC AND CONTAGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE

REVOLUTIONARY DISEASE.

In the departments, it is by hundreds that we enumerate days like the 20th of June, August 10, September 2. The body has its epidemic, its contagious diseases; the mind has the same; the revolutionary malady is one of them. It appears throughout the country at the same time; each infected point infects others. In each city, in each borough, the club is a Center of inflammation which disorganizes the sound parts; and the example of each disorganized Center spreads afar like contagious fumes.3201 Everywhere the same fever, delirium, and convulsions mark the presence of the same virus. That virus is the Jacobin dogma. By virtue of the Jacobin dogma, theft, usurpation, murder, take on the guise of political philosophy, and the gravest crimes against persons, against public or private property, become legitimate; for they are the acts of the legitimate supreme power, the power that has the public welfare in its keeping.

I. The Sovereignty of the People.

Its principle is the Jacobin dogma of the sovereignty of the

people.--The new right is officially proclaimed.-Public

statement of the new régime.-Its object, its opponents, its

methods.-Its extension from Paris to the provinces.

That each Jacobin band should be invested with the local dictatorship in its own canton is, according to the Jacobins, a natural right. It becomes the written law from the day that the National Assembly declares the country in danger. "From that date," says their most widely read Journal,3202 and by the mere fact of that declaration, "the people of France are assembled and insurgent. They have repossessed themselves of the sovereign power." Their magistrates, their deputies, all constituted authorities, return to nothingness, their essential state. And you, temporary and revocable representatives, "you are nothing but presiding officers for the people; you have nothing to do but to collect their votes, and to announce the result when these shall have been cast with due solemnity."-Nor is this the theory of the Jacobins only; it is also official theory. The National Assembly approves of the insurrection, recognizes the Commune, keeps in the background, abdicates as far as possible, and only remains provisionally in office in order that the place may not be left vacant. It abstains from exercising power, even to provide its own successors; it merely "invites" the French people to organize a national convention; it confesses that it has "no right to put the exercise of sovereign power under binding rules"; it does no more than "indicate to citizens" the rules for the elections "to which it invites them to conform." Meanwhile it is subject to the will of the sovereign people, then so-called; it dares not resist their crimes; it interferes with assassins only by entreaties.-Much more; it authorizes them, either by ministerial signature or counter-signature, to begin their work elsewhere. Roland has signed Fournier's commission to Orleans; Danton has sent the circular of Marat over all France. To reconstruct the departments the council of ministers sends the most infuriated members of the Commune and the party, Chaumette, Fréron, Westerman, Auduoin, Huguenin, Momoro, Couthon, Billaud-Varennes,3204 and others still more tainted and brutal, who preach the purest Jacobin doctrine. "They announce openly3205 that laws no longer exist; that since the people are sovereign, every one is master; that each fraction of the nation can take such measures as suit it, in the name of the country's safety; that they have the right to tax corn, to seize it in the laborer's fields, to cut off the heads of the farmers who refuse to bring their grain to market." At Lisieux, agrarian law is preached by Fufour and Momoro. At Douai, other preachers from Paris say to the popular club, "Prepare scaffolds; let the walls of the city bristle with gallows, and hang upon them every man who does not accept our opinions."-Nothing is more logical, more in conformity with their principles. The journals, deducing their consequences, explain to the people the use they ought to make of their reconquered sovereignty.3206 "Under the present circumstances, community of property is the law; everything belongs to everybody." Besides, "an equalizing of fortunes must be brought about, a leveling, which shall abolish the vicious principle of the domination of the rich over the poor." This reform is all the more pressing because "the people, the real sovereign people, have nearly as many enemies as there are proprietors, large merchants, financiers, and wealthy men. In a time of revolution, we must regard all men who have more than enough as the enemies, secret or avowed, of popular government." Therefore, "let the people of each commune, before they quit their homes" for the army, "put all those who are suspected of not loving liberty in a secure place, and under the safe-keeping of the law; let them be kept shut up until war is over; let them be guarded with pikes," and let each one of their guardians receive thirty sous per day.

* As for the partisans of the fallen government, the members of the Paris directory, "with Roederer and Blondel at their head,"

* as for the general officers, "with Lafayette and d'Affry at their head,"

* as for "the critical deputies of the Constituent Assembly, with Barnave and Lameth at their head,"

* as for the Feuillant deputies of the Legislative Assembly, "with Ramond and Jaucourt at their head,"3207

* as for "all those who consented to soil their hands with the profits of the civil list,"

* as for "the 40,000 hired assassins who were gathered at the palace on the night of August 9-10,

they are all (say the Jacobins) furious monsters, who ought to be strangled to the last one. People! you have risen to your feet; stand firm until not one of these conspirators remains alive. Your humanity requires you for once to show yourselves inexorable. Strike terror to the wicked. The proscriptions which we impose on you as a duty, are the sacred wrath of your country."

There is no mistaking this; it is a tocsin sounding against all the powers that be, against all social superiority, against priests and nobles, proprietors, capitalists, the leaders of business and industry; it is sounding, in short, against the whole élite of France, whether of old or recent origin. The Jacobins of Paris, by their journals, their examples, their missionaries, give the signal; and in the provinces their kindred spirits, imbued with the same principles, only wait the summons to hurl themselves forward.

II.-In several departments it establishes itself in advance.

An instance of this in the Var.

In many departments3208 they have forestalled the summons. In the Var, for example, pillages and proscriptions have begun with the month of May. According to custom, they first seize upon the castles and the monasteries, although these have become national property, at one time alleging as a reason for this that the administration "is too slow in carrying out sentence against the émigrés," and again, that "the chateau, standing on an eminence, weighs upon the inhabitants."3209 There is scarcely a village in France that does not contain twoscore wretches who are always ready to line their pockets, which is just the number of thieves who thoroughly sacked the chateau of Montaroux, carrying off "furniture, produce, clothing, even the jugs and bottles in the cellar." There are the same doings by the same band at the chateau of Tournon; the chateau of Salerne is burned, that of Flagose is pulled down; the canal of Cabris is destroyed; then the convent of Montrieux, the chateaux of Grasse, of Canet, of Régusse, of Brovaz, and many others, all devastated, and the devastations are made "daily."-It is impossible to suppress this country brigandage. The reigning dogma, weakening authority in the magistrates' hands, and the clubs, "which cover the department," have spread the fermentation of anarchy everywhere. "Administrators, judges, municipal officers, all who are invested with any authority, and who have the courage to use it in forcing respect for law, are one by one denounced by public opinion as enemies of the constitution and of liberty; because, people say, they talk of nothing but the law, as if they did not know that the will of the people makes the law, and that we are the people."3210 This is the real principle; here, as at Paris, it instantly begets its consequences. "In many of these clubs nothing is discussed but the plundering of estates and cutting off the heads of aristocrats. And who are designated by this infamous title? In the cities, the great traders and rich proprietors; in the country, those whom we call the bourgeois; everywhere, all peaceable citizens, the friends of order, who wish to enjoy, under the shadow of the protecting law, the blessings of the Constitution. Such was the rage of their denunciations that in one of these clubs a good and brave peasant was denounced as an aristocrat; the whole of his aristocracy consisting in his having said to those who plundered the chateau of their seigneur, already mentioned, that they would not enjoy in peace the fruits of their crime."-Here is the Jacobin programme of Paris in advance, namely, the division of the French into two classes, the spoliation of one, the despotism of the other; the destruction of the well-to-do, orderly and honest under the dictation of those who are not so.

Here, as in Paris, the programme is carried out step by step. At Beausset, near Toulon, a man named Vidal, captain of the National Guard, "twice set at liberty by virtue of two consecutive amnesties,"3211 punishes not resistance merely, but even murmurs, with death. Two old men, one of them a notary, the other a turner, having complained of him to the public prosecutor, the general alarm is beaten, a gathering of armed men is formed in the street, and the complainants are clubbed, riddled with balls, and their bodies thrown into a pit. Many of their friends are wounded, others take to flight; seven houses are sacked, and the municipality, "either overawed or in complicity," makes no interference until all is over. There is no way of pursuing the guilty ones; the foreman of the jury, who goes, escorted by a thousand men, to hold an inquest, can get no testimony. The municipal officers feign to have heard nothing, neither the general alarm nor the guns fired under their windows. The other witnesses say not a word; but they declare, sotto voce, the reason for their silence. If they should testify, "they would be sure of being killed as soon as the troops should have gone away." The foreman of the jury is himself menaced; after remaining three-quarters of an hour, he finds it prudent to leave the city.-After this the clubs of Beausset and of the neighborhood, gaining hardihood from the impotence of the law, break out into incendiary propositions: "It is announced that after the troops retreat, nineteen houses more will be sacked; it is proposed to behead all aristocrats, that is to say, all the land-owners in the country." Many have fled, but their flight does not satisfy the clubs. Vidal orders those of Beausset who took refuge in Toulon to return at once; otherwise their houses will be demolished, and that very day, in fact, by way of warning, several houses in Beausset, among them that of a notary, are either pulled down or pillaged from top to bottom; all the riff-raff of the town are at work, "half-drunken men and women," and, as their object is to rob and drink, they would like to begin again in the principal town of the canton.-The club, accordingly, has declared that "Toulon would soon see a new St. Bartholomew"; it has allies there, and arrangements are made; each club in the small towns of the vicinity will furnish men, while all will march under the leadership of the Toulon club. At Toulon, as at Beausset, the municipality will let things take their course, while the proceedings complained of by the public prosecutor and the district and department administrators will be applied to them. They may send reports to Paris, and denounce patriots to the National Assembly and the King, if they choose; the club will reply to their scribbling with acts. Their turn is coming. Lanterns and sabers are also found at Toulon, and the faction murders them because they have lodged complaints against the murderers.

III.-Each Jacobin band a dictator in its own neighborhood.

Saint-Afrique during the interregnum.

By what it dared to do when the government still stood on its feet we may we may imagine what it will do during the interregnum. Facts, then, as always, furnish the best picture, and, to obtain a knowledge of the new sovereign, we must first observe him on a limited stage.

On the reception of the news of the 10th of August, the Jacobins of Saint-Afrique, a small town of the Aveyron,3212 likewise undertook to save the country, and, to this end, like their fellows in other boroughs of the district, they organized themselves into an "Executive Power." This institution is of an old date, especially in the South; it had flourished for eighteen months from Lyons to Montpellier, from Agen to N?mes; but after the interregnum, its condition is still more flourishing; it consists of a secret society, the object of which is to carry out practically the motions and instructions of the club.3213 Ordinarily, they work at night, wearing masks or slouched hats, with long hair falling over the face. A list of their names, each with a number opposite to it, is kept at the meeting-place of the society. A triangular club, decked with a red ribbon, serves them both as weapon and badge; with this club, each member "may go anywhere," and do what seems good to him. At Saint-Afrique they number about eighty, among whom must be counted the rascals forming the seventh company of Tarn, staying in the town; their enrollment in the band is effected by constantly "preaching pillage to them," and by assuring them that the contents of the chateaux in the vicinity belong to them.3214-Not that the chateaux excite any fear; most of them are empty; neither in Saint-Afrique nor in the environs do the men of the ancient régime form a party; for many months orthodox priests and the nobles have had to fly, and now the well-to-do people are escaping. The population, however, is Catholic; many of the shop-keepers, artisans, and farmers are discontented, and the object now is to make these laggards keep step.-In the first place, they order women of every condition, work-girls and servants, to attend mass performed by the sworn curé, for, if they do not, they will be made acquainted with the cudgel.-In the second place, all the suspected are disarmed; they enter their houses during the night in force, unexpectedly, and, besides their gun, carry off their provisions and money. A certain grocer who persists in his lukewarmness is visited a second time; seven or eight men, one evening, break open his door with a stick of timber; he takes refuge on his roof, dares not descend until the following day at dawn, and finds that everything in his store has been either stolen or broken to pieces.3215 In the third place, there is "punishment of the ill-disposed." At nine o'clock in the evening a squad knocks at the door of a distrusted shoemaker; it is opened by his apprentice; six of the ruffians enter, and one of them, showing a paper, says to the poor fellow:

"I come on the part of the Executive Power, by which you are condemned to a beating."

"What for?"

"If you have not done anything wrong, you are thinking about it."3216

And so they beat him in the presence of his family. Many others like him are seized and unmercifully beaten on their own premises.-As to the expenses of the operation, these must be defrayed by the malevolent. These, therefore, are taxed according to their occupations; this or that tanner or dealer in cattle has to pay 36 francs; another, a hatter, 72 francs; otherwise "they will be attended to that very night at nine o'clock." Nobody is exempt, if he is not one of the band. Poor old men who have nothing but a five-franc assignat are compelled to give that; they take from the wife of an unskilled laborer, whose savings consist of seven sous and a half, the whole of this, exclaiming, "that is good for three mugs of wine."3217 When money is not to be had, they take goods in kind; they make short work of cellars, bee-hives, clothes-presses, and poultry-yards. They eat, drink, and break, giving themselves up to it heartily, not only in the town, but in the neighboring villages. One detachment goes to Brusque, and proceeds so vigorously that the mayor and syndic-attorney scamper off across the fields, and dare not return for a couple of days.3218 At Versol, the dwelling of the sworn curé, and at Lapeyre, that of the sworn vicar, are both sacked; the money is stolen and the casks are emptied. In the house of the curé of Douyre, "furniture, clothes, cabinets, and window-sashes are destroyed"; they feast on his wine and the contents of his cupboard, throw away what they could not consume, then go in search of the curé and his brother, a former Carthusian, shouting that "their heads must be cut off; and sausage-meat made of the rest of their bodies!" Some of them, a little shrewder than the others, light on a prize; for example, a certain Bourguière, a trooper of the line, seized a vineyard belonging to an old lady, the widow of a physician and former mayor;3219 he gathered in its crop, "publicly in broad daylight," for his own benefit, and warns the proprietress that he will kill her if she makes a complaint against him, and, as she probably does complain of him, he obliges her, in the name of the Executive Power, to pay him fifty crowns damages.-As to the common Jacobin gangsters, their reward, besides food and drink, is perfect licentiousness. In all houses invaded at eleven o'clock in the evening. Whilst the father flies, or the husband screams under the cudgel, one of the villains stations himself at the entrance with a drawn saber in his hands, and the wife or daughter remains at the mercy of the others; they seize her by the neck and maintain their hold.3220 In vain does she scream for help. "Nobody in Saint-Afrique dares go outdoors at night"; nobody comes, and, the following day, the juge-de-paix dares not receive the complaint, because "he is afraid himself."-Accordingly, on the 23rd of September, the municipal officers and the town-clerk, who made their rounds, were nearly beaten to death with clubs and stones; on the 10th of October another municipal officer was left for dead; a fortnight before this, a lieutenant of volunteers, M. Mazières, "trying to do his duty, was assassinated in his bed by his own men." Naturally, nobody dares whisper a word, and, after two months of this order of things, it may be presumed that at the municipal elections of the 21st of October, the electors will be docile. In any event, as a precaution, their notification eight days before, according to law, is dispensed with; as extra precaution, they are informed that if they do not vote for the Executive Power, they will have to do with the triangular cudgel.3221 Consequently, most of them abstain; in a town of over 600 active citizens, 40 votes give a majority; Bourgougnon and Sarrus, the two chiefs of the Executive Power, are elected, one mayor, and the other syndic-attorney, and henceforth the authority they seized by force is conferred on them by the law.

IV.-Ordinary practices of the Jacobin dictatorship.

The stationary companies of the clubs.-Their personnel.

-Their leaders.

This is roughly the type of government which spring up in every commune of France after the 10th of August; the club reigns, but the form and processes of its dictatorship are different, according to circumstances.-Sometimes it operates directly through an executive gang or by lancing an excited mob; sometimes it operates indirectly through the electoral assembly it has had elected, or through the municipality, which is its accomplice. If the administrations are Jacobin, it governs through them. If they are passive, it governs alongside of them. If they are refractory, it purges them,3222 or breaks them up,3223 and, to put them down, it resorts not only to blows, but even to murder3224 and massacre.3225 Between massacre and threats, all intermediaries meet, the revolutionary seal being everywhere impressed with inequalities of relief.

In many places, threats suffice. In regions where the temperament of the people is cool, and where there is no resistance, it is pointless to resort to assault and battery. What is the use is killing in a town like Arras, for instance, where, on the day of the civic oath, the president of the department, a prudent millionaire, stalks through the streets arm in arm with Aunty Duchesne, who sells cookies down in a cellar, where, on election days, the townspeople, through cowardice, elect the club candidates under the pretense that "rascals and beggars" must be sent off to Paris to purge the town of them!3226 It would be labor lost to strike people who grovel so well.3227 The faction is content to mark them as mangy curs, to put them in pens, keep them on a leash, and to annoy them.3228 It posts at the entrance of the guard-room a list of inhabitants related to an émigré; it makes domiciliary visits; it draws up a fancied list of the suspected, on which list all that are rich are found inscribed. It insults and disarms them; it confines them to the town; it forbids them to go outside of it even on foot; it orders them to present themselves daily before its committee of public safety; it condemns them to pay their taxes for a year in twenty-four hours; it breaks the seals of their letters; it confiscates, demolishes, and sells their family tombs in the cemeteries. This is all in order, as is the religious persecution,

* with the irruption into private chapels where mass is said,

* with blows with gun-stocks and the fist bestowed on the officiating priest,

* with the obligation of orthodox parents to have their children baptized by the schismatic curé,

* with the expulsion of nuns, and

* with the pursuit, imprisonment and transportation of unsworn ecclesiastics.

But if the domination of the club is not always a bloody one, the judgments are always those of an armed man, who, putting his gun to his shoulder, aims at the wayfarers whom he has stopped on the road. Generally they kneel down, tender their purses, and the shot is not fired. But the gun is cocked, nevertheless, and, to be certain of this, we have only to look at the shriveled hand grasping the trigger. We are reminded of those swarms of banditti which infested the country under the ancient regime;3229 the double-girdle of smugglers and receivers embraced within twelve hundred leagues of internal excise-duties, the poachers abounding on the four hundred leagues of guarded captaincies, the deserters so numerous that in eight years they amounted to sixty thousand, the beggars with which the prisons overflowed, the thousands of thieves and vagabonds thronging the highways, quarry of the police which the Revolution let loose and armed, and which, in its turn, from being prey, became the hunters of game. For three years these strong-armed prowlers have served as the hard-core of local jacqueries; at the present time they form the staff of the universal jacquerie. At N?mes,3230 the head of the Executive Power is a "dancing-master." The two leading demagogues of Toulouse are a shoemaker, and an actor who plays valets.3231 At Toulon,3232 the club, more absolute than any Asiatic despot, is recruited from among the destitute, sailors, harbor-hands, soldiers, "stray peddlers," while its president, Sylvestre, sent down from Paris, is a criminal of the lowest degree. At Rheims,3233 the principal leader is an unfrocked priest, married to a nun, aided by a baker, who, an old soldier, came near being hung. Elsewhere,3234 it is some deserter tried for robbery; here, a cook or innkeeper, and there, a former lackey The oracle of Lyons is an ex-commercial traveler, an emulator of Marat, named Chalier, whose murderous delirium is complicated with morbid mysticism. The acolytes of Chalier are a barber, a hair-dresser, an old-clothes dealer, a mustard and vinegar manufacturer, a cloth-dresser, a silk-worker, a gauze-maker, while the time is near when authority is to fall into still meaner hands, those of "the dregs of the female population," who, aided by "a few bullies," elect "female commissaries," tax food, and for three days pillage the warehouses.3235 Avignon has for its masters the Glacière bandits. Arles is under the yoke of its porters and bargemen. Marseilles belongs to "a band of wretches spawned out of houses of debauchery, who recognize neither laws nor magistrates, and ruling the city through terror."3236-It is not surprising that such men, invested with such power, use it in conformity with their nature, and that the interregnum, which is their reign, spreads over France a circle of devastations, robberies, and murders.

V.-The companies of traveling volunteers.

Quality of the recruits.-Election of officers.-Robberies

and murders.

Usually, the stationary band of club members has an auxiliary band of the same species which roves about. I mean the volunteers, who inspire more fear and do more harm, because they march in a body and are armed.3237 Like their brethren in the ordinary walks of life, many of them are town and country vagabonds; most of them, living from hand to mouth, have been attracted by the pay of fifteen sous a day; they have become soldiers for lack of work and bread.3238 Each commune, moreover, having been called upon for its army contingent, "they have picked up whatever could be found in the towns, all the scamps hanging around street-corners, men with no pursuit, and, in the country, wretches and vagabonds of every description; nearly all have been forced to march by money or drawing lots," and it is probable that the various administrations thought that "in this way they would purge France."3239 To the wretched "bought by the communes," add others of the same stamp, procured by the rich as substitutes for their sons.3240 Thus do they pick over the social dunghill and obtain at a discount the natural and predestined inmates of houses of correction, poor-houses and hospitals, with an utter disregard of quality, even physical, "the halt, the maimed and the blind," the deformed and the defective, "some too old, and others too young and too feeble to support the fatigues of war, others so small as to stand a foot lower than their guns," a large number of boys of sixteen, fourteen, and thirteen; in short, the reprobate of great cities as we now see him, stunted, puny, and naturally insolent and insurgent.3241 "One-third of them are found unfit for service" on reaching the frontier.3242-But, before reaching the frontier, they act like "pirates" on the road.-The others, with sounder bodies and better hearts, become, under the discipline of constant danger, good soldiers at the end of a year. In the mean time, however, they make no less havoc, for, if they are less disposed to robbery, they are more fanatical. Nothing is more delicate than the military organization, owing to the fact that it represents force, and man is always tempted to abuse force; for any free company of soldiers to remain inoffensive in a civil community, it must be restrained by the strongest curbs, which curbs, either within or without, were wholly wanting with the volunteers of 1792.3243

Artisans, peasants, the petty bourgeois class, youthful enthusiasts stimulated by the prevailing doctrine, they are still much more Jacobin than patriotic; the dogma of popular sovereignty, like a heady wine, has turned their inexperienced brains; they are fully persuaded that, "destined to contend with the enemies of the republic, is an honor which permits them to exact and to dare all things."3244 The least among them believes himself superior to the law, "as formerly a Condé,3245" and he becomes king on a small scale, self-constituted, an autocratic justiciary and avenger of wrongs, a supporter of patriots and the scourge of aristocrats, the disposer of lives and property, and, without delay or formality, taking it upon himself to complete the Revolution on the spot in every town he passes through.-He is not to be hindered in all this by his officers. "Having created his chiefs, they are of no more account to him than any of a man's creations usually are"; far from being obeyed, the officers are not even respected, "and that comes from resorting to analogies without considering military talent or moral superiority."3246 Through the natural effects of the system of election, all grades of rank have fallen upon demagogues and blusterers.

"The intriguers, loud-talkers, and especially the great boozers, have prevailed against the capable."3247

Besides, to retain his popularity, the new officer will go to a bar and drink with his men,3248 and he must show himself more Jacobin than they are, from which it follows that, not content with tolerating their excesses, he provokes them.-Hence, after March, 1792, and even before,3249 we see the volunteers behaving in France as in a conquered country. Sometimes they make domiciliary visits, and break everything to pieces in the house they visit. Sometimes, they force the re-baptism of infants by the conventionalist curé, and shoot at the traditional father. Here, of their own accord, they make arrests; there, they join in with mutineers and stop grain-boats; elsewhere, they force a municipality to tax bread; farther on, they burn or sack chateaux, and, if a mayor happens to inform them that the chateau now belongs to the nation and not to an émigré; they reply with "thrusts," and threaten to cut his throat.3250 As the 10th of August draws near, the phantom of authority, which still occasionally imposed on them, completely vanishes, and "they risk nothing in killing" whoever displeases them.3251 Exasperated by the perils they are about to encounter on the frontier, they begin war in the interior. Provisionally, and as a precaution, they slaughter probable aristocrats on the way, and treat the officers, nobles and priests they meet on the road worse than their club allies. For, on the one hand, being merely on the march, they are much safer from punishment than local murderers; in a week, lost in the army, they will not be sought for in camp, and they may slay with perfect security. On the other hand, as they are strangers and newcomers, they are not able, like local persons, to identify a person. So on account of a name, a dress, qualifications, a coffee-house rumor, or an appearance, however venerable and harmless a man may be, they kill him, not because they know him, but because they do not know him.

VI.-A tour of France in the cabinet of the Minister of the Interior.

From Carcassonne to Bordeaux.-Bordeaux to Caen.-The north

and the east.-Chalons-sur-Marne to Lyons.-The Comtat and

Provence.-The tone and the responses of the Jacobin

administration.-The programme of the party.

Let us enter the cabinet of Roland, Minister of the Interior, a fortnight after the opening of the Convention, and suppose him contemplating, some evening, in miniature, a picture of the state of the country administered by him. His clerks have placed the correspondence of the past few weeks on his table, arranged in proper order; his replies are noted in brief on the margin; he has a map of France before him, and, placing his finger on the southern section, he moves it along the great highway across the country. At every stage he recurs to the paper file of letters, and passing innumerable reports of violence, he merely gives his attention to the great revolutionary exploits.3252 Madame Roland, I imagine, works with her husband, and the couple, sitting together alone under the lamp, ponder over the doings of the ferocious brute which they have set free in the provinces the same as in Paris.

Their eyes go first to the southern extremity of France. There,3253 on the canal of the Deux-Mers, at Carcassonne, the population has seized three boats loaded with grain, demanded provisions, then a lower prices of bread, then guns and cannon from the magazine, and, lastly, the heads of the administrators; an inspector-general has been wounded by an axe, and the syndic-attorney of the department, M. Verdie; massacred.-The Minister follows with his eye the road from Carcassonne to Bordeaux, and on the right and on the left he finds traces of blood. At Castres,3254 a report is spread that a dealer in grain was trying to raise the price, whereupon a mob gathers, and, to save the dealer, he is placed in the guard-house. The volunteers, however, force open the guard-house, and throw the man out of the first-story window; they then finish him off with "blows with clubs and weights," drag his body along the street and cast it into the river.-The evening before, at Clairac,3255 M. Lartigue-Langa, an unsworn priest, pursued through the street by a troop of men and women, who wanted to remove his cassock and set him on an ass, found refuge, with great difficulty, in his country-house. They go there for him, however, fetch him back to the public promenade, and there they kill him. A number of brave fellows who interfered were charged with incivism, and severely handled. Repression is impossible; the department writes to the Minister that "at this time it would be impolitic to follow the matter up." Roland knows that by experience. The letters in his hands show him that there, as in Paris, murder engenders murder. M. d'Alespée; a gentleman, has just been assassinated at Nérac; "all reputable citizens formed around him a rampart with their bodies," but the rabble prevailed, and the murderers, "through their obscurity," escaped.-The Minister's finger stops at Bordeaux. There the federation festivities are marked with a triple assassination.3256 In order to let this dangerous moment pass by, M. de Langoiran, vicar-general of the archbishopric, had retired half a league off; in the village of Cauderan, to the residence of an octogenarian priest, who, like himself; had never meddled with public matters. On the 15th of July the National Guards of the village, excited by the speeches of the previous night, have come to the residence to pick them up, and moreover, a third priest belonging in the neighborhood. There is nothing to lay to their charge; neither the municipal officers, nor the justices before whom they are brought, can avoid declaring them innocent. As a last recourse, they are conducted to Bordeaux, before the Directory of the department. But it is getting dark, and the riotous crowd becoming impatient, makes an attack on them. The octogenarian "receives so many blows that he cannot recover"; the abbé du Puy is knocked down and dragged along by a rope attached to his feet; M. de Langoirac's head is cut off, carried about on a pike, taken to his house and presented to the servant, who is told that "her master will not come home to supper." The torment of the priests has lasted from five o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock in the evening, and the municipal authorities were duly advised; but they cannot put themselves out of the way to give succor; they are too seriously occupied in erecting a liberty-pole.

Route from Bordeaux to Caen.-The Minister's finger turns to the north, and stops at Limoges. The day following the federation has been here celebrated the same as at Bordeaux.3257 An unsworn priest, the abbé Chabrol, assailed by a gang of men and women, is first conducted to the guard-house and then to the dwelling of the juge-de-paix; for his protection a warrant of arrest is gotten out, and he is kept under guard, in sight, by four chasseurs, in one of the rooms. But the populace are not satisfied with this. In vain do the municipal officers appeal to it, in vain do the gendarmes interpose themselves between it and the prisoner; it rushes in upon them and disperses them. Meanwhile, volleys of stones smash in the windows, and the entrance door yields to the blows of axes; about thirty of the villains scale the windows, and pass the priest down like a bale of goods. A few yards off, "struck down with clubs and other instruments," he draws his last breath, his head "crushed" by twenty mortal wounds.-Farther up, towards Orleans, Roland reads the following dispatches, taken from the file for Loiret:3258 "Anarchy is at its height," writes one of the districts to the Directory of the department; "there is no longer recognition of any authority; the administrators of the district and of the municipalities are insulted, and are powerless to enforce respect.... Threats of slaughter, of destroying houses and giving them up to pillage prevail; plans are made to tear down all the chateaux. The municipal authorities of Achères, along with many of the inhabitants, have gone to Oison and Chaussy, where everything is smashed, broken up and carried off On the 16th of September six armed men went to the house of M. de Vaudeuil and obliged him to return the sum of 300 francs, for penalties pretended to have been paid by them. We have been notified that M. Dedeley will be visited at Achères for the same purpose to-day. M. de Lory has been similarly threatened... Finally, all those people there say that they want no more local administrations or tribunals, that the law is in their own hands, and they will execute it. In this extremity we have decided on the only safe course, which is to silently accept all the outrages inflicted upon us. We have not called upon you for protection, for we are well aware of the embarrassment you labor under."-The best part of the National Guard, indeed, having been disarmed at the county-town, there is no longer an armed force to put riots down. Consequently, at this same date,3259 the populace, increased by the afflux of "strangers" and ordinary nomads, hang a corn-inspector, plant his head on the end of a pike, drag his body through the streets, sack five houses and burn the furniture of a municipal officer in front of his own door. Thereupon, the obedient municipality sets the arrested rioters free, and lowers the price of bread one-sixth. Above the Loire, the dispatches of Orne and Calvados complete the picture. "Our district," writes a lieutenant of the gendarmerie,3260 "is a prey to brigandage... About thirty rascals have just sacked the chateau of Dampierre. Calls for men are constantly made upon us," which we cannot satisfy, "because the call is general on all sides." The details are curious, and here, notwithstanding the Minister's familiarity with popular misdeeds, he cannot avoid noting one extortion of a new species. "The inhabitants of the villages3261 collect together, betake themselves to different chateaux, seize the wives and children of their proprietors, and keep them as bail for promises of reimbursement which they force the latter to sign, not merely for feudal taxes, but, again, for expenses to which this taxation may have given rise," first under the actual proprietor and then under his predecessors; in the mean time they install themselves on the premises, demand payments for their time, devastate the buildings on the place, and sell the furniture.-All this is accompanied with the usual slaughter. The Directory of the department of Orne advises the Minister3262 that "a former noble has been killed (homicide) in the canton of Sepf, an ex-curé in the town of Bellême, an unsworn priest in the canton of Putanges, an ex-capuchin in the territory of Alen?on." The same day, at Caen, the syndic-attorney of Calvados, M. Bayeux, a man of sterling merit, imprisoned by the local Jacobins, has just been shot down in the street and bayoneted, while the National Assembly was passing a decree proclaiming his innocence and ordering him to be set at liberty.3263

Route of the East.-At Rouen, in front of the H?tel-de-ville, the National Guard, stoned for more than an hour, finally fire a volley and kill four men; throughout the department violence is committed in connection with grain, while wheat is stolen or carried off by force;3264 but Roland is obliged to restrict himself; he can note only political disturbances. Besides, he is obliged to hurry up, for murders abound everywhere. In addition to the turmoil of the army and the capital,3265 each department in the vicinity of Paris or near the frontier furnishes its quota of murders. They take place at Gisors, in the Eure, at Chantilly, and at Clermont in the Oise, at Saint-Amand in the Pas-de-Calais, at Cambray in the Nord, at Retel and Charleville in the Ardennes, at Rheims and at Chalons in the Marne, at Troyes in the Aube, at Meaux in Seine-et-Marne, and at Versailles in Seine-et-Oise.3266-Roland, I imagine, does not open this file, and for a good reason; he knows too well how M. de Brissac and M. Delessart, and the other sixty-three persons killed at Versailles; it was he who signed Fournier's commission, the commander of the murderers. At this very moment he is forced to correspond with this villain, to send him certificates of "zeal and patriotism," and to assign him, over and above his robberies, 30,000 francs to defray the expenses of the operation.3267-But among the dispatches there are some he cannot overlook, if he desires to know to what his authority is reduced, in what contempt all authority is held, how the civil or military rabble exercises its power, with what promptitude it disposes of the most illustrious and most useful lives, especially those who have been, or are now, in command, the Minister perhaps saying to himself that his turn will come next.

Let us look at the case of M. de la Rochefoucauld. A philanthropist since he was young, a liberal on entering the Constituent Assembly, elected president of the Paris department, one of the most persistent, most generous, and most respected patriots from first to last,-who better deserved to be spared than? Arrested at Gisors3268 by order of the Paris Commune, he left the inn, escorted by the Parisian commissary, surrounded by the municipal council, twelve gendarmes and one hundred National Guards; behind him walked his mother, eighty years of age, his wife following in a carriage; there could be no fear of an escape. But, for a suspected person, death is more certain than a prison; three hundred volunteers of the Orne and the Sarthe departments, on their way through Gisors, collect and cry out: "We must have his head-nothing shall stop us!" A stone hits M. de la Rochefoucauld on the temple; he falters, his escort is broken up, and they finish him with clubs and sabers, while the municipal council "have barely time to drive off the carriage containing the ladies."-Accordingly, national justice, in the hands of the volunteers, has its sudden outbursts, its excesses, its reactions, the effect of which it is not advisable to wait for. For example, at Cambray,3269 a division of foot-gendarmerie had just left the town, and it occurs to them that they had forgotten "to purge the prison". It returns, seizes the keeper, takes him to the H?tel-de-ville, examines the prison register, sets at liberty those whose crimes seem to it excusable, and provides them with passports. On the other hand, it kills a former royal procureur, on whom addresses are found tainted with "aristocratic principles," an unpopular lieutenant-colonel, and a suspected captain.-However slight or ill-founded a suspicion, so much the worse for the officer on whom it falls! At Charleville,3270 two loads of arms having passed through one gate instead of another, to avoid a bad road, M. Juchereau, inspector of the manufacture of arms and commander of the place, is declared a traitor by the volunteers and the crowd, torn from the hands of the municipal officers, clubbed to the ground, stamped on, and stabbed. His head, fixed to a pike, is paraded through Charleville, then into Mézières, where it is thrown into the river running between the two towns. The body remains, and this the municipality orders to be interred; but it is not worthy of burial; the murderers get hold of it, and cast it into the water that it may join the head. In the meantime the lives of the municipal officers hang by a single thread. One is seized by the throat; another is knocked out of his chair and threatened with hanging, a gun is aimed at him and he is beaten and kicked; subsequently a plot is devised "to cut off their heads and plunder their houses."

He who disposes of lives, indeed, also disposes of property. Roland has only to flick through two or three reports to see how patriotism furnishes a cloak for brutal license and greed. At Coucy, in the department of Aisne,3271 the peasantry of seventeen parishes, assembled for the purpose of furnishing their military quota, rush with a loud clamor to two houses, the property of M. des Fossés, a former deputy to the Constituent Assembly, and the two finest in the town; one of them had been occupied by Henry IV. Some of the municipal officers who try to interfere are nearly cut to pieces, and the entire municipal body takes to flight. M. des Fossés, with his two daughters, succeed in hiding themselves in an obscure corner in the vicinity, and afterwards in a small tenement offered to them by a humane gardener, and finally, after great difficulty, they reach Soissons. Of his two houses, "nothing remains but the walls. Windows, casings, doors, and wainscoting, all are shattered"; twenty thousand francs of assignats in a portfolio are destroyed or carried off; the title-deeds of the property are not to be found, and the damage is estimated at 200,000 francs. The pillage lasted from seven o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock in the evening, and, as is always the case, ended in a fête. The plunderers, entering the cellars, drank "two hogsheads of wine and two casks of brandy; thirty or forty remained dead drunk, and were taken away with considerable difficulty." There is no prosecution, no investigation; the new mayor, who, one month after, makes up his mind to denounce the act, begs the Minister not to give his name, for, he says, "the agitators in the council-general of the Commune threaten, with fearful consequences, whoever is discovered to have written to you."3272-Such is the ever-present menace under which the gentry live, even when veterans in the service of freedom; Roland, foremost in his files, finds heartrending letters addressed directly to him, as a last recourse. Early in 1789, M. de Gouy d'Arcy3273 was the first to put his pen to paper in behalf of popular rights. A deputy of the noblesse to the Constituent Assembly, he is the first to rally to the Third-Estate; when the liberal minority of the noblesse came and took their seats in the hall of the Communes, he had already been there eight days, and, for thirty months, he "invariably seated himself on the side of the 'Left.'" Senior major-general, and ordered by the Legislative Assembly to suppress the outbreak of the 6,000 insurgents at Noyon, "he kept his rigorous orders in his pocket for ten days"; he endured their insults; he risked his life "to save those of his misguided fellow-citizens, and he had the good fortune not to spill a drop of blood." Exhausted by so much labor and effort, almost dying, ordered into the country by his physicians, "he devoted his income to the relief of poverty"; he planted on his own domain the first liberty tree that was erected; he furnished the volunteers with clothes and arms; "instead of a fifth, he yielded up a third of his revenue under the forced system of taxation." His children live with him on the property, which has been in the family four hundred years, and the peasantry call him "their father." No one could lead a more tranquil or, indeed, a more meritorious existence. But, being a noble, he is suspected, and a delegate from the Paris Commune denounces him at Compiègne as having in his house two cannon and five hundred and fifty muskets. There is at once a domiciliary visit. Eight hundred men, infantry and cavalry, appear before the chateau d'Arcy in battle array. He meets them at the door and tenders them the keys. After a search of six hours, they find twelve fowling pieces and thirteen rusty pistols, which he has already declared. His disappointed visitors grumble, break, eat and drink to the extent of 2,000 crowns damage.3274 Nevertheless, urged by their leaders they finally retire. But M. de Gouy has 60,000 francs in rentals which would be so much gain to the nation if he would emigrate; this must be effected, by expelling him, and, moreover during his expulsion, they may fill their pockets. For eight days this matter is discussed in the Compiègne club, in the bars, in the barracks, and, on the ninth day, 150 volunteers issue from the town, declaring that they are going to kill M. de Gouy and all who belong to him. Informed of this, he departs with his family, leaving the doors of his house wide open. There is a general pillage for five hours; the mob drink the costly wines, steal the plate, demand horses to carry their booty away, and promise to return soon and take the owner's head.-In effect, on the following morning at four o'clock, there is a new invasion, a new pillage, and, this time, the last one; the servants escape under a fire of musketry, and M. de Gouy, at the request of the villagers, whose vineyards are devastated, is obliged to quit that part of the country.3275-There is no need to go through the whole file. At Houdainville, at the house of M. de Saint-Maurice, at Nointel, on the estate of the Duc de Bourbon, at Chantilly, on the estate of the Prince de Condé, at the house of M. de Fitz-James, and elsewhere, a certain Gauthier, "commandant of the Paris detachment of Searchers, and charged with the powers of the Committee of Supervision," makes his patriotic circuit, and Roland knows beforehand of what that consists, namely, a dragonnade3276 in regular form on the domains of all nobles, absent or present.3277

Favorite game is still found in the clergy, more vigorously hunted than the nobles; Roland, charged with the duty of maintaining public order, asks himself how the lives of inoffensive priests, which the law recommends to him, can be protected.-At Troyes, at the house of M. Fardeau, an old non-conformist curé, an altar decked with its sacred vessels is discovered, and M. Fardeau, arrested, refuses to take the civic oath. Torn from his prison, and ordered to shout "Vive la Nation!" he again refuses. On this, a volunteer, borrowing an ax from a baker, chops off his head, and this head, washed in the river, is borne to the H?tel-de-ville.3278-At Meaux, a brigade of Parisian gendarmerie murders seven priests, and, as an extra, six ordinary malefactors in confinement.3279 At Rheims, the Parisian volunteers first make way with the post-master and his clerk, both under suspicion because the smell of burnt paper had issued from their chimney, and, next, M. de Montrosier, an old retired officer, which is the opening of the hunt. Afterwards they fall upon two ecclesiastics with pikes and sabers, whom their game-beaters have brought in from the country, then on the former curé of Saint-Jean, and on that of Rilly; their corpses are cut up, paraded through the streets in portions, and burnt in a bonfire; one of the wounded priests, the abbé Alexandre, is thrown in still alive.3280-Roland recognizes the men of September, who, exposing their still bloody pikes, came to his domicile to demand their wages; wherever the band passes it announces, "in the name of the people," its "plenary power to spread the example of the capital." Now, as 40,000 unsworn priests are condemned by the decree of August 26 to leave their departments in a week and France in a fortnight, shall they be allowed to depart? Eight thousand of them at Rouen, in obedience to the decree, charter transports, which the riotous population of both sides of the Seine prevent from leaving. Roland sees in his dispatches that in Rouen, as elsewhere, they crowd the municipalities for their passports,3281 but that these are often refused. Better still, at Troyes; at Meaux, at Lyons, at D?le, and in many other towns, the same thing is done as at Paris; they are confined in particular houses or in prisons, at least, provisionally, "for fear that they may congregate under the German eagle"; so that, made rebellious and declared traitors in spite of themselves, they may still remain in their pens subject to the knife. As the exportation of specie is prohibited, those who have procured the necessary coin are robbed of it on the frontier, while others, who fly at all hazards, tracked like wild boars, or run down like hares, escape like the bishop of Barral, athwart bayonets, or like the abbé Guillon, athwart sabers, when they are not struck down, like the abbé Pescheur, by the blows of a gun-stock.3282

It is soon dawn. The files are too numerous and too large; Roland finds that, out of eighty-three, he can examine but fifty; he must hasten on; leaving the East, his eyes again turn to the South.-On this side, too, there are strange sights. On the 2nd of September, at Chalons-sur-Marne3283, M. Chanlaire, an octogenarian and deaf, is returning, with his prayer-book under his arm, from the Mall, to which he resorted daily to read his prayers. A number of Parisian volunteers who meet him, seeing that he looks like a devotee, order him to shout, "Vive la Liberté" Unable to understand them, he makes no reply. They then seize him by the ears, and, not marching fast enough, they drag him along; his old ears give way, and, excited by seeing blood, they cut off his ears and nose, and thus, the poor old man dripping with blood, they reach the H?tel-de-Ville. At this sight a notary, posted there as sentinel, and who is a man of feeling, is horror-stricken and escapes, while the other National Guards hasten to shut the iron gates. The Parisians, still dragging along their captive, go to the district and then to the department bureau "to denounce aristocrats"; on the way they continue to strike the tottering old man, who falls down; they then decapitate him, place pieces of his body on pikes, and parade these about. Meanwhile, in this same town, twenty-two gentlemen; at Beaune, forty priests and nobles; at Dijon, eighty-three heads of families, locked up as suspected without evidence or examination, and confined at their own expense two months under pikes, ask themselves every morning whether the populace and the volunteers, who shout death cries through the streets, mean to release them in the same way as in Paris.3284-A trifle is sufficient to provoke a murder. On the 19th of August, at Auxerre as the National Guard is marching along, three citizens, after having taken the civic oath, "left the ranks," and, on being called back, "to make them fall in," one, either impatient or in ill-humor, "replied with an indecent gesture". The populace, taking it as an insult, instantly rush at them, and shoving aside the municipal body and the National Guards, wound one and kill the other two.3285 A fortnight after, in the same town, several young ecclesiastics are massacred, and "the corpse of one of them remains three days on a manure heap, the relatives not being allowed to bury it." About the same date, in a village of sabot makers, five leagues from Autun, four ecclesiastics provided with passports, among them a bishop and his two grand-vicars, are arrested, then examined, robbed, and murdered by the peasantry.-Below Autun, especially in the district of Roanne, the villagers burn the rent-rolls of national property; the volunteers put property-owners to ransom; both, apart from each other or together, give themselves up "to every excess and to every sort of iniquity against those whom they suspect of incivism under pretense of religious opinions."3286 However preoccupied or upset Roland's mind may be by the philosophic generalities with which it is filled, he has long inspected manufactures in this country; the name of every place is familiar to him; objects and forms are this time clearly defined to his arid imagination, and he begins to see things through and beyond mere words.

Madame Roland rests her finger on Lyons, so familiar to her two years before; she becomes excited against "the quadruple aristocracy of the town, petty nobles, priests, heavy merchants, and limbs of the law; in short, those formerly known as honest folks, according to the insolence of the ancient régime."3287 She may now find an aristocracy of another kind there, that of the gutter. Following the example of Paris, the Lyons clubbists, led by Charlier, have arranged for a massacre on a grand scale of the evil-disposed or suspected Another ringleader, Dodieu, has drawn up a list by name of two hundred aristocrats to be hung; on the 9th of September, women with pikes, the maniacs of the suburbs, bands of "the unknown," collected by the central club,3288 undertake to clean out the prisons. If the butchery is not equal to that of Paris, it is because the National Guard, more energetic, interferes just at the moment when a Parisian emissary, Saint-Charles, reads off a list of names in the prison of Roanne already taken from the prison register. But, in other places, it arrives too late.-Eight officers of the Royal-Pologne regiment, in garrison at Auch, some of them having been in the service twenty and thirty years, had been compelled to resign owing to the insubordination of their men; but, at the express desire of the Minister of War, they had patriotically remained at their posts, and, in twenty days of laborious marching, they had led their regiment from Auch to Lyons. Three days after their arrival, seized at night in their beds, conducted to Pierre-Encize, pelted with stones on the way, kept in secret confinement, and with frequent and prolonged examinations, all this merely put their services and their innocence in stronger light. They are taken from the prison by the Jacobin mob; of the eight, seven are killed in the street, and four priests along with them, while the exhibition of their work by the murderers is still more brazen than at Paris. They parade the heads of the dead all night on the ends of their pikes; they carry them to the Place des Terreaux into the coffee-houses; they set them on the tables and derisively offer them beer; they then light torches, enter the Célestins theater, and, marching on the stage with their trophies, blending real and mock tragedy.-The epilogue is both grotesque and horrible. Roland, at the bottom of the file, finds a letter from his colleague, Danton,3289 who begs him to release the officers, murdered three months ago, "for," says Danton, "if no charge can be found against them, it would be crying injustice to keep them longer in irons." Roland's clerk makes a minute on Danton's letter: "This matter disposed of." At this I imagine the couple looking at each other in silence. Madame Roland may remember that, at the beginning of the Revolution, she herself demanded heads, especially "two illustrious heads," and hoped "that the National Assembly would formally try them, or that some generous Decius"3290 would devote himself to "striking them down."3291 Her prayers are granted. The trial is about to begin in the regular way, and the Decius she has invoked is everywhere found throughout France.

The south-east corner remains, that Provence, described to him by Barbaroux as the last retreat of philosophy and freedom. Roland follows the Rh?ne down with his finger, and on both banks he finds, as he passes along, the usual characteristic misdeeds.-On the right bank, in Cantal and in the Gard, "the defenders of the country" fill their pockets at the expense of taxpayers designated by themselves;3292 this forced subscription is called "a voluntary gift." "Poor laborers at Nismes were taxed 50 francs, others 200, 300, 900, 1,000, under penalty of devastation and of bad treatment."-In the country near Tarascon the volunteers, returning to the old-fashioned ways of bandits, brandish the saber over the mother's head, threaten to smother the aunt in her bed, hold the child over a deep well, and thus extort from the farmer or proprietor even as much as 4,000 or 5,000 francs. Generally the farmer keeps silent, for, in case of complaint, he is sure to have his buildings burnt and his olive trees cut down.3293-On the left bank, in the Isère, Lieutenant-colonel Spendeler, seized by the populace of Tullins, was murdered, and then hung by his feet in a tree on the roadside;3294-in the Dr?me, the volunteers of Gard forced the prison at Montélimart and hacked an innocent person to death with a saber;3295 in Vaucluse, the pillaging is general and constant. With all public offices in their hands, and they alone admitted into the National Guard, the old brigands of Avignon, with the municipality for their accomplice, sweep the town and raid about the country; in town, 450,000 francs of "voluntary gifts" are handed over to the Glacière murderers by the friends and relatives of the dead;-in the country, ransoms of 1,000 and 10,000 francs are imposed on rich cultivators, to say nothing of the orgies of conquest and the pleasures of despots, money forcibly obtained in honor of innumerable liberty trees, banquets at a cost of five or six hundred francs, paid for by extorted funds, reveling of every sort and unrestrained havoc on the invaded farms;3296 in short, the abuse drunken force amusing itself with brutality and proud of its violence.

Following this long line of murders and robbery, the Minister reaches Marseilles, and I imagine him stopping at this city some-what dumbfounded. Not that he is in any way astonished at widespread murders; undoubtedly he has had received information of them from Aix, Aubagne, Apt, Brignolles, and Eyguières, while there are a series of them at Marseilles, one in July, two in August, and two in September;3297 but this he must be used to. What disturbs him here is to see the national bond dissolving; he sees departments breaking away, new, distinct, independent, complete governments forming on the basis of popular sovereignty;3298 publicly and officially, they keep funds raised for the central government for local uses; they institute penalties against their inhabitants seeking refuge in France; they organize tribunals, levy taxes, raise troops, and undertake military expeditions.3299 Assembled together to elect representatives to the Convention, the electors of the Bouches-du-Rh?ne were, additionally, disposed to establish throughout the department "the reign of liberty and equality," and to this effect they found, says one of them, "an army of 1,200 heroes to purge the districts in which the bourgeois aristocracy still raises its bold, imprudent head." Consequently, at Sonas, Noves, St. Remy, Maillane, Eyrages, Graveson, Eyguières, extended over the territory consisting of the districts of Tarascon, Arles and Salon, these twelve hundred heroes are authorized to get a living out of the inhabitants at pleasure, while the rest of the expenses of the expedition are to be borne "by suspected citizens."32100 These expeditions are prolonged six weeks and more; one of them goes outside of the department, to Monosque, in the Basses-Alpes, and Monosque, obliged to pay 104,000 francs to its "saviors and fathers," as an indemnity for traveling expenses, writes to the Minister that, henceforth, it can no longer meet his impositions.

What kind of improvised sovereigns are these who have instituted perambulating brigandage? Roland, on this point, has simply to question his friend Barbaroux, their president and the executive agent of their decrees. "Nine hundred persons," Barbaroux himself writes, "generally of slight education, impatiently listening to conservatives, and yielding all attention to the effervescent, cunning in the diffusion of calumnies, petty suspicious minds, a few men of integrity but unenlightened, a few enlightened but cowardly; many of them patriotic, but without judgment, without philosophy"; in short, a Jacobin club, and Jacobin to such an extent as to "make the hall ring with applause32101 on receiving the news of the September massacre"; in the foremost ranks, "a crowd of men eager for office and money, eternal informers, imagining trouble or exaggerating it to obtain for themselves lucrative commissions;"32102 in other words, the usual pack of hungry appetites in full chase.-To really know them, Roland has only to examine the last file, that of the neighboring departments, and consider their colleagues in Var. In this great wreck of reason and of integrity, called the Jacobin Revolution, a few stray waifs still float on the surface; many of the department administrations are composed of liberals, friends of order, intelligent men, upright and firm defenders of the law. Such was the Directory of Var.32103 To get rid of it the Toulon Jacobins contrived an ambush worthy of the Borgias and Oliverettos of the sixteenth century.32104 On the 28th of July, in the forenoon, Sylvestre, president of the club, distributed among his trusty men in the suburbs and purlieus of the town an enormous sack of red caps, while he posted his squads in convenient places. In the mean time the municipal body, his accomplices, formally present themselves at the department bureau, and invite the administrators to join them in fraternizing with the people. The administrators, suspecting nothing, accompany them, each arm in arm with a municipal officer or delegate of the club. They scarcely reach the square when there rushes upon it from every avenue a troop of red-caps lying in wait. The syndic-attorney, the vice-president of the department, and two other administrators, are seized, cut down and hung; another, M. Debaux, succeeding in making his escape, hides away, scales the ramparts during the night, breaks his thigh and lies there on the ground; he is discovered the next morning; a band, led by Jassaud, a harbor-laborer, and by Lemaille, calling him self "the town hangman," come and raise him up, carry him away in a barrow, and hang him at the first lamppost. Other bands dispatch the public prosecutor in the same fashion, a district administrator, and a merchant, and then, spreading over the country, pillage and slay among the country houses.-In vain has the commandant of the place, M. Dumerbion, entreated the municipality to proclaim martial law. Not only does it refuse, but it enjoins him to order one-half of his troops back to their barracks. By way of an offset, it sets free a number of soldiers condemned to the galleys, and all that are confined for insubordination.-Henceforth every shadow of discipline vanishes, and, in the following month, murders multiply. M. de Possel, a navy administrator, is taken from his dwelling, and a rope is passed around his neck; he is saved just in time by a bombardier, the secretary of the club. M. Senis, caught in his country-house, is hung on the Place du Vieux Palais. Desidery, a captain in the navy, the curé of La Valette, and M. de Sacqui des Thourets, are beheaded in the suburbs, and their beads are brought into town on the ends of three poles. M. de Flotte d'Argenson, vice-admiral, a man of Herculean stature, of such a grave aspect, and so austere that he is nicknamed the "Père Eternel" is treacherously enticed to the entrance of the Arsenal, where he sees the lantern already dropping; he seizes a gun, defends himself; yields to numbers, and after having been slashed with sabers, is hung. M. de Rochemaure, a major-general of marines, is likewise sabred and hung in the same manner; a main artery in the neck, severed by the blow of the saber, spouts blood from the corpse and forms a pool on the pavement; Barry, one of the executioners, washes his hands in it and sprinkles the by-standers as if bestowing a blessing on them.-Barry, Lemaille, Jassaud, Sylvestre, and other leading assassins, the new kings of Toulon, sufficiently resemble those of Paris. Add to these a certain Figon, who gives audience in his garret, straightens out social inequalities, forces the daughters of large farmers to marry poor republicans, and rich young men to marry prostitutes,32105 and, taking the lists furnished by the club or neighboring municipalities, ransoming all the well-to-do and opulent persons inscribed on them. In order that the portraiture of the band may be complete, it must be noted that, on the 23rd of August, it attempted to set free the 1800 convicts; the latter, not comprehending that they were wanted for political allies, did not dare sally forth, or, at least, the reliable portion of the National Guard arrived in time to put their chains on again. But here its efforts cease, and for more than a year public authority remains in the hands of a Jacobin faction which, as far as public order is concerned, does not even have the morals of a convict.

More than once during the course of this long review the Minister must have flushed with shame; for to the reprimands dispatched by him to these apathetic administrations, they reply by citing himself as an example:

"You desire us to denounce the arbitrary arrests to the public prosecutor; have you denounced those guilty of similar and yet greater crimes committed at the capital?"32106-

From all quarters come the cries of the oppressed appealing to "the patriot Minister, the sworn enemy of anarchy," to "the good and incorruptible Minister of the Interior, his only reproach, the common sense of his wife," and he could only reply with empty phrases and condolences:

"To lament the events which so grievously distress the province, all administrations being truly useful when they forestall evils, it being very sad to be obliged to resort to such remedies, and recommend to them a more active supervision."32107

"To lament and find consolation in the observations made in the letter," which announces four murders, but calls attention to the fact that "the victims immolated are counter-revolutionaries."32108

Roland has carried on written dialogues with the village municipalities, and given lessons in constitutional law to communities of pot-breakers.32109-But, on this territory, he is defeated by his own principles, while the pure Jacobins read him a lesson in turn; they, likewise, are able to deduce the consequences of their own creed.

"Brother and Friend, Sir," write those of Rouen, "not to be always at the feet of the municipality, we have declared ourselves permanent, deliberative sections of the Commune."32110

Let the so-called constituted authorities, the formalists and pedants of the Executive Council and the Minister of the Interior, look twice before censuring the exercise of popular sovereignty. This sovereign raises his voice and drives his clerks back into their holes; spoliation and murder, all this is just.

"Can you have forgotten that, after the tempest, as you yourself declared in the height of the storm, it is the nation which saves itself? Well, sir, this is what we have done.32111.. What! when all France was resounding with that long expected proclamation of the abolition of tyranny, you were willing that the traitors, who strove to reestablish it, should escape public prosecution! My God, what century is this in which we find such Ministers!"

Arbitrary taxes, penalties, confiscations, revolutionary expeditions, nomadic garrisons, pillage, what fault can be found with all that?

"We do not pretend that these are legal methods; but, drawing nearer to nature, we demand what object the oppressed have in view in invoking justice. Is it to lag behind and vainly pursue an equitable adjustment which is rendered fleeting by judicial forms? Correct these abuses or do not complain of the sovereign people suppressing them in advance.... You, sir, with so many reasons for it, would do well to recall your insults and redeem the wrongs you have inflicted before we happen to render them public."... "Citizen Minister, people flatter you; you are told too often that you are virtuous; the moment this gives you pleasure you cease to be so.... Discard the astute brigands who surround you, listen to the people, and remember that a citizen Minister is merely the executor of the sovereign will of the people."

However narrow Roland's outlook may be, he must finally comprehend that the innumerable robberies and murders which he has just noted over are not a thoughtless eruption, a passing crisis of delirium, but a manifesto of the victorious party, the beginning of an established system of government. Under this system, write the Marseilles Jacobins,

"to-day, in our happy region, the good rule over the bad, and constitute a party which allows no contamination; whatever is vicious has gone into hiding or has been exterminated." The programme is very precise, and acts form its commentary. This is the programme which the faction, throughout the interregnum, sets openly before the electors.

* * *

3201 (return)

[ Guillon de Montléon, I. 122. Letter of Laussel, dated Paris, 28th of August, 1792, to the Jacobins of Lyons: "Tell me how many heads have been cut off at home. It would be infamous to let our enemies escape." (1792).]

3202 (return)

[ "Les Révolutions de Paris," by Prudhomme, Vol. XIII. pp. 59-63 (14th of July, 3 Decrees of the 10th and 11th of August, 1792.)]

3204 (return)

[ Prudhomme, number of the 15th of September, p. 483.-Mortimer-Ternaux, IV. 430.]

3205 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux. IV. II. Fauchet's report, Nov. 6, 1792.-Ib., IV. 91, 142. Discourse of M. Fockedey, administrator of the department of the north, and of M. Bailly, deputy de Seine-et-Marne.]

3206 (return)

[ Prudhomme, number of Sept. 1, 1792, pp. 375, 381, 385: number of Sept. 22, pp. 528-530,-Cf. Guillon de Montléon, I. 144. Here are some of the principles announced by the Jacobin leaders of Lyons, Chalier, Laussel, Cusset, Rouillot, etc. "The time has come when this prophecy must be fulfilled: The rich shall be put in the place of the poor, and the poor in the place of the rich."-"If a half of their property be left them the rich will still be happy."-"If the laboring people of Lyons are destitute of work and of bread, they can profit by these calamities in helping themselves to wealth in the quarter where they find it."-"No one who is near a sack of wheat can die of hunger. Do you wish the word that will buy all that you want? Slay!-or perish!"]

3207 (return)

[ Prudhomme, number for the 28th of August, 1792, pp. 284-287.]

3208 (return)

[ Cf.. "The French Revolution," I.346. In ten of the departments the seventh jacquerie continues the sixth without a break. Among other examples, this letter from the administrators of Tarn, June 18, 1792, may be read ("Archives Nationales," F7, 3271). "Numerous bands overran both the city (Castres) and the country. They forcibly entered the houses of the citizens, broke the furniture to pieces, and pillaged everything that fell into their hands. Girls and women underwent shameful treatment. Commissioners sent by the district and the municipality to advocate peace were insulted and menaced. The pillage was renewed; the home of the citizen was violated." The administrators add: "In many places the progress made by the constitution was indicated by the speedy and numerous emigrations of its enemies."]

3209 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3272. Letter of the administrators of the Var, May 27, 1792.-Letter of the minister, Duranthon, May 28.-Letter of the commission composing the directory Oct. 31.]

3210 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," Letter of the administrators of Var, May. 27.-The saying is the summary of the revolutionary spirit; it recurs constantly.-Cf. the Duc de Montpensier, "Mémoires," p. 11. At Aix one of his guards said to the sans-culotte who were breaking into the room where he had been placed: "Citizens, by what order do you enter here? and why have you forced the guard at the door?" One of them. answered: "By order of the people. Don't you know that the people is sovereign?"]

3211 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," letter of the public prosecutor, May 23.-Letters of the administrators of the department, May 22, and 27 (on the events of the 13th of May at Beausset).]

3212 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7 3193 and 3194. Previous details may be found in these files. This department is one of those in which the seventh jacquerie is merely a prolongation of the sixth.-Cf. F7, 3193. Letter of the royal Commissioner at Milhau, May 5, 1791. "The situation is getting worse; the administrative bodies continue powerless and without resources. Most of their members are still unable to enter upon their duties; while the factions, who still rule, multiply their excesses in every direction. Another house in the country, near the town, has been burnt; another broken into, with a destruction of the furniture and a part of the dinner-service, and doors and windows broken open and smashed; several houses visited, under the pretense of arms or powder being concealed in them; all that is found with private persons and dealers not of the factious party is carried off; tumultuous shouts, nocturnal assemblages, plots for pillage or burning; disturbances caused by the sale of grain, searches under this pretext in private granaries, forced prices at current reductions; forty louis taken from a lady retired into the country, found in her trunk, which was broken into, and which, they say, should have been in assignats. The police and municipal officers witnesses of these outrages, are sometimes forced to sanction them with their presence; they neither dare suppress them nor punish the well-known authors of them. Such is a brief statement of the disorders committed in less than eight days."-In relation specially to Saint-Afrique. Cf. F7, 3194, the letter, among others, of the department administrator, march 29, 1792.]

3213 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3193. Extract from the registers of the clerk of the juge-de-paix of Saint-Afrique, and report by the department commissioners, Nov. 10, 1792, with the testimony of the witnesses, forming a document of 115 pages.]

3214 (return)

[ Deposition of Alexis Bro, a volunteer, and three others.]

3215 (return)

[ Deposition of Pons, a merchant. After this devastation he is obliged to address a petition to the executive power, asking permission to remain in the town.]

3216 (return)

[ Deposition of Capdenet, a shoemaker.]

3217 (return)

[ Depositions of Marguerite Galzeng, wife of Guibal a miller, Pierre Canac and others.]

3218 (return)

[ Depositions of Martin, syndic-attorney of the commune of Brusque; Aussel, curé of Versol; Martial Aussel, vicar of Lapeyre and others.]

3219 (return)

[ Deposition of Anne Tourtoulon.]

3220 (return)

[ Depositions of Jeanne Tuffon, of Marianne Terral, of Marguerite Thomas, of Martin syndic-attorney of the commune of Brusque, of Virot, of Brassier, and othes. The details are too specific to allow quotation.]

3221 (return)

[ Depositions of Moursol, wool-carder; Louis Grand, district-administrator, and others.]

3222 (return)

[ For example, at Limoges, Aug. 16.-Cf. Louis Guibert, "le Parti Girondin dans la Haute-Vienne," p. 14.]

3223 (return)

[ Paris, "Histoire de Joseph Lebon," I. 60. Restoration of the Arras municipality. Joseph Lebon is proclaimed mayor Sept. 16.]

3224 (return)

[ For example, at Caen and at Carcassonne.]

3225 (return)

[ For example, at Toulon.]

3226 (return)

[ "Un séjour en France," 19, 29. ("Letters of a Wittness to the French Revolution," translated by H. Taine.1872)]

3227 (return)

[ Ibid., p. 38: 2M. de M-, who had served for thirty years gave up his arms to a boy who treated him with the greatest insolence."]

3228 (return)

[ Paris, Ibid., p. 55 and the following pages.-Albert Babeau, "Histoire de Troyes," I. 503-515.-Sausay, III. ch. I.]

3229 (return)

[ "The Ancient Régime," 381, 391, 392.]

3230 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3217. Letter of Castanet, an old gendarme, Aug. 21 1792.]

3231 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3219. Letter of M. Alquier to the first consul, Pluvi?se 18, year VIII.]

3232 (return)

[ Lauvergne, "Histoire du Var," p. 104.]

3233 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 325, 327.]

3234 (return)

[ "Archives-Nationales," F7, 3271. Letter of the Minister of Justice, with official reports of the municipality of Rabastens. "The juge-de-paix of Rabastens was insulted in his place by putting an end to the proceedings commenced against an old deserter at the head of the municipality, and tried for robbery. They threatened to stab the judge if he recommenced the trial. Numerous gangs of vagabonds overrun the country, pillaging and putting to ransom all owners of property.. . The people has been led off by a municipal officer, a constitutional curé, and a brother of sieur Tournal, one of the authors of the evils which have desolated the Comtat." (March 5, 1792).]

3235 (return)

[ Guillon de Montléon, I. 84, 109, 139, 155, 158, 464.-Ibid., p.441, details concerning Chalier by his companion Chassagnon.-"Archives Nationales," F7, 3255. Letter by Laussel, Sept. 22, 1792.]

3236 (return)

[ Barbaroux, "Mémoires," 85. Barbaroux is an eye-witness, for he has just returned to Marseilles and is about to preside over the electoral assembly of the Bouches-du-Rh?ne.]

3237 (return)

[ C. Rousset, "Les Volontaires," p. 67.-In his report of June 27, 1792, Albert Dubayet estimates the number of volunteers at 84,000.]

3238 (return)

[ C. Rousset, "Les Volontaires," 101. Letter of Kellermann, Aug.23, 1792.-"Un séjour en France," I. 347 and following pages.-"Archives Nationales," F7, 3214. Letter of an inhabitant of Nogent-le-Rotrou (Eure). "Out of 8,000 inhabitants one-half require assistance, and two-thirds of these are in a sad state, having scarcely straw enough to sleep on."(Dec. 3, 1792).-In his report of June 27, 1792, Albert Dubayet estimates the number of volunteers at 84,000.]

3239 (return)

[ C. Rousset, "Les Volontaires," 106 (Letter of General Biron, Aug. 23, 1792).-226, Letter of Vezu, major, July 24, 1793.]

3240 (return)

[ C. Rousset, "Les Volontaires," 144 (Letter of a district administrator of Moulins to General Custines, Jan. 27, 1793).-"Un séjour en France," p.27: "I am sorry to see that most the volunteers about to join the army are old men or very young boys."-C. Rousset, Ibid., 74, 108, 226 (Letter of Biron, Nov. 7, 1792); 105 (Letter of the commander of Fort Louis, Aug. 7); 127 (Letter of Captain Motmé). One-third of the 2d battalion of Haute-Sa?ne is composed of children 13 and 14 years old.]

3241 (return)

[ Moniteur, XIII. 742 (Sept. 21). Marshal Lückner and his aids-de-camp just miss being killed by Parisian volunteers.-"Archives Nationales," BB, 16703. Letter by Labarrière aide-de-camp of General Flers, Antwerp, March 19, 1793. On the desertion en masse of gendarmes from Dumouriez's army, who return to Paris.]

3242 (return)

[ Cf. "L'armée et la garde nationale," by Baron Poisson, III. 475. "On hostilities being declared (April, 1792), the contingent of volunteers was fixed at 200,000 men. This second attempt resulted in nothing but confused and disorderly levies. Owing to the spinelessness of the volunteer troops it was impossible to continue the war in Belgium, which allowed the enemy to cross the frontier."-Gouverneur Morris, so well informed, had already written, under date of Dec.27, 1791: "The national guards, who have turned out as volunteers, are in many instances that corrupted scum of overgrown population of which large cities purge themselves, and which, without constitutions to support the fatigues... of war, have every vice and every disease which can render them the scourge of their friends and the laughing stock of their foes."-Buchez et Roux, XXVI. 177. Plan of the administrators of Hérault, presented to the Convention April 27, 1793. "The composition of the enlistment should not be concealed. Most of those of which it is made up are not volunteers; they are not citizens all classes of society, who, submitting to draft on the ballot, have willingly made up their minds to go and defend the Republic. The larger part of the recruits are substitutes who, through the attraction of a large sum, have concluded to leave their homes."]

3243 (return)

[ C. Rousset, 47. Letter of the directory of Somme, Feb. 26, 1792.]

3244 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F 7, 3270. Deliberations of the council-general of the commune of Roye, Oct. 8, 1792 (in relation to the violence committed by two divisions of Parisian gendarmerie during their passage, Oct. 7 and 8).]

3245 (return)

[ Moore, I. 338 (Sept. 8, 1792).-(The Condés were proud princes from a branch of the royal house of Bourbon. (SR).]

3246 (return)

[ C Rousset, 189 (Letter of the Minister of War, dated at Dunkirk, April 29, 1793).-Archives Nationales," BB, 16, 703. (Parisian national guard staff major-general, order of the day, letter of citizen Férat, commanding at Ostend, to the Minister of War, March 19, 1793): "Since we have had the gendarmes with us at Ostend there is nothing but disturbance every day. They attack the officers and volunteers, take the liberty of pulling off epaulettes and talk only of cutting and slashing, and declare that they recognize no superior being equals with everybody, and that they will do as they please. Those who are ordered to arrest them are chased and attacked with saber cuts and pistols]

3247 (return)

[ C. Rousset, 20 (Letter of General Wimpfen, Dec. 30, 1791).-"Souvenirs" of General Pelleport, pp.7 and 8.]

3248 (return)

[ C. Rousset, 45 (Report of General Wimpfen, Jan. 20, 1792).-Letter of General Biron, Aug. 23, 1792.]

3249 (return)

[ C. Rousset, 47, 48.-"Archives Nationales," F7, 3249. Official report of the municipality of Saint-Maxence, Jan. 21, 1792.-F 7, 3275. Official report of the municipality of Chatellerault, Dec. 27, 1791.-F7, 3285 and 3286-F7, 3213. Letter of Servan, Minister of War, to Roland, June 12, 1792: "I frequently receive, as well as yourself and the Minister of Justice, complaints against the national volunteers. They commit the most reprehensible offenses daily in places where they are quartered, and through which they pass on their way to their destination."-Ibid., Letter of Duranthon, Minister of Justice, May 5: "These occurrences are repeated, under more or less aggravating circumstances, in all the departments."]

3250 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3193. Official report of the commissaries of the department of Aveyron, April 4, 1792. "Among the pillagers and incendiaries of the chateaux of Privesac, Vaureilles, Péchins, and other threatened mansions, were a number of recruits who had already taken the road to Rhodez to join their respective regiments." Nothing remains of the chateau of Privesac but a heap of ruins. The houses in the village "are filled to over flowing with pillaged articles, and the inhabitants have divided the owners' animals amongst themselves."-Comte de Seilhac, "Scènes et portraits de la Révolution dans le bas Limousin," P.305. Pillage of the chateaux of Saint-Jéal and Seilhac, April 12, 1792, by the 3rd battalion of la Corrèze, commanded by Bellegarde, a former domestic in the chateau.]

3251 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3270. Deliberation of the council-general of the commune of Roye, Oct. 8, 1792 (passage of two divisions of Parisian gendarmes). "The inhabitants and municipal officers were by turns the sport of their insolence and brutality, constantly threatened in case of refusal with having their heads cut off, and seeing the said gendarmes, especially the gunners, with naked sabers in their hands, always threatening. The citizen mayor especially was treated most outrageously by the said gunners... forcing him to dance on the Place d'armes, to which they resorted with violins and where they remained until midnight, rudely pushing and hauling him about, treating him as an aristocrat, clapping the red cap on his head, with constant threats of cutting it off and that of every aristocrat in the town, a threat they swore to carry out the next day, openly stating, especially two or three amongst them, that they had massacred the Paris prisoners on the 2nd of September, and that it cost them nothing to massacre."]

3252 (return)

[ Summaries, in the order of their date or locality, and similar to those about to be placed before the reader, sometimes occur in these files. I pursue the same course as the clerk, in conformity with Roland's methodical habits.]

3253 (return)

[ Aug. 17, 1792 (Moniteur, XIII, 383, report of M. Emmery).]

3254 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3271. Letter of the administrators of Tarn, July 21.]

3255 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3234. Report of the municipal officers of Clairac, July 20.-Letter of the syndic-attorney of Lot-et-Garonne, Sept. 16.]

3256 (return)

[ Mercure de France, number for July 28, (letters from Bordeaux).]

3257 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3275. Letter of the administrators of Haute-Vienne, July 28 (with official reports).]

3258 (return)

[ '"Archives Nationales," F7, 3223. Letter of the directory of the district of Neuville to the department-administrators, Sept 18.]

3259 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," report of the administrators of the department and council-general of the commune of Orleans, Sept 16 and 17. (The disarmament had been effected through the decrees of Aug.26 and Sept. 2.)]

3260 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3249. Letter of the lieutenant of the gendarmerie of Dampierre, Sept 23 (with official report dated Sept 19).]

3261 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," draft of a letter by Roland, Oct 4, and others of the same kind.-Letter of the municipal officers of Ray, Sept 24.-Letter of M. Desdouits, proprietor, Sept 30.-Letter of the permanent council of Aigle, Oct 1, etc.]

3262 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," Letter of the administrators of the Orne department, Sept 7.]

3263 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 337 (Sept. 6).]

3264 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3265. Letter of the lieutenant-general of the gendarmerie, Aug. 30.-Official report of the Rouen municipality on the riot of Aug. 29.-Letters of the department-administrators, Sept 18 and Oct. 11.-Letter of the same, Oct 13, etc.-Letter of David, cultivator and department administrator Oct 11.]

3265 (return)

[ Albert Babean, "Letters of a deputy of the municipality of Troyes to the army of Dumuriez," p. 8.-(Sainte-Menehould, Sept. 7, 1792): "Our troops burn with a desire to meet the enemy. The massacre reported to have taken place in Paris does not discourage them; on the contrary, they are glad to know that suspected persons in the interior are got rid of."]

3266 (return)

[ Moore, I.338 (Sept. 4). At Clermont, the murder of a fish-dealer, killed for insulting the Breton volunteers.-401 (Sept. 7), the son of the post-master at Saint-Amand is killed on suspicion of communicating with the enemy.-"Archives Nationales," F7; 3249. Letter of the district-administrators of Senlis, Oct. 31 (Aug. 15). At Chantilly, M. Pigean is assassinated in the midst of 1,200 persons.-C. Rousset, p.84 (Sept. 21), lieutenant-colonel Imonnier is assassinated at Chalons-sur-Marne.-Mortimer-Ternaux, IV. 172. Four Prussian deserters are murdered at Rethel, Oct. 5, by the Parisian volunteers]

3267 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 378, 594 and following pages.]

3268 (return)

[ Lacretelle, "Dix années d'épreuves," p. 58. Description of Liancourt.-"Archives Nationales," F7, 3249. Letter of the department-administrators of the Eure, Sept. 11 (with official report of the Gisors municipality, Sept 4).-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 550.]

3269 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 4394. Letter of Roland to the convention, Oct. 31 (with a copy of the documents sent by the department of the Nord on the events of Oct. 10 and 11).]

3270 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3191. Official report of the municipality of Charleville; Sept. 4, and letter, Sept. 6.-Moniteur, XIII. 742, number for Sept. 21,1792 (letter of Sept. 17, On the Parisian volunteers of Marshal Lückner's army). "The Parisian volunteers again threatened to have several heads last evening, among others those of the marshal and his aids. He had threatened to return some deserters to their regiments. At this the men exclaimed that the ancient régime no longer existed, that brothers should not be treated in that way, and that he general should be arrested. Several of them had already seized the horse's bridle."]

3271 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3185. Documents relating to the case of M. de Fossés. (The pillage takes place Sept. 4.)]

3272 (return)

[ Letter of Goulard, mayor of Coucy, Oct. 4.-Letter of Osselin, notary, Nov. 7. "Threats of setting fire to M. de Fossés' two remaining farm-houses are made."-Letter of M. de Fossés, Jan. 28, 1793. He states that he has entered no complaint, and if anybody has done so for him he is much displeased. "A suit might place me in the greatest danger, from my knowledge of the state of the public mind in Coucy, and of what the guilty have done and will do to affect the minds of the people in the seventeen communes concerned in the devastation."]

3273 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3249 letter of M. de Gouy to Roland, Sept. 21. (An admirable letter, which, if copied entire, would show the character of the gentleman of 1789. Lots of heart, many illusions and much verbosity.) The first attack was made Sept. 4 and the second on the 13th.]

3274 (return)

[ Most of the domiciliary visits end in similar damages. For example, ("Archives Nationales," F7, 3265, letter of the administrators of Seine-Inferieure, Sept. 18, 1792). Visit to the chateau de Catteville, Sept. 7, by the national guard of the neighborhood. "The national guard get drunk, break the furniture to pieces, and fire repeated volleys at the windows and mirrors; the chateau is a complete ruin." The municipal officers on attempting to interfere are nearly killed.]

3275 (return)

[ The letter ends with the following: "No, never will I abandon the French soil!" He is guillotined at Paris, Thermidor 5, year II., as an accomplice in the pretended prison-plot.]

3276 (return)

[ Raid on Protestants under Louis XIV. (SR).]

3277 (return)

[ '"Archives Nationales," Letter of the Oise administrators, Sept. 12 and 15.-Letter of the syndic-attorney of the department, Sept. 23.-Letter of the administrators, Sept. 20 (on Chantilly). "The vast treasures of this domain are being plundered." In the forest of Hez and in the park belonging to M. de Fitz-James, now national property, "the finest trees are sold on the spot, cut down, and carried off."-F7, 3268, Letter of the overseer of the national domains at Rambouillet, Oct. 31. Woods devastated "at a loss of more than 100,000 crowns since August 10."-"The agitators who preach liberty to citizens in the rural districts are the very ones who excite the disorders with which the country is menaced. They provoke the demand for a partition of property, with all the accompanying threats."]

3278 (return)

[ Albert Babeau, I.504 (Aug.20).]

3279 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 322 (Sept 4).]

3280 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III.325.-"Archives Nationales," F7, 3239. Official report of the municipality of Rheims, Sept 6.]

3281 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 4394. Correspondence of the ministers in 1792 and 1793. Lists presented by Roland to the convention, on the part of various districts and departments, containing the names of priests demanding passports to go abroad, those who have gone without passports, and of sick or aged priests in the department asylums.]

3282 (return)

[ Albert Babeau, I. 515-517. Guillon de Montléon, I. 120. At Lyons after the 10th of August the unsworn conceal themselves; the municipality offers them passports; many who come for them are incarcerated; others receive a passport with a mark on it which serves for their recognition on the road, and which excites against them the fury of the volunteers. "A majority of the soldiers filled the air with their cries of 'Death to kings and priests!' "-Sauzay, III. ch. IX., and especially p. 193: "M. Pescheu; while running along the road from Belfort to Porentruy, is seen by a captain of the volunteers, riding along the same road with other officers; demanding his gun, he aimed at M. Pescheur and shot him."]

3283 (return)

[ "Histoire de Chalons-sur-Marne et de ses monuments," by L. Barbat, pp. 420, 425]

3284 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3207. Letter of the directory of the C?te d'Or, Aug. 28 and Sept. 26. Address of the Beaune municipality, Sept. 2. Letter of M. Jean Sallier, Oct. 9: "Allow me to appeal to you for justice and to interest yourself in behalf of my brother, myself, and five servants, who on the 14th of September last, at the order of the municipality of La Roche-en-Bressy, where we have lived for three years, were arrested by the national guard of Saulieu, and, first imprisoned here in this town, were on the 18th transferred to Semur, no reason for our detention being given, and where we have in vain demanded a trial from the directory of the district, which body, making no examination or inquiry into our case, sent us on the 25th, at great expense, to Dijon, where the department has imprisoned us again without, as before, giving any reason therefore."-The directory of the department writes "the communes of the towns and of the country arrest persons suspected by them, and instead of caring for these themselves, send them to the district"-Such arbitrary imprisonment multiply towards the end of 1792 and early in 1793. The commissaries of the convention arrest at Sedan 55 persons in one day: at Nancy, 104 in three weeks; at Arras, more than 1,000 in two months; in the Jura, 4,000 in two months. At Lons-le-Saulnier all the nobles with their domestics, at Aix all the inhabitants of one quarter without exception are put in prison. (De Sybel, II. 305.)]

3285 (return)

["Archives Nationales," F7, 3276. Letters of the administrators of the Yonne, Aug. 20 and 21.-Ibid., F7, 3255. Letter of the commissary, Bonnemant, Sept. 22.-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 338.-Lavalette, "Mémoires," I.100.]

3286 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3,255. Letter of the district administrator of Roanne, Aug. 18. Fourteen volunteers of the canton of Néronde betake themselves to Chenevoux, a mansion belonging to M. Dulieu, a supposed émigré. They exact 200 francs from the keeper of' the funds of the house under penalty of death, which he gives them.-Letter of the same. Sept. 1. "Every day repressive means are non-existent. Juges-de-paix before whom complaints are made dare not report them, nor try citizens who cause themselves to be feared. Witnesses dare not give testimony for fear of being maltreated or pillaged by the criminals."-Letter of the same, Aug. 22.-Official report of the municipality of Charlieu, Sept. 9, on the destruction of the land registry books. "We replied that not having the force with which to oppose them, since they themselves were the force, we would abstain."-Letter of an officer of the gendarmerie, Sept.9, etc.]

3287 (return)

[ "Lettres autographes de Madame Roland," published by Madame Bancal des Issarts, p. 5 (June 2, 1790)]

3288 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3245.-Letter of the mayor and municipal officers of Lyons, Aug. 2.-Letter of the deputy procureur of the commune, Aug. 29.-Copy of a letter by Dodieu, Aug. 27. (Roland replies with consternation and says that there must be a prosecution.)-Official report of the 9th of September, and letter of the municipality, Sept. 11.-Memorandum of the officers of the Royal-Pologne regiment, Sept. 7.-Letter of M. Perigny, father-in-law of one of the officers slain, Sept. 19.-Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 342.-Guillon de Montléon, I. 124.-Balleyder, "Histoire du peuple de Lyon," 91.]

3289 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," Letter of Danton, Oct. 3.]

3290 (return)

[ Decius, Roman emperor from 248 to 251 famous for having persecuted the Christians. He was unable to tolerate their refusal to join in communal corporate pagan observances. He insisted that they do so and once they had done it, a Certificate of Sacrifice (libellus), was issued. (SR).]

3291 (return)

[ "Etude sur Madame Roland," by Dauban, 82. Letter of Madame Roland to Bosc, July 26, 1798. "You busy yourselves with a municipality and allow heads to escape which will devise new horrors. You are mere children; your enthusiasm is merely a straw bonfire! If the National Assembly does not try two illustrious heads in regular form or some generous Décius strike them down, you are all lost.-" Ibid.,, May 17, 1790: "Our rural districts are much dissatisfied with the decree on feudal privileges... A reform is necessary, in which more chateaux must be burnt. It would not be a serious evil were there not some danger of the enemies of the Revolution profiting by these discontents to lessen the confidence of the people in the National Assembly."-Sept. 27, 1790. "The worst party is successful; it is forgotten that insurrection is the most sacred of duties when the country is in danger."-Jan.24, 1791. "The wise man shuts his eyes to the grievances or weaknesses of the private individual; but the citizen should show no mercy, even to his father, when the public welfare is at stake."]

3292 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3202. Report of the commissary, member of the Cantal directory, Oct. 24. On the 16th of October at Chaudesaigues the volunteers break open a door and then kill one of their comrades who opposes them, whom the commissary tries to save. The mayor of the place, in uniform, leads them to the dwellings of aristocrats, urging them on to pillage; they enter a number of houses by force and exact wine. The next day at Saint-Urcize they break into the house of the former curé, devastate or pillage it, and "sell his furniture to different persons in the neighborhood." The same treatment is awarded to sieur Vaissier, mayor, and to lady Lavalette; their cellars are forced open, barrels of wine are taken to the public square, and drinking takes place from the tap. After this "the volunteers go in squads into the neighboring parishes and compel the inhabitants to give them money or effects." The commissary and municipal officers of St. Urcize who tried to mediate were nearly killed and were saved only through the efforts of a detachment of regular cavalry. As to the Jacobin mayor of Chaudesaigues, it was natural that he should preach pillage; on the sale of the effects of the nuns "he kept all bidders away, and had things knocked down to him for almost nothing."]

3293 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3217. Letter or Castanet, an old gendarme, N?mes, Aug.21.-Letter of M. Griolet, syndic-attorney of the Gard, Sept. 8: "I beg, sir, that this letter may be considered as confidential; I pray you do not compromise me. "-Letter of M. Gilles, juge-de-paix at Rocquemaure, Oct.31 (with official reports).]

3294 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3227. Letter of the municipal officers of Tullins, Sept. 8.]

3295 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3190. Letter of Danton, Oct. 9.-Memorandum of M. Casimir Audiffret (with documents in support of it). His son had been locked up by mistake, instead of another Audiffret, belonging to the Comtat; he was slashed with a saber in prison Aug.25. Report of the surgeon, Oct. 17: "The wounded man has two gashes more on the head, one on the left cheek and the right leg is paralyzed; he has been so roughly treated in carrying him from prison to prison as to bring on an abscess on the wrist; if he is kept there he will soon die."]

3296 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3195. Letter of M. Amiel, president of the bureau of conciliation, Oct. 28.-Letter of an inhabitant of Avignon, Oct. 7.-Other letters without signatures.-Letter of M. Gilles, juge-de-paix, Jan. 23, 1793.]

3297 (return)

[ Fabre, "Histoire de Marseilles," II. 478 and following pages.-"Archives Nationales," F7, 3195. Letter of the Minister of Justice, M. de Joly (with supporting documents), Aug. 6.-Official reports of the Marseilles municipality, July 21, 22, 23.-Official report of the municipality of Aix, Aug. 24.-Letter of the syndic-attorney of the department (with a letter of the municipality of Aubagne), Sept. 22, etc., in which M. Jourdan, a ministerial officer, is accused of "aristocracy." A guard is assigned to him. About midnight the guard is overcome, he is carried off, and then killed in spite of the entreaties of his wife and son. The letter of the municipality ends with the following: "Their lamentations pierced our hearts. But, alas, who can resist the French people when aroused? We remain, gentlemen, very cordially yours, the municipal officers of Aubagne."]

3298 (return)

[ This stage of revolution seems to be sought after by the secret communist revolutionaries arranging for the break-up of formerly powerful independent states such as Germany, Yougoslavia, India etc. (SR).]

3299 (return)

[ Moniteur, XIII. 560. Act passed by the administrators of the Bouches-du-Rh?ne, Aug. 3, "forbidding special collectors from henceforth paying taxes with the national treasury."-Ibid., 744. A report by Roland. The department of Var, having called a meeting of commissaries at Avignon to provide for the defense of these regions, the Minister says: "This step, subversive of all government, nullifies the general regulations of the executive power."-"Archives Nationales," F7, 3195. Deliberation of the three administrative bodies assembled at Marseilles, Nov. 5, 1792.-Petition of Anselme, a citizen of Avignon, residing in Paris, Dec. 14.-Report of the Saint-Rémy affair, etc.]

32100 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," CII. I. 32. Official Report of the Electoral Assembly of Bouches-du-Rh?ne, Sept. 4. "To defray the expenses of this expenditure the syndic-attorney of the district of Tarascon is authorized to draw upon the funds of public registry and vendor of revenue stamps, and in addition thereto on the collector of direct taxation. The expenses of this expedition will be borne by the anti-revolutionary agitators who have made it necessary. A list, therefore, is to be drawn up and sent to the National Assembly. The commissioners will be empowered to suspend the district administrations, municipal officers, and generally all public functionaries who, through incivism or improper conduct, shall have endangered the public weal. They may even arrest them as well as suspected citizens. They will see that the law regarding the disarming of suspected citizens and the banishment of priests be faithfully executed."-Ibid., F7, 3195. Letter of Truchement, commissary of the department, Nov. 15.-Memorandum of the community of Eyguières and letter of the municipality of Eyguières, Sept. 13.-Letter of M. Jaubert, secretary of the Salon popular club, Oct. 22: "The department of Bouches-du-Rh?ne has for a month past been ravaged by commissions. .. The despotism of one is abolished, and we now stagger under the much more burdensome yoke of a crowd of despots."-Situation of the department in September and October, 1792 (with supporting documents).]

32101 (return)

[ Barbaroux, "Mémoires," 89.]

32102 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3196.-Letters and petition of citizen de Sades, Nov., 1792, Feb.17, 1793, and Ventose 8, year III.: "Towards the middle of Sept., 1792 (old style), some Marseilles brigands broke into a house of mine near Apt. Not content with carrying away six loads of furniture.. they broke the mirrors and wood-work." The damage is estimated at 80,000 francs. Report of the executive council according to the official statement of the municipality of Coste. On the 27th of September Montbrion, commissioner of the administration of the Bouche-du-Rh?ne, sends two messengers to fetch the furniture to Apt. On reaching Apt Montbrion and his colleague Bergier have the vehicles unloaded, putting the most valuable effects on one cart, which they appropriate to themselves, and drive away with it to some distance out of sight, paying the driver out of their own pockets: "No doubt whatever exists as to the knavery of Montbrion and Bergier; administrators and commissioners of the administration of the department."-De Sades, the author of "Justine," pleads his well-known civism and the ultra-revolutionary petitions drawn up by him in the name of the section of the Pikes.]

32103 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3272. Read in this file the entire correspondence of the directory and the public prosecutor.]

32104 (return)

[ Deliberation of the commune of Toulon. July 28 and following days.-That of the three administrative bodies, Sep. 10-Lauvergne, "Histoire du department du Var," 104-137.]

32105 (return)

[ "Mémoires" of Chancelier Pasquier. Vol. I. p. 106. Librarie Plon, Paris 1893-Pasquier and his wife stopped in Picardy, brought to Paris by a member of the commune, a small, bandy-legged fellow formerly a chair-letter in his parish church, imbued with the doctrines of the day and a determined leveler. At the village of Saralles they passed the house of M. de Livry, a rich man enjoying an income of 50,000 francs, and the lover of Saunier, an opera-dancer. "He is a good fellow," exclaims Pasquier's bandy-legged guardian: "we have just made hint marry. Look here, we said to him, it is time that to put a stop to that behavior! Down with prejudice! Marquises and dancers ought to marry each other. He made her his wife, and it is well he did; otherwise he would have been done for a long time ago, or caged behind the Luxembourg walls."-Elsewhere, on passing a chateau being demolished, the former chair-letter quotes Rousseau: "For every chateau that falls, twenty cottages rise in its place." His mind was stored with similar phrases and tirades, uttered by him as the occasion warranted. This man may be considered as an excellent specimen of the average Jacobin.]

32106 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3,207. Letter of the administrators of the C?te d'Or to the Minister, Oct. 6, 1792.]

32107 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales" F7, 3195. Letter of the administrators of the Bouche-du-Rh?ne, Oct 29, and the Minister's answer on the margin.]

32108 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3249. Letter of the administrators of the Orne, Sept. 7, and the Minister's reply noted on the margin.]

32109 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F', 3,249. Correspondence with the municipality of Saint-Firmin (Oise). Letter of Roland, Dec. 3: "I have read the letter addressed to me on the 25th of the past month, and I cannot conceal from you the pain it gives me to find in it principles so destructive of all the ties of subordination existing between constituted authorities, principles so erroneous that should the communes adopt them every form of government would be impossible and all society broken up. Can the commune of Saint-Firmin, indeed, have persuaded itself that it is sovereign, as the letter states? and have the citizens composing it forgotten that the sovereign is the entire nation, and not the forty-four thousandth part of it? that Saint-Firmin is simply a fraction of it, contributing its share to endowing the deputies of the National Convention, the administrators of departments and districts with the power of acting for the greatest advantage of the commune, but which, the moment it elects its own administrators and agents, can no longer revoke the powers it has bestowed, without a total subversion of order? etc."-All the documents belonging to this affair ought to be quoted; there is nothing more instructive or ludicrous, and especially the style of the secretary-clerk of Saint-Firmin: "We conjure you to remember that the administrators of the district of Senlis strive to play the part of the sirens who sought to enchant Ulysses."]

32110 (return)

[ Letter of the central bureau of the Rouen sections, Aug. 30.]

32111 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3195. Letter of the three administrative bodies and commissaries of the sections of Marseilles, Nov. 15, 1792. Letter of the electors of Bouches-du-Rh?ne, Nov. 28.-(Forms of politeness are omitted at the end of these letters, and no doubt purposely.) Roland replies (Dec. 31): "While fully admiring the civism of the brave Marseilles people,... do not fully agree with you on the exercise of popular Sovereignty." He ends by stating that all their letters with replies have been transmitted to the deputies of the Bouches-du-Rh?ne, and that the latter are in accord with him and will arrange matters.]

I.-The second stage of the Jacobin conquest.

The importance and multitude of vacant offices.

The second stage of the Jacobin conquest will,3301 after August 10th and during the next three months, extend and multiply all vacancies from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy, for the purpose of filling them with their own men.-In the first place, the faction (the party) installs representatives on the summits of public authority which represent itself alone, seven hundred and forty-nine omnipotent deputies, in a Convention which, curbed neither by collateral powers nor by a previously established constitution, disposes at pleasure of the property, the lives and the consciences of all French people.-Then, through this barely installed convention, it decrees the complete renewal3302 of all administrative and judicial bodies, councils and directories of departments, councils and communal municipalities, civil, criminal and commercial tribunals, justices and their assistants in the lower courts, deputies of the justices, national commissaries of the civil courts, with secretaries and bailiffs belonging to the various tribunals and administrations.3303 The obligation of having practiced as a lawyer is abolished by the same stroke, so that the first comer, if he belongs to the club (party) may become a judge without knowing how to write, and even without being able to read.3304-Just before this the staff of the National Guard, in all towns above fifty thousand souls, and afterwards in all the towns on the frontier, has again passed through the electoral sieve.3305 In like manner, the officers of the gendarmerie at Paris and throughout France once more undergo an election by their men. Finally, all post-masters and post-office comptrollers have to submit to election.-Even better, below or alongside the elected officials, this administrative purge concerns all non-elective functionaries and employees, no matter how insignificant their service, however feeble and indirect their office may be connected with political matters. This is because tax receivers and assessors, directors and other agents of rivers and forests, engineers, notaries, attorneys, clerks and scribes belonging to the administrative branch, are all subject to dismissal if they do not obtain a certificate of civism from their municipality. At Troyes, out of fifteen notaries, it is refused to four,3306 which leaves four places to be filled by their Jacobin clerks. At Paris,3307 "all honest folks, all clerks who are educated," are driven out of the navy offices; the war department is getting to be "a den where everybody on duty wears a red cap, where all thee-and-thou each other, even the Minister, where four hundred employees, among which are a number of women, show off in the dirtiest dress, affect the coolest cynicism, do nothing, and steal on all sides."-Under the denunciation of the clubs, the broom is applied even at the bottom of the hierarchical scale, even to secretaries of village councils, to messengers and call-boys in the towns, to jail-keepers and door-keepers, to beadles and sextons, to foresters, field-custodians, and others of this class.3308 All these persons must be, or appear to be, Jacobin; otherwise, their place slips away from them, for there is always some one to covet it, apply for it and take it.-Outside of employees the sweeping operation reaches the suppliers and contractors; even here there are the faithful to be provided for, and nowhere is the bait so important. The State, even in ordinary times, is always the largest of consumers, and, at this moment, it is expending monthly, merely on the war, two hundred millions extra. What fish may be caught in such disturbed waters!3309-All these lucrative orders as well as all these remunerated positions are at the disposition of the Jacobins, and they seize the opportunity; they are the lawful owner, who comes home after a long absence and gives or withdraws his custom as the pleases, while he makes a clean sweep in his own household.-The administrative and judicial services alone number 1,300,000 places, all those in the treasury department, in that of public works, in that of public education, and in the Church; all posts in the National Guard and in the army, from that of commander-in-chief down to a drummer; the whole of the central or local power, with the vast patronage flowing from this. Never had such rich spoils been made available to the general public in one go. Lots will be drawn, apparently, by vote; but it is evident that the Jacobins have no intention of surrendering their prey to the hazards of a free ballot; they mean to keep it the way they got it; by force, and will leave no stone unturned to control the elections.

II.-The elections.

The young and the poor invited to the ballot-box.-Danger of

the Conservatives if candidates.-Their chiefs absent

themselves.-Proportion of absentees at the primary

assemblies.

They begin by paving their way.3310 A new decree has at once suppressed the feeble and last legal requirement for impartiality, integrity and competence of the elector and the eligible candidate. No more discrimination between active and passive citizens; no longer any difference between poll tax of an elector of the first degree and that of the second degree: no electoral poll tax qualification whatever. All Frenchmen, except domestics, of whom they are distrustful, supposing them under their employer's influence, may vote at the primary assemblies, and not longer at the age of twenty-five, but at twenty-one, which brings to the polls the two most revolutionary groups, on the one hand the young, and on the other the poor, the latter in great numbers in these times of unemployment, dearth and poverty, amounting in all to two millions and a half, and, perhaps, three millions of new electors.-At Besan?on the number of the registered voters is doubled.3311-Thus are the usual clients of the Jacobins admitted within the electoral boundaries, from which they had hitherto been excluded,3312 and, to ensure their coming, their leaders decide that every elector obliged to travel "shall receive twenty sous mileage," besides "three francs per diem during his stay."3313

While attracting their supporters they drove their adversaries away. The political banditry, through which they dominate and terrify France, has already taken care of that. Many arbitrary arrests and unpunished murders are a warning to all candidates who do not belong to their party; and I do not speak about to the nobles or friends of the ancient regime that have fled or are in prison, but the Constitutionalists and the Feuillants. Any electoral enterprise on their part would be madness, almost a suicide. Accordingly, none of them call attention to themselves. If any outrageous moderate, like Durand de Maillane, appears on a list, it is because the revolutionaries have adopted him without knowing him, and because he swears that he hates royalty.3314 The others, more honest, do not want to don the popular livery and resort to club patronage, so they carefully stay away; they know too well that to do otherwise would mark their heads for pikes and their homes for pillage. At the very moment of depositing the vote the domains of several deputies are sacked simply because, "on the comparative lists of seven calls by name," sent to the departments from Paris by the Jacobins, their names are found on the right.3315-Through an excess of precaution the Constitutionalists of the Legislative body are kept at the capital, their passports being refused to them to prevent them from returning into the provinces and obtaining votes by publicly stating the truth in relation to the recent revolution.-In the same way, all conservative journals are suppressed, reduced to silence, or compelled to become turncoats.-Now, when one has neither the possibility to speak up nor a candidate which might become one's representative, of what use is it to vote? And especially, since the primary assemblies are places of disorder and violence,3316 patriots alone, in many places, being admitted,3317 a conservative being "insulted and overwhelmed with numbers," and, if he utters an opinion, exposed to danger, also, if he remains silent, incurring the risk of denunciations, threats, and blows. To keep in the background, remain on the sidelines, avoid being seen, and to strive to be forgotten, is the rule under a pasha, and especially when this pasha is a mob. Hence the absenteeism of the majority; around the ballot-box there is an enormous void. At Paris, in the election of mayor and municipal officers, the balloting of October, November and December collect together only 14,000 out of 160,000 registered voters, later 10,000, and, later again, only 7,000.3318 At Besan?on, 7,000. registered voters result in less than 600; there is the same proportion in other towns, as for example, in Troyes. In like manner, in the rural cantons, east of Doubs and west of Loire-Inférieure, but one-tenth of the electors dare exercise their right to vote.3319 The electoral source is so exhausted, so often disturbed, and so stopped up as to be almost dry: in these primary assemblies which, directly or indirectly, delegate all public powers, and which, in the expression of the common will, should be full, there are lacking six millions three hundred thousands electors out of seven millions.3320

III.-Composition and tone of the secondary assemblies.

Exclusion of "Feuillant" electors.-Pressure on other

electors.-Persons elected by the conservatives obliged to

resign.-Elections by the Catholics canceled.-Secession of

the Jacobin minorities.-The election of their men made

valid.-Public opinion not in accord with official

selections.

Through this anticipated purge the assemblies of the first degree find themselves, for the most part, Jacobin; consequently the electors of the second degree, appointed by them, are for the most part, Jacobin; in many departments, their assembly becomes the most anarchical, the most turbulent, and the most usurping of all the clubs. Here there is only shouting, denunciations, oath-taking, incendiary motions, cheering which carry all questions, furious speeches by Parisian commissaries, by delegates from the local club, by passing Federates, and by female wretches demanding arms.3321 The Pas-de-Calais assemblage sets free and applauds a woman imprisoned for having beaten a drum in a mob. The Paris assembly fraternizes with the Versailles slaughterers and the assassins of the mayor of Etampes. The assembly of the Bouches-du-Rh?ne gives a certificate o virtue to Jourdan, the Glacière murderer. The assembly of Seine-et-Marne applauds the proposal to cast a cannon which might contain the head of Louis XVI. for a cannon-ball to be fired at the enemy.-It is not surprising that an electoral body without self-respect should respect nothing, and practice self-mutilation under the pretext of purification.3322 The object of the despotic majority was to reign at once, without any contest, on its own authority, and to expel all offensive electors. At Paris, in the Aisne, in Haute-Loire, in Ille-et-Vilaine, in Maine-et-Loire, it excludes as unworthy the members of old Feuillants and monarchical clubs, and the signers of Constitutionalist protests. In Hérault it cancels the elections in the canton of Servian, because the elected men, it says, are "mad aristocrats." In Orne it drives away an old Constituent, Goupil de Préfeln, because he voted for the revision, also, his son-in-law, because he is his son-in-law. In the Bouches-du-Rh?ne, where the canton of Seignon, by mistake or through routine, swore "to maintain the constitution of the kingdom," it sets aside these retrograde elected representatives, commences proceedings against the "crime committed," and sends troops against Noves because the Noves elector, a justice who is denounced and in peril, has escaped from the electoral den.-After the purification of persons it proceeds to the purification of sentiments. At Paris, and in at least nine departments,3323 and in contempt of the law, is suppresses the secret ballot, the last refuge of timid conservatives, and imposes on each elector a verbal public vote, loud and clear, on his name being called; that is to say, if he does not vote as he ought to, he risks the gallows.3324 Nothing could more surely convert hesitation and indecision into good sense, while, in many a place, still more powerful machinery is violently opposed to the elections. At Paris the elections are carried on in the midst of atrocities, under the pikes of the butchers, and con ducted by their instigators. At Meaux and at Rheims the electors in session were within hearing of the screeches of the murdered priests. At Rheims the butchers themselves ordered the electoral assembly to elect their candidates, Drouet, the famous post-master, and Armonville, a tipsy wool-carder, upon which one-half of the assembly withdrew, while the two candidates of the assassins are elected. At Lyons, two days after the massacre, the Jacobin commander writes to the Minister: "Yesterday's catastrophe puts the aristocrats to flight, and ensures us the majority in Lyons."3325 From universal suffrage thus subjected to so much sifting, submitted to such heavy pressure, heated and refined in the revolutionary alembic, those who control it obtain all they want, a concentrated extract, the quintessence of the Jacobin spirit.

And yet, should this extract not seem to them sufficiently strong, wherever they are sovereign, they throw it away and begin over again. At Paris,3326 by means of a purifying and surplus ballot, the new Council of the Commune undertakes the expulsion of its lukewarm members, while d'Ormesson, the mayor elect of the moderates, is assailed with so many threats that, on the verge of his installation, he resigns. At Lyons,3327 another moderate, Nivière-Chol, twice elected, and, by 9,000 out of 11,000 votes, is twice compelled to abandon his place; after him, Gilibert, the physician, who, supported by the same voters, is about to obtain the majority, is seized suddenly and cast into prison; even in prison, he is elected; the clubbists confine him there more rigidly, and do not let him out even after extorting his resignation.-Elsewhere in the rural cantons, for example, in Franche-Comté,3328 a number of elections are canceled when the person elected happens to be a Catholic. The Jacobin minority frequently secede, meet in a tavern, elect their mayor or justice of the peace, and the validity of his election is secured because he is a patriot; so much the worse for that of the majority, whose more numerous votes are null because given by "fanatics."-The response of universal suffrage thus appealed to cannot be other than that which is framed for it. Indisputable facts are to show to what extent this response is compulsive or perverted, what a distance there is between an official choice and public opinion, how the elections give a contrary meaning to popular sentiment. The departments of Deux-Sèvres, Maine-et-Loire, la Vendée, Loire-Infèrieure, Morbihan, and Finistère, send only anti-Catholic republicans to the Convention, while these same departments are to become the inexhaustible nursery of the great catholic and royalist insurrection. Three regicides out of four deputies represent Lozère, where, six months later, thirty thousand peasants are to march under the Royal white banner. Six regicides out of nine deputies represent la Vendée, which is going to rise from one end of it to the other in the name of the King.3329

IV.-Composition of the National Convention.

Number of Montagnards at the start.-Opinions and sentiments

of the deputies of the Plain.-The Gironde.-Ascendancy of

the Girondins in the Convention.-Their intellectual

character.-Their principles.-The plan of their

Constitution.-Their fanaticism.-Their sincerity, culture

and tastes.-How they differ from pure Jacobins.-How they

comprehend popular sovereignty.-Their stipulations with

regard to the initiative of individuals and of groups.-

Weakness of philosophic thought and of parliamentary

authority in times of anarchy.

However vigorous the electoral pressure may have been, the voting machine has not provided the expected results. At the opening of the session, out of 749 deputies, only about fifty3330 are found to approve of the Commune, nearly all of the elected in places where, as at Rheims and Paris, terror has the elector by the throat, "under the clubs, axes, daggers, and bludgeons of the butchers."3331 But where the physical impressions of murder have not been so tangible and impressive, some sense of decency has prevented too glaring elections. The inclination to vote for well-known names could not wholly be arrested; seventy-seven former members of the Constituent Assembly, and one hundred and eighty-six of the previous Legislative Assembly enter the Convention, and the practical knowledge which many of these have of government business has given them some insights. In short, the consciences of six hundred and fifty deputies are only in part perverted.

They are all, unquestionably, decided republicans, enemies of tradition, apostles of reason, and trained in deductive politics; only on these conditions could they be elected. Every candidate is supposed to possess the Jacobin faith, or, at least, to recite the revolutionary creed. The Convention, consequently, at its opening session votes unanimously, with cheers and enthusiasm, the abolition of royalty, and three months later it pronounces, by a large majority, Louis XVI.,

"guilty of conspiring against the liberty of the nation, and of assaults on the general welfare of the State."3332

Nevertheless, social habitudes still subsist under political prejudices. A man who is born in and lives for a long time in an old community, is, through this alone, marked with its imprint; the customs to which he conforms have crystallized in him in the shape of sentiments: if it is well-regulated and civilized, he has involuntarily arrived at respect for property and for human life, and, in most characters, this respect has taken very deep root. A theory, even if adopted, does not wholly succeed in destroying this respect; only in rare instances is it successful, when it encounters coarse and defective natures; to take full hold, it is necessary that it should fall on the scattered inheritors of former destructive appetites, on those hopelessly degenerate souls in which the passions of an anterior date are slumbering; then only does its malevolence fully appear, for it rouses the ferocious or plundering instincts of the barbarian, the raider, the inquisitor, and the pasha. On the contrary, with the greatest number, do what it will, integrity and humanity always remain powerful motives. Nearly all these legislators, who originate in the middle class, are at bottom, irrespective of a momentary delusion, what they always have been up to now, advocates, attorneys, merchants, priests, or physicians of the ancient regime, and what they will become later on, docile administrators or zealous functionaries of Napoleon's empire,3333 that is to say, ordinary civilized persons belonging to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sufficiently honest in private life to have a desire to be equally so in public life.-Hence their horror of anarchy, of Marat,3334 and of the September butchers and robbers. Three days after their assembling together they vote, "almost unanimously," the preparation of a law "against the instigators of murder and assassination." "Almost unanimously," they desire to raise a guard, recruited in the 83 departments, against the armed bands of Paris and the Commune. Pétition is elected as their first president by "almost the totality of suffrages." Roland who has just read his report to them, is greeted with the "loudest" applause from nearly the "entire" Assembly. In short they are for the ideal republic against actual brigands. This accounts for their ranging themselves around those upright and sincere deputies, who, in the two preceding Assemblies or alongside of them, were the ablest defenders of both principles and humanity, around Buzot, Lanjuinais, Pétition, and Rabaut-Saint-Etienne; around Brissot, Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonné, Isnard, and Condorcet; around Roland, Louvet, Barbaroux, and the five hundred deputies of the "Plain,"3335 marching in one body under the leadership of the 180 Girondists who now form the "Right."3336

These latter, among the republicans, are the most sincere and have the most faith; for they have long been such, after much thought, study and as a matter of principle. Nearly all of them are well-read educated men, reasoners, philosophers, disciples of Diderot or of Rousseau, satisfied that absolute truth had been revealed by their masters, thoroughly imbued with the Encyclopédie3337 or the Contrat Social, the same as the Puritans formerly were with the Bible.3338 At the age when the mind is maturing, and fondly clings to general ideas,3339 they embraced the theory and aimed at a reconstruction of society according to abstract principles. They have accordingly set to work as pure logicians, rigorously applying the superficial and false system of analysis then in vogue.3340 They have formed for themselves an idea of man in general, the same in all times and ages, an extract or minimum of man; they have pondered over several thousands of or millions of these abstract mortals, erected their imaginary wills into primordial rights, and drawn up in anticipation the chimerical contract which is to regulate their impossible union. There are to be no more privileges, no more heredity, no qualifications of any kind; all are to be electors, all eligible and all of equal members of the sovereignty; all powers are to be of short date, and conferred through election; there must be but one assembly, elected and entirely renewed annually, one executive council elected and one-half renewed annually, a national treasury-board elected and one-third renewed annually; all local administrations and tribunals must be elected; a referendum to the people, the electoral body endowed with the initiative, a constant appeal to the sovereignty, which, always consulted and always active, will manifest its will not alone by the choice of its mandatories but, again, through "the censure" which it will apply to the laws-such is the Constitution they forge for themselves.3341 "The English Constitution," says Condorcet, "is made for the rich, that of America for citizens well-off; the French Constitution should be made for all men."-It is, for this reason, the only legitimate one; every institution that deviates from it is opposed to natural rights and, therefore, fit only to be put down.-This is what the Girondists have done during the Legislative sessions; we know how they, armed with the illusions3342 of their new philosophy and triumphing through a rigid, rash and hasty reason, have

* persecuted Catholic consciences,

* violated feudal property,

* encroached on the legal authority of the King,

* persecuted the remains of the ancient regime,

* tolerated crimes committed by the crowds,

* even plunged France into an European war,

* armed even the paupers,

* caused the overthrow of all government.-

As far as his Utopia is concerned, the Girondist is a sectarian, and he knows no scruples.

* Little does he care that nine out of ten electors do not vote: he regards himself as the authorized representative of all ten.

* Little does he care whether the great majority of Frenchmen favor the Constitution of 1791; it is his business to impose on them his own.

* Little does he care whether his former opponents, King, émigrés, unsworn ecclesiastics, are honorable men or at least excusable; he will launch against them every rigorous legal proceeding, transportation, confiscation, civil death and physical death.3343

In his own eyes he is the justiciary, and his investiture is bestowed upon him by eternal right. There is no human infatuation so pernicious to man as that of absolute right; nothing is better calculated for the destruction in him of the hereditary accumulation of moral conceptions.-Within the narrow bounds of their creed, however, the Girondins are sincere and consistent. They are masters of their formulae; they know how to deduce consequences from them; they believe in them the same as a surveyor in his theorems, and a theologian in the articles of his faith; they are anxious to apply them, to devise a constitution, to establish a regular government, to emerge from a barbarous state, to put an end to fighting in the street, to pillaging, to murders, to the sway of brutal force and of naked arms.

The disorder, mover, so repugnant to them as logicians is still more repugnant to them as cultivated, polished men. They have a sense of what is proper,3344 of becoming ways, and their tastes are even refined. They are not familiar with, nor do they desire to imitate, the rude manners of Danton, his coarse language, his oaths, and his low associations with the people. They have not, like Robespierre, gone to lodge with a master joiner, to live him and eat with his family. Unlike Pache, Minister of War, no one among them "feels honored" by "going down to dine with his porter," and by sending his daughters to the club to give a fraternal kiss to drunken Jacobins.3345 At Madame Roland's house there is a salon, although it is stiff and pedantic; Barbaroux send verses to a marchioness, who, after the 2nd of June, elopes with him to Caen.3346 Condorcet has lived in high society, while his wife, a former canoness, possess the charms, the repose, the instruction, and the elegance of an accomplished woman. Men of this stamp cannot endure close alongside of them the inept and gross dictatorship of an armed rabble. In providing for the public treasury they require regular taxes and not tyrannical confiscations.3347 To repress the malevolent they propose "punishment and not banishment."3348 In all State trials they oppose irregular courts, and strive to maintain for those under indictment some of the usual safeguards.3349 On declaring the King guilty they hesitate in pronouncing the sentence of death, and try to lighten their responsibility by appealing to the people. The line "laws and not blood," was a line which, causing a stir in a play of the day, presented in a nutshell their political ideas. And, naturally, the law, especially Republican law, is the law of all; once enacted, nobody, no citizen, no city, no party, can refuse to obey it without being criminal. It is monstrous that one city should arrogate to itself the privilege of ruling the nation; Paris, like other departments, should be reduced to its on-eighty-third proportion of influence. It is monstrous that, in a capital of 700,000 souls, five or six thousand radical Jacobins should oppress the sections and alone elect their candidates; in the sections and at the polls, all citizens, at least all republicans, should enjoy an equal and free vote. It is monstrous that the principle of popular sovereignty should be used to cover up attacks against popular sovereignty, that, under the pretense of saving the State, the first that comes along may kill whom he pleases, that, on the pretext that they are resisting oppression, each mob should have the "Right" to put the government down.-Hence, this militant "Right" must be pacified, enclosed within legal boundaries, and subjected to a fixed process.3350 Should any individual desire a law, a reform or a public measure, let him state his on paper over his own signature and that of fifty other citizens of the same primary assembly; then the proposition must be submitted to his own primary assembly; then in case it obtains a majority, to the primary assemblies of his arrondissement; then, in case of a majority, to the primary assemblies of his department; then, in case of a majority, to all the primary assemblies of the nation, so that after a second verdict of the same assemblies twice consulted, the Legislative body, yielding to the majority of primary suffrages, may dissolve and a new Legislative body, in which all old members shall be declared ineligible, take its place.-This is the final expression and the master idea, of the theory. Condorcet, its able constructor, has outdone himself. Impossible to design on paper a more ingenious or complicated mechanism. The Girondists, in the closing article of this faultless constitution, believe that they have discovered a way to muzzle the beast and allow the sovereign people to fully assert their rights.

As if, with some kind of constitution and especially with this one, one could muzzle the beast! As if it was in the mood to crane the neck allowing them to put the muzzle on! Robespierre, on behalf of the Jacobins, counters with a clause radically opposed to the one drafted by Condorcet3351:

"To submit 'the right to resist oppression' to legal formalities is the ultimate refinement of tyranny... When a government violates the people's rights, a general insurrection of the people, as well as portions of the people, is the most sacred of duties."

Political orthodoxy, close reasoning, and oratorical talent are, however, no weapon against this ever-muttering insurrection.

"Our philosophers," says a good observer,3352 "want to attain their ends by persuasion; which is equivalent to saying that battles may be won by eloquence, fine speeches, and plans of constitution. Very soon, according to them,.. if will suffice to carry complete copies of Macchiavelli, Rousseau and Montesquieu into battle instead of cannon, it never occurring to them that these authors, like their works, never were, and never will be, anything but fools when put up against a cut-throat provided with a good sword."

The parliamentary landscape has fallen away; things have returned to a state of nature, that is, to a state of war, and one is no longer concerned with debate but with brute force. To be in the right, to convince the convention, to obtain majorities, to pass decrees, would be appropriate in ordinary times, under a government provided with an armed force and a regular administration, by which, from the summits of public authority, the decrees of a majority descend through submissive functionaries to a sympathetic and obedient population. But, in times of anarchy, and above all, in the den of the Commune, in Paris, such as the 10th of August and the 2nd of September made it, all this is of no account.

V.-The Jacobins forming alone the Sovereign People.

Opinion in Paris.-The majority of the population

constitutional.-The new régime unpopular.-Scarcity and

high cost of food.-Catholic customs obstructed.-Universal

and increasing discontent.-Aversion or indifference to the

Girondins.-Political resignation of the majority.-Modern

customs incompatible with pure democracy.-Men of property

and income, manufacturers and tradesmen, keep aloof.

-Dissension, timidity, and feebleness of the Conservatives.

-The Jacobins alone form the sovereign people.

And it is of no account because, first of all, in this great city of Paris the Girondists are isolated, and have no group of zealous partisans to depend upon. For, if the large majority is opposed to their adversaries, that is not in their favor, it having secretly, at heart, remained "Constitutionalists."3353 "I would make myself master of Paris," says a professional observer, "in ten days without striking a blow if I had but six thousand men, and one of Lafayette's stable-boys to command them." Lafayette, indeed, since the departure or concealment of the royalists, represents the old, fixed, and innermost opinion of the capital. Paris submits to the Girondists as well as to the Montagnards as usurpers; the mass of the public regards them with ill-will, and not only the bourgeoisie, but likewise the majority of the people loathe the established government.

Work is scarce and food is dear; brandy has tripled in price; only four hundred oxen are brought in at the Poissy market instead of seven or eight thousand; the butchers declare that there will be no meat in Paris next week except for the sick.3354 To obtain a small ration of bread it is necessary to wait five or six hours in a line at the baker's shops, and,3355 as is customary, workmen and housekeepers impute all this to the government. This government, which so poorly provides for its needs, offends them yet more in their deepest feelings, in the habits most dear to them, in their faith and worship. The common people, even at Paris, is still at this time very religious, much more so than at the present day. When the priest bearing the Host passes along the street, the crowd "gathers from all sides, men, women, and children, young and old, and fall on their knees in worship."3356 The day on which the relics of saint Leu are borne in procession through the Rue St. Martin, "everybody kneels; I did not see a man," says a careful observer, "that did not take off his hat. At the guard-house of the Mauconseil section, the entire company presented arms." At the same time the "citoyennes around the markets talked with each other to know if there was any way of decking houses with tapestry."3357 The following week they compel the revolutionary committee of Saint-Eustache3358 to authorize another procession, and again each one kneels: "everybody approved of the ceremony, no one, that I heard of; making any objection. This is a striking picture.... I saw repentance, I saw the parallel each is forced to draw between the actual state of things and the former one. I saw what a privation the people had to endure in the loss of that which, formerly, was the most imposing of all church ceremonies. People of all ranks and ages were deeply affected and humble, and many had tears in their eyes." Now, in this respect, the Girondists, by virtue of being philosophers, are more iconoclastic, more intolerant than any one, and there is no reason for preferring them to their adversaries. At bottom, the government installed by the recent electoral comedy, for the major portion of the Parisians, has no authority but the fact of its existence; people put up with it because there is no other, fully recognizing its worthlessness;3359 it is a government of strangers, of interlopers, of bunglers, of cantankerous, weak and violent persons. The Convention has no hold either on the people or on the bourgeois class, and in proportion as it glides more rapidly down the revolutionary hill, it breaks one by one the ties with which it is still connected to the undecided.

In a reign of eight months the Convention has alienated public opinion entirely. "Almost all who have property of any kind are conservative,"3360 and all the conservatives are against it. "The gendarmes here openly speak up against the Revolution, even up to the revolutionary tribunal, whose judgments they loudly condemn. All the old soldiers detest the actual order of things."3361-The volunteers "who come back from the army appear angry at putting the King to death, and on that account they would flay all the Jacobins."3362-No party in the Convention escapes this universal disaffection and growing aversion. "If the question of guillotining the members of the Convention could be put to an open vote, it would be carried against them by a majority of nineteen-twentieths,"3363 which, in fact, is about the proportion of electors who, through fright or disgust, keep away from the polls. Let the "Right" or the "Left" of the Convention be victors or vanquished, that is a matter which concerns them; the public at large does not enter into the discussions of its conquerors, and no longer cares for either Gironde or "Mountain." Its old grievances always revive "against the Vergniauds, Guadets" and company;3364 it does not like them, and has no confidence in them, and will let them be crushed without helping them. The infuriates may expel the Thirty-Two, if they choose, and put them under lock and key. "There is nothing the aristocracy (meaning by this, owners of property, merchants, bankers, the rich, and the well-to-do), desire so much as to see them guillotined."3365 'Even the inferior aristocracy (meaning petty tradesmen and head-workmen) take no more interest in their fate than if they were so many escaped wild beasts... again caught and put in their cages."3366 "Guadet, Pétion, Brissot, would not find thirty persons in Paris who would take their part, or even take the first step to save them."3367

Apart from all this, it makes little difference whether the majority has any preferences; its sympathies, if it has any, will never be other than platonic. It no longer counts for anything in either camp, it has withdrawn from the battle-field, it is now simply the stakes of the conflict, the prey and the booty of the winner. For, unable or unwilling to comply with the political system imposed on it, it is self-condemned to utter powerlessness. This system is the direct government of the people by the people, with all that ensues, permanence of the section assemblies, club debates in public, uproar in the galleries, motions in the open air, mobs and manifestations in the streets; nothing is less attractive and more impracticable to civilized and busy people. In our modern communities, work, the family, and social intercourse absorb nearly all our time; hence, such a system suits only the idle and rough outcasts who feel at home there; the others refuse to enter an environment expressly set up for singles, orphans, unskilled persons, living in lodgings, foul-mouthed, lacking the sense of smell, with a gift of the gab, robust arms, tough hide, solid haunches, expert in hustling, and with whom blows replace arguments.3368-After the September massacres, and on the opening of the barriers, a number of proprietors and persons living on their incomes, not alone the suspected but those who thought they might become so, escaped from Paris, and, during the following months, the emigration increases along with the danger. Towards December rumor has it that lists have been made up of former Feuillants; "we are assured that during the past eight days more than fourteen thousand persons have left the capital."3369 According to the report of the Minister himself;3370 "many who are independent in fortune and position abandon a city where the renewal of proscription is talked of daily."-" Grass grows in the finest streets," writes a deputy, "while the silence of the grave reigns in the Théba?des (isolated villas) of the faubourg Saint-Germain."-As to the conservatives who remain, they confine themselves to private life, from which it follows that, in the political balance, those present are of no more account than the absentees. At the municipal elections in October, November, and December, out of 160,000 registered voters, there are at first 144,000, then 150,000, and finally 153,000 who stay away from the polls; these, certainly, and for a much better reason, do not show themselves at the assemblies of their sections. Commonly, out of three or four thousand citizens, only fifty or sixty attend; one of these, called a general assembly, which signifies the will of the people to the Convention, is composed of twenty-five voters.3371 Accordingly, what would a sensible man, a friend of order, do in these dens of fanatics? He stays at home, as on stormy days; he lets the shower of words spend itself, not caring to be spattered in the gutter of nonsense which carries off the filth of this district.

If he leaves his house at all he goes out for a walk, the same as in old times, to indulge the tastes he had under the old régime, those of a talkative, curious on-looker and friendly stroller, of a Parisian safe in his well run town. "Yesterday evening," writes a man who feels the coming Reign of Terror, "I took my stand in the middle of the right alley of the Champs-Elysées;3372 it was thronged with-who do you think? Would you believe it, with moderates, aristocrats, owners of property, and very pretty women, elegantly dressed, seeking the caresses of the balmy spring breeze! It was a charming sight. All were gay and smiling. I was the only one that was not so... I withdrew hastily, and, on passing through the Tuileries garden, I saw a repetition of what I had seen before, forty thousand wealthy people scattered here and there, almost as many as Paris contains."-These are evidently the sheep ready for the slaughter-house. They no longer think of defense, they have abandoned their posts to the sans-culottes, "they refuse all civil and military functions,"3373 they avoid doing duty in the National Guard and instead pay their substitutes. In short, they withdraw from a game which, in 1789, they desired to play without understanding it, and in which, since the end of 1791, they have always burnt their fingers. The cards may be handed over to others, especially as the cards are dirty and the players fling them in each others' faces; as for themselves they are spectators, they have no other ambitions.-"Leave them their old enjoyments,3374 leave them the pleasure of going and coming throughout the kingdom; but do not force them to take part in the war. Subject them to the heaviest taxation and they will not complain; nobody will even know that they exist, while the most serious question that disturbs them in their thoughtful days is, can one amuse one's self as much under a republican form of government as under the ancient régime?" They hope, perhaps, to escape under cover of inoffensive neutrality. Is it likely that the victor, whoever he is, will regard people as enemies who are resigned to his rule before-hand? "A dandy3375 alongside of me remarked, yesterday morning, 'They will not take my arms away, for I never had any.' Alas,' I replied to him, 'don't make a boast of it, for you may find forty thousand simpletons in Paris that would say the same thing, and, indeed, it is not at all to the credit of Paris.'"-Such is the blindness or self-complacency of the city dweller who, having always lived under a good police, is unwilling to change his habits, and is not aware that the time has come for him to turn fighting man in his turn.

The manufacturers, the merchants and the man living on his income are even less disposed than the independent gentleman, to give up his private affairs for public affairs. His business will not wait for him, he being confined to his office, store or counting-room. For example, "the wine-dealers3376 are nearly all aristocrats in the sense of this word at this period," but "never were their sales so great as during the insurrections of the people and in revolutionary days." Hence the impossibility of obtaining their services in those days. "They are seen on their premises very active, with three or four of their assistants," and turn a deaf ear to every appeal. "How can we leave when custom is so good? People must have their wants supplied. Who will attend to them if I and the waiters should go away?"-There are other causes of their weakness. All grades in the National Guard and all places in the municipality having been given up to the Jacobin extremists, they have no chiefs: the Girondists are incapable of rallying them, while Garat, the Minister, is unwilling to employ them. Moreover, they are divided amongst themselves, no one having any confidence in the other, "it being necessary to chain them together to have anything accomplished."3377 Besides this, the remembrance of September weighs upon their spirits like a nightmare.-All this converts people into a timid flock, ready to scamper at the slightest alarm. "In the Contrat Social section," says an officer of the National Guard, "one-third of those who are able to defend the section are off in the country; another third are hiding away in their houses, and the other third dare not do anything."3378 "If, out of fifty thousand moderates, you can collect together three thousand, I shall be very much astonished. And if; out of these three thousand, five hundred only are found to agree, and have courage enough to express their opinion, I shall be still more astonished. The latter, for instance, must expect to be Septemberized!"3379 This they know, and hence they keep silent and bend beneath the yoke. "What, indeed, would the majority of the sections do when it is demonstrated that a dozen raving maniacs at the head of a sans-culottes section puts the other forty-seven sections of Paris to flight?"-Through this desertion of the state and themselves, they surrender in advance, and, in this great city, as formerly in ancient Athens and Rome, we see alongside of an immense population of subjects without any rights, a small despotic oligarchy in itself composing the sovereign people.3380

VI.-Composition of the party.

Its numbers and quality decline.-The Underlings.-Idle and

dissipated workmen.-The suburban rabble.-Bandits and

blackguards.-Prostitutes.-The September actors.

Not that this minority has been on the increase since the 10th of August, quite the reverse.-On the 19th of November, 1792, its candidate for the office of Mayor of Paris, Lhuillier, obtains only 4,896 votes.3381 On the 18th of June, 1793, its candidate for the command of the National Guard, Henriot, will secure but 4,573 votes; to ensure his election it will be necessary to cancel the election twice, impose the open vote, and relieve voters from showing their section tickets, which will permit the trusty to vote successively in other quarters and apparently double their number by allowing each to vote two or three times.3382 Putting all together, there are not six thousand Jacobins in Paris, all of them sans-culottes and partisans of the "Mountain."3383 Ordinarily, in a section assembly, they number "ten or fifteen," at most "thirty or forty," "organized into a permanent tyrannical board."... "The rest listen and raise their hands mechanically."... "Three or four hundred Visionaries, whose devotion is as frank as it is stupid, and two or three hundred more to whom the result of the last revolution did not bring the places and honors they too evidently relied on," form the entire staff of the party; "these are the clamorers of the sections and of the groups, the only ones who have clearly declared themselves against order, the apostles of a new sedition, scathed or ruined men who need disturbance to keep alive," while under these comes the train of Marat, vile women, worthless wretches, and "paid shouters at three francs a day."3384

To this must be added that the quality of the factious is still more reduced than their number. Plenty of honest men, small tradesmen, wine dealers, cook-shop keepers, clerks, who, on the 10th of August, were against the Court, are now against the Commune.3385 The September affair, probably, disgusted them, and they were not disposed to recommence the massacres. A workman named Gonchon, for example, the usual spokesman of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, an upright man, sincere and disinterested, supports Roland, and, very soon, at Lyons, seeing how things are with his own eyes, he is to loyally endorse the revolt of the moderates against the Maratists.3386 "The respectable class of the arts, says observers, "is gradually leaving the faction to join the sane party."3387 "Now that water-carriers, porters and the like storm the loudest in the sections, it is plain to all eyes that the gangrene of disgust has reached the fruit-sellers, tailors, shoe-makers, bar owners," and others of that class.3388-Towards the end, "butchers of both classes, high and low, are aristocratized."-In the same way, "the women in the markets, except a few who are paid and whose husbands are Jacobins, curse and swear, fume, fret and storm." "This morning," says a merchant, "four or five of them were here; they no longer insist on being called citoyennes; they declare that they "spit on the republic."3389-The only remaining patriot females are from the lowest of the low class, the harpies who pillage shops as much through envy as through necessity, "boat-women, embittered by hard labor,3390... jealous of the grocer's wife, better dressed than herself, as the latter was of the wives of the attorney and counselor, as these were of those of the financier and noble. The woman of the people thinks she cannot do too much to lower the grocer's wife to her own level."

Thus reduced to its dregs through the withdrawal of its tolerably honest recruits, the faction now comprises none but the scum of the populace, first, "subordinate workmen who look upon the downfall of their employers with a certain satisfaction," then, the small retailers, the old-clothes dealers, plasterers, "those who offer second-hand coats for sale on the fringes of the market, fourth-rate cooks who, at the cemetery of the Innocents, sell meat and beans under umbrella tops,"3391 next, domestics highly pleased with now being masters of their masters, kitchen helpers, grooms, lackeys, janitors, every species of valet, who, in contempt of the law, voted at the elections3392 and at the Jacobin club form a group of "silly people" satisfied "that they were universal geographers because they had ridden post once or twice," and that they were politicians "because they had read 'The Four Sons of Aymon.'"3393-But, in this mud, spouting and spreading around in broad daylight, it is the ordinary scum of great cities which forms the grossest flux, the outcasts of every trade and profession, dissipated workmen of all kinds, the irregular and marauding troops of the social army, the class which, "discharged from La Pitié, run through a career of disorder and end in Bicêtre."3394 "From La Pitié to Bicêtre" is a well known popular adage. Men of this stamp are without any principle whatever. If they have fifty francs they live on fifty, and if they have only five they live on five; spending everything, they are always out of pocket and save nothing. This is the class that took the Bastille,3395 got up the 10th of August, etc. It is the same class which filled the galleries in the Assembly with all sorts of characters, filling up the groups," and, during all this time it never did a stroke of work. Consequently, "a wife who owns a watch, ear-rings, finger-rings, any jewels, first takes them to the pawnbrokers where they end up being sold. At this period many of these people owe the butcher, the baker, the wine-dealer, etc.; nobody trusts them any more. They have ceased to love their wives, and their children cry for food, while the father is at the Jacobin club or at the Tuileries. Many of them have abandoned their position and trade," while, either through "indolence" or consciousness "of their incapacity,"... "they would with a kind of sadness see this trade come back to life." That of a political gossip, of a paid claqueur, is more agreeable, and such is the opinion of all the idlers, summoned by the bugle to work on the camps around Paris.--Here,3396 eight thousand men are paid forty sous a day "to do nothing"; "the workmen come along at eight, nine and ten o'clock in the morning. If they remain after roll-call... they merely trundle about a few wheelbarrow loads of dirt. Others play cards all day, and most of them leave at three or four o'clock, after dinner. On asking the inspectors about this they reply that they are not strong enough to enforce discipline, and are not disposed to have their throats slit." Whereupon, on the Convention decreeing piece-work, the pretended workers fall back on their equality, remind it that they had risen on the 10th of August, and wish to massacre the commissioners. It is not until the 2nd of November that they are finally dismissed with an allowance of three sous per league mileage for those of the departments. Enough, however, remain in Paris to increase immeasurably the troop of drones which, accustomed to consuming the store of honey, think they have a right to be paid by the public for buzzing around the State.

As a rear-guard, they have "the rabble of the suburbs of Paris, which flocks in at every tap of the drum because it hopes to make something."3397 As advance-guard they have "brigands," while the front ranks contain "all the robbers in Paris, which the faction has enrolled in its party to use when required;" the second ranks are made up of "a number of former domestics, the bullies of gambling-houses and of houses of ill-fame, all the vilest class."3398-Naturally, lost women form a part of the crowd "Citoyennes," Henriot says, addressing the prostitutes of the Palais-Royal, whom he has assembled in its garden, "citoyennes, are you good republicans?" "Yes, general, yes!" "Have you, by chance, any refractory priest, any Austrian, any Prussian, concealed in your apartments?" "Fie, fie! We have nobody but sans-culottes!"3399-Along with these are the thieves and prostitutes out of the Chatelet and Conciergerie, set at liberty and then enlisted by the September slaughterers, under the command of an old hag named Rose Lacombe,33100 forming the usual audience of the Convention; on important days, seven or eight hundred of these may be counted, sometimes two thousand, stationed at the entrance and in the galleries, from nine o'clock in the morning.33101-Male and female, "this anti-social vermin"33102 thus crawls around at the sessions of the Assembly, the Commune, the Jacobin club, the revolutionary tribunal, the sections and one may imagine the physiognomies it offers to view. "It would seem," says a deputy,33103 "as if every sink in Paris and other great cities had been scoured to find whatever was foul, the most hideous, and the most infected.... Ugly, cadaverous features, black or bronzed, surmounted with tufts of greasy hair, and with eyes sunken half-way into the head.... They belched forth with their nauseous breath the grossest insults amidst sharp cries like those of carnivorous animals." Among them there can be distinguished "the September murderers, whom" says an observer33104 in a position to know them, "I can compare to nothing but lazy tigers licking their paws, growling and trying to find a few more drops of blood just spilled, awaiting a fresh supply." Far from hiding away they strut about and show themselves. One of them, Petit-Mamain, son of an innkeeper at Bordeaux and a former soldier, "with a pale, wrinkled face, sharp eyes and bold air, wearing a scimitar at his side and pistols at his belt," promenades the Palais-Royal33105 "accompanied or followed at a distance by others of the same species," and "taking part in every conversation." "It was me," he says, "who ripped open La Lamballe and tore her heart out.... All I have to regret is that the massacre was such a short one. But we shall have it over again. Only wait a fortnight!" and, thereupon, he calls out his own name in defiance.-Another, who has no need of stating his well-known name, Maillard, president of the Abbaye massacres, has his head-quarters at the café Chrétien,33106 Rue Favart, from which, guzzling drams of brandy, "he dispatches his mustached men, sixty-eight cutthroats, the terror of the surrounding region;" we see them in coffee-houses and in the foyers of the theaters "drawing their huge sabers," and telling inoffensive people: "I am Mr. so and so; if you look at me with contempt I'll cut you down!-A few months more and, under the command of one of Henriot's aids, a squad of this band will rob and toast (chauffer) peasants in the environment of Corbeil and Meaux.33107 In the meantime, even in Paris, they toast, rob, and rape on grand occasions. On the 25th and 26th of February, 1793,33108 they pillage wholesale and retail groceries, "save those belonging to Jacobins," in the Rue des Lombards, Rue des Cinq-Diamants, Rue Beaurepaire, Rue Montmartre, in the Ile Saint-Louis, on the Port-au-Blé, before the H?tel-de-ville, Rue Saint-Jacques, in short, twelve hundred of them, not alone articles of prime necessity, soap and candles, but again, sugar, brandy, cinnamon, vanilla, indigo and tea. "In the Rue de la Bourdonnaie, a number of persons came out with loaves of sugar they had not paid for and which they re-sold." The affair was arranged beforehand, the same as on the 5th of October, 1789; among the women are seen "several men in disguise who did not even take the precaution of shaving," and in many places, thanks to the confusion, they heartily abandon themselves to it. With his feet in the fire or a pistol at his head, the master of the house is compelled to give them "gold, money, assignats and jewels," only too glad if his wife and daughters are not raped before his eyes as in a town taken by assault.

VII. The Jacobin Chieftains.

The make up of the rulers.-The nature and scope of their

intellect.-The political views of M. Saule.

Such are the politicians who, after the last months of the year 1792, rule over Paris, and, through Paris, over the whole of France, five thousand brutes and blackguards with two thousand hussies, just about the number a good police force would expel from the city, were it important to give the capital a cleaning out;33109 they too, were convinced of their rights, all the more ardent in their revolutionary faith, because the creed converts their vices into virtues, and transforms their misdeeds into public services.33110 They are the actual sovereign people, this is why we should try to unravel their innermost thoughts. If we truly are to comprehend the past events we must discern the spontaneous feelings moving them on the trial of the King, the defeat of Neerwinden, at the defection of Dumouriez, on the insurrection in La Vendée, at the accusation of Marat, the arrest of Hébert, and each of the dangers which in turn fall on their heads. For, this is not borrowed emotion; it does not descend from above; they are not a trusty army of disciplined soldiers, but a suspicious accumulation of temporary adherents. To command them requires obedience to them, their leaders always remaining their tool. However popular and firmly established a chief may seem to be, he is there only for a short time, at all times subject to their approval as the bullhorn for their passions and the purveyor to their appetites.33111 Such was Pétion in July, 1792, and such is Marat since the days of September. "One Marat more or less (which will soon be seen) would not change the course of events."33112-"But one only would remain,33113 Chaumette, for instance; one would suffice to lead the horde," because it is the horde itself which leads. "Its attachment will always be awarded to whoever shows a disposition to follow it the closest in its outrages without in any respect caring for its former leaders... Its liking for Marat and Robespierre is not so great as for those who will exclaim, Let us kill, let us plunder!" Let the leader of the day stop following the current of the day, and he will be crushed as an obstacle or cast off as a piece of wreckage.-Judge if they are willing to be entangled in the spider's web which the Girondins put in their way. Instead of the metaphysical constitution with which the Girondins confront them, they have one in their own head ready made, simple to the last point, adapted to their capacity and their instincts. The reader will call to mind one of their chiefs, whom we have already met, M. Saule, "a stout, stunted little old man, drunk all his life, formerly an upholsterer, then a peddler of quackeries in the shape of four-penny boxes of hangman's grease, to cure pains in the loins,33114 afterwards chief of the claque in the galleries of the Constituent Assembly and driven out for rascality, restored under the Legislative Assembly, and, under the protection of a groom of the Court, favored with a spot near the Assembly door, to set up a patriotic coffee-shop, then awarded six hundred francs as a recompense, provided with national quarters, appointed inspector of the tribunes, a regulator of public opinion, and now "one of the madcaps of the Corn-market." Such a man is typical, an average specimen of his party, not only in education, character and conduct, but, again, in ambition, principles, logic and success. "He swore that he would make his fortune, and he did it. His constant cry was that nobles and priests should be put down, and we no longer have either. He has constantly shouted against the civil list, and the civil list has been suppressed. At last, lodged in the house belonging to Louis XVI., he told him to his face that his head ought to be struck off, and the head of Louis XVI. has fallen."-Here, in a nutshell, is the history and the portrait of all the others; it is not surprising that genuine Jacobins see the Revolution in the same way as M. Saule,33115

* when, for them, the sole legitimate Constitution is the definitive establishment of their omnipotence;

* when they designate as order and justice the boundless despotism they exercise over property and life;

* when their instinct, as narrow and violent as that of a Turkish bey, comprises only extreme and destructive measures, arrests, deportations, confiscations, executions, all of which is done with head erect, with delight as if a patriotic duty, by right of a moral priesthood, in the name of the people, either directly and tumultuously with their own hands, or indirectly and legally by the hands of their docile representatives.

This is the sum of their political system, from which nothing will detach them; for they are anchored fast to it with the full weight and with every hold upon it that characterizes their immorality, ignorance and folly. Through the hypocritical glitter of compulsory parades, their one fixed idea imposes itself on the orator that he may utter it in tirades, on the legislator that he may put it into decrees, on the administrator that he may put it in practice, and, from their opening campaign up to their final victory, they will tolerate but one variation, and this variation is trifling. In September, 1792, they declare by their acts:

"Those whose opinions are opposed to ours will be assassinated, and their gold, jewels and pocketbooks will belong to us."

In November, 1793, they are to declare through the official inauguration of the revolutionary government:

"those whose opinions differ from ours will be guillotined and we shall be their heirs."33116

Between this program, which is supported by the Jacobin population and the program of the Girondins which the majority in the Convention supports, between Condorcet's Constitution and the summary articles of M. Saule, it is easy to see which will prevail. "These Parisian blackguards," says a Girondist, "take us for their valets!33117 Let a valet contradict his master and he is sure to lose his place. From the first day, when the Convention in a body traversed the streets to begin its sessions, certain significant expressions enabled it to see into what hands it had fallen:

"Why should so many folks come here to govern France," says a bystander, "haven't we enough in Paris?"33118

* * *

3301 (return)

[ Any contempory Western reader take notice!! The proof of any Jacobin or Socialist or Communist take-over, surreptitious or open-handed, lies in their take-over of the important posts in politics, the judicial system, the media and the administration. They may be years in doing this, placing convinced or controlled men and women, first in the faculties, later in career post, so that they, 30 years later, have their people on all leading posts; or they may do it all at once, like the Jacobins in France, Lenin in Russia or Stalin in the conquered territories after the second world war. (SR).]

3302 (return)

[ Duvergier, "Collection des lois et décrets," decrees of Sept. 22 and Oct. 19, 1792. The electoral assemblies and clubs had already proceeded in many places to renew on their own authority the decree rendering their appointments valid.]

3303 (return)

[ The necessity of placing Jacobins everywhere is well shown in the following letter: "Please designate by a cross, on the margin of the jury-panel for your district, those Jacobins that it will do to put on the list of 200 for the next quarter. We require patriots." (Letter from the attorney-general of Doubs, Dec. 23, 1792. Sauzay, III. 220.)]

3304 (return)

[ Pétion, "Mémoires" (Ed. Dauban), p. 118: "The justice who accompanied me was very talkative, but could not speak a word of French. He told me that he had been a stone-cutter before he became a justice, having taken this office on patriotic grounds. He wanted to draw up a statement and give me a guard of two gendarmes; he did not know how, so I dictated to him what to say; but my patience was severely taxed by his incredibly slow writing."]

3305 (return)

[ Decrees of July 6, Aug. 15 and 20, Sept. 26, 1792.]

3306 (return)

[ Decree of Nov. 1, 1792.-Albert Babeau, II. 14, 39, 40.]

3307 (return)

[ Dumouriez, III. 309, 355.-Miot de Melito, "Mémoires," I.31, 33.-Gouverneur Morris, letter of Feb. 14, 1793: "The state of disorganization appears to be irremediable. The venality is such that, if there be no traitors, it is because the enemy have not common sense."]

3308 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," F7, 3268. Letter of the municipal officers of Rambouillet, Oct. 3, 1792. They denounce a petition of the Jacobins of the town, who strive to deprive forty foresters of their places, nearly all with families, "on account of their once having been in the pay of a perjured king."-Arnault ("Souvenirs d'un sexagénaire"), II. 15. He resigns a small place he had in the assignate manufacture, because, he says, "the most insignificant place being sought for, he found himself exposed to every kind of denunciation."]

3309 (return)

[ Dumouriez, III. 339.-Meillan, "Mémoires," 27. "Eight days after his installation as Minister of War, Beurnonville confessed to me that he had been offered sums to the amount of 500,000 francs to lend himself to embezzlements." He tries to sweep out the vermin of stealing employees, and is forthwith denounced by Marat.-Barbaroux, "Mémoires" (Ed. Dauban). (Letter of Feb. 5, 1793.) "I found the Minister of the Interior in tears at the obstinacy of Vieilz, who wanted him to violate the law of Oct. 12, 1791 (on promotion)." Vieilz had been in the service only four months, instead of five years, as the law required, and the Minister did not dare to make an enemy of a man of so much influence in the clubs. Buchez et Roux, XXVIII.19 ("Publication des pièces relatives au 31 Mai," at Caen, by Bergoing, June 28, 1793): "My friend learned that the place had been given to another, who had paid 50 louis to the deputy.-The places in the bureaus, the armies, the administrations and commissions are estimated at 9,000. The deputies of the Mountain have exclusive disposal of them and set their price on them, the rates being almost publicly stated." The number greatly increases during the following year (Mallet du Pan, II.56, March, 1794). "The public employees at the capital alone amount to 35,000."]

3310 (return)

[ Decree of Aug. 11, 12, 1792.]

3311 (return)

[ Sauzay, III. 45. The number increases from 3,200 to 7,000.]

3312 (return)

[ Durand-Maillane, "Mémoires," p. 30: "This proceeding converted the French proletariat, which had no property or tenacity, into the dominant party at electoral assemblages.... The various clubs established in France (were) then masters of the elections." In the Bouches-du-Rh?ne "400 electors in Marseilles, one-sixth of whom had not the income of a silver marc, despotically controlled our Electoral Assembly. Not a voice was allowed to be raised against them... Only those were elected whom Barbaroux designated."]

3313 (return)

[ Decree of Aug. 11, 12, "Archives Nationales," CII. 58 to 76. Official report of the Electoral Assembly of the Rh?ne-et-Loire, held at Saint-Etienne. The electors of Saint-Etienne demand remuneration the same as the others, considering that they gave their time in the same way. Granted.]

3314 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," CII. 1 to 32. Official report of the Electoral Assembly of the Bouches-du-Rh?ne, speech by Durand-Maillane: "Could I in the National Convention be otherwise than I have been in relation to the former Louis XVI., who, after his flight on the 22d of June, appeared to me unworthy of the throne? Can I do otherwise than abhor royalty, after so many of our regal crimes?"]

3315 (return)

[ Moniteur, XIII. 623, session of Sept. 8, speech by Larivière.-"Archives Nationales," CII., 1 to 83. (The official reports make frequent mention of the dispatch of this comparative lists, and the Jacobins who send it request the Electoral Assembly to have it read forthwith.)]

3316 (return)

[ Rétif de la Bretonne, "Les Nuits de Paris," Night X. p. 301: "As soon as the primary assemblies had been set up, the plotters began to work, electors were nominated, and through the vicious system adopted in the sections, an uproar made it out for a majority of voices."-Cf. Schmidt, "Tableaux de la Révolution Fran?aise," I. 98. Letter of Damour, vice-president of the section of the Théatre-Fran?ais, Oct.29.-" Un Séjour en France," p.29: "The primary assemblies have already begun in this department (Pas-de-Calais). We happened to enter a church, where we found young Robespierre haranguing an audience as small in point of number as it was in that of respectability. They applauded vigorously as if to make up for their other shortcomings."]

3317 (return)

[ Albert Babeau, I. 518. At Troyes, Aug.26, the revolutionaries in most of the sections have it decided that the relations of an émigré, designated as hostages and the signers of royalist addresses, shall not be entitled to vote: "The sovereign people in their primary assembly may admit among its members only pure citizens against whom there is not the slightest reproach" (resolution of the Madeleine section).-Sauzay, III. 47, 49 and following pages. At Quinsy, Aug. 26, Lout, working the Chattily furnaces, along with a hundred of his men armed with clubs, keeps away from the ballot-box the electors of the commune of Courcelles, "suspected of incivisme. "-" Archives Nationales," F7, 3217. Letters of Gilles, justice an the canton of Roquemaure (Gard), Oct. 31, 1792, and Jan. 23, 1793, on the electoral proceedings employed in this canton: Dutour, president of the club, left his chair to support the motion for "lanterning" the grumpy and all the false patriots... On the 4th of November "he forced contributions by threatening to cut off heads and destroy houses." He was elected juge-de-paix.-Another, Magère, "approved of the motion for setting up a gallows, provided that it was not placed in front of his windows, and stated openly in the club that if people followed the law they would never accomplish anything to be remembered." He was elected member of the department directory.-A third, Fournier, "wrote that the gifts which citizens made to save their lives were voluntary gifts." He is made a department councilor. "Peaceable citizens are storing their furniture in safe places in order to take to flight... There is no security in France; the epithet of aristocrat, of Feuillant, of moderate affixed to the most honest citizen's name is enough to make him an object of spoliation and to expose him to losing his life... I insist on regarding the false idea which is current in relation to popular sovereignty as the principal cause of the existing anarchy."]

3318 (return)

[ Schmidt, "Pariser Zustande," I. 50 and following pages.-Mortimer-Ternaux, V. 95. 109, 117, 129. (Ballot of Oct. 4, 14,137 voters; Oct. 22, 14,006; Nov.19, 10,223, Dec. 6, 7062.)]

3319 (return)

[ Sauzay, III. 45, 46, 221.-Albert Babeau, I. 517.-Lallié, "Le district de Machecoul," 225.-Cf. in the above the history of the elections 'of Saint-Affrique: out of more than 600 registered electors the mayor and syndic-attorney are elected by forty votes.-The plebiscite of September, 1795, on the constitution of the year III. calls out only 958,000 voters. Repugnance to voting still exists. "Ninety times out of a hundred, on asking: 'Citizen, how did the Electoral Assembly of your canton go off?' they would reply (in patois): 'Me, citizen? why should I go there? They have a good deal of trouble in getting along together.' Or, 'What would you? Only a few will come; honest people will stay at home!'" (Meissner, "Voyage à Paris," towards the end of 1795.)]

3320 (return)

[ Stalin easily found a remedy. He obliged all to vote and falsified the count so that 99% now voted for him and his men. (SR).]

3321 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," CII. 1 to 76, passim, especially the official reports of the assemblies of the Bouches-du-Rh?ne, Hérault and Paris. Speech by Barbaroux to the Electoral Assembly of the Bouches-du-Rh?ne: "Brothers and friends, liberty will perish if you do not elect men to the National Convention whose hearts are filled with hatred of royalty... Mine is the soul of a freeman; ever since my fourth year it has been nourished on hatred to kings. I will relieve France from this detestable race, or I will die in the attempt. Before I leave you I will sign my own death-warrant, I will designate what I love most, I will show you all my possessions, I will lay a dagger on the table which shall pierce my heart if ever for an instant I prove false to the cause of the people!" (session of Sept. 3).-Guillon de Montléon, I, 135.]

3322 (return)

[ Durand-Maillane, I.33. In the Electoral Assembly of the Bouches-du-Rh?ne "there was a desire to kill an elector suspected of aristocracy."]

3323 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, IV. 52. "Archives Nationales," CII. I to 32.-Official report of the Electora1 Assembly of Bouches-du-Rh?ne. Speech by Pierre Bayle, Sept. 3: "That man is not free who tries to conceal his conscience in the shadow of a vote. The Romans openly elected their tribunes... Who amongst us would reject so wise a measure? The galleries of the National Assembly have had as much to do with fostering the Revolution as the bayonets of patriots. "-In Seine-et-Marne the Assembly at first decided for the secret vote; at the request of the Paris commissaries, Ronsin and Lacroix, it rescinds its decision and adopts voting aloud and by call.]

3324 (return)

[ Barbaroux, "Mémoires," 379: "One day, on proceeding to the elections, tumultuous shouts break out: 'That is an anti-revolutionary from Arles, hang him!' An Arlesian had, indeed, been arrested on the square, brought into the Assembly, and they were lowering the lantern to run him up."]

3325 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 338.-De Sybel, "Histoire de l'Europe pendant la Révolution Fran?aise" (Dosquet's translation), I. 525. (Correspondence of the army of the South, letter by Charles de Hesse, commanding the regular troops at Lyons.)]

3326 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, V.101, 122 and following pages.]

3327 (return)

[ Guillon de Montléon, I. 172, 196 and following pages.]

3328 (return)

[ Sauzay, III. 220 and following pages.-Albert Babeau, II. 15. At Troyes, two mayors elected refuse in turn. At the third ballot in this town of from 32,000 to 35,000 souls, the mayor-elect obtains 400 out of 555 votes.]

3329 (return)

[ Moniteur, XV. 184 to 233 (the roll-call of those who voted for the death of Louis XVI).-Dumouriez, II. 73 (Dumouriez reaches Paris Feb. 2, 1793, after visiting the coasts of Dunkirk and Antwerp): "All through Picardy, Artois, and maritime Flanders Dumouriez found the people in consternation at the tragic end of Louis XVI. He noticed that the very name of Jacobin excited horror as well as fear."]

3330 (return)

[ This number, so important, is verified by the following passages:-Moniteur, session of Dec. 39, 1792. Speech by Birotteau: "Fifty members against 690... About twenty former nobles, fifteen or twenty priests, and a dozen September judges (want to prevail against) 700 deputies."-Ibid., 851 (Dec.26, on the motion to defer the trial of the king): "About fifty voices, with energy, No! no!"-Ibid., 865, (Dec.27, a violent speech by Lequinio, applauded by the extreme "Left" and the galleries; the president calls them to order): "The applause continues of about fifty members of the extreme 'Left.' "-Mortimer-Ternaux, VI. 557. (Address by Tallien to the Parisians, Dec.23, against the banishment of the Duke of Orleans): "To-morrow, under the vain pretext of another measure of general safety, the 60 or 80 members who on account of their courageous and inflexible adherence to principles are offensive to the Brissotine faction, will be driven out."-Moniteur, XV. 74 (Jan. 6). Robespierre, addressing Roland, utters this expression: "the factious ministers." "Cries of Order! A vote of censure! To the Abbaye/ 'Is the honest minister whom all France esteems,' says a member, 'to be treated in this way?'-Shouts of laughter greet the exclamation from about sixty members."-Ibid., XV. 114. (Jan. 11). Denunciation of the party of anarchists by Buzot. Garnier replies to him: "You calumniate Paris; you preach civil war!" "Yes! yes! 'exclaim about sixty members.-Buchez et Roux, XXIV. 368 (Feb. 26). The question is whether Marat shall be indicted. "Murmurs from the extreme left, about a dozen members noisily demanding the order of the day."]

3331 (return)

[ Mercier, "Le nouveau Paris," II. 200.]

3332 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XIX. 17. XXVIII. 168.-The king is declared guilty by 683 votes; 37 abstain from voting, as judges; of these 37, 26, either as individuals or legislators, declare the king guilty. None of the other 11 declare him innocent.]

3333 (return)

[ "Dictionnaire biographique," by Eymery, 1807 (4 vols). The situation of the conventionists who survive the Revolution may here be ascertained. Most of them will become civil or criminal judges, prefects, commissaries of police, heads of bureaus, post-office employees, or registry clerks, collectors, review-inspectors, etc. The following is the proportion of regicides among those thus in office: Out of 23 prefects 21 voted for the king'' death; 42 out of 43 magistrates voted for it, the 43rd being ill at the time of the sentence. Of 5 senators 4 voted for his death, and 14 deputies out of 16. Out of 36 other functionaries of various kinds 35 voted for death. Among the remaining regicides we again find 2 councillors of state, 4 diplomatic agents and consuls, 2 generals, 2 receiver-generals, 1 commissary-general of the police, 1 minister in the cabinet of King Joseph, the minister of police, and the arch-chancellor of the empire.]

3334 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XIX, 97, session of Sept. 25, 1792. Marat states: "'I have many personal enemies in this assembly.' 'All! all!' exclaim the entire Assembly, indignantly rising."-Ibid., XIX. 9, 49, 63, 338.]

3335 (return)

[ "Right" and "Left", only refers to the right and left wings of the hemicycles of the hall in which the Assembly meets. The Plain and the Mountain refer to the same Assembly but here to those on the lower or the upper benches.(SR).]

3336 (return)

[ Meillan, "Mémoires," 20.-Buchez et Roux, XXVI. Session of April 15, 1793. Denunciation of the Twenty-two Girondists by the sections of Paris: Royer-Fonfrède regrets "that his name is not inscribed on this honorable list. 'And all of us-all! All!' exclaim three-quarters of the Assembly, rising from their seats."]

3337 (return)

[ The Philosophe Denis Diderot (1713-84) was largely responsible for the 28 volume Encyclopédie (1751-729, which incorporated the latest knowledge and progressive ideas, and which helped spread the ideas of the Enlightenment in France and in other parts of Europe. (Guinness Encyclopedia).]

3338 (return)

[ "Archives Nationales," A.F. 45. Letter of Thomas Paine to Danton, May 6, 1792 (in English). "I do not know better men or better patriots." This letter, compared with the speeches or publications of the day, produces a singular impression through its practical good sense. This Anglo-American, however radical he may be, relies on nothing but experience and example in his political discussions.]

3339 (return)

[ Cf. The memoirs of Buzot, Barbaroux, Louvet, Madame Roland, etc.]

3340 (return)

[ And for some incomprehensible reason still in fashion at the end of the 20th Century. (SR).]

3341 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XXIV. 102. (Plan drawn up by Condorcet, and reported in the name of the Committee on the Constitution, April 15 and 16, 1793.) Condorcet adds to this a report of his own, of which he publishes and abstract in the Chronique de Paris.]

3342 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XXIV. 102. Condorcet's abstract contains the following extraordinary sentence: "In all free countries the influence of the populace is feared with reason; but give all men the same rights and there will be no populace."]

3343 (return)

[ Cf. Edmond Biré. "La Légende des Girondins," on the part of the Girondists in all these odious measures.]

3344 (return)

[ These traits are well defined in the charges of the popular party against them made by Fabre d'Eglantine. Maillan, "Mémoires," 323. (Speech of Fabre d'Eglantine at the Jacobin Club in relation to the address of the commune, demanding the expulsion of the Twenty-Two.) "You have often taken the people to task; you have even sometimes tried to flatter them; but there was about this flattery that aristocratic air of coldness and dislike which could deceive nobody. Your ways of a bourgeois patrician are always perceptible in your words and acts; you never wanted to mix with the people. Here is your doctrine in few words: after the people have served in revolutions they must return to dust, be of no account, and allow themselves to be led by those who know more than they and who are willing to take the trouble to lead them. You, Brissot, and especially you, Pétion, you have received us formally, haughtily, and with reserve. You extend to us one finger, but you never grasp the whole hand. You have not even refused yourselves that keen delight of the ambitious, insolence and disdain."]

3345 (return)

[ Buzot, "Mémoires," 78.]

3346 (return)

[ Edmond Biré, "La légende des Girondins." (Inedited fragments of the memoirs of Pétion and Barbaroux, quoted by Vatel in "Charlotte Corday and the Girondists," III. 472, 478.)]

3347 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XXVI. A financial plan offered by the department of Hérault adopted by Cambon and rejected by the Girondists.]

3348 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XXV. Speech by Vergniaud (April 10), pp. 376, 377, 378. "An effort is made to accomplish the Revolution by terror. I would accomplish it through love."]

3349 (return)

[ Maillan, 22.]

3350 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XXIV. 109. Plan of a constitution presented by Condorcet. Declaration of rights, article 32. "In every free government the mode of resistance to different acts of oppression should be regulated by law."-Ibid., 136. Title VIII. Of the Constitution "De la Censure des lois."]

3351 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, 93. Session of the Jacobin Club, April 21, 1793.]

3352 (return)

[ Schmidt, "Tableaux de la révolution Fran?aise," II.4 (Report of Dutard, June 6, 1793.)-The mental traits of the Jacobins form a contrast and are fully visible in the following speeches: "We desire despotically a popular constitution." (Address of the Paris Jacobin Club to the clubs in the departments, Jan. 7, 1793.)-Buchez et Roux, XXIII. 288-Ibid., 274. (Speech by Legros in the Jacobin Club, Jan. 1.) "Patriots are not counted; they go by weight... One patriot in a scale weights more than 100,000 aristocrats. One Jacobin weights more than 10,000 Feuillants. One republican weights more than 100,000 monarchists. One patriot of the Mountain weights more than 100,000 Brissotins. Hence I conclude that the convention should not be stopped by the large number of votes against the death-sentence of Louis XVI., (and that) even (if there should be) but a minority of the nation desiring Capet's death."-"Applauded." (I am obliged to correct the last sentence, as it would otherwise be obscure.)]

3353 (return)

[ Buzot, "Mémoires," 33: "The majority of French people yearned after royalty and the Constitution of 1790. This was the strongest feeling, and especially at Paris.. This people is only republican because it is threatened by the guillotine.. All its desires, all its hopes incline to the constitution of 1791."-Schmidt, I. 232 (Dutard, May 16). Dutard, an old advocate and friend of Garat, is one of those rare men who see facts behind words; clear-sighted, energetic, active, abounding in practical counsels, and deserving of a better chief than Garat.]

3354 (return)

[ Schmidt, ibid., I. 173, 179 (May 1, 1793).]

3355 (return)

[ "La Démagogie à en Paris en 1793," p.152. Dauban ("Diurnal de Beaulieu," April 17).-"Archives Nationales," AF II. 45 (report by the police, May 20). "The dearness of supplies is the leading cause of agitation and complaints."-(Ib., May 24). "The calm which now appear to prevail in Paris will soon be disturbed if the prices of the prime necessities of life do not shortly diminish."-(Ibid., May 25). "Complaints against dear food increase daily end this circumstance looks as if it might become one of the motives of forthcoming events."]

3356 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 198 (Dutard, May 9).]

3357 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 350; II. 6 (Dutard, May 30, June 7 and 8).]

3358 (return)

[ Durand-Maillane,100: "The Girondist party was yet more impious than Robespierre."-A deputy having demanded that mention should be made of the Supreme Being in the preamble of the constitution, Vergniaud replied: "We have no more to do with Numa's nymph than with Mahomet's pigeon; reason is sufficient to give France a good constitution."-Buchez et Roux, XIII. 444. Robespierre having spoken of the Emperor Leopold's death as a stroke of Providence, Guadet replies that he sees "no sense in that idea," and blames Robespierre for "endeavoring to return the people to slavery of superstition."-Ibid., XXVI. 63 (session of April 19, 1793). Speech by Vergniaud against article IX of the Declaration of Rights, which states that "all men are free to worship as they please." This article, says Vergniaud, "is a result of the despotism and superstition under which we have so long languished."-Salle: "I ask the Convention to draw up an article by which each citizen, whatever his form of worship, shall bind himself to submit to the law "-Lanjuinais, who often ranked along with the Girondists, is a Catholic and confirmed Gallican.]

3359 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 347 (Dutard, May 30). "What do I now behold? A discontented people hating the Convention, all its administrators, and the actual state of things generally."]

3360 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 278. (Dutard, May 23).]

3361 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 216 (Dutard, May 13).]

3362 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 240 (Dutard, May 17).]

3363 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 217 (Dutard, May 13).]

3364 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 163 (Dutard, April 30).]

3365 (return)

[ Schmidt, II. 377 (Dutard, June 13). Cf. Ibid., II. 80. (Dutard, June 21): "If the guillotining of the Thirty-Two were subject to a roll call, and the vote a secret one I declare to you no respectable man would fail to hasten in from the country to give his vote and that none of those now in Paris would fail to betake themselves to their section."]

3366 (return)

[ Schmidt, II. 35 (Dutard, June 13). On the sense of these two words, inferior aristocracy, Cf. All of Dutard's reports and those of other observers in the employ of Garat.]

3367 (return)

[ Schmidt, II. 37 (Dutard, June 13).]

3368 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 328 (Perrière, May 28): "Intelligent men and property-owners abandoned the section assemblies and handed them to others as these were places where the workman's fist prevailed against the speaker's tongue."-Moniteur. XV. 114 (session of Jan. 11, speech by Buzot). "There is not a man in this town who owns anything, that is not afraid of being insulted and struck in his section if he dares raise his voice against the ruling power... The permanent assemblies of Paris consist of a small number of men who have succeeded in keeping other citizens away."-Schmidt, I. 235 (Dutard, May 28): "Another plan would be to drill young men in the use of the staff. One must be a sans-culotte, must live with sans-culottes, to discover the value of expedients of this kind. There is nothing the sans-culotte fears as much as a truncheon. A number of young men lately carried them in their trousers, and everybody trembled as they passed. I wished that the fashion were general."]

3369 (return)

[ Moniteur, XV. 95 (Letter of Charles Villette, deputy).]

3370 (return)

[ Moniteur, XV. 179 (Letter of Roland, Jan. 11. 1793).]

3371 (return)

[ Moniteur, XV. 66, session of Jan. 5, speech of the mayor of Paris; (Chambon)-Ib., XV 114, session of Jan. 14, speech by Buzot;--Ib., XV. 136, session of Jan. 13. Speech by a deputation of Federates.-Buchez et Roux, XXVIII. 91 (Letter of Gadolle to Roland, October, 1792).-XXI. 417 (Dec. 20, article by Marat): "Boredom and disgust have emptied the assemblies."-Schmidt, II, 69 (Dutard, June 18).]

3372 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 203. (Dutard, May 10). The engravings published during the early period of the Revolution and under the directory exhibit this scene perfectly (cabinet des estampes, Paris).]

3373 (return)

[ Moniteur, XV. 67 (session of Jan. 5, 1793). Speech by the mayor of Paris.]

3374 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 378 (Blanc, June 12).]

3375 (return)

[ Schmidt, II. 5 (Dutard, June 5).]

3376 (return)

[ Schmidt, II. (Dutard, June 11)-Ibid., II. (Dutard, June i8): "I should like to visit with you," if it were possible, "the 3,000 or 4,000 wine-dealers, and the equally numerous places of refreshment in Paris; you would find the 15,000 clerks they employ constantly busy. If we should then go to the offices of the 114 notaries, we should again find two-thirds of these gentlemen in their caps and red slippers, also very much engaged. We might then, again, go to the 200 or 300 printing establishments, where we should find 4,000 or 5,000 editors, compositors, clerks, and porters all conservatized because they no longer earn what they did before; and some because they have made a fortune."-The incompatibility between modern life and direct democratic rule strikes one at every step, owing to modern life being carried out under other conditions than those which characterized life in ancient times. For modern life these conditions are, the magnitude of States, the division of labor, the suppression of slavery and the requirements of personal comforts and prosperity. Neither the Girondists nor the Montagnards, who aimed to revive Athenian and Spartan ways, comprehended the precisely opposite conditions on which Athens and Sparta flourished.]

3377 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 207 (Dutard, May 10).]

3378 (return)

[ Schmidt, II. 79 (Dutard, June 19).]

3379 (return)

[ Schmidt, II.70 (Dutard, June 10).]

3380 (return)

[ Lenin must have felt encouraged by reading these lines which can only have increase his disdain for the "capitalist" and bourgeoisie. (SR).]

3381 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, V. 101.]

3382 (return)

[ Meillan, 54.-Raffet, Henriot's competitor and denounced as an aristocrat, had at first the most votes, 4,953 against 4,578. At the last ballot, out of about 15,000 he still has 5,900 against 9,087 for Henriot.-Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII. 31: "The electors had to vote thirty at a time. All who dared give their votes to Raffet were marked with a red cross on the roll-call, followed by the epithet of anti-revolutionary."]

3383 (return)

[ Schmidt, II. 37 (Dutard, June 13): "Marat and others have a party of from 4,000 to 6,000 men, who would do anything to rescue them."-Meillan, 155 (depositions taken by the Commission of the Twelve): Laforet has stated that there were 6,000 sans-culottes to massacre objectionable deputies at the first signal.-Schmidt, II, 87 (Dutard, June 24): "I know that there are not in all Paris 3,000 decided revolutionaries."]

3384 (return)

[ Moniteur, XV. 114, session of Jan. 11, speech by Buzot.-Ibid., 136, session of Jan. 13, speech of the Federates of Finisterre.-Buchez et Roux, XXVIII. 80, 81, 87, 91, 93 (Letter of Gadolle to Roland, October 1792).-Schmidt, I. 207 (Dutard, May 10, 1793).]

3385 (return)

[ Schmidt, II. 37 (Dutard, May 10, 1793).]

3386 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, IV. 269 (petition presented by Gonchon.)-"Archives Nationales," AF, II 43. Letters of Gonchon to the Minister Garat, (May 31, June 1, June 3, 1793). These are very odd and naive. He addresses the Minister Garat: "Citizen Garra."]

3387 (return)

[ Schmidt, I, 254 (Dutard, May 19).-Moniteur, XIV. 522 (Letter addressed to Roland number for Nov. 21, 1792): "The sections (are) composed of, or at least frequented, nineteen-twentieth of them, by the lowest class, both in manners and information."]

3388 (return)

[ Schmidt, II. 39 (Dutard, June 13).]

3389 (return)

[ Schmidt, II.87 (Dutard, June 14). The expression of these fish-women is still coarser.]

3390 (return)

[ Rétif de la Bretonne ("Bibliographie de ses oeuvres, par Jacob," 287).-(On the pillage of shops, Feb.25 and 26, 1793).]

3391 (return)

[ Schmidt, II. 61; I. 265 (Dutard, May 21 and June 17).]

3392 (return)

[ Schmidt, I.96 (Letter of citizen Lauchou to the president of the Convention, Oct. 11, 1792).-II. 37 (Dutard, June 13). Statement of a wigmaker's wife: "They are a vile set, the servants. Some of them come here every day. They chatter away and say all sorts of horrible things about their masters. They are all just alike. Nobody is crazier than they are. I knew that some of them had received benefits from their masters, and others who were:still being kindly treated; but nothing stopped them."]

3393 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 246 (Dutard, May 18).-Grégoire, "Mémoires," I. 387. The mental and moral decline of the party is well shown in the new composition of the Jacobin Club after September, 1792: "I went back there," says Grégoire in September, 1792 (after a year's absence), "and found it unrecognizable; no opinions could be expressed there other than those of the Paris section... I did not set foot there again; (it was) a factious disreputable drinking place."-Buchez et Roux, XXVI. 214 (session of April 30,1793, speech by Buzot). "Behold that once famous club. But. thirty of its founders remain there; you find there none but men steeped in debt and crime."]

3394 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 189 (Dutard, May 6).]

3395 (return)

[ Cf. Rétif de la Bretonne, "Nuits de Paris," vol. XVI. (July 12, 1789). At this date Rétif is in the Palais-Roya1, where "since the 13th of June numerous meetings have been held and motions made... I found there none but brutal fellows with keen eyes, preparing themselves for plunder rather than for liberty."]

3396 (return)

[ Mortimer-Ternaux, V.226 and following pages (address of the sans-culottes section, Sept. 25).-"Archives Nationales," F7, 146 (address of the Roule section, Sept. 23). In relation to the threatening tone of those at work on the camp, the petitioners add: "Such was the language of the workshops in 1789 and 1790."]

3397 (return)

[ Schmidt, II.12 (Dutard, June 7): "During a few days past I have seen men from Neuilly, Versailles, and Saint-Germain staying here, attracted by the scent."]

3398 (return)

[ Schmidt, I.254 (Dutard, May 19).-At this date robbers swarm in Paris; Mayor Chambon, in his report to the Convention, himself admits it (Moniteur, XV. 67, session of Jan. 5, 1793).]

3399 (return)

[ De Concourt, "La Société Fran?aise pendant 'a Révolution." (According to the "Courrier de l'Egalité," Jul. 1793).]

33100 (return)

[ Buzot, 72.]

33101 (return)

[ Moore, Nov.10, 1792 (according to an article in the Chronique de Paris). 'The day Robespierre made his "apology," "the galleries contained from seven to eight hundred women, and two hundred men at most. Robespierre is a priest who has his congregation of devotees."--Mortimer-Ternaux, VII. 562 (letter of the deputy Michel, May 20, 1793): "Two or three thousand women, organized and drilled by the Fraternal Society in session at the Jacobin Club, began their uproar. which lasted until 6 o'clock, when the house adjourned. Most of these creatures are prostitutes."]

33102 (return)

[ An expression of Gadol's in his letter to Roland.]

33103 (return)

[ Buzot, 57.]

33104 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XXVIII. 80 (Letter of Gadolle to Roland).]

33105 (return)

[ Beaulieu, "Essais," I. 108 (an eye-witness).-Schmidt, II. 15. Report by Perrières, June 8.]

33106 (return)

[ Beaulieu, "Essais," I. 100. "Maillard died, his stomach eaten away by brandy" (April 15, 1794).-Alexandre Sorel, "Stanislas Maillard," pp. 32 to 42. Report of Fabre d'Eglantine on Maillard, Dec. 17, 1793. A decree subjecting him to indictment along with Ronsin and Vincent, Maillard publishes his apology, in which we see that he was already active in the Rue Favart before the 31st of May. "I am one of the members of that meeting of true patriots and I am proud of it, for it is there that the spark of that sacred insurrection of the 31st of May was kindled."]

33107 (return)

[ Alexandre Sorel, ibid. (denunciation of the circumstance by Lecointre, Dec.14, 1793 accompanied with official reports of the justices).-"Archives Nationales," F7, 3268 (letter of the directory of Corbeil to the Minister, with official report, Nov. 28,1792). On the 26th of November eight or ten armed men, foot-soldiers, and others on horseback, entered the farm-house of a man named Ruelle, in the commune of Lisse. They dealt him two blows with their sabers, then put a bag over his head, kicked him in the face, tormented him, and almost smothered his wife and two women servants, to make him give up his money. A carter was shot with a pistol in the shoulder and twice struck with a saber; the hands about the premises were tied and bound like so many cattle. Finally the bandits went away, carrying with them silver plate, a watch, rings, laces, two guns, etc.]

33108 (return)

[ Moniteur, XV. 565.-Buchez et Roux, XXIV. 335 and following pages.-Rétif de la Bretonne, "Nuits de Paris," VIII. 460. (an eye witness). The last of these details are given by him.]

33109 (return)

[ Cf. Ed. Fleury, "Baboeuf;" pp.139 and 150. Through a striking coincidence the party staff is still of the same order in 1796. Baboeuf estimates his adherents in Paris as "4,000 revolutionaries, 1,500 members of the former authorities, and 1,000 bourgeois gunners," besides soldiers, prisoners, and a police force. He also recruited a good many prostitutes. The men who come to him are workmen who pretend to have arsouillé in the Revolution and who are ready to repeat the job, provided it is "for the purpose of killing those rich rascals, the monopolizers, merchants, informers, and panachés at the Luxembourg." (Letter of the agent of the Bonne-Nouvelle section, April 13, 1796.)]

33110 (return)

[ The proportion, composition and spirit of the party are everywhere the same, especially at Lyons (Guillon de Montléon, "Mémoires," and Balleydier, "Histoire du peuple de Lyon,". passim); at Toulon (Lauvergne, "Histoire du department du Var"); at Marseilles, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Besan?on, etc.-At Bordeaux (Riouffe, "Mémoires," 23) "it consisted wholly of vagabonds, Savoyards, Biscayans, even Germans,..brokers, and water-carriers, who had become so powerful that they arrested the rich, and so well-off that they traveled by post" Riouffe adds: "When I read this passage in the Conciergerie men from every corner of the republic exclaimed in one voice: 'It is the same in all the communes!'"-Cf. Durand-Maillane, "Mémoires," 67: "This people, thus qualified, since the suppression of the silver marc has been the most vicious and most depraved in the community."-Dumouriez, II. 51. "The Jacobins, taken for the most part, from the most abject and most brutal of the nation, unable to furnish men of sufficient dignity for offices, have degraded offices to their own level... They are drunken, barbarous Helots that have taken the places of the Spartans."-The sign of their advent is the expulsion of the liberals and of the refined of 1789. ("Archives Nationales," F7, 4434, No.6. Letter of Richard to the committee on Public Safety, Vent?se 3, year II.). During the proconsulate of Baudot at Toulouse "almost all the patriots of 1789 were excluded from the popular club they had founded; an immense number were admitted whose patriotism reached only as far back as the 10th of August 1792, if it even went so far as the 31st of last May. It is an established fact that out of more than 1,000 persons who now compose the club there are not fifty whose patriotism as far back as the beginning of the Revolution."]

33111 (return)

[ Any tribune taking command of a mob of brutes is well advised to understand Taine's analysis. One might think Hitler had read Taine pr somebody who had learned from his wisdom, somewhat like the Devil who had read the Bible. See page 208, The Secret of Ruling the Masses, in Rauschning's book, "Hitler Speaks". (SR).]

33112 (return)

[ Roederer, "Chronique des cinquante jours."]

33113 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 246 (Dutard, May 18).]

33114 (return)

[ Schmidt, I. 215 (Dutard, May 25).]

33115 (return)

[ Buchez et Roux, XXV. 156 (extract from the Patriote Fran?ais, March 30, 1793).Speech by Chasles at the Jacobin Club, March 27: "We have announced to our fellow-citizens in the country that by means of the war-tax the poor could be fed by the rich, and that they would find in the purses of those egoists the wherewithal to live on." Ibid., 269. Speech by Rose Lacombe: "Let us make sure of the aristocrats; let us force them to meet the enemies which Dumouriez is bringing against Paris. Let us give them to understand that if they prove treacherous their wives and children shall have their throats cut, and that we will burn their houses.. I do not want patriots to leave the city; I want them to guard Paris. And if we are beaten, the first man who hesitates to apply the torch, let him be stabbed at once. I want all the owners of property who have grabbed everything and excited the people's anger, to kill the tyrants themselves or else be killed." Applause-April 3.:-Ibid., 302 (in the Convention, April 8): "Marat demands that 100,000 relatives and friends of the émigrés be seized as hostages for the safety of the commissioners in the hands of the enemy."-Cf. Balleydier, 117, 122. At Lyons, Jan. 26, 1793, Challier addresses the central club: "Sans-culottes, rejoice! the blood of the royal tiger has flowed in sight of his den! But full justice is not yet done to the people There are still 500 among you deserving of the tyrant's fate!"-He proposes on the 5th of February a revolutionary tribunal for trying arrested persons in a revolutionary manner. "It is the only way to force it (the Revolution) on royal and aristocratic factionists, the only rational way to avenge the sovereignty of the brave sans-culottes, who belong only to us."--Hydens, a national commissioner adds: "Let 25,000,000 of Frenchmen perish a hundred times over rather than one single indivisible Republic!"]

33116 (return)

[ Mallet du Pan, the last expression.]

33117 (return)

[ Buzot, 64.]

33118 (return)

[ Michelet, IV. 6 (according to an oral statement by Daunou).-Buchez et Roux, 101 (Letter of Louvet to Roland): "At the moment of the presentation of their petition against armed force (departmental) by the so-called commissioners of the 48 sections of Paris, I heard Santerre say in a loud tone to those around him, somewhat in these words: 'You see, now, these deputies are not up to the Revolution... That all comes from fifty, a hundred two hundred leagues off; they don't understand one word you say!'"]