Mainvielle.” Jourdan supplies the executioners; the apothecary Mende, brother-in-law of Duprat, plies them with liquor, while a clerk of Tournal, the newsman, bids them “kill all, so that there shall be no witnesses left.” Whereupon, at the reiterated orders of Mainvielle, Tournal, Duprat, and Jourdan, with a complications of hilarious lewdness,[48] the massacre develops itself on the 16th of October and following days, during sixty-six hours, the victims being a couple of priests, three children, an old man of eighty, thirteen women, two of whom are pregnant, in all, sixty-one persons, with their throats slit or knocked out and then cast one on top of each other into the Glacière hole, a mother on the body of her infant, a son on the body of his father, all finished off with rocks, the hole being filled up with stones and covered over with quicklime on account of the smell.[49] In the meantime about a hundred more, killed in the streets, are pitched into the Sorgues canal; five hundred families make their escape. The ousted bandits return in a body, while the assassins who are at the head of them, enthroned by murder, organize for the benefit of their new band a legal system of brigandage, against which nobody defends himself.[50]
These are the friends of the Jacobins of Arles and Marseilles, the respectable men whom M. d’Antonelle has come to address in the cathedral at Avignon.[51] These are the pure patriots, who, with their hands in the till and their feet in gore, caught in the act by a French army, the mask torn off through a scrupulous investigation, universally condemned by the emancipated electors, also by the deliberate verdict of the new mediating commissioners,[52] are included in the amnesty proclaimed by the Legislative Assembly a month before their last crime. – But the sovereigns of the Bouches-du-Rhône do not regard the release of their friends and allies as a pardon: something more than pardon and forgetfulness must be awarded to the murderers of the Glacière. On the 29th of April, 1792, Rebecqui and Bertin, the vanquishers of Arles, enter Avignon[53] along with a cortége, at the head of which are from thirty to forty of the principal murderers whom the Legislative Assembly itself had ordered to be recommitted to prison, Duprat, Mainvielle, Toumal, Mende, then Jourdan in the uniform of a commanding general crowned with laurel and seated on a white horse, and, lastly, the dames Duprat, Mainvielle and Tournal, in dashing style, standing on a sort of triumphal chariot; during the procession the cry is heard, “The Glacière will be full this time! ” — On their approach the public functionaries fly; twelve hundred persons abandon the town. Forthwith each terrorist, under the protection of the Marseilles bayonets, resumes his office, like a man at the head of his household. Raphel, the former judge, along with his clerk, both with warrants of arrest against them, publicly officiate, while the relatives of the poor victims slain on the 16th of October, and the witnesses that appeared on the trial, are threatened in the streets; one of them is killed, and Jourdan, king of the department for an entire year, begins over again on a grand scale, at the head of the National Guard, and afterwards of the police body, the same performance which, on a small scale, he pursued under the ancient régime, when, with a dozen “armed and mounted” brigands, he traversed the highways, forced open lonely houses at night, and, in one château alone, stole 24,000 francs.
V.
The other departments. — Uniform process of the Jacobin conquest. — Preconceived formation of a Jacobin State.
The Jacobin conquest takes place like this: already in during April, 1792, through acts of violence almost equal to those we have just described, it spreads over more than twenty departments and, to a smaller degree, over the other sixty.[54] The composition of the parties is the same everywhere. On one side are the irresponsible of all conditions,
“squanderers who, having consumed their own inheritance, cannot tolerate that of another, men without property to whom disorder is a door open to wealth and public office, the envious, the ungrateful whose obligations to their benefactors the revolution cancels, the hot-headed, all those enthusiastic innovators who preach reason with a dagger in their hand, the poor, the brutal and the wretched of the lower class who, possessed by one leading anarchical idea, one example of immunity, with the law dumb and the sword in the scabbard, are stimulated to dare all things
On the other side are the steady-going, peaceable class, minding their own business, upper and lower middle class in mind and spirit,
“weakened by being used to security and wealth, surprised at any unforeseen disturbance and trying to find their way, isolated from each other by diversity of interests, opposing only tact and caution to persevering audacity in defiance of legitimate means, unable either to make up their mind or to remain inactive, perplexed over sacrifices just at the time when the enemy is going to render it impossible to make any in the future, in a word, bringing weakness and egoism to bear against the liberated passions, great poverty and hardened immorality.”[55]
The issue of the conflict is everywhere the same. In each town or canton an aggressive squad of unscrupulous fanatics and resolute adventurers imposes its rule over a sheep-like majority which, accustomed to the regularity of an old civilization, dares neither disturb order for the sake of putting and end to disorder, or get together a mob to put down another mob. Everywhere the Jacobin principle is the same.
“Your system,” says one of the department Directories to them,[56] “is to act imperturbably on all occasions, even after a constitution is established, and the limitations to power are fixed, as if the empire would always be in a state of insurrection, as if you were granted a dictatorship essential for the city’s salvation, as if you were given such full power in the name of public safety.”
Everywhere are Jacobin tactics the same. At the outset they assume to have a monopoly of patriotism and, through the brutal destruction of other associations, they are the only visible organ of public opinion. Their voice, accordingly, seems to be the voice of the people; their control is established on that of the legal authorities; they have taken the lead through persistent and irresistible misdeeds; their crimes are consecrated by exemption from punishment.
“Among officials and agents, good or bad, constituted or not constituted, that alone governs which is inviolable. Now the club, for a long time, has been too much accustomed to domineering, to annoying, to persecuting, to wreaking vengeance, for any local administration to regard it in any other light than as inviolable.”[57]
They accordingly govern and their indirect influence is promptly transformed into direct authority. — Voting alone, or almost alone, in the primary meetings, which are deserted or under constraint, the Jacobins easily choose the municipal body and the officers of the National Guard.[58] After this, through the mayor, who is their tool or their accomplice, they have the legal right to launch or arrest the entire armed force and they avail themselves of it. — Two obstacles still stand in their way. One the one hand, however conciliatory or timid the Directory of the district or department may be, elected as it is by electors of the second degree, it usually contains a fair proportion of well-informed men, comfortably off, interested in keeping order, and less inclined than the municipality to put up with gross violations of the law. Consequently the Jacobins denounce it to the National Assembly as an unpatriotic and anti-revolutionary center of “bourgeois aristocracy.” Sometimes, as at Brest,[59] they shamefully disobey orders which are perfectly legal and proper, often repeated and strictly formal; afterward, still more shamefully, they demand of the Minister if, “placed in the cruel alternative of giving offense to the hierarchy of powers, or of leaving the commonwealth in danger, they ought to hesitate.” Sometimes, as at Arras, they impose themselves illegally on the Directory in session and browbeat it so insolently as to make it a point of honor with the latter to solicit its own suspension.[60] Sometimes, as a Figeac, they summon an administrator to their bar, keep him standing three-quarters of an hour, seize his papers and oblige him, for fear of something worse, to leave the town.[61] Sometimes, as at Auch, they invade the Directory’s chambers, seize the administrators by the throat, pound them with their fists and clubs, drag the president by the hair, and, after a good deal of trouble, grant him his life.[62] — On the other hand, the gendarmerie and the troops brought for the suppression of riots, are always in the way of those who stir up the rioters. Consequently, they expel, corrupt and, especially purify the gendarmerie together with the troops. At Cahors they drive out a sergeant of the gendarmerie, “alleging that he keeps company with none but aristocrats.”[63] At Toulouse, without mentioning the lieutenant- colonel, whose life they threaten by anonymous letters and oblige to leave the town, they transfer the whole corps to another district under the pretense that “its principles are adverse to the Constitution.”[64] At Auch, and at Rennes, through the insubordination which they provoke among the men, they exhort resignations from their officers. At Perpignan, by means of a riot which they foment, they seize, beat and drag to prison, the commandant and staff whom they accuse “of wanting to bombard the town with five pounds of powder.”[65]- Meanwhile, through the jacquerie, which they let loose from the Dordogne to Aveyron, from Cantal to the Pyrenees and the Var, under the pretence of punishing the relatives of émigrés and the abettors of unsworn priests, they create an army of their own made up of robbers and the destitute who, in anticipation of the exploits of the coming revolutionary army, freely kill, burn, pillage, hold to ransom and prey at large on the defenseless flock of proprietors of every class and degree.[66]
In this operation each club has its neighbors for allies, offering to them or receiving from them offers of men and money. That of Caen tenders its assistance to the Bayeux association for expelling unsworn priests, and to help the patriots of the place “to rid themselves of the tyranny of their administrators.”[67] That of Besançon declares the three administrative bodies of Strasbourg “unworthy of the confidence with which they have been honored,” and openly enters into a league with all the clubs of the Upper and Lower Rhine, to set free a Jacobin arrested as a fomenter of insurrections.[68] Those of the Puy-de-Dôme and neighboring departments depute to and establish at Clermont a central club of direction and propaganda.[69] Those of the Bouches-du-Rhône treat with the commissioners of the departments of Drôme, Gard, and Hérault, to watch the Spanish frontier, and send delegates of their own to see the state of the fortifications of Figuières.[70] — There is no recourse to the criminal tribunals. In forty departments, these are not yet installed, in the forty-three others, they are cowed, silent, or lack money and men to enforce their decisions.[71]
Such is the foundation of the Jacobin State, a confederation of twelve hundred oligarchies, which maneuver their proletariat clients in obedience to the word of command dispatched from Paris. It is a complete, organized, active State, with its central government, its active force, its official journal, its regular correspondence, its declared policy, its established authority, and its representative and local agents; the latter are actual administrators alongside of administrations which are abolished, or athwart administrations which are brought under subjection. — In vain do the latest ministers, good clerks and honest men, try to fulfill their duties; their injunctions and remonstrances are only so much waste paper.[72] They resign in despair, declaring that,
“in this overthrow of all order, . . . in the present weakness of the public forces, and in the degradation of the constituted authorities, . . . it is impossible for them to maintain the life and energy of the vast body, the members of which are paralyzed.” –
When the roots of a tree are laid bare, it is easy to cut it down; now that the Jacobins have severed them, a push on the trunk suffices to bring the tree to the ground.
______________________________________________________________________
NOTES:
[1] De Loménie, “Les Mirabeaus,” I. 11. (Letter of the Marquis de Mirabeau).
[2] ” Archives Nationales,” F7, 7171, No. 7915. Report on the situation in Marseilles, by Miollis, commissioner of the Directory in the department, year V. Nivôse 15. “A good many strangers from France and Italy are attracted there by the lust of gain, a love of pleasure, the want of work, a desire to escape from the effects of ill conduct . . . Individuals of both sexes and of every age, with no ties of country or kindred, with no profession, no opinions, pressed by daily necessities that are multiplied by debauched habit, seeking to indulge these without too much effort, the means for this being formerly found in the many manual operations of commerce, gone astray during the Revolution and, subsequently, scared of the dominant party, accustomed unfortunately at that time to receiving pay for taking part in political strife, and now reduced to living on almost gratuitous distributions of food, to dealing in small wares, to the menial occupations which chance rarely presents — in short, to swindling. Such is what the observer finds in that portion of the population of Marseilles most in sight; eager to profit by whatever occurs, easily won over, active through its necessities, flocking everywhere, and appearing very numerous . . . The patriot Escalon had twenty rations a day; Féri, the journalist, had six; etc. . . Civil officers and district commissioners still belong, for the most part, to that class of men which the Revolution had accustomed to live without work, to making those who shared their principles the beneficiaries of the nation’s favors, and finally, to receiving contributions from gambling halls and brothels. These commissioners give notice to their protégés, even the crooks, when warrants against them are to be enforced.”
[3] Blanc-Gilly, “Réveil d’alarme d’un député de Marseilles” (cited in the Memoirs” of Barbaroux, 40, 41). Blanc-Gilly must have been acquainted with these characters, inasmuch as he made use of them in the August riot, 1789, and for which he was indicted. – Cf. Fabre “Histoire de Marseilles,” II. 422.
[4] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3197. Correspondence of Messrs. Debourge, Gay, and Lafitte, commissioners sent to Provence to restore order in accordance with an act of the National Assembly. Letter of May 10, 1791. Letter of May 10. 1791, and passim.
[5] Mayor Martin, says Juste, was a sort of Pétion, weak and vain. — Barbaroux, clerk of the municipality, is the principal opponent of M. Lieutaud. – The municipal decree referred to is dated Sept. 10, 1790.
[6] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3197. Letters of three commissioners, April 13, 17, 18, and May 10, 1791.
[7] Blanc-Gilly, “Réveil d’Alarme.” Ibid., “Every time that the national guard marched outside the city walls, the horde of homeless brigands never failed to close up in their rear and carry devastation wherever they went.”
[8] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3197. Correspondence of the three commissioners, letter of May 10,1791. “The municipality of Marseilles obeys only the decrees it pleases, and for eighteen months has not paid a cent into the city treasury.-Proclamation of April 13. – Letters of April 13 and 18.
[9] “Archives Nationales,” letter of the municipal officers of Marseilles to the minister, June 11, 1791. — They demand the recall of the three commissioners, one of their arguments being as follows: “In China, every mandarin against whom public opinion is excited is dismissed from his place; he is regarded as an ignorant instructor, who is incapable of gaining the love of children for their parent.”
[10] “Archives Nationales,” letter of the commissioners, May 25, 1791. “It is evident, on recording the proceedings at Aix and Marseilles, that only the accusers and the judges were guilty.” — Petition of the prisoners, Feb. 1. “The municipality, in despair of our innocence and not knowing how to justify its conduct, is trying to buy up witnesses. They say openly that it is better to sacrifice one innocent man than disgrace a whole body. Such ale the speeches of the sieur Rebecqui, leading man, and of Madame Elliou, wife of a municipal officer, in the house of the sieur Rousset.”
[11] Letter of M. Lieutaud to the commissioners, May 11 and 18, 1791. “If I have not fallen under the assassin’s dagger I owe my preservation to your strict orders and to the good behavior of the national guard and the regular troops . . . At the hearing of the case today, the prosecutor on the part of the commune ventured to threaten the court with popular opinion and its avenging fury. . . The people, stirred up against us, and brought there, shouted, ‘Let us seize Lieutaud and take him there by force and if he will not go up the steps, we will cut his head off!’ The hall leading to the courtroom and the stairways were filled with barefooted vagabonds.”– Letter of Cabrol, commander of the national guard, and of the municipal officers to the commissioners, May 21. That picket-guard of fifty men on the great square, is it not rather the cause of a riot than the means of preventing one? A requisition to send four national guards inside the prison, to remain there day and night, is it not insulting citizen soldiers, whose function it is to see that the laws are maintained, and not to do jail duty?”
[12] Letter of M. d’Olivier, lieutenant-colonel of the Ernest regiment, May 28. — Extracts from the papers of the secretary to the municipality, May 28 (Barbaroux is the clerk). – Letter of the commissions, May 29
[13] Letter of the commissioners, June 29.
[14] Letter of M. Laroque-Dourdan, naval commander at Marseilles, Oct. 18, 1791. (in relation to the departure of the Swiss regiment).
[15] The elections are held on the 13th of November, 1791. Martin, the former mayor, showed timidity, and Mouraille was elected in his place.
[16] “Archives Nationales.” F 7 3197. Letter (printed) of the Directory to the Minister of War, Jan. 4, 1792. — Letter of the municipality of Marseilles to the Directory, Jan. 4, and the Directory’s reply. – Barbaroux, “Mémoires,” 19. — Here we see the part played by Barbaroux at Marseilles. Guadet played a similar part at Bordeaux. This early political period is essential for a comprehension of the Girondists.
[17] “Archives Nationales.” F7, 3195. Official report of the municipality of Aix (on the events of Feb. 26). March 1st. — Letter of M. Villardy, president of the directory, dated Avignon, March 10. (He barely escaped assassination at Aix.) — Ibid., F7,3196. Report of the district administrators of Arles, Feb. 28 (according to private letters from Aix and Marseilles). – Barbaroux, “Mémoires” (collection of Berville and Barrière), 106. (Narrative of M. Watteville, major in the Ernest regiment. Ibid., 108 (Report from M. de Barbentane, commanding general). These two documents show the liberalism, want of vigor, and the usual indecision of the superior authorities, especially the military authorities – Mercure de France, March 24, 1792 (letters from Aix).
[18] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Dispatches of the new Directory to the Minister, March 24 and April 4, 1792. “Since the departure of the Directory, our administrative assembly is composed of only six members, notwithstanding our repeated summons to every member of the Council. . . Only three members of the Council consent to act with us; the reason is a lack of pecuniary means.” The new Directory, consequently, passes a resolution to indemnify members of the Council. This, indeed, is contrary to a royal proclamation of Jan. 15; but “this proclamation was wrested from the King, on account of his firm faith. You must be aware that, in a free nation, the influence of a citizen on his government must not be estimated by his fortune; such a principle is false, and destructive of equality of rights. We trust that the King will consent to revoke his proclamation.”
[19] Ib., Letters of Borelly, vice-president of the Directory, to the Minister, April 10, 17, and 30, 1792. — Letter from another administrator, March 10. “They absolutely want us to march against Arles, and to force us to give the order. – Ibid., F7, 3195. Letters from Aix, March 12 and 16, addressed to M. Verdet.
[20] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3195. Letter of the administrators of the department Council to the Minister, March 10, “The Council of the administration is surprised, sir, at the fa1se impressions given you of the city of Marseilles; it should be regarded as the patriotic buckler of the department . . . If the people of Paris did not wait for orders to destroy the Bastille and begin the Revolution, can you wonder that in this fiery climate the impatience of good citizens should make them anticipate legal orders, and that they cannot comply with the slow forms of justice when their personal safety and the safety of the country is in peril?”
[21] “Archives Nationales.” F7, 3197. Dispatches of the three commissioners, passim, and especially those of May 11, June 10 and 19, 1791 (on affairs in Arles). “The property-owners were a long time subject to oppression. A few of the factions maintained a reign of terror over honest folks, who trembled in secret.”
22 Ibid., Dispatch of the commissioners, June 19: “One of the Mint gang causes notes to be publicly distributed (addressed to the unsworn) in these words: ‘If you don’t “piss-off” you will have to deal with the gang from the Mint.'”
[23] “Archives Nationales.” F7, 3198. Narration (printed) of what occurred at Arles, June 9 and 10, 1791. — Dispatch of M. Ripert, royal commissioner, Aug. 5, 1791. — F 7, 3197. Dispatch of the three commissioners, June 19. “Since then, many of the farm laborers have taken the same oath. It is this class of citizens which most eagerly desires a return to order. ” — Other dispatches to the same effect, Oct. 24 and 29, and Dec. 14, 1791. — Cf. “The French Revolution,” I. 301, 302.
[24] “Archives Nationales.” F7, 3196. Dispatch of the members of the Directory of Arles and the municipal officers to the Minister, March 3, 1792 (with a printed diatribe of the Marseilles municipality)
[25] Ibid.,F7, 3198. Dispatches of the procureur- syndic of the department to the Minister, Aix, Sept. 14, 15, 20, and 23, 1791. The electoral assembly declared itself permanent, the constitutional authorities being fettered and unrecognized. — Dispatch of the members of the military bureau and correspondence with the Minister, Arles, Sept.17, 1791.
[26] Ibid., Dispatch of the commandant of the Marseilles detachment to the Directory of the department, Sept. 22, 1791: “I feel that our proceedings are not exactly legal, but I thought it prudent to acquiesce in the general desire of the battalion.”
[27] “Archives Nationales.” Official report of the municipal officers of Arles on the insurrection of the Mint band, Sept. 2, 1791. — Dispatch of Ripert, royal commissioner, Oct. 2 and 8. — Letter of M. d’Antonelle, to the Friends of the Constitution, Sept.22. “I cannot believe in the counter-orders with which we are threatened. Such a decision in the present crisis would be too inhuman and dangerous. Our co-workers, who have had the courage to devote themselves to the new law, would be deprived of their bread and shelter. . . The king’s proclamation has all the appearance of having been hastily prepared. and every sign of having been secured unawares.”
[28] De Dampmartin (an eye-witness), II. 60-70. — ” Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. — Dispatch of the two delegated commissioners to the Minister, Nimes, March 25, 1792. – Letter of M. Wittgenstein to the Directory of the Bouche-du- Rhône, April 4, 1792. — Reply and act passed by the Directory, April 5. — Report of Bertin and Rebecqui to the administrators of the department, April 3. — Moniteur, XII. 379. Report of the Minister of the Interior to the National Assembly, April 4.
[29] Moniteur, XII. 408 (session of May 16). Petition of M. Fossin, deputy from Arles. — “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Petition of the Arlesians to the Minister, June 28. — Despatches of M. Lombard, provisional royal commissioner, Arles, July 6 and 10. “Neither persons nor property have been respected for three months by those who wear the mask of patriotism.”
[30] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Letter of M. Borelly, vice- president of the Directory, to the Minister, Aix, April 30, 1792. “The course pursued by the sieur: Bertin and Rébecqui is the cause of all the disorders committed in these unhappy districts. . . Their sole object is to levy contributions, as they did at Aries, to enrich themselves and render the Comtat-Venaisson desolate.”
[31] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Deposition of one of the keepers of the sieur Coye, a proprietor at Mouriez-les-Baux, April 4. — Petition of Peyre, notary at Maussane, April 7. — Statement by Manson, a resident of Mouriez-les-Baux, March 27. — Petition of Andrieu, March 30. – Letter of the municipality of Maussane, April 4: “They watch for a favorable opportunity to devastate property and especially country villas.”
[32] “Archives Nationales,” Claim of the national guard presented to the district administrators of Tarascon by the national guard of Château-Renard, April 6. — Petition of Juliat d’Eyguières, district administrator of Tarascon, April 2 (in relation to a requisition of 30,000 francs by Camoïn on the commune of Eyguières). — Letter of M. Borelly, April 30. “Bertin and Rébecqui have openly protected the infamous Camoïn, and have set him free. ” – Moniteur, XII. 408. Petition of M. Fossin, deputy from Arles.
[33] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3195. Dispatch of M. Mérard, royal commissioner at the district court of Apt, Apt, March 15, 1792 (with official report of the Apt municipality and debates of the district, March 13). — Letter of M. Guillebert, syndic-attorney of the district March 5.. (He has fled. ) — Dispatches of the district Directory, March 23 and 28. “It must not be supposed for a moment that either the court or the juge-de-paix will take the least notice of this circumstance. One step in this direction would, in a week, bring 10,000 men on our hands.”
[34] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3195. Letter of the district Directory of Apt, March 28. “On the 26th of March 600 armed men, belonging to the communes of Apt, Viens, Rustrel, etc. betook themselves to St.-Martin-de-Castillon and, under the pretense of restoring order, taxed the inhabitants, lodging and feeding themselves at their charge” — The expeditions extend even to the neighboring departments, one of them March 23, going to Sault, near Forcalquier, in the Upper-Alps.
[35] Ib., F7, 3195. On the demand of a number of petitioning soldiers who went to Aries on the 22d of March, 1792, the department administration passes an act (September, 1793) granting them each forty-five francs indemnity. There are 1,916 of them, which makes 86,200 francs “assessed on the goods and property of individuals for the authors, abettors, and those guilty of the disturbances occasioned by the party of Chiffonists in the commune of Arles.” The municipality of Aries designates fifty-one individuals, who pay the 86,200 livres, plus 2,785 francs exchange, and 300 francs for the cost of sojourn and delays. — Petition of the ransomed, Nov.21, 1792.
[36] Ib., F7, 3165. Official report of the Directory on the events which occurred in Aix, April 27, 28, and 29, 1792.
[37] Michelet, “Histoire de la Révolution Française,” III.56 (according to the narratives of aged peasants). — Mercure de France, April 30, 1791 (letter from an inhabitant of the Comtat). — All public dues put together (octrois and interest on the debt) did not go beyond 800,000 francs for 126,684 inhabitants. On the contrary, united with France, it would pay 3,793,000 francs. — André, “Histoire de la Révolution Avignonaise,” I. 61. — The Comtat possessed representative institutions, an armed general assembly, composed of three bishops, the elected representative of the nobility, and thirteen consuls of the leading towns. — Mercure de France, Oct. 15, 1791 (letter from an inhabitant of the Comtat). — There were no bodies of militia in the Comtat; the privileges of nobles were of little account. Nobody had the exclusive right to hunt or fish, while people without property could own guns and hunt anywhere.
[38] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3272. Letter of M. Pelet de la Lozère, prefect of Vaucluse; to the Minister, year VIII. Germinal 30. – Ibid., DXXIV. 3. Letter of M. Mulot, one of the mediating commissioners, to the Minister, Oct. 10, 1791. “What a country you have sent me to! It is the land of duplicity. Italianism has struck its roots deep here, and I fear that they are very hardy.”
[39] The details of these occurrences may be found in André and in Soulier, “Histoire de la Révolution Avignonaise.” The murder of their seven principal opponents, gentlemen, priests and artisans, took place June 11, 1790. — “Archives Nationales,” DXXIV. 3. The starting-point of the riots is the hostility of the Jansenist Camus, deputy to the Constituent Assembly. Several letters, the first from April, 1790, may be found in this file, addressed to him from the leading Jacobins of Avignon, Mainvielle, Raphel, Richard, and the rest, and among others the following (3uly, 1790): “Do not abandon your work, we entreat you. You, sir, were the first to inspire us with a desire to be free and to demand our right to unite with a generous nation, from which we have been severed by fraud.”– As to the political means and enticements, these are always the same. Cf., for instance, this letter of a protégé, in Avignon, of Camus, addressed to him July 13, 1791: “I have just obtained from the commune the use of a room inside the Palace, where I can carry on my tavern business . . My fortune is based on your kindness . . . what a distance between you and myself!”
[40] “Archives Nationales,” DXXIV. 3. Report on the events of Oct.10, 1791. — Ibid., F7, 3197. Letter of the three commissioners to the municipality of Avignon, April 21, and to the Minister, May 14, 1791. “The deputies of Orange certify that there were at least 500 French deserters in the Avignon army. ” — In the same reports, May 21 and June 8: “It is not to be admitted that enrolled brigands should establish in a small territory, surrounded by France on all sides, the most dangerous school of brigandage that ever disgraced or preyed upon this human species. ” — Letter of M. Villardy, president of the Directory of the Bouches-du-Rhône May 21. “More than two millions of the national property is exposed to pillage and total destruction by the new Mandrins who devastate this unfortunate country. ” — Letter of Méglé, recruiting sergeant of the La Mark regiment, arrested along with two of his comrades. “The corps of Mandrins which arrested us set us at liberty. . . We were arrested because we refused to join them, and on our refusal we were daily threatened with the gallows.”
[41] Mortimer-Ternaux, I. 379 (note on Jourdan, by Faure, deputy). — Barbaroux, “Mémoires”(Ed. Dauban), 392. “After the death of Patrix a general had to be elected. Nobody wanted the place in an army that had just shown so great a lack of discipline. Jourdan arose and declared that as far as he was concerned, he was ready to accept the position. No reply was made. He nominated himself, and asked the soldiers if they wanted him for general. A drunkard is likely to please other drunkards; they applauded him, and he was thus proclaimed.”
[42] After a famous brigand in Dauphiny, named Mandrin.-TR. [Mandrin, (Louis) (Saint Étienne-de- Saint-Geoirs, Isère, 1724 – Valence, 1755). French smuggler who, after 1750, was active over an enormous territory with the support of the population; hunted down by the army, caught, condemned to death to be broken alive on the wheel. See also Taine’s explanation in Ancient Régime page 356 app. (SR).]
[43] Cf. André, passim, and Soulier, passim. – Mercure de France, June 4, 1791. — “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3197. Letter of Madame de Gabrielli, March 14, 1791. (Her house is pillaged Jan. 10, and she and her maid escape by the roof.) — Report of the municipal officers of Tarascon, May 22. “The troop which has entered the district pillages everything it can lay its hands on.” — Letter of the syndic-attorney of Orange, May 22. “Last Wednesday, a little girl ten years of age, on her way from Châteauneuf to Courtheson, was violated by one on of them, and the poor child is almost dead. ” — Dispatch of the three commissioners to the Minister, May 21. “It is now fully proved by men who are perfectly reliable that the pretended patriots, said to have acted so gloriously at Sarrians, are cannibals equally execrated both at Avignon and Carpentras.”
[44] “Archives Nationales,” letter of the Directory of the Bouches-du- Rhône, May 21, 1791. — Deliberations of the Avignon municipality, associated with the notables and the military committee, May 15: “The enormous expense attending the pay and food for the detachments . . .forced contributions. . . What is most revolting is that those who are charged with the duty arbitrarily tax the inhabitants, according as they arc deemed bad or good patriots. . . The municipality, the military committee, and the club of the Friends of the Constitution dared to make a protest; the proscription against them is their reward for their attachment to the French constitution.
[45] Letter of M. Boulet, formerly physician in the French military hospitals and member of the electoral assembly, May 21.
[46] “Archives Nationales,” DXXIv. 16-23, No.3. Narrative of what took place yesterday, August 21, in the town of Avignon. — Letters by the mayor, Richard, and two others, Aug. 21. — Letter to the president of the National Assembly, Aug.22 (with five signatures, in the name of 200 families that had taken refuge in the Ile de la Bartelasse).
[47] “Archives Nationales,” DXXIV. 3. — Letter of M. Laverne, for M. Canonge, keeper of the Mont-de-Piété. (The electoral assembly of Vaucluse and the juge-de-paix had forbidden him to give this box into any other hands.) — Letters of M. Mulot, mediating commissioner, Gentilly les Sorgues, Oct. 14, 15, 16, 1791. — Letter of M. Laverne, mayor, and the municipal officers, Avignon, Jan. 6, 1792. — Statement of events occurring at Avignon, Oct. 16, 17, and 18 (without a signature, but written at once on the spot). — Official rapport of the provisional administrators of Avignon, Oct. 16. — Certified copy of the notice found posted in Avignon in different places this day, Oct. 16 (probably written by one of the women of the lower class and showing what the popular feeling was). — A letter written to M. Mulot, Oct. 13′ already contains this phrase: “Finally, even if they delay stopping their robberies and pillage, misery and the miserable will still remain ” — Testimony of Joseph Sauton, a chasseur in the paid guard of Avignon, Oct. 17 (an eye-witness of what passed at the Cordeliers).
[48] André. II.62. Deposition of la Ratapiole. — Death of the girl Ayme and of Mesdames Niel et Crouzet. — De Dampmartin, II. 2.
[49] “Archives Nationales,” DXXIV, 3. Report on the events of Oct. 16: “Two sworn priests were killed, which proves that a counter- revolution had nothing to do with it, . . Six of the municipal officers were assassinated. They had been elected according to the terms of the decree; they were the fruit of the popular will at the outbreak of the Revolution; they were accordingly patriots.” — Buchez et Roux, XII. 420.– Official report of the Commune of Avignon, on the events of Oct. 16.
[50] “Archives Nationales,” DXXIV. 3. Dispatch of the civil Commissioners deputized by France (Messrs. Beauregard, Lecesne, and Champion) to the Minister Jan. 8, 1792. (A long and admirable letter, in which the difference between the two parties is exhibited, supported by facts, in refutation of the calumnies of Duprat. The oppressed party is composed not of royalists, but of Constitutionalists.)
[51] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3177. Dispatches of the three commissioners, April 27, May 4, 18, and 21.
[52] Three hundred and thirty-five witnesses testified during the trial. — De Dampmartin, I.266. Entry of the French army into Avignon, Nov. 16, 1791: “All who were rich, except a very small number, had taken flight or perished. The best houses were all empty or closed.” – – Elections for a new municipality were held Nov.26, 1791. Out of 2,287 active citizens Mayor Levieux de Laverne obtains 2,227 votes, while the municipal officer lowest on the list 1,800. All are Constitutionalists and conservatives.
[53] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3196. Official report of Augier and Fabre, administrators of the Bouches-du-Rhône, Avignon, May 11, 1792. — Moniteur, XII. 313. Report of the Minister of Justice, May 5. — XII. 324. Petition of forty inhabitants of Avignon, May 7. — XII 334. Official report of Pinet, commissioner of the Drôme, sent to Avignon. — XII. 354 Report of M. Chassaignac and other papers, May 10.– XI. 741 Letter of the civil commissioners, also of the Avignon municipality, March 23.
[54] “The French Revolution,” vol. I . pp. 344-352, on the sixth jacquerie, everywhere managed by the Jacobins. Two or three traits show its spirit and course of action. (“Archives Nationales,” F7, 3202. Letter of the Directory of the district of Aurillac, March 27, 1792, with official reports.) “On the 20th of March, about forty brigands, calling themselves patriots and friends of the constitution, force honest and worthy but very poor citizens in nine or ten of the houses of Capelle-Viscamp to give them money, generally five francs each person, and sometimes ten, twenty, and forty francs.” Others tear down or pillage the châteaux of Rouesque, Rode, Marcolès, and Vitrac and drag the municipal officers along with them. “We, the mayor and municipal officers of the parish of Vitrac, held a meeting yesterday, March 22, following the example of our neighboring parishes on the occasion of the demolition of the châteaux. We marched at the head of our national guard and that of Salvetat to the said châteaux. We began by hoisting the national flag and to demolish . . . The national guard of Boisset, eating and drinking without stint, entered the château and behaved in the most brutal manner; for whatever they found in their way, whether clocks, mirrors, doors, closets, and finally documents, all were made way with. They even sent off forty of the men to a patriotic village in the vicinity. They forced the inmates of every house to give them money, and those who refused were threatened with death.” Besides this the national guard of Boisset carried off the furniture of the château. — There is something burlesque in the conflicts of the municipalities with the Jacobin expeditions (letter of the municipal officers of Cottines to the Directory of St. Louis, March 26). “We are very glad to inform you that there is a crowd in our parish, amongst which are many belonging to neighboring parishes; and that they have visited the house of sieur Tossy and a sum of money of which we do not know the amount is demanded, and that they will not leave without that sum so that they cam have something to live on, these people being assembled solely to maintain the constitution and give greater éclat to the law.”
[55] Mercure de France, numbers for Jan. 1 and 14, 1792 (articles by Mallet du Pan). – ” Archives Nationales,” F7, 3185, 3186. Letter of the president of the district of Laon (Aisne) to the Minister, Feb. 8, 1792: “With respect to the nobles and priests, any mention of them as trying to sow discord among us indicates a desire to spread fear. All they ask is tranquility and the regular payment of their pensions.” — De Dampmartin, II. 63 (on the evacuation of Arles, April, 1792). On the illegal approach of the Marseilles army, M. de Dampmartin, military commander, orders the Arlesians to rise in a body. Nobody comes forward. Wives hide away their husbands’ guns in the night. Only one hundred volunteers are found to act with the regular troops.
[56] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3224. Speech of M. Saint-Amans, vice-president of the Directory of Lot-et-Garonne, to the mayor of Tonneins, April 20 and the letter of the syndic-attorney-general to M. Roland, minister, April 22: “According to the principles of the mayor of Tonneins, all resistance to him is aristocratic, his doctrine being that all property-owners are aristocrats. You can readily perceive, sir, that he is not one of them.” — Dubois, formerly a Benedictine and now a Protestant minister. — Act of the Directory against the municipality of Tonneins, April 13. The latter appeals to the Legislative Assembly. The mayor and one of the municipal counselors appear in its name (May 19) at the bar of the Assembly.
[57] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3198. Letter of M. Debourges, one of the three commissioners sent by the National Assembly and the king, Nov. 2, 1791 (apropos of the Marseilles club). “This club has quite recently obtained from the Directory of the department, on the most contemptible allegation, an order requiring of M. de Coincy, lieutenant-general at Toulon, to send the admirable Ernest regiment out of Marseilles, and M. de Coincy has yielded.”
[58] For instance (Guillon de Montléon, “Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Lyon,” I. 109), the general in command of the national guard of this large town in 1792 is Juillard, a poor silk-weaver of the faubourg of the Grande Côte, a former soldier.
[59] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3215, affair of Plabennec (very curious, showing the tyrannical spirit of the Jacobins and the good disposition at bottom of the Catholic peasantry) — The commune of Brest dispatches against that of Plabennec 400 men, with two cannon and commissioners chosen by the club. — Many documents, among them: Petition of 150 active citizens of Brest, May 16, 1791. Deliberations of the council-general and commune of Brest, May 17. Letter of the Directory of the district, May 17 (very eloquent). Deliberations of the municipality of Plabennec, May 20. Letter of the municipality of Brest to the minister, May 21. Deliberations of the department Directory, June 13.
[60] Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 376 (session of the Directory of the Pas- du-Calais, July 4, 1792). The petition, signed by 127 inhabitants of Arras, is presented to the Directory by Robespierre the younger and Geoffroy. The administrators are treated as impostors, conspirators, etc., while the president, listening to these refinements, says to his colleagues: “Gentlemen, let us sit down; we can attend to insults sitting as well as standing.”
[61] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3223. Letter of M. Valéry, syndic- attorney of the department, April 4, 1792.
[62] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3220. Extract from the deliberations of the department Directory and letter to the king, Jan.28, 1792. — Letter of M. Lafiteau, president of the Directory, Jan. 30. (The mob is composed of from five to six hundred persons. The president is wounded on the forehead by a sword-cut and obliged to leave the town.) Feb. 20, following this, a deputy of the department denounces the Directory as unpatriotic.
[63] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3223. Letter of M. de Riolle, colonel of the gendarmerie, Jan. 19, 1792. — “One hundred members of the club Friends of Liberty” come and request the brigadier’s discharge. On the following day, after a meeting of the same club, “four hundred persons move to the barracks to send off or exterminate the brigadier.”
[64] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3219. Letter of M. Sainfal, Toulouse, March 4, 1792. — Letter of the department Directory, March 14.
[65] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3229. Letter of M. de Narbonne, minister, to his colleague M. Cahier, Feb. 3, 1792. — “The municipality of Auch has persuaded the under-officers and soldiers of the 1st battalion that their chiefs were making preparation to withdraw.” — The same with the municipality and club of the Navarreins. “All the officers except three have been obliged to leave and send in their resignations.” – F7, 3225. The same to the same, March 8. — The municipality of Rennes orders the arrest of Col. de Savignac, and four other officers. Mercure de France, Feb. 18, 1792. De Dampmartin, I. 230; II. 70 (affairs of Landau, Lauterbourg, and Avignon).
[66] “‘The French Revolution,” I. 344 and following pages. Many other facts could be added to those cited in this volume. – “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3219. Letter of M. Neil, administrator of Haute- Garonne, Feb. 27, 1792. “The constitutional priests and the club of the canton of Montestruc suggested to the inhabitants that all the abettors of unsworn priests and of aristocrats should be put to ransom and laid under contribution.” – Cf. 7, 3193, (Aveyron), F7, 3271 (Tarn), etc.
[67] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3200. Letter of the syndic-attorney of Bayeux, May 14, 1792, and letter of the Bayeux Directory, May 21. “The dubs should be schools of patriotism; they have become the terror of it. If this scandalous struggle against the law and legitimate authority does not soon cease liberty, a constitution, and safeguards for the French people will no longer exist”
[68] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3253. Letter, of the Directory of the Bas-Rhin, April 26, 1792, and of Dietrich, Mayor of Strasbourg, May 8. (The Strasbourg club had publicly invited the citizens to take up arms, “to vigorously pursue priests and administrators.” ) — Letter of the Besançon club to M. Dietrich, May 3. “If the constitution depended on the patriotism or the perfidy of a few magistrates in one department, like that of the Bas-Rhin, for instance, we might pay you some attention, and all the freemen of the empire would then stoop to crush you. ” — Therefore the Jacobin clubs of the Upper and Lower Rhine send three deputies to the Paris club.
[69] Moniteur, XII. 558, May 19, 1792. “Letter addressed through patriotic journalists to all clubs of the Friends of the Constitution by the patriotic central society, formed at Clermont-Ferrand.” (there is the same centralization between Lyons and Bordeaux.)
[70] ” Archives Nationales,” F7, 3198. Report of Commissioners Bertin and Rebecqui, April 3, 1792. — Cf. Dumouriez, book II. ch. V. The club at Nantes wants to send commissioners to inspect the foundries of the Ile d’Indrette.
[71] Moniteur, X. 420. Report of M. Cahier, Minister of the Interior, Feb. 18, 1792. “In all the departments freedom of worship has been more or less violated. . . Those who hold power are cited before the tribunals of the people as their enemies.” — On the radical and increasing powerlessness of the King and his ministers, Cf. Moniteur, XI. 11 (Dec. 31, 1791). — Letter of the Minister of Finances. — XII. 200 (April 23, 1792), report of the Minister of the Interior. — XIII. 53 (July 4, 1792), letter of the Minister of Justice.
[72] Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 369. Letter of the Directory of the Basses- Pyrénées, June 25, 1792. — “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3200. Letter of the Directory of Calvados to the Minister of the Interior, Aug. 3. “We are not agents of the king or his ministers.” – Moniteur, XIII. 103. Declaration of M. de Joly, minister, in the name of his colleagues (session of July 10, 1792).
CHAPTER V. PARIS.
I.
Pressure of the Assembly on the King. — His veto rendered void or eluded. — His ministers insulted and driven away. — The usurpations of his Girondist ministry. — He removes them. – Riots being prepared.
PREVIOUS to this the tree was so shaken as to be already tottering at its base. — Reduced as the King’s prerogative is, the Jacobins still continue to contest it, depriving him of even its shadow. At the opening session they refuse to him the titles of Sire and Majesty; to them he is not, in the sense of the constitution, a hereditary representative of the French people, but “a high functionary,” that is to say, a mere employee, fortunate enough to sit in an equally good chair alongside of the president of the Assembly, whom they style “president of the nation.”[1] The Assembly, in their eyes, is sole sovereign, “while the other powers,” says Condorcet, “can act legitimately only when specially authorized by a positive law;[2] the Assembly may do anything that is not formally prohibited to it by the law,” ‘in other words, interpret the constitution, then change it, take it to pieces, and do away with it. Consequently, in defiance of the constitution, it takes upon itself the initiation of war, and, on rare occasions, on the King using his veto, it sets this aside, or allows it to be set aside.[3] In vain he rejects, as he has a legal right to do, the decrees which sanction the persecution of unsworn ecclesiastics, which confiscate the property of the émigrés, and which establish a camp around Paris. At the suggestion of the Jacobin deputies,[4] the unsworn ecclesiastics are interned, expelled, or imprisoned by the municipalities and Directories; the estates and mansions of the émigrés and of their relatives are abandoned without resistance to the jacqueries; the camp around Paris is replaced by the summoning of the Federates to Paris. In short, the monarch’s sanction is eluded or dispensed with. — As to his ministers, “they are merely clerks of the Legislative Body decked with a royal leash.”[5] In full session they are maltreated, reviled, grossly insulted, not merely as lackeys of bad character, but as known criminals. They are interrogated at the bar of the house, forbidden to leave Paris before their accounts are examined; their papers are overhauled; their most guarded expressions and most meritorious acts are held to be criminal; denunciations against them are provoked; their subordinates are incited to rebel against them;[6] committees to watch them and calumniate them are appointed; the perspective of a scaffold is placed before them in every relation, acts or threats of accusation being passed against them, as well as against their agents, on the shallowest pretexts, accompanied with such miserable quibbling,[7] and such an evident falsification of facts and texts that the Assembly, forced by the evidence, twice reverses its hasty decision, and declares those innocent whom it had condemned the evening before.[8] Nothing is of any avail, neither their strict fulfillment of the law, their submission to the committees of the Assembly, nor their humble attitude before the Assembly itself; “they are careful now to treat it politely and avoid the galleys.”[9] — But this does not suffice. They must become Jacobins; otherwise the high court of Orleans will be for them as for M. Delessart, the ante-room to the prison and the guillotine. “Terror and dismay,” says Vergniaud, pointing with his finger to the Tuileries, “have often issued in the name of despotism in ancient times from that famous palace; let them to-day go back to it in the name of law.”[10]
Even with a Jacobin Minister, terror and dismay are permanent. Roland, Clavières, and Servan not only do not shield the King, but they give him up, and, under their patronage and with their connivance, he is more victimized, more harassed, and more vilified than ever before. Their partisans in the Assembly take turns in slandering him, while Isnard proposes against him a most insolent address.[11] Shouts of death are uttered in front of his palace. An abbé or soldier is unmercifully beaten and dragged into the Tuileries basin. One of the gunners of the Guard reviles the queen like a fish woman, and exclaims to her, “How glad I should be to clap your head on the end of my bayonet!”[12] They supposed that the King is brought to heel under this double pressure of the Legislative Body and the street; they rely on his accustomed docility, or at least, on his proven lethargy; they think that they have converted him into what Condorcet once demanded, a signature machine.[13] Consequently, without notifying him, just as if the throne were vacant, Servan, on his own authority, proposes to the Assembly the camp outside Paris.[14] Roland, for his part, reads to him at a full meeting of the council an arrogant, pedagogical remonstrance, scrutinizing his sentiments, informing him of his duties, calling upon him to accept the new “religion,” to sanction the decree against unsworn ecclesiastics, that is to say, to condemn to beggary, imprisonment, and transportation[15] 70,000 priests and nuns guilty of orthodoxy, and authorize the camp around Paris, which means, to put his throne, his person, and his family at the mercy of 20,000 madmen, chosen by the clubs and other assemblages expressly to do him harm;[16] in short, to discard at once his conscience and his common sense. — Strange enough, the royal will this time remains staunch; not only does the King refuse, but he dismisses his ministers. So much the worse for him, for sign he must, cost what it will; if he insists on remaining athwart their path, they will march over him. — Not because he is dangerous, and thinks of abandoning his legal immobility. Up to the 10th of August, through a dread of action, and not to kindle a civil war, he rejects all plans leading to an open rupture. Up to the very last day he resigns himself even when his personal safety and that of his family is at stake, to constitutional law and public common sense. Before dismissing Roland and Servan, he desires to furnish some striking proof of his pacific intentions by sanctioning the dissolution of his guard and disarming himself not only for attack but for defense; henceforth he sits at home and awaits the insurrection with which he is daily menaced; he resigns himself to everything, except drawing his sword; his attitude is that of a Christian in the amphitheatre.[17] — The proposition of a camp outside Paris, however, draws out a protest from 8,000 Paris National Guards. Lafayette denounces to the Assembly the usurpations of the Jacobins; the faction sees that its reign is threatened by this reawakening and union of the friends of order. A blow must be struck. This has been in preparation for a month past, and to renew the days of October 5th and 6th, the materials are not lacking.
II.
The floating and poor population of Paris. — Disposition of the workers.– Effect of poverty and want of work. — Effect of Jacobin preaching. — The revolutionary army. – Quality of its recruits — Its first review. — Its actual effective force.
Paris always has its interloping, floating population. A hundred thousand of the needy, one-third of these from the departments, “beggars by race,” those whom Rétif de la Bretonne had already seen pass his door, Rue de Bièvre, on the 13th of July, 1789, on their way to join their fellows on the suburb of St. Antoine,[18] along with them “those frightful raftsmen,” pilots and dock-hands, born and brought up in the forests of the Nièvre and the Yonne, veritable savages accustomed to wielding the pick and the ax, behaving like cannibals when the opportunity offers,[19] and who will be found foremost in the ranks when the September days come. Alongside these stride their female companions “barge-women who, embittered by toil, live for the moment only,” and who, three months earlier, pillaged the grocer-shops.[20] All this “is a frightful crowd which, every time it stirs, seems to declare that the last day of the rich and well-to-do has come; tomorrow it is our turn, to-morrow we shall sleep on eiderdown.” — Still more alarming is the attitude of the steady workmen, especially in the suburbs. And first of all, if bread is not as expensive as on the 5th of October, the misery is worse. The production of articles of luxury has been at a standstill for three years, and the unemployed artisan has consumed his small savings. Since the ruin of St. Domingo and the pillaging of grocers’ shops colonial products are dear; the carpenter, the mason, the locksmith, the market-porter, no longer has his early cup of coffee,[21] while they grumble every morning at the thought of their patriotism being rewarded by an increase of deprivation.
But more than all this they are now Jacobins, and after nearly three years of preaching, the dogma of popular sovereignty has taken deep root in their empty brains. “In these groups,” writes a police commissioner, “the Constitution is held to be useless and the people alone are the law. The citizens of Paris on the public square think themselves the people, populus, what we call the universality of citizens.”[22] — It is of no use to tell them that, alongside of Paris, there is a France. Danton has shown them that the capital ” is composed of citizens belonging one way or another to the eighty-three departments; that is has a better chance than any other place to appreciate ministerial conduct; that it is the first sentinel of the nation,” which makes them confident of being right.[23] — It is of no use to tell them that there are better-informed and more competent authorities than themselves. Robespierre assures them that “in the matter of genius and public-spiritedness the people are infallible, whilst every one else is subject to mistakes,”[24] and here they are sure of their capacity. — In their own eyes they are the legitimate, competent authorities for all France, and, during three years, the sole theme their courtiers of the press, tribune, and club, vie with each other in repeating to them, is the expression of the Duc de Villeroy to Louis XIV. when a child: “Look my master, behold this great kingdom! It is all for you, it belongs to you, you are its master!” — Undoubtedly, to swallow and digest such gross irony people must be half-fools or half-brutes; but it is exactly their capacity for self-deception which makes them different from the sensible or passive crowd and casts them into a band whose ascendancy is irresistible. Convinced that a street mob is entitled to absolute rule and that the nation expresses its sovereignty through its gatherings, they alone assemble the street mobs, they alone, by virtue of their conceit and lack of judgment, believe themselves kings .
Such is the new power which, in the early months of the year 1792, starts up alongside of the legal powers. It is not foreseen by the Constitution; nevertheless it exists and declares itself; it is visible and its recruits can be counted.[25] On the 29th of April, with the Assembly consenting, and contrary to the law, three battalions from the suburb of St. Antoine, about 1500 men,[26] march in three columns into the hall, one of which is composed of fusiliers and the other two of pikemen, “their pikes being from eight to ten feet long,” of formidable aspect and of all sorts, “pikes with laurel leaves, pikes with clover leaves, pikes à carlet, pikes with turn- spits, pikes with hearts, pikes with serpents tongues, pikes with forks, pikes with daggers, pikes with three prongs, pikes with battle- axes, pikes with claws, pikes with sickles, lance-pikes covered with iron prongs.” On the other side of the Seine three battalions from the suburb of St. Marcel are composed and armed in the same fashion. This constitutes a kernel of 3,000 more in other quarters of Paris. Add to these in each of the sixty battalions of the National guard the gunners, almost all of them blacksmiths, locksmiths and horse-shoers, also the majority of the gendarmes, old soldiers discharged for insubordination and naturally inclined to rioting, in all an army of about 9,000 men, not counting the usual accompaniment of vagabonds and mere bandits; ignorant and eager, but men who do their work, well armed, formed into companies, ready to march and ready to strike. Alongside of the talking authorities we have the veritable force that acts, for it is the only one which does act. As formerly the praetorian guard of the Caesars in Rome, or the Turkish guards of the Caliphs of Baghdad, it is henceforth master of the capital, and through the capital, of the Nation.
III.
Its leaders. – Their committee. -. Methods for arousing the crowd.
As the troops are so are their leaders. Bulls must have drovers to conduct them, one degree superior to the brute but only one degree, dressed, talking and acting in accordance with his occupation, without dislikes or scruples, naturally or willfully hardened, fertile in jockeying and in the expedients of the slaughterhouse, themselves belonging to the people or pretending to belong to them. Santerre is a brewer of the Faubourg St. Antoine, commander of the battalion of ” Enfants Trouvés,” tall, stout and ostentatious, with stentorian lungs, shaking the hand of everybody he meets in the street, and when at home treating everybody to a drink paid for by the Duke of Orleans. Legendre is a choleric butcher, who even in the Convention maintains his butchering traits. There are three or four foreign adventurers, experienced in all kinds of deadly operations, using the saber or the bayonet without warning people to get out of the way. Rotonde, the first one, is an Italian, a teacher of English and professional rioter, who, convicted of murder and robbery, is to end his days in Piedmont on the gallows. The second, Lazowski, is a Pole, a former dandy, a conceited fop, who, with Slave facility, becomes the barest of naked sans-culottes; former enjoying a sinecure, then suddenly turned out in the street, and shouting in the clubs against his protectors who he sees put down; he is elected captain of the gunners of the battalion St. Marcel, and is to be one of the September slaughterers. His drawing-room temperament, however, is not rigorous enough for the part he plays in the streets, and at the end of a year he is to die, consumed by a fever and by brandy. The third is another chief slaughterer at the September massacres. Fournier, known as the American, a former planter, who has brought with him from St. Domingo a contempt for human life; “with his livid and sinister countenance, his mustache, his triple belt of pistols, his coarse language, his oaths, he looks like a pirate.” By their side we encounter a little hump-backed lawyer named Cuirette-Verrières, an unceasing speaker, who, on the 6th of October, 1789, paraded the city on a large white horse and afterwards pleaded for Marat, which two qualifications with his Punch figure, fully establish him in the popular imagination; the rugged guys, moreover, who hold nocturnal meetings at Santerre’s needed a writer and he probably met their requirements. – This secret society can count on other faithfuls. “Brière, wine-dealer, Nicolas, a sapper in the ‘Enfants Trouvés’ battalion, Gonor, claiming to be one of the victors of the Bastille,”[27] Rossignol, an old soldier and afterwards a journeyman-jeweler, who, after presiding at the massacres of La Force, is to become an improvised general and display his incapacity, debauchery, and thievery throughout La Vendée. “There are yet more of them,” Huguenin undoubtedly, a ruined ex-lawyer, afterwards carabineer, then a deserter, next a barrier-clerk, now serving as spokesman for the Faubourg St. Honoré and finally president of the September commune; there was also, doubtless, St. Huruge alias Père Adam, the great barker of the Palais-Royal, a marquis fallen into the gutter, drinking with and dressing like a common porter, always flourishing an enormous club and followed by the riffraff.[28] — These are all the leaders. The Jacobins of the municipality and of the Assembly confine their support of the enterprise to conniving at it and to giving it their encouragement.[29] It is better for the insurrection to seem spontaneous. Through caution or shyness the Girondins, Pétion, Manual and Danton himself, keep in the background – – there is not reason for their coming forward. — The rest, affiliated with the people and lost in the crowd, are better qualified to fabricate the story which their flock will like. This tale, adapted to the crowd’s intellectual limits, form and activity, is both simple and somber, such as children like, or rather a melodrama taken from an alien stage in which the good appear on one side, and the wicked on the other with an ogre or tyrant in the center, some infamous traitor who is sure to be unmasked at the end of the piece and punished according to his deserts, the whole grandiloquent terms and, as a finale, winding up with a grand chorus. In the raw brain of an over- excited workman politics find their way only in the shape of rough- hewn, highly-colored imagery, such as is furnished by the Marseillaise, the Carmagnole, and the Ça ira. The requisite motto is adapted to his use; through this misshapen magnifying glass the most gracious figure appears under a diabolical aspect. Louis XVI. is represented here “as a monster using his power and treasure to oppose the regeneration of the French. A new Charles IX., he desires to bring on France death and desolation. Be gone, cruel man, your crimes must end! Damiens was less guilty than thou art! He was punished with the most horrible torture for having tried to rid France of a monster, while you, attempting twenty-five million times more, are allowed full immunity![30] Let us trample under our feet this simulacra of royalty ! Tremble tyrants, Scvolas are still amongst you!”
All this is pronounced, declaimed or rather shouted, publicly, in full daylight, under the King’s windows, by stump-speakers mounted on chairs, while similar provocations daily flow from the committee installed in Santerre’s establishment, now in the shape of displays posted in the faubourgs, now in that of petitions circulated in the clubs and sections, now through motions which are gotten up “among the groups in the Tuileries, in the Palais-Royal, in the Place de Grève and especially on the Place de la Bastille.” After the 2nd of June the leaders founded a new club in the church of the “Enfants Trouvés” that they might have their special laboratory and thus do their work on the spot.[31] Like Plato’s demagogues, they understand their business. They have discovered the cries which make the popular animal take note, what offense offends him, what charm attracts him, and on what road he should be made to follow. Once drawn in and under way, he will march blindly on, borne along by his own involuntary inspiration and crushing with his mass all that he encounters on his path.
IV.
The 20th of June. — The programme. — The muster. — The procession before the Assembly. — Irruption into the Château. — The King in the presence of the people.
The bait has been carefully chosen and is well presented. It takes the form of a celebration of the anniversary of the oath of the Tennis- court. A tree of Liberty will be planted on the terrace of the Feuillants and “petitions relating to circumstances” will be presented in the Assembly and then to the King. As a precaution, and to impose on the ill-disposed, the petitioners provide themselves with arms and line the approaches.[32] — A popular procession is an attractive thing, and there are so many workers who do not know what to do with their empty day! And, again, it is so pleasant to appear in a patriotic opera while many, and especially women and children, want very much to see Monsieur and Madame Veto. The people from the surrounding suburbs are invited,[33] the homeless prowlers and beggars will certainly join the party, while the numerous body of Parisian loafers, the loungers that join every spectacle can be relied on, and the curious who, even in our time, gather by hundreds along the quays, following a dog that has chanced to tumble into the river. All this forms a body which, without thinking, will follow its head.
At five o’clock in the morning on the 20th of June groups are already formed in the faubourgs St. Antoine and St. Marcel, consisting of National Guards, pikemen, gunners with their cannon, persons armed with sabers or clubs, and women and children. — A notice, indeed, just posted on the walls, prohibits any assemblage, and the municipal officers appear in their scarves and command or entreat the crowd not to break the law.[34] But, in a working-class brain, ideas are as tenacious as they are short-lived. People count on a civic procession and get up early in the morning to attend to it; the cannon have been hitched up, the maypole tree is put on wheels and all is ready for the ceremony, everybody takes a holiday and none are disposed to return home. Besides, they have only good intentions. They know the law as well as the city officials; they are “armed solely to have it observed and respected.” Finally, other armed petitioners have already filed along before the National Assembly, and, as one is as good as another, “the law being equal for all,” others must be admitted as well. In any event they, too, will ask permission of the National Assembly and they go expressly. This is the last and the best argument of all, and to prove to the city officials that they have no desire to engage in a riot, they request them to join the procession and march along with them.
Meanwhile, time passes. In a crowd irritated by delay, the most impatient, the rudest, those most inclined to commit violence, always lead the rest. — At the head-quarters of the Val-de-Grâce[35] the pikemen seize the cannon and drag them along; the National Guards let things take their course; Saint-Prix and Leclerc, the officers in command, threatened with death, have nothing to do but to yield with a protest. — There is the same state of things in the Montreuil section; the resistance of four out of six of the battalion officers merely served to give full power to the instigator of the insurrection, and henceforth Santerre becomes the sole leader of the assembled crowd. About half-past eleven he leaves his brewery, and, followed by cannon, the flag, and the truck which bears the poplar tree, he places himself at the head of the procession “consisting of about fifteen hundred persons including the bystanders.”[36] Like a snowball, however, the troop grows as it marches along until, on reaching the National Assembly, Santerre has behind him from seven to eight thousand persons.[37] Guadet and Vergniaud move that the petitioners be introduced; their spokesman, Huguenin, in a bombastic and threatening address, denounces the ministry, the King, the accused at Orleans, the deputies of the “Right,” demands “blood,” and informs the Assembly that the people “resolute” is ready to take the law in their own hands.[38] Then, with drums beating and bands playing, the crowd defiles for more than an hour through the chamber under the eyes of Santerre and Saint-Huruge: here and there a few files of the National Guard pass mingled with the throng and lost in “the moving forest of pikes”; all the rest is pure rabble, “hideous faces,”[39] says a deputy, on which poverty and loose living have left their marks, ragamuffins, men “without coats,” in their shirt-sleeves, armed in all sorts of ways, with chisels and shoe-knives fastened on sticks, one with a saw on a pole ten feet long, women and children, some of them brandishing a saber.[40] In the middle of this procession, an old pair of breeches [culottes] borne on a pike with this motto: Vivent les Sans-Culottes! and, on a pitch-fork, the heart of a calf with this inscription: Cur d’aristocrate, both significant emblems of the grim humor the imaginations of rag-dealers or butchers might come up with for a political carnival. — This, indeed, it is, they have been drinking and many are drunk.[41] A parade is not enough, they want also to amuse themselves: traversing the hall they sing ça ira and dance in the intervals. They at the same time show their civism by shouting Vive les patriotes! A bas le Veto! They fraternise, as they pass along, with the good deputies of the “Left”; they jeer those of the “Right” and shake their fists at them; one of these, known by his tall stature, is told that his business will be settled for him the first opportunity.[42] Thus do they flaunt their collaborators to the Assembly, everyone prepared and willing to act, even against the Assembly itself. — And yet, with the exception of an iron-railing pushed in by the crowd and an irruption on to the terrace of the “Feuillants,” no act of violence was committed. The Paris population, except when in a rage, is rather voluble and curious than ferocious; besides, thus far, no one had offered any resistance. The crowd is now sated with shouting and parading; many of them yawn with boredom and weariness;[43] at four o’clock they have stood on their legs for ten or twelve hours. The human stream issuing from the Assembly and emptying itself into the Carrousel remains stagnant there and seems ready to return to its usual channels. — This is not what the leaders had intended. Santerre, on arriving with Saint-Huruge, cries out to his men, “Why didn’t you enter the château? You must go in — that is what we came here for.”[44] A lieutenant of the Val-de-Grâce gunners shouts: “We have forced open the Carrousel, we must force open the château too! This is the first time the Val-de-Grâce gunners march — they are not j…. f…. Come, follow me, my men, on to the enemy![45] – “Meanwhile, outside the gate, some of the municipal officers selected by Pétion amongst the most revolutionary members of the council, overcome resistance by their speeches and commands. ‘After all,” says one of them, named Mouchet, “the right of petition is sacred.” — ” Open the gate!” shout Sergent and Boucher-René, “nobody has a right to shut it. Every citizen has a right to go through it!”[46] A gunner raises the latch, the gate opens and the court fills in the winkling of an eye;[47] the crowd rushes under the archway and up the grand stairway with such impetuosity that a cannon borne along by hand reaches the third room on the first story before it stops. The doors crack under the blows of axes and, in the large hall of the Oeil de Buf, the multitude find themselves face to face with the King.
In such circumstances the representatives of public authority, the directories, the municipalities, the military chiefs, and, on the 6th of October, the King himself, have all thus far yielded; they have either yielded or perished. Santerre, certain of the issue, preferred to take no part in this affair; he prudently holds back, he shies away, and lets the crowd push him into the council chamber, where the Queen, the young Dauphin, and the ladies have taken refuge.[48] There, with his tall, corpulent figure, he formed a sort of shield to forestall useless and compromising injuries. In the mean time, in the Oeil de Buf, he lets things take their course; everything will be done in his absence that ought to be done, and in this he seems to have calculated justly. — On one side, in a window recess, sits the King on a bench, almost alone, while in front of him, as a guard, are four or five of the National Guards; on the other side, in the apartments, is an immense crowd, hourly increasing according as the rumor of the irruption spreads in the vicinity, fifteen or twenty thousand persons, a prodigious accumulation, a pell-mell traversed by eddies, a howling sea of bodies crushing each other, and of which the simple flux and reflux would flatten against the walls obstacles ten times as strong, an uproar sufficient to shatter the window panes, “frightful yells,” curses and imprecations, “Down with M. Veto!” “Let Veto go to the devil!” “Take back the patriot ministers!” “He shall sign; we won’t go away till he does!”[49] — Foremost among them all, Legendre, more resolute than Santerre, declares himself the spokesman and trustee of the powers of the sovereign people: “Sir,” says he to the King, who, he sees, makes a gesture of surprise, “yes, Sir, listen to us; you are made to listen to what we say! You are a traitor! You have always deceived us; you deceive us now! But look out, the measure is full; the people are tired of being played upon ! ” — ” Sire, Sire,” exclaims another fanatic, “I ask you in the name of the hundred thousand beings around us to recall the patriot ministers. . . I demand the sanction of the decree against the priests and the twenty thousand men. Either the sanction or you shall die!” — But little is wanting for the threat to be carried out. The first comers are on hand, “presenting pikes,” among them “a brigand,” with a rusty sword blade on the end of a pole, “very sharp,” and who points this at the King. Afterwards the attempt at assassination is many times renewed, obstinately, by three or four madmen determined to kill, and who make signs of so doing, one, a shabby, ragged fellow, who keeps up his excitement with “the foulest propositions,” the second one, “a so- called conqueror of the Bastille,” formerly porte-tête for Foulon and Berthier, and since driven out of the battalion, the third, a market- porter, who, “for more than an hour,” armed with a saber, makes a terrible effort to make his way to the king.[50] — Nothing is done. The king remains impassible under every threat. He takes the hand of a grenadier who wishes to encourage him, and, placing it on his breast, bids him, “See if that is the beating of a heart agitated by fear.”[51] To Legendre and the zealots who call upon him to sanction, he replies without the least excitement:
“I have never departed from the Constitution. . . . I will do what the Constitution requires me to do. . . . It is you who break the law.”
— And, for nearly three hours, remaining standing, blockaded on his bench,[52] he persists in this without showing a sign of weakness or of anger. This cool deportment at last produces an effect, the impression it makes on the spectators not being at all that which they anticipated. It is very clear that the personage before them is not the monster which has been depicted to them, a somber, imperious tyrant, the savage, cunning Charles IX. they had hissed on the stage. They see a man somewhat stout, with placid, benevolent features, whom they would take, without his blue sash, for an ordinary, peaceable bourgeois.[53] His ministers, near by, three or four men in black coats, gentlemen and respectable employees, are just what they seem to be. In another window recess stands his sister, Madame Elizabeth, with her sweet and innocent face. This pretended tyrant is a man like other men; he speaks gently, he says that the law is on his side, and nobody says the contrary; perhaps he is less wrong than he is thought to be. If he would only become a patriot! — A woman in the room brandishes a sword with a cockade on its point; the King makes a sign and the sword is handed to him, which he raises and, hurrahing with the crowd, cries out: Vive la Nation! That is already one good sign. A red cap is shaken in the air at the end of a pole. Some one offers it to him and he puts it on his head; applause bursts forth, and shouts of Vive la Nation! Vive la Liberte! and even vive le Roi!
From this time forth the greatest danger is over. But it is not that the besiegers abandon the siege. “He did damned well,” they exclaim, “to put the cap on, and if he hadn’t we would have seen what would come of it. And damn it, if he does not sanction the decree against the priests, and do it right off; we will come back every day. In this way we shall tire him out and make him afraid of us. — But the day wears on. The heat is over-powering, the fatigue extreme, the King less deserted and better protected. Five or six of the deputies, three of the municipal officers, a few officers of the National Guard, have succeeded in making their way to him. Pétion himself, mounted on a sofa, harangues the people with his accustomed flattery.[54] At the same time Santerre, aware of the opportunity being lost, assumes the attitude of a liberator, and shouts in his rough voice: “I answer for the royal family. Let me see to it.” A line of National Guards forms in front of the King, when, slowly and with difficulty, urged by the mayor, the crowd melts away, and, by eight o’clock in the evening, it is gone.
_______________________________________________________________________ Notes:
[1] Moniteur, X. 39 and following pages (sessions of Oct. 5 and 6, 1791). Speeches by Chabot, Couthon, Lequinio, and Vergniaud. – Mercure de France, Oct. 15. Speech by Robespierre, May 17, 1790. “The king is not the nation’s representative, but its clerk. – Cf. Ernest Hamel, “Vie de Robespierre.”
[2] Moniteur, XIII. 97 (session of July 6, 1792)
[3] Buchez et Roux, XIII. 61, Jan.28, 1792. The King in his usually mild way calls the attention of the Assembly to the usurpation it is committing. “The form adopted by you is open to important observations. I shall not extend these to-day; the gravity of the situation demands that I concern myself much more with maintaining harmonious sentiments than with continually discussing my rights.”
[4] Sauzay, II. 99. Letter of the deputy Vernerey to the Directory of Doubs: “The Directory of the department may always act with the greatest severity against the seditious, and, apart from the article relating to their pension, follow the track marked out in the decree. If the executive desires to impede the operations of the Directory. . . the latter has its recourse in the National Assembly, which in all probability will afford it a shelter against ministerial attacks.” — Moniteur, XII. 202 (session of April 23). Report of Roland, Minister of the Interior. Already at this date forty-two departments had expelled or interned the unsworn ecclesiastics.
[5] Mercure-de-France, Feb.25.
[6] Moniteur, X. 440 (session of Nov.22, 1791). A letter to M. Southon, Director of the Mint at Paris, is read, “complaining of an arbitrary order, that of the Minister of the Interior, to report himself at Pau on the 25th of this month, under penalty of dismissal.” Isnard supports the charge: “M. Southon,” he says, “is here at work on a very circumstantial denunciation of the Minister of the Interior [Applause from the galleries.] If citizens who are zealous enough to make war on abuses are sent back to their departments we shall never have denunciations” [The applause is renewed.] – Ibid., X, 504 (session of Nov. 29). Speech by Isnard: “Our ministers must know that we are not fully satisfied with the conduct of each of them [repeated applause]; that henceforth they must simply choose between public gratitude and the vengeance of the law, and that our understanding of the word responsibility is death.” [The applause is renewed.] — The Assembly orders this speech to be printed and sent into the departments. – Cf. XII, 73, 138, etc.
[7] Moniteur, XI. 603. (Session of March 10. Speech by Brissot, to secure a decree of accusation against M. Delessart, Minister of Foreign Affairs.) M. Delessart is a “perfidious man,” for having stated in a dispatch that “the Constitution, with the great majority of the nation, has become a sort of religion which is embraced with the greatest enthusiasm.” Brissot denounces these two expressions as inadequate and anti-patriotic.-Ibid., XII. 438 (session of May 20). Speech by Guadet: “Larivière, the juge-de-paix, has convicted himself of the basest and most atrocious of passions, in having desired to usurp the power which the Constitution has placed in the hands of the National Assembly.” — I do not believe that Laubardemont himself could have composed anything equal to these two speeches. — Cf. XII. 462 (session of May 23). Speech by Brissot and one by Gonsonné on the Austrian committee. The feebleness and absurdity of their argument is incredible.
[8] Affairs of the Minister Duport-Dutertre and of the Ambassador to Vienna, M. de Noailles.
[9] Mercure de France, March 10, 1792.
[10] Moniteur, XI. 607 (session of March 10).
[11] Moniteur, XII .396 (session of May 15). Isnard’s address is the ground-plan of Roland’s famous letter. — Cf. passim, the sessions of the Assembly during the Girondist ministry, especially those of May 19 and 20, June 5, etc.
[12] Dumouriez, “Mémoires,” book III. ch. VI.
[13] “Letter of a young mechanician,” proposing to make a constitutional king, which, “by means of a spring, would receive from the hands of the president of the Assembly a list of ministers designated by the majority” (1791).
[14] Servan, who was Girondist minister of war, proposed to let 20 000 fédérés or provincial National guards establish themselves outside Paris. (SR).
[15] You will meet this sinister expression later on when the Government ceased killing in France but simply sent undesirables and imaginary or real opponents overseas to death-camps. Transportation was used by Stalin and Hitler only their extermination took place in their own countries not overseas. (SR).
[16] Moniteur, XI. 426 (session of May 19). Speech by Lasource: “Could not things be so arranged as to have a considerable force near enough to the capital to terrify and keep inactive the factions, the intriguers, the traitors who are plotting perfidious plans in its bosom, simultaneously with the maneuvers of outside enemies?”
[17] ‘Mallet du Pan, “Mémoires.” I. 303. Letter of Malouet, June 29: “The king is calm and perfectly resigned. On the 19th he wrote to his confessor: “Come, sir; never have I had so much need of your consolations. I am done with men; I must now turn my eyes to heaven. Sad events are announced for to-morrow. I shall have courage.’ ” — “Lettres de Coray au Protopsalte de Smyrne” (translated by M. de Queux de Saint-Hilaire,) 145, May 1st: “The court is in peril every moment. Do not be surprised if I write you some day that his unhappy king and his wife are assassinated.”.”
[18] Rétif de la Bretonne, “Nuits de Paris,” VoL XVI. (analyzed by Lacroix in “Bibliothèque de Rétif de la Bretonne” ). –Rétif is the man in Paris who lived the most in the streets and had the most intercourse with the low class.
[19] “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3276. Letter from the Directory of Clamecy, March 27, and official report of the civil commissioners, March 31, 1792, on the riot of the raftsmen. Tracu, their captain, armed with a cudgel ten feet long, compelled peaceful people to march along with him, threatening to knock them down; he tried to get the head of Peynier, the clerk of the Paris dealers in wood. “I shall have a good supper to-night,” he exclaimed “(or the head of that bastard Peynier is a fat one, and I’ll stick it in my Pot!”
[20] Letters of Coray, 126. “This pillaging has lasted three days, Jan. 22, 23 and 24, and we expect from hour to hour similar riots still more terrible.”
[21] Mercier (” Tableau de Paris”) had already noticed before the Revolution this habit of the Parisian workman, especially among the lowest class of workmen.
[22] Mortimer-Ternaux, 1.346 (letter of June 21, 1792).
[23] Buchez et Roux, VIII. 25 (session of the National Assembly, Nov.10, 1790). Petition presented by Danton in the name of the forty- eight sections of Paris.
[24] Buchez et Roux, XIV. 268 (May. 1792). Article by Robespierre against the fête decreed in honor of Simonneau, Mayor of Etampes, assassinated in a riot: “Simonneau was guilty before he became a victim.”
[25] How can one forget that great seducer of the masses Hitler? In his book “Hitler Speaks” page 208 Rauschning reports Hitler as saying: “It is true that the masses are uncritical, but not in the way these idiots of Marxists and reactionaries imagine. The masses have their critical faculties, too, but they function differently from those of the private individual. The masses are like an animal they obeys instincts. They do not reach conclusions by reasoning. My success in initiating the greatest people’s movement of all time is due to my never having done anything in violation of the vital laws and feelings of the mass. These feelings may be primitive, but they have the resistance and indestructibility of natural qualities. A once intensely felt experience in the life of the masses, like ration cards and inflation, will never again be driven out of their blood. The masses have a simple system of thinking and feeling, and anything that cannot be fitted into it disturbs them. It is only because I take their vital laws into consideration that I can rule them.”
[26] Moniteur, XII. 254. – According to the royal almanac of 1792 the Paris national guard comprises 32,000 men, divided into sixty battalions, to which must be added the battalions of pikemen, spontaneously organized and composed, especially of the non-active citizens. – Cf. in “Les Révolutions de Paris,” Prudhomme’s Journal, the engravings which represent this sort of procession.
[27] Buchez et Roux, XV. 122. Declaration of Lareynie, a volunteer soldier in the Ile Saint-Louis battalion. — To those which he names I add Huguenin, because on the 20th of June it was his duty to read the petition of the rioters; also Saint-Huruge, because he led the mob with Santerre. — About Rossignol, Cf. Dauban, “La Demagogie à Paris,” 369 (according to the manuscript memoirs of Mercier du Rocher). He reaches Fontenay Aug.21, 1793, with the representative Bourbotte, Momoro, commissary-general, three adjutants, Moulins, Hasard, the ex- priest, Grammont, an ex-actor and several prostitutes. “The prettiest shared her bed with Bourbotte and Rossignol.” They lodge in a mansion to which seals are affixed. “The seals were broken, and jewelry, dresses, and female apparel were confiscated for the benefit of the general and his followers. There was nothing, even down to the crockery, which did not become the booty of these self-styled republicans”
[28] Mathon de la Varenne, “Histoire particulière des événements qui ont eu lieu en juin, juillet, août, et septembre, 1792,” p. 23. (He knew Saint-Huruge personally.) Saint-Huruge had married an actress at Lyons in 1778. On returning to Paris he learned through the police that his wife was a trollop, and he treated her accordingly. Enraged, she looked up Saint-Huruge’s past career, and found two charges against him, one for the robbery and assassination of an alien merchant, and the other for infanticide; she obtained his incarceration by a lettre-de-cachet. He was shut in Charenton from Jan. 14, 1781, to December, 1784, when he was transferred to another prison and afterwards exiled to his estates, from which he fled to England. He returned to France on the outbreak of the Revolution.
[29] With respect to connivance, Cf. Mortimer-Ternaux, I. 132 and the following pages. – Mallet du Pan, “Mémoires,” I. 300. Letter of the Abbé de Pradt, June 21, 1795. “The insurrection had been announced for several days. . . The evening before, 150 deputies so many Jacobins, had dined at their great table in the Champs-Elysées, and distributed presents of wine and food.”
[30] Moniteur, XII. 642 (session of June 12, 1792, narrative of M. Delfaux, deputy). – The execution of Damiens was witnessed by Parisians still living, while “Charles IX.,,” by Marie Chénier, was at this time the most popular tragedy. — The French people,” says M. Ferières (I. 35), “went away from its representation eager for vengeance and tormented with a thirst for blood. At the end of the fourth act a lugubrious bell announces the moment of the massacre, and the audience, drawing in its breath sighing and groaning, furiously exclaims silence! silence! as if fearing that the sound of this death- knell had not stirred the heart to its very depths.” — ” Révolutions de Paris,” number for June 23, 1792. “The speakers, under full sail, distributed their parts amongst themselves,” one against the staffs, another against priests, another against judges, department, and the ministers, and especially the king. “Some there are, and we agree in this with the sieur Delfaux, who pass the measure and advise murder through gestures, eyes, and speech.”
[31] Mortimer-Ternaux, I. 133. — There is the same calculation and the same work-shop in the faubourg Saints-Marcel (report of Saint- Prix, commandant of the Val-de-Grâce battalion). “Minds remained tranquil until a club was opened at the Porte Saint-Marcel; now they are all excited and divided. This dub, which is in contact with that of Santerre, urges citizens to go armed to-morrow (June 20) to the National Assembly and to the king’s Palace, notwithstanding the acts of the constituted authorities.”
[32] Mortimer-Ternaux, I. 136. This program is first presented to the council-general of the commune by Lazowski and nine others (June 16). The council-general rejects it and refers to the law. “The petitioners, on learning this decision, loudly declare that it shall not prevent them from assembling in arms” (Buchez et Roux, XV. 120, official report by M. Borie). — The bibliography of documents relating to the 20th of June is given by Mortimer-Ternaux, I. 397 and following pages. The principal documents are found in Mortimer- Ternaux, in “L’Histoire Parlementaire” of Buchez et Roux, and in the Revue Rétrospective.
[33] “Correspondance de Mirabeau et M. de la Marck,” III. 319. Letter of the Count de Montmorin, June 21, 1792. “The Paris bandits not being sufficient, they have invited in these of the neighboring villages.”
[34] Reports of the municipal officers Perron (7 o’clock in the morning), Sergent (8 o’clock), Mouchet, Gujard, and Thomas (9 o’clock).
[35] Report of Saint Prix, commandant of the Val-de-Grâce battalion (10 o’clock In the morning). — Report of Alexandre, commanding the Saint-Marcel battalion. “The whole battalion was by no means ready to march.” — Official report of the Montreuil section. Bonneau, the commander concludes to march only under protest and to avoid spilling blood.
[36] Deposition of Lareyrnie, a volunteer soldier of the Ile Saint- Louis battalion.
[37] Deposition of M. Witinghof, lieutenant-general. — “Correspondence of Mirabeau and M. de la Marck.” Letter of M. de Montmorin, June 21. “At two o’clock the gathering amounted to 8,000 or 10,000 persons.”
[38] Moniteur, XII. 717. “What a misfortune for the freemen who have transferred their powers to you, to find themselves reduced to the cruel necessity of dipping their hands in the blood of conspirators!” etc. — The character of the leaders is apparent in their style. The incompetent copyist who drew up the address did not even know the meaning of words. “The people so wills it, and its head is of more account than that of crowned despots. That head is the genealogical tree of the nation, and before that robust head the feeble reed must bend!” He has already recited the fable of “The Oak and the Bulrush,” and he knows the names of Demosthenes, Cicero, and Catiline. It seems to be the composition of a school master turned public letter writer, at a penny a page.
[39] Hua, “Mémoires,” 134.
[40] Moniteur, XII. 718.
[41] “Chronique des cinquante jours,” by Rderer, syndic-attorney of the department.
[42] Hua, 134. — Bourrienne, “Mémoires,” I. 49. (He was with Bonaparte in a restaurant, rue Saint-Honoré, near the Palais-Royal.) “On going out we saw a troop coming from the direction of the market, which Bonaparte estimated at from 5,000 to 6,000 men, all in rags and armed in the oddest manner, yelling and shouting the grossest provocations, and turning towards the Tuileries. It was certainly the vilest and most abject lot that could be found in the faubourgs. ‘Let us follow that rabble,’ said Bonaparte to me.” They ascend the terrace on the river bank. “I could not easily describe the surprise and indignation which these scenes excited in him. He did not like so much weakness and forbearance. ‘Che coglione! he exclaimed in a loud tone. ‘How could they let those rascals in? Four or five hundred of them ought to have been swept off with cannon, and the rest would still be running!'”
[43] “Chronique des cinquante jours,” by Rderer. – Deposition of Lareynie.
[44] Deposition of Lareynie.
[45] Report of Saint-Prix.
[46] Report by Mouchet. — Deposition of Lareynie. (The interference of Sergent and Boucher-Réne is contested, but Raederer thinks it very probable.)
[47] M. Pinon, in command of the 5th legion, and M. Vannot, commanding a battalion, tried to shut the iron gate of the archway, but are driven back and told: “You want thousands to perish, do you, to save one man?” This significant expression is heard over and over again during the Revolution, and it explains the success of the insurrections. — Alexandre, in command of the Saint-Marcel battalion, says in his report: “Why make a resistance which can be of no usefulness to the public, one which may even compromise it a great deal more?…”
[48] Deposition of Lareynie. The attitude of Santerre is here clearly defined. At the foot of the staircase in the court he is stopped by a group of citizens, who threaten “to make him responsible for any harm done,” and tell him: “You alone are the author of this unconstitutional assemblage; it is you alone who have led away these worthy people. You are a rascal!” – “The tone of these honest citizens in addressing the sieur Santerre made him turn pale. But, encouraged by a glance from the sieur Legendre, he resorted to a hypocritical subterfuge, and addressing the troop, he said: ‘Gentlemen, draw up a report, officially stating that I refuse to enter the king’s apartments.’ The only answer the crowd made, accustomed to divining what Santerre meant, was to hustle the group of honest citizens out of the way.
[49] Depositions of four of the national guard, Lecrosnier, Gossé, Bidault, and Guiboult. — Reports of Acloque and de Lachesnaye, commanding officers of the legion. — “Chronique des cinquante jours,” by Rderer. – Ibid. p.65: “I have to state that, during the Convention, the butcher Legendre declared to Boissy d’Anglas, from whom I had it, that the plan was to kill the king.” — Prudhomme, “Crimes de la Révolution,” III.43. “The king was to be assassinated. We heard citizens all in rags say that it was a pity; he looks like a good sort of a bastard.”
[50] Madame Campan, “Mémoires,” II. 212. “M. Vannot, commander of the battalion, had turned aside a weapon aimed at the king. One of the grenadiers of the Filles-Saint-Thomas warded off a blow with a sword, aimed in the same direction with the same intention.”
[51] Declaration of Lachesnaye, in command of the legion. – Moniteur, XII. 719 (evening session of June 20). Speech of M. Alos, an eye- witness. (The king does this twice, using about the same words, the first time immediately on the irruption of the crowd, and the second time probably after Vergniaud’s harangue.) Declaration of Lachesnaye, in command of the legion. – Moniteur, XII. 719 (evening session of June 20). Speech of M. Alos, an eye-witness. (The king does this twice, using about the same words, the first time immediately on the irruption of the crowd, and the second time probably after Vergniaud’s harangue.)
[52] The engraving in the “Révolutions de Paris” represents him seated, and separated from the crowd by an empty space; that is a falsehood of the party..
[53] The queen produces the same impression. Prudhomme, in his journal, calls her “the Austrian panther,” which word well expresses the idea of her in the faubourgs. A prostitute stops before her and bestows on her a volley of curses. The reply of the queen is: “Have I ever done you any wrong?” “No; but it is you who do so much harm to the nation.” You have been deceived,” replies the queen. “I married the King of France. I am the mother of the dauphin. I am a French woman. I shall never again see my own country. I shall never be either happy or miserable anywhere but in France. When you loved me I was happy then.” The prostitute burst into tears. “Ah. Madame, forgive me! I did not know you. I see that you have been very good.” Santerre, however, wishing to put an end to this emotion, cries out: “The girl is drunk ” -(Madame Campan, II. 214. – Report by Mandat, an officer of the legion.)
[54] Mortimer-Ternaux, I. 213. “Citizens, you have just legally made known your will to the hereditary representative of the nation; you have done this with the dignity, with the majesty of a free people! There is no doubt that your demands will be reiterated by the eighty- three departments, while the king cannot refrain from acquiescing in the manifest will of the people. . . Retire now, . . . and if you remain any longer, do not give occasion to anything which may incriminate your worthy intentions.”
CHAPTER VI. The Birth of the Terrible Paris Commune.
I.
Indignation of the Constitutionalists. — Cause of their weakness. – The Girondins renew the attack. — Their double plan.
As the blow has missed the target, it must be repeated. This is the more urgent, inasmuch as the faction has thrown off the mask and “honest people”[1] on all sides become indignant at seeing the Constitution subject to the arbitrariness of the lowest class. Nearly all the higher administrative bodies, seventy-five of the department directories,[2] give in their adhesion to Lafayette’s letter, or respond by supporting the proclamation, so noble and so moderate, in which the King, recounting the violence done to him, maintains his legal rights with mournful, inflexible gentleness. Many of the towns, large and small, thank him for his firmness, the addresses being signed by “the notables of the place,”[3] chevaliers of St. Louis, former officials, judges and district-administrators, physicians, notaries, lawyers, recorders, post-masters, manufacturers, merchants, people who are settled down, in short the most prominent and the most respected men. At Paris, a similar petition, drawn up by two former Constituents, contains 247 pages of signatures attested by 99 notaries.[4] Even in the council-general of the commune a majority is in favor of publicly censuring the mayor Pétion, the syndic-attorney Manuel, and the police administrators Panis, Sergent, Viguer, and Perron.[5] On the evening of June 20th, the department council orders an investigation; it follows this up; it urges it on; it proves by authentic documents the willful inaction, the hypocritical connivance, the double-dealing of the syndic-attorney and the mayor;[6] it suspends both from their functions, and cites them before the courts as well as Santerre and his accomplices. Lafayette, finally, adding to the weight of his opinion the influence of his presence, appears at the bar of the National Assembly and demands “effectual” measures against the usurpations of the Jacobin sect, insisting that the instigators of the riot of the 20th of June be punished “as guilty of lése-nation.” As a last and still more significant symptom, his proceedings are approved of in the Assembly by a majority of more than one hundred votes.[7]
All this must and will be crushed out. For on the side of the Constitutionalists, whatever they may be, whether King, deputies, ministers, generals, administrators, notables or national-guards, the will to act evaporates in words; and the reason is, they are civilized beings, long accustomed to the ways of a regular community, interested from father to son in keeping the law, disconcerted at the thought of consequences, upset by multifaceted ideas, unable to comprehend that, in the state of nature to which France has reverted, but one idea is of any account, that of the man who, in accepting a declared war, meets the offensive with the offensive, loads his gun, descends into the street and contends with the savage destroyers of human society. – – Nobody comes to the support of Lafayette, who alone has the courage to take the lead; about one hundred men muster at the rendezvous named by him in the Champs-Élysées. They agree to march to the Jacobin club the following day and close it, provided the number is increased to three hundred; but the next day only thirty turn up. Lafayette can do no more than leave Paris and write a letter containing another protest. — Protestations, appeals to the Constitution, to the law, to public interest, to common sense, well-reasoned arguments; this side will never resort to anything else than speeches and paperwork; and, in the coming conflict words will be of no use. — Imagine a quarrel between two men, one ably presenting his case and the other indulging in little more than invective; the latter, having encountered an enormous mastiff on his road, has caressed him, enticed him, and led him along with him as an auxiliary. To the mastiff, clever argumentation is only so much unmeaning sound; with his eager eyes fixed on his temporary master he awaits only his signal to spring on the adversaries he points out. On the 20th of June he has almost strangled one of them, and covered him with his slaver. On the 21st,[8] he is ready to spring again. He continues to growl for fifty days, at first sullenly and then with terrific energy. On the 25th of June, July 14 and 27, August 3 and 5, he again makes a spring and is kept back only with great difficulty.[9] Already on one occasion, July 29th, his fangs are wet with human gore.[10] — At each turn of the parliamentary debate the defenseless Constitutionalists beholds those open jaws before him; it is not surprising that he throws to this dog, or allows to be thrown to him, all the decrees demanded by the Girondists as a bone for him to gnaw on. — Sure of their strength the Girondists renew the attack, and the plan of their campaign seems to be skillfully prepared. They are quite willing to retain the King on his throne, but on the condition that he shall be a mere puppet; that he shall recall the patriot ministers, allow them to appoint the Dauphin’s tutor, and that Lafayette shall be removed;[11] otherwise the Assembly will pass the act of de-thronement and seize the executive power. Such is the defile with two issues in which they have placed the Assembly and the King. If the King balks at leaving by the first door, the Assembly, equally nonplused, will leave through the second; in either case, as the all-powerful ministers of the submissive King or as executive delegates of the submissive Assembly, the Girondists will become the masters of France.
II.
Pressure on the King. — Pétion and Manual brought to the Hôtel-de- ville. — The Ministry obliged to resign. — Jacobin agitation against the King. — Pressure on the Assembly. – – Petition of the Paris Commune. — Threats of the petitioners and of the galleries. — Session of August 8th. – Girondist strategy foiled in two ways.
With this in mind they begin by attacking the King, and try to make him yield through fear. — They remove the suspension pronounced against Pétion and Manuel, and restore them both to their places in the Hôtel-de-ville. They will from now on rule Paris without restriction or supervision; for the Directory of the department has resigned, and no superior authority exists to prevent them from calling upon or giving orders as they please to the armed forces; they are exempt from all subordination, as well as from all control. Behold the King of France in good hands, in those of the men who, on the 20th of June, refused to nuzzle the popular brute, declaring that it had done well, that it had right on its side, and that it may begin again. According to them, the palace of the monarch belongs to the public; people may enter it as they would a coffee-house; in any event, as the municipality is occupied with other matters, it cannot be expected to keep people out. “Is there nothing else to guard in Paris but the Tuileries and the King?”[12] — Another maneuver consists in rendering the King’s instruments powerless. Honorable and inoffensive as the new ministers may be, they never appear in the Assembly without being hooted at in the tribunes. Isnard, pointing with his finger to the principal one, exclaims: “That is a traitor!”[13] Every popular outburst is imputed to them as a crime, while Guadet declares that, “as royal counselors, they are answerable for any disturbances” that the double veto might produce.[14] Not only does the faction declare them guilty of the violence provoked by itself, but, again, it demands their lives for the murders which it commits. “France must know,” says Vergniaud, “that hereafter ministers are to answer with their heads for any disorders of which religion is the pretext.” — “The blood just spilt at Bordeaux,” says Ducos, “may be laid at the door of the executive power. “[15] La Source proposes to “punish with death,” not alone the minister who is not prompt in ordering the execution of a decree, but, again, the clerks who do not fulfill the minister’s instructions. Always death on every occasion, and for every one who is not of the sect. Under this constant terror, the ministers resign in a body, and the King is required at once to appoint others; meanwhile, to increase the danger of their position, the Assembly decrees that hereafter they shall “be answerable for each other.” It is evident that they are aiming at the King over his minister’s shoulders, while the Girondists leave nothing unturned to render government to him impossible. The King, again, signs this new decree; he declines to protest; to the persecution he is forced to undergo he opposes nothing but silence, sometimes a simple, frank, good-hearted expression,[16] some kindly, touching complaining, which seems like a suppressed moan.[17] But dogmatic obstinacy and impatient ambition are willfully deaf to the most sorrowful strains! His sincerity passes for a new false-hood. Vergniaud, Brissot, Torné, Condorcet, in the tribune, charge him with treachery, demand from the Assembly the right of suspending him,[18] and give the signal to their Jacobin auxiliaries. — At the invitation of the parent club, the provincial branches bestir themselves, while all other instruments of agitation belonging to the revolutionary machine are likewise put in motion, — gatherings on the public squares, homicidal announcements on the walls, incendiary resolutions in the clubs, shouting in the tribunes, insulting addresses and seditious deputations at the bar of the National Assembly.[19] After the working of this system for a month, the Girondists regard the King as subdued, and, on the 26th of July, Guadet, and then Brissot, in the tribune, make their last advances to him, and issue the final summons.[20] A profound delusion! He refuses, the same as on the 20th of June: “Girondist ministers, Never!”
Since he bars one of the two doors, they will pass out at the other, and, if the Girondists cannot rule through him, they will rule without him. Pétion, in the name of the Commune, appears personally and proposes a new plan, demanding the dethronement. “This important measure once passed,”[21] he says, “the confidence of the nation in the actual dynasty being very doubtful, we demand that a body of ministers, jointly responsible, appointed by the National Assembly, but, as the constitutional law provides, outside of itself, elected by the open vote of freemen, be provisionally entrusted with the executive power.” Through this open vote the suffrage will be easily controlled. This is but one more decree extorted, like so many others, the majority for a long time having been subject to the same pressure as the King. “If you refuse to respond to our wishes,” as a placard of the 23rd of June had already informed them, “our hands are lifted, and we shall strike all traitors wherever they can be found, even amongst yourselves.”[22] — “Court favorites,” says a petition of August 6, “have seats in your midst. Let their inviolability perish if the national will must always tamely submit to that lethal power!” — In the Assembly the yells from the galleries are frightful; the voices of those who speak against dethronement are overpowered; so great are the hooting, the speakers are driven out of the tribune.[23] Sometimes the “Right” abandons the discussion and leaves the chamber. The insolence of the galleries goes so far that frequently almost the entire Assembly murmurs while they applaud; the majority, in short, loudly expresses anger at its bondage.[24] — Let it be careful! In the tribunes and at the approaches to the edifice, stand the Federates, men who have a tight grip. They will force it to vote the decisive measure, the accusation of Lafayette, the decree under which the armed champion of the King and the Constitution must fall. The Girondists, to make sure of it, exact a call of the house; in this way the names are announced and printed, thus designating to the populace the opponents of the measure, so that none of them are sure of getting to their homes safe and sound. — Lafayette, however, a liberal, a democrat, and a royalist, as devoted to the Revolution as to the Law, is just the man, who, through his limited mental grasp, his disconnected political conceptions, and the nobleness of his contradictory sentiments, best represents the present opinion of the Assembly, as well as that of France.[25] Moreover, his popularity, his courage, and his army are the last refuge. The majority feels that in giving him up they themselves are given up, and, by a vote of 400 to 224, it acquits him. — On this side, again, the strategy of the Girondists is found erroneous. Power slips away from them the second time. Neither the King nor the Assembly have consented to restore it to them, while they can no longer leave it suspended in the air, or defer it until a better opportunity, and keep their Jacobin acolytes waiting. The feeble leash restraining the revolutionary dog breaks in their hands; the dog is free and in the street
III.
The Girondins have worked for the benefit of the Jacobins. — The armed force sent away or disorganized. — The Federates summoned. — Brest and Marseilles send men. — Public sessions of administrative bodies. — Permanence of administrative bodies and of the sections. – – Effect of these two measures. — The central bureau of the Hôtel- de-ville. — Origin and formation of the revolutionary Commune.
Never was better work done for another. Every measure relied on by them for getting power back, serves only to place it in the hands of the mob. — On the one hand, through a series of legislative acts and municipal ordinances, they have set aside or disbanded the army, alone capable of repressing or intimidating it. On the 29th of May they dismissed the king’s guard. On the 15th of July they ordered away from Paris all regular troops. On the 16th of July,[26] they select ” for the formation of a body of infantry-gendarmerie, the former French- guardsmen who served in the Revolution about the epoch of the 1st day of June, 1789, the officers, under-officers, gunners, and soldiers who gathered around the flag of liberty after the 12th of July of that year,” that is to say, a body of recognized insurgents and deserters. On the 6th of July, in all towns of 50,000 souls and over, they strike down the National Guard by discharging its staff, “an aristocratic corporation,” says a petition,[27] “a sort of modern feudality composed of traitors, who seem to have formed a plan for directing public opinion as they please.” Early in August,[28] they strike into the heart of the National Guard by suppressing special companies, grenadiers, and chasseurs, recruited amongst well-to-do-people, the genuine elite, stripped of its uniform, reduced to equality, lost in