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"[2601] 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,[2602]
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,"[2603] 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.[2604] 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.[2605] 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;[2606] 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.[2607]
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,[2608] 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.[2609] Already on one occasion,
July 29th, his fangs are wet with human gore.[2610]--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;[2611] 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?"[2612]--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!"[2613] 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.[2614] 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. "[2615] 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,[2616] some kindly, touching complaining, which
seems like a suppressed moan.[2617] 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,[2618] 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.[2619] 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.[2620] 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,"[2621] 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."[2622]--"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.[2623] 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.[2624]--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.[2625] 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,[2626] 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,[2627] "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,[2628] 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
the mass, and now, moreover, finding its 'ranks degraded by a mixture of
interlopers, federates, and men armed with pikes. Finally, to complete
the pell-mell, they order that the palace guard be hereafter composed
daily of citizens taken from the sixty battalions,[2629] so that the
chiefs may no longer know their men nor the men their chiefs; so that
no one may place confidence in his chief, in his subordinate, in his
neighbor, or in himself; so that all the stones of the human dike may be
loosened beforehand, and the barrier crumble at the first onslaught.--On
the other hand, they have taken care to provide the insurrection with
a fighting army and an advanced guard. By another series of legislative
acts and municipal ordinances, they authorize the assemblage of the
Federates at Paris; they allow them pay and military lodgings;[2630]
they allow them to organize under a central committee sitting at the
Jacobin club, and to take their instructions from that club. Of these
new-comers, two-thirds, genuine soldiers and true patriots, set out for
the camp at Soissons and for the frontier; one-third of them, however,
remain at Paris,[2631] perhaps 2,000, the rioters and politicians, who,
feasted, entertained, indoctrinated, and each lodged with a Jacobin,
become more Jacobin than their hosts, and incorporate themselves with
the revolutionary battalions, so as to serve the good cause with their
guns.[2632]--Two squads, late comers, remain separate, and are only the
more formidable; both are dispatched by the towns on the sea-cost in
which, four months before this, "twenty-one capital acts of insurrection
had occurred, all unpunished, and several under sentence of the maritime
jury."[2633] The first, numbering 300 men, comes from Brest,
* where the municipality, as infatuated as those of Marseilles and
Avignon, engages in armed expeditions against its neighbors; where
popular murder is tolerated;
* where M. de la Jaille is nearly killed;
* where the head of M. de la Patry is borne on a pike;
* where veteran rioters compose the crews of the fleet,
* where "workers paid by the State, clerks, masters, non-commission
officers, converted into agitators, political stump-speakers, movers,
and critics of the administration," ask only to be given roles to
perform on a more conspicuous stage.
The second troop, summoned from Marseilles by the Girondins, Rebecqui,
and Barbaroux,[2634] comprises 516 men, intrepid, ferocious adventurers,
from everywhere, either Marseilles or abroad, Savoyards, Italians,
Spaniards, driven out of their country, almost all of the vilest
class, or gaining a livelihood by infamous pursuits, "hit-men and
their henchmen of evil haunts," used to blood, quick to strike, good
cut-throats, picked men out of the bands that had marched on Aix, Arles,
and Avignon, the froth of that froth which, for three years, in the
Comtat and in the Bouches-du-Rhône, boiled over the useless barriers
of the law.--The very day they reach Paris they show what they can
do.[2635] Welcomed with great pomp by the Jacobins and by Santerre, they
are conducted, for a purpose, to the Champs-Elysées, into a tavern,
near the restaurant in which the grenadiers of the Filles St. Thomas,
bankers, brokers, leading men, well-known for their attachment to a
monarchical constitution, were dining in a body, as announced several
days in advance. The mob which had formed a convoy for the Marseilles
battalion, gathers before the restaurant, shouts, throws mud, and then
lets fly a volley of stones; the grenadiers draw their sabers. Forthwith
a shout is heard just in front of them, à nous les Marseillais! upon
which the gang jump out of the windows with true southern agility,
clamber across the ditches, fall upon the grenadiers with their swords,
kill one and wound fifteen.--No début could be more brilliant. The party
at last possesses men of action;[2636] and they must be kept within
reach! Men who do such good work, and so expeditiously, must be well
posted near the Tuileries. The mayor, consequently, on the night of the
8th of August, without informing the commanding general, solely on his
own authority, orders them to leave their barracks in the Rue Blanche
and take up their quarters, with their arms and cannon, in the barracks
belonging to the Cordeliers.[2637]
Such is the military force in the hands of the Jacobin masses; nothing
remains but to place the civil power in their hands also, and, as the
first gift of this kind was made to them by the Girondins, they will not
fail to make them the second one.--On the 1st of July, they decree that
the sessions of administrative bodies should thenceforth be public; this
is submitting municipalities, district, and department councils, as
well as the National Assembly itself, to the clamor, the outrages, the
menaces, the rule of their audiences, which in these bodies as in the
National Assembly, will always be Jacobin.[2638] On the 11th of July,
on declaring the country in danger,[2639] they render the sessions
permanent, first of the administrative bodies, and next of
the forty-eight sections of Paris, which is a surrender of the
administrative bodies and the forty-eight sections of Paris to the
Jacobin minority, which minority, through its zeal and being ever
present, knows how to convert itself into a majority.--Let us trace the
consequences of this, and see the selection which is thus effected by
the double decree. Those who attend these meetings, day and night, are
not the steady, busy people. In the first place, they are too busy in
their own counting-rooms, shops and factories to lose so much time. In
the next place, they are too sensible, to docile, and too honest to
go and lord it over their magistrates in the Hôtel-de-ville, or regard
themselves in their various sections as the sovereign people. Moreover,
they are disgusted with all this bawling. Lastly, the streets of Paris,
especially at night, are not safe; owing to so much outdoor politics,
there is a great increase of caning and of knocking down. Accordingly,
for a long time, they do not attend at the clubs, nor are they seen in
the galleries of the National Assembly; nor will they be seen again
at the sessions of the municipality, nor at the meetings of the
sections.--Nothing, on the other hand, is more attractive to the idle
tipplers of the cafés, to bar-room oracles, loungers, and talkers,
living in furnished rooms,[2640] to the parasites and refractory of the
social army, to all who have left the social structures and unable to
get back again, who want to tear things to pieces, and, for lack of
a private career, establish one for themselves in public. Permanent
sessions, even at night, are not too long either for them, or for lazy
Federates, for disordered intellects, and for the small troop of genuine
fanatics. Here they are either performers or claqueurs, an uproar not
being offensive to them, because they create it. They relieve each
other, so as to be always on hand in sufficient number, or compensate
for a deficiency by usurpations and brutality. The section of the
Théâtre-Français, for instance, in contempt of the law, removes the
distinction between active and passive citizens, by granting to all
residents in its circumscription the right to be present at its meetings
and the right to vote. Other sections[2641] admit to their sittings
all well-disposed spectators, all women, children, and the nomads, all
agitators, and the agitated, who, as at the National Assembly, applaud
or hoot at the word of command. In the sections not disposed to be at
the mercy of an anonymous public, the same herd of frantic characters
make a racket at the doors, and insult the electors who pass through
them.--Thanks to this itinerant throng of co-operating intruders, the
Jacobin extremists rule the sections the same as the Assembly; in the
sections as in the Assembly, they drive away or silence the moderates,
and when the hall becomes half empty or dumb, their motion is passed.
Hawked about in the vicinity, the motion is even carried off; in a
few days it makes the tour of Paris, and returns to the Assembly as an
authentic and unanimous expression of popular will.[2642]
At present, to ensure the execution of this counterfeit will, it
requires a central committee, and through a masterpiece of delusion,
Pétion, the Girondist mayor, is the one who undertakes to lodge,
sanction, and organize the committee. On the 17th day of July,[2643] he
establishes in the offices belonging to the Commune, "a central
bureau of correspondence between the sections." To this a duly elected
commissioner is to bring the acts passed by his section each day, and
carry away the corresponding acts of the remaining forty-seven sections.
Naturally, these elected commissioners will hold meetings of their own,
appointing a president and secretary, and making official reports of
their proceedings in the same form as a veritable municipal council. As
they are elected to-day, and with a special mandate, it is natural that
they should consider themselves more legitimate than a municipal council
elected four or five months before them, and with a very uncertain
mandate. Installed in the town hall of Paris (Hôtel-de-ville), only two
steps from the municipal council, it is natural for them to attempt to
take its place; to substitute themselves for it, they have only to cross
over to the other side of a corridor.
IV.--Vain attempts of the Girondins to put it down.
Jacobin alarm, their enthusiasm, and their program.
Thus, hatched by the Girondins, does the terrible Commune of Paris come
into being, that of August 10th, September 2nd 1792 and May 31st. 1793.
The viper has hardly left its nest before it begins to hiss. A fortnight
before the 10th of August[2644] it begins to uncoil, and the wise
statesmen who have so diligently sheltered and fed it, stand aghast at
its hideous, flattened head. Accordingly, they back away from it up to
the last hour, and strive to prevent it from biting them. Pétion himself
visits Robespierre on the 7th of August, in order to represent to him
the perils of an insurrection, and to allow the Assembly time enough to
discuss the question of dethronement. The same day Verginaud and
Guadet propose to the King, through the medium of Thierry, his
valet-de-chambre, that, until peace is assured, the government be
carried on under a regency. Pétion, on the night of August 9-10,
issues a pressing circular to the sections, urging them to remain
tranquil.[2645]
But it is too late. Fifty days of excitement and alarm have worked up
the aberrations of morbid imaginations into a delirium.--On the second
of August, a crowd of men and women rush to the bar of the
Assembly, exclaiming, "Vengeance! Vengeance! our brethren are being
poisoned!"[2646] The fact as ascertained is this: at Soissons, where the
bread of the soldiery was prepared in a church, some fragments of broken
glass were found in the oven, on the strength of which a rumor was
started that 170 volunteers had died, and that 700 were lying in the
hospital. A ferocious instinct makes men see their adversaries in
their own image and thus justify them to take those measures which
they imagine their enemies would have taken in their place.[2647]--The
committee of Jacobin leaders states positively that the Court is about
to attack, and, accordingly, has devised "not merely signs of this,
but of the most unmistakable proof."[2648]--"It is the Trojan horse,"
exclaimed Panis; "We are lost if we do not succeed in disemboweling
it.... The bomb explodes on the night of August 9-10... Fifteen
thousand aristocrats stand ready to slaughter all patriots."
Patriots, consequently, attribute to themselves the right to slaughter
aristocrats.--Late in June, in the Minimes section, "a French guardsman
had already determined to kill the King," if the King persisted in his
veto. When the president of the section wanted to expulse the regicide,
it was the latter who was retained and the president was expelled.[2649]
On the 14th of July, the day of the Federation festival, another
predecessor of Louvel and Fieschi, provided with a cutlass, had
introduced himself into the battalion on duty at the palace, for the
same purpose; during the ceremony the crowd warmed up, and, for a
moment, the King owed his life to the firmness of his escort. On the
27th of July, in the garden of the Tuileries, d'Espréménil, the old
Constituent[2650], beaten, slashed, and his clothes torn, pursued like a
stag across the Palais Royal, falls bleedings on a mattress at the gates
of the Treasury.[2651] On the 29th of July, whilst one of Lafayette's
aides, M. Bureau de Pusy, is at the bar of the house, "they try to have
a motion passed in the Palais Royal to parade his head on the end of a
pike."[2652]--At this level of rage and fear, the brutal and the excited
can wait no longer. On the 4th of August,[2653] the Mauconseil section
declares "to the Assembly, to the municipality, and to all the citizens
of Paris, that it no longer recognizes Louis XVI. as King of the
French". Its president, the foreman of a tailor's shop, and its
secretary, employed in the leather market, support their manifesto with
three lines of a tragedy floating vaguely in their minds,[2654] and
name the Boulevard Madeleine St. Honoré as a rendezvous on the following
Sunday for all well-disposed persons. On the 6th of August, Varlet,
a post-office clerk, makes known to the Assembly, in the name of the
petitioners of the Champ de Mars, the program of the faction:
1. the dethronement of the King,
2. the indictment, arrest, and speedy condemnation of Lafayette,
3. the immediate convoking of the primary assemblies,
4. universal suffrage,
5. the discharge of all staff officers,
6. the renewal of the departmental directories,
7. the recall of all ambassadors,
8. the suppression of diplomacy,
9. and a return to the state of nature.
The Girondins may now delay, negotiate, beat about and argue as much as
they please; their hesitation has no other effect that to consign them
into the background, as being lukewarm and timid. Thanks to them, the
(Jacobin) faction now has its deliberative assemblies, its executive
powers, its central seat of government, its enlarged, tried, and ready
army, and, forcibly or otherwise, its program will be carried out.
V.--Evening of August 8.
Session of August 9.--Morning of August 10.--Assembly
purged.
The Assembly must first of all be made to depose the King. Several times
already,[2655] on the 26th of July and August 4, clandestine meetings
had been held where strangers decided the fate of France, and gave
the signal for insurrection.--Restrained with great difficulty, they
consented "to have patience until August 9, at 11 o'clock in the
evening."[2656] On that day the discussion of the dethronement is to
take place in the Assembly, and calculations are made on a favorable
vote under such a positive threat; its reluctance must yield to the
certainty of a military occupation--On the 8th of August, however,
the Assembly refuses, by a majority of two-thirds, to indict the great
enemy, Lafayette. The double amputation essential for State security,
must therefore begin with the destruction of this majority.
The moment Lafayette's acquittal is announced, the galleries, usually
so vociferous, maintain "gloomy silence."[2657] The word of command for
them is to keep themselves in reserve for the streets. One by one the
deputies who voted for Lafayette are pointed out to the mob at the
doors, and a shout is raised, "the rascals, the knaves, the traitors
living on the civil list! Hang them! Kill them! Put an end to them!
Mud, mortar, plaster, stones are thrown at them, and they are severely
pummeled. M. Mézières, in the Rue du Dauphin, is seized by the throat,
and a woman strikes at him, which he parries. In the Rue St. Honoré, a
number of men in red caps surround M. Regnault-Beauceron, and decide to
"string him up at the lantern"; a man in his jacket had already
grabbed him from behind and raised him up, when the grenadiers of
Sainte-Opportune arrive in time to set him free. In the Rue St. Louis,
M. Deuzy, repeatedly struck on the back with stones, has a saber twice
raised over his head. In the Passage des Feuillants, M. Desbois is
pummeled, and a "snuff-box, his pocket-book, and cane" are stolen from
him. In the lobbies of the Assembly, M. Girardin is on the point of
being assassinated.[2658] Eight deputies besides these are pursued, and
take refuge in the guard-room of the Palais Royal. A Federate enters
along with them, and "there, his eyes sparkling with rage and thumping
on the table like a madman," he exclaims to M. Dumolard, who is the
best known:" "If you are unlucky enough to put your feet in the Assembly
again, I'll cut off your head with my sword!" As to the principal
defender of Lafayette, M. Vaublanc, he is assailed three times, but
he is wary enough not to return home; a number of infuriates, however,
invest his house, yelling out that "eighty citizens are to perish by
their hands, and he is one of the first"; a dozen of the gang ascend
to his apartments, rummage them in every corner, make another effort to
find him in the adjoining houses, and, not being able to secure him, try
to find his family; he is notified that, if he returns to his house,
he will be massacred.--In the evening, on the Feuillants terrace, other
deputies are subjected to the same outrages; the gendarmerie tries in
vain to protect them, while the 'commandant of the National Guard, on
leaving his post, is attacked and cut down."[2659]--Meanwhile, some
of the Jacobins in the lobbies "doom the majority of the Assembly to
destruction"; one orator declares that "the people have a right to form
lists of proscription," and the club accordingly decides on printing and
publishing the names of all the deputies who acquitted Lafayette.--Never
was physical constraint displayed and applied with such open
shamelessness.[2660]
On the following day, August 9, armed men gather around the approaches
to the Assembly, and sabers are seen even in the corridors.[2661] The
galleries, more imperious than ever, cheer, and break out in ironic
shouts of triumph and approval every time the attacks of the previous
evening are denounced in the tribune. The president calls the offenders
to order more than twenty times, but his voice and his bell are drowned
in the uproar. It is impossible to express an opinion. Most of the
representatives who were maltreated the evening before, write that they
will not return, while others, who are present, declare that they will
not vote again "if they cannot be secure of freedom of conscience in
their deliberations." At this utterance, which expresses the secret
sentiment of "nearly the whole of the Assembly,"[2662] "all the members
of the 'Right', and many of the 'Left' arise simultaneously and exclaim:
'Yes, yes; we will debate no longer unless we are free!"--As usual,
however, the majority gives away the moment effective measures are to be
adopted; its heart sinks, as it always has done, on being called upon
to act in self-defense, while these official declarations, one on top of
the other, in hiding from it the gravity of the danger, sink it deeper
in its own timidity. At this same session the syndic-attorney of the
department reports that the mob is ready, that 900 armed men had just
entered Paris, that the tocsin would be rung at midnight, and that the
municipality tolerates or favors the insurrection. At this same session,
the Minister of Justice gives notice that "the laws are powerless,"
and that the government is no longer responsible. At this same session,
Pétion, the mayor, almost avowing his complicity, appears at the bar of
the house, and declares positively that he will have nothing to do with
the public forces, because "it would be arming one body of citizens
against another."[2663]--Every support is evidently knocked away.
Feeling that it is abandoned, the National Assembly gives up, and, as
a last expedient, and with a degree of weakness or simplicity which
admirably depicts the legislators of the epoch, it adopts a philosophic
address to the people, "instructing it what to do in the exercise of its
sovereignty."
How this is done, it may see the next morning. At 7 o'clock, a Jacobin
deputy stops in a cab before the door of the Feuillants club; a crowd
gathers around him, and he gives his name, Delmas. The crowd understood
it as Dumas, a well-known Constitutionalist, and, in a rage, drag him
out of the vehicle and knock him down; had not other deputies run up and
given assurances that he was the patriot Delmas, of Toulouse, instead
of "the traitor, Mathieu Dumas," he was a lost man.[2664] Dumas makes
no effort to enter. He finds on the Place Vendôme a second and not less
instructive warning. Some wretches, followed by the usual rabble, carry
about a number of heads on pikes, those probably of the journalist
Suleau, and three others, massacred a quarter of an hour before; "boys
quite young, mere children, play with these heads by tossing them in the
air, and catching them on the ends of their sticks."--There is no doubt
but that the deputies of the "Right" and even the "Center," would do
well to go home and stay there. In fact, they are no longer seen in the
Assembly.[2665] In the afternoon, out of the 630 members still present
the evening before, 346 do not answer the call, while about
thirty others, had either withdrawn before this or sent in their
resignations.[2666] The purging is complete, like that to which
Cromwell, in 1648, subjected the Long Parliament. Henceforth the
Legislative body, reduced to 224 Jacobins or Girondins, with 60
frightened or tractable neutrals, will obey the orders of the street
without any difficulty. A change has come over the spirit of the body
as well as over its composition; it is nothing more now than a servile
instrument in the hands of the seditious, who have mutilated it, and
who, masters of it through a first misdeed, are going to use it to
legalize other crimes.
VI.--Nights of August 9 and 10.
The sections.--Commissioners of the sections at the Hôtel-
de-ville.--The revolutionary Commune is substituted for the
legal Commune.
During the night of the 9th and 10th of August their government forms
itself for action, it has been set up as it will behave, with violence
and fraud.--In vain have they annoyed and worked on the sections
for the past fortnight; they are not yet submissive, only six out of
forty-eight at the present hour, eleven o'clock at night, being found
sufficiently excited or purged to send their commissioners forthwith,
with full power, to the Hôtel-de-ville. The others will follow, but the
majority rests inert or recalcitrant.[2667]--It is necessary, therefore,
to deceive or force this majority, and, to this end, darkness, the late
hour, disorder, dread of the coming day, and the uncertainty of what
to do, are precious auxiliaries. In many of the sections,[2668] the
meetings are already adjourned or deserted; only a few members of the
permanent bureau in the room, with a few men, perhaps asleep, on the
nearly empty benches. An emissary arrives from the insurgent sections,
along with a company of trusty fellows belonging to the quarter, and
cries out, Save the country! The sleepers open their eyes, stretch
themselves, raise their hands, and elect whoever is designated,
sometimes strangers and other unknown individuals, who will be disowned
the coming day at a full meeting of the section. There is no official
report drawn up, no balloting, the course pursued being the most prompt.
At the Arsenal section, six electors present choose three among their
own number to represent 1,400 active citizens. Elsewhere, a throng of
shrews, night-brawlers and dishonorable persons, invade the premises,
chase out the believers in law and order, and win all the desired
appointments.[2669] Other sections consent to elect, but without
consenting to give power of attorney. Several make express reservations,
stipulating that their delegates shall act in concert with the legal
municipality, distrusting the future committee, and declaring in advance
that they will not obey it. A few elect their commissioners only to
obtain information, and, at the same time, to show that they intend
earnestly to stop all rioting.[2670] Finally, at least twenty
sections abstain from or disapprove of the proceedings and send no
delegates.--Never mind, they can be dispensed with. At three o'clock
in the morning, 19 sections, and, at seven o'clock, 24 or 25,[2671] are
represented one way or another at the Town-hall (Hôtel-de-ville), and
this representation forms a central committee. Anyhow, there is nothing
to prevent seventy or eighty subordinate intriguers and desperadoes, who
have slipped in or pushed through, from calling themselves authorized
delegates and ministers plenipotentiary of the entire Paris
population,[2672] and to operate accordingly.--Scarcely are they
installed under the presidency of Huguenin, with Tallien as secretary,
when they issue a summons for "twenty-five armed men from each section,"
five hundred strapping lads, to act as guards and serve as an executive
force.--Against a band of this description the municipal council, in
session in the opposite chamber, is feeble enough. Moreover, the most
moderate and firmest of its members, sent away on purpose, are on
missions to the Assembly, at the palace, and in different quarters of
Paris, while its galleries are crammed with villainous looking men,
posted there to create an uproar, its deliberations being carried
on under menaces of death.--That's why, as the night passes, the
equilibrium between the two assemblages, one legal the other illegal,
facing each other like the two sides of a scale, disappears. Lassitude,
fear, discouragement, desertion, increase on one side, while numbers,
audacity, force and usurpation increase on the other. At length,
the latter wrests from the former all the acts it needs to start the
insurrection and render defense impossible. About six o'clock in the
morning the intruding committee, in the name of the people, ends the
matter by suspending the legitimate council, which it then expels, and
takes possession of its chairs.
The first act of the new sovereign rulers indicates at once what they
mean to do. M. de Mandat, in command of the National guard, summoned to
the Hôtel-de-ville, had come to explain to the council what disposition
he had made of his troops, and what orders he had issued. They seize
him, interrogate him in their turn,[2673] depose him, appoint Santerre
in his place, and, to derive all the benefit they can from his capture,
they order him to withdraw one-half of his men stationed around the
palace. Fully aware of what he was exposed to in this den of thieves, he
nobly refuses; forthwith they consign him to prison, and send him to
the Abbaye "for his greater safety." At these significant words from
Danton,[2674] he is murdered at the door as he leaves by Rossignol, one
of Danton's acolytes, with a pistol-shot at arm's length.--After tragedy
comes comedy. At the repeated entreaties of Pétion, who does not want to
be requisitioned against the rioters,[2675] they send him a guard of 400
men, thus confining him in his own house, and, apparently in spite of
himself.
On one side, sheltered by treachery and, on the other side, by
assassination, the insurrection may now go on in full security in
front of the terrible hypocrite who solemnly complains of his voluntary
captivity, and before the corpse, with shattered brow, lying on the
steps of the Hôtel-de-ville. On the right bank of the river, the
battalions of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and, on the left, those of the
Faubourg Saint-Marcel, the Bretons, and the Marseilles band, march forth
as freely as if going to parade. Measures of defense are frustrated
by the murder of the commanding general, and by the mayor's duplicity;
there is not resistance on guarded spots, at the arcade Saint-Jean,
the passages of the bridges, along the quays, and in the court of the
Louvre. An advance guard of the mob, women, children, and men, armed
with cutters, cudgels, and pikes, spread over the abandoned Carrousel,
and, towards eight o'clock, the advance column, led by Westerman,
appears in front of the palace.
VII.--August 10.
The King's forces.--Resistance abandoned.--The King in the
National Assembly.--Conflict at the palace and discharge of
the Swiss Guard.--The palace evacuated by the King's order.
--The massacres.--The enslaved Assembly and its decrees.
If the King had wanted to fight, he might still have defended himself,
saved himself, and even been victorious.[2676]--In the Tuileries, 950 of
the Swiss Guard and 200 gentlemen stood ready to die for him to the last
man. Around the Tuileries, two or three thousand National Guard,
the élite of the Parisian population, had just cheered him as he
passed.[2677] "Hurrah for the King! Hurrah for Louis XVI.! He is our
King and we want no other; we want him only! Down with the rioters! Down
with the Jacobins! We will defend him unto death! Let him put himself
at our head! Hurrah for the Nation, the Law, the Constitution, and
the King, which are all one! If the gunners were silent, and seemed
ill-disposed,[2678] it was simply necessary to disarm them suddenly,
and hand over their pieces to loyal men. Four thousand rifles and eleven
pieces of artillery, protected by the walls of the courts and by the
thick masonry of the palace, were certainly sufficient against the nine
or ten thousand Jacobins in Paris, most of them pikemen, badly led by
improvised or rebellious battalion officers,[2679] and, still worse,
commanded by their new general, Santerre, who, always cautious, kept
himself aloof in the Hôtel-de-ville, out of harm's way. The only
staunch men in the Carrousel were the eight hundred men from Brest and
Marseilles; the rest consisted of a rabble like that of July 14, October
5, and June 20;[2680] the palace, says Napoleon Bonaparte, was attacked
by the vilest canaille, professional rioters, Maillard's band, and the
bands of Lazowski, Fournier, and Théroigne, by all the assassins, indeed
of the previous night and day, and of the following day, which species
of combatants, as was proved by the event, would have scattered at
the first discharge of a cannon.--But, with the governing as with the
governed, all notion of the State was lost, the former through humanity
become a duty, and the latter through insubordination erected into a
right. At the close of the eighteenth century, in the upper as well as
in the middle class, there was a horror of blood;[2681] refined social
ways, coupled with an idyllic imagination, had softened the militant
disposition. Everywhere the magistrates had forgotten that the
maintenance of society and of civilization is a benefit of infinitely
greater importance than the lives of a parcel of maniacs and
malefactors; that the prime object of government, as well as of a
police, is the preservation of order by force; that a gendarme is not
a philanthropist; that, if attacked on his post, he must use his sword,
and that, in sheathing it for fear of wounding his aggressors, he fails
to do his duty.
This time again, in the court of the Carrousel, the magistrates on the
spot, finding that "their responsibility is insupportable," concern
themselves only with how to "avoid the effusion of blood;" it is with
regret, and this they state to the troops, "in faltering tones," that
they proclaim martial law.[2682] They "forbid them to attack," merely
"authorizing them to repel force with force;" in other words, they order
them to stand up to the first fire; "you are not to fire until you are
fired upon."--Still better, they go from company to company, "openly
declaring that opposition to such a large and well-armed assemblage
would be folly, and that it would be a very great misfortune to attempt
it."--"I repeat to you," said Leroux, "that a defense seems to me
madness."--Such is the way in which, for more than an hour, they
encourage the National Guard. "All I ask," says Leroux again, "is that
you wait a little longer. I hope that we shall induce the King to yield
to the National Assembly."--Always the same tactics: hand the fortress
and the general over rather than fire on the mob. To this end they
return to the King, with Roederer at their head, and renew their efforts:
"Sire," says Roederer, "time presses, and we ask you to consent to
accompany us."--For a few moments, the last and most solemn of the
monarchy, the King hesitates.[2683] His good sense, probably,
enabled him to see that a retreat was abdication; but his phlegmatic
understanding is at first unable to clearly define its consequences;
moreover, his optimism had never explored the vastness of the stupidity
of the people, nor sounded the depths of human malice and spite; he
cannot imagine that slander may transform his determination not to shed
blood into a desire to shed blood.[2684] Besides, he is bound by his
past, by his habit of always yielding; by his determination, declared
and maintained for the past three years, never to cause civil war; by
his obstinate humanitarianism, and especially by his religious goodwill.
He has systematically extinguished in himself the animal instinct of
resistance, the flash of anger in all of us which starts up under unjust
and brutal aggressions; the Christian has supplanted the King; he is no
longer aware that duty obliges him to be a man of the sword that, in his
surrender, he surrenders the State, and that to yield like a lamb is to
lead all honest people, along with himself, to the slaughterhouse. "Let
us go," said he, raising his right hand; "we will give, since it is
necessary, one more proof of our self-sacrifice."[2685] Accompanied
by his family and Ministers, he sets out between two lines of National
Guards and the Swiss Guard,[2686] and reaches the Assembly, which sends
a deputation to meet him; entering the chamber he says: "I come here to
prevent a great crime. "--No pretext, indeed, for a conflict now exists.
An assault on the insurgent side is useless, since the monarch, with all
belonging to him and his government, have left the palace. On the other
side, the garrison will not begin the fight; diminished by 150 Swiss and
nearly all the grenadiers of the Filles-Saint-Thomas, who served as the
King's escort to the Assembly, it is reduced to a few gentlemen, 750
Swiss, and about a hundred National Guards; the others, on learning
that the King is going, consider their services at an end and
disperse.[2687]--All seems to be over in the sacrifice of royalty. Louis
XVI. imagines that the Assembly, at the worst, will suspend him from
his functions, and that he will return to the Tuileries as a private
individual. On leaving the palace, indeed, he orders his valet to
keep up the service until he himself returns from the National
Assembly.[2688]
He did not count on the exigencies, blindness and disorders of the riot.
Threatened by the Jacobin gunners remaining with their artillery in the
inside courts, the gatekeepers open the gates. The insurgents rush
in, fraternise with the gunners, reach the vestibule, ascend the grand
staircase, and summon the Swiss to surrender.[2689]--These show no
hostile spirit; many of them, as a mark of good humor, throw packets of
cartridges out of the windows; some even go so far as to let themselves
be embraced and led away. The regiment, however, faithful to its orders,
will not yield to force.[2690] "We are Swiss," replies the sergeant,
Blaser; "the Swiss do not part with their arms but with their lives. We
think that we do not merit such an insult. If the regiment is no longer
wanted, let it be legally discharged. But we will not leave our post,
nor will we let our arms be taken from us." The two bodies of troops
remain facing each other on the staircase for three-quarters of an hour,
almost intermingled, one silent and the other excited, turbulent, and
active, with all the ardor and lack of discipline peculiar to a popular
gathering, each insurgent striving apart, and in his own way, to
corrupt, intimidate, or constrain the Swiss Guards. Granier, of
Marseilles, at the head of the staircase, holds two of them at arms'
length, trying in a friendly manner to draw them down.[2691] At the foot
of the staircase the crowd is shouting and threatening; lighter men,
armed with boat-hooks, harpoon the sentinels by their shoulder-straps,
and pull down four or five, like so many fishes, amid shouts of
laughter.--Just at this moment a pistol goes off; nobody being able to
tell which party fired it.[2692] The Swiss, firing from above, clean out
the vestibule and the courts, rush down into the square and seize
the cannon; the insurgents scatter and fly out of range. The bravest,
nevertheless, rally behind the entrances of the houses on the Carrousel,
throw cartridges into the courts of the small buildings and set them
on fire. During another half-hour, under the dense smoke of the first
discharge and of the burning buildings, both sides fire haphazard, while
the Swiss, far from giving way, have scarcely lost a few men, when a
messenger from the King arrives, M. d'Hervilly, who orders in his name
the firing to cease, and the men to return to their barracks.
Slowly and regularly they form in line and retire along the broad alley
of the garden. At the sight of these foreigners, however, in red coats,
who had just fired on Frenchmen, the guns of the battalion stationed on
the terraces go off of their own accord, and the Swiss column divides in
two. One body of 250 men turns to the right, reaches the Assembly, lays
down its arms at the King's order, and allows itself to be shut up
in the Feuillants church. The others are annihilated on crossing the
garden, or cut down on the Place Louis XV. by the mounted gendarmerie.
No quarter is given. The warfare is that of a mob, not civilized war,
but primitive war, that of barbarians. In the abandoned palace into
which the insurgents entered five minutes after the departure of the
garrison,[2693] they kill the wounded, the two Swiss surgeons attending
to them,[2694] the Swiss who had not fired a gun, and who, in the
balcony on the side of the garden, "cast off their cartridge-boxes,
sabers, coats, and hats, and shout: 'Friends, we are with you, we are
Frenchmen, we belong to the nation!'"[2695] They kill the Swiss, armed
or unarmed, who remain at their posts in the apartments. They kill the
Swiss gate-keepers in their boxes. They kill everybody in the kitchens,
from the head cook down to the pot boys.[2696] The women barely escape.
Madame Campan, on her knees, seized by the back, sees an uplifted saber
about to fall on her, when a voice from the foot of the staircase calls
out: "What are you doing there? The women are not to be killed!" "Get
up, you hussy, the nation forgives you!"--To make up for this the nation
helps itself and indulges itself to its heart's content in the palace
which now belongs to it. Some honest persons do, indeed, carry money and
valuables to the National Assembly, but others pillage and destroy all
that they can.[2697] They shatter mirrors, break furniture to pieces,
and throw clocks out of the window; they shout the Marseilles hymn,
which one of the National Guards accompanies on a harpsichord,[2698] and
descend to the cellars, where they gorge themselves. "For more than
a fortnight," says an eye witness,[2699] "one walked on fragments of
bottles." In the garden, especially, "it might be said that they had
tried to pave the walks with broken glass."--Porters are seen seated on
the throne in the coronation robes; a trollop occupies the Queen's bed;
it is a carnival in which unbridled base and cruel instincts find plenty
of good forage and abundant litter. Runaways come back after the victory
and stab the dead with their pikes. Nicely dressed prostitutes fooling
around with naked corpses.[26100] And, as the destroyers enjoy their
work, they are not disposed to be disturbed in it. In the courts of the
Carrousel, where 1800 feet of building are burning, the firemen try four
times to extinguish the fire; "they are shot at, and threatened with
being pitched into the flames,"[26101] while petitioners appear at
the bar of the Assembly, and announce in a threatening tone that the
Tuileries are blazing, and shall blaze until the dethronement becomes a
law.
The poor Assembly, become Girondist through its late mutilation, strives
in vain to arrest the downhill course of things, and maintain, as it has
just sworn to do, "the constituted authorities";[26102] it strives, at
least, to put Louis XVI. in the Luxembourg palace, to appoint a tutor
for the Dauphin, to keep the ministers temporarily in office, and to
save all prisoners, and those who walk the streets. Equally captive, and
nearly as prostrate as the King himself; the Assembly merely serves as
a recording office for the popular will, that very morning furnishing
evidence of the value which the armed commonalty attaches to its
decrees. That morning murders were committed at its door, in contempt of
its safe conduct; at eight o'clock Suleau and three others, wrested from
their guards, are cut down under its windows. In the afternoon, from
sixty to eighty of the unarmed Swiss still remaining in the church
of the Feuillants are taken out to be sent to the Hôtel-de-ville,
and massacred on the way at the Place de Grève. Another detachment,
conducted to the section of the Roule, is likewise disposed of in the
same way.[26103] Carle, at the head of the gendarmerie, is called out
of the Assembly and assassinated on the Place Vendôme, and his head is
carried about on a pike. The founder of the old monarchical club, M. de
Clermont-Tonnerre, withdrawn from public life for two years past, and
quietly passing along the streets, is recognized, dragged through the
gutter and cut to pieces.--After such warnings (murder and pillage) the
Assembly can only obey, and, as usual, conceal its submission beneath
sonorous words. If the dictatorial committee, self-imposed at the
Hôtel-de-ville, still condescends to keep it alive, it is owing to a new
investiture,[26104] and by declaring to it that it must not meddle with
its doings now or in the future. Let it confine itself to its function,
that of rendering decrees made by the faction. Accordingly, like fruit
falling from a tree vigorously shaken, these decrees rattle down, one
after another, into the hands that await them,[26105]
1. the suspension of the King,
2. the convoking of a national convention,
3. electors and the eligible exempted from all property qualifications,
4. an indemnity for displaced electors,
5. the term of Assemblies left to the decision of the electors,[26106]
6. the removal and arrest of the late ministers,
7. the re-appointment of Servan, Clavières and Roland,
8. Danton as Minister of Justice,
9. the recognition of the usurping Commune,
10. Santerre confirmed in his new rank,
11. the municipalities empowered to look after general safety,
12. the arrest of suspicious persons confided to all well-disposed
citizens,[26107]
13. domiciliary visits prescribed for the discovery of arms and
ammunition,[26108]
14. all the justices of Paris to be re-elected by those within their
jurisdiction,
15. all officers of the gendarmerie subject to re-election by their
soldiers,[26109]
16. thirty sous per diem for the Marseilles troops from the day of their
arrival,
17. a court-martial against the Swiss,
18. a tribunal for the dispatch of justice against the vanquished of
August 10, and a quantity of other decrees of a still more important
bearing:
19. the suspension of the commissioners appointed to enforce the
execution of the law in civil and criminal courts,[26110]
20. the release of all persons accused or condemned for military
insubordination, for press offenses and pillaging of grain,[26111]
21. the partition of communal possessions,[26112]
22. the confiscation and sale of property belonging to émigrés,[26113]
23. the relegation of their fathers, mothers, wives and children into
the interior,
24. the banishment or transportation of unsworn ecclesiastics,[26114]
25. the establishment of easy divorce at two months' notice and on
demand of one of the parties,[26115] in short, every measure is
taken which tend to disturb property, break up the family, persecute
conscience, suspend the law, pervert justice, and rehabilitate crime.
laws are promulgated to deliver:
* the judicial system,
* the full control of the nation,
* the selection of the members of the future omnipotent Assembly,
* in short, the entire government,
to an autocratic, violent minority, which, having risked all to grab the
dictatorship, dares all to keep it.[26116]
VIII.--State of Paris in the Interregnum.
The mass of the population.--Subaltern Jacobins.--The
Jacobin leaders.
Let us stop a moment to contemplate this great city and its new
rulers.--From afar, Paris seems a club of 700,000 fanatics, vociferating
and deliberating on the public squares; near by, it is nothing of the
sort. The slime, on rising from the bottom, has become the surface,
and given its color to the stream; but the human stream flows in its
ordinary channel, and, under this turbid exterior, remains about the
same as it was before. It is a city of people like ourselves,
governed, busy, and fond of amusement. To the great majority, even in
revolutionary times, private life, too complex and absorbing, leaves but
an insignificant corner for public affairs. Through routine and through
necessity, manufacturing, display of wares, selling, purchasing, keeping
accounts, trades, and professions, continue as usual. The clerk goes
to his office, the workman to his shop, the artisan to his loft, the
merchant to his warehouse, the professional to his cabinet, and the
official to his duty;[26117] they are devoted, first of all, to their
pursuits, to their daily bread, to the discharge of their obligations,
to their own advancement, to their families, and to their pleasures; to
provide for these things the day is not too long. Politics only briefly
distract them, and then rather out of curiosity, like a play one
applauds or hisses in his seat without stepping upon the stage.--"The
declaration that the country is in danger," says many eye
witnesses,[26118] "has made no change in the physiognomy of Paris. There
are the same amusements, the same gossip.... The theaters are full as
usual. The wine-shops and places of diversion overflow with the people,
National Guards, and soldiers.... The fashionable world enjoys its
pleasure-parties,"--"The day after the decree, the effect of the
ceremony, so skillfully managed, is very slight. "The National Guard
in the procession, writes a patriotic journalist,[26119] "first shows
indifference and even boredom"; it is exasperated with night watches
and patrol duty; they probably tell each others that in parading for the
nation, one finds no time to work for one's self.--A few days after this
the manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick "produces no sensation whatever.
People laugh at it. Only the newspapers and their readers are familiar
with it... . The mass know nothing about it. Nobody fears the coalition
nor foreign troops."[26120]--On the 10th of August, outside the theater
of the combat, all is quiet in Paris. People walk about and chat in
the streets as usual."[26121]--On the 19th of August, Moore, the
Englishman,[26122] sees, with astonishment, the heedless crowd filling
the Champs Elysées, the various diversions, the air of a fête, the
countless small shops in which refreshments are sold accompanied with
songs and music, and the quantities of pantomimes and marionettes. "Are
these people as happy as they seem to be?" he asks of a Frenchman along
with him.--"They are as jolly as gods!"--"Do you think the Duke of
Brunswick is ever in their heads?"--"Monsieur, you may be sure of this,
that the Duke of Brunswick is the last man they think of."
Such is the unconcern or light-heartedness of the gross, egoistic mass,
otherwise busy, and always passive under any government whatever it may
be, a veritable flock of sheep, allowing government to do as it
pleases, provided it does not hinder it from browsing and capering as it
chooses.--As to the men of sensibility who love their country, they are
still less troublesome, for they are gone or going (to the army), often
at the rate of a thousand and even two thousand a day, ten thousand in
the last week of July,[26123] fifteen thousand in the first two weeks
of September,[26124] in all perhaps 40,000 volunteers furnished by
the capital alone and who, with their fellows proportionate in number
supplied by the departments, are to be the salvation of France.--Through
this departure of the worthy, and this passivity of the flock,
Paris belongs to the fanatics among the population. "These are the
sans-culottes," wrote the patriotic Palloy, "the scum and riffraff of
Paris, and I glory in belonging to that class which has put down the
so-called honest folks."[26125]--"Three thousand workmen," says the
Girondist Soulavie, later, "made the Revolution of the 10th of August,
against the kingdom of the Feuillants, the majority of the capital and
against the Legislative Assembly."[26126] Workmen, day laborers, and
petty shop-keepers, not counting women, common vagabonds and regular
bandits, form, indeed, one-twentieth of the adult male population of the
city, about 9,000 spread over all sections of Paris, the only ones to
vote and act in the midst of universal stupor and indifference.--We find
in the Rue de Seine, for example, seven of them, Lacaille, keeper of a
roasting-shop; Philippe, "a cattle-breeder, who leads around she-asses
for consumptives," now president of the section, and soon to become one
of the Abbaye butchers; Guérard, "a Rouen river-man who has abandoned
the navigation of the Seine on a large scale and keeps a skiff, in which
he ferries people over the river from the Pont du Louvre to the Quai
Mazarin," and four characters of the same stamp. Their energy, however,
replaces their lack of education and numerical inferiority. One day,
Guérard, on passing M. Hua, the deputy, tells him in the way of a
warning, "You big rascal, you were lucky to have other people with
you. If you had been alone, I would have capsized my boat, and had the
pleasure of drowning a blasted aristocrat!" These are the "matadors
of the quarter".[26127]--Their ignorance does not trouble them; on
the contrary, they take pride in coarseness and vulgarity. One of the
ordinary speechmakers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Gouchon, a designer
for calicos, comes to the bar of the Assembly, "in the name of the men
of July 14 and Augusts 10," to glorify the political reign of brutal
incapacity; according to him, it is more enlightened than that of the
cultivated:[26128] "those great geniuses graced with the fine title of
Constitutionalists are forced to do justice to men who never studied the
art of governing elsewhere than in the book of experience.... Consulting
customs and not principles, these clever people have for a long period
been busy with the political balance of things; we have found it without
looking for it in the heart of man: Form a government which will place
the poor above their feeble resources and the rich below their means,
and the balance will be perfect." [26129]
This is more than clear, their declared purpose is a complete leveling,
not alone of political rights, but, again, and especially, of conditions
and fortunes; they promise themselves "absolute equality, real
equality," and, still better, "the magistracy and all government
powers."[26130] France belongs to them, if they are bold enough to seize
hold of it.--And, on the other hand, should they miss their prey, they
feel themselves lost, for the Brunswick manifesto,[26131] which had made
no impression on the public, remains deeply impressed in their minds.
They apply its threats to themselves, while their imagination, as usual,
translates it into a specific legend:[26132] all the inhabitants
of Paris are to be led out on the plain of Saint-Denis, and there
decimated; previous to this, the most notorious patriots will be singled
out together with forty or fifty market-women and broken on the wheel.
Already, on the 11th of August, a rumor is current that 800 men of the
late royal guards are ready to make a descent on Paris;[26133] that very
day the dwelling of Beaumarchais is ransacked for seven hours;[26134]
the walls are pierced, the privies sounded, and the garden dug down to
the rock. The same search is repeated in the adjoining house. The women
are especially "enraged at not finding anything," and wish to renew the
attempt, swearing that they will discover where things are hidden in
ten minutes. The nightmare is evidently too much for these unballasted
minds. They break down under the weight of their accidental kingship,
their inflamed pride, extravagant desires, and intense and silent fears
which form in them that morbid and evil concoction which, in democracy
as well as in a monarchy, fashions a Nero.[26135]
Their leaders, who are even more upset, conceited, and despotic, have no
scruples holding them back, for the most noteworthy are corrupt, acting
alone or as leaders. Of the three chiefs of the old municipality,
Pétion, the mayor, actually in semi-retirement, but verbally respected,
is set aside and considered as an old decoration. The other two remain
active and in office, Manuel,[26136] the syndic-attorney, son of
a porter, a loud-talking, untalented bohemian, stole the private
correspondence of Mirabeau from a public depository, falsified it, and
sold it for his own benefit. Danton,[26137] Manuel's deputy, faithless
in two ways, receives the King's money to prevent the riot, and makes
use of it to urge it on.--Varlet, "that extraordinary speech-maker, led
such a foul and prodigal life as to bring his mother in sorrow to
the grave; afterwards he spent what was left, and soon had
nothing."[26138]--Others not only lacked honor but even common honesty.
Carra, with a seat in the secret Directory of the Federates, and who
drew up the plan of the insurrection, had been condemned by the Mâcon
tribunals to two years' imprisonment for theft and burglary.[26139]
Westermann, who led the attacking column, had stolen a silver dish, with
a coat of arms on it, from Jean Creux, keeper of a restaurant, rue des
Poules, and was twice sent away from Paris for swindling.[26140] Panis,
chief of the Committee of Supervision,[26141] was turned out of the
Treasury Department, where his uncle was a sub cashier, in 1774, for
robbery. His colleague, Sergent, appropriates to himself "three
gold watches, an agate ring, and other jewels," left with him on
deposit.[26142] "Breaking seals, false charges, breaches of trust,"
embezzlements, are familiar transactions. In their hands piles of silver
plate and 1,100,000 francs in gold are to disappear.[26143] Among the
members of the new Commune, Huguenin, the president, a clerk at
the barriers, is a brazen embezzler.[26144] Rossignol, a journeyman
jeweller, implicated in an assassination, is at this moment subject
to judicial prosecution.[26145] Hébert, a journalistic garbage bag,
formerly check-taker in a theatre, is turned away from the Variétés for
larceny.[26146] Among men of action, Fournier, the American, Lazowski,
and Maillard are not only murderers, but likewise robbers,[26147] while,
by their side, arises the future general of the Paris National Guard,
Henriot, at first a domestic in the family of an attorney who turned
him out for theft, then a tax-clerk, again turned adrift for theft, and,
finally, a police spy, and still incarcerated in the Bicêtre prison
for another theft, and, at last, a battalion officer, and one of the
September executioners.[26148]--Simultaneously with the bandits and
rascals, monstrous maniacs come out of their holes. De Sades,[26149] who
lived the life of "Justine" before he wrote it, and whom the Revolution
delivered from the Bastille, is secretary of the section of the Place
Vendôme. Marat, the homicidal monomaniac, constitutes himself, after
the 23rd of August, official journalist at the Hôtel-de-ville, political
advisor and consciousness of the new Commune, and the obsessive plan,
which he preaches for three years, is merely an instant and direct
wholesale butchery.
"Give me," said he to Barbaroux,[26150] "two hundred Neapolitans armed
with daggers, and with only a hand-kerchief on their left arms for a
buckler, and I will overrun France and build the Revolution."
According to him it is necessary to do away with 260,000 men "on humane
grounds," for, unless this is done, there is no safety for the rest.
"The National Assembly may still save France; let it decree that all
aristocrats shall wear a blue ribbon, and the moment that three of them
are seen in company, let them be hung."
Another way would be
"to lay in wait in dark streets and at corners for the royalists and
Feuillants, and cut their throats. Should ten patriots happen to be
killed among a hundred men, what does it matter? It is only ninety for
ten, which prevents mistakes. Fall upon those who own carriages, employ
valets, wear silk coats, or go to the theatres. You may be sure that
they are aristocrats."
The Jacobin proletariat has obviously found the leadership that suits
them. They will get on with each other without difficulty. In order
that this spontaneous massacre may become an administrative measure, the
Neros of the gutter have but to await the word of command from the Neros
of the Hôtel-de-ville.
*****
[Footnote 2601: An expression of Lafayette's in his address to the
Assembly.]
[Footnote 2602:Lafayette, "Mémoires," I. 452.--Malouet (II. 213) states
that there were seventy.]
[Footnote 2603:Cf., for example, "Archives Nationales," A.F. II.116.
Petition of 228 notables of Montargis.]
[Footnote 2604: Petition of the 20,000, so-called, presented by
Messrs. Guillaume and Dupont de Nemours.--Cf.. Mortimer-Ternaux, I.
278.--According to Buchez et Roux, the petition containing only 7,411
names.]
[Footnote 2605: Mortimer-Ternaux, I.277.]
[Footnote 2606: Moniteur, XIII. 89. The act (July 7) is drawn up with
admirable precision and force. On comparing it with the vague, turgid
exaggerations of their adversaries, it seems to measure the intellectual
distance between the two parties.]
[Footnote 2607: 339 against 224--Roederer ("Chronique des cinquante
jours," p.79). "A strong current of opinion by a majority of the
inhabitants of Paris sets in favor of the King."--C. Desmoulins; "That
class of petty traders and shopkeepers, who are more afraid of the
revolutionaries than of so many Uhlans... "]
[Footnote 2608: Mortimer-Ternaux, I. 236. Letter of Roederer to the
president of the National Assembly, June 25. "Mr. President, I have the
honor to inform the Assembly that an armed mob is marching towards the
Château."]
[Footnote 2609: Mortimer-Ternaux, I. 245, 246.--II. 81, 131, 148, 170.]
[Footnote 2610: The murder of M. Duhamel, sub-lieutenant of the national
guard.]
[Footnote 2611: Letter of Vergniaud and Guadet to the painter Boze (in
the "Mémoires de Dumouriez").--Roederer, "Chronique des cinquante jours,"
295.--Bertrand de Molleville, "Mémoires," III. 29.]
[Footnote 2612: Moniteur, XIII. 155 (session of July
16).--Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 69. "Favored by you," says Manuel, "all
citizens are entitled to visit the first functionary of the nation...
The prince's dwelling should be open, like a church. Fear of the people
is an insult to the people. If Louis XVI. possessed the soul of a Marcus
Aurelius, he would have descended into his gardens and tried to
console a hundred thousand beings, on account of the slowness of the
Revolution... Never had there been fewer thieves in the Tuileries than
on that day; for the courtiers had fled...The red cap was an honor to
Louis XVI's head, and ought to be his crown." At this solemn moment the
fraternization of the king with the people took place, and "the next day
the same king betrayed, calumniated, and disgraced the people!" Manuel's
rigmarole surpasses all that can be imagined. "After this there arises
in the panelings of the Louvre, at the confluence of the civil list,
another channel, which leads through the shades below to Pétion's
dungeon... The department, in dealing a blow at the municipality,
explains how, at the banquet of the Law, it represents the Law in the
form of a crocodile, etc."]
[Footnote 2613: Moniteur, XIII. 93 (session of July 9);--27 (session of
July 2).]
[Footnote 2614: Moniteur, XII. 751 (session of June 24); XIII.33
(session of July 3).]
[Footnote 2615: Moniteur, XIII. 224 (session of July 23). Two unsworn
priests had just been massacred at Bordeaux and their heads carried
through the streets on pikes. Ducos adds: "Since the executive power has
put its veto on laws repressing fanaticism, popular executions begin to
be repeated. If the courts do not render justice, etc."--Ibid., XIII.
301 (session of July 31).]
[Footnote 2616: Moniteur, XIII. 72 (session of July 7). The king's
speech to the Assembly after the Lamourette kiss. "I confess to you, M.
President, that I was very anxious for the deputation to arrive, that I
might hasten to the Assembly."]
[Footnote 2617: Moniteur, XIII. 313 (session of Aug. 3). The declaration
read in the king's name must be weighed sentence by sentence; it sums
up his conduct with perfect exactness and thus ends: "What are personal
dangers to a king, from whom they would take the love of his people?
This is what affects me most. The day will come, perhaps, when the
people will know how much I prize its welfare, how much this has always
been my concern and my first need. What sorrows would disappear at the
slightest sign of its return!"]
[Footnote 2618: Moniteur, XIII. 33, 56 bis 85, 97 (sessions of July 3,
5, 6 and 9).]
[Footnote 2619: Moniteur, XIII. 26, 170, 273 (sessions of July 12, 17,
28).--Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 122 (session of July 23): Addresses of
the municipal council of Marseilles, of the federates, of the Angers
petitioners, of the Charente volunteers, etc. "A hereditary monarchy is
opposed to the Rights of Man. Pass the act of dethronement and France
is saved... Be brave, let the sword of the law fall on a perjured
functionary and conspirator! Lafayette is the most contemptible, the
guiltiest,... the most infamous of the assassins of the people," etc.]
[Footnote 2620: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 126.--Bertrand de Molleville, III.
294.]
[Footnote 2621: Moniteur, XIII. 325 (session of Aug. 3).]
[Footnote 2622: Moniteur, XII. 738; XII. 340.]
[Footnote 2623: Moniteur, XIII. 170, 171, 187, 208, 335 (sessions of
July 17, 18, and 23, and Aug. 5).]
[Footnote 2624: Moniteur, XIII. 187 (session of July 18). "The galleries
applaud. The Assembly murmurs."--208 (July 21). "Murmuring, shouts, and
cries of Down with the speaker! from the galleries. The president calls
the house to order five times, but always fruitlessly."--224 (July
23). "The galleries applaud; long continued murmurs are heard in the
Assembly."]
[Footnote 2625: Buzot, "Mémoires" (Ed. Dauban, 83 and 84). "The majority
of the French people yearned for royalty and the constitution of 1790...
It was at Paris particularly that this desire governed the general plan,
the discussion of it being the least feared in special conversations
and in private society. There were only a few noble-minded, superior
men that were worthy of being republicans... The rest desired the
constitution of 1791, and spoke of the republicans only as one speaks of
very honest maniacs."]
[Footnote 2626: Duvergier, "Collection des lois et décrets," May 29,
1792; July 15, 16, and 18; July 6-20.]
[Footnote 2627: Moniteur, XIII. 25 (session of July 1). Petition of 150
active citizens of the Bonne-Nouvelle section.]
[Footnote 2628: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 194. Buchez et Roux, XVI. 253. The
decree of dismissal was not passed until the 12th of August, but after
the 31St of July the municipality demanded it and during the following
days several Jacobin grenadiers go to the National Assembly, trample on
their bearskin hats and put on the red cap of liberty.]
[Footnote 2629: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 192 (municipal action of Aug. 5).]
[Footnote 2630: Decree of July 2.]
[Footnote 2631: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 129.--Buchez et Roux, XV. 458.
According to the report of the Minister of War, read the 30th of July,
at the evening session, 5,314 department federates left Paris between
July 14 and 30. Pétion wrote that the levy of federates then in Paris
amounted to 2,960, "of which 2,032 were getting ready to go to the camp
at Soissons."--A comparison of these figures leads to the approximate
number that I have adopted]
[Footnote 2632: Buchez et Roux, XVI. 120, 133 (session of the Jacobins,
Aug. 6). The federates "resolved to watch the Château, each taking
a place in the battalions respectively of the sections in which they
lodge, and many incorporated themselves with the battalions of the
faubourg St Antoine."]
[Footnote 2633: Mercure de France, April 14, 1793.--" The Revolution,"
I. p. 332.]
[Footnote 2634: Barbaroux, "Mémoires," 37-40.--Lauront-Lautard,
"Marseilles depuis 1789 jusqu'à 1815," I. 134. "The mayor, Mourdeille,"
who had recruited them, "was perhaps very glad to get rid of them."--On
the composition of this group and on the previous rôle of Rebecqui, see
chapter VI.]
[Footnote 2635: Buchez et Roux, XVI. 197 and following
pages.--Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 148 (the grenadiers numbered only
166).--Moniteur, XIII. 310 (session of Aug. 1). Address of the
grenadiers: "They swore on their honor that they did not draw their
swords until after being threatened for a quarter of an hour, then
insulted and humiliated, until forced to defend their lives against
a troop of brigands armed with pistols, and some of them with
carbines."--" The reading of this memorandum is often interrupted
by hooting from the galleries, in spite of the president's
orders."--Hooting again, when they file out of the chamber.]
[Footnote 2636: The lack of men of action greatly embarrassed the
Jacobin party. ("Correspondance de Mirabeau et du Comte de la Marck,"
II. 326.) Letter of M. de Montmorin, July 13, 1792. On the disposition
of the people of Paris, wearied and worn out "to excess." "They will
take no side, either for or against the king... They no longer stir for
any purpose; riots are wholly factitious. This is so right that they are
obliged to bring men from the South to get them up. Nearly all of those
who forced the gates of the Tuileries, or rather, who got inside of them
on the 20th of June, were outsiders or onlookers, got together at the
sight of such a lot of pikes and red caps, etc. The cowards ran at the
slightest indication of presenting arms, which was done by a portion
of the national guard on the arrival of a deputation from the National
Assembly, their leaders being obliged to encourage them by telling them
that they were not to be fired at."]
[Footnote 2637: Buchez et Roux, XVI. 447. "Chronique des cinquante
jours," by Roederer.]
[Footnote 2638: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 378.-127 Jacobins of Arras, led by
Geoffroy and young Robespierre, declare to the Directory that they mean
to come to its meetings and follow its deliberations. "It is time that
the master should keep his eye on his agents." The Directory, therefore,
resigns (July 4, 1792).--Ibid., 462 (report of Leroux, municipal
officer). The Paris municipal council, on the night of August 9-10
deliberates under threats of death and the furious shouts of the
galleries.]
[Footnote 2639: Duvergier's "Collection of Laws and Decrees," July 4,
5-8, 11-12, 25-28.--Buchez et Roux, XVI. 250. The section of the
Theatre Français (of which Danton is president and Chaumette and Momoro
secretaries) thus interpret the declaration of the country being in
danger. "After a declaration of the country being in danger by the
representatives of the people, it is natural that the people itself
should take back its sovereign supervision."]
[Footnote 2640: Schmidt, "Tableaux de la Révolution," I. 99-100. Report
to Roland, Oct. 29, 1792.]
[Footnote 2641: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 199.--Buchez et Roux, XVI.
320.--Moniteur, XIII. 336 (session of Aug. 5). Speech by Collot
d'Herbois.]
[Footnote 2642: Moniteur, XI. 20, session of Feb. 4. At this meeting
Gorguereau, reporter of the committee on legislation, had already stated
that "The authors of these multiplied addresses seem to command rather
than demand... It is ever the same sections or the same individuals who
deceive you in bringing to you their own false testimony for that of the
capital."--"Down with the reporter! From the galleries."--Ibid., XIII.
93, session of July 11. M. Gastelier: "Addresses in the name of the
people are constantly read to you, which are not even the voice of one
section. We have seen the same individual coming three times a week to
demand something in the name of sovereignty." (Shouts of down! down! in
the galleries.) Ibid., 208, session of July 21. M. Dumolard: "You
must distinguish between the people of Paris and these subaltern
intriguers... these habitual oracles of the cafés and public squares,
whose equivocal existence has for a long time occupied the attention and
claimed the supervision of the police." (Down with the speaker! murmurs
and hooting in the galleries).-Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 398. Protests of
the arsenal section, read by Lavoisier (the chemist): "The caprice of a
knot of citizens (thus) becomes the desire of an immense population."]
[Footnote 2643: Buchez et Roux, XVI. 251.--Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 239
and 243. The central bureau is first opened in "the building of the
Saint-Esprit, in the second story, near the passage communicating with
the common dwelling." Afterwards the commissioners of the section occupy
another room in the Hôtel-de-ville, nearly joining the throne-room,
where the municipal council is holding its sessions. During the night
of August 9-10 both councils sit four hours simultaneously within a few
steps of each other.]
[Footnote 2644: Robespierre, "Seventh letter to his constituents," says:
"The sections... have been busy for more than a fortnight getting ready
for the last Revolution."]
[Footnote 2645: Robespierre, "Seventh letter to his
constituents"--Malouet, II. 233, 234.--Roederer, "Chronique des cinquante
jours."]
[Footnote 2646: Moniteur, XIII. 318, 319. The petition is drawn up
apparently by people who are beside themselves. "If we did not rely
on you, I would not answer for the excesses to which our despair would
carry us! We would bring on ourselves all the horrors of civil war,
provided we could, on dying, drag along with us some of our cowardly
assassins!"----The representatives, it must be noted, talk in the same
vein. La Source exclaims: "The members here, like yourselves, call for
vengeance!"--Thuriot: "The crime is atrocious!"]
[Footnote 2647: Taine is describing a basic trait of human nature,
something we see again and again whether our ancestors attacked small,
harmless neighboring nations, witches, renegades, Jews, or religious
people of another faith.(SR).]
[Footnote 2648: Buchez et Roux, XIX 93, session of Sept. 23, 1792.
Speech by Panis: "Many worthy citizens would like to have judicial
proof; but political proofs satisfy us"--Towards the end of July the
Minister of the Interior had invited Pétion to send two municipal
officers to examine the Tuileries; but this the council refused to do,
so as to keep up the excitement.]
[Footnote 2649: Mallet du Pan, "Mémoires," 303. Letter of Malouet, June
29.--Bertrand de Molleville, "Mémoires," II. 301.--Hua, 148.--Weber, II.
208.--Madame Campan, "Mémoires," II. 188. Already, at the end of 1791,
the king was told that he was liable to be poisoned by the pastry-cook
of the palace, a Jacobin. For three or four months the bread and pastry
he ate were secretly purchased in other places. On the 14th of July,
1792, his attendants, on account of the threats against his life, put a
breastplate on him under his coat.]
[Footnote 2650: member of the 1789 Constituent Assembly. (SR).]
[Footnote 2651: Moniteur, VIII. 271, 278. A deputy, excusing his
assailants, pretends that d'Ésprémesnil urged the people to enter the
Tuileries garden. It is scarcely necessary to state that during the
Constituent Assembly d'Espréménil was one of the most conspicuous
members of the extreme "Right."--Duc de Gaëte, "Mémoires," I. 18.]
[Footnote 2652: Lafayette, "Mémoires," I. 465.]
[Footnote 2653: Moniteur, XIII. 327,--Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 176.]
[Footnote 2654: Moniteur, XIII. 340.--The style of these petitions
is highly instructive. We see in them the state of mind and degree
of education of the petitioners: sometimes a half-educated writer
attempting to reason in the vein of the Contrat Social; sometimes, a
schoolboy spouting the tirades of Raynal; and sometimes, the corner
letter-writer putting together the expressions forming his stock in
trade.]
[Footnote 2655: Carra, "Précis historique sur l'origine et les
véritables auteurs de l'insurrection du 10 Août."--Barbaroux, "Mémoires,
49. The executive directory, appointed by the central committee of the
confederates, held its first meeting in a wine-shop, the Soleil d'or,
on the square of the Bastille; the second at the Cadran bleu, on the
boulevard; the third in Antoine's room, who then lodged in the same
house with Robespierre. Camille Desmoulins was present at this latter
meeting. Santerre, Westermann, Fournier the American, and Lazowski were
the principal members of this Directory. Another insurrectionary
plan was drawn up on the 30th of July in a wine-shop at Charenton
by Barbaroux, Rebecqui, Pierre Bayle, Heron, and Fournier the
American.--Cf. J. Claretie, "Camille Desmoulins," p. 192. Desmoulins
wrote, a little before the 10th of August: "If the National Assembly
thinks that it cannot save the country, let it declare then, that,
according to the Constitution, and like the Romans, it hands this over
to each citizen. Let the tocsin be rung forthwith, the whole nation
assembled, and every man, as at Rome, be invested with the power of
putting to death all well-known conspirators!"]
[Footnote 2656: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 182. Decision of the Quinze-Vingt
Section, Aug. 4.--Buchez et Roux, XVI. 402-410. History of Quinze-Vingt
Section.]
[Footnote 2657: Moniteur. XIII. 367, session of Aug. 8.--Ibid., 369 and
following pages. Session of Aug. 9. Letters and speeches of maltreated
deputies.]
[Footnote 2658: Moniteur, 371. Speech of M. Girardin: "I am convinced
that most of those who insulted me were foreigners."--Ibid., 370. Letter
of M. Frouvières: "Many of the citizens, coming out of their shops,
exclaimed: How can they insult the deputies in this way? Run away! run
off!"--M. Jolivet, that evening attending a meeting of the Jacobin Club,
states "that the Jacobin tribunes were far from sharing in this frenzy."
He heard "one individual in these tribunes exclaim, on the proposal
to put the dwellings of the deputies on the list, that it was
outrageous."--Countless other details show the small number and
character of the factions.--Ibid., 374. Speech of Aubert-Dubacet: "I
saw men dressed in the coats of the national guard, with countenances
betraying everything that is most vile in wickedness." There are "a
great many evil-disposed persons among the federates."]
[Footnote 2659: Moniteur, XIII. 170 (letter of M. de Joly, Minister of
Justice).--Ibid., 371, declaration of M. Jolivet.--Buchez et Roux,
XVI. 370 (session of the Jacobin Club, Aug. 8, at evening). Speech by
Goupilleau.]
[Footnote 2660: One may imagine with what satisfaction Lenin, must
have read this description agreeing: "Yes, open voting by a named and
identified count, that is how a leader best can control any assembly."
(SR).]
[Footnote 2661: Moniteur, XIII. 370.--Cf. Ibid., the letter of M.
Chapron.--Ibid., 372. Speech by M. A. Vaublanc.--Moore, "Journal during
a Residence in France," I. 25 (Aug. 10). The impudence of the people in
the galleries was intolerable. There was "a loud and universal peal of
laughter from all the galleries" on the reading of a letter, in which a
deputy wrote that he was threatened with decapitation.--" Fifty members
were shouting at the same time; the most boisterous night I ever was
witness to in the House of Commons was calmness itself alongside of
this."]
[Footnote 2662: Moniteur, Ibid., p. 371.--Lafayette, I. 467. "On the 9th
of August, as can be seen in the unmutilated editions of the Logographe,
the Assembly, almost to a man, arose and declared that it was not free."
Ibid., 478. "On the 9th of August the Assembly had passed a decree
declaring that it was not free. This decree was torn up on the 10th. But
it is no that it was passed."]
[Footnote 2663: Moniteur, XIII. 370, 374, 375. Speech by Roederer, letter
of M. de Joly, and speech by Pétion.]
[Footnote 2664: Mathieu Dumas, "Mémoires," II. 461.]
[Footnote 2665: "Chronique des cinquante jours," by
Roederer.--Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 260.--Buchez et Roux, XVI. 458.--Towards
half-past seven in the morning there were only from sixty to eighty
members present. (Testimony of two of the Ministers who leave the
Assembly.)]
[Footnote 2666: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 205. At the ballot of July 12,
not counting members on leave of absence or delegated elsewhere, and
the dead not replaced, there were already twenty-seven not answering the
call, while after that date three others resigned.--Buchez et Roux,
XVII. 340 (session of Sept. 2, 1792). Hérault de Séchelles is elected
president by 248 out of 257 voters.--Hua, 164 (after Aug. 10). "We
attended the meetings of the House simply to show that we had not given
them up. We took no part in the discussions, and on the vote being
taken, standing or sitting, we remained in our seats. This was the only
protest we could make."]
[Footnote 2667: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 229, 233, 417 and following pages.
M. Mortimer-Ternaux is the first to expose, with documents to support
him and critical discussion, the formation of the revolutionary
commune.--The six sections referred to are the Lombards, Gravilliers,
Mauconseil, Gobelins, Théatre-Français, and Faubourg Poissonnière.]
[Footnote 2668: For instance, the Enfants Rouges, Louvre, Observatoire,
Fontaine-Grenelle, Faubourg Saint-Denis, and Thermes de Julien..]
[Footnote 2669: For example, at the sections of Montreuil, Popincourt,
and Roi de Sicile..]
[Footnote 2670: For example, Ponceau, Invalides, Sainte-Geneviève.]
[Footnote 2671: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 240.]
[Footnote 2672: Mortimer-Ternaux, 446 (list of the commissioners who
took their seats before 9 o'clock in the morning). "Le Tableau général
des Commisaires des 48 sections qui ont composé le conseil général de la
Commune de Paris, le 10 Août, 1792," it must be noted, was not published
until three or four months later, with all the essential falsifications.
It may be found in Buchez et Roux, XVI. 450.--"Relation de l'abbé
Sicard." "At that time a lot of scoundrels, after the general meeting of
the sections was over, passed acts in the name of the whole assemblage
and had them executed, utterly unknown to those who had done this, or by
those who were the unfortunate victims of these proceedings." (supported
by documents).]
[Footnote 2673: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 270, 273. (The official report
of Mandat's examination contains five false statements, either through
omission or substitution.)]
[Footnote 2674: Claretie, "Camille Desmoulins," p.467 (notes of
Topino-Lebrun on Danton's trial). Danton, in the pleadings, says: "I
left at 1 o'clock in the morning. I was at the revolutionary commune and
pronounced sentence of death on Mandet, who had orders to fire op the
people." Danton in the same place says: "I had planned the 10th of
August." It is very certain that from 1 to 7 o'clock in the
morning (when Mandat was killed) he was the principal leader of the
insurrectional commune. Nobody was so potent, so overbearing, so well
endowed physically for the control of such a conventicle as Danton.
Besides, among the new-comers he was the best known and with the most
influence through his position as deputy of the syndic-attorney. Hence
his prestige after the victory and appointment as Minister of Justice.
His hierarchical superior, the syndic-attorney Manuel, who was there
also and signed his name, showed himself undoubtedly the pitiful fellow
he was, an affected, crazy, ridiculous loud-talker. For this reason he
was allowed to remain syndic-attorney as a tool and servant.--Beaulieu,
"Essais sur la Révolution Française," III. 454. "Rossignal boasted of
having committed this assassination himself."]
[Footnote 2675: "Pièces intéressantes pour l'histoire," by Pétion, 1793.
"I desired the insurrection, but I trembled for fear that it might
not succeed. My position was a critical one. I had to do my duty as a
citizen without sacrificing that of a magistrate; externals had to be
preserved without derogating from forms. The plan was to confine me in
my own house; but they forgot or delayed to carry this out. Who do you
think repeatedly sent to urge the execution of this measure? Myself;
yes, myself!"]
[Footnote 2676: In "Histoire de la Révolution Française" by Ferrand
& Lamarque, Cavaillés, Paris 1851, vol. II. Page 225 we may read the
following footnote: "This very evening, a young artillery lieutenant
observed, from a window of a house in the rue de l'Echelle, the
preparations which were being undertaken in the château des Tuileries:
that was Napoleon Bonaparte.--Well, right, asked the deputy Pozze
di Borgo, his compatriot, what do you think of what is going on? This
evening they will attack the château. Do you think the people will
succeed?--I don't know, answered the future emperor, but what I can
assure you is that if they gave me the command of two Swiss battalions
and one hundred good horsemen, I should repel the insurgents in a manner
which would for ever rid them of any desire to return." (SR)]
[Footnote 2677: Napoleon, at this moment, was at the Carrousel, in the
house of Bourrienne's brother. "I could see conveniently," he says, "all
that took place during the day... The king had at least as many troops
in his defense as the Convention since had on the 13th Vendémaire,
while the enemies of the latter were much more formidable and better
disciplined. The greater part of the national guard showed that they
favored the king; this justice must be done to it." (It might be
helpful to some readers to know that when Napoleon refers to the 13th
Vendémaire, (5th Oct. 1795) that was when he, as a young officer was
given the task to defend the Convention against a royalist uprising.
He was quick-witted and got hold of some guns in time, loaded them with
grape-shot, placed them in front of the Parisian church of Saint-Roch
and completely eliminated the superior royalist force. SR.)]
[Footnote 2678: Official report of Leroux. On the side of the garden,
along the terrace by the river, and then on the return were "a
few shouts of Vive le roi! many for Vive la nation! Vivent les
sans-culottes! Down with the king! Down with the veto! Down with the
old porker! etc.--But I can certify that these insults were all uttered
between the Pont-Turnant and the parterre, and by about a dozen men,
among which were five or six gunners following the king, the same as
flies follow an animal they are bent on tormenting."]
[Footnote 2679: Mortimer-Ternaux, III. 223, 273--Letter of Bonnaud,
chief of the Sainte-Marguerite battalion: "I cannot avoid marching at
their head under any pretext... Never will I violate the Constitution
unless I am forced to."--The Gravilliers section and that of the
Faubourg Poissonnière cashiered their officers and elected others.]
[Footnote 2680: Mortimer-Ternaux, IV. 342. Speech of Fabre d'Eglantine
at the Jacobin Club, Nov. 5, 1792. "Let it be loudly proclaimed that
these are the same men who captured the Tuileries, broke into the
prisons of the Abbaye, of Orleans and of Versailles."]
[Footnote 2681: In this respect the riot of the Champ-de-Mars (July 17,
1791), the only one that was suppressed, is very instructive: "As the
militia would not as usual ground their arms on receiving the word of
command from the mob, this last began, according to custom, to pelt them
with stones. To be deprived of their Sunday recreational activities,
to be marching through the streets under a scorching sun, and then be
remain standing like fools on a public holiday, to be knocked out
with bricks, was a little more than they had patience to bear so that,
without waiting for an order, they fired and killed a dozen or two of
the raggamuffins. The rest of the brave chaps bolted. If the militia had
waited for orders they might, I fancy, have been all knocked down
before they received any... Lafayette was very near being killed in the
morning; but the pistol failed to go off at his breast. The assassin was
immediately secured, but he arranged to be let free" (Gouverneur Morris,
letter of July 20, 1791). Likewise, on the 29th of August, 1792, at
Rouen, the national guard, defending the Hôtel-de-ville, is pelted with
stones more than an hour while many are wounded. The magistrates make
every concession and try every expedient, the mayor reading the riot act
five or six times. Finally the national guard, forced into it, exclaim:
"If you do not allow us to repel force with force we shall leave." They
fire and four persons are killed and two wounded, and the crowd breaks
up. ("Archives Nationales," F7, 2265, official report of the Rouen
municipality, Aug. 29; addresses of the municipality, Aug. 28; letter of
the lieutenant-colonel of the gendarmerie, Aug. 30, etc.).]
[Footnote 2682: Official report of Leroux.--"Chronique des cinquante
jours," by Roederer.--"Détails particuliers sur la journée du 10 Aout,"
by a bourgeois of Paris, an eye-witness (1822).]
[Footnote 2683: Barbaroux, "Mémoires," 69. "Everything betokened victory
for the court if the king had never left his post... If he had shown
himself, if he had mounted on horseback the battalions of Paris would
have declared for him."]
[Footnote 2684: "Révolution de Paris," number for Aug. 11, 1792. "The
10th of August, 1792, is still more horrible than the 24th of August,
1572, and Louis XVI. a greater monster than Charles IX. "--"Thousands
of torches were found in cellars, apparently placed there to burn down
Paris at a signal from this modern Nero." In the number for Aug.18: "The
place for Louis Nero and for Medicis Antoinette is not in the towers of
the Temple; their heads should have fallen from the guillotine on the
night of the 10th of August." (Special details of a plan of the king
to massacre all patriot deputies, and intimidate Paris with a grand
pillaging and by keeping the guillotine constantly at work.) "That
crowned ogre and his Austrian panther."]
[Footnote 2685: Narrative of the Minister Joly (written four days after
the event). The king departs about half-past eight.--Cf. Madame Campan,
"Mémoires," and Moniteur, XIII. 378.]
[Footnote 2686: "Révolution de Paris," number for Aug. 18. On his way
a sans-culotte steps out in front of the rows and tries to prevent the
king from proceeding. The officer of the guard argues with him, upon
which he extends his hand to the king, exclaiming: "Touch that hand,
bastard, and you have shaken the hand of an honest man! But I have no
intention that your bitch of a wife goes with you to the Assembly; we
don't want that whore."--"Louis XVI," says Prudhomme, "kept on his way
without being upset by the with this noble impulse."--I regard this as a
masterpiece of Jacobin interpretation.]
[Footnote 2687: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 311, 325. The king, at the foot
of the staircase, had asked Roederer: "what will become of the persons
remaining above?" "Sire," he replies, "they seem to be in plain dress.
Those who have swords have merely to take them off, follow you and leave
by the garden." A certain number of gentlemen, indeed, do so, and thus
depart while others escape by the opposite side through the gallery of
the Louvre.]
[Footnote 2688: Mathon de la Varenne, "Histoire particulière," etc.,
108. (Testimony of the valet-de-chambre Lorimier de Chamilly, with whom
Mathon was imprisoned in the prison of La Force.]
[Footnote 2689: De Lavalette, "Mémoires," I. 81. "We there found the
grand staircase barred by a sort of beam placed across it, and defended
by several Swiss officers, who were civilly disputing its passage with
about fifty mad fellows, whose odd dress very much resembled that of the
brigands in our melodramas. They were intoxicated, while their coarse
language and queer imprecations indicated the town of Marseilles, which
had belched them forth."]
[Footnote 2690: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 314, 317 (questioning of M. de
Diesbach). "Their orders were not to fire until the word was given, and
not before the national guard had set the example."]
[Footnote 2691: Buchez et Roux, XVI, 443. Narration by Pétion.--Peltier,
"Histoire du 10 août."]
[Footnote 2692: M. de Nicolay wrote the following day, the 11th of
August: "The federates fired first, which was followed by a sharp volley
from the château windows." (Le Comte de Fersen et la cour de France. II.
347.)]
[Footnote 2693: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 491. The abandonment of the
Tuileries is proved by the small loss of the assailants. (List of the
wounded belonging to the Marseilles corps and of the killed and wounded
of the Brest corps, drawn up Oct. 16, 1792.--Statement of the aid
granted to wounded Parisians, to widows, to orphans, and to the aged,
October, 1792, and then 1794.)--The total amounts to 74 dead and 54
severely wounded The two corps in the hottest of the fight were the
Marseilles band, which lost 22 dead and 14 wounded, and the Bretons, who
lost 2 dead and 5 wounded. The sections that suffered the most were the
Quinze-Vingts (4 dead and 4 wounded), the Faubourg-Montmartre (3 dead),
the Lombards (4 wounded), and the Gravilliers (3 wounded).--Out of
twenty-one sections reported, seven declare that they did not lose
a man.--The Swiss regiment, on the contrary, lost 760 men and 26
officers.]
[Footnote 2694: Napoleon's narrative.]
[Footnote 2695: Pétion's account.]
[Footnote 2696: Prudhomme's "Révolution de Paris," XIII. 236 and
237.--Barbaroux, 73.--Madame Campan, II. 250.]
[Footnote 2697: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 258.--Moore, I. 59. Some of
the robbers are killed. Moore saw one of them thrown down the grand
staircase.]
[Footnote 2698: Michelet, III. 289.]
[Footnote 2699: Mercier, "Le Nouveau Paris," II. 108.--"The Comte de
Fersen et la Cour de France," II. 348. (Letter of Sainte-Foix, Aug. 11).
"The cellars were broken open and more than 10,000 bottles of wine of
which I saw the fragments in the court, so intoxicated the people that
I made haste to put an end to an investigation imprudently begun amidst
2,000 sots with naked swords, handled by them very carelessly."]
[Footnote 26100: Napoleon's narrative.--Memoirs of Barbaroux.]
[Footnote 26101: Moniteur, XIII. 387.--Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 340.]
[Footnote 26102: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 303. Words of the president
Vergniaud on receiving Louis XVI.--Ibid. 340, 342, 350.]
[Footnote 26103: Mortimer-Ternaux, 356, 357.]
[Footnote 26104: Mortimer-Ternaux, 337. Speech of Huguenin, president of
the Commune, at the bar of the National Assembly: "The people by whom
we are sent to you have instructed us to declare to you that they invest
you anew with its confidence; but they at the same time instruct us to
declare to you that, as judge of the extraordinary measures to which
they have been driven by necessity and resistance to oppression, they k
now no other authority than the French people, your sovereign and ours,
assembled in its primary meetings."]
[Footnote 26105: Duvergier, "Collection des lois et décrets," (between
Aug. 10 and Sept. 20).]
[Footnote 26106: Duvergier, "Collection des lois et décrets," Aug.
11-12. "The National Assembly considering that it has not the right
to subject sovereignty in the formation of a national Convention to
imperative regulations,... invites citizens to conform to the following
rules."]
[Footnote 26107: August 11 (article 8)]
[Footnote 26108: Aug. 10-12 and Aug. 28.]
[Footnote 26109: Ibid., Aug. 10, Aug. 13.--Cf. Moniteur, XIII. 399
(session of Aug. 12).]
[Footnote 26110: Ibid., Aug. 18.]
[Footnote 26111: Aug. 23 and Sep. 3. After the 11th of August the
Assembly passes a decree releasing Saint-Huruge and annulling the
warrant against Antoine.]
[Footnote 26112: Ibid., Aug. 14.]
[Footnote 26113: Ibid., Aug. 14. Decree for dividing the property of
the émigrés into lots of from two to four arpents, in order to "multiply
small proprietors."--Ibid., Sept. 2. Other decrees against the émigrés
and their relations, Aug. 14, 23, 30, and Sept. 5 and 9.]
[Footnote 26114: Ibid., Aug. 26. Other decrees against the ecclesiastics
or the property of the church, Aug. 17, 18, 19, and Sept. 9 and 19.]
[Footnote 26115: Ibid., Sept. 20.]
[Footnote 26116: Imagine the impression these last lines may have upon
any ardent, ambitious and arrogant young man who, like Lenin in 1907,
would have read this between 1893 and 1962, date of the last English
reprinting of Taine's once widely know work. They summed up both
what had to be done and who would be the primary beneficiaries of the
revolution. Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini and countless other young hopeful
political men. Read it once more and ask yourself if much of this
program has not been more or less surreptitiously carried out in most
western countries after the second world war? (SR).]
[Footnote 26117: Malouet, II. 241.]
[Footnote 26118: Mercure de France, July 21, 1792.]
[Footnote 26119: "Révolutions de Paris," XIII. 137.]
[Footnote 26120: Mallet du Pan. "Mémoires," I. 322. Letters to Mallet du
Pan. Aug. 4 and following days.]
[Footnote 26121: Buchez et Roux, XVI. 446. Pétion's narrative.--Arnault,
"Souvenirs d'un sexagénaire," I. 342. (An eye-witness on the 10th of
August.) "The massacre extended but little beyond the Carrousel, and did
not cross the Seine. Everywhere else I found a population as quiet as if
nothing had happened. Inside the city the people scarcely manifested any
surprise; dancing went on in the public gardens. In the Marais, where I
lived then, there was only a suspicion of the occurrence, the same as at
Saint-Germain; it was said that something was going on in Paris, and the
evening newspaper was impatiently looked for to know what it was."]
[Footnote 26122: Moore, I. 122.--The same thing is observable at other
crises in the Revolution. On the 6th of October, 1789 (Sainte-Beuve,
"Causeries du Lundi," XII. 461), Sénac de Meilhan at an evening
reception hears the following conversations: "'Did you see the king
pass?' asks one. 'No, I was at the theater.' 'Did Molé play?'--'As for
myself; I was obliged to stay in the Tuileries; there was no way of
getting out before 9 o'clock.' 'You saw the king pass then?' 'I could
not see very well; it was dark.'--Another says: 'It must have taken
six hours for him to come from Versailles.'--Others coolly add a few
details.--To continue: 'Will you take a hand at whist?' 'I will play
after supper, which is just ready.' Cannon are heard, and then a few
whisperings, and a transient moment of depression,. 'The king is leaving
the Hôtel-de-ville. They must be very tired.' Supper is taken and there
are snatches of conversation. They play trente et quarante and while
walking about watching the game and their cards they do some talking:
'What a horrid affair!' while some speak together briefly and in a
low tone of voice. The clock strikes two and they all leave or go to
bed.--These people seem to you insensible. Very well; there is not one
of them who would not accept death at the king's feet."--On the 23d of
June, 1791, at the news of the king's arrest at Varennes, "the Bois de
Boulogne and the Champs Elysées were filled with people talking in a
frivolous way about the most serious matters, while young men are
seen, pronouncing sentences of death in their frolics with courtesans."
(Mercure de France, July 9, 1791. It begins with a little piece entitled
Dépit d'un Amant.)--See ch. XI. for the sentiment of the population in
May and June, 1793.]
[Footnote 26123: Moniteur, XIII. 290 (July 29) and 278 (July 30).]
[Footnote 26124: "Archives Nationales," F7, 145. Letter of Santerre to
the Minister of the Interior, Sept. 16, 1792, with the daily list of all
the men that have left Paris between the3rd and 15th of September, the
total amounting to 18,635, of which 15,504 are volunteers. Other letters
from the same, indicating subsequent departures: Sept. 17, 1,071 men;
none the following days until Sept. 21, 243; 22nd 150; up to the 26th,
813; on Oct. 1st, 113; 2nd and 3rd, 1,088; 4th, 1620; 16th, 196, etc.--I
believe that amongst those who leave, some are passing through Paris
coming from the provinces; this prevents an exact calculation of the
number of Parisian volunteers. M. de Lavalette, himself a volunteer,
says 60,000; but he furnishes not proofs of this.]
[Footnote 26125: Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 362.]
[Footnote 26126: Soulavie, "Vie privée du Maréchal duc de Richelieu,"
IX. 384.----"One can scarcely comprehend," says Lafayette, ("Mémoires,"
I. 454), "how the Jacobin minority and a gang of pretended Marseilles
men could render themselves masters of Paris, while almost the whole
of the 40,000 citizens forming the national guard desired the
Constitution."]
[Footnote 26127: Hua, 169.]
[Footnote 26128: Moniteur, XIII. 437. (session of Aug. 16, the applause
reiterated and the speech ordered to be printed).]
[Footnote 26129: These words should cause society to change resulting
in a leveling of incomes through proportional taxation and aids of all
kinds throughout the industrialized world. Nobody could ever imagine the
immense wealth which was to be produced by the efficient industry of the
20th century. (SR).]
[Footnote 26130: Roederer, "oeuvres Complètes." VIII 477. "The club
orators displayed France to the proletariat as a sure prey if they would
seize hold of it."]
[Footnote 26131: This manifesto, was drafted for the Duke of
Brunswick-Lunebourg, the general commanding the combined Prussian and
Austrian forces, by the French émigré Marquis de Limon. It threatened
the French and especially the Paris population with unspecified "rigors
of war" should it have the temerity to resist or to harm the King and
his family. It was signed in Koblenz, Germany on 25 August 1792 and
published in royalist newspapers 3 days later in Paris.(SR).]
[Footnote 26132: "Moore's Journal," I. 303-309.]
[Footnote 26133: "Archives Nationales," 474, 426. Section of
Gravilliers, letter of Charles Chemin, commissary, to Santerre, and
deposition of Ilingray, cavalryman of the national gendarmerie, Aug.
11.]
[Footnote 26134: Beaumarchais, "oeuvres complètes," letter of Aug. 12,
1792.--This very interesting letter shows how mobs are composed at this
epoch. A small gang of regular brigands and thieves plot together some
enterprise, to which is added a frightened, infatuated crowd, which may
become ferocious, but which remains honest.]
[Footnote 26135: The words of Hobbes applied by Roederer to the democracy
of 1792: "In democratia tot possent esse Nerones quot sunt oratores qui
populo adulantur; simul et plures sunt in democratia, et quotidie novi
suboriuntur."]
[Footnote 26136: Lucas de Montigny, "Mémoires de Mirabeau," II. 231
and following pages.--The preface affixed by Manuel to his edition
(of Mirabeau's letters) is a masterpiece of nonsense and
impertinence.--Peltier, "Histoire du 10 Aout," II. 205.--Manuel "came
out of a little shop at Montargis and hawked about obscene tracts in the
upper stories of Paris. He got hold of Mirabeau's letters in the drawers
of the public department and sold them for 2,000 crowns." (testimony of
Boquillon, juge-de la paix).]
[Footnote 26137: Lafayette, "Mémoires," I. 467, 471. "The queen had
50,000 crowns put into Danton's hands a short time before these terrible
days."--" The court had Danton under pay for two years, employing him as
a spy on the Jacobins."--" Correspondance de Mirabeau et du Comte de la
Marck," III. 82. Letter from Mirabeau, March 10, 1791: "Danton received
yesterday 30,000 livres".--Other testimony, Bertrand de Molleville, I.
354, II. 288.--Brissot, IV. 193--. Miot de Melito, "Mémoires," I. 40,
42. Miot was present at the conversations which took place between
Danton, Legendre, etc., at the table of Desforges, Minister of Foreign
Affairs. "Danton made no concealment of his love of pleasure and money,
and laughed at all conscientious and delicate scruples."--" Legendre
could not say enough in praise of Danton in speaking of his talents as a
public man; but he loudly censured his habits and cxpensive tastes,
and never joined him in any of his odious speculations."--The opposite
thesis has been maintained by Robinet and Bougeart in their articles
on Danton. The discussion would require too much space. The important
points are as follows: Danton, a barrister in the royal council in March, 1787, loses about
10,000 francs on the refund of his charge. In his marriage-contract
dated June, 1787, he admits 12,000 francs patrimony in lands and houses,
while his wife brings him only 20,000 francs dowry. From 1787 to 1791 he
could not earn much, being in constant attendance at the Cordeliers club
and devoted to politics; Lacretelle saw him in the riots of 1788. He
left at his death about 85,000 francs in national property bought in
1791. Besides, he probably held property and valuables under
third parties, who kept them after his death. (De Martel, "Types
Révolutionnaires," 2d part, p.139. Investigations of Blache at
Choisy-sur-Seine, where a certain Fauvel seems to have been Danton's
assumed name.)--See on this question, "Avocats aux conseils du Roi," by
Emil Bos, pp.513-520. According to accounts proved by M. Bos, it follows
that Danton, at the end of 1791, was in debt to the amount of 53,000
francs; this is the hole stopped by the court. On the other side, Danton
before the Revolution signs himself Danton even in authentic writing,
which is an usurpation of nobility and at that time subject to the
penalty of the galleys.--The double-faced infidelity in question must
have been frequent, for their leaders were anything else but sensitive.
On the 7th of August Madame Elizabeth tells M. de Montmorin that
the insurrection would not take place; that Pétion and Santerre were
concerned in it, and that they had received 750,000 francs to prevent
it and bring over the Marseilles troop to the king's side (Malouet,
II. 223).--There is no doubt that Santerre, in using the king's money
against the king, thought he was acting patriotically. Money is at the
bottom of every riot, to pay for drink and to stimulate subordinate
agents.]
[Footnote 26138: Buchez et Roux, XXVIII. 92. Letter of Gadolle to
Roland, October, 1792, according to a narrative by one of the teachers
in the college d'Harcourt, in which Varlet was placed.]
[Footnote 26139: Buchez et Roux, XIII. 254.]