Part 164

"The news of the 10th of August was carried to Lafayette by one of his own officers who happened to be in Paris on business. He learned that the throne was overturned and the Assembly in subjection, but he could not believe that the cause of the constitutional monarchy was abandoned without a struggle. He announced to the army the events that had taken place, and conjured the men to remain true to the king and constitution. The commissioners despatched by the Commune of Paris to announce to the different armies the change of government and to exact oaths of fidelity to it soon arrived at Sedan within Lafayette's command. The general had them brought before the municipality of Sedan and interrogated regarding their mission. Convinced, from their own account, that they were the agents of a faction which had unlawfully seized upon power, he ordered their arrest and had them imprisoned. Lafayette's moral influence in the army and the country was still so great that the Jacobins knew that they must either destroy him or win him over to their side. The latter course was preferred. ... The imprisoned commissioners, therefore, requested a private conference with Lafayette, and offered him, on the part of their superiors in Paris, whatever executive power he desired in the new government. It is needless to say that Lafayette, whose sole aim was to establish liberty in his country, refused to entertain the idea of associating himself with the despotism of the mob. He caused his own soldiers to renew their oath of fidelity to the king, and communicated with Luckner on the situation. ... Meanwhile, emissaries from the Commune were sent to Sedan to influence the soldiers by bribes and threats to renounce their loyalty to their commander. All the other armies and provinces to which commissioners had been sent had received them and taken the new oaths. Lafayette found himself alone in his resistance. His attitude acquired, every day, more the appearance of rebellion against authorities recognized by the rest of France. New commissioners arrived, bringing with them his dismissal from command. The army was wavering between attachment to their general and obedience to government. On the 19th of August, the Jacobins, seeing that they could not win him over, caused the Assembly to declare him a traitor. Lafayette had now to take an immediate resolution. France had declared for the Paris Commune. The constitutional monarchy was irretrievably destroyed. For the general to dispute with his appointed successor the command of the army was to provoke further disorders in a cause that had ceased to be that of the nation and become only his own. Three possible courses remained open to him,--to accept the Jacobin overtures and become a part of their bloody despotism; to continue his resistance and give his head to the guillotine; to leave the country. He resolved to seek an asylum in a neutral territory with the hope, as he himself somewhat naively expressed it, 'some day to be again of service to liberty and to France.' Lafayette made every preparation for the safety of his troops, placing them under the orders of Luckner until the arrival of Dumouriez, the new general in command. He publicly acknowledged responsibility for the arrest of the commissioners and the defiance of Sedan to the Commune, in order that the municipal officers who had supported him might escape punishment. He included in his party his staff-officers, whose association with him would have subjected them to the fury of the Commune, and some others who had also been declared traitors on account of obedience to his orders. He then made his way to Bouillon, on the extreme frontier. There, dismissing the escort, and sending back final orders for the security of the army, he rode with his companions into a foreign land."

_B. Tuckerman, Life of Lafayette, volume 2, chapter 3._

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FRANCE: A. D. 1792 (August-September). The September Massacres in the Paris prisons.

The house-to-house search for suspects was carried on during the night of August 29 and the following day. "The next morning, at daybreak, the Mairie, the sections, the ancient prisons of Paris, and the convents that had been converted into prisons, were crowded with prisoners. They were summarily interrogated, and half of them, the victims of error or precipitation, were set at liberty, or claimed by their sections. The remainder were distributed in the prisons of the Abbaye Saint Germain, the Conciergerie, the Châtelet, La Force, the Luxembourg, and the ancient monasteries of the Bernardins, Saint Firmin, and the Carmes; Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière also opened their gates to receive fresh inmates. The three days that followed this night were employed by the commissaries in making a selection of the prisoners. Already their death was projected. ... "We must purge the prisons, and leave no traitors behind us when we hasten to the frontiers.' Such was the cry put into the mouth of the people by Marat and Danton. Such was the attitude of Danton on the brink of these crimes. As for the part of Robespierre, it was the same as in all these crises--on the debate concerning war, on the 20th of June, and on the 10th of August. He did not act, he blamed; but he left the event to itself, and when once accomplished he accepted it as a progressive step of the Revolution. ... On Sunday, the 2d of September, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the signal for the massacre was given by one of those accidents that seem so perfectly the effect of chance. Five coaches, each containing six priests, started from the Hôtel-de-Ville to the prison of the Abbaye ... escorted by weak detachments of Avignonnais and Marseillais, armed with pikes and sabers. ... Groups of men, women and children insulted them as they passed, and their escort joined in the invective threats and outrages of the populace. ... The émeute, increasing in number at every step across the Rue Dauphine, was met by another mob, that blocked up the Carrefour Bussy, where municipal officers received enrolments in the open air. The carriages stopped; and a man, forcing his way through the escort, sprung on the step of the first carriage, plunged his saber twice into the body of one of the priests, and displayed it reeking with blood: the people uttered a cry of horror. 'This frightens you, cowards!' said the assassin, with a smile of disdain; 'You must accustom yourselves to look on death.' With these [words] he again plunged his saber into the carriage and continued to strike. ... The coaches slowly moved on, and the assassin, passing from one to the other, and clinging with one hand to the door, stabbed at random at all he could reach; while the assassins of Avignon, who formed part of their escort, plunged their bayonets into the interior; and the pikes, pointed against the windows, prevented any of the priests from leaping into the street. The long line of carriages moving slowly on, and leaving a bloody trace behind them, the despairing cries and gestures of the priests, the ferocious shouts of their butchers, the yells of applause of the populace, announced from a distance their arrival to the prisoners of the Abbaye. The cortège stopped at the door of the prison, and the soldiers of the escort dragged out by the feet eight dead bodies. The priests who had escaped, or who were only wounded, precipitated themselves into the prison; four of them were seized and massacred on the threshold. ... The prisoners ... cooped up in the Abbaye heard this prelude to murder at their gates. ... The internal wickets were closed on them, and they received orders to return to their chambers, as if to answer the muster-roll. A fearful spectacle was visible in the outer court: the last wicket opening into it had been transformed into a tribunal; and around a large table--covered with papers, writing materials, the registers of the prisons, glasses, bottles, pistols, sabers, and pipes--were seated twelve judges, whose gloomy features and athletic proportions stamped them men of toil, debauch or blood. Their attire was that of the laboring classes. ... Two or three of them attracted attention by the whiteness of their hands and the elegance of their shape; and that betrayed the presence of men of intellect, purposely mingled with these men of action to guide them. A man in a gray coat, a saber at his side, pen in his hand, and whose inflexible features seemed as though they were petrified, was seated at the center of the table, and presided over the tribunal. This was the Huissier Maillard, the idol of the mobs of the Faubourg Saint Marceau ... an actor in the days of October, the 20th of June, and the 10th of August. ... He had just returned from the Carmes, where he had organized the massacre. It was not chance that had brought him to the Abbaye at the precise moment of the arrival of the prisoners, and with the prison registers in his hand. He had received, the previous evening, the secret orders of Marat, through the members of the Comité de Surveillance. Danton had sent for the registers to the prison, and gone through them; and Maillard was shown those he was to acquit and condemn. If the prisoner was acquitted, Maillard said, 'Let this gentleman be set at liberty'; if condemned, a voice said, 'A la Force.' At these words the outer door opened, and the prisoner fell dead as he crossed the threshold. The massacre commenced with the Swiss, of whom there were 150 at the Abbaye, officers and soldiers. ... They fell, one after another, like sheep in a slaughter-house. The tumbrils were not sufficient to carry away the corpses, and they were piled up on each side of the court to make room for the rest to die: their commander, Major Reding, was the last to fall. ... After the Swiss, the king's guards, imprisoned in the Abbaye, were judged en masse. ... Their massacre lasted a long time, for the people, excited by what they had drank--brandy mingled with gun-powder-and intoxicated by the sight of blood, prolonged their tortures. ... The whole night was scarcely enough to slay and strip them."

_A. de Lamartine, History of the Girondists, book 25 (volume 2)._

"To moral intoxication is added physical intoxication, wine in profusion, bumpers at every pause, revelry over corpses. ... They dance ... and sing the 'carmagnole'; they arouse the people of the quarter 'to amuse them,' and that they may have their share of 'the fine fête.' Benches are arranged for 'gentlemen' and others for 'ladies': the latter, with greater curiosity, are additionally anxious to contemplate at their ease 'the aristocrats' already slain; consequently, lights are required, and one is placed on the breast of each corpse. Meanwhile, slaughter continues, and is carried to perfection. A butcher at the Abbaye complains that 'the aristocrats die too quick, and that those only who strike first have the pleasure of it'; henceforth they are to be struck with the backs of the swords only, and made to run between two rows of their butchers, like soldiers formerly running a gauntlet. ... {1281} All the unfettered instincts that live in the lowest depths of the heart start from the human abyss at once, not alone the heinous instincts with their fangs, but likewise the foulest with their slaver, while both packs fall furiously on women whose noble or infamous repute brings them before the world; on Madame de Lamballe, the Queen's friend; on Madame Desrues, widow of the famous prisoner; on the flower-girl of the Palais-Royal, who, two years before, had mutilated her lover, a French guardsman, in a fit of jealousy. Ferocity here is associated with lubricity to add profanation to torture, while life is attacked through attacks on modesty. In Madame de Lamballe, killed too quickly, the libidinous butchers could only outrage a corpse, but for the widow, and especially the flower-girl, they imagine the same as a Nero the fire-circle of the Iroquois. ... At La Force, Madame de Lamballe is cut to pieces. I cannot transcribe what Charlot, the hair-dresser, did with her head. I merely state that another wretch, in the Rue Saint-Antoine, bore off her heart and 'ate it.' They kill and they drink, and drink and kill again. ... As the prisons are to be cleaned out, it is as well to clean them all out, and do it at once. After the Swiss, priests, the aristocrats, and the 'white-skin gentlemen,' there remain convicts and those confined through the ordinary channels of justice, robbers, assassins, and those sentenced to the galleys in the Conciergerie, in the Châtelet, and in the Tour St. Bernard, with branded women, vagabonds, old beggars and boys confined in Bicêtre and the Salpétrière. They are good for nothing, cost something to feed, and, probably, cherish evil designs. ... This time, as the job is more foul, the broom is wielded by fouler hands. ... At the Salpétrière, 'all the bullies of Paris, former spies, ... libertines, the rascals of France and all Europe, prepare beforehand for the operation,' and rape alternates with massacre. ... At Bicêtre, however, it is crude butchery, the carnivorous instinct alone satisfying itself. Among other prisoners are 43 youths of the lowest class, from 17 to 19 years of age, placed there for correction by their parents, or by those to whom they are bound. ... These the band falls on, beating them to death with clubs. ... There are six days and five nights of uninterrupted butchery, 171 murders at the Abbaye, 169 at La Force, 223 at the Châtelet, 328 at the Conciergerie, 73 at the Tour-Saint-Bernard, 120 at the Carmelites, 79 at Saint-Firmin, 170 at Bicêtre, 35 at the Salpétrière; among the dead, 250 priests, 3 bishops or archbishops, general officers, magistrates, one former minister, one royal princess, belonging to the best names in France, and, on the other side, one negro, several low class women, young scape-graces, convicts, and poor old men. ... Fournier, Lazowski, and Bécard, the chiefs of robbers and assassins, return from Orleans with 1,500 cut-throats. On the way they kill M. de Brissac, M. de Lessart, and 42 others accused of 'lèse-nation,' whom they arrested from their judges' hands, and then, by way of surplus, 'following the example of Paris,' 21 prisoners taken from the Versailles prisons. At Paris the Minister of Justice thanks them, the Commune congratulates them, and the sections feast them and embrace them. ... All the journals approve, palliate, or keep silent; nobody dares offer resistance. Property as well as lives belong to whoever wants to take them. ... Like a man struck on the head with a mallet, Paris, felled to the ground, lets things go; the authors of the massacre have fully attained their ends. The faction has fast hold of power, and will maintain its hold. Neither in the Legislative Assembly nor in the Convention will the aims of the Girondists be successful against its tenacious usurpation. ... The Jacobins, through sudden terror, have maintained their illegal authority; through a prolongation of terror they are going to establish their legal authority. A forced suffrage is going to put them in office at the Hotel-de-Ville, in the tribunals, in the National Guard, in the sections, and in the various administrations."

_H. A. Taine, The French Revolution, book 4, chapter 9 (volume 2)._

ALSO IN: _A. Thiers, History of the French Revolution, (American edition.), volume 1, pages 350-368._

_Sergent Marceau, Reminiscences of a Regicide, chapter 9._

_A. Dobson, The Princess de Lamballe ("Four Frenchwomen," chapter 3)._

_The Reign of Terror: A collection of Authentic Narratives, volume 2._

_J. B. Cléry, Journal of Occurrences at the Temple._

_Despatches of Earl Gower, pages 225-229._

FRANCE: A. D. 1792 (September-November). Meeting of the National Convention. Abolition of royalty. Proclamation of the Republic. Adoption of the Era of the Republic. Establishment of absolute equality. The losing struggle of the Girondists with the Jacobins of the Mountain.