[1795 A.D.]

However, this parody of a sitting, this insurrectionary inertia, left the committee time to concoct measures, and one might safely predict that the day would end like the 12th Germinal. Duquesnoy understood that it was time to act. He asked that the committee of public safety be suspended; that four representatives be endowed with power extraordinary. This was done. Boissy d'Anglas re-entered the hall and took the chair. Legendre and Delecloy presented themselves in the name of the committee of public safety. They had some trouble in entering, being pushed back and ill-treated. Legendre, however, made himself heard; he intimated that the citizens should leave the hall, and invited the representatives to remain at their posts. Then he went out. It was midnight. The four commissioners from the Mountain, encouraged by some lively words from Soubrany, left the hall. They met at the door a comparatively small number of the national guard with Legendre, Anguis, Kervelegan, Chénier, and Bergoeng at their head. Raffet commanded the national guard. Prieur de la Marne asked him if he had a presidential order to enter the hall. "I am not accountable to you for what I do," answered the commander. "Follow me, sansculottes!" cried Prieur, turning towards the crowd. The president enjoined him in the name of the law to leave the hall. No attention was paid and the struggle re-commenced. The tramp of soldiers was heard, and the cry, "Down with the Jacobins ! Long live the convention!" The crowd began to look around for some means of escape. When the column filed into the hall, there was a general sauve qui peut; some climbed to the galleries, seeking a way out, others fled by the windows. Soon an armed force occupied the entire hall. The representatives took their seats; one was sure that the principal Mountainists were secured. In spite of the abominable murder of Ferraud, which recalled revolutionary ferocities, it was soon evident that the rioters had no wish for a fight. They had been taught to cry, "Bread, and the Constitution of 1793!" but were actuated by no definite opinions. The Mountainists lacked boldness and unity. Their discourses and decrees, beyond those which had reference to food, excited no enthusiasm among the people, who hardly understood what was required of them. When, towards 11 o'clock, they saw they were merely assisting at voting and proposals without any result, they began to go out even before the arrival of the national guard.

For some hours there had been round the Tuileries more bayonets than were necessary to force an entrance into the hall. Several times the heads of columns advanced to the doors or showed themselves in the public galleries; but as the crowd remained compact and tumultuous and noisy, they did not wish to run the risk of firing or being fired upon. There was, however, real danger for the representatives who, to get in or out of the hall, had to make a way through the crowd at the door. Some showed great courage; Kervelegan was wounded rather seriously. But the honours of the day rested with Boissy d'Anglas. His firm and unshaken constancy while covered by several guns aimed at him; his presidential authority, so persistent though disregarded; his noble demeanour when they presented the head of his unfortunate colleague—are traits that will be remembered in history and transmitted to all posterity.d

66

FALL OF THE MOUNTAIN" AND THE LOWER CLASSES

The convention, having recovered its liberty, instantly declared its votes during the presence of the insurrection to be null, and ordered under arrest the remainder of the Mountainists who had shown sympathy with the mob.

[1795 A.D.] The redoubtable faubourg St. Antoine was again defeated, but not crushed. The bands and sections again took the field in a few days, and were met in battle array by the sections favourable to the convention; but no combat ensued. Negotiations, remonstrances, were employed, and the men of the faubourg, deprived of their leader or of all aim,-for the Mountainists had already been conveyed out of their reach,-abandoned their positions and their zeal. Their last feat was to rescue the murderer of Ferraud, who had been condemned, and was proceeding to the scaffold. By this time, however, some troops of the line had been drafted to the capital. At the head of these and the national guards, General Menou, commanding under Barras, invested the faubourg St. Antoine, and menaced to bombard it. The female population dreaded this act of retribution. The faubourg submitted, in token of which its section surrendered their formidable cannon.

Here terminated the influence of the lower orders; here ended the Revolution, as far as they were concerned. It is worthy of remark that their submission was far more the effect of their own apathy than of the force brought against them. This last might, indeed, have awed the most turbulent. But the greater number were weary of disorder, and all showed in the days of Prairial a forbearance and a fear of shedding blood, certainly creditable to them. This arose from the general execration in which the popular massacres of September and the legal ones of the Terror were held. The death of Ferraud was an accident. The safety experienced by the rest of the convention-a safety that allowed them to triumph-marks that even with the mob there are bounds to crime; and that political rage, even with them, when carried to an extreme, has a turn and a recoil.

The Thermidorians, after escaping from such imminent peril, were relentless towards those of their colleagues who had triumphed in the disorder, and who had shown alacrity to restore the Terror. Tidings of a simultaneous effort of the ultra-revolutionists of Toulon increased the exasperation of the victors. All the leading Jacobins were seized, and delivered over to a military commission to be judged. Six deputies of the Mountain were condemned to death. All committed suicide. Only one or two, failing in the attempt, could be delivered over to the guillotine. In the provinces, especially in the south, the moderates did not confine their vengeance to the chief criminals. They rose in many places, especially at Lyons, and massacred those who had practised or favoured terrorism. One half of France having decimated the other, the latter, victorious in turn, proceeded to take the same barbarous revenge. Thus the clambering up from the pit of the Revolution was almost as fearful as the precipitous fall.c

66

LOUIS BLANC ON THE WHITE TERROR (MAY-JUNE, 1795)

The promoters of the Red Terror had been men of fierce convictions, fanatics for the public welfare, violent and gloomy souls; but at least they had spoken in accordance with their acts, they had not been seen grinning at humanity with a sword dyed with blood in one hand and their foot upon a heap of dead bodies, and they had not perfumed and adorned themselves before going to the shambles. The promoters or partisans of the White Terror, on the contrary, were men of good address, elegant libertines, fashionable women, people of an unctuous piety. Under the empire of the White Terror, atrocious thoughts were put forth in a ridiculously effeminate gibberish; they swore upon their word of honour that they would stab their disarmed enemy; they killed prisoners with shot or burned them alive,

[1795 A.D.]

in virtue of the law of good manners; in the streets, to please the ladies, they flogged daughters who were guilty of weeping over the bodies of their slaughtered fathers. There were to be found men, quite as cruel as Marat, but beauteous in youth and manners that won hearts as they entered a drawing-room in the midst of a cloud of amber perfume. If they had not smelt of amber, they would have smelt of blood.

At Paris and in the north the assassins were held in respect, because in Paris and in the north the Revolution was not yet stamped out; but all the south was given to the sword. Woe to those who, in the Revolution, had enacted any sort of rôle, or only maintained the principles that it had proclaimed. However limited had been their influence, however inoffensive their conduct, however obscure their condition, a tragic death awaited them; for they were not killed only on account of what they had done, they were killed for what they had been or were, or were suspected of being. To provide a list of the victims would be impossible. Prudhommee in his gloomy book, and Fréron ƒ in his memoir upon the massacres of the south, are able to record only a certain number of names, yet nevertheless this list, all incomplete as it is, causes us to shudder. In it are boys and girls, almost children, who perished, hacked by sabre cuts or pierced by bayonet thrusts; there are women whom they murdered in cold blood. Men who were suspected as Jacobins were arrested; they watched for the moment when they would be taken to prison, and massacred them on the way. Dead bodies found here and there on all the roads testified in these unhappy places to the ubiquity of the assassin.

Do not the prisons at least serve as a refuge for the victims? No, the magnet does not attract iron with more force than the prisons attracted the murderers; and the aspect of these tragedies was more sinister in the dungeons.

Öften they mixed libertinism with the refinements of cruelty; witness the women who, at Montbrison, were dragged to the foot of the Tree of Liberty and exposed quite nude to the lascivious looks of the young royalists, and were then flogged.

And these things were done in the name of the most sacred principles; for never, at any epoch, were the terms Justice and Humanity employed with so much complacency, until at last they were made part of the necessary vocabulary of the toilette. A woman would not have been in the fashion had she not worn a "humanity bonnet" and "justice corsets." This derisive affectation, this impious frivolity is met with again in the manner in which the reactionaries unblushingly parody the sufferings of those of their relatives whom the Revolution had struck. Wanting in respect for their own grief, they even made a carnival of their own mourning. A son mourned his father, who had died upon the scaffold, by saluting his acquaintance in the street by a movement of his head similar to that of one falling into the executioner's basket. A widow's grief displayed itself in the method of dressing her hair for a lover's rendezvous. The days of general affliction were the days whereon they proceeded to dance, to drink, and to feast to their hearts' content. There were balls "à la victime," when to be admitted there it was necessary to show a proper certificate, stating that one had lost a father, a mother, a wife, a brother, or a sister beneath the knife of the guillotine. The death of any collateral relative gave no right to be at such a fête. The indispensable costume of a dancer was that in which the brother or sister had perished, that is to say, the red shawl, and the hair cut close to the neck. These conditions fulfilled, they were received to dance, and to make love at the balls" à la victime." "Was it Holbein's dance of death," exclaimed

[1793-1795 A.D.] Mercier,g"that had inspired such an idea? Why, in the midst of the sounds of violins did they not make a headless spectre dance?" h

Among the ugly features of this period, the fate of one of the most pitiful victims of the Revolution may claim a space. This is the little son of the late king, Louis XVI. He was eight years old when his father was executed, and had been called the dauphin for four years. He was recognised as Louis XVII by England and Russia, but his title was a bitter mockery to the child suffering unearned hardships in prison."

BARANTE ON THE CAPTIVITY OF LOUIS XVII

It is difficult not to believe that, at the moment when the convention determined to continue indefinitely the captivity of the son of Louis XVI,

the government committees knew that this was equivalent to pronouncing the death sentence on the royal child. When, on the 3rd of July, 1793, he had been pitilessly torn from his mother's arms, the municipal functionaries who had taken on themselves the execution of this business led him away to the room in which the king had been a prisoner, and handed him over to one of their colleagues, whose insulting coarseness the royal family had often had to endure. This was the shoemaker named Simon, long known to Marat as his neighbour in the rue de Cordeliers, and still better as his assiduous admirer at the club. With Robespierre's consent he proposed him as a tutor for the "little Capet." Whether from the natural brutality of his character and the habits of an ignoble life, or whether he had formed beforehand the project of reducing the son of so many kings to being a child without education, without morality, and without shame, he exhibited from the very first day the wish to transform the heir to the throne into a street vagabond. It was a frightful battle that was to be waged against the good and noble sentiments, the regal instincts, and the seemly and distinguished manners which early impressions and the atmosphere in which he was born and had hitherto lived had developed in this noble child.

LOUIS XVII

(Born 1785)

He began by offering some resistance; his tears were as much of anger as despair. Simon was irritated by these aristocratic ways and soon illtreatment began; he was continually passing from insulting and threatening words to actual brutalities; his love of equality enjoyed insulting and striking the king's son. He saw, however, that by treating the child intrusted to his care in this fashion, he would end by killing instead of brutalising him.

[1793-1794 A.D.]

On this point he consulted the committee of public safety.

"The wolf's cub

has learned to be insolent; I shall know how to break his spirit; but if he dies under it, I will not be answerable. Do you want to kill him?" "No." "To poison him?"-"No." "To transport him?"-"No." "To get rid of him?" This time Simon was not answered.

Encouraged by this silence, the tutor whom the republic had given to Louis XVII continued the same system of education. He had wished to make him leave off his mourning clothes, but Marat perished, and he let him retain them. Some days afterwards he dressed him in a carmagnole, had his beautiful fair hair cut off, and put a bonnet rouge on his head. A collection has been made with religious care and scrupulous exactness, of all the sad souvenirs of the Temple, all the details of this long torture, in which every day was marked by a fresh atrocity. It is a story which makes the heart ache and fills us with indignation. Simon sought another means of degrading the unhappy child. He made him drink wine and brandy, intoxicated him, and then made him repeat coarse oaths and obscene songs. It chanced that a member of the commune rebuked this wickedness. He was denounced and arrested "for having thought it a bad thing that Capet's son should be brought up like a sansculotte.

The captivity of Louis XVII continued under Simon's rule in alternations of savage violence and indulgence which was neither kindness nor pity. The poor little martyr became more and more self-absorbed and silent. He no longer answered when spoken to. Sometimes Simon's barbarity endangered his life. One day, as he refused to sing some obscene couplets, Simon lifted him up by his hair. "I have a good mind to crush the little viper against the wall," he said. The doctor was obliged to drag the child away from him.

He made him clean his wife's shoes, and feet which he had just wetted in a bath.

one day forced him to wipe his

The

Nevertheless, at the end of seven months, he perhaps grew weary of the infamous business in which he was acquitting himself so well. The unhappy orphan was already half destroyed. Mute, dejected, and trembling, living under menace and in fear, his situation was to grow yet worse. committees of the convention decided that Simon was not to have a successor, and that the municipal authorities should have all the responsibility of guarding the prisoner.

The room which Cléry had occupied during his attendance on the king was turned into a cell. The door was cut at the height of a man's breast; in front was a grating which was let down from the top. A second grating closed the space of the wicket left above the half door, which was fastened with screws, and the shutters of the window were put up. The room was warmed by a stove-pipe crossing it. The child was shut up in this prison, from which he was not allowed to go out. A bed had been put there. Bread and water were passed to him and no one entered the room. Here Louis XVII was installed on the 21st of January, 1794, the anniversary of the death of the king his father. The Mémoires du Temple, written by his august sister, from whom he was rigorously kept apart but who knew how he was being treated, recount the sufferings he endured in this cell.

This phase of torture lasted six months. On the 10th Thermidor, Barras, after the triumph of the convention, recommended the continuance of a strict supervision. One Laurent, a member of the revolutionary committee of the Temple section, was chosen by the committees the very next day to be "charged to guard the tyrant's children detained at the Temple.'

H. W.-VOL. XII. 2 D