1793 CONSTITUTION OF THE YEAR III 55 The assassination of Marat was unfortunate. It cut off ɔne sanguinary wretch, but it had the effect of endearing tc the rabble his memory and policy. The blow was considered to have been directed by the Gironde; and a reason or pretext was thus afforded for condemning the imprisoned deputies. Up to this time speakers in favor of moderation were still heard in the assembly. Arrests took place, but no execution. The discussion of the new constitution promised a return to a system of law and order. The general insurrection of the provinces tempered the zeal, if it did not excite the fears, of the leaders in the capital. As the provinces succumbed, however, feelings of irritation and vengeance appeared; the revolutionary monster felt the return of its access of fury, that had for a moment been allayed. The new constitution, one as democratic as could well be formed, was to be proclaimed and inaugurated on the 10th of August. The departments, which in two months had almost all given in their submission to the convention, were requested to send commissaries to Paris in token of reconciliation. They came; and on the 10th of August Paris enjoyed the spectacle of a third federation, celebrating the birth of the third constitution that had been framed in the short space of four years. -was The ceremony,-for even these enlightened republicans, whose only creed was in the maxims of abstract philosophy, found worship, or at least its semblance, necessary, arranged by David. To the artist was assigned the task of religious legislation; and all that the Jacobin possessed of taste was expended in the flagrant parody. The half fête, half liturgy, began by a hymn to Nature, sung in the place de la Bastile. From hence there was a procession to the Champ de Mars, where the altar of the country was erected, before which the final mummeries were performed. The ark of the constitution of the year III. figured in the ceremony; and the assembled multitude swore to observe and defend its laws. Vain oath! It had been scarcely uttered when the Jacobins and the commissaries of the departments, the very cortége and chorus of the drama, petitioned that the constitution, thus solemnly inaugurated, should be set aside and postponed. In its place the committee of public safety, having subdued the mutilated convention, set up its own reign, known everlastingly as the Terror. This fearful reign is dated, by some, from the successful insurrection of the last days of May. Its character, however, did not become declared till this period; when the presence and zeal of so many commissaries from the primary assemblies of the departments gave strength and countenance to the Jacobins, hitherto abashed by their victory and its menacing consequences. At the same time, the step taken by the still rebellious towns to adopt the cause of royalism came to sanction the ultra-revolutionary rage of the Mountain. It was then that Toulon delivered up itself, its docks and fleets, to the English. The duke of York had taken Valenciennes; and the king of Prussia had made himself master of May ence. These disasters enabled the convention to raise truly the cry of the country being in danger, and enabled the Jacobins, despite their tyranny and crimes, to rally round them even the patriots discontented with their rule. Feeling the breeze of popular favor thus freshen in their sails, the two surviving leaders of the triumvirate proceeded to put forth their energy, each in his peculiar department. Robespierre, the home tyrant, the civil dictator, mounted the tribune to denounce. He attributed all the reverses of the republican arms to the impunity of Dumouriez, of Lafayette, and of Custine. The measure of safety that he proposed was, "to brush away the remaining aristocrats from the national hearths." Danton, the stirring Danton, abandoned to his colleague the task of domestic slaughter; but demanded the levy en masse against the foreign enemy. The wish of both was soon passed into decrees by the obsequious convention. Danton's project was answered by a law, placing all Frenchmen at the disposal of the war minister as long as an enemy remained on the soil of France. All unmarried males, from eighteen years of age to five and twenty, com posed the first requisition; and were instantly to assenible at the different depôts. All from twenty-five to thirty were to hold themselves in readiness. Property was seized with as unsparing a hand as persons. A maximum was named for the price of all commodities; and the monopolizer, or he who refused to sell, was punished with death. A tax on the rich had previously been ordained, levying on them all the revenue above what was necessary for the maintenance of their family. A law against suspected persons, dividing them into categories, and ordering their arrest, came at the same time to satisfy the politic views of Robespierre. In this time of frenzy, every actor-and who was not an actor in the popular scene?—was seized with a desire to show his energy. He who could not cut down a foreign foe, had rather strike his neighbor than allow his arm to be idle. The passionate were impelled to cruelty from a vague desire to gratify an impulse of activity and rage; the timid imitated and or out-ranted them, that they might not be taken for victims There was no medium possible, no neutral 1793. FATE OF THE QUEEN. 57 ground betwixt the slaughterers and slaughtered. To look on was to perish. And few there were who, when offered the alternative, had the courage to choose with Condorcet "Ils m'ont dit, Choisis d'être oppresseur ou victime; Such was the frenzy that now clamored for blood: for, be it remarked, it was not as yet the solitary tyrant Robespierre, that singled out his victims; but in a great measure a populace, that, like the Roman rabble collected round their sanguinary games, enjoyed the savage sport, and turned their thumbs, spilling blood in the mere and heartless exuberance of delight. It was now that the revolutionary tribunal was organized to work with arbitrariness and dispatch. The sections petitioned for the judgment of the Girondists. Domiciliary visits took place in search of the suspected, and the prisons were filled in consequence. General Custine was the first victim of the terror; he was guillotined on the last day of August. The unfortunate Marie Antoinette was the next. By a refinement of cruelty, she had been separated from her son, and the young prince intrusted to the tutelage of a cobbler named Simon, who treated him with barbarous severity. The queen herself was transferred from the Temple to a common malefactor's dungeon in the Conciergerie, where she remained two months. Brought before the tribunal, she heard with dignity and resignation the usual list of crimes laid to her charge, until the deposition of Hebert pronounced new and unheard of horrors. The cobbler Simon, forsooth, had discovered vicious practices in young Louis; he induced the prince to confess, or to sign a confession, to the purpose that his mother and aunt had initiated him in guilt. Marie Antoinette disdained to make reply; but when pressed by her accusers, exclaimed, "I appeal to all the mothers that hear me." Although none save the furies of the day were in the audience, Hebert feared to rouse up even their shame and pity; and the queen underwent condemnation without further torture. On the 16th of October, she was conducted, in a common cart, her hands tied behind her, to the place of execution, the mob saluting her funeral procession with shouts of exultation. The view of the Tuilleries caused her but a moment's emotion. She died with courage. Who is there that cannot supply his own fit and sad reflections on her fate? Next came the turn of the Girondists to appear before the fatal tribunal. Twenty-one of their members remained in prison since the 2d of June; of these the chiefs were Vergniaud, Brissot, Valazé, Gensonné, Lasource, Fonfrede. Their trial was, of course, but the mockery of justice. Chabot and Fabre d'Eglantine appeared as witnesses, and uttered, without fear of contradiction, whatever circumstances of conspiracy or crime their imaginations could suggest. The eloquence of Vergniaud, although he had been too careless to prepare a defence, here exerted for the last time, shook the judges, and melted the auditors. A decree of the convention instantly stopped the pleadings, and ordered the court to proceed to pass sentence: it was death. The victims hailed the fate, which they had foreseen, with a verse of the Marseillois hymn, originally applied to the enemies of freedom, now but too applicable to its friends. Valazé, at the moment, pierced himself with a poignard, and fell dead; Vergniaud, more heroic, flung away a box of poison, in order to die with his friends. They were executed on the morrow, showing in death that firmness which, had it been displayed in the acts of their political life, would have at least saved their memory from reprobation, and most probably insured them a glorious and successful career. Those who think that the stern law of retaliation is or should be applied to human fortunes, will say they merited their fate; will argue that those who stirred the mob to the insurrection of the 20th of June, 1792, and who looked on at that of the 10th of August, deserved to be overthrown by the same force in June, 1793; and that those who in timidity voted the death of Louis XVI. might expect to find in their judges a similar sacrifice of justice and mercy to cowardly expediency. Soon after her political friends, the wife of Roland perished on the same scaffold. "O Liberty!" said she, addressing in her dying breath the statue so called, and placed with melancholy irony to preside over the place of execution,-"O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" Her husband, on learning her death, stabbed himself. Others of the Gironde were taken at Bordeaux, by this time reduced. Tallien, the pro-consul, caused several to be executed amidst the wide proscription and slaughter of their partisans. But space is wanting to enumerate the victims of even this early epoch, when heads fell as yet singly, or but a score at a time beneath the guillotine. Bailly, however, must not be forgotten; Bailly, the idolized mayor of Paris, whom, by a refinement of cruelty, the mob employed, on the day of his execution, in displacing and dragging his gibbet from one place to another. The old man, as he awaited the executioner, was seen to tremble under his many years and the winter's day. "You tremble, Bailly," sneered one of his guards. ""Tis from cold," replied the aged man. The duke of Orleans, 1793. MASSACRES IN THE PROVINCES. 59 Egalité, perished also at this epoch. Not all his ferocity, intrigue, and baseness, could save him. He too died firmly, hardened in apathy and crime. Death-blows were dealt around so thickly, that those subject to them gathered courage, like soldiers exposed to the fire of battle. Innocent and guilty braved alike the guillotine with carelessness: some even courted it. Distant spectators, however, shuddered. Terror penetrated into every domicile, and came as a moral medicine to neutralize and arrest that thirst of liberty, the excess of which had produced all these ills. If the pen shrinks from describing, except by a few strokes, the wholesale murders of the capital, how shall it attempt tc portray the massacres in the provinces? If in Paris some discrimination was used, some form observed; in the departments the pro-consuls of the convention dispensed with all. Nor could reaction, vengeance, or security be given as the pretexts; for in the department of the north, where neither resistance nor federation had been manifested, the proscriptions were no less sweeping and severe. The Terrorists who punished the south were not more cruel, and scarcely shed more blood, than Joseph Lebon, in the pure spirit of ferocity, spilled at Arras. At Bordeaux the scaffolds streamed, and were still supplied by the agency of Tallien. Marseilles underwent the same fate. The inhabitants of Toulon, to escape decimation, had yielded to the English, and were now besieged. Lyons had been invested since the month of August; and after suffering bombardment and famine, at length, on the 9th of October, surrendered. A decree of the convention instantly ordered that Lyons should be destroyed, and all those inhabitants, who had taken arms, guillotined. Couthon, and after him Collot d'Herbois, a comedian, often hissed on the stage of Lyons, undertook to execute this decree. They began employing the revolutionary army to destroy the houses with pickaxes, and by decapitating the population with the guillotine. Both means were found too tedious. Mines of gunpowder were therefore employed to blow up the most beautiful streets; and the victims, crowded in one of the public squares, were fired at, lacerated, and destroyed, by grape-shot. Six thousand were said to have perished. Their bodies choked up the Rhone, which flung them up upon its banks, and obliged Collot d'Herbois, in dread of pestilence, to bury them. It is difficult for even the most ample canvas to include the many and prominent events of this tragical period. The war of La Vendée might well demand a volume: a paragraph could never give even an idea of this insurrectionary struggle, |