6.V.
The Prisons.
It is time now, however, to cast a glance into the Prisons. When Desmoulins moved for his Committee of Mercy, these Twelve Houses of Arrest held five thousand persons. Continually arriving since then, there have now accumulated twelve thousand. They are Ci-devants, Royalists; in far greater part, they are Republicans, of various Girondin, Fayettish, Un- Jacobin colour. Perhaps no human Habitation or Prison ever equalled in squalor, in noisome horror, these Twelve Houses of Arrest. There exist records of personal experience in them Memoires sur les Prisons; one of the strangest Chapters in the Biography of Man.
Very singular to look into it: how a kind of order rises up in all conditions of human existence; and wherever two or three are gathered together, there are formed modes of existing together, habitudes, observances, nay gracefulnesses, joys! Citoyen Coitant will explain fully how our lean dinner, of herbs and carrion, was consumed not without politeness and place-aux-dames: how Seigneur and Shoeblack, Duchess and Doll-Tearsheet, flung pellmell into a heap, ranked themselves according to method: at what hour 'the Citoyennes took to their needlework;' and we, yielding the chairs to them, endeavoured to talk gallantly in a standing posture, or even to sing and harp more or less. Jealousies, enmities are not wanting; nor flirtations, of an effective character.
Alas, by degrees, even needlework must cease: Plot in the Prison rises, by Citoyen Laflotte and Preternatural Suspicion. Suspicious Municipality snatches from us all implements; all money and possession, of means or metal, is ruthlessly searched for, in pocket, in pillow and paillasse, and snatched away; red-capped Commissaries entering every cell! Indignation, temporary desperation, at robbery of its very thimble, fills the gentle heart. Old Nuns shriek shrill discord; demand to be killed forthwith. No help from shrieking! Better was that of the two shifty male Citizens, who, eager to preserve an implement or two, were it but a pipe-picker, or needle to darn hose with, determined to defend themselves: by tobacco. Swift then, as your fell Red Caps are heard in the Corridor rummaging and slamming, the two Citoyens light their pipes and begin smoking. Thick darkness envelops them. The Red Nightcaps, opening the cell, breathe but one mouthful; burst forth into chorus of barking and coughing. "Quoi, Messieurs," cry the two Citoyens, "You don't smoke? Is the pipe disagreeable! Est-ce que vous ne fumez pas?" But the Red Nightcaps have fled, with slight search: "Vous n'aimez pas la pipe?" cry the Citoyens, as their door slams-to again. (Maison d'Arret de Port-Libre, par Coittant, &c. (Memoires sur les Prisons, ii.) My poor brother Citoyens, O surely, in a reign of Brotherhood, you are not the two I would guillotine!
Rigour grows, stiffens into horrid tyranny; Plot in the Prison getting ever riper. This Plot in the Prison, as we said, is now the stereotype formula of Tinville: against whomsoever he knows no crime, this is a ready-made crime. His Judgment-bar has become unspeakable; a recognised mockery; known only as the wicket one passes through, towards Death. His Indictments are drawn out in blank; you insert the Names after. He has his moutons, detestable traitor jackalls, who report and bear witness; that they themselves may be allowed to live,--for a time. His Fournees, says the reproachful Collot, 'shall in no case exceed three-score;' that is his maximum. Nightly come his Tumbrils to the Luxembourg, with the fatal Roll- call; list of the Fournee of to-morrow. Men rush towards the Grate; listen, if their name be in it? One deep-drawn breath, when the name is not in: we live still one day! And yet some score or scores of names were in. Quick these; they clasp their loved ones to their heart, one last time; with brief adieu, wet-eyed or dry-eyed, they mount, and are away. This night to the Conciergerie; through the Palais misnamed of Justice, to the Guillotine to-morrow.
Recklessness, defiant levity, the Stoicism if not of strength yet of weakness, has possessed all hearts. Weak women and Ci-devants, their locks not yet made into blond perukes, their skins not yet tanned into breeches, are accustomed to 'act the Guillotine' by way of pastime. In fantastic mummery, with towel-turbans, blanket-ermine, a mock Sanhedrim of Judges sits, a mock Tinville pleads; a culprit is doomed, is guillotined by the oversetting of two chairs. Sometimes we carry it farther: Tinville himself, in his turn, is doomed, and not to the Guillotine alone. With blackened face, hirsute, horned, a shaggy Satan snatches him not unshrieking; shews him, with outstretched arm and voice, the fire that is not quenched, the worm that dies not; the monotony of Hell-pain, and the What hour? answered by, It is Eternity! (Montgaillard, iv. 218; Riouffe, p. 273.)
And still the Prisons fill fuller, and still the Guillotine goes faster. On all high roads march flights of Prisoners, wending towards Paris. Not Ci-devants now; they, the noisy of them, are mown down; it is Republicans now. Chained two and two they march; in exasperated moments, singing their Marseillaise. A hundred and thirty-two men of Nantes for instance, march towards Paris, in these same days: Republicans, or say even Jacobins to the marrow of the bone; but Jacobins who had not approved Noyading. (Voyage de Cent Trente-deux Nantais (Prisons, ii. 288-335.) Vive la Republique rises from them in all streets of towns: they rest by night, in unutterable noisome dens, crowded to choking; one or two dead on the morrow. They are wayworn, weary of heart; can only shout: Live the Republic; we, as under horrid enchantment, dying in this way for it!
Some Four Hundred Priests, of whom also there is record, ride at anchor, 'in the roads of the Isle of Aix,' long months; looking out on misery, vacuity, waste Sands of Oleron and the ever-moaning brine. Ragged, sordid, hungry; wasted to shadows: eating their unclean ration on deck, circularly, in parties of a dozen, with finger and thumb; beating their scandalous clothes between two stones; choked in horrible miasmata, closed under hatches, seventy of them in a berth, through night; so that the 'aged Priest is found lying dead in the morning, in the attitude of prayer!' (Relation de ce qu'ont souffert pour la Religion les Pretres deportes en 1794, dans la rade de l'ile d'Aix (Prisons, ii. 387-485.)--How long, O Lord!
Not forever; no. All Anarchy, all Evil, Injustice, is, by the nature of it, dragon's-teeth; suicidal, and cannot endure.
6.VI.
To finish the Terror.
It is very remarkable, indeed, that since the Etre-Supreme Feast, and the sublime continued harangues on it, which Billaud feared would become a bore to him, Robespierre has gone little to Committee; but held himself apart, as if in a kind of pet. Nay they have made a Report on that old Catherine Theot, and her Regenerative Man spoken of by the Prophets; not in the best spirit. This Theot mystery they affect to regard as a Plot; but have evidently introduced a vein of satire, of irreverent banter, not against the Spinster alone, but obliquely against her Regenerative Man! Barrere's light pen was perhaps at the bottom of it: read through the solemn snuffling organs of old Vadier of the Surete Generale, the Theot Report had its effect; wrinkling the general Republican visage into an iron grin. Ought these things to be?
We note further that among the Prisoners in the Twelve Houses of Arrest, there is one whom we have seen before. Senhora Fontenai, born Cabarus, the fair Proserpine whom Representative Tallien Pluto-like did gather at Bourdeaux, not without effect on himself! Tallien is home, by recall, long since, from Bourdeaux; and in the most alarming position. Vain that he sounded, louder even than ever, the note of Jacobinism, to hide past shortcomings: the Jacobins purged him out; two times has Robespierre growled at him words of omen from the Convention Tribune. And now his fair Cabarus, hit by denunciation, lies Arrested, Suspect, in spite of all he could do!--Shut in horrid pinfold of death, the Senhora smuggles out to her red-gloomy Tallien the most pressing entreaties and conjurings: Save me; save thyself. Seest thou not that thy own head is doomed; thou with a too fiery audacity; a Dantonist withal; against whom lie grudges? Are ye not all doomed, as in the Polyphemus Cavern; the fawningest slave of you will be but eaten last!--Tallien feels with a shudder that it is true. Tallien has had words of omen, Bourdon has had words, Freron is hated and Barras: each man 'feels his head if it yet stick on his shoulders.'
Meanwhile Robespierre, we still observe, goes little to Convention, not at all to Committee; speaks nothing except to his Jacobin House of Lords, amid his bodyguard of Tappe-durs. These 'forty-days,' for we are now far in July, he has not shewed face in Committee; could only work there by his three shallow scoundrels, and the terror there was of him. The Incorruptible himself sits apart; or is seen stalking in solitary places in the fields, with an intensely meditative air; some say, 'with eyes red- spotted,' (Deux Amis, xii. 347-73.) fruit of extreme bile: the lamentablest seagreen Chimera that walks the Earth that July! O hapless Chimera; for thou too hadst a life, and a heart of flesh,--what is this the stern gods, seeming to smile all the way, have led and let thee to! Art not thou he who, few years ago, was a young Advocate of promise; and gave up the Arras Judgeship rather than sentence one man to die?--
What his thoughts might be? His plans for finishing the Terror? One knows not. Dim vestiges there flit of Agrarian Law; a victorious Sansculottism become Landed Proprietor; old Soldiers sitting in National Mansions, in Hospital Palaces of Chambord and Chantilly; peace bought by victory; breaches healed by Feast of Etre Supreme;--and so, through seas of blood, to Equality, Frugality, worksome Blessedness, Fraternity, and Republic of the virtues! Blessed shore, of such a sea of Aristocrat blood: but how to land on it? Through one last wave: blood of corrupt Sansculottists; traitorous or semi-traitorous Conventionals, rebellious Talliens, Billauds, to whom with my Etre Supreme I have become a bore; with my Apocalyptic Old Woman a laughing-stock!--So stalks he, this poor Robespierre, like a seagreen ghost through the blooming July. Vestiges of schemes flit dim. But what his schemes or his thoughts were will never be known to man.
New Catacombs, some say, are digging for a huge simultaneous butchery. Convention to be butchered, down to the right pitch, by General Henriot and Company: Jacobin House of Lords made dominant; and Robespierre Dictator. (Deux Amis, xii. 350-8.) There is actually, or else there is not actually, a List made out; which the Hairdresser has got eye on, as he frizzled the Incorruptible locks. Each man asks himself, Is it I?
Nay, as Tradition and rumour of Anecdote still convey it, there was a remarkable bachelor's dinner one hot day at Barrere's. For doubt not, O Reader, this Barrere and others of them gave dinners; had 'country-house at Clichy,' with elegant enough sumptuosities, and pleasures high-rouged! (See Vilate.) But at this dinner we speak of, the day being so hot, it is said, the guests all stript their coats, and left them in the drawing-room: whereupon Carnot glided out; groped in Robespierre's pocket; found a list of Forty, his own name among them; and tarried not at the wine-cup that day!--Ye must bestir yourselves, O Friends; ye dull Frogs of the Marsh, mute ever since Girondism sank under, even ye now must croak or die! Councils are held, with word and beck; nocturnal, mysterious as death. Does not a feline Maximilien stalk there; voiceless as yet; his green eyes red-spotted; back bent, and hair up? Rash Tallien, with his rash temper and audacity of tongue; he shall bell the cat. Fix a day; and be it soon, lest never!
Lo, before the fixed day, on the day which they call Eighth of Thermidor, 26th July 1794, Robespierre himself reappears in Convention; mounts to the Tribune! The biliary face seems clouded with new gloom; judge whether your Talliens, Bourdons listened with interest. It is a voice bodeful of death or of life. Long-winded, unmelodious as the screech-owl's, sounds that prophetic voice: Degenerate condition of Republican spirit; corrupt moderatism; Surete, Salut Committees themselves infected; back-sliding on this hand and on that; I, Maximilien, alone left incorruptible, ready to die at a moment's warning. For all which what remedy is there? The Guillotine; new vigour to the all-healing Guillotine: death to traitors of every hue! So sings the prophetic voice; into its Convention sounding- board. The old song this: but to-day, O Heavens! has the sounding-board ceased to act? There is not resonance in this Convention; there is, so to speak, a gasp of silence; nay a certain grating of one knows not what!-- Lecointre, our old Draper of Versailles, in these questionable circumstances, sees nothing he can do so safe as rise, 'insidiously' or not insidiously, and move, according to established wont, that the Robespierre Speech be 'printed and sent to the Departments.' Hark: gratings, even of dissonance! Honourable Members hint dissonance; Committee-Members, inculpated in the Speech, utter dissonance; demand 'delay in printing.' Ever higher rises the note of dissonance; inquiry is even made by Editor Freron: "What has become of the Liberty of Opinions in this Convention?" The Order to print and transmit, which had got passed, is rescinded. Robespierre, greener than ever before, has to retire, foiled; discerning that it is mutiny, that evil is nigh.
Mutiny is a thing of the fatallest nature in all enterprises whatsoever; a thing so incalculable, swift-frightful; not to be dealt with in fright. But mutiny in a Robespierre Convention, above all,--it is like fire seen sputtering in the ship's powder-room! One death-defiant plunge at it, this moment, and you may still tread it out: hesitate till next moment,--ship and ship's captain, crew and cargo are shivered far; the ship's voyage has suddenly ended between sea and sky. If Robespierre can, to-night, produce his Henriot and Company, and get his work done by them, he and Sansculottism may still subsist some time; if not, probably not. Oliver Cromwell, when that Agitator Serjeant stept forth from the ranks, with plea of grievances, and began gesticulating and demonstrating, as the mouthpiece of Thousands expectant there,--discerned, with those truculent eyes of his, how the matter lay; plucked a pistol from his holsters; blew Agitator and Agitation instantly out. Noll was a man fit for such things.
Robespierre, for his part, glides over at evening to his Jacobin House of Lords; unfolds there, instead of some adequate resolution, his woes, his uncommon virtues, incorruptibilities; then, secondly, his rejected screech- owl Oration;--reads this latter over again; and declares that he is ready to die at a moment's warning. Thou shalt not die! shouts Jacobinism from its thousand throats. "Robespierre, I will drink the hemlock with thee," cries Painter David, "Je boirai la cigue avec toi;"--a thing not essential to do, but which, in the fire of the moment, can be said.
Our Jacobin sounding-board, therefore, does act! Applauses heaven-high cover the rejected Oration; fire-eyed fury lights all Jacobin features: Insurrection a sacred duty; the Convention to be purged; Sovereign People under Henriot and Municipality; we will make a new June-Second of it: to your tents, O Israel! In this key pipes Jacobinism; in sheer tumult of revolt. Let Tallien and all Opposition men make off. Collot d'Herbois, though of the supreme Salut, and so lately near shot, is elbowed, bullied; is glad to escape alive. Entering Committee-room of Salut, all dishevelled, he finds sleek sombre Saint-Just there, among the rest; who in his sleek way asks, "What is passing at the Jacobins?"--"What is passing?" repeats Collot, in the unhistrionic Cambyses' vein: "What is passing? Nothing but revolt and horrors are passing. Ye want our lives; ye shall not have them." Saint-Just stutters at such Cambyses'-oratory; takes his hat to withdraw. That report he had been speaking of, Report on Republican Things in General we may say, which is to be read in Convention on the morrow, he cannot shew it them this moment: a friend has it; he, Saint- Just, will get it, and send it, were he once home. Once home, he sends not it, but an answer that he will not send it; that they will hear it from the Tribune to-morrow.
Let every man, therefore, according to a well-known good-advice, 'pray to Heaven, and keep his powder dry!' Paris, on the morrow, will see a thing. Swift scouts fly dim or invisible, all night, from Surete and Salut; from conclave to conclave; from Mother Society to Townhall. Sleep, can it fall on the eyes of Talliens, Frerons, Collots? Puissant Henriot, Mayor Fleuriot, Judge Coffinhal, Procureur Payan, Robespierre and all the Jacobins are getting ready.
6.VII.
Go down to.
Tallien's eyes beamed bright, on the morrow, Ninth of Thermidor 'about nine o'clock,' to see that the Convention had actually met. Paris is in rumour: but at least we are met, in Legal Convention here; we have not been snatched seriatim; treated with a Pride's Purge at the door. "Allons, brave men of the Plain," late Frogs of the Marsh! cried Tallien with a squeeze of the hand, as he passed in; Saint-Just's sonorous organ being now audible from the Tribune, and the game of games begun.
Saint-Just is verily reading that Report of his; green Vengeance, in the shape of Robespierre, watching nigh. Behold, however, Saint-Just has read but few sentences, when interruption rises, rapid crescendo; when Tallien starts to his feet, and Billaud, and this man starts and that,--and Tallien, a second time, with his: "Citoyens, at the Jacobins last night, I trembled for the Republic. I said to myself, if the Convention dare not strike the Tyrant, then I myself dare; and with this I will do it, if need be," said he, whisking out a clear-gleaming Dagger, and brandishing it there: the Steel of Brutus, as we call it. Whereat we all bellow, and brandish, impetuous acclaim. "Tyranny; Dictatorship! Triumvirat!" And the Salut Committee-men accuse, and all men accuse, and uproar, and impetuously acclaim. And Saint-Just is standing motionless, pale of face; Couthon ejaculating, "Triumvir?" with a look at his paralytic legs. And Robespierre is struggling to speak, but President Thuriot is jingling the bell against him, but the Hall is sounding against him like an Aeolus-Hall: and Robespierre is mounting the Tribune-steps and descending again; going and coming, like to choke with rage, terror, desperation:--and mutiny is the order of the day! (Moniteur, Nos. 311, 312; Debats, iv. 421-42; Deux Amis, xii. 390-411.)
O President Thuriot, thou that wert Elector Thuriot, and from the Bastille battlements sawest Saint-Antoine rising like the Ocean-tide, and hast seen much since, sawest thou ever the like of this? Jingle of bell, which thou jinglest against Robespierre, is hardly audible amid the Bedlam-storm; and men rage for life. "President of Assassins," shrieks Robespierre, "I demand speech of thee for the last time!" It cannot be had. "To you, O virtuous men of the Plain," cries he, finding audience one moment, "I appeal to you!" The virtuous men of the Plain sit silent as stones. And Thuriot's bell jingles, and the Hall sounds like Aeolus's Hall. Robespierre's frothing lips are grown 'blue;' his tongue dry, cleaving to the roof of his mouth. "The blood of Danton chokes him," cry they. "Accusation! Decree of Accusation!" Thuriot swiftly puts that question. Accusation passes; the incorruptible Maximilien is decreed Accused.
"I demand to share my Brother's fate, as I have striven to share his virtues," cries Augustin, the Younger Robespierre: Augustin also is decreed. And Couthon, and Saint-Just, and Lebas, they are all decreed; and packed forth,--not without difficulty, the Ushers almost trembling to obey. Triumvirat and Company are packed forth, into Salut Committee-room; their tongue cleaving to the roof of their mouth. You have but to summon the Municipality; to cashier Commandant Henriot, and launch Arrest at him; to regular formalities; hand Tinville his victims. It is noon: the Aeolus- Hall has delivered itself; blows now victorious, harmonious, as one irresistible wind.
And so the work is finished? One thinks so; and yet it is not so. Alas, there is yet but the first-act finished; three or four other acts still to come; and an uncertain catastrophe! A huge City holds in it so many confusions: seven hundred thousand human heads; not one of which knows what its neighbour is doing, nay not what itself is doing.--See, accordingly, about three in the afternoon, Commandant Henriot, how instead of sitting cashiered, arrested, he gallops along the Quais, followed by Municipal Gendarmes, 'trampling down several persons!' For the Townhall sits deliberating, openly insurgent: Barriers to be shut; no Gaoler to admit any Prisoner this day;--and Henriot is galloping towards the Tuileries, to deliver Robespierre. On the Quai de la Ferraillerie, a young Citoyen, walking with his wife, says aloud: "Gendarmes, that man is not your Commandant; he is under arrest." The Gendarmes strike down the young Citoyen with the flat of their swords. (Precis des evenemens du Neuf Thermidor, par C.A. Meda, ancien Gendarme (Paris, 1825).)
Representatives themselves (as Merlin the Thionviller) who accost him, this puissant Henriot flings into guardhouses. He bursts towards the Tuileries Committee-room, "to speak with Robespierre:" with difficulty, the Ushers and Tuileries Gendarmes, earnestly pleading and drawing sabre, seize this Henriot; get the Henriot Gendarmes persuaded not to fight; get Robespierre and Company packed into hackney-coaches, sent off under escort, to the Luxembourg and other Prisons. This then is the end? May not an exhausted Convention adjourn now, for a little repose and sustenance, 'at five o'clock?'
An exhausted Convention did it; and repented it. The end was not come; only the end of the second-act. Hark, while exhausted Representatives sit at victuals,--tocsin bursting from all steeples, drums rolling, in the summer evening: Judge Coffinhal is galloping with new Gendarmes to deliver Henriot from Tuileries Committee-room; and does deliver him! Puissant Henriot vaults on horseback; sets to haranguing the Tuileries Gendarmes; corrupts the Tuileries Gendarmes too; trots off with them to Townhall. Alas, and Robespierre is not in Prison: the Gaoler shewed his Municipal order, durst not on pain of his life, admit any Prisoner; the Robespierre Hackney-coaches, in confused jangle and whirl of uncertain Gendarmes, have floated safe--into the Townhall! There sit Robespierre and Company, embraced by Municipals and Jacobins, in sacred right of Insurrection; redacting Proclamations; sounding tocsins; corresponding with Sections and Mother Society. Is not here a pretty enough third-act of a natural Greek Drama; catastrophe more uncertain than ever?
The hasty Convention rushes together again, in the ominous nightfall: President Collot, for the chair is his, enters with long strides, paleness on his face; claps on his hat; says with solemn tone: "Citoyens, armed Villains have beset the Committee-rooms, and got possession of them. The hour is come, to die at our post!" "Oui," answer one and all: "We swear it!" It is no rhodomontade, this time, but a sad fact and necessity; unless we do at our posts, we must verily die! Swift therefore, Robespierre, Henriot, the Municipality, are declared Rebels; put Hors la Loi, Out of Law. Better still, we appoint Barras Commandant of what Armed- Force is to be had; send Missionary Representatives to all Sections and quarters, to preach, and raise force; will die at least with harness on our back.
What a distracted City; men riding and running, reporting and hearsaying; the Hour clearly in travail,--child not to be named till born! The poor Prisoners in the Luxembourg hear the rumour; tremble for a new September. They see men making signals to them, on skylights and roofs, apparently signals of hope; cannot in the least make out what it is. (Memoires sur les Prisons, ii. 277.) We observe however, in the eventide, as usual, the Death-tumbrils faring South-eastward, through Saint-Antoine, towards their Barrier du Trone. Saint-Antoine's tough bowels melt; Saint-Antoine surrounds the Tumbrils; says, It shall not be. O Heavens, why should it! Henriot and Gendarmes, scouring the streets that way, bellow, with waved sabres, that it must. Quit hope, ye poor Doomed! The Tumbrils move on.
But in this set of Tumbrils there are two other things notable: one notable person; and one want of a notable person. The notable person is Lieutenant-General Loiserolles, a nobleman by birth, and by nature; laying down his life here for his son. In the Prison of Saint-Lazare, the night before last, hurrying to the Grate to hear the Death-list read, he caught the name of his son. The son was asleep at the moment. "I am Loiserolles," cried the old man: at Tinville's bar, an error in the Christian name is little; small objection was made. The want of the notable person, again, is that of Deputy Paine! Paine has sat in the Luxembourg since January; and seemed forgotten; but Fouquier had pricked him at last. The Turnkey, List in hand, is marking with chalk the outer doors of to-morrow's Fournee. Paine's outer door happened to be open, turned back on the wall; the Turnkey marked it on the side next him, and hurried on: another Turnkey came, and shut it; no chalk-mark now visible, the Fournee went without Paine. Paine's life lay not there.--
Our fifth-act, of this natural Greek Drama, with its natural unities, can only be painted in gross; somewhat as that antique Painter, driven desperate, did the foam! For through this blessed July night, there is clangour, confusion very great, of marching troops; of Sections going this way, Sections going that; of Missionary Representatives reading Proclamations by torchlight; Missionary Legendre, who has raised force somewhere, emptying out the Jacobins, and flinging their key on the Convention table: "I have locked their door; it shall be Virtue that re- opens it." Paris, we say, is set against itself, rushing confused, as Ocean-currents do; a huge Mahlstrom, sounding there, under cloud of night. Convention sits permanent on this hand; Municipality most permanent on that. The poor Prisoners hear tocsin and rumour; strive to bethink them of the signals apparently of hope. Meek continual Twilight streaming up, which will be Dawn and a To-morrow, silvers the Northern hem of Night; it wends and wends there, that meek brightness, like a silent prophecy, along the great Ring-Dial of the Heaven. So still, eternal! And on Earth all is confused shadow and conflict; dissidence, tumultuous gloom and glare; and Destiny as yet shakes her doubtful urn.
About three in the morning, the dissident Armed-Forces have met. Henriot's Armed Force stood ranked in the Place de Greve; and now Barras's, which he has recruited, arrives there; and they front each other, cannon bristling against cannon. Citoyens! cries the voice of Discretion, loudly enough, Before coming to bloodshed, to endless civil-war, hear the Convention Decree read: 'Robespierre and all rebels Out of Law!'--Out of Law? There is terror in the sound: unarmed Citoyens disperse rapidly home; Municipal Cannoneers range themselves on the Convention side, with shouting. At which shout, Henriot descends from his upper room, far gone in drink as some say; finds his Place de Greve empty; the cannons' mouth turned towards him; and, on the whole,--that it is now the catastrophe!
Stumbling in again, the wretched drunk-sobered Henriot announces: "All is lost!" "Miserable! it is thou that hast lost it," cry they: and fling him, or else he flings himself, out of window: far enough down; into masonwork and horror of cesspool; not into death but worse. Augustin Robespierre follows him; with the like fate. Saint-Just called on Lebas to kill him: who would not. Couthon crept under a table; attempting to kill himself; not doing it.--On entering that Sanhedrim of Insurrection, we find all as good as extinct; undone, ready for seizure. Robespierre was sitting on a chair, with pistol shot blown through, not his head, but his under jaw; the suicidal hand had failed. (Meda. p. 384. (Meda asserts that it was he who, with infinite courage, though in a lefthanded manner, shot Robespierre. Meda got promoted for his services of this night; and died General and Baron. Few credited Meda in what was otherwise incredible.).) With prompt zeal, not without trouble, we gather these wretched Conspirators; fish up even Henriot and Augustin, bleeding and foul; pack them all, rudely enough, into carts; and shall, before sunrise, have them safe under lock and key. Amid shoutings and embracings.
Robespierre lay in an anteroom of the Convention Hall, while his Prison- escort was getting ready; the mangled jaw bound up rudely with bloody linen: a spectacle to men. He lies stretched on a table, a deal-box his pillow; the sheath of the pistol is still clenched convulsively in his hand. Men bully him, insult him: his eyes still indicate intelligence; he speaks no word. 'He had on the sky-blue coat he had got made for the Feast of the Etre Supreme'--O reader, can thy hard heart hold out against that? His trousers were nankeen; the stockings had fallen down over the ankles. He spake no word more in this world.
And so, at six in the morning, a victorious Convention adjourns. Report flies over Paris as on golden wings; penetrates the Prisons; irradiates the faces of those that were ready to perish: turnkeys and moutons, fallen from their high estate, look mute and blue. It is the 28th day of July, called 10th of Thermidor, year 1794.
Fouquier had but to identify; his Prisoners being already Out of Law. At four in the afternoon, never before were the streets of Paris seen so crowded. From the Palais de Justice to the Place de la Revolution, for thither again go the Tumbrils this time, it is one dense stirring mass; all windows crammed; the very roofs and ridge-tiles budding forth human Curiosity, in strange gladness. The Death-tumbrils, with their motley Batch of Outlaws, some Twenty-three or so, from Maximilien to Mayor Fleuriot and Simon the Cordwainer, roll on. All eyes are on Robespierre's Tumbril, where he, his jaw bound in dirty linen, with his half-dead Brother, and half-dead Henriot, lie shattered; their 'seventeen hours' of agony about to end. The Gendarmes point their swords at him, to shew the people which is he. A woman springs on the Tumbril; clutching the side of it with one hand; waving the other Sibyl-like; and exclaims: "The death of thee gladdens my very heart, m'enivre de joie;" Robespierre opened his eyes; "Scelerat, go down to Hell, with the curses of all wives and mothers!"--At the foot of the scaffold, they stretched him on the ground till his turn came. Lifted aloft, his eyes again opened; caught the bloody axe. Samson wrenched the coat off him; wrenched the dirty linen from his jaw: the jaw fell powerless, there burst from him a cry;--hideous to hear and see. Samson, thou canst not be too quick!
Samson's work done, there burst forth shout on shout of applause. Shout, which prolongs itself not only over Paris, but over France, but over Europe, and down to this Generation. Deservedly, and also undeservedly. O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou worse than other Advocates? Stricter man, according to his Formula, to his Credo and his Cant, of probities, benevolences, pleasures-of-virtue, and such like, lived not in that age. A man fitted, in some luckier settled age, to have become one of those incorruptible barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble-tablets and funeral-sermons! His poor landlord, the Cabinetmaker in the Rue Saint- Honore, loved him; his Brother died for him. May God be merciful to him, and to us.
This is end of the Reign of Terror; new glorious Revolution named of Thermidor; of Thermidor 9th, year 2; which being interpreted into old slave-style means 27th of July, 1794. Terror is ended; and death in the Place de la Revolution, were the 'Tail of Robespierre' once executed; which service Fouquier in large Batches is swiftly managing.
BOOK 3.VII.
7.I.
Decadent.
How little did any one suppose that here was the end not of Robespierre only, but of the Revolution System itself! Least of all did the mutinying Committee-men suppose it; who had mutinied with no view whatever except to continue the National Regeneration with their own heads on their shoulders. And yet so it verily was. The insignificant stone they had struck out, so insignificant anywhere else, proved to be the Keystone: the whole arch- work and edifice of Sansculottism began to loosen, to crack, to yawn; and tumbled, piecemeal, with considerable rapidity, plunge after plunge; till the Abyss had swallowed it all, and in this upper world Sansculottism was no more.
For despicable as Robespierre himself might be, the death of Robespierre was a signal at which great multitudes of men, struck dumb with terror heretofore, rose out of their hiding places: and, as it were, saw one another, how multitudinous they were; and began speaking and complaining. They are countable by the thousand and the million; who have suffered cruel wrong. Ever louder rises the plaint of such a multitude; into a universal sound, into a universal continuous peal, of what they call Public Opinion. Camille had demanded a 'Committee of Mercy,' and could not get it; but now the whole nation resolves itself into a Committee of Mercy: the Nation has tried Sansculottism, and is weary of it. Force of Public Opinion! What King or Convention can withstand it? You in vain struggle: the thing that is rejected as 'calumnious' to-day must pass as veracious with triumph another day: gods and men have declared that Sansculottism cannot be. Sansculottism, on that Ninth night of Thermidor suicidally 'fractured its under jaw;' and lies writhing, never to rise more.
Through the next fifteenth months, it is what we may call the death-agony of Sansculottism. Sansculottism, Anarchy of the Jean-Jacques Evangel, having now got deep enough, is to perish in a new singular system of Culottism and Arrangement. For Arrangement is indispensable to man; Arrangement, were it grounded only on that old primary Evangel of Force, with Sceptre in the shape of Hammer. Be there method, be there order, cry all men; were it that of the Drill-serjeant! More tolerable is the drilled Bayonet-rank, than that undrilled Guillotine, incalculable as the wind.-- How Sansculottism, writhing in death-throes, strove some twice, or even three times, to get on its feet again; but fell always, and was flung resupine, the next instant; and finally breathed out the life of it, and stirred no more: this we are now, from a due distance, with due brevity, to glance at; and then--O Reader!--Courage, I see land!
Two of the first acts of the Convention, very natural for it after this Thermidor, are to be specified here: the first is renewal of the Governing Committees. Both Surete Generale and Salut Public, thinned by the Guillotine, need filling up: we naturally fill them up with Talliens, Frerons, victorious Thermidorian men. Still more to the purpose, we appoint that they shall, as Law directs, not in name only but in deed, be renewed and changed from period to period; a fourth part of them going out monthly. The Convention will no more lie under bondage of Committees, under terror of death; but be a free Convention; free to follow its own judgment, and the Force of Public Opinion. Not less natural is it to enact that Prisoners and Persons under Accusation shall have right to demand some 'Writ of Accusation,' and see clearly what they are accused of. Very natural acts: the harbingers of hundreds not less so.
For now Fouquier's trade, shackled by Writ of Accusation, and legal proof, is as good as gone; effectual only against Robespierre's Tail. The Prisons give up their Suspects; emit them faster and faster. The Committees see themselves besieged with Prisoners' friends; complain that they are hindered in their work: it is as with men rushing out of a crowded place; and obstructing one another. Turned are the tables: Prisoners pouring out in floods; Jailors, Moutons and the Tail of Robespierre going now whither they were wont to send!--The Hundred and thirty-two Nantese Republicans, whom we saw marching in irons, have arrived; shrunk to Ninety-four, the fifth man of them choked by the road. They arrive: and suddenly find themselves not pleaders for life, but denouncers to death. Their Trial is for acquittal, and more. As the voice of a trumpet, their testimony sounds far and wide, mere atrocities of a Reign of Terror. For a space of nineteen days; with all solemnity and publicity. Representative Carrier, Company of Marat; Noyadings, Loire Marriages, things done in darkness, come forth into light: clear is the voice of these poor resuscitated Nantese; and Journals and Speech and universal Committee of Mercy reverberate it loud enough, into all ears and hearts. Deputation arrives from Arras; denouncing the atrocities of Representative Lebon. A tamed Convention loves its own life: yet what help? Representative Lebon, Representative Carrier must wend towards the Revolutionary Tribunal; struggle and delay as we will, the cry of a Nation pursues them louder and louder. Them also Tinville must abolish;--if indeed Tinville himself be not abolished.
We must note moreover the decrepit condition into which a once omnipotent Mother Society has fallen. Legendre flung her keys on the Convention table, that Thermidor night; her President was guillotined with Robespierre. The once mighty Mother came, some time after, with a subdued countenance, begging back her keys: the keys were restored her; but the strength could not be restored her; the strength had departed forever. Alas, one's day is done. Vain that the Tribune in mid air sounds as of old: to the general ear it has become a horror, and even a weariness. By and by, Affiliation is prohibited: the mighty Mother sees herself suddenly childless; mourns, as so hoarse a Rachel may.
The Revolutionary Committees, without Suspects to prey upon, perish fast; as it were of famine. In Paris the whole Forty-eight of them are reduced to Twelve, their Forty sous are abolished: yet a little while, and Revolutionary Committees are no more. Maximum will be abolished; let Sansculottism find food where it can. (24th December 1794 (Moniteur, No. 97).) Neither is there now any Municipality; any centre at the Townhall. Mayor Fleuriot and Company perished; whom we shall not be in haste to replace. The Townhall remains in a broken submissive state; knows not well what it is growing to; knows only that it is grown weak, and must obey. What if we should split Paris into, say, a Dozen separate Municipalities; incapable of concert! The Sections were thus rendered safe to act with:-- or indeed might not the Sections themselves be abolished? You had then merely your Twelve manageable pacific Townships, without centre or subdivision; (October 1795 (Dulaure, viii. 454-6).) and sacred right of Insurrection fell into abeyance!
So much is getting abolished; fleeting swiftly into the Inane. For the Press speaks, and the human tongue; Journals, heavy and light, in Philippic and Burlesque: a renegade Freron, a renegade Prudhomme, loud they as ever, only the contrary way. And Ci-devants shew themselves, almost parade themselves; resuscitated as from death-sleep; publish what death-pains they have had. The very Frogs of the Marsh croak with emphasis. Your protesting Seventy-three shall, with a struggle, be emitted out of Prison, back to their seats; your Louvets, Isnards, Lanjuinais, and wrecks of Girondism, recalled from their haylofts, and caves in Switzerland, will resume their place in the Convention: (Deux Amis, xiii. 3-39.) natural foes of Terror!
Thermidorian Talliens, and mere foes of Terror, rule in this Convention, and out of it. The compressed Mountain shrinks silent more and more. Moderatism rises louder and louder: not as a tempest, with threatenings; say rather, as the rushing of a mighty organ-blast, and melodious deafening Force of Public Opinion, from the Twenty-five million windpipes of a Nation all in Committee of Mercy: which how shall any detached body of individuals withstand?
7.II.
La Cabarus.
How, above all, shall a poor National Convention, withstand it? In this poor National Convention, broken, bewildered by long terror, perturbations, and guillotinement, there is no Pilot, there is not now even a Danton, who could undertake to steer you anywhither, in such press of weather. The utmost a bewildered Convention can do, is to veer, and trim, and try to keep itself steady: and rush, undrowned, before the wind. Needless to struggle; to fling helm a-lee, and make 'bout ship! A bewildered Convention sails not in the teeth of the wind; but is rapidly blown round again. So strong is the wind, we say; and so changed; blowing fresher and fresher, as from the sweet South-West; your devastating North-Easters, and wild tornado-gusts of Terror, blown utterly out! All Sansculottic things are passing away; all things are becoming Culottic.
Do but look at the cut of clothes; that light visible Result, significant of a thousand things which are not so visible. In winter 1793, men went in red nightcaps; Municipals themselves in sabots: the very Citoyennes had to petition against such headgear. But now in this winter 1794, where is the red nightcap? With the thing beyond the Flood. Your monied Citoyen ponders in what elegantest style he shall dress himself: whether he shall not even dress himself as the Free Peoples of Antiquity. The more adventurous Citoyenne has already done it. Behold her, that beautiful adventurous Citoyenne: in costume of the Ancient Greeks, such Greek as Painter David could teach; her sweeping tresses snooded by glittering antique fillet; bright-eyed tunic of the Greek women; her little feet naked, as in Antique Statues, with mere sandals, and winding-strings of riband,--defying the frost!
There is such an effervescence of Luxury. For your Emigrant Ci-devants carried not their mansions and furnitures out of the country with them; but left them standing here: and in the swift changes of property, what with money coined on the Place de la Revolution, what with Army-furnishings, sales of Emigrant Domain and Church Lands and King's Lands, and then with the Aladdin's-lamp of Agio in a time of Paper-money, such mansions have found new occupants. Old wine, drawn from Ci-devant bottles, descends new throats. Paris has swept herself, relighted herself; Salons, Soupers not Fraternal, beam once more with suitable effulgence, very singular in colour. The fair Cabarus is come out of Prison; wedded to her red-gloomy Dis, whom they say she treats too loftily: fair Cabarus gives the most brilliant soirees. Round her is gathered a new Republican Army, of Citoyennes in sandals; Ci-devants or other: what remnants soever of the old grace survive, are rallied there. At her right-hand, in this cause, labours fair Josephine the Widow Beauharnais, though in straitened circumstances: intent, both of them, to blandish down the grimness of Republican austerity, and recivilise mankind.
Recivilise, as of old they were civilised: by witchery of the Orphic fiddle-bow, and Euterpean rhythm; by the Graces, by the Smiles! Thermidorian Deputies are there in those soirees; Editor Freron, Orateur du Peuple; Barras, who has known other dances than the Carmagnole. Grim Generals of the Republic are there; in enormous horse-collar neckcloth, good against sabre-cuts; the hair gathered all into one knot, 'flowing down behind, fixed with a comb.' Among which latter do we not recognise, once more, the little bronzed-complexioned Artillery-Officer of Toulon, home from the Italian Wars! Grim enough; of lean, almost cruel aspect: for he has been in trouble, in ill health; also in ill favour, as a man promoted, deservingly or not, by the Terrorists and Robespierre Junior. But does not Barras know him? Will not Barras speak a word for him? Yes,--if at any time it will serve Barras so to do. Somewhat forlorn of fortune, for the present, stands that Artillery-Officer; looks, with those deep earnest eyes of his, into a future as waste as the most. Taciturn; yet with the strangest utterances in him, if you awaken him, which smite home, like light or lightning:--on the whole, rather dangerous? A 'dissociable' man? Dissociable enough; a natural terror and horror to all Phantasms, being himself of the genus Reality! He stands here, without work or outlook, in this forsaken manner;--glances nevertheless, it would seem, at the kind glance of Josephine Beauharnais; and, for the rest, with severe countenance, with open eyes and closed lips, waits what will betide.
That the Balls, therefore, have a new figure this winter, we can see. Not Carmagnoles, rude 'whirlblasts of rags,' as Mercier called them 'precursors of storm and destruction:' no, soft Ionic motions; fit for the light sandal, and antique Grecian tunic! Efflorescence of Luxury has come out: for men have wealth; nay new-got wealth; and under the Terror you durst not dance except in rags. Among the innumerable kinds of Balls, let the hasty reader mark only this single one: the kind they call Victim Balls, Bals a Victime. The dancers, in choice costume, have all crape round the left arm: to be admitted, it needs that you be a Victime; that you have lost a relative under the Terror. Peace to the Dead; let us dance to their memory! For in all ways one must dance.
It is very remarkable, according to Mercier, under what varieties of figure this great business of dancing goes on. 'The women,' says he, 'are Nymphs, Sultanas; sometimes Minervas, Junos, even Dianas. In light-unerring gyrations they swim there; with such earnestness of purpose; with perfect silence, so absorbed are they. What is singular,' continues he, 'the onlookers are as it were mingled with the dancers; form as it were a circumambient element round the different contre-dances, yet without deranging them. It is rare, in fact, that a Sultana in such circumstances experience the smallest collision. Her pretty foot darts down, an inch from mine; she is off again; she is as a flash of light: but soon the measure recalls her to the point she set out from. Like a glittering comet she travels her eclipse, revolving on herself, as by a double effect of gravitation and attraction.' (Mercier, Nouveau Paris, iii. 138, 153.) Looking forward a little way, into Time, the same Mercier discerns Merveilleuses in 'flesh-coloured drawers' with gold circlets; mere dancing Houris of an artificial Mahomet's-Paradise: much too Mahometan. Montgaillard, with his splenetic eye, notes a no less strange thing; that every fashionable Citoyenne you meet is in an interesting situation. Good Heavens, every! Mere pillows and stuffing! adds the acrid man;--such, in a time of depopulation by war and guillotine, being the fashion. (Montgaillard, iv. 436-42.) No further seek its merits to disclose.
Behold also instead of the old grim Tappe-durs of Robespierre, what new street-groups are these? Young men habited not in black-shag Carmagnole spencer, but in superfine habit carre or spencer with rectangular tail appended to it; 'square-tailed coat,' with elegant antiguillotinish specialty of collar; 'the hair plaited at the temples,' and knotted back, long-flowing, in military wise: young men of what they call the Muscadin or Dandy species! Freron, in his fondness names them Jeunesse doree, Golden, or Gilt Youth. They have come out, these Gilt Youths, in a kind of resuscitated state; they wear crape round the left arm, such of them as were Victims. More they carry clubs loaded with lead; in an angry manner: any Tappe-dur or remnant of Jacobinism they may fall in with, shall fare the worse. They have suffered much: their friends guillotined; their pleasures, frolics, superfine collars ruthlessly repressed: 'ware now the base Red Nightcaps who did it! Fair Cabarus and the Army of Greek sandals smile approval. In the Theatre Feydeau, young Valour in square-tailed coat eyes Beauty in Greek sandals, and kindles by her glances: Down with Jacobinism! No Jacobin hymn or demonstration, only Thermidorian ones, shall be permitted here: we beat down Jacobinism with clubs loaded with lead.
But let any one who has examined the Dandy nature, how petulant it is, especially in the gregarious state, think what an element, in sacred right of insurrection, this Gilt Youth was! Broils and battery; war without truce or measure! Hateful is Sansculottism, as Death and Night. For indeed is not the Dandy culottic, habilatory, by law of existence; 'a cloth-animal: one that lives, moves, and has his being in cloth?'--
So goes it, waltzing, bickering; fair Cabarus, by Orphic witchery, struggling to recivilise mankind. Not unsuccessfully, we hear. What utmost Republican grimness can resist Greek sandals, in Ionic motion, the very toes covered with gold rings? (Ibid. Mercier (ubi supra).) By degrees the indisputablest new-politeness rises; grows, with vigour. And yet, whether, even to this day, that inexpressible tone of society known under the old Kings, when Sin had 'lost all its deformity' (with or without advantage to us), and airy Nothing had obtained such a local habitation and establishment as she never had,--be recovered? Or even, whether it be not lost beyond recovery? (De Stael, Considerations iii. c. 10, &c.)--Either way, the world must contrive to struggle on.
7.III.
Quiberon.
But indeed do not these long-flowing hair-queues of a Jeunesse Doree in semi-military costume betoken, unconsciously, another still more important tendency? The Republic, abhorrent of her Guillotine, loves her Army.
And with cause. For, surely, if good fighting be a kind of honour, as it is, in its season; and be with the vulgar of men, even the chief kind of honour, then here is good fighting, in good season, if there ever was. These Sons of the Republic, they rose, in mad wrath, to deliver her from Slavery and Cimmeria. And have they not done it? Through Maritime Alps, through gorges of Pyrenees, through Low Countries, Northward along the Rhine-valley, far is Cimmeria hurled back from the sacred Motherland. Fierce as fire, they have carried her Tricolor over the faces of all her enemies;--over scarped heights, over cannon-batteries; down, as with the Vengeur, into the dead deep sea. She has 'Eleven hundred thousand fighters on foot,' this Republic: 'At one particular moment she had,' or supposed she had, 'seventeen hundred thousand.' (Toulongeon, iii. c. 7; v. c. 10 (p. 194).) Like a ring of lightning, they, volleying and ca-ira-ing, begirdle her from shore to shore. Cimmerian Coalition of Despots recoils; smitten with astonishment, and strange pangs.
Such a fire is in these Gaelic Republican men; high-blazing; which no Coalition can withstand! Not scutcheons, with four degrees of nobility; but ci-devant Serjeants, who have had to clutch Generalship out of the cannon's throat, a Pichegru, a Jourdan, a Hoche, lead them on. They have bread, they have iron; 'with bread and iron you can get to China.'--See Pichegru's soldiers, this hard winter, in their looped and windowed destitution, in their 'straw-rope shoes and cloaks of bass-mat,' how they overrun Holland, like a demon-host, the ice having bridged all waters; and rush shouting from victory to victory! Ships in the Texel are taken by huzzars on horseback: fled is York; fled is the Stadtholder, glad to escape to England, and leave Holland to fraternise. (19th January, 1795 (Montgaillard, iv. 287-311).) Such a Gaelic fire, we say, blazes in this People, like the conflagration of grass and dry-jungle; which no mortal can withstand--for the moment.
And even so it will blaze and run, scorching all things; and, from Cadiz to Archangel, mad Sansculottism, drilled now into Soldiership, led on by some 'armed Soldier of Democracy' (say, that Monosyllabic Artillery-Officer), will set its foot cruelly on the necks of its enemies; and its shouting and their shrieking shall fill the world!--Rash Coalised Kings, such a fire have ye kindled; yourselves fireless, your fighters animated only by drill- serjeants, messroom moralities, and the drummer's cat! However, it is begun, and will not end: not for a matter of twenty years. So long, this Gaelic fire, through its successive changes of colour and character, will blaze over the face of Europe, and afflict the scorch all men:--till it provoke all men; till it kindle another kind of fire, the Teutonic kind, namely; and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day! For there is a fire comparable to the burning of dry-jungle and grass; most sudden, high- blazing: and another fire which we liken to the burning of coal, or even of anthracite coal; difficult to kindle, but then which nothing will put out. The ready Gaelic fire, we can remark further, and remark not in Pichegrus only, but in innumerable Voltaires, Racines, Laplaces, no less; for a man, whether he fight, or sing, or think, will remain the same unity of a man,--is admirable for roasting eggs, in every conceivable sense. The Teutonic anthracite again, as we see in Luthers, Leibnitzes, Shakespeares, is preferable for smelting metals. How happy is our Europe that has both kinds!--
But be this as it may, the Republic is clearly triumphing. In the spring of the year Mentz Town again sees itself besieged; will again change master: did not Merlin the Thionviller, 'with wild beard and look,' say it was not for the last time they saw him there? The Elector of Mentz circulates among his brother Potentates this pertinent query, Were it not advisable to treat of Peace? Yes! answers many an Elector from the bottom of his heart. But, on the other hand, Austria hesitates; finally refuses, being subsidied by Pitt. As to Pitt, whoever hesitate, he, suspending his Habeas-corpus, suspending his Cash-payments, stands inflexible,--spite of foreign reverses; spite of domestic obstacles, of Scotch National Conventions and English Friends of the People, whom he is obliged to arraign, to hang, or even to see acquitted with jubilee: a lean inflexible man. The Majesty of Spain, as we predicted, makes Peace; also the Majesty of Prussia: and there is a Treaty of Bale. (5th April, 1795 (Montgaillard, iv. 319).) Treaty with black Anarchists and Regicides! Alas, what help? You cannot hang this Anarchy; it is like to hang you: you must needs treat with it.
Likewise, General Hoche has even succeeded in pacificating La Vendee. Rogue Rossignol and his 'Infernal Columns' have vanished: by firmness and justice, by sagacity and industry, General Hoche has done it. Taking 'Movable Columns,' not infernal; girdling-in the Country; pardoning the submissive, cutting down the resistive, limb after limb of the Revolt is brought under. La Rochejacquelin, last of our Nobles, fell in battle; Stofflet himself makes terms; Georges-Cadoudal is back to Brittany, among his Chouans: the frightful gangrene of La Vendee seems veritably extirpated. It has cost, as they reckon in round numbers, the lives of a Hundred Thousand fellow-mortals; with noyadings, conflagratings by infernal column, which defy arithmetic. This is the La Vendee War. (Histoire de la Guerre de la Vendee, par M. le Comte de Vauban, Memoires de Madame de la Rochejacquelin, &c.)
Nay in few months, it does burst up once more, but once only:--blown upon by Pitt, by our Ci-devant Puisaye of Calvados, and others. In the month of July 1795, English Ships will ride in Quiberon roads. There will be debarkation of chivalrous Ci-devants, of volunteer Prisoners-of-war--eager to desert; of fire-arms, Proclamations, clothes-chests, Royalists and specie. Whereupon also, on the Republican side, there will be rapid stand- to-arms; with ambuscade marchings by Quiberon beach, at midnight; storming of Fort Penthievre; war-thunder mingling with the roar of the nightly main; and such a morning light as has seldom dawned; debarkation hurled back into its boats, or into the devouring billows, with wreck and wail;--in one word, a Ci-devant Puisaye as totally ineffectual here as he was in Calvados, when he rode from Vernon Castle without boots. (Deux Amis, xiv. 94-106; Puisaye, Memoires, iii-vii.)
Again, therefore, it has cost the lives of many a brave man. Among whom the whole world laments the brave Son of Sombreuil. Ill-fated family! The father and younger son went to the guillotine; the heroic daughter languishes, reduced to want, hides her woes from History: the elder son perishes here; shot by military tribunal as an Emigrant; Hoche himself cannot save him. If all wars, civil and other, are misunderstandings, what a thing must right-understanding be!
7.IV.
Lion not dead.
The Convention, borne on the tide of Fortune towards foreign Victory, and driven by the strong wind of Public Opinion towards Clemency and Luxury, is rushing fast; all skill of pilotage is needed, and more than all, in such a velocity.
Curious to see, how we veer and whirl, yet must ever whirl round again, and scud before the wind. If, on the one hand, we re-admit the Protesting Seventy-Three, we, on the other hand, agree to consummate the Apotheosis of Marat; lift his body from the Cordeliers Church, and transport it to the Pantheon of Great Men,--flinging out Mirabeau to make room for him. To no purpose: so strong blows Public Opinion! A Gilt Youthhood, in plaited hair-tresses, tears down his Busts from the Theatre Feydeau; tramples them under foot; scatters them, with vociferation into the Cesspool of Montmartre. (Moniteur, du 25 Septembre 1794, du 4 Fevrier 1795.) Swept is his Chapel from the Place du Carrousel; the Cesspool of Montmartre will receive his very dust. Shorter godhood had no divine man. Some four months in this Pantheon, Temple of All the Immortals; then to the Cesspool, grand Cloaca of Paris and the World! 'His Busts at one time amounted to four thousand.' Between Temple of All the Immortals and Cloaca of the World, how are poor human creatures whirled!
Furthermore the question arises, When will the Constitution of Ninety- three, of 1793, come into action? Considerate heads surmise, in all privacy, that the Constitution of Ninety-three will never come into action. Let them busy themselves to get ready a better.
Or, again, where now are the Jacobins? Childless, most decrepit, as we saw, sat the mighty Mother; gnashing not teeth, but empty gums, against a traitorous Thermidorian Convention and the current of things. Twice were Billaud, Collot and Company accused in Convention, by a Lecointre, by a Legendre; and the second time, it was not voted calumnious. Billaud from the Jacobin tribune says, "The lion is not dead, he is only sleeping." They ask him in Convention, What he means by the awakening of the lion? And bickerings, of an extensive sort, arose in the Palais-Egalite between Tappe-durs and the Gilt Youthhood; cries of "Down with the Jacobins, the Jacoquins," coquin meaning scoundrel! The Tribune in mid-air gave battle- sound; answered only by silence and uncertain gasps. Talk was, in Government Committees, of 'suspending' the Jacobin Sessions. Hark, there!- -it is in Allhallow-time, or on the Hallow-eve itself, month ci-devant November, year once named of Grace 1794, sad eve for Jacobinism,--volley of stones dashing through our windows, with jingle and execration! The female Jacobins, famed Tricoteuses with knitting-needles, take flight; are met at the doors by a Gilt Youthhood and 'mob of four thousand persons;' are hooted, flouted, hustled; fustigated, in a scandalous manner, cotillons retrousses;--and vanish in mere hysterics. Sally out ye male Jacobins! The male Jacobins sally out; but only to battle, disaster and confusion. So that armed Authority has to intervene: and again on the morrow to intervene; and suspend the Jacobin Sessions forever and a day. (Moniteur, Seances du 10-12 Novembre 1794: Deux Amis, xiii. 43-49.) Gone are the Jacobins; into invisibility; in a storm of laughter and howls. Their place is made a Normal School, the first of the kind seen; it then vanishes into a 'Market of Thermidor Ninth;' into a Market of Saint-Honore, where is now peaceable chaffering for poultry and greens. The solemn temples, the great globe itself; the baseless fabric! Are not we such stuff, we and this world of ours, as Dreams are made of?
Maximum being abrogated, Trade was to take its own free course. Alas, Trade, shackled, topsyturvied in the way we saw, and now suddenly let go again, can for the present take no course at all; but only reel and stagger. There is, so to speak, no Trade whatever for the time being. Assignats, long sinking, emitted in such quantities, sink now with an alacrity beyond parallel. "Combien?" said one, to a Hackney-coachman, "What fare?" "Six thousand livres," answered he: some three hundred pounds sterling, in Paper-money. (Mercier, ii. 94. ('1st February, 1796: at the Bourse of Paris, the gold louis,' of 20 francs in silver, 'costs 5,300 francs in assignats.' Montgaillard, iv. 419).) Pressure of Maximum withdrawn, the things it compressed likewise withdraw. 'Two ounces of bread per day' in the modicum allotted: wide-waving, doleful are the Bakers' Queues; Farmers' houses are become pawnbrokers' shops.
One can imagine, in these circumstances, with what humour Sansculottism growled in its throat, "La Cabarus;" beheld Ci-devants return dancing, the Thermidor effulgence of recivilisation, and Balls in flesh-coloured drawers. Greek tunics and sandals; hosts of Muscadins parading, with their clubs loaded with lead;--and we here, cast out, abhorred, 'picking offals from the street;' (Fantin Desodoards, Histoire de la Revolution, vii. c. 4.) agitating in Baker's Queue for our two ounces of bread! Will the Jacobin lion, which they say is meeting secretly 'at the Acheveche, in bonnet rouge with loaded pistols,' not awaken? Seemingly not. Our Collot, our Billaud, Barrere, Vadier, in these last days of March 1795, are found worthy of Deportation, of Banishment beyond seas; and shall, for the present, be trundled off to the Castle of Ham. The lion is dead;--or writhing in death-throes!
Behold, accordingly, on the day they call Twelfth of Germinal (which is also called First of April, not a lucky day), how lively are these streets of Paris once more! Floods of hungry women, of squalid hungry men; ejaculating: "Bread, Bread and the Constitution of Ninety-three!" Paris has risen, once again, like the Ocean-tide; is flowing towards the Tuileries, for Bread and a Constitution. Tuileries Sentries do their best; but it serves not: the Ocean-tide sweeps them away; inundates the Convention Hall itself; howling, "Bread, and the Constitution!"
Unhappy Senators, unhappy People, there is yet, after all toils and broils, no Bread, no Constitution. "Du pain, pas tant de longs discours, Bread, not bursts of Parliamentary eloquence!" so wailed the Menads of Maillard, five years ago and more; so wail ye to this hour. The Convention, with unalterable countenance, with what thought one knows not, keeps its seat in this waste howling chaos; rings its stormbell from the Pavilion of Unity. Section Lepelletier, old Filles Saint-Thomas, who are of the money-changing species; these and Gilt Youthhood fly to the rescue; sweep chaos forth again, with levelled bayonets. Paris is declared 'in a state of siege.' Pichegru, Conqueror of Holland, who happens to be here, is named Commandant, till the disturbance end. He, in one day, so to speak, ends it. He accomplishes the transfer of Billaud, Collot and Company; dissipating all opposition 'by two cannon-shots,' blank cannon-shots, and the terror of his name; and thereupon announcing, with a Laconicism which should be imitated, "Representatives, your decrees are executed," (Moniteur, Seance du 13 Germinal (2d April) 1795.) lays down his Commandantship.
This Revolt of Germinal, therefore, has passed, like a vain cry. The Prisoners rest safe in Ham, waiting for ships; some nine hundred 'chief Terrorists of Paris' are disarmed. Sansculottism, swept forth with bayonets, has vanished, with its misery, to the bottom of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau.--Time was when Usher Maillard with Menads could alter the course of Legislation; but that time is not. Legislation seems to have got bayonets; Section Lepelletier takes its firelock, not for us! We retire to our dark dens; our cry of hunger is called a Plot of Pitt; the Saloons glitter, the flesh-coloured Drawers gyrate as before. It was for "The Cabarus" then, and her Muscadins and Money-changers, that we fought? It was for Balls in flesh-coloured drawers that we took Feudalism by the beard, and did, and dared, shedding our blood like water? Expressive Silence, muse thou their praise!--
7.V.
Lion sprawling its last.
Representative Carrier went to the Guillotine, in December last; protesting that he acted by orders. The Revolutionary Tribunal, after all it has devoured, has now only, as Anarchic things do, to devour itself. In the early days of May, men see a remarkable thing: Fouquier-Tinville pleading at the Bar once his own. He and his chief Jurymen, Leroi August-Tenth, Juryman Vilate, a Batch of Sixteen; pleading hard, protesting that they acted by orders: but pleading in vain. Thus men break the axe with which they have done hateful things; the axe itself having grown hateful. For the rest, Fouquier died hard enough: "Where are thy Batches?" howled the People.--"Hungry canaille," asked Fouquier, "is thy Bread cheaper, wanting them?"
Remarkable Fouquier; once but as other Attorneys and Law-beagles, which hunt ravenous on this Earth, a well-known phasis of human nature; and now thou art and remainest the most remarkable Attorney that ever lived and hunted in the Upper Air! For, in this terrestrial Course of Time, there was to be an Avatar of Attorneyism; the Heavens had said, Let there be an Incarnation, not divine, of the venatory Attorney-spirit which keeps its eye on the bond only;--and lo, this was it; and they have attorneyed it in its turn. Vanish, then, thou rat-eyed Incarnation of Attorneyism; who at bottom wert but as other Attorneys, and too hungry Sons of Adam! Juryman Vilate had striven hard for life, and published, from his Prison, an ingenious Book, not unknown to us; but it would not stead: he also had to vanish; and this his Book of the Secret Causes of Thermidor, full of lies, with particles of truth in it undiscoverable otherwise, is all that remains of him.
Revolutionary Tribunal has done; but vengeance has not done. Representative Lebon, after long struggling, is handed over to the ordinary Law Courts, and by them guillotined. Nay, at Lyons and elsewhere, resuscitated Moderatism, in its vengeance, will not wait the slow process of Law; but bursts into the Prisons, sets fire to the prisons; burns some three score imprisoned Jacobins to dire death, or chokes them 'with the smoke of straw.' There go vengeful truculent 'Companies of Jesus,' 'Companies of the Sun;' slaying Jacobinism wherever they meet with it; flinging it into the Rhone-stream; which, once more, bears seaward a horrid cargo. (Moniteur, du 27 Juin, du 31 Aout, 1795; Deux Amis, xiii. 121-9.) Whereupon, at Toulon, Jacobinism rises in revolt; and is like to hang the National Representatives.--With such action and reaction, is not a poor National Convention hard bested? It is like the settlement of winds and waters, of seas long tornado-beaten; and goes on with jumble and with jangle. Now flung aloft, now sunk in trough of the sea, your Vessel of the Republic has need of all pilotage and more.
What Parliament that ever sat under the Moon had such a series of destinies, as this National Convention of France? It came together to make the Constitution; and instead of that, it has had to make nothing but destruction and confusion: to burn up Catholicisms, Aristocratisms, to worship Reason and dig Saltpetre, to fight Titanically with itself and with the whole world. A Convention decimated by the Guillotine; above the tenth man has bowed his neck to the axe. Which has seen Carmagnoles danced before it, and patriotic strophes sung amid Church-spoils; the wounded of the Tenth of August defile in handbarrows; and, in the Pandemonial Midnight, Egalite's dames in tricolor drink lemonade, and spectrum of Sieyes mount, saying, Death sans phrase. A Convention which has effervesced, and which has congealed; which has been red with rage, and also pale with rage: sitting with pistols in its pocket, drawing sword (in a moment of effervescence): now storming to the four winds, through a Danton-voice, Awake, O France, and smite the tyrants; now frozen mute under its Robespierre, and answering his dirge-voice by a dubious gasp. Assassinated, decimated; stabbed at, shot at, in baths, on streets and staircases; which has been the nucleus of Chaos. Has it not heard the chimes at midnight? It has deliberated, beset by a Hundred thousand armed men with artillery-furnaces and provision-carts. It has been betocsined, bestormed; over-flooded by black deluges of Sansculottism; and has heard the shrill cry, Bread and Soap. For, as we say, its the nucleus of Chaos; it sat as the centre of Sansculottism; and had spread its pavilion on the waste Deep, where is neither path nor landmark, neither bottom nor shore. In intrinsic valour, ingenuity, fidelity, and general force and manhood, it has perhaps not far surpassed the average of Parliaments: but in frankness of purpose, in singularity of position, it seeks its fellow. One other Sansculottic submersion, or at most two, and this wearied vessel of a Convention reaches land.
Revolt of Germinal Twelfth ended as a vain cry; moribund Sansculottism was swept back into invisibility. There it has lain moaning, these six weeks: moaning, and also scheming. Jacobins disarmed, flung forth from their Tribune in mid air, must needs try to help themselves, in secret conclave under ground. Lo, therefore, on the First day of the Month Prairial, 20th of May 1795, sound of the generale once more; beating sharp, ran-tan, To arms, To arms!
Sansculottism has risen, yet again, from its death-lair; waste wild- flowing, as the unfruitful Sea. Saint-Antoine is a-foot: "Bread and the Constitution of Ninety-three," so sounds it; so stands it written with chalk on the hats of men. They have their pikes, their firelocks; Paper of Grievances; standards; printed Proclamation, drawn up in quite official manner,--considering this, and also considering that, they, a much-enduring Sovereign People, are in Insurrection; will have Bread and the Constitution of Ninety-three. And so the Barriers are seized, and the generale beats, and tocsins discourse discord. Black deluges overflow the Tuileries; spite of sentries, the Sanctuary itself is invaded: enter, to our Order of the Day, a torrent of dishevelled women, wailing, "Bread! Bread!" President may well cover himself; and have his own tocsin rung in 'the Pavilion of Unity;' the ship of the State again labours and leaks; overwashed, near to swamping, with unfruitful brine.
What a day, once more! Women are driven out: men storm irresistibly in; choke all corridors, thunder at all gates. Deputies, putting forth head, obtest, conjure; Saint-Antoine rages, "Bread and Constitution." Report has risen that the 'Convention is assassinating the women:' crushing and rushing, clangor and furor! The oak doors have become as oak tambourines, sounding under the axe of Saint-Antoine; plaster-work crackles, woodwork booms and jingles; door starts up;--bursts-in Saint-Antoine with frenzy and vociferation, Rag-standards, printed Proclamation, drum-music: astonishment to eye and ear. Gendarmes, loyal Sectioners charge through the other door; they are recharged; musketry exploding: Saint-Antoine cannot be expelled. Obtesting Deputies obtest vainly; Respect the President; approach not the President! Deputy Feraud, stretching out his hands, baring his bosom scarred in the Spanish wars, obtests vainly: threatens and resists vainly. Rebellious Deputy of the Sovereign, if thou have fought, have not we too? We have no bread, no Constitution! They wrench poor Feraud; they tumble him, trample him, wrath waxing to see itself work: they drag him into the corridor, dead or near it; sever his head, and fix it on a pike. Ah, did an unexampled Convention want this variety of destiny too, then? Feraud's bloody head goes on a pike. Such a game has begun; Paris and the Earth may wait how it will end.
And so it billows free though all Corridors; within, and without, far as the eye reaches, nothing but Bedlam, and the great Deep broken loose! President Boissy d'Anglas sits like a rock: the rest of the Convention is floated 'to the upper benches;' Sectioners and Gendarmes still ranking there to form a kind of wall for them. And Insurrection rages; rolls its drums; will read its Paper of Grievances, will have this decreed, will have that. Covered sits President Boissy, unyielding; like a rock in the beating of seas. They menace him, level muskets at him, he yields not; they hold up Feraud's bloody head to him, with grave stern air he bows to it, and yields not.
And the Paper of Grievances cannot get itself read for uproar; and the drums roll, and the throats bawl; and Insurrection, like sphere-music, is inaudible for very noise: Decree us this, Decree us that. One man we discern bawling 'for the space of an hour at all intervals,' "Je demande l'arrestation des coquins et des laches." Really one of the most comprehensive Petitions ever put up: which indeed, to this hour, includes all that you can reasonably ask Constitution of the Year One, Rotten- Borough, Ballot-Box, or other miraculous Political Ark of the Covenant to do for you to the end of the world! I also demand arrestment of the Knaves and Dastards, and nothing more whatever. National Representation, deluged with black Sansculottism glides out; for help elsewhere, for safety elsewhere: here is no help.
About four in the afternoon, there remain hardly more than some Sixty Members: mere friends, or even secret-leaders; a remnant of the Mountain- crest, held in silence by Thermidorian thraldom. Now is the time for them; now or never let them descend, and speak! They descend, these Sixty, invited by Sansculottism: Romme of the New Calendar, Ruhl of the Sacred Phial, Goujon, Duquesnoy, Soubrany, and the rest. Glad Sansculottism forms a ring for them; Romme takes the President's chair; they begin resolving and decreeing. Fast enough now comes Decree after Decree, in alternate brief strains, or strophe and antistrophe,--what will cheapen bread, what will awaken the dormant lion. And at every new Decree, Sansculottism shouts, Decreed, Decreed; and rolls its drums.
Fast enough; the work of months in hours,--when see, a Figure enters, whom in the lamp-light we recognise to be Legendre; and utters words: fit to be hissed out! And then see, Section Lepelletier or other Muscadin Section enters, and Gilt Youth, with levelled bayonets, countenances screwed to the sticking-place! Tramp, tramp, with bayonets gleaming in the lamp-light: what can one do, worn down with long riot, grown heartless, dark, hungry, but roll back, but rush back, and escape who can? The very windows need to be thrown up, that Sansculottism may escape fast enough. Money-changer Sections and Gilt Youth sweep them forth, with steel besom, far into the depths of Saint-Antoine. Triumph once more! The Decrees of that Sixty are not so much as rescinded; they are declared null and non-extant. Romme, Ruhl, Goujon and the ringleaders, some thirteen in all, are decreed Accused. Permanent-session ends at three in the morning. (Deux Amis, xiii. 129-46.) Sansculottism, once more flung resupine, lies sprawling; sprawling its last.
Such was the First of Prairial, 20th May, 1795. Second and Third of Prairial, during which Sansculottism still sprawled, and unexpectedly rang its tocsin, and assembled in arms, availed Sansculottism nothing. What though with our Rommes and Ruhls, accused but not yet arrested, we make a new 'True National Convention' of our own, over in the East; and put the others Out of Law? What though we rank in arms and march? Armed Force and Muscadin Sections, some thirty thousand men, environ that old False Convention: we can but bully one another: bandying nicknames, "Muscadins," against "Blooddrinkers, Buveurs de Sang." Feraud's Assassin, taken with the red hand, and sentenced, and now near to Guillotine and Place de Greve, is retaken; is carried back into Saint-Antoine: to no purpose. Convention Sectionaries and Gilt Youth come, according to Decree, to seek him; nay to disarm Saint-Antoine! And they do disarm it: by rolling of cannon, by springing upon enemy's cannon; by military audacity, and terror of the Law. Saint-Antoine surrenders its arms; Santerre even advising it, anxious for life and brewhouse. Feraud's Assassin flings himself from a high roof: and all is lost. (Toulongeon, v. 297; Moniteur, Nos. 244, 5, 6.)
Discerning which things, old Ruhl shot a pistol through his old white head; dashed his life in pieces, as he had done the Sacred Phial of Rheims. Romme, Goujon and the others stand ranked before a swiftly-appointed, swift Military Tribunal. Hearing the sentence, Goujon drew a knife, struck it into his breast, passed it to his neighbour Romme; and fell dead. Romme did the like; and another all but did it; Roman-death rushing on there, as in electric-chain, before your Bailiffs could intervene! The Guillotine had the rest.
They were the Ultimi Romanorum. Billaud, Collot and Company are now ordered to be tried for life; but are found to be already off, shipped for Sinamarri, and the hot mud of Surinam. There let Billaud surround himself with flocks of tame parrots; Collot take the yellow fever, and drinking a whole bottle of brandy, burn up his entrails. (Dictionnaire des Hommes Marquans, paras Billaud, Collot.) Sansculottism spraws no more. The dormant lion has become a dead one; and now, as we see, any hoof may smite him.
7.VI.
Grilled Herrings.
So dies Sansculottism, the body of Sansculottism, or is changed. Its ragged Pythian Carmagnole-dance has transformed itself into a Pyrrhic, into a dance of Cabarus Balls. Sansculottism is dead; extinguished by new isms of that kind, which were its own natural progeny; and is buried, we may say, with such deafening jubilation and disharmony of funeral-knell on their part, that only after some half century or so does one begin to learn clearly why it ever was alive.
And yet a meaning lay in it: Sansculottism verily was alive, a New-Birth of TIME; nay it still lives, and is not dead, but changed. The soul of it still lives; still works far and wide, through one bodily shape into another less amorphous, as is the way of cunning Time with his New-Births:- -till, in some perfected shape, it embrace the whole circuit of the world! For the wise man may now everywhere discern that he must found on his manhood, not on the garnitures of his manhood. He who, in these Epochs of our Europe, founds on garnitures, formulas, culottisms of what sort soever, is founding on old cloth and sheep-skin, and cannot endure. But as for the body of Sansculottism, that is dead and buried,--and, one hopes, need not reappear, in primary amorphous shape, for another thousand years!
It was the frightfullest thing ever borne of Time? One of the frightfullest. This Convention, now grown Anti-Jacobin, did, with an eye to justify and fortify itself, publish Lists of what the Reign of Terror had perpetrated: Lists of Persons Guillotined. The Lists, cries splenetic Abbe Montgaillard, were not complete. They contain the names of, How many persons thinks the reader?--Two Thousand all but a few. There were above Four Thousand, cries Montgaillard: so many were guillotined, fusilladed, noyaded, done to dire death; of whom Nine Hundred were women. (Montgaillard, iv. 241.) It is a horrible sum of human lives, M. l'Abbe:-- some ten times as many shot rightly on a field of battle, and one might have had his Glorious-Victory with Te-Deum. It is not far from the two- hundredth part of what perished in the entire Seven Years War. By which Seven Years War, did not the great Fritz wrench Silesia from the great Theresa; and a Pompadour, stung by epigrams, satisfy herself that she could not be an Agnes Sorel? The head of man is a strange vacant sounding-shell, M. l'Abbe; and studies Cocker to small purpose.
But what if History, somewhere on this Planet, were to hear of a Nation, the third soul of whom had not for thirty weeks each year as many third- rate potatoes as would sustain him? (Report of the Irish Poor-Law Commission, 1836.) History, in that case, feels bound to consider that starvation is starvation; that starvation from age to age presupposes much: History ventures to assert that the French Sansculotte of Ninety-three, who, roused from long death-sleep, could rush at once to the frontiers, and die fighting for an immortal Hope and Faith of Deliverance for him and his, was but the second-miserablest of men! The Irish Sans-potato, had he not senses then, nay a soul? In his frozen darkness, it was bitter for him to die famishing; bitter to see his children famish. It was bitter for him to be a beggar, a liar and a knave. Nay, if that dreary Greenland-wind of benighted Want, perennial from sire to son, had frozen him into a kind of torpor and numb callosity, so that he saw not, felt not, was this, for a creature with a soul in it, some assuagement; or the cruellest wretchedness of all?
Such things were, such things are; and they go on in silence peaceably: and Sansculottisms follow them. History, looking back over this France through long times, back to Turgot's time for instance, when dumb Drudgery staggered up to its King's Palace, and in wide expanse of sallow faces, squalor and winged raggedness, presented hieroglyphically its Petition of Grievances; and for answer got hanged on a 'new gallows forty feet high,'-- confesses mournfully that there is no period to be met with, in which the general Twenty-five Millions of France suffered less than in this period which they name Reign of Terror! But it was not the Dumb Millions that suffered here; it was the Speaking Thousands, and Hundreds, and Units; who shrieked and published, and made the world ring with their wail, as they could and should: that is the grand peculiarity. The frightfullest Births of Time are never the loud-speaking ones, for these soon die; they are the silent ones, which can live from century to century! Anarchy, hateful as Death, is abhorrent to the whole nature of man; and must itself soon die.
Wherefore let all men know what of depth and of height is still revealed in man; and, with fear and wonder, with just sympathy and just antipathy, with clear eye and open heart, contemplate it and appropriate it; and draw innumerable inferences from it. This inference, for example, among the first: 'That if the gods of this lower world will sit on their glittering thrones, indolent as Epicurus' gods, with the living Chaos of Ignorance and Hunger weltering uncared for at their feet, and smooth Parasites preaching, Peace, peace, when there is no peace,' then the dark Chaos, it would seem, will rise; has risen, and O Heavens! has it not tanned their skins into breeches for itself? That there be no second Sansculottism in our Earth for a thousand years, let us understand well what the first was; and let Rich and Poor of us go and do otherwise.--But to our tale.
The Muscadin Sections greatly rejoice; Cabarus Balls gyrate: the well-nigh insoluble problem Republic without Anarchy, have we not solved it?--Law of Fraternity or Death is gone: chimerical Obtain-who-need has become practical Hold-who-have. To anarchic Republic of the Poverties there has succeeded orderly Republic of the Luxuries; which will continue as long as it can.
On the Pont au Change, on the Place de Greve, in long sheds, Mercier, in these summer evenings, saw working men at their repast. One's allotment of daily bread has sunk to an ounce and a half. 'Plates containing each three grilled herrings, sprinkled with shorn onions, wetted with a little vinegar; to this add some morsel of boiled prunes, and lentils swimming in a clear sauce: at these frugal tables, the cook's gridiron hissing near by, and the pot simmering on a fire between two stones, I have seen them ranged by the hundred; consuming, without bread, their scant messes, far too moderate for the keenness of their appetite, and the extent of their stomach.' (Nouveau Paris, iv. 118.) Seine water, rushing plenteous by, will supply the deficiency.
O man of Toil, thy struggling and thy daring, these six long years of insurrection and tribulation, thou hast profited nothing by it, then? Thou consumest thy herring and water, in the blessed gold-red evening. O why was the Earth so beautiful, becrimsoned with dawn and twilight, if man's dealings with man were to make it a vale of scarcity, of tears, not even soft tears? Destroying of Bastilles, discomfiting of Brunswicks, fronting of Principalities and Powers, of Earth and Tophet, all that thou hast dared and endured,--it was for a Republic of the Cabarus Saloons? Patience; thou must have patience: the end is not yet.
7.VII.
The Whiff of Grapeshot.
In fact, what can be more natural, one may say inevitable, as a Post- Sansculottic transitionary state, than even this? Confused wreck of a Republic of the Poverties, which ended in Reign of Terror, is arranging itself into such composure as it can. Evangel of Jean-Jacques, and most other Evangels, becoming incredible, what is there for it but return to the old Evangel of Mammon? Contrat-Social is true or untrue, Brotherhood is Brotherhood or Death; but money always will buy money's worth: in the wreck of human dubitations, this remains indubitable, that Pleasure is pleasant. Aristocracy of Feudal Parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing; and now, by a natural course, we arrive at Aristocracy of the Moneybag. It is the course through which all European Societies are at this hour travelling. Apparently a still baser sort of Aristocracy? An infinitely baser; the basest yet known!
In which however there is this advantage, that, like Anarchy itself, it cannot continue. Hast thou considered how Thought is stronger than Artillery-parks, and (were it fifty years after death and martyrdom, or were it two thousand years) writes and unwrites Acts of Parliament, removes mountains; models the World like soft clay? Also how the beginning of all Thought, worth the name, is Love; and the wise head never yet was, without first the generous heart? The Heavens cease not their bounty: they send us generous hearts into every generation. And now what generous heart can pretend to itself, or be hoodwinked into believing, that Loyalty to the Moneybag is a noble Loyalty? Mammon, cries the generous heart out of all ages and countries, is the basest of known Gods, even of known Devils. In him what glory is there, that ye should worship him? No glory discernable; not even terror: at best, detestability, ill-matched with despicability!-- Generous hearts, discerning, on this hand, widespread Wretchedness, dark without and within, moistening its ounce-and-half of bread with tears; and on that hand, mere Balls in fleshcoloured drawers, and inane or foul glitter of such sort,--cannot but ejaculate, cannot but announce: Too much, O divine Mammon; somewhat too much!--The voice of these, once announcing itself, carries fiat and pereat in it, for all things here below.
Meanwhile, we will hate Anarchy as Death, which it is; and the things worse than Anarchy shall be hated more! Surely Peace alone is fruitful. Anarchy is destruction: a burning up, say, of Shams and Insupportabilities; but which leaves Vacancy behind. Know this also, that out of a world of Unwise nothing but an Unwisdom can be made. Arrange it, Constitution-build it, sift it through Ballot-Boxes as thou wilt, it is and remains an Unwisdom,-- the new prey of new quacks and unclean things, the latter end of it slightly better than the beginning. Who can bring a wise thing out of men unwise? Not one. And so Vacancy and general Abolition having come for this France, what can Anarchy do more? Let there be Order, were it under the Soldier's Sword; let there be Peace, that the bounty of the Heavens be not spilt; that what of Wisdom they do send us bring fruit in its season!-- It remains to be seen how the quellers of Sansculottism were themselves quelled, and sacred right of Insurrection was blown away by gunpowder: wherewith this singular eventful History called French Revolution ends.
The Convention, driven such a course by wild wind, wild tide, and steerage and non-steerage, these three years, has become weary of its own existence, sees all men weary of it; and wishes heartily to finish. To the last, it has to strive with contradictions: it is now getting fast ready with a Constitution, yet knows no peace. Sieyes, we say, is making the Constitution once more; has as good as made it. Warned by experience, the great Architect alters much, admits much. Distinction of Active and Passive Citizen, that is, Money-qualification for Electors: nay Two Chambers, 'Council of Ancients,' as well as 'Council of Five Hundred;' to that conclusion have we come! In a like spirit, eschewing that fatal self- denying ordinance of your Old Constituents, we enact not only that actual Convention Members are re-eligible, but that Two-thirds of them must be re- elected. The Active Citizen Electors shall for this time have free choice of only One-third of their National Assembly. Such enactment, of Two- thirds to be re-elected, we append to our Constitution; we submit our Constitution to the Townships of France, and say, Accept both, or reject both. Unsavoury as this appendix may be, the Townships, by overwhelming majority, accept and ratify. With Directory of Five; with Two good Chambers, double-majority of them nominated by ourselves, one hopes this Constitution may prove final. March it will; for the legs of it, the re- elected Two-thirds, are already there, able to march. Sieyes looks at his Paper Fabric with just pride.
But now see how the contumacious Sections, Lepelletier foremost, kick against the pricks! Is it not manifest infraction of one's Elective Franchise, Rights of Man, and Sovereignty of the People, this appendix of re-electing your Two-thirds? Greedy tyrants who would perpetuate yourselves!--For the truth is, victory over Saint-Antoine, and long right of Insurrection, has spoiled these men. Nay spoiled all men. Consider too how each man was free to hope what he liked; and now there is to be no hope, there is to be fruition, fruition of this.
In men spoiled by long right of Insurrection, what confused ferments will rise, tongues once begun wagging! Journalists declaim, your Lacretelles, Laharpes; Orators spout. There is Royalism traceable in it, and Jacobinism. On the West Frontier, in deep secrecy, Pichegru, durst he trust his Army, is treating with Conde: in these Sections, there spout wolves in sheep's clothing, masked Emigrants and Royalists! (Napoleon, Las Cases (Choix des Rapports, xvii. 398-411).) All men, as we say, had hoped, each that the Election would do something for his own side: and now there is no Election, or only the third of one. Black is united with white against this clause of the Two-thirds; all the Unruly of France, who see their trade thereby near ending.
Section Lepelletier, after Addresses enough, finds that such clause is a manifest infraction; that it, Lepelletier, for one, will simply not conform thereto; and invites all other free Sections to join it, 'in central Committee,' in resistance to oppression. (Deux Amis, xiii. 375-406.) The Sections join it, nearly all; strong with their Forty Thousand fighting men. The Convention therefore may look to itself! Lepelletier, on this 12th day of Vendemiaire, 4th of October 1795, is sitting in open contravention, in its Convent of Filles Saint-Thomas, Rue Vivienne, with guns primed. The Convention has some Five Thousand regular troops at hand; Generals in abundance; and a Fifteen Hundred of miscellaneous persecuted Ultra-Jacobins, whom in this crisis it has hastily got together and armed, under the title Patriots of Eighty-nine. Strong in Law, it sends its General Menou to disarm Lepelletier.
General Menou marches accordingly, with due summons and demonstration; with no result. General Menou, about eight in the evening, finds that he is standing ranked in the Rue Vivienne, emitting vain summonses; with primed guns pointed out of every window at him; and that he cannot disarm Lepelletier. He has to return, with whole skin, but without success; and be thrown into arrest as 'a traitor.' Whereupon the whole Forty Thousand join this Lepelletier which cannot be vanquished: to what hand shall a quaking Convention now turn? Our poor Convention, after such voyaging, just entering harbour, so to speak, has struck on the bar;--and labours there frightfully, with breakers roaring round it, Forty thousand of them, like to wash it, and its Sieyes Cargo and the whole future of France, into the deep! Yet one last time, it struggles, ready to perish.
Some call for Barras to be made Commandant; he conquered in Thermidor. Some, what is more to the purpose, bethink them of the Citizen Buonaparte, unemployed Artillery Officer, who took Toulon. A man of head, a man of action: Barras is named Commandant's-Cloak; this young Artillery Officer is named Commandant. He was in the Gallery at the moment, and heard it; he withdrew, some half hour, to consider with himself: after a half hour of grim compressed considering, to be or not to be, he answers Yea.
And now, a man of head being at the centre of it, the whole matter gets vital. Swift, to Camp of Sablons; to secure the Artillery, there are not twenty men guarding it! A swift Adjutant, Murat is the name of him, gallops; gets thither some minutes within time, for Lepelletier was also on march that way: the Cannon are ours. And now beset this post, and beset that; rapid and firm: at Wicket of the Louvre, in Cul de Sac Dauphin, in Rue Saint-Honore, from Pont Neuf all along the north Quays, southward to Pont ci-devant Royal,--rank round the Sanctuary of the Tuileries, a ring of steel discipline; let every gunner have his match burning, and all men stand to their arms!
Thus there is Permanent-session through night; and thus at sunrise of the morrow, there is seen sacred Insurrection once again: vessel of State labouring on the bar; and tumultuous sea all round her, beating generale, arming and sounding,--not ringing tocsin, for we have left no tocsin but our own in the Pavilion of Unity. It is an imminence of shipwreck, for the whole world to gaze at. Frightfully she labours, that poor ship, within cable-length of port; huge peril for her. However, she has a man at the helm. Insurgent messages, received, and not received; messenger admitted blindfolded; counsel and counter-counsel: the poor ship labours!-- Vendemiaire 13th, year 4: curious enough, of all days, it is the Fifth day of October, anniversary of that Menad-march, six years ago; by sacred right of Insurrection we are got thus far.
Lepelletier has seized the Church of Saint-Roch; has seized the Pont Neuf, our piquet there retreating without fire. Stray shots fall from Lepelletier; rattle down on the very Tuileries staircase. On the other hand, women advance dishevelled, shrieking, Peace; Lepelletier behind them waving its hat in sign that we shall fraternise. Steady! The Artillery Officer is steady as bronze; can be quick as lightning. He sends eight hundred muskets with ball-cartridges to the Convention itself; honourable Members shall act with these in case of extremity: whereat they look grave enough. Four of the afternoon is struck. (Moniteur, Seance du 5 Octobre 1795.) Lepelletier, making nothing by messengers, by fraternity or hat- waving, bursts out, along the Southern Quai Voltaire, along streets, and passages, treble-quick, in huge veritable onslaught! Whereupon, thou bronze Artillery Officer--? "Fire!" say the bronze lips. Roar and again roar, continual, volcano-like, goes his great gun, in the Cul de Sac Dauphin against the Church of Saint-Roch; go his great guns on the Pont Royal; go all his great guns;--blow to air some two hundred men, mainly about the Church of Saint-Roch! Lepelletier cannot stand such horse-play; no Sectioner can stand it; the Forty-thousand yield on all sides, scour towards covert. 'Some hundred or so of them gathered both Theatre de la Republique; but,' says he, 'a few shells dislodged them. It was all finished at six.'
The Ship is over the bar, then; free she bounds shoreward,--amid shouting and vivats! Citoyen Buonaparte is 'named General of the Interior, by acclamation;' quelled Sections have to disarm in such humour as they may; sacred right of Insurrection is gone for ever! The Sieyes Constitution can disembark itself, and begin marching. The miraculous Convention Ship has got to land;--and is there, shall we figuratively say, changed, as Epic Ships are wont, into a kind of Sea Nymph, never to sail more; to roam the waste Azure, a Miracle in History!
'It is false,' says Napoleon, 'that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.' Most false: the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch Church show splintered by it, to this hour.--Singular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this Whiff of Grapeshot was promised; but it could not be given then, could not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was!--
Homer's Epos, it is remarked, is like a Bas-relief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos of Universal History itself. Directorates, Consulates, Emperorships, Restorations, Citizen-Kingships succeed this Business in due series, in due genesis one out of the other. Nevertheless the First-parent of all these may be said to have gone to air in the way we see. A Baboeuf Insurrection, next year, will die in the birth; stifled by the Soldiery. A Senate, if tinged with Royalism, can be purged by the Soldiery; and an Eighteenth of Fructidor transacted by the mere shew of bayonets. (Moniteur, du 5 Septembre 1797.) Nay Soldiers' bayonets can be used a posteriori on a Senate, and make it leap out of window,--still bloodless; and produce an Eighteenth of Brumaire. (9th November 1799 (Choix des Rapports, xvii. 1-96).) Such changes must happen: but they are managed by intriguings, caballings, and then by orderly word of command; almost like mere changes of Ministry. Not in general by sacred right of Insurrection, but by milder methods growing ever milder, shall the Events of French history be henceforth brought to pass.
It is admitted that this Directorate, which owned, at its starting, these three things, an 'old table, a sheet of paper, and an ink-bottle,' and no visible money or arrangement whatever, (Bailleul, Examen critique des Considerations de Madame de Stael, ii. 275.) did wonders: that France, since the Reign of Terror hushed itself, has been a new France, awakened like a giant out of torpor; and has gone on, in the Internal Life of it, with continual progress. As for the External form and forms of Life,--what can we say except that out of the Eater there comes Strength; out of the Unwise there comes not Wisdom! Shams are burnt up; nay, what as yet is the peculiarity of France, the very Cant of them is burnt up. The new Realities are not yet come: ah no, only Phantasms, Paper models, tentative Prefigurements of such! In France there are now Four Million Landed Properties; that black portent of an Agrarian Law is as it were realised! What is still stranger, we understand all Frenchmen have 'the right of duel;' the Hackney-coachman with the Peer, if insult be given: such is the law of Public Opinion. Equality at least in death! The Form of Government is by Citizen King, frequently shot at, not yet shot.
On the whole, therefore, has it not been fulfilled what was prophesied, ex- postfacto indeed, by the Archquack Cagliostro, or another? He, as he looked in rapt vision and amazement into these things, thus spake: (Diamond Necklace, p. 35.) 'Ha! What is this? Angels, Uriel, Anachiel, and the other Five; Pentagon of Rejuvenescence; Power that destroyed Original Sin; Earth, Heaven, and thou Outer Limbo, which men name Hell! Does the EMPIRE Of IMPOSTURE waver? Burst there, in starry sheen updarting, Light-rays from out its dark foundations; as it rocks and heaves, not in travail-throes, but in death-throes? Yea, Light-rays, piercing, clear, that salute the Heavens,--lo, they kindle it; their starry clearness becomes as red Hellfire!
'IMPOSTURE is burnt up: one Red-sea of Fire, wild-billowing enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue, licks at the very Stars. Thrones are hurled into it, and Dubois mitres, and Prebendal Stalls that drop fatness, and-- ha! what see I?--all the Gigs of Creation; all, all! Wo is me! Never since Pharaoh's Chariots, in the Red-sea of water, was there wreck of Wheel-vehicles like this in the Sea of Fire. Desolate, as ashes, as gases, shall they wander in the wind. Higher, higher yet flames the Fire-Sea; crackling with new dislocated timber; hissing with leather and prunella. The metal Images are molten; the marble Images become mortar-lime; the stone Mountains sulkily explode. RESPECTABILITY, with all her collected Gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the earth: not to return save under new Avatar. Imposture, how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up; for a time. The World is black ashes; which, ah, when will they grow green? The Images all run into amorphous Corinthian brass; all Dwellings of men destroyed; the very mountains peeled and riven, the valleys black and dead: it is an empty World! Wo to them that shall be born then!--A King, a Queen (ah me!) were hurled in; did rustle once; flew aloft, crackling, like paper-scroll. Iscariot Egalite was hurled in; thou grim De Launay, with thy grim Bastille; whole kindreds and peoples; five millions of mutually destroying Men. For it is the End of the Dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is Darkness and opaque Firedamp); and the burning up, with unquenchable fire, of all the Gigs that are in the Earth.' This Prophecy, we say, has it not been fulfilled, is it not fulfilling?
And so here, O Reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together; not without offence; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a Voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one; doubt not that! Whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacrednesses sprang, and will yet spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as 'an incarnated Word.' Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.
THE END.
INDEX.
ABBAYE, massacres, Jourgniac, Sicard, and Maton's account of.
ACCEPTATION, grande, by Louis XVI.
AGOUST, Captain d', seizes two Parlementeers.
AIGUILLON, d', at Quiberon, account of, in favour, at death of Louis XV.
AINTRIGUES, Count d'.
ALTAR of Fatherland in Champ-de-Mars, scene at, christening at.
AMIRAL, assassin, guillotined.
ANGLAS, Boissy d', President, First of Prairial.
ANGOULEME, Duchesse d', parts from her father.
ANGREMONT, Collenot d', guillotined.
ANTOINETTE, Marie, splendour of, applauded, compromised by Diamond Necklace, griefs of, weeps, unpopular, at Dinner of Guards, courage of, Fifth October, at Versailles, shows herself to people, and Louis at Tuileries, and the Lorrainer, and Mirabeau, previous to flight, flight from Tuileries, captured, and Barnave, Coblentz intrigues, and Lamotte's Memoires, during Twentieth June, during Tenth August, as captive, and Princess de Lamballe, in Temple Prison, parting scene with King, to the Conciergerie, trial of, guillotined.
ARGONNE Forest, occupied by Dumouriez, Brunswick at.
ARISTOCRATS, officers in French army, number in Paris, seized, condition in 1794.
ARLES, state of.
ARMS, smiths making, search for, at Charleville, manufacture, in 1794, scarcity in 1792, Danton's search for.
ARMY, French, after Bastille, officered by aristocrats, to be disbanded, demands arrears, general mutiny of, outbreak of, Nanci military executions, Royalists leave, state of, in want, recruited, Revolutionary, fourteen armies on foot.
ARRAS, guillotine at.
ARRESTS in August 1792.
ARSENAL, attempted destruction of.
ARTOIS, M. d', ways of, unpopularity of, memorial by, flies, at Coblentz, refusal to return.
ASSEMBLIES, Primary and Secondary.
ASSEMBLY, National, Third Estate becomes, to be extruded, stands grouped in the rain, occupies Tennis-Court, scene there, joined by clergy, doings on King's speech, ratified by King, cannon pointed at, regrets Necker, after Bastille.
ASSEMBLY, Constituent, National, becomes, pedantic, Irregular Verbs, what it can do, Night of Pentecost, Left and Right side, raises money, on the Veto, Fifth October, women, in Paris Riding-Hall, on deficit, assignats, on clergy, and riot, prepares for Louis's visit, on Federation, Anacharsis Clootz, eldest of men, on Franklin's death, on state of army, thanks Bouille, on Nanci affair, on Emigrants, on death of Mirabeau, on escape of King, after capture of King, completes Constitution, dissolves itself, what it has done.
ASSEMBLY, Legislative, First French Parliament, book of law, dispute with King, Baiser de Lamourette, High Court, decrees vetoed, scenes in, reprimands King's ministers, declares war, declares France in danger, reinstates Petion, nonplused, Lafayette, King and Swiss, August Tenth, becoming defunct, September massacres, dissolved.
ASSIGNATS, origin of, false Royalist, forgers of, coach-fare in.
AUBRIOT, Sieur, after King's capture.
AUBRY, Colonel, at Jales.
AUCH, M. Martin d', in Versailles Court.
AUSTRIA quarrels with France.
AUSTRIAN Committee, at Tuileries.
AUSTRIAN Army, invades France, defeated at Jemappes, Dumouriez escapes to, repulsed, Watigny.
AVIGNON, Union of, described, state of, riot in church at, occupied by Jourdan, massacre at.
BACHAUMONT, his thirty volumes.
BAILLE, involuntary epigram of.
BAILLY, Astronomer, account of, President of National Assembly, Mayor of Paris, receives Louis in Paris, and Paris Parlement, on Petition for Deposition, decline of, in prison, at Queen's trial, guillotined cruelly.
BAKERS', French in tail at.
BARBAROUX and Marat, Marseilles Deputy, and the Rolands, on Map of France, demand of, to Marseilles, meets Marseillese, in National Convention, against Robespierre, cannot be heard, the Girondins declining, arrested, and Charlotte Corday, retreats to Bourdeaux, farewell of, shoots himself.
BARDY, Abbe, massacred.
BARENTIN, Keeper of Seals.
BARNAVE, at Grenoble, member of Assembly, one of a trio, Jacobin, duel with Cazales, escorts the King from Varennes, conciliates Queen, becomes Constitutional, retires to Grenoble, treason, in prison, guillotined.
BARRAS, Paul-Francois, in National Convention, commands in Thermidor, appoints Napoleon in Vendemiaire.
BARRERE, Editor, at King's trial, peace-maker, levy in mass, plot, banished.
BARTHOLOMEW massacre.
BASTILLE, Linguet's Book on, meaning of, shots fired at, summoned by insurgents, besieged, capitulates, treatment of captured, Queret-Demery, demolished, key sent to Washington, Heroes.
BAZIRE, of Mountain, imprisoned.
BEARN, riot at.
BEAUHARNAIS in Champ-de-Mars, Josephine, imprisoned, and Napoleon, at La Cabarus's.
BEAUMARCHAIS, Caron, his lawsuit, his 'Mariage de Figaro,' commissions arms from Holland, his distress.
BEAUMONT, Archbishop, notice of.
BEAUREPAIRE, Governor of Verdun, shoots himself.
BENTHAM, Jeremy, naturalised.
BERLINE, towards Varennes.
BERTHIER, Intendant, fled, arrested and massacred.
BERTHIER, Commandant, at Versailles.
BESENVAL, Baron, Commandant of Paris, on French Finance, in riot of Rue St. Antoine, on corruption of Guards, at Champ-de-Mars, apparition to, decamps, and Louis XVI.
BETHUNE, riot at.
BEURNONVILLE, with Dumouriez, imprisoned.
BILLAUD-VARENNES, Jacobin, cruel, at massacres, September 1792, in Salut Committee, and Robespierre's Etre Supreme, accuses Robespierre, accused, banished.
BLANC, Le, landlord at Varennes, escape of family.
BLOOD, baths of.
BONCHAMPS, in La Vendee War.
BONNEMERE, Aubin, at Siege of Bastille.
BOUILLE, at Metz, account of, character of, troops mutinous, and Salm regiment, intrepidity of, marches on Nanci, quells Nanci mutineers, at Mirabeau's funeral, expects fugitive King, would liberate King, emigrates.
BOUILLE, Junior, asleep at Varennes, flies to father.
BOURDEAUX, priests hanged at, for Girondism.
BOYER, duellist.
BREST, sailors revolt, state of, in 1791, Federes in Paris, in 1793.
BRETEUIL, Home-Secretary.
BRETON Club, germ of Jacobins.
BRETONS, deputations of, Girondins.
BREZE, Marquis de, his mode of ushering, and National Assembly, extraordinary etiquette.
BRIENNE, Lomenie, anti-protestant, in Notables, incapacity of, failure of, arrests Paris Parlement, secret scheme, scheme discovered, arrests two Parlementeers, bewildered, desperate shifts by, wishes for Necker, dismissed, and provided for, his effigy burnt.
BRISSAC, Duke de, commands Constitutional Guard, disbanded.
BRISSOT, edits 'Moniteur,' friend of Blacks, in First Parliament, plans in 1792, active in Assembly, in Jacobins, at Roland's, pelted in Assembly, arrested, trial of, guillotined.
BRITTANY, disturbances in.
BROGLIE, Marshal, against Plenary Court, in command, in office, dismissed.
BRUNSWICK, Duke, marches on France, advances, Proclamation, at Verdun, at Argonne, retreats.
BUFFON, Mme. de, and Duke d'Orleans, at d'Orleans execution.
BUTTAFUOCO, Napoleon's letter to.
BUZOT, in National Convention, arrested, retreats to Bourdeaux, end of.
CABANIS, Physician to Mirabeau.
CABARUS, Mlle., and Tallien, imprisoned.
CAEN, Girondins at.
CALENDAR, Romme's new, comparative ground-scheme of.
CALONNE, M. de, Financier, character of, suavity and genius of, his difficulties, dismissed, marriage and after-course.
CALVADOS, for Girondism.
CAMUS, Archivist, in National Convention, with Dumouriez, imprisoned.
CANNON, Siamese, wooden, fever, Goethe on.
CARMAGNOLE, costume, what, dances in Convention.
CARNOT, Hippolyte, notice of, plan for Toulon, discovery in Robespierre's pocket.
CARPENTRAS, against Avignon.
CARRA, on plots for King's flight, in National Convention.
CARRIER, a Revolutionist, in National Assembly, Nantes noyades, guillotined.
CARTAUX, General, fights Girondins, at Toulon.
CASTRIES, Duke de, duel with Lameth.
CATHELINEAU, of La Vendee.
CAVAIGNAC, Convention Representative.
CAZALES, Royalist, in Constituent Assembly.
CAZOTTE, author of 'Diable Amoureux,' seized, saved for a time by his daughter.
CERCLE, Social, of Fauchet.
CERUTTI, his funeral oration on Mirabeau.
CEVENNES, revolt of.
CHABOT, of Mountain, against Kings, imprisoned.
CHABRAY, Louison, at Versailles, October Fifth.
CHALIER, Jacobin, Lyons, executed, body raised.
CHAMBON, Dr., Mayor of Paris, retires.
CHAMFORT, Cynic, arrested, suicide.
CHAMP-DE-MARS, Federation, preparations for, accelerated by patriots, anecdotes of, Federation-scene at, funeral-service, Nanci, riot, Patriot petition, 1791, new Federation, 1792.
CHAMPS Elysees, Menads at, festivities in.
CHANTILLY Palace, a prison.
CHAPT-RASTIGNAC, Abbe de, massacred.
CHARENTON, Marseillese at.
CHARLES I., Trial of, sold in Paris.
CHARLEVILLE Artillery.
CHARTRES, grain-riot at.
CHATEAUBRIANDS in French Revolution.
CHATELET, Achille de, advises Republic.
CHATILLON-SUR-SEVRE, insurrection at.
CHAUMETTE, notice of, signs petition, in governing committee, at King's trial, demands constitution, arrest and death of.
CHAUVELIN, Marquis de, in London, dismissed.
CHENAYE, Baudin de la, massacred.
CHENIER, Poet, and Mlle. Theroigne.
CHEPY, at La Force in September.
CHOISEUL, Duke, why dismissed.
CHOISEUL, Colonel Duke, assists Louis's flight, too late at Varennes.
CHOISI, General, at Avignon.
CHURCH, spiritual guidance, of Rome, decay of.
CITIZENS, French, demeanour of.
CLAIRFAIT, Commander of Austrians.
CLAVIERE, edits 'Moniteur,' account of, Finance Minister, arrested, suicide of.
CLERGY, French, in States-General, conciliators of orders, joins Third Estate, lands, national, power of, &c.
CLERMONT, flight of King through, Prussians near.
CLERY, on Louis's last scene.
CLOOTZ, Anacharsis, Baron de, account of, disparagement of, in National Convention, universal republic of, on nullity of religion, purged from the Jacobins, guillotined.
CLOVIS, in the Champ-de-Mars.
CLUB, Electoral, at Paris, becomes Provisional Municipality, permanent.
CLUGNY, M., as Finance Minister.
COBLENTZ, Emigrants at.
COBOURG and Dumouriez.
COCKADES, green, tricolor, black, national, trampled, white.
COFFINHAL, Judge, delivers Henriot.
COIGNY, Duke de, a sinecurist.
COMMISSIONERS, Convention, like Kings.
COMMITTEE of Defence, Central, of Watchfulness, of Public Salvation, Circular of, of the Constitution, Revolutionary.
COMMUNE, Council-General of the, Sovereign of France, enlisting.
CONDE, Prince de, attends Louis XV., departure of.
CONDE, Town, surrender of.
CONDORCET, Marquis, edits 'Moniteur,' Girondist, prepares Address, on Robespierre, death of.
CONSTITUTION, French, completed, will not march, burst in pieces, new, of 1793.
CONVENTION, National, in what case to be summoned, demanded by some, determined on, Deputies elected, constituted, motions in, work to be done, hated, politeness, effervescence of, on September Massacres, guard for, try the King, debate on trial, invite to revolt, condemn Louis, armed Girondins in, power of, removes to Tuileries, besieged, June 2nd, 1793, extinction of Girondins, Jacobins and, on forfeited property, Carmagnole, Goddess of Reason, Representatives, at Feast of Etre Supreme, end of Robespierre, retrospect of, Feraud, Germinal, Prairial, termination, its successor.
CORDAY, Charlotte, account of, in Paris, assissinates Marat, examined, executed.
CORDELIERS, Club, Hebert in.
COURT, Chevalier de.
COUTHON, of Mountain, in Legislative, in National Convention, at Lyons, in Salut Committee, his question in Jacobins, decree of, arrest and execution.
COVENANT, Scotch, French.
CRUSSOL, Marquise de, executed.
CUISSA, massacre of, at La Force.
CUSSY, Girondin, retreats to Bourdeaux.
CUSTINE, General, takes Mentz, retreats, censured, guillotined, his son guillotined.
CUSTOMS and morals.
DAMAS, Colonel Comte de, at Clermont, at Varennes.
DAMPIERRE, General, killed.
DAMPMARTIN, Captain, at riot in Rue St. Antoine, on condition of army, on state of France, at Avignon, on Marseillese.
DANDOINS, Captain, Flight to Varennes.
DANTON, notice of, President of Cordeliers, and Marat, served with writs, in Cordeliers Club, elected Councillor, Mirabeau of Sansculottes, in Jacobins, for Deposition, of Committee, August Tenth, Minister of Justice, after September massacre, after Jemappes, and Robespierre, in Netherlands, at King's trial, on war, rebukes Marat, peace-maker, and Dumouriez, in Salut Committee, breaks with Girondins, his law of Forty sous, and Revolutionary Government, and Paris Municipality, retires to Arcis, and Robespierre, arrested, tried, and guillotined.
DAVID, Painter, in National Convention, works by, hemlock with Robespierre.
DEMOCRACY, on Bunker Hill, spread of, in France.
DEPARTMENTS, France divided into.
DESEZE, Pleader for Louis.
DESHUTTES massacred, Fifth October.
DESILLES, Captain, in Nanci.
DESLONS, Captain, at Varennes, would liberate the King.
DESMOULINS, Camille, notice of, in arms at Cafe de Foy, on Insurrection of Women, in Cordeliers Club, and Brissot, in National Convention, on Sansculottism, on plots, suspect, for a committee of mercy, ridicules law of the suspect, his Journal, trial of, guillotined, widow guillotined.
DIDEROT, prisoner in Vincennes.
DINNERS, defined.
DOPPET, General, at Lyons.
DROUET, Jean B., notice of, discovers Royalty in flight, raises Varennes, blocks the bridge, defends his prize, rewarded, to be in Convention, captured by Austrians.
DUBARRY, Dame, and Louis XV., flight of, imprisoned.
DUBOIS Crance bombards and captures Lyons.
DUCHATEL votes, wrapped in blankets, at Caen.
DUCOS, Girondin.
DUGOMMIER, General, at Toulon.
DUHAMEL, killed by Marseillese.
DUMONT, on Mirabeau.
DUMOURIEZ, notice by, account of him, in Brittany, at Nantes, in La Vendee, sent for to Paris, Foreign Minister, dismissed, to Army, disobeys Luckner, Commander-in-Chief, his army, Council of War, seizes Argonne Forest, Grand Pre, and mutineers, and Marat in Paris, to Netherlands, at Jemappes, in Paris, discontented, retreats, beaten, will join the enemy, arrests his arresters, escapes to Austrians.
DUPONT, Deputy, Atheist.
DUPORT, Adrien, in Paris Parlement, in Constituent Assembly, one of a trio, law-reformer.
DUPORTAIL, in office.
DUROSOY, Royalist, guillotined.
DUSAULX, M., on taking of Bastille, notice of.
DUTERTRE, in office.
EDGEWORTH, Abbe, attends Louis, at execution of Louis.
EGLANTINE, Fabre d', in National Convention, assists in New Calendar, imprisoned.
ELIE, Capt., at Siege of Bastille, after victory.
ELIZABETH, Princess, flight to Varennes, August 10th, in Temple Prison, guillotined.
ENGLAND declares war on France, captures Toulon.
ENRAGED Club, the.
EQUALITY, reign of.
ESCUYER, Patriot l', at Avignon.
ESPREMENIL, Duval d', notice of, patriot, speaker in Paris Parlement, with crucifix, discovers Brienne's plot, arrest and speech of, turncoat, in Constituent Assembly, beaten by populace, guillotined, widow guillotined.
ESTAING, Count d', notice of, National Colonel, Royalist, at Queen's Trial.
ESTATE, Fourth, of Editors.
ETOILE, beginning of Federation at.
FAMINE, in France, in 1788-1792, Louis and Assembly try to relieve, in 1792, and remedy, remedy by maximum, &c.
FAUCHET, Abbe, at siege of Bastille, his Te-Deums, his harangue on Franklin, his Cercle Social, in First Parliament, motion by, doffs his insignia, King's death, lamentation, will demit, trial of.
FAUSSIGNY, sword in hand.
FAVRAS, Chevalier, execution of.
FEDERATION, spread of, of Champ-de-Mars, deputies to, human species at, ceremonies of, a new, 1792.
FERAUD, in National Convention, massacred there.
FERSEN, Count, gets Berline built, acts coachman in King's flight.
FEUILLANS, Club, denounce Jacobins, decline, extinguished, Battalion, Justices and Patriotism.
FINANCES, serious state of, how to be improved.
FLANDERS, how Louis XV. conquers.
FLANDRE, regiment de, at Versailles.
FLESSELLES, Paris Provost, shot.
FLEURIOT, Mayor, guillotined.
FLEURY, Joly de, Controller of Finance.
FONTENAI, Mme.
FORSTER (FOSTER), and French soldier, account of.
FOUCHE, at Lyons.
FOULON, bad repute of, sobriquet, funeral of, alive, judged, massacred.
FOURNIER, and Orleans Prisoners.
FOY, Cafe de, revolutionary.
FRANCE, abject, under Louis XV., Kings of, early history of, decay of Kingship in, on accession of Louis XVI., and Philosophy, famine in, 1775, state of, prior Revolution, aids America, in 1788, inflammable, July 1789, gibbets, general overturn, how to reform, riotousness of, Mirabeau and, after King's flight, petitions against Royalty, warfare of towns in, European league against, terror of, in Spring 1792, decree of war, France in danger, general enlisting, rage of, Autumn 1792, Marat's Circular, September, Sansculottic, declaration of war, Mountain and Girondins divide, communes of, coalition against, levy in mass.
FRANKLIN, Ambassador to France, his death lamented, bust in Jacobins.
FRENCH Anglomania, character of the, literature, in 1784, Parlements, nature of, Mirabeau, type of the, mob, character of.
FRERON, notice of, renegade, Gilt Youth of.
FRETEAU, at Royal Session, arrested, liberated.
FREYS, the Jew brokers, imprisoned.
GALLOIS, to La Vendee.
GAMAIN, Sieur, informer.
GARAT, Minister of Justice.
GENLIS, Mme., account of, and D'Orleans, to Switzerland.
GENSONNE, Girondist, to La Vendee, arrested, trial of.
GEORGES-CADOUDAL, in La Vendee.
GEORGET, at taking of Bastille.
GERARD, Farmer, Rennes deputy.
GERLE, Dom, at Theot's.
GERMINAL Twelfth, First of April 1795.
GIRONDINS, origin of term, in National Convention, against Robespierre, on King's trial, and Jacobins, formula of, favourers of, schemes of, to be seized? break with Danton, armed against Mountain, accuse Marat, departments, commission of twelve, commission broken, arrested, dispersed, war by, retreat of eleven, trial and death of.
GOBEL, Archbishop to be, renounces religion, arrested, guillotined.
GOETHE, at Argonne, in Prussian retreat, at Mentz.
GOGUELAT, Engineer, assists Louis's flight, intrigues.
GONDRAN, captain of Guard.
GORSAS, Journalist, pleads for Swiss, in National Convention, his house broken into, guillotined.
GOUJON, Member of Convention, in riot of Prairial, suicide of.
GOUPIL, on extreme left.
GOUVION, Major-General, at Paris, flight to Varennes, death of.
GOVERNMENT, Maurepas's, bad state of French, French revolutionary, Danton on.
GRAVE, Chev. de, War Minister, loses head.
GREGOIRE, Cure, notice of, in National Convention, detained in Convention, and destruction of religion.
GUADET, Girondin, cross-questions Ministers, arrested, guillotined.
GUARDS, Swiss, and French, at Reveillon riot, French refuse to fire, come to Palais-Royal, fire on Royal-Allemand, to Bastille, name changed, National origin of, number of, Body at Versailles, October Fifth, fight, fly in Chateau, Body, and French, at Versailles, National, at Nanci, French, last appearance of, National, how commanded, 1791, Constitutional, dismissed, Filles-St.-Thomas, routed, Swiss, at Tuileries, ordered to cease, destroyed, eulogy of, Departmental, for National Convention.
GUILLAUME, Clerk, pursues King.
GUILLOTIN, Doctor, summoned by Paris Parlement, invents the guillotine, deputed to King.
GUILLOTINE invented, described, in action, to be improved, number of sufferers by.
HASSENFRATZ, in War-office.
HEBERT, Editor of 'Pere Duchene,' signs petition, arrested, at Queen's trial, quickens Revolutionary Tribunal, arrested, and guillotined, widow guillotined.
HENAULT, President, on Surnames.
HENRIOT, General of National Guard, and the Convention, to deliver Robespierre, seized, rescued, end of.
HERBOIS, Collot d', notice of, in National Convention, at Lyons massacre, in Salut Committee, attempt to assassinate, bullied at Jacobins, President, night of Thermidor, accused, banished.
HERITIER, Jerome l', shot at Versailles.
HOCHE, Sergeant Lazare, General against Prussia, pacifies La Vendee,
HONDSCHOOTEN, Battle of.
HOTEL des Invalides, plundered.
HOTEL de Ville, after Bastille taken, harangues at.
HOUCHARD, General, unsuccessful.
HOWE, Lord, defeats French.
HUGUENIN, Patriot, tocsin in heart, 20th June 1792.
HULIN, half-pay, at siege of Bastille.
INISDAL'S, Count d', plot.
INSURRECTION, most sacred of duties, of Women, of August Tenth, difficult, of Paris, against Girondins, sacred right of, last Sansculottic, of Baboeuf.
ISNARD, Max, notice of, in First Parliament, on Ministers, to demolish Paris.
JACOB, Jean Claude, father of men.
JACOBINS, Society, beginning of, Hall, described, and members, Journal &c., of, daughters of, at Nanci, suppressed, Club increases, and Mirabeau, prospers, 'Lords of the Articles,' extinguishes Feuillans, Hall enlarged, described, and Marseillese, and Lavergne, message to Dumouriez, missionaries in Army, on King's trial, on accusation of Robespierre, against Girondins, National Convention and, Popular Tribunals of, purges members, to become dominant, locked out by Legendre, begs back its keys, decline of, mobbed, suspended, hunted down.
JALES, Camp of, Royalists at, destroyed.
JAUCOURT, Chevalier, and Liberty.
JAY, Dame le.
JONES, Paul, equipped for America, at Paris, account of, burial of.
JOUNNEAU, Deputy, in danger in September.
JOURDAN, General, repels Austria.
JOURDAN, Coupe-tete, at Versailles, leader of Brigands, supreme in Avignon, massacre by, flight of, guillotined.
JULIEN, Sieur Jean, guillotined.
KAUNITZ, Prince, denounces Jacobins.
KELLERMANN, at Valmy.
KLOPSTOCK, naturalised.
KNOX, John, and the Virgin.
KORFF, Baroness de, in flight to Varennes.
LAFARGE, President of Jacobins, Madame Lavergne and.
LAFAYETTE, bust of, erected, against Calonne, demands by, in Notables, Cromwell-Grandison, Bastille time, Vice-President of National Assembly, General of National Guard, resigns and reaccepts, Scipio-Americanus, thanked, rewarded, French Guards and, to Versailles, Fifth October, at Versailles, swears the Guards, Feuillant, on abolition of Titles, at Champ- de-Mars Federation, at De Castries' riot, character of, in Day of Poniards, difficult position of, at King's going to St. Cloud, resigns and reaccepts, at flight from Tuileries, after escape of King, moves for amnesty, resigns, decline of, doubtful against Jacobins, journey to Paris, to be accused, flies to Holland.
LAFLOTTE, poison-plot, informer.
LAIS, Sieur, Jacobin, with Louis Philippe.
LALLY, death of.
LAMARCHE, guillotined.
LAMARCK'S, illness of Mirabeau at.
LAMBALLE, Princess de, to England, intrigues for Royalists, at La Force, massacred.
LAMETH, in Constituent Assembly, one of a trio, brothers, notice of, Jacobins, Charles, Duke de Castries, brothers become constitutional, Theodore, in First Parliament.
LAMOIGNON, Keeper of Seals, dismissed, effigy burned, and death of.
LAMOTTE, Countess de, and Diamond Necklace, in the Salpetriere, 'Memoirs' burned, in London, M. de, in prison.
LAMOURETTE, Abbe, kiss of, guillotined.
LANJUINAIS, Girondin, clothes torn, arrested, recalled.
LAPORTE, Intendant, guillotined.
LARIVIERE, Justice, imprisoned.
LA ROCHEJACQUELIN, in La Vendee, death of.
LASOURCE, accuses Danton, president, and Marat, arrested, condemned.
LATOUR-MAUBOURG, notice of.
LAUNAY, Marquis de, Governor of Bastille, besieged, unassisted, to blow up Bastille, massacred.
LAVERGNE, surrenders Longwi.
LAVOISIER, Chemist, guillotined.
LAW, Martial, in Paris, Book of the.
LAWYERS, their influence on the Revolution, number of, in Tiers Etat, in Parliament First.
LAZARE, Maison de St., plundered.
LEBAS at Strasburg, arrested,
LEBON, Priest, in National Convention, at Arras, guillotined.
LECHAPELIER, Deputy, and Insurrection of Women.
LECOINTRE, National Major, will not fight, active, in First Parliament.
LEFEVRE, Abbe, distributes powder.
LEGENDRE, in danger, at Tuileries riot, in National Convention, against Girondins, for Danton, locks out Jacobins, in First of Prairial.
LENFANT, Abbe, on Protestant claims, massacred.
LEPELLETIER, Section for Convention, revolt of, in Vendemiaire.
LETTRES-DE-CACHET, and Parlement of Paris.
LEVASSEUR, in National Convention, Convention Representative.
LIANCOURT, Duke de, Liberal, not a revolt, but a revolution.
LIES, Philosophism on, to be extinguished, how.
LIGNE, Prince de, death of.
LILLE, Colonel Rouget de, Marseillese Hymn.
LILLE, besieged.
LINGUET, his 'Bastille Unveiled,' returns.
LOISEROLLES, General, guillotined for his son.
LONGWI, surrender of, fugitives at Paris.
LORDS of the Articles, Jacobins as.
LORRAINE Federes and the Queen, state of, in 1790.
LOUIS XIV., l'etat c'est moi, booted in Parlement, pursues Louvois.
LOUIS XV., origin of his surname, last illness of, dismisses Dame Dubarry, Choiseul, wounded, has small-pox, his mode of conquest, impoverishes France, his daughters, on death, on ministerial capacity, death and burial of.
LOUIS XVI., at his accession, good measures of, temper and pursuits of, difficulties of, commences governing, and Notables, holds Royal Session, receives States-General Deputies, in States-General procession, speech to States-General, National Assembly, unwise policy of, dismisses Necker, apprised of the Revolution, conciliatory, visits Assembly, Bastille, visits Paris, deserted, will fly, languid, at Dinner of Guards, deposition of, proposed, October Fifth, women deputies, to fly or not? grants the acceptance, Paris propositions to, in the Chateau tumult, appears to mob, will go to Paris, his wisest course, procession to Paris, review of his position, lodged at Tuileries, Restorer of French Liberty, no hunting, locksmith, schemes, visits Assembly, Federation, Hereditary Representative, will fly, and D'Inisdal's plot, Mirabeau, useless, indecision of, ill of catarrh, prepares for St. Cloud, hindered by populace, effect, should he escape, prepares for flight, his circular, flies, letter to Assembly, manner of flight, loiters by the way, detected by Drouet, captured at Varennes, indecision there, return to Paris, reception there, to be deposed? reinstated, reception of Legislative, position of, proposes war, with tears, vetoes, dissolves Roland Ministry, in riot of, June 20, and Petion, at Federation, with cuirass, declared forfeited, last levee of, Tenth August, quits Tuileries for Assembly, in Assembly, sent to Temple prison, in Temple, to be tried, and the Locksmith Gamain, at the bar, his will, condemned, parting scene, and execution of, his son.
LOUIS-PHILIPPE, King of the French, Jacobin door-keeper, at Valmy, bravery at Jemappes, and sister, with Dumouriez to Austrians, to Switzerland.
LOUSTALOT, Editor.
LOUVET, his 'Chevalier de Faublas,' his 'Sentinelles,' and Robespierre, in National Convention, Girondin accuses Robespierre, arrested, retreats to Bourdeaux, escape of, recalled.
LUCKNER, Supreme General, and Dumouriez, guillotined.
LUNEVILLE, Inspector Malseigne at.
LUX, Adam, guillotined.
LYONS, Federation at, disorders in, Chalier, Jacobin, executed at, capture of magazine, massacres at.
MAILHE, Deputy, on trial of Louis.
MAILLARD, Usher, at siege of Bastille, Insurrection of Women, drum, Champs Elysees, entering Versailles, addresses National Assembly there, signs Decheance petition, in September Massacres.
MAILLE, Camp-Marshal, at Tuileries, massacred at La Force.
MAILLY, Marshal, one of Four Generals.
MALESHERBES, M. de, in King's Council, defends Louis.
MALSEIGNE, Army Inspector, at Nanci, imprisoned, liberated.
MANDAT, Commander of Guards, August, 1792.
MANUEL, Jacobin, slow-sure, in August Tenth, in Governing Committee, haranguing at La Force, in National Convention, motions in, vote at King's trial, in prison, guillotined.
MARAT, Jean Paul, horseleech to D'Artois, notice of, against violence, at siege of Bastille, summoned by Constituent, not to be gagged, astir, how to regenerate France, police and, on abolition of titles, would gibbet Mirabeau, bust in Jacobins, concealed in cellars, in seat of honour, signs circular, elected to Convention, and Dumouriez, oaths by, in Convention, on sufferings of People, and Girondins, arrested, returns in triumph, fall of Girondins.
MARECHAL, Atheist, Calendar by.
MARECHALE, the Lady, on nobility.
MARSEILLES, Brigands at, on Decheance, the bar of iron, for Girondism.
MARSEILLESE, March and Hymn of, at Charenton, at Paris, Filles-St.-Thomas and, barracks.
MASSACRE, Avignon, September, number slain in, compared to Bartholomew.
MATON, Advocate, his 'Resurrection.'
MAUPEOU, under Louis XV., and Dame Dubarry.
MAUREPAS, Prime Minister, character of, government of, death of.
MAURY, Abbe, character of, in Constituent Assembly, seized emigrating, dogmatic, efforts fruitless, made Cardinal.
MEMMAY, M., of Quincey, explosion of rustics.
MENOU, General, arrest of.
MENTZ, occupied by French, siege of, surrender of.
MERCIER, on Paris revolting, Editor, the September Massacre, in National Convention, King's trial.
MERLIN of Thionville in Mountain, irascible, at Mentz.
MERLIN of Douai, Law of Suspect.
METZ, Bouille at, troops mutinous at.
MEUDON tannery.
MIOMANDRE de Ste. Marie, Bodyguard, October Fifth, left for dead, revives, rewarded.
MIRABEAU, Marquis, on the state of France in 1775, and his son, his death.
MIRABEAU, Count, his pamphlets, the Notables, Lettres-de-Cachet against, expelled by the Provence Noblesse, cloth-shop, is Deputy for Aix, king of Frenchmen, family of, wanderings of, his future course, groaned at, in Assembly, his newspaper suppressed, silences Usher de Breze, at Bastille ruins, on Robespierre, fame of, on French deficit, populace, on veto, Mounier, October Fifth, insight of, defends veto, courage, revenue of, saleable? and Danton, on Constitution, at Jacobins, his courtship, on state of Army, Marat would gibbet, his power in France, on D'Orleans, on duelling, interview with Queen, speech on emigrants, the 'trente voix,' in Council, his plans for France, probable career of, last appearance in Assembly, anxiety of populace for, last sayings of, death and funeral of, burial-place of, character of, last of Mirabeaus, bust in Jacobins, bust demolished.
MIRABEAU the younger, nicknamed Tonneau, in Constituent Assembly, breaks his sword.
MIRANDA, General, attempts Holland.
MIROMENIL, Keeper of Seals.
MOLEVILLE, Bertrand de, Historian, minister, his plan, frivolous policy of, and D'Orleans, Jesuitic, concealed.
MOMORO, Bookseller, agrarian, arrested, guillotined, his Wife, 'Goddess of Reason.'
MONGE, Mathematician, in office, assists in new Calendar.
MONSABERT, G. de, President of Paris Parlement, arrested.
MONTELIMART, covenant sworn at.
MONTESQUIOU, General, takes Savoy.
MONTGAILLARD, on captive Queen, on September Massacres.
MONTMARTRE, trenches at.
MONTMORIN, War-Secretary.
MOORE, Doctor, at attack of Tuileries, at La Force.
MORANDE, De, newspaper by, will return, in prison.
MORELLET, Philosophe.
MOUCHETON, M. de, of King's Bodyguard.
MOUDON, Abbe, confessor to Louis XV.
MOUNIER, at Grenoble, proposes Tennis-Court oath, October Fifth, President of Constituent Assembly, deputed to King, dilemma of.
MOUNTAIN, members of the, re-elected in National Convention, Gironde and, favourers of the, vulnerable points of, prevails, Danton, Duperret, after Gironde dispersed, in labour.
MULLER, General, expedition to Spain.
MURAT, in Vendemiaire revolt.
NANCI, revolt at, description of town, deputation imprisoned, deputation of mutineers, state of mutineers in, Bouille's fight, Paris thereupon, military executions at, Assembly Commissioners.
NANTES, after King's flight, massacres at.
NAPOLEON Bonaparte (Buonaparte) studying mathematics, pamphlet by, democratic, in Corsica, August Tenth, under General Cartaux, at Toulon, Josephine and, at La Cabarus's, Vendemiaire.
NARBONNE, Louis de, assists flight of King's Aunts, to be War-Minister, demands by, secreted, escapes.
NAVY, Louis XV. on French.
NECKER, and finance, account of, dismissed, refuses Brienne, recalled, difficulty as to States-General, reconvokes Notables, opinion of himself, popular, dismissed, recalled, returns in glory, his plans, becoming unpopular, departs, with difficulty.
NECKLACE, Diamond.
NERWINDEN, battle of.
NIEVRE-CHOL, Mayor of Lyons.
NOBLES, state of the, under Louis XV., new, join Third Estate.
NOTABLES, Calonne's convocation of, assembled 22nd February 1787, members of, effects of dismissal of, reconvoked, 6th November 1788, dismissed again.
NOYADES, Nantes.
OCTOBER Fifth, 1789
OGE, condemned.
ORLEANS, High Court at, prisoners massacred at Versailles.
ORLEANS, a Duke d', in Louis XV.'s sick-room.
ORLEANS, Philippe (Egalite), Duc d', Duke de Chartres (till 1785), waits on Dauphin, Father, with Louis XV., not Admiral, wealth, debauchery, Palais- Royal buildings, in Notables (Duke d'Orleans now), looks of, Bed-of- Justice, 1787, arrested, liberated, in States-General Procession, joins Third Estate, his party, in Constituent Assembly, Fifth October and, shunned in England, Mirabeau, cash deficiency, use of, in Revolution, accused by Royalists, at Court, insulted, in National Convention, decline of, in Convention, vote on King's trial, at King's execution, arrested, imprisoned, condemned, and executed.
ORMESSON, d', Controller of Finance.
PACHE, Swiss, account of, Minister of War, Mayor, dismissed, reinstated, imprisoned.
PAN, Mallet du, solicits for Louis.
PANIS, Advocate, in Governing Committee, and Beaumarchais, confidant of Danton.
PANTHEON, first occupant of.
PARENS, Curate, renounces religion.
PARIS, origin of city, police in 1750, ship Ville-de-Paris, riot at Palais- de-Justice, beautified, in 1788, election, 1789, troops called to, military preparations in, July Fourteenth, cry for arms, search for arms, Bailly, mayor of, trade-strikes in, Lafayette patrols, October Fifth, propositions to Louis, Louis in, Journals, bill-stickers, undermined, after Champ-de- Mars Federation, on Nanci affair, on death of Mirabeau, on flight to Varennes, on King's return, Directory suspends Petion, enlisting, 1792, on forfeiture of King, Sections, rising of, August Tenth, prepares for insurrection, Municipality supplanted, statues destroyed, King and Queen to prison, September, 1792, names printed on house-door, in insurrection, Girondins, May 1793, Municipality in red caps, brotherly supper, Sections to be abolished.
PARIS, Guardsman, assassinates Lepelletier.
PARIS, friend of Danton.
PARLEMENT, patriotic, against Taxation, remonstrates, at Versailles, arrested, origin of, nature of, corrupt, at Troyes, yields, Royal Session in, how to be tamed, oath and declaration of, firmness of, scene in, and dismissal of, reinstated, unpopular, summons Dr. Guillotin, abolished.
PARLEMENTS, Provincial, adhere to Paris, rebellious, exiled, grand deputations of, reinstated, abolished.
PELTIER, Royalist Pamphleteer, 'Pere Duchene,' Editor of.
PEREYRA (Peyreyra), Walloon, account of, imprisoned.
PETION, account of, Dutch-built, and D'Espremenil, to be mayor, Varennes, meets King, and Royalty, at close of Assembly, in London, Mayor of Paris, in Twentieth June, suspended, reinstated, welcomes Marseillese, August Tenth, in Tuileries, rebukes Septemberers, in National Convention, declines mayorship, against Mountain, retreat to Bourdeaux, end of.
PETION, National-Pique, christening of.
PETITION of famishing French, at Fatherland's altar, of the Eight Thousand.
PETITIONS, on capture of King, for deposition, &c.
PHELIPPEAUX, purged out of the Jacobins.
PHILOSOPHISM, influence of, on Revolution, what it has done with Church, with Religion.
PICHEGRU, General, account of, in Germinal.
PILNITZ, Convention at.
PIN, Latour du, War-Minister, dismissed.
PITT, against France, and Girondins, inflexible.
PLOTS, of King's flight, various, of Aristocrats, October Fifth, Royalist, of Favras and others, cartels, Twelve bullies from Switzerland, D'Inisdal, will-o'-wisp, Mirabeau and Queen, poniards, Mallet du Pan, Narbonne's, traces of, in Armoire-de-Fer, against Girondins, Desmoulins on, prison.
POLIGNAC, Duke de, a sinecurist, dismissed, at Bale, younger, in Ham.
POMPIGNAN, President of National Assembly.
POPE PIUS VI., excommunicates Talleyrand, his effigy burned.
PRAIRIAL First to Third, May 20-22, 1795.
PRECY, siege of, Lyons.
PRIESTHOOD, disrobing of, costumes in Carmagnole.
PRIESTLEY, Dr., riot against, naturalised, elected to National Convention.
PRIESTS, dissident, marry in France, Anti-national, hanged, many killed near the Abbaye, number slain in September Massacre, to rescue Louis, drowned at Nantes.
PRISONS, Paris, in Bastille time, full, August 1792, number of, in France, state of, in Terror, thinned after Terror.
PRISON, Abbaye, refractory Members sent to, Temple, Louis sent to, Abbaye, Priests killed near, massacres at La Force, Chatelet, and Conciergerie.
PROCESSION, of States-General Deputies, of Necker and D'Orleans busts, of Louis to Paris, again, after Varennes, of Louis to trial, at Constitution of 1793.
PROVENCE Noblesse, expel Mirabeau.
PRUDHOMME, Editor, on assassins, on Cavaignac.
PRUSSIA, Fritz of, against France, army of, ravages France, King of, and French Princes.
PUISAYE, Girondin General, at Quiberon.
QUERET-DEMERY, in Bastille.
QUIBERON, debarkation at.
RABAUT, St. Etienne, French Reformer, in National Convention, in Commission of Twelve, arrested, between two walls, guillotined.
RAYNAL, Abbe, Philosophe, his letter to Constituent Assembly.
REBECQUI, of Marseilles, in National Convention, against Robespierre, retires, drowns himself.
REDING, Swiss, massacred.
RELIGION, Christian, and French Revolution, abolished, Clootz on, a new.
REMY, Cornet, at Clermont.
RENAULT, Cecile, to assassinate Robespierre, guillotined.
RENE, King, bequeathed Avignon to Pope.
RENNES, riot in.
RENWICK, last of Cameronians.
REPAIRE, Tardivet du, Bodyguard, Fifth October, rewarded.
REPRESENTATIVES, Paris, Town.
REPUBLIC, French, first mention of, first year of, established, universal, Clootz's, Girondin, one and indivisible, its triumphs.
RESSON, Sieur, reports Lafayette to Jacobins.
REVEILLON, house destroyed.
REVOLT, Paris, in, of Gardes Francaises, becomes Revolution, military, what, of Lepelletier section.
REVOLUTION, French, causes of the, Lord Chesterfield on the, not a revolt, meaning of the term, whence it grew, general commencement of, prosperous characters in, Philosophes and, state of army in, progress of, duelling in, Republic decided on, European powers and, Royalist opinion of, cardinal movements in, Danton and the, changes produced by the, effect of King's death on, Girondin idea of, suspicion in, Terror and, and Christian religion, Revolutionary Committees, Government doings in, Robespierre essential to, end of.
RHEIMS, in September massacre.
RICHELIEU, at death of Louis XV., death of.
RIOT, Paris, in May 1750, Cornlaw (in 1775), at Palais de Justice (1787), triumph, of Rue St. Antoine, of July Fourteenth (1789), and Bastille, at Strasburg, Paris, on the veto, Versailles Chateau, October Fifth (1789), uses of, to National Assembly, Paris, on Nanci affair, at De Castries' Hotel, on flight of King's Aunts, at Vincennes, on King's proposed journey to St. Cloud, in Champ-de-Mars, with sharp shot, Paris, Twentieth June, 1792, August Tenth, 1792, Grain, Paris, at Theatre de la Nation, selling sugar, of Thermidor, 1794, of Germinal, 1795, of Prairial, final, of Vendemiaire.
RIOUFFE, Girondin, to Bourdeaux, in prison, on death of Girondins, on Mme. Roland.
ROBESPIERRE, Maximilien, account of, derided in Constituent Assembly, Jacobin, incorruptible, on tip of left, elected public accuser, after King's flight, at close of Assembly, at Arras, position of, plans in 1792, chief priest of Jacobins, invisible on August Tenth, reappears, on September Massacre, in National Convention, accused by Girondins, accused by Louvet, acquitted, King's trial, Condorcet on, at Queen's trial, in Salut Committee, and Paris Municipality, embraces Danton, Desmoulins and, and Danton, Danton on, at trial, his three scoundrels, supreme, to be assassinated, at Feast of Etre Supreme, apocalyptic, Theot, on Couthon's plot-decree, reserved, his schemes, fails in Convention, applauded at Jacobins, accused, rescued, at Townhall, declared out of law, half-killed, guillotined, essential to Revolution.
ROBESPIERRE, Augustin, decreed accused, guillotined.
ROCHAMBEAU, one of Four Generals, retires.
ROCHE-AYMON, Grand Almoner of Louis XV.
ROCHEFOUCAULT, Duke de la, Liberal, President of Directory, killed.
ROEDERER, Syndic, Feuillant, 'Chronicle of Fifty Days,' on Federes Ammunition, dilemma at Tuileries, August 10th.
ROHAN, Cardinal, Diamond Necklace.
ROLAND, Madame, notice of, at Lyons, narrative by, in Paris, after King's flight, and Barbaroux, public dinners and business, character of, misgivings of, accused, Girondin declining, arrested, condemned and guillotined.
ROLAND, M., notice of, in Paris, Minister, letter, and dismissal of, recalled, decline of, on September Massacres, and Pache, doings of, resigns, flies, suicide of.
ROMME, in National Convention, in Caen prison, his new Calendar, in riot of Prairial, 1795, suicide.
ROMOEUF, pursues King.
RONSIN, General of Revolutionary Army, arrested and guillotined.
ROSIERE, Thuriot de la, summons Bastille, in First Parliament, in National Convention, President at Robespierre's fall.
ROSSIGNOL, in September Massacre, in La Vendee.
ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques, Contrat Social of, Gospel according to, burial- place of, statue decreed to.
ROUX, M., 'Histoire Parlementaire.'
ROYALTY, signs of demolished, abolition of.
RUAMPS, Deputy, against Couthon.
RUHL, notice of, in riot of Prairial, suicide.
SABATIER de Cabre, at Royal Session, arrested, liberated.
ST. ANTOINE to Versailles, Warhorse supper, Nanci affair, at Vincennes, at Jacobins, and Marseillese, August Tenth.
ST. CLOUD, Louis prohibited from.
ST. DENIS, Mayor of, hanged.
ST. FARGEAU, Lepelletier, in National Convention, at King's trial, assassinated, burial of.
ST. HURUGE, Marquis, bull-voice, imprisoned, at Versailles, and Pope's effigy, at Jacobins, on King's trial.
ST. JUST in National Convention, on King's trial, in Salut Committee, at Strasburg, repels Prussians, on Revolution, in Committee-room, Thermidor, his report, arrested.
ST. LOUIS Church, States-General procession from.
ST. MEARD, Jourgniac de, in prison, his 'Agony' at La Force.
ST. MERY, Moreau de, prostrated.
SALLES, Deputy, guillotined.
SANSCULOTTISM, apparition of, effects of, growth of, at work, origin of term, and Royalty, above theft, a fact, French Nation and, Revolutionary Tribunal and, how it lives, consummated, fall of, last rising of, death of.
SANTERRE, Brewer, notice of, at siege of Bastille, at Tuileries, June Twentieth, meets Marseillese, Commander of Guards, how to relieve famine, at King's trial, at King's execution, fails in La Vendee, St. Antoine disarmed.
SAPPER, Fraternal.
SAUSSE, M., Procureur of Varennes, scene at his house, flies from Prussians.
SAVONNIERES, M., de, Bodyguard, October Fifth, loses temper.
SAVOY, occupied by French.
SECHELLES, Herault de, in National Convention, leads Convention out, arrested and guillotined.
SECTIONS, of Paris, denounce Girondins, Committee of.
SEIGNEURS, French, compelled to fly.
SERGENT, Agate, Engraver, in Committee, nicknamed 'Agate,' signs circular.
SERVAN, War-Minister, proposals of.
SEVRES, Potteries, Lamotte's 'Memoires' burnt at.
SICARD, Abbe, imprisoned, in danger near the Abbaye, account of massacre there.
SIDE, Right and Left, of Constituent Assembly, Right and Left, tip of Left, popular, Right after King's flight, Right quits Assembly, Right and Left in First Parliament.
SIEYES, Abbe, account of, Constitution-builder, in Champ-de-Mars, in National Convention, of Constitution Committee, 1790, vote at King's trial, making fresh Constitution.
SILLERY, Marquis.
SIMON, Cordwainer, Dauphin committed to, guillotined.
SIMONEAU, Mayor of Etampes, death of, festival for.
SOMBREUIL, Governor of Hotel des Invalides, examined, seized, saved by his daughter, guillotined, his son shot.
SPAIN, at war with France, invaded by France.
STAAL, Dame de, on liberty.
STAEL, Mme. de, at States-General procession, intrigue for Narbonne, secretes Narbonne.
STANHOPE and Price, their club and Paris.
STATES-GENERAL, first suggested, meeting announced, how constituted, orders in, Representatives to, Parlements against, Deputies to, in Paris, number of Deputies, place of Assembly, procession of, installed, union of orders.
STRASBURG, riot at, in 1789.
SUFFREN, Admiral, notice of.
SULLEAU, Royalist, editor, massacred.
SUSPECT, Law of the, Chaumette jeered on.
SWEDEN, King of, to assist Marie Antoinette, shot by Ankarstrom.
SWISS Guards at Brest, prisoners at La Force.
TALLEYRAND-PERIGORD, Bishop, notice of, at fatherland's altar, his blessing, excommunicated, in London, to America.
TALLIEN, notice of, editor of 'Ami des Citoyens,' in Committee of Townhall, August 1792, in National Convention, at Bourdeaux, and Madame Cabarus, recalled, suspect, accuses Robespierre, Thermidorian.
TALMA, actor, his soiree.
TANNERY of human skins, improvements in.
TARGET, Advocate, declines King's defence.
TASSIN, M., and black cockade.
TENNIS-COURT, National Assembly in, Club of, and procession to, master of, rewarded.
TERROR, consummation of, reign of, designated, number guillotined in.
THEATINS Church, granted to Dissidents.
THEOT, Prophetess, on Robespierre.
THERMIDOR, Ninth and Tenth, July 27 and 28, 1794.
THEROIGNE, Mlle., notice of, in Insurrection of Women, at Versailles (October Fifth), in Austrian prison, in Jacobin tribune, armed for insurrection (August Tenth), keeps her carriage, fustigated, insane.
THIONVILLE besieged, siege raised.
THOURET, Law-reformer, dissolves Assembly, guillotined.
THOUVENOT and Dumouriez.
TINVILLE, Fouquier, revolutionist, Jacobin, Attorney-General in Tribunal Revolutionnaire, at Queen's trial, at trial of Girondins, at trial of Mme. Roland, at trial of Danton, and Salut Public, his prison-plots, his batches, the prisons under, mock doom of, at trial of Robespierre, accused, guillotined.
TOLLENDAL, Lally, pleads for father, in States-General, popular, crowned.
TORNE, Bishop.
TOULON, Girondin, occupied by English, besieged, surrenders.
TOULONGEON, Marquis, notice of, on Barnave triumvirate, describes Jacobins Hall.
TOURNAY, Louis, at siege of Bastille.
TOURZELLE, Dame de, escape of.
TRONCHET, Advocate, defends King.
TUILERIES, Louis XVI. lodged at, a tile-field, Twentieth June at, tickets of entry, 'Coblentz,' Marseillese chase Filles-Saint-Thomas to, August Tenth, King quits, attacked, captured, occupied by National Convention.
TURGOT, Controller of France, on Corn-law, dismissed, death of.
TYRANTS, French people rise against.
UNITED STATES, declaration of Liberty, embassy to Louis XVI., aided by France, of Congress in.
USHANT, battle off.
VALADI, Marquis, Gardes Francaises and, guillotined.
VALAZE, Girondin, on trial of Louis, plots at his house, trial of, kills himself.
VALENCIENNES, besieged, surrendered.
VARENNE, Maton de la, his experiences in September.
VARIGNY, Bodyguard, massacred.
VARLET, 'Apostle of Liberty,' arrested.
VENDEE, La, Commissioners to, state of, in 1792, insurrection in, war, after King's death, on fire, pacificated.
VENDEMIAIRE, Thirteenth, October 4, 1795.
VERDUN, to be besieged, surrendered.
VERGENNES, M. de, Prime Minister, death of.
VERGNIAUD, notice of, August Tenth, orations of, President at King's condemnation, in fall of Girondins, trial of, at last supper of Girondins.
VERMOND, Abbe de.
VERSAILLES, death of Louis XV. at, in Bastille time, National Assembly at, troops to, march of women on, of French Guards on, insurrection scene at, the Chateau forced, prisoners massacred at.
VIARD, Spy.
VILATE, Juryman, guillotined, book by.
VILLARET-JOYEUSE, Admiral, defeated by Howe.
VILLEQUIER, Duke de, emigrates.
VINCENNES, riot at, saved by Lafayette.
VINCENT, of War-Office, arrested, guillotined.
VOLTAIRE, at Paris, described, burial-place of.
WAR, civil, becomes general.
WASHINGTON, key of Bastille sent to, formula for Lafayette.
WATIGNY, Battle of.
WEBER, in Insurrection of Women, Queen leaving Vienna.
WESTERMANN, August Tenth, purged out of the Jacobins, tried and guillotined.
WIMPFEN, Girondin General.
YORK, Duke of, besieges Valenciennes and Dunkirk.
YOUNG, Arthur, at French Revolution.
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