XXXV. THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES.

Lovers of paradoxes have tried to represent the September massacres as something spontaneous, a passing delirium of opinion, a sort of great national convulsion. This myth was a lie against history and humanity. It exists no longer, Heaven be thanked. The mists with which it was sought to shroud these execrable crimes are now dissipated. Light has been shed upon that series of infernal spectacles which would have made cannibals blush. No; these odious massacres were not the result of a popular movement, an unforeseen fanaticism, a paroxysm of rage or vengeance. They present an ensemble of murders committed in cool blood, a planned and premeditated thing. M. Mortimer-Ternaux, in his Histoire de la Terreur, M. Granier de Cassagnac, in his Histoire des Girondins et des Massacres de Septembre, have proved this abundantly. They have exhumed from the archives and the record offices such a mass of uncontested and incontestable documents, that not the slightest doubt is now permissible. Edgar Quinet has not hesitated to recognize this in his book, La Révolution. He says: "The massacres were executed administratively; the same discipline was everywhere displayed throughout the carnage.... This was not a piece of blind, spontaneous barbarism; it was a barbarity slowly meditated, minutely elaborated by a sanguinary mind. Hence it bears no resemblance to anything previously known in history. Marat harvested in September what he had been sowing for three years." The Parisian populace, eight hundred thousand souls, was inert; it was cowardly, it trembled; but it did not approve, it was not an accomplice. It was a monstrous thing that a handful of cut-throats should be enough to transform Paris into a slaughter-house. One shudders in thinking what a few criminals can accomplish in the midst of an immense population. "The people, the real people—that composed of laborious and honest workmen, ardent and patriotic at heart, and of young bourgeois with generous aspirations and indomitable courage—never united for an instant with the scoundrels recruited by Maillard from every kennel in the capital. While the hired assassins of the Committee of Surveillance established in the prisons what Vergniaud called a butcher's shop for human flesh, the true populace was assembled on the Champ-de-Mars, and before the enlistment booths; it was offering its purest blood for the country; it would have blushed to shed that of helpless unfortunates."[1] In 1871, the murder of hostages and the burning of monuments was no more approved by the population than the massacres in the prisons were in 1792. The crimes were committed at both epochs by a mere handful of individuals. The great majority of the people were guilty merely of apathy and fear.

The hideous tableau surpasses the most lugubrious conceptions of Dante's sombre imagination. Paris is a hell. From August 29, it is like a torpid Oriental town. The whole city is in custody, like a criminal whose limbs are held while he is being searched and put in irons. Every house is inspected by the agents of the Commune. A knock at the door makes the inmates tremble. The denunciation of an enemy, a servant, a neighbor, is a death sentence. People scarcely dare to breathe. Neither running water nor solid earth is free. The parapets of quays, the arches of bridges, the bathing and washing boats are bristling with sentries. Everything is surrounded. There is no refuge. Three thousand suspected persons are taken out of houses, and crowded into prisons. The hunt begins anew the following day. The programme of massacres is arranged. The Communal Council of Surveillance has minutely regulated everything. The price of the actual work is settled. The personnel of cut-throats is at its post. Danton has furnished the executioners; Manuel, the victims. All is ready. The bloody drama can begin.

On September 2, Danton said to the Assembly: "The tocsin about to sound is not an alarm signal; it is a charge upon the enemies of the country. To vanquish them, gentlemen, all that is needed is boldness, and again boldness, and always boldness." Two days before, he had been still more explicit. "The 10th of August," said he, "divided us into republicans and royalists; the first few in number, the second many...; we must make the royalists afraid." A frightful gesture, a horizontal gesture, sufficed to express his meaning.

Robbery preceded murder. It was a veritable raid. The Commune caused the palaces, national property, the Garde-Meuble, the houses and mansions of the émigrés to be pillaged. One saw nothing but carts and wagons transporting stolen goods to the Hôtel-de-Ville. All the plate was stolen from the churches likewise. "Millions," says Madame Roland in her Memoirs, "passed into the hands of people who used it to perpetuate the anarchy which was the source of their domination." When will the men of the Commune render their accounts? Never. Who are the accomplices of Danton and Marat in organizing the massacres? A band of defaulting accountants, faithless violators of public trusts, breakers of locks, swindlers, spies, and men overwhelmed with debts. What interest have they in planning the murders? That of perpetuating the dictatorship they had assumed on the eve of August 10, and, above all, of having no accounts to render. A few weeks later on, Collot d'Herbois will say at the Jacobin Club: "The 2d of September is the chief article in the creed of our liberty."

The jailors were forewarned. They served the prisoners' dinner earlier, and took away their knives. There was a disturbed and uneasy look in their faces which made the victims suspect their end was near. Toward noon the general alarm was beaten in every street. The citizens were ordered to return at once to their dwellings. An order was issued to illuminate every house when night fell. The shops were closed. Terror overspread the entire city.

It was agreed that at the third discharge of cannon the cut-throats should set to work. The first blood shed was that of prisoners taken from the mayoralty to the Abbey prison. The carriages containing them passed along the Quai des Orfèvres, the Pont-Neuf and rue Dauphine, until it reached the Bussy square. Here there was a crowd assembled around a platform where enlistments were going on. The throng impeded the progress of the carriages. Thereupon one of the escort opened the door of one of them, and standing on the step, plunged his sabre into the breast of an aged priest. The multitude shuddered and fled in affright. "That makes you afraid," said the assassin; "you will see plenty more like it."

The rest of the escort followed the example set them. The carriages go on again, and so do the massacres. They kill along the route, and they kill on arriving at the Abbey. Towards five o'clock, Billaud-Varennes presents himself there, wearing his municipal scarf. "People," says he—what he calls people is a band of salaried assassins—"people, thou immolatest thine enemies, thou art doing thy duty." Then he walks into the midst of the dead bodies, dipping his feet in blood, and fraternizes with the murderers. "There is nothing more to do here," exclaims Maillard; "let us go to the Carmelites."

At the Carmelites, one hundred and eighty priests, crowded into the church and convent, were awaiting their fate with pious resignation. Two days before, Manuel had said to them ironically: "In forty-eight hours you will all be free. Get ready to go into a foreign country and enjoy the repose you cannot find here." And on the previous day a gendarme had said to the Archbishop of Arles, blowing the smoke from his pipe into his face as he did so: "It is to-morrow, then, that they are going to kill Your Grandeur." A short time before the massacre began, the victims were sent into the garden. At the bottom of it was an orangery which has since become a chapel. Mgr. Dulau, Archbishop of Arles, and the Bishops of Beauvais and de Saintes, both of whom were named de la Rochefoucauld, kneeled down with the other priests and recited the last prayers. The murderers approached. The Archbishop of Arles, who was upwards of eighty, advanced to meet them. "I am he whom you seek," he said; "my sacrifice is made; but spare these worthy priests; they will pray for you on earth, and I in heaven." They insulted him before they struck him. "I have never done harm to any one," said he. An assassin responded: "Very well; I'll do some to you," and killed him. The other priests were chased around the garden from one tree to another, and shot down. During this infernal hunt the murderers were shouting with laughter and singing their favorite song: Dansez la Carmagnole!

The massacre of the Carmelites is over. "Let us go back to the Abbey!" cries Maillard; "we shall find more game there." This time there is a pretence of justice made. The tribunal is the vestibule of the Abbey; Maillard, the chief cut-throat, is president; the assassins are the judges, and the public, the Marseillais, the sans-culottes, the female furies, and men to whom murder was a delightful spectacle. The prisoners are summoned one after another. They enter the vestibule, which has a wicket as a door of exit. They are questioned simply as a matter of form. Their answers are not even listened to. "Conduct this gentleman to the Force!" says the president. The prisoner thinks he is safe; he does not know that this phrase has been agreed upon as the signal of death. On reaching the wicket, hatchet and sabre strokes cut him down in the midst of his dream. The Swiss officers and soldiers who had survived August 10 were murdered thus. Their torture lasted a longer or shorter time, and was accomplished with more or less cruel refinements, according to the caprice of the assassins, who were nearly all drunk.

Night came, and torches were lighted. No shadows; a grand illumination. They must see clearly in the slaughter house. Lanterns were placed near the lakes of blood and heaps of dead bodies, so as plainly to distinguish the work from the workmen. There were some who were bent on losing no details of the carnage. The spectators wanted to take things easy. They were tired of standing too long. Benches for men and others for dames were got ready for them. The death-rattle of the agonizing, the vociferations of the assassins, the emulation between the executioners who kill slowly and the victims who are in haste to die, give joy to the spectators. There is no interruption to the human butchery. There has been so much blood spilled that the feet of the murderers slip on the pavement. A litter is made of straw and the clothes of the victims, and thereafter none are killed except upon this mattress. In this way the work is more commodiously accomplished. The assassins have plenty of assurance. Morning dawns on the continuation of the murders, and the wives of the murderers bring them something to eat.

On September 2, the only persons handed over to the cut-throats, were at the Abbey, the Carmelites, and Saint-Firmin. On September 3, the massacre became more general. The assassins had said: "If there is no more work, we shall have to find some." Their desire realizes itself. Work will not be lacking. There is still some at the Force, where the Princess de Lamballe, the preferred victim, is murdered. The assassins, who at the Abbey had been paid at the rate of eight francs a day, get only fifty sous at the Force. They work with undiminished zeal, even at this reduction. If necessary, they would work for nothing. To drink wine and shed blood is the essential thing. The negro Delorme, servant to Fournier "the American," distinguishes himself among them all. His black skin, reddened with blood, his white teeth and ferocious eyes, his bestial laugh, his ravenous fury, make him a choice assassin. There is work too at the Conciergerie, at the great and little Châtelet, the Salpêtrière, and the Bicêtre. A great number of those detained are people condemned or accused of private crimes which had absolutely nothing in common with politics. No matter; blood is wanted; they kill there as elsewhere. At the Grand Châtelet, work is so plenty, and the assassins so few, that they release several individuals imprisoned for theft, and impress them into their service. One of these unfortunate accidental executioners begins in a hesitating way, strikes a few undecided blows, and then throws down the hatchet placed in his hands. "No, no," he cries, "I cannot. No, no! Rather a victim than a murderer! I would rather receive death from scoundrels like you, then give it to innocent, disarmed people. Strike me!" And at once the veteran murderers kill the inexperienced cut-throat. There was a woman, known on account of her charms as the Beautiful Flower Girl, who was accused of having wounded her lover, a French guard, in a fit of jealousy. Théroigne de Mericourt, an amazon of the gutters, was her rival. She pointed her out to the assassins. They fastened her naked to a post, her legs apart and her feet nailed to the ground. They burned her alive. They cut off her breasts with sabre strokes. They impaled her on a hot iron. Her shrieks carried dismay as far as the outer banks of the Seine. Théroigne was at the height of felicity.

At the Salpêtrière there was still another spectacle. This prison for fallen women is a place of correction for the old, of amendment for the young, and an asylum for those who are still children. More than forty children of the lower classes were slain during these horrible days. The delirium of murder reached its height. Gorged with wine mingled with gunpowder, intoxicated with the fumes and reek of carnage, the assassins experienced a devouring, inextinguishable thirst for blood which nothing could quench. More blood, and yet more blood! And where can it now be found? The prisons are empty. There are no more nobles, no more priests, to put to death. Very well! for lack of anything better, they will go to an asylum for the poor, the sick, and the insane; to the Bicêtre. Vagabonds, paupers, fools, thieves, steward, chaplains, janitor, all is fish that comes to their net. The butchery lasts five days and nights without stopping. Massacre takes every form; some are drowned in the cellars, others shot in the courts. Water, fire, and sword, every sort of torture.

The cut-throats can at last take some repose. They have worked all the week. There are still some, however, who have not yet had enough, and who are going to continue the massacres of Paris in the provinces. The Communal Council of Surveillance has taken care to send to every commune in France a circular bearing the seal of the Minister of Justice, inviting them to follow the example of the capital.

September 9, the prisoners who had been detained at Orleans to be tried there by the Superior Court, entered Versailles on carts. At the moment when they approached the grating of the Orangery, assassins sent from Paris under the lead of Fournier "the American" sprang upon them and immolated every one. Thus perished the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, de Lessart, and the Duke de Brissac, former commander of the Constitutional Guard. Fournier "the American"[2] returned on horseback to Paris and began to caracole on the Place Vendôme; Danton loudly felicitated him on the success of the expedition, from the balcony of the Ministry of Justice.

During all this time, what efforts had the Assembly made to put a stop to the murders? None, absolutely none. Never has any deliberative body shown a like cowardice. Neither Vergniaud's voice nor that of any other Girondin was heard in protest. Indignation, pity, found not a single word to say. Speeches, discussions, votes on different questions, went on as usual. Concerning the massacres, not a syllable. During that infamous week, neither the ministers, the virtuous Roland not more than the others, neither Pétion, the mayor of Paris, nor the commander of the National Guard sent a picket guard of fifty men to any quarter to prevent the murders. A population of eight hundred thousand souls and a National Guard of fifty thousand men bent their necks under the yoke of a handful of bandits, of two hundred and thirty-five assassins (the exact number is known). People trembled. At the Assembly the old moderate party had disappeared. There were not more than two hundred odd deputies present at the shameful and powerless sessions. Terrorized Paris was in a state of stupor and prostration.

The murderers ended by execrating themselves. Tormented by remorse, they could see nothing before them but vivid faces, reeking entrails, bleeding limbs. "Among the cut-throats," M. Louis Blanc has said, "some gave signs of insanity that led to the supposition that some mysterious and terrible drug had been mingled with the wine they drank." Some of them became furious madmen. Others sought refuge in suicide, killing themselves the moment they had no one else to kill. Others enlisted. They were chased out of the army. Among these was the man who had carried the head of the Princess de Lamballe on a pike. One day when he was boasting of his murders, the soldiers became indignant and put him to death. Others still were tried as Septembrists and sent to the scaffold. The guilty received their punishment, even on this earth. Well! there are people nowadays who would like to rehabilitate them! In vain has Lamartine, the founder of the Second Republic, exclaimed in a burst of noble wrath: "Has human speech an execration, an anathema, which is equal to the horror these crimes of cannibals inspire in me, as in all civilized men?" In vain have the most celebrated historians of democracy, Edgar Quinet and Michelet, expressed in eloquent terms their indignation against these crimes. In vain has M. Louis Blanc said: "Every murder is a suicide. In the victim the body alone is killed; but what is killed in the murderer is the soul." There are men who would not alone excuse, but glorify the assassinations and the assassins!

[1] M. Mortimer-Ternaux, Histoire de la Terreur.

[2] Claude Fournier-Lhéritier, was born in Auvergne, 1745, and served as a volunteer in Santo Domingo, 1772-85, with Toussaint l'Ouverture, whence his sobriquet "the American."