XXVIII. THE ROYAL FAMILY IMPRISONED
Tumult and Dismay in the Assembly.--Storming the Tuileries.--Aspect of the Royal Family.--The Decree of Suspension.--Night in the Cloister.--The Second Day in the Assembly.--The Royal Family Prisoners.--Third Day in the Assembly.--The Temple.--The Royal Family Transferred to the Temple.
But few of the excited thousands who crowded all the approaches to the Tuileries were conscious that the royal family had escaped from the palace. The clamor rapidly increased to a scene of terrific uproar. First a few gun-shots were heard, then volleys of musketry, then the deep booming of artillery, while shouts of onset, cries of fury, and the shrieks of the wounded and the dying filled the air. The hall of the Assembly was already crowded to suffocation, and the deputies stood powerless and appalled. A tumultuous mass pressed the door. Blows, pistol-shots, and groans of death were heard beneath the windows, and it was every moment apprehended that the assassins would break into the hall, and that the royal family and all their defenders would be cut down. Several bullets shattered the windows, and one or two cannon-balls passed through the roof of the building. Every one was exposed to fearful peril.
There was no longer any retreat for the king. By the side of the president's chair there was a space inclosed by an iron railing, appropriated to the reporters. Several of the members aided the king in tearing down a portion of this railing, and all the royal family sought refuge there. At this moment the door of the hall was attacked, and tremendous blows seemed to shake the whole building. "We are stormed!" shouted one of the deputies. There was, however, no escape for any one in any direction, and for some moments there was witnessed a scene of confusion and terror which no language can describe.
At the same time there was a frightful conflict raging in and around the palace. Immediately upon the departure of the king, all the Swiss troops, who were hated as foreign mercenaries hired to shoot down the French, were drawn into the palace from the court-yard, and were mingled in confusion through its apartments with the loyalist gentlemen, the officers, and the domestics. Notwithstanding the vast dimensions of the palace, it was so crowded that there was scarcely space to move.
The throng in the Carrousel attacked one of the gates, broke it down, and rushed into the royal court, which was nearly vacated by the retirement of the Swiss. The companies of the National Guard in the Carrousel, instead of opposing, looked approvingly on, and were evidently quite disposed to lend the assailants a helping hand. A large piece of timber was placed at the foot of the staircase of the palace in the form of a barrier, and behind this were intrenched in disorder, crowding the steps, the Swiss and some of the National Guard who adhered to the king.[355]
Just then the whole Faubourg St. Antoine came marching along in solid column. They marched through the Carrousel, entered the court, and placed six pieces of cannon in battery to open a fire upon the palace. It was to avoid, if possible, a conflict, that the guards had been withdrawn from the court into the palace. The shouts of a countless multitude applauded this military movement of the mob. The Swiss had received command from the king not to fire. The crowd cautiously pressed nearer and nearer to the door, and at length, emboldened by the forbearance of the defenders of the palace, seized, with long poles to which hooks were attached, one after another of the sentinels, and, with shouts, captured and disarmed them. Thus five of the Swiss troops were taken prisoners.
At last a single shot was fired, no one can tell on which side. It was the signal for blood. The Swiss, crowded upon the magnificent marble stairs, rising one above another, occupied a very formidable position. They instantly opened a deadly fire. Volley succeeded volley, and every bullet told upon the dense mass crowding the court. At the same moment, from every window of the palace, a storm of shot was showered down upon the foe. In a moment the pavement was red with blood, and covered with the dying and the dead. The artillerymen abandoned their pieces, and the whole multitude rushed pell-mell, trampling the dead and wounded beneath them in frantic endeavors to escape from the court into the Carrousel. In a few moments the whole court was evacuated, and remained strewed with pikes, muskets, grenadiers' caps, and gory bodies.
The besiegers, however, soon rallied. Following the disciplined troops from Marseilles, who were led by able officers, the multitude returned with indescribable fury to the charge. Cannon-balls, bullets, and grapeshot dashed in the doors and the windows. Most of the loyalist gentlemen escaped by a secret passage through the long gallery of the Louvre, as the victorious rabble, with pike, bayonet, and sabre, poured resistlessly into the palace and rushed through all its apartments. The Swiss threw down their arms and begged for quarter. But the pitiless mob, exasperated by the slaughter of their friends, knew no mercy. Indiscriminate massacre ensued, accompanied with every conceivable act of brutality. For four hours the butchery continued, as attics, closets, cellars, chimneys, and vaults were searched, and the terrified victims were dragged out to die. Some leaped from the windows and endeavored to escape through the Garden. They were pursued and mercilessly cut down. Some climbed the marble monuments. The assassins, unwilling to injure the statuary, pricked them down with their bayonets and then slaughtered them at their feet. Seven hundred and fifty Swiss were massacred in that day of blood.
The Assembly during these hours were powerless, and they awaited in intense anxiety the issue of the combat. Nothing can more impressively show the weak and frivolous mind of the king than that, in such an hour, seeing the painter David in the hall, he inquired of him,
"How soon shall you probably have my portrait completed?"
David brutally replied, "I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold."[356]
The queen sat in haughty silence. Her compressed lip, burning eye, and hectic cheek indicated the emotions of humiliation and of indignation with which she was consumed. The young princess wept, and her fevered face was stained with the dried current of her tears. The dauphin, too young to appreciate the terrible significance of the scene, looked around in bewildered curiosity.
At eleven o'clock reiterated shouts of victory, which rose from the Garden, the palace, the Carrousel, and all the adjoining streets and places, proclaimed that the triumph of the people was complete. The Assembly, now overawed, unanimously passed a decree suspending the king, dismissing the Royalist ministers, recalling the Girondist ministry, and convoking a National Assembly for the trial of the king. As Vergniaud read, in accents of grief, this decree to which the Assembly had been forced, the king listened intently, and then said satirically to M. Coustard, who was standing by his side,
"This is not a very constitutional act."
"True," M. Coustard replied; "but it is the only means of saving your majesty's life."
The Assembly immediately enacted the decrees, which the king had vetoed, banishing the refractory priests and establishing a camp near Paris. Danton,[357] whose tremendous energies had guided the insurrection, was appointed Minister of Justice. Monge, the illustrious mathematician, by the nomination of his equally illustrious friend Condorcet, was placed at the head of the Marine. Lebrun, a man of probity and untiring energy, was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Thus was the whole government effectually revolutionized and reorganized. During all the long hours of this day the royal family sat in the crowded Assembly almost suffocated with heat, and enduring anguish which no tongue can tell. The streets were filled with uproar, and the waves of popular tumult dashed against the old monastery of the Feuillans, even threatening to break in the doors. The regal victims listened to the decrees which tore the crown from the brow of the king, and which placed his sceptre in the hands of his most envenomed foes. In the conflict with the defenders of the palace, between three and four thousand of the populace had perished, in revenge for which nearly eight hundred of the inmates of the Tuileries had been massacred. The relatives of the slain citizens, exasperated beyond measure, were clamorous for the blood of the king as the cause of the death of their friends. There was no possible covert for the royal family but in the Assembly. Fifty armed soldiers, with bayonets fixed, surrounded them in their box, and yet it was every moment feared that the populace would break in and satiate their rage with the blood of the monarch and his family.
The king was ever famed for his ravenous appetite. Even in the midst of these terrific scenes he was hungry and called for food. Bread, wine, and cold viands were brought to him. He ate and drank voraciously to the extreme mortification of the queen, who could not but perceive how little respect the conduct of the king inspired. Neither she, Madame Elizabeth, nor the children could taste of any food. They merely occasionally moistened their fevered lips with iced water.
It was now ten o'clock in the evening. The night was calm and beautiful. The tumult of the day was over, but the terrific excitement of the scene had brought the whole population of Paris out into the promenades. Fires were still blazing beneath the trees of the Tuileries, consuming the furniture which had been thrown from the windows of the chateau. Lurid flames flashed from the barracks of the Swiss in the court-yard, which had been set on fire, streaming over the roof of the palace, and illuminated both banks of the Seine.
The whole number slain during the day, Royalists and Revolutionists, amounted to over four thousand. Many of the dead had been removed by relatives, but the ground was still covered with the bodies of the slain, who were entirely naked, having been stripped of their clothing by those wretches who ever swarm in the streets of a great city, and who find their carnival in deeds of violence and blood. By order of the insurrectional committee at the Hôtel de Ville, who had deposed the municipal government and usurped its authority, these dead bodies were collected and piled in vast heaps in the court-yards, in the Garden, in the Place Louis XV., and in the Elysian Fields. Immense quantities of wood were thrown upon them, and the whole city was illuminated by the glare of these funeral fires. The Swiss and the Marsellais, the Royalists and the Jacobins, were consumed together, and the ashes were swept clean from the pavement into the Seine.
As these scenes at midnight were transpiring in the streets, the Assembly sent a summary of its decrees to be read by torch-light to the groups of the people. It was hoped that these decrees would satisfy them, and put a stop to any farther acts of violence on the morrow. It was two o'clock in the morning before the Assembly suspended its sitting. For seventeen hours the royal family had sat in the reporters' box, enduring all of humiliation and agony which human hearts can feel.
In the upper part of the old monastery, above the committee-rooms of the Assembly, there was a spacious corridor, from which opened several cells formerly used by the monks. These cells, with walls of stone and floors of brick, and entirely destitute of furniture, were as gloomy as the dungeons of a prison. Here only could the king and his family find safety for the night. Some articles of furniture were hastily collected from different parts of the building, and four of these rooms were prepared for the royal party. Five nobles, who had heroically adhered to the king in these hours of peril, occupied one, where, wrapped in their cloaks and stretched out upon the floor, they could still watch through the night over the monarch. The king took the next. It was furnished with a table, and a plain wooden bedstead. He bound a napkin around his head for a night-cap, and threw himself, but partially undressed, upon his uncurtained bed. The queen, with her two children, took the next cell. Madame Elizabeth, with the governess of the children, Madame de Tourzel, and the Princess Lamballe, who had joined the royal family in the evening, took the fourth. Thus, after thirty-six hours of sleeplessness and terror, the royal family were left to such repose as their agitated minds could attain.
The sun had long arisen when the queen awoke from her fevered slumber. She looked around her for a moment with an expression of anguish, and then, covering her eyes with her hands, exclaimed,
"Oh, I hoped that it had all been a dream!"
The whole party soon met in the apartment of the king. As Madame Tourzel led in the two royal children, Marie Antoinette looked at them sadly, and said,
"Poor children! how heart-rending it is, instead of handing down to them so fine an inheritance, to say, it ends with us!"
"I still see, in imagination," writes Madame Campan, "and shall always see, that narrow cell of the Feuillans, hung with green paper; that wretched couch where the dethroned queen stretched out her arms to us, saying that our misfortunes, of which she was the cause, aggravated her own. There, for the last time, I saw the tears, I heard the sobs of her whom her high birth, the endowments of nature, and, above all, the goodness of her heart, had seemed to destine for the ornament of a throne and for the happiness of her people."
The tumult of the streets still penetrated their cells, and warned them that they had entered upon another day of peril. The excited populace were still hunting out the aristocrats, and killing them pitilessly wherever they could be found. At ten o'clock the royal family were conducted again to the Assembly, probably as the safest place they could occupy, and there they remained all day. Several of the Swiss had been taken prisoners on the previous day, and by humane people had been taken to the Assembly that their lives might be saved. The mob now clamored loudly at the door of the hall, and endeavored to break in, demanding the lives of the Swiss and of the escort of the king, calling them murderers of the people. Vergniaud, the president, was so shocked by their ferocity that he exclaimed, "Great God, what cannibals!"
At one time the doors were so nearly forced that the royal family were hurried into one of the passages, to conceal them from the mob. The king, fully convinced that the hour of his death had now come, entreated his friends to provide for their safety by flight. Heroically, every one persisted in sharing the fate of the king. Danton hastened to the Assembly, and exerted all his rough and rude energy to appease the mob. They were at length pacified by the assurance that the Swiss, and all others who had abetted in the slaughter of the people on the preceding day, should be tried by a court-martial and punished. With great difficulty the Assembly succeeded in removing the Swiss and the escort of the king to the prison of the Abbaye.
At the close of this day the king and his family were again conducted to their cells, but they were placed under a strict guard, and their personal friends were no longer permitted to accompany them. This last deprivation was a severe blow to them all, and the king said bitterly,
"I am, then, a prisoner, gentlemen. Charles I. was more fortunate than myself. His friends were permitted to accompany him to the scaffold."
Another morning dawned upon this unhappy family, and again they were led to the hall of the Assembly, where they passed the weary hours of another day in the endurance of all the pangs of martyrdom.
It was at length decided that the royal family, for safe keeping, should be imprisoned in the tower of the Temple. This massive, sombre building, in whose gloomy architecture were united the palace, the cloister, the fortress, and the prison, was erected and inhabited by the Knights Templar of the Middle Ages. Having been long abandoned it was now crumbling to decay. It was an enormous pile which centuries had reared near the site of the Bastille, and with its palace, donjon, towers, and garden, which was choked with weeds and the débris of crumbling walls, covered a space of many acres.
The main tower was one hundred and fifty feet high, nine feet thick at the base, surrounded by a wide, deep ditch, and inclosed by an immensely high wall. This tower was ascended by a very narrow flight of circular stairs, and was divided into four stories, each containing a bare, dismal room about thirty feet square. The iron doors to these rooms were so low and narrow that it was necessary to stoop almost double to enter them. The windows, which were but slits in the thick wall, were darkened by slanting screens placed over them, and were also secured by stout iron bars.
Such were the apartments which were now assigned to the former occupants of the Tuileries, Versailles, and Fontainebleau. It was a weary ride for the royal captives through the Place Vendôme and along the Boulevards to the Temple. An immense crowd lined the road. All the royal family, with Pétion, the mayor, occupied one carriage, and the procession moved so slowly that for two hours the victims were exposed to the gaze of the populace before the carriages rolled under the arches of the Temple. It was late in the afternoon when they left the Assembly, and the shades of night darkened the streets ere they reached the Temple.
The Assembly had surrendered the safe-keeping of the king to the Commune of Paris, and appropriated one hundred thousand dollars to meet the expenses of the royal family until the king should be brought to trial. Conscious that an army of nearly two hundred thousand men was within a few days' march of Paris, hastening to rescue the king, and that there were thousands of Royalists in the city, and tens of thousands in France, who were ready at any moment to lay down their lives to secure the escape of the monarch, and conscious that the escape of the king would not only re-enslave France, but consign every friend of the Revolution to the dungeon or the scaffold, they found it necessary to adopt the most effectual measures to hold the king securely. They, therefore, would no longer allow the friends of the king to hold free communication with him.
The Temple itself, by outworks, had been promptly converted into a fortress, and was strongly garrisoned by the National Guard. Twelve commissioners were without interruption to keep watch of the king's person. No one was allowed to enter the tower of the Temple without permission of the municipality. Four hundred dollars were placed in the hands of the royal family for their petty expenses. They were not intrusted with more, lest it might aid them to escape. A single attendant, the king's faithful valet Clery,[358] was permitted to accompany the captives. It does not appear that the authorities wished to add unnecessary rigor to the imprisonment. Thirteen cooks were provided for the kitchen, that their table might be abundantly supplied. One of these only was allowed to enter the prison and aid Clery in serving at the table, the expenses of which for two months amounted to nearly six thousand dollars.[359]
It was an hour after midnight when the royal family were led from the apartments of the Temple to which they had first been conducted to their prison in the tower. The night was intensely dark. Dragoons with drawn sabres marched by the side of the king, while municipal officers with lanterns guided their steps. Through gloomy and dilapidated halls, beneath massive turrets, and along the abandoned paths of the garden, encumbered with weeds and stones, they groped their way until they arrived at the portals of the tower, whose summit was lost in the obscurity of night. As in perfect silence the sad procession was passing through the garden, a valet-de-chambre of the king inquired in a low tone of voice whither the king was to be conducted.
"Thy master," was the reply, "has been used to gilded roofs. Now he will see how the assassins of the people are lodged."
The three lower rooms of the tower were assigned to the captives. They had been accompanied by several of their friends who adhered to them in these hours of adversity. All were oppressed with gloom, and many shed bitter tears. Still they were not in despair. Powerful armies were marching for their rescue, and they thought it not possible that the French people, all unprepared for war, could resist such formidable assailants. A week thus passed away, when on the 19th the municipal officers entered and ordered the immediate expulsion of all not of the royal family. This harsh measure was deemed necessary in consequence of the conspiracies which were formed by the Royalists for the rescue of the king. Unfeeling jailers were now placed over them, and, totally uninformed of all that was passing in the world without, they sank into the extreme of woe.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 355: "Napoleon se trouvait au 10ième Août à Paris; il avait été présent à l'action. Il m'écrevit une lettre très détaillée, que je lus à mes collègues du directoire du département; voici les deux traits principaux. 'Si Louis XVI. se fût montré à cheval la victoire lui fût restée; c'est ce qui m'a paru, à l'esprit qui animait les groupes le matin.
"'Après la victoire des Marseillais, j'en vis un sur le point de tuer un garde du corps; je lui dis,
"'Homme du midi, sauvons ce malheureux!
"'Es tu du midi?
"'Oui!
"'Eh, bien! sauvons le!'"--Mémoires du Roi Joseph, t. i., p. 47.]
[Footnote 356: History of the Girondists, by Lamartine, vol. ii., p. 77.]
[Footnote 357: Danton was one of the fiercest of the Jacobins. Madame Roland, a political opponent, thus describes him: "I never saw any countenance that so strongly expressed the violence of brutal passions, and the most astonishing audacity, half disguised by a jovial air, an affectation of frankness, and a sort of simplicity, as Danton's. In 1778 he was a needy lawyer, more burdened with debts than causes. He went to Belgium to augment his resources, and, after the 10th of August, had the hardihood to avow a fortune of £158,333 ($791,665), and to wallow in luxury while preaching sans culottism and sleeping on heaps of slaughtered men." "Danton," says Mignet, "was a gigantic revolutionist. He deemed no means censurable so they were useful. He has been termed the Mirabeau of the populace. Mirabeau's vices were those of a patrician. Danton's those of a democrat. He was an absolute exterminator without being personally ferocious; inexorable toward masses, humane, generous even, toward individuals."--Mignet, p. 158.]
[Footnote 358: "Clery we have seen and known, and the form and manners of that model of pristine faith and loyalty ran never be forgotten. Gentlemanlike and complaisant in his manners, his deep gravity and melancholy features announced that the sad scenes in which he had acted a part so honorable were never for a moment out of his memory."--Scott's Life of Napoleon.]
[Footnote 359: Thiers's Hist. French Revolution, vol. ii., p. 26.]
XXIX. THE MASSACRE OF THE ROYALISTS
Supremacy of the Jacobins.--Their energetic Measures.--The Assembly threatened.--Commissioners sent to the Army.--Spirit of the Court Party in England.--Speech of Edmund Burke.--Triumphant March of the Allies.--The Nation summoned en masse to resist the Foe.--Murder of the Princess Lamballe.--Apology of the Assassins.--Robespierre and St. Just.--Views of Napoleon.
The majestic armies of the Allies were now rapidly on the march toward France, and there was no force on the frontiers which could present any effectual resistance. La Fayette was at Sedan, about one hundred and fifty miles northwest of Paris, at the head of twenty thousand troops who were devoted to him. His opposition to the Jacobins had already caused him to be denounced as a traitor, and it was feared that he might go over to the enemy, and by his strong influence carry not only his own troops, but those of General Luckner with him. The condition of the Patriots was apparently desperate. The Allies were confident of a triumphant and a rapid march to Paris, where all who had sacrilegiously laid hands upon the old despotism of France would be visited with condign punishment.
The Jacobin Club was now the sovereign power in France. It was more numerous than the Legislative Assembly, and its speakers, more able and impassioned, had perfect control of the populace. The Jacobins had, by the insurrection, or rather revolution of the 10th of August, organized a new municipal government. Whatever measure the Jacobin Club decided to have enforced it sent to the committee which the club had organized as the city government at the Hôtel de Ville. This committee immediately demanded the passage of the decree by the Legislative Assembly. If the Assembly manifested any reluctance in obeying, they were informed that the tocsin would be rung, the populace summoned, and the scenes of the 10th of August renewed, to make them willing. Such was now the new government instituted in France.
The Commune of Paris, as this municipal body at the Hôtel de Ville was called, immediately entered upon the most vigorous measures to break up the conspiracy of the Royalists, that they might not be able to rise and join the invading armies of the Allies. The French Patriots had two foes equally formidable to dread--the emigrants with the Allies marching upon the frontiers, composing an army nearly two hundred thousand strong, and the Royalists in France, who were ready, as soon as the Allies entered the kingdom, to raise the standard of civil war, and to fall upon the Patriots with exterminating hand. There was thus left for the leaders of the Revolution only the choice between killing and being killed. It was clear that they must now either exterminate their foes or be exterminated by them. And it must on all hands be admitted that the king and the court, by refusing to accept constitutional liberty, had brought the nation to this direful alternative.
To prevent suspected persons from escaping, no one was allowed to leave the gates of Paris without the most careful scrutiny of his passport. A list was made out of every individual known to be unfriendly to the Revolution, and all such were placed under the most vigilant surveillance. The citizens were enjoined to denounce all who had taken any part in the slaughter of the citizens on the 10th of August. All writers who had supported the Royalist cause were ordered to be arrested, and their presses were given to Patriotic writers. Commissioners were sent to the prisons to release all who had been confined for offenses against the court. As it was feared that the army, influenced by La Fayette, might manifest hostility to the revolutionary movement in Paris, which had so effectually demolished the Constitution, commissioners were sent to enlighten the soldiers and bring them over to the support of the people. It was at first contemplated to assign the palace of the Luxembourg as the retreat of the royal family. The Commune of Paris, however, decided that the public safety required that they should be held in custody where escape would be impossible, and that their safe-keeping should be committed to the mayor, Pétion, and to Santerre, who had been appointed commander of the National Guards.
The Assembly, alarmed at the encroachments of the self-constituted Commune of Paris, ordered a re-election of a municipal government to take the place of that which the insurrection had dissolved. The Commune instantly dispatched a committee to inform the Assembly that if they made any farther move in that direction the tocsin should again be rung, and that the populace, who had stormed the Tuileries, should be directed against their hall. The deputies, overawed by the threat, left the Commune in undisputed possession of its power. The Commune now demanded of the Assembly the appointment of a special tribunal to punish the Royalists who had fired upon the people from the Tuileries, and those who "as conspirators and traitors" were ready to join the Allies as soon as they should enter France. The Assembly hesitated. The Commune sent Robespierre at the head of a deputation to inform them in those emphatic terms which he ever had at his command, that the country was in danger, that the Allies and emigrants were on the march, that no delay could be tolerated, and that if the decree were not immediately passed the tocsin should be rung. The appalling threat was efficient, and the decree, though some heroically opposed, was passed.[360] Such was the origin of the first revolutionary tribunal.
As soon as the commissioners from Paris arrived at the camp of La Fayette they were by his orders arrested and imprisoned, and the soldiers took anew the oath of fidelity to the law and the king. The news of their arrest reached Paris on the 17th, and excited intense irritation. La Fayette was denounced more vehemently than ever, and a fresh deputation was dispatched to the army. La Fayette was now ruined. The court was ready to hang him for his devotion to liberty. The Jacobins thirsted for his blood because he thwarted their plans. Every hour his situation became more desperate, and it was soon evident that he could do no more for his country, and that there was no refuge for him but in flight. On the 20th, accompanied by a few friends, he secretly left his army, and took the road to the Netherlands. When he reached the Austrian outposts at Rochefort, he was arrested as a criminal in defiance of all law. With great secrecy he was taken into the interior of Austria, and thrown into a dungeon in the impregnable fortress of Olmutz. His only crime was that he had wished to introduce constitutional liberty to his country. This, in the eye of despots, was an unpardonable sin. Here we must leave him to languish five years in captivity, deprived of every comfort. Many efforts were made in vain for his release. Washington wrote directly to the Emperor of Austria in his behalf, but without effect. It was not till Napoleon, thundering at the walls of Vienna with his invincible legions, demanded the release of La Fayette, in 1797, that the doors of his dungeon were thrown open.[361]
The British people sympathized deeply with La Fayette, but the British government assailed him with unrelenting ferocity. On the 17th of March, 1794, General Fitzpatrick moved an address in the House of Commons, to his majesty, requesting his interference with the King of Prussia in behalf of La Fayette. Mr. Fox advocated the measure in a speech of great eloquence and power. Nothing can more clearly show the spirit of the court party in England at this time than the speeches made by them on this occasion. William Pitt assailed La Fayette in the most unfeeling manner, declaring that "he would never admit that La Fayette was a true friend of liberty or deserved well of his country or of Europe." "He said," writes Prof. Smyth, "every thing that it is painful to read--he was rendered insensible on this occasion to all the better notions of his education and natural intuitions of his understanding. There is no pleasure in reading the abstract of his speech. It might have been made by the most vulgar minister that ever appeared. Edmund Burke followed in a speech of unmeasured abuse. In glowing colors he depicted all the scenes of violence which had occurred in France, and, declaring La Fayette responsible for them all," concluded with the words, "I would not debauch my humanity by supporting an application like the present in behalf of such a horrid ruffian."[362] Mr. Windham followed in the same strain. He expressed exultation in view of the calamities which had fallen upon this great patriot. "La Fayette," said he, "has brought himself into that state into which all fomenters of great and ruinous revolutions must necessarily fall; he has betrayed and ruined his country and his king. I am not sorry. I rejoice to see such men drink deep of the cup of calamity which they have prepared for the lips of others; and I never will consent to do an act which will put a premium on revolution, and which will give the example of sanction to treason, and of reward to rebellion."
Such was the spirit of the court of St. James at this time. These speeches were made after La Fayette had been languishing for two years in the dungeons of Olmutz, exposed to almost every conceivable indignity, the particulars of which Mr. Fox had affectingly narrated. The debate was concluded by Mr. Dundas, who thanked Mr. Windham for his admirable speech. When the vote was taken but fifty were found in sympathy with La Fayette, while one hundred and thirty-two voted against him.
The two sovereigns of Prussia and Austria were now at Mayence. Sixty thousand Prussians were marching in single column by Luxembourg upon Longwy, flanked on the right by twenty thousand Austrians, and on the left by twenty-six thousand Austrians and Hessians. This majestic force was strengthened by several co-operating corps of French emigrants, destined to attack exposed positions, and to afford rallying points for treason. The invaders crossed the frontiers unimpeded, and after a short and bloody strife captured Longwy. Onward they rushed. The feeble, undisciplined patriots, could make no resistance, and fled rapidly before them. Thionville and Verdun were surrounded, and after a short but terrific storm of balls and shells capitulated. There were many Royalists in each of these towns, and they received the invaders with every demonstration of joy. Their daughters in congratulatory procession met the King of Prussia at the gates and strewed his path with flowers.
The garrison of Verdun might have held out for several days, though they would have eventually been compelled to surrender. General Beaurepaire urged very strenuously that they should maintain the siege to the last possible moment. But the defensive council of the city, with whom rested the decision, voted an immediate capitulation.
"Gentlemen," said Beaurepaire, "I have sworn never to surrender but with my life. You may live in disgrace, since you wish it; but as for me, faithful to my oath, behold my last words: I die free."
Immediately he discharged a pistol-shot through his brain, and fell dead before them. The Convention decreed to him the honors of the Pantheon, and granted a pension to his widow.
The victorious allies, having surmounted these first obstacles, now plunged into the defiles of the Argonne, and in fierce and bloody assaults drove before them the troops of Dumouriez, who had hoped in these forest-encumbered passes to present effectual resistance to the foe. The invaders were now triumphantly marching on the high-road to Paris, and fugitives were continually arriving in the metropolis, declaring that the army of the north was destroyed, and that there was no longer any obstacle to the advance of the enemy. No language can describe the consternation which pervaded the capital. The exultation in the enemy's camp was immense. The "cobblers and tailors," as the emigrants contemptuously called the Patriots, were running away, it was said, like sheep.[363]
As each day brought tidings of the fearful strides which the Allies were making toward the capital, indescribable terror was enkindled. The Constitutionalists and the Girondists were utterly paralyzed. But the leaders of the Jacobins--Danton, Robespierre, and Marat--resolved that, if they were to perish, their Royalist enemies should perish with them. It was known that the Royalists intended, as soon as the Allies should be in Paris, to rise, liberate the king, and with the immense moral force they would attain by having the king at their head, join the invaders. Nothing would then remain for the Revolutionists but exile, death, and the dungeon.[364]
It was now with them but a desperate struggle for life. They must either destroy or be destroyed. The first great peril to be apprehended was the rising of the Royalists in Paris. The barriers were immediately ordered to be closed, and guard-boats were stationed on the river that no one might escape. At the beat of the drum every individual was enjoined to repair to his home. Commissioners then, accompanied by an armed force, visited every dwelling. Party lines were so distinctly drawn that the Royalists could not easily escape detection. At the knock of the commissioners they held their breath with terror. Many attempted concealment in chimneys, in cellar-vaults, beneath the floors, and in recesses covered by pictures of tapestry. But workmen, accustomed to all such arts, accompanied the commissioners. Chimneys were smoked, doors burst open, and cellars, floors, and walls sounded. In one short night five thousand suspected persons were torn from their homes and dragged to prison. Every man was deemed guilty who could not prove his devotion to the popular cause.[365]
Still the enemy was approaching. "In three days," rumor said, "the Prussians will be in Paris." The whole city was in a state of phrensy, and ready for any deed of desperation which could rescue them from their peril. Danton entered the Assembly and ascended the tribune with pallid face and compressed lips. Silence, as of the grave, awaited his utterance.
"The enemy," said he, "threatens the kingdom, and the Assembly must prove itself worthy of the nation. It is by a convulsion that we have overthrown despotism; it is only by another vast national convulsion that we shall drive back the despots. It is time to urge the people to precipitate themselves en masse against their enemies. The French nation wills to be free, and it shall be."
There was lurking beneath these words a terrible significance then little dreamed of. Jacobins and Girondists were now united by the pressure of a common and a terrible danger. A decree was immediately passed for every citizen in Paris capable of bearing arms to repair to the Field of Mars, there to be enrolled to march to repel the Allies. It was the morning of the Sabbath. The générale was beat, the tocsin rung, alarm-guns fired, and placards upon the walls, and the voice of public criers, summoned every able-bodied man to the appointed rendezvous. The philosophic Vergniaud, in a word, explained to Paris the necessity and the efficacy of the measure.[366]
"The plan of the enemy," said he, "is to march directly to the capital, leaving the fortresses behind him. Let him do so. This course will be our salvation and his ruin. Our armies, too weak to withstand him, will be strong enough to harass him in the rear. When he arrives, pursued by our battalions, he will find himself face to face with our Parisian army drawn up in battle array under the walls of the capital. There, surrounded on all sides, he will be swallowed up by the soil which he has profaned."
In the midst of the uproar of the multitudes surging through the streets, as the bells were ringing, drums beating, and the armed citizens hurrying to the Field of Mars, the rumor was widely circulated that the Royalists had formed a conspiracy to strike down their jailers, break from their prisons, liberate the king, take possession of the city, rally all their confederates around them, and thus throw open the gates of Paris to the Prussians. It was manifest to all that, in the confusion which then reigned, and when the thunders of the Prussian and Austrian batteries were hourly expected to be heard from the heights of Montmartre, this was far from an impracticable plan. It was certain that the Royalists would attempt it, whether they had already formed such a plan or not.
It is, however, probable that shrewd men, foreseeing this peril, had deliberately resolved to hurl the mob of Paris upon the prisons for the assassination of all the Royalists, before emptying the city of its defenders to march to meet the foe. While the bewildered masses were in this state of terrific excitement, six hackney-coaches left the Hôtel de Ville, conducting twenty-four Royalist priests, who had refused to take the oath, to the prisons of the Abbaye. The people crowding around and following the carriages began to murmur. "Here are the traitors," said they, "who intend to murder our wives and children while we are on the frontiers."
The first carriage reached the door of the prison. One priest alighted. He was instantly seized, and fell pierced by a thousand poniards. It was the signal for the slaughter of the whole. The murderers fell upon every carriage, and in a few moments all but one, who miraculously escaped, were slain. This hideous massacre roused the populace as the tiger is roused when he has once lapped his tongue in blood. The cry was raised, "To the Carmelites, to the Carmelites." In this prison two hundred priests were confined. The mob broke in and butchered them all.
A man by the name of Maillard headed this mob, which consisted of but a few hundred men. Having finished the work at the Carmelites and gorged themselves with wine, Maillard exclaimed, "Now to the Abbaye." The blood-stained crew rushed after him through the streets, and dashed in the doors of the prison. The Abbaye was filled with debtors and ordinary convicts as well as suspected aristocrats. As the mob rushed into the corridor one of the jailers mounted a stool, and, addressing the assassins, said, "My friends, you wish to destroy the aristocrats, who are the enemies of the people, and who meant to murder your wives and children while you were at the frontiers. You are right no doubt; but you are good citizens; you love justice; and you would be very sorry to steep your hands in innocent blood."
"Yes, certainly," one of the leaders replied.
"Well, then," continued the jailer, "when you are rushing like furious tigers upon men who are strangers to you, are you not liable to confound the innocent with the guilty?"
These thoughts seemed to impress them, and it was immediately decided that Maillard should judge each prisoner. He took his seat at a table; the prison list was placed in his hands, and the prisoners, one by one, were brought before his prompt and terrible tribunal. It was agreed, in order to spare unnecessary suffering, that when the judge should say, "Sir, you must go to the prison of La Force," as soon as the prisoner was led out into the court-yard he should be cut down.
A Swiss officer was first brought forward. "It was you," said Maillard, "who murdered the people on the 10th of August."
"We were attacked," the unfortunate man replied, "and only obeyed our superior officers."
"Very well," said Maillard, "we must send you to the prison of La Force."
He was led into the court-yard and instantly slain. Every Swiss soldier in the prison met the same fate. Thus the work went on with terrible expedition until one hundred and eighty were put to death. All the women were left unharmed. Many who were brought before the tribunal were acquitted, and the crowd manifested great joy in rescuing them as their friends. Amid these horrid scenes there were some gleams of humanity. The Governor of the Invalides was doomed to death. His daughter clasped her father in her arms and clung to him so despairingly that the hearts of the assassins were melted. One, in a strange freak, presented her with a cup of blood, saying, "If you would save your father drink this blood of an aristocrat." She seized the cup and drained it. Shouts of applause greeted the act, and her father was saved.[367]
All the night long these horrid scenes were continued. Every prison in Paris witnessed the same massacres, accompanied with every conceivable variety of horrors.
The unfortunate Princess Lamballe, bosom friend of Marie Antoinette, was confined in the prison of La Force. She was brought before the revolutionary judge, and after a brief interrogation she was ordered to "swear to love liberty and equality; to swear to hate the king, the queen, and royalty." "I will take the first oath," the princess replied; "the second I can not take; it is not in my heart." One of the judges, wishing to save her, whispered in her ear, "Swear every thing or you are lost." But the unhappy princess was now utterly bewildered with terror, and could neither see nor hear. Her youth and beauty touched the hearts even of many of these brutal men. They desired her rescue, and endeavored to lead her safely through the crowd. Cry out, said they, 'long live the nation,' and you will not be harmed. But as she beheld the pavement strewn with corpses of the slain, she could not utter a word. Her silence was taken for defiance. A sabre blow struck her down. The murderers fell upon her like famished wolves upon a lamb. Her body was cut into fragments, and a band of wretches, with her head and heart upon pikes, shouted "Let us carry them to the foot of the throne." They rushed through the streets to the Temple, and shouted for the king and queen to look out at the windows. A humane officer, to shield them from the awful sight, informed them of the horrors which were transpiring. The queen fainted. As the king and Madame Elizabeth bent over her, for hours they were appalled by the clamor of the rabble around the walls of the Temple.
At last the prisons were emptied, and the murderers themselves became weary of blood. It is impossible to ascertain the numbers who perished. The estimate varies from six to twelve thousand. The Commune of Paris, which was but the servant of the Jacobin Club, issued orders that no more blood should be shed. Assuming that the assassination was demanded by the public danger, and that the wretches who had perpetrated it had performed a patriotic though a painful duty, they rewarded them for their work. Nothing can more clearly show the terrible excitation of the public mind, produced by a sense of impending danger, than that a circular should have been addressed to all the communes of France, giving an account of the massacre as a necessary and a praiseworthy deed. In this extraordinary memorial, signed by the Administrators of the Committee of Surveillance, the writers say,
"Brethren and Friends,--A horrid plot, hatched by the court, to murder all the Patriots of the French empire, a plot in which a great number of members of the National Assembly are implicated, having, on the ninth of last month, reduced the Commune of Paris to the cruel necessity of employing the power of the people to save the nation, it has not neglected any thing to deserve well of the country.
"Apprised that barbarous hordes are advancing against it, the Commune of Paris hastens to inform its brethren in all the departments that part of the ferocious conspirators confined in the prisons have been put to death by the people--acts of justice which appear to it indispensable for repressing by terror the legions of traitors encompassed by its walls, at the moment when the people were about to march against the enemy; and no doubt the nation, after the long series of treasons which have brought it to the brink of the abyss, will eagerly adopt this useful and necessary expedient; and all the French will say, like the Parisians, 'We are marching against the enemy, and we will not leave behind us brigands to murder our wives and children.'"
The instigators of these atrocious deeds defended the measure as one of absolute necessity. "We must all go," it was said, "to fight the Prussians, and we can not leave these foes behind us, to rise and take the city and assail us in the rear." "If they had been allowed to live," others said, "in a few days we should have been murdered. It was strictly an act of self-defense." Danton ever avowed his approval of the measure, and said, "I looked my crime steadfastly in the face and I did it." Marat is reproached as having contributed to the deed.[368] Robespierre appears to have given his assent to the massacre with reluctance, but it is in evidence that he walked his chamber through the whole night in agony, unable to sleep.
At eleven o'clock at night of this 2d of September Robespierre and St. Just retired together from the Jacobin Club to the room of the latter. St. Just threw himself upon the bed for sleep. Robespierre exclaimed in astonishment,
"What, can you think of sleeping on such a night? Do you not hear the tocsin? Do you not know that this night will be the last to perhaps thousands of our fellow-creatures, who are men at the moment you fall asleep, and when you awake will be lifeless corpses?"
"I know it," replied St. Just, "and deplore it; and I wish that I could moderate the convulsions of society; but what am I?" then, turning in his bed, he fell asleep. In the morning, as he awoke, he saw Robespierre pacing the chamber with hasty steps, occasionally stopping to look out of the window, and listening to the noises in the streets. "What, have you not slept?" asked St. Just.
"Sleep!" cried Robespierre; "sleep while hundreds of assassins murdered thousands of victims, and their pure or impure blood runs like water down the streets! Oh no! I have not slept. I have watched like remorse or crime. I have had the weakness not to close my eyes, but Danton, he has slept."[369]
Paris was at this time in a state of such universal consternation, the government so disorganized, and the outbreak so sudden and so speedy in its execution, that the Legislative Assembly, which was not in sympathy with the mob, and which was already overawed, ventured upon no measures of resistance.[370]
But there can be no excuse offered in palliation of such crimes. Language is too feeble to express the horror with which they ever must be regarded by every generous soul. But while we consign to the deepest infamy the assassins of September, to equal infamy let those despots be consigned who, in the fierce endeavor to rivet the chains of slavery anew upon twenty-five millions of freemen, goaded a nation to such hideous madness. The allied despots of Europe roused the people to a phrensy of despair, and thus drove them to the deed. Let it never be forgotten that it was despotism, not liberty, which planted the tree which bore this fruit. If the government of a country be such that there is no means of redress for the oppressed people but in the horrors of insurrection, that country must bide its doom, for, sooner or later, an outraged people will rise. While, therefore, we contemplate with horror the outrages committed by the insurgent people, with still greater horror must we contemplate the outrages perpetrated by proud oppressors during long ages, consigning the people to ignorance and degradation. They who brutalize a people should be the last to complain that, when these people rise in the terribleness of their might, they behave like brutes. There is no safety for any nation but in the education, piety, and liberty of its masses.[371]
The Duke of Brunswick, urging resistlessly on his solid columns, battering down fortresses, plunging through defiles, anticipated no check. But on the 20th of September, to his great surprise, he encountered a formidable army intrenched upon the heights of Valmy, near Chalons, apparently prepared for firm resistance. Here Dumouriez, with much military skill, had rallied his retreating troops. All France had been roused and was rushing eagerly to his support. Paris, no longer fearing a rise of the Royalists, was dispatching several thousand thoroughly-armed men from the gates every day to strengthen the camp at Valmy, which was hardly a hundred miles from Paris. Dumouriez, when first assailed, had less than forty thousand troops in his intrenchments, but the number rapidly increased to over seventy thousand.
These were nearly all inexperienced soldiers, but they were inspired with intense enthusiasm, all struggling for national independence, and many conscious that defeat would but conduct them to the scaffold. Macdonald,[372] who afterward so gloriously led the columns at Wagram, and Kellerman, who subsequently headed the decisive charge at Marengo, were aids of Dumouriez. Louis Philippe also, then the Duke of Chartres and eldest son of the Duke of Orleans, signalized himself on the patriot side at the stern strife of Valmy.
The Duke of Brunswick brought forward his batteries and commenced a terrific cannonade. Column after column was urged against the redoubts. But the young soldiers of France, shouting Vive la Nation, bravely repulsed every assault. The Prussians, to their inexpressible chagrin, found it impossible to advance a step. Here the storm of battle raged with almost incessant fury for twenty days. The French were hurrying from all quarters to the field; the supplies of the invaders were cut off; dysentery broke out in their camp; autumnal rains drenched them; winter was approaching; and they were compelled, in discomfiture and humiliation, to turn upon their track and retire.
On the 15th of October the Allies abandoned their camp and commenced a retreat. They retired in good order, and recrossed the frontier, leaving behind them twenty-five thousand, who had perished by sickness, the bullet, and the sword. Dumouriez did not pursue them with much vigor, for the army of the Allies was infinitely superior in discipline to the raw troops under his command.
Winter was now at hand, during which no external attack upon France was to be feared. All government was disorganized, and the question which agitated every heart was, "What shall be done with the king?"
The Duke of Chartres, subsequently Louis Philippe, King of the French, then a young man but seventeen years of age, after vigorously co-operating with Dumouriez in repelling the invaders, returned to Paris. He presented himself at the audience of Servan, Minister of War, to complain of some injustice. Danton was present, and, taking the young duke aside, said to him,
"What do you do here? Servan is but the shadow of a minister. He can neither help nor harm you. Call on me to-morrow and I will arrange your business."
The next day Danton, the powerful plebeian, received the young patrician with an air of much affected superiority. "Well, young man," said he, "I am informed that your language resembles murmurs; that you blame the great measures of government; that you express compassion for the victims and hatred for the executioners. Beware; patriotism does not admit of lukewarmness, and you have to obtain pardon for your great name."
The young prince boldly replied, "The army looks with horror on bloodshed any where but on the battle-field. The massacres of September seem in their eyes to dishonor liberty."
"You are too young," Danton replied, "to judge of these events; to comprehend these you must be in our place. For the future be silent. Return to the army; fight bravely; but do not rashly expose your life. France does not love a republic; she has the habits, the weaknesses, the need of a monarchy. After our storms she will return to it, either through her vices or necessities, and you will be king. Adieu, young man. Remember the prediction of Danton."[373]
In reference to these scenes Napoleon remarked at St. Helena, on the 3d of September, 1816, "To-day is the anniversary of a hideous remembrance; of the massacres of September, the St. Bartholomew of the French Revolution. The atrocities of the 3d of September were not committed under the sanction of government, which, on the contrary, used its endeavors to punish the crime. The massacres were committed by the mob of Paris, and were the result of fanaticism rather than of absolute brutality. The Septembriseurs did not pillage, they only wished to murder. They even hanged one of their own party for having appropriated a watch which belonged to one of their victims.
"This dreadful event arose out of the force of circumstances and the spirit of the moment. We must acknowledge that there has been no political change unattended by popular fury, as soon as the masses enter into action. The Prussian army had arrived within one hundred miles of Paris. The famous manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick was placarded on all the walls of the city. The people had persuaded themselves that the death of all the Royalists in Paris was indispensable to the safety of the Revolution. They ran to the prisons and intoxicated themselves with blood, shouting Vive la Revolution. Their energy had an electric effect, from the fear with which it inspired one party, and the example which it gave to the other. One hundred thousand volunteers joined the army, and the Revolution was saved.
"I might have preserved my crown by turning loose the masses of the people against the advocates of the restoration. You well recollect, Montholon, when, at the head of your faubouriens, you wished to punish the treachery of Fouché and proclaim my dictatorship. I did not choose to do so. My whole soul revolted at the thought of being king of another mob. As a general rule no social revolution can take place without terror. Every revolution is in principle a revolt, which time and success ennoble and render legal, but of which terror has been one of the inevitable phases. How, indeed, can we say to those who possess fortune and public situations, 'Begone and leave us your fortunes and your situations,' without first intimidating them, and rendering any defense impossible. In France this point was effected by the lantern and the guillotine."[374]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 360: "As a citizen, as a magistrate of the people," said one of the deputation, "I come to inform you that at twelve o'clock this night the tocsin will be rung and the alarm beaten. The people are weary of not being avenged. Beware lest they do themselves justice. I demand that you forthwith decree that a citizen be appointed by each section to form a criminal tribunal."--Thiers, i, 341.]
[Footnote 361: "However irritated they might be by La Fayette's behavior at the outset of the Revolution, the present conduct of the monarchs toward him was neither to be vindicated by morality, the law of nations, nor the rules of sound policy. Even if he had been amenable for a crime against his own country, we know not what right Austria or Prussia had to take cognizance of it."--Scott's Life of Napoleon.]
[Footnote 362: "Such were the reasonings and expressions of Mr. Burke on this striking occasion. So entirely was the mind of this extraordinary man now over excited and overthrown; so entirely estranged from those elevated feelings and that spirit of philanthropic wisdom which have made his speeches in the American contest, and many paragraphs of his Reflections on this Revolution of France, so justly the admiration of mankind."--Prof. Smyth's Lectures on the French Revolution, vol. ii., p. 409.]
[Footnote 363: Jean Debry, in the Assembly, exclaimed with fervor, "The most instant and vigorous measures must be adopted in defense of our country. The expense must not be thought of. Within fifteen days we shall enjoy freedom or meet with death. If we are conquered we shall have no need of money, for we shall not exist. If we are victorious, still we shall not feel the want of money, for we shall be free."--Journal of John Moore, M.D., vol. i., p. 116.]
[Footnote 364: "The intelligence of the flight of La Fayette, the entry of the army of the coalition into the French territory, the capture of Longwy, and the surrender of Verdun burst like thunder in Paris, and filled every heart with consternation, for France had never approached more nearly those sinister days which presage the decay of nations. Every thing was dead in her save the desire of living; the enthusiasm of the country and liberty survived. Abandoned by all, the country did not abandon itself. Two things were required to save it--time and a dictatorship. Time? The heroism of Dumouriez afforded it. The dictatorship? Danton assumed it in the name of the Commune of Paris."--Lamartine, Hist. Gir., vol, ii., p. 119.]
[Footnote 365: Dr. John Moore, a very intelligent English physician, who, in company with Lord Lauderdale, was in Paris during all these scenes, writes in his journal, "This search was made accordingly in the course of last night and this morning. The commissioners were attended with a body of the National Guards, and all avenues of the section were watched to prevent any persons from escaping. They did not come to our hotel till about six in the morning. I attended them through every room, and opened every door of our apartments. They behaved with great civility. We had no arms but pistols, which lay openly on the chimney. They admired the nicety of the workmanship of one pair, but never offered to take them."--Vol. i., p. 116.]
[Footnote 366: "The people are told that there was a horrid plot between the Duke of Brunswick and certain traitors in Paris; that as soon as all the new levies were completed, and all the men intended for the frontiers had marched out of Paris, then those same traitors were to take command of a large body of men, now dispersed over the capital and its environs, who have been long in the pay of the court, though they also are concealed; that these concealed leaders at the head of their concealed troops were to have thrown open the prisons and to arm the prisoners, then to go to the Temple, set the royal family free, and proclaim the king; to condemn to death all the Patriots who remain in Paris, and most of the wives and children of those who have marched out of it against the enemies of their country."--Moore's Journal, vol. i., p. 144.]
[Footnote 367: "Some inexplicable and consolatory acts astonish us amid these horrors. The compassion of Maillard appeared to seek for the innocent with as much care as his vengeance sought for the guilty. He exposed his life to snatch victims from his executions."--Lamartine, History of the Girondists, vol. ii., p. 140.]
[Footnote 368: M. Chabot, a patriotic orator, who had been a Franciscan friar, spoke in the Society of Jacobins as follows of Marat: "Marat is reproached with being of a sanguinary disposition; that he contributed to the late massacres in the prisons. But in so doing he acted in the true spirit of the Revolution, for it was not to be expected that while our bravest patriots were on the frontiers we should remain here exposed to the rage of the prisoners, who were promised arms and the opportunity of assassinating us. It is well known that the plan of the aristocrats has always been, and still is, to make a general carnage of the common people. Now, as the number of the latter is to that of the former in the proportion of ninety-nine to one, it is evident that he who proposes to kill one to prevent the killing of ninety-nine is not a blood-thirsty man."]
[Footnote 369: Lamartine, History of the Girondists, ii., 132.]
[Footnote 370: Dr. Moore, while denouncing in the strongest terms the brutality of the populace, says, "In such an abominable system of oppression as the French labored under before the Revolution, when the will of one man could control the course of law, and his mandate tear any citizen from the arms of his family and throw him into a dungeon for years or for life--in a country where such a system of government prevails, insurrection, being the sole means of redress, is not only justifiable, but it is the duty of every lover of mankind and of his country, as soon as any occasion presents itself which promises success."]
[Footnote 371: "Amid the disorders and sad events which have taken place in this country of late, it is impossible not to admire the generous spirit which glows all over the nation in support of its independency. No country ever displayed a nobler or more patriotic enthusiasm than pervades France at this period, and which glows with increasing ardor since the publication of the Duke of Brunswick's manifesto, and the entrance of the Prussians into the country. None but those whose minds are obscured by prejudice or perverted by selfishness will refuse this justice to the general spirit displayed by the French in defense of their national independence. A detestation of the excesses committed at Paris, not only is compatible with an admiration of this spirit, but it is such well-informed minds alone as possess sufficient candor and sensibility to admire the one, who can have a due horror of the other."--Journal of John Moore, M.D., vol. i., p. 160.]
[Footnote 372: "The young Macdonald, descended from a Scotch family transplanted to France, was aid-de-camp to Dumouriez. He learned at the camp of Grandpré, under his commander, how to save a country. Subsequently he learned, under Napoleon, how to illustrate it. A hero at his first step, he became a marshal of France at the end of his life."--Lamartine, Hist. Gir., ii., 158.]
[Footnote 373: History of the Girondists, by Lamartine, ii., 185.]
XXX. THE KING LED TO TRIAL
Assassination of Royalists at Versailles.--Jacobin Ascendency.--The National Convention.--Two Parties, the Girondists and the Jacobins.--Abolition of Royalty.--Madame Roland.--Battle of Jemappes.--Mode of life in the Temple.--Insults to the Royal Family.--New Acts of Rigor.--Trial of the King.--Separation of the Royal Family.--The Indictment.--The King begs for Bread.
The massacre of the Royalists in Paris was not followed by any general violence throughout the kingdom, for it was in Paris alone that the Patriots were in imminent danger. In Orleans, however, there were a number of Royalists imprisoned under the accusation of treason. These prisoners were brought to Versailles on the night of the 9th of September to be tried. A band of assassins from Paris rushed upon the carriages, dispersed the escort, and most brutally murdered forty-seven out of fifty-three.[375] They then went to the prison, where twelve were taken out, and, after a summary trial, assassinated.
In the mean time elections were going on for the National Convention. The Jacobin Clubs, now generally dominant throughout France, almost every where controlled the elections. Some sober Patriots hoped that the Convention would be disposed and able to check the swelling flood of anarchy. But others, when they saw that the most violent Revolutionists were chosen as deputies, and that they would be able to overawe the more moderate Patriots by the terrors of the mob, began to despair of their country. Paris sent to the Convention Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Chabot, and others who have attained terrible notoriety through scenes of consternation and blood. The Girondists in the Convention, Vergniaud, Condorcet, Barbaroux, Gensonné, though much in the minority, were heroic men, illustrious in intelligence and virtue. There was no longer a Royalist party, not even a Constitutional Royalist party, which dared to avow itself in France. The court and the Allies had driven France to the absolute necessity of a Republic.
On the 20th of September the Legislative Assembly was dissolved, and at the same hour and in the same hall the National Convention commenced its session. The spirit of the Girondists may be seen in their first motion.
"Citizen representatives," said M. Manuel, "in this place every thing ought to be stamped with a character of such dignity and grandeur as to fill the world with awe. I propose that the President of the Assembly be lodged in the Tuileries, that in public he shall be preceded by guards, that the members shall rise when he opens the Assembly. Cineas, the embassador of Pyrrhus, on being introduced to the Roman senate, said that they appeared like an assembly of kings."
This proposition was contemptuously voted down by the Jacobins. Collot d'Herbois, one of the leading Jacobins, then proposed the immediate abolition of royalty. "The word king," said he, "is still a talisman, whose magic power may create many disorders. The abolition of royalty therefore is necessary. Kings are in the moral world that which monsters are in the natural. Courts are always the centre of corruption and the work-houses of crime."
No one ventured to oppose this, and the president declared that by a unanimous vote royalty was abolished. It was then voted the 22d of September, 1792, should be considered the first day of the first year of the Republic, and that all documents should follow the date of this era. It was on the eve of this day that intelligence arrived of the cannonade of Valmy, in which the Patriot armies had beaten back the foe. For one short night Paris was radiant with joy.
The most illustrious of the Girondists met that evening in the saloon of Madame Roland, and celebrated, with almost religious enthusiasm, the advent of the Republic. Madame Roland, in the accomplishment of the most intense desire of her heart, appeared radiant with almost supernatural brilliance and beauty. It was observed that M. Roland gazed upon her with a peculiar expression of fondness. The noble and gifted Vergniaud conversed but little, and pensive thoughts seemed to chasten his joy.
At the close of the entertainment he filled his glass, and proposed to drink to the eternity of the Republic.
"Permit me," said Madame Roland, "after the manner of the ancients, to scatter some rose-leaves from my bouquet in your glass."
Vergniaud held out his glass, and some leaves were scattered on the wine. He then said, in words strongly prophetic of their fate, "We should quaff, not roses, but cypress-leaves, in our wine to-night. In drinking to a republic, stained at its birth with the blood of September, who knows that we do not drink to our own death? No matter; were this wine my blood, I would drain it to liberty and equality."
To this all responded with the words Vive la République. But a few months elapsed ere almost every individual then present perished on the scaffold.
In the mean time Dumouriez, with thirty-five thousand men, was pursuing a division of the retreating Allies, consisting of twenty-five thousand Austrians, under General Clairfayt, through Belgium. On the 4th of November he overtook them strongly intrenched upon the heights of Jemappes. One day was consumed in bringing up his forces and arranging his batteries for the assault. Sixty thousand men were now arrayed for a deadly strife. One hundred pieces of cannon were in battery to hurl into the dense ranks destruction and death. On the morning of the 6th the storm of war commenced. All the day long it raged with pitiless fury. In the evening ten thousand of the dying and the dead covered the ground, and the Austrians were every where retreating in dismay. This new victory caused great rejoicing in Paris, and inspired the revolutionary party with new courage.
The day at length arrived for the trial of the king. It was the 11th of December. For four months the royal family, with ever-alternating hopes and fears, which had been gradually deepening into despair, had now endured the rigors of captivity. The king, with that wonderful equanimity which distinguished him through all these days of trial, immediately upon taking possession of his gloomy abode introduced system into the employment of his time.
His room was on the third story. He usually rose at six o'clock, shaved himself, and carefully dressed his hair. He then entered a small room or closet, which opened from his sleeping-room, and engaged in devotional reading and prayer for an hour. He was not allowed to close the door, for a municipal officer ever stationed in his room was enjoined never to allow the king to leave his sight. He then read till nine o'clock, during which time his faithful servant, Clery, put the room in order, and spread the table for the breakfast of the royal family. At nine o'clock the queen, the children, and Madame Elizabeth came up from the rooms which they occupied below to breakfast.
The meal occupied an hour. The royal family then all descended to the queen's room, where they passed the day. The king employed himself in instructing his son, giving him lessons in geography, which was a favorite study of the king; teaching him to draw and color maps, and to recite choice passages from Corneille and Racine. The queen assumed the education of her daughter, while her own hands and those of Madame Elizabeth were busy in needle-work, knitting, and working tapestry.
At one o'clock, when the weather was fine, the royal family were conducted by four municipal officers into the spacious but dilapidated garden for exercise and the open air. The officials who guarded the king were frequently changed. Sometimes they chanced to be men of humane character, who, though devoted to the disinthrallment of France from the terrible despotism of ages, still pitied the king as the victim of circumstances, and treated him with kindness and respect. But more generally these men were vulgar and rabid Jacobins, who exulted in the opportunity of wreaking upon the king the meanest revenge. They chalked upon the walls of the prison, "The guillotine is permanent and ready for the tyrant Louis." "Madame Veto shall swing." "The little wolves must be strangled." Under a gallows, to which a figure was suspended, was inscribed the words, "Louis taking an air-bath." From such ribald insults the monarch had no protection.
A burly brutal wretch, named Rocher, was one of the keepers of the Tower. He went swaggering about with a bunch of enormous keys clattering at his belt, seeming to glory in his power of annoying, by petty insults, a king and a queen. When the royal family were going out into the garden he would go before them to unlock the doors. Making a great demonstration in rattling his keys, and affecting much difficulty in finding the right one, all the party would be kept waiting while he made all possible delay and noise in drawing the bolts and swinging open the ponderous doors. At the side of the last door he not unfrequently stationed himself with his pipe in his mouth, and puffed tobacco-smoke into the faces of the king, the queen, and the children. Some of the guards stationed around would burst into insulting laughter in view of these indignities, which the king endured with meekness which seems supernatural.
The recital of such conduct makes the blood boil in one's veins, and leads one almost to detest the very name of liberty. But then we must not forget that it was despotism which formed these hideous characters; that, age after age and century after century, kings and nobles had been trampling upon the people, crushing their rights, lacerating their heart-strings, dooming fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, by millions upon millions, to beggary, degradation, and woe. It was time for the people to rise at every hazard and break these chains. And while humanity must weep over the woes of Louis XVI. and his unhappy household, humanity can not forget that there are other families and other hearts who claim her sympathies, and that this very Louis XVI. was at this very time doing every thing in his power, by the aid of the armies of foreign despots, to bring the millions of France again under the sway of the most merciless despotism. And it can not be questioned that, had kings and nobles regained their power, they would have wreaked a more terrible vengeance upon the re-enslaved people than the people wreaked upon them.
For an hour the royal family continued walking in the garden. From the roofs of the adjacent houses and the higher windows they could be seen. Every day at noon these roofs and windows were crowded by those anxious to obtain a view of the melancholy group of captives. Frequently they were cheered by gestures of affection from unknown friends. Tender words were occasionally unrolled in capital letters, or a flower to which a pebble was attached would fall at their feet. These tokens of love, slight as they were, came as a balm to their lacerated hearts. So highly did they prize them, that regardless of rain, cold, and snow, and the intolerable insults of their guards, they looked forward daily with eagerness to their garden walk. They recognized particular localities as belonging to their friends, saying, "such a house is devoted to us; such a story is for us; such a room is loyal; such a window friendly."
At two o'clock the royal family returned to the king's room, where dinner was served. After dinner the king took a nap, while the queen, Madame Elizabeth, and the young princess employed themselves with their needles, and the dauphin played some game with Clery, whose name should be transmitted with honor to posterity as faithful in misfortune. When the king awoke from his nap he usually read aloud to his family for an hour or two until supper-time. Soon after supper, the queen, with her children and Madame Elizabeth, retired to their rooms for the night. With hearts bound together by these terrible griefs, they never parted but with a tender and sorrowful adieu.[376]
Such was the monotonous life of the royal family during the four months they occupied the Temple before the trial of the king. But almost every day of their captivity some new act of rigor was enforced upon them. As the armies of the Allies drew nearer, and city after city was falling before their bombardments, and Paris was in a phrensy of terror, apprehensions of a conspiracy of the king with the Royalists, and of their rising and aiding the invaders with an outburst of civil war, led to the adoption of precautions most irksome to the captives.
Municipal officers never allowed any member of the royal family to be out of their sight, except when they retired to bed at night. They then locked the doors, and placed a bed against the entrance to each apartment, and there an officer slept, so as to prevent all possibility of egress. Every day Santerre, commander of the National Guard, made a visit of inspection to all the rooms with his staff. At first the royal family had been allowed pen, ink, and paper, but this privilege was soon withdrawn, and at last the cruel and useless measure was adopted of taking from them all sharp instruments, such as knives, scissors, and even needles, thus depriving the ladies not only of a great solace, but of the power of repairing their decaying apparel. It was not the intention of the Legislative Assembly that the royal family should be exposed to needless suffering. Four hundred dollars were placed in their hands at the commencement of their captivity for their petty expenses, and the Governor of the Temple was ordered to purchase for them whatever they might need, five hundred thousand francs ($100,000) having been appropriated by the Convention for their expenses.[377]
They were not allowed to see the daily journals, which would have informed them of the triumphant march of the Allies, but occasionally papers were sent to them which recorded the victories of the Republic. Clery, however, devised a very shrewd expedient to give them some information of the events which were transpiring. He hired a newsman to pass daily by the windows of the Temple, under the pretense of selling newspapers, and to cry out the principal details contained in them. Clery, while apparently busy about the room, was always sure to be near the window at the appointed hour, listening attentively. At night, stooping over the king's bed to adjust the curtains, he hastily whispered the news he had thus gathered. All this required the greatest caution, for a municipal officer was always in the room, watching every movement.
Early in the morning of the 11th of December all Paris was in commotion to witness the trial of the king, which was to commence on that day. The beating of drums in the street, the mustering of military squadrons at their appointed places of rendezvous, the clatter of hoofs, and the rumbling of artillery over the pavements penetrated even the gloomy apartments of the Temple, and fell appallingly upon the ears of the victims there.
The royal family were at breakfast as they heard these ominous sounds, and they earnestly inquired the cause. After some hesitation the king was informed that the Mayor of Paris would soon come to conduct him to his trial, and that the troops gathering around the Temple were to form his escort. He was also required immediately to take leave of his family, and told that he could not be permitted to see them again until after his trial. Expressions of heart-rending anguish and floods of tears accompanied this cruel separation. The king pleaded earnestly and with gushing eyes that, at least, he might enjoy the society of his little son, saying,
"What, gentlemen! deprive me of even the presence of my son--a child of seven years!"
But the commissioners were inexorable. "The Commune thinks," said they, "that, since you are to be au secret during your trial, your son must necessarily be confined either with you or his mother; and it has imposed the privation upon that parent who, from his sex and courage, was best able to support it."
The queen, with the children and Madame Elizabeth, were conducted to the rooms below. The king, overwhelmed with anguish, threw himself into a chair, buried his face in his hands, and, without uttering a word, remained immovable as a statue for two hours. At noon M. Chambon,[378] the Mayor of Paris, with Santerre, commander of the National Guard, and a group of officers, all wearing the tricolored scarf, entered the king's chamber.
Chambon, with solemnity and with a faltering voice, informed the king of the painful object of their mission, and summoned him, in the name of the Convention, as Louis Capet, to appear before their bar.
"Gentlemen," replied the king, "Capet is not my name. It is the name of one of my ancestors. I could have wished that my son, at least, had been permitted to remain with me during the two hours I have awaited you. However, this treatment is but a part of the system adopted toward me throughout my captivity. I follow you, not in obedience to the orders of the Convention, but because my enemies are more powerful than I."
Immediately rising, he put on his great-coat, took his hat, and, following the mayor, and followed by the staff of officers, descended the stairs of the tower.
Before the massive portal of the Temple the carriage of the mayor was drawn up, surrounded by a guard of six hundred picked men. A numerous detachment of cavalry, as an advance-guard, dragging six pieces of cannon, led the melancholy procession which was conducting a monarch to the judgment-bar and to death. A similar body of cavalry followed in the rear with three pieces of cannon. These precautions were deemed necessary to guard against any possible rescue by the Royalists. Every soldier was supplied with sixteen rounds of cartridges, and the battalions marched in such order that they could instantly form in line of battle. The National Guard lined the streets through which they passed, one hundred thousand men being under arms in Paris that day.
The cavalcade passed slowly along the Boulevards. The house-tops, the windows, the side-walks, were thronged with countless thousands. The king, deprived of his razor, had been unable to shave, and his face was covered with shaggy hair; his natural corpulence, wasted away by imprisonment, caused his garments to hang loose and flabby about him; his features were wan through anxiety and suffering. Thus, unfortunately, every thing in his personal appearance combined to present an aspect exciting disgust and repulsion rather than sympathy. The procession passed down the Place Vendôme and thence to the Monastery of the Feuillants. The king alighted. Santerre took his arm and led him to the bar of the Convention. There was a moment of profound silence. All were awe-stricken by the solemnity of the scene. The president, Barrere,[379] broke the silence, saying,
"Citizens! Louis Capet is before you. The eyes of Europe are upon you. Posterity will judge you with inflexible severity. Preserve, then, the dignity and the dispassionate coolness befitting judges. You are about to give a great lesson to kings, a great and useful example to nations. Recollect the awful silence which accompanied Louis from Varennes--a silence that was the precursor of the judgment of kings by the people." Then, turning to the king, Barrere said, "Louis, the French nation accuses you. Be seated, and listen to the Act of Accusation." It was then two o'clock in the afternoon.
The formidable indictment was read. The king was held personally responsible for all the acts of hostility to popular liberty which had occurred under his reign. A minute, truthful, impartial recapitulation of those acts, which we have recorded in the previous pages, constituted the accusation. The king listened attentively to the reading, and without any apparent emotion. The accusation consisted of fifty-seven distinct charges. As they were slowly read over, one by one, the president paused after each and said to the king, "What have you to answer?" But two courses consistent with kingly dignity were open for the accused. The one was to refuse any reply and to take shelter in the inviolability with which the Constitution had invested him. The other was boldly to avow that he had adopted the measures of which he was accused, believing it to be essential to the welfare of France that the headlong progress of the Revolution should be checked. Neither would have saved his life, but either would have rescued his memory from much reproach. But the king, cruelly deprived of all counsel with his friends, dragged unexpectedly to his trial, and overwhelmed with such a catalogue of accusations, unfortunately adopted the worst possible course. The blame of some of the acts he threw upon his ministers; some facts he denied; and in other cases he not only prevaricated but stooped to palpable falsehood. When we reflect upon the weak nature of the king and the confusion of mind incident to an hour of such terrible trial, we must judge the unhappy monarch leniently. But when the king denied even the existence of the iron chest which the Convention had already found, and had obtained proof to demonstration that he himself had closed up, and when he denied complicity with the Allies, proofs of which, in his own handwriting, were found in the iron safe, it is not strange that the effect should have been exceedingly unfavorable to his defense.[380]
This interrogation was continued for three hours, at the close of which the king, who had eaten nothing since his interrupted breakfast, was so exhausted that he could hardly stand. Santerre then conducted him into an adjoining committee-room. Before withdrawing, however, the king demanded a copy of the accusation, and counsel to assist him in his defense. In the committee-room the king saw a man eating from a small loaf of bread. Faint with hunger, the monarch approached the man, and, in a whisper, implored a morsel for himself.
"Ask aloud," said the man, retreating, "for what you want." He feared that he should be suspected of some secret conspiracy with the king.
"I am hungry," said Louis XVI., "and ask for a piece of your bread."
"Divide it with me," said the man. "It is a Spartan breakfast. If I had a root I would give you half."
The king entered the carriage eating his crust. The same cavalcade as in the morning preceded and accompanied him. The same crowds thronged the streets and every point of observation. A few brutal wretches, insulting helplessness, shouted Vive la Révolution! and now and then a stanza of the Marseillaise Hymn fell painfully upon his ear. Chambon, the mayor, and Chaumette, the public prosecutor, were in the carriage with the king. Louis, having eaten as much of the half loaf of bread as he needed, had still a fragment in his hand.
"What shall I do with it?" inquired the simple-hearted monarch. Chaumette relieved him of his embarrassment by tossing it out of the window.
"Ah," said the king, "it is a pity to throw bread away when it is so dear."
"True," replied Chaumette; "my grandmother used to say to me, 'Little boy, never waste a crumb of bread; you can not make one.'"[381]
"Monsieur Chaumette," Louis rejoined, "your grandmother appears to me to have been a woman of great good sense."
It was half-past six o'clock, and the gloom of night enveloped the Temple, when Louis was again conducted up the stairs of the tower to his dismal cell. He piteously implored permission again to see his family. But Chambon dared not grant his request in disobedience to the commands of the Commune.
The most frivolous things often develop character. It is on record that the toils and griefs of the day had not impaired the appetite of the king, and that he ate for supper that night "six cutlets, a considerable portion of a fowl, two eggs, and drank two glasses of white wine and one of Alicante wine, and forthwith went to bed."[382]
During these dreadful hours the queen, with Madame Elizabeth and the children, were in a state of agonizing suspense, not even knowing but that the king was being led to his execution. Clery, however, late in the evening, went to their room and informed them of all the details he had been able to gather respecting the king's examination.
"Has any mention been made of the queen?" asked Madame Elizabeth. "Her name was not mentioned," Clery replied, "in the act of accusation."
"Ah," rejoined the princess, "perhaps they demand my brother's life as necessary for their safety; but the queen--these poor children--what obstacle can their lives present to their ambition?"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 374: Napoleon at St. Helena, 394.]
[Footnote 375: Peltier.]
[Footnote 376: The queen undressed the dauphin, when he repeated the following prayer, composed by the queen and remembered and recorded by her daughter: "Almighty God, who created and redeemed me, I love you! Preserve the days of my father and my family. Protect us against our enemies. Give my mother, my aunt, my sister, the strength they need to support their troubles."--Lamartine, History of the Girondists, vol. ii., p. 287.]
[Footnote 377: "We must not exaggerate the faults of human nature, and suppose that, adding an execrable meanness to the fury of fanaticism, the keepers of the imprisoned family imposed on it unworthy privations, with the intention of rendering the remembrance of its past greatness the more painful. Distrust was the sole cause of certain refusals. Thus, while the dread of plots and secret communications prevented them from admitting more than one attendant into the interior of the prison, a numerous establishment was employed in preparing their food. Thirteen persons were engaged in the duties of the kitchen, situated at some distance from the tower. The report of the expenses of the Temple, where the greatest decency is observed, where the prisoners are mentioned with respect, where their sobriety is commended, where Louis XVI. is justified from the low reproach of being too much addicted to wine--these reports, which are not liable to suspicion, make the total expenses of the table amount in two months to 28,745 livres ($5749)."--Thiers, vol. ii., p. 26.]
[Footnote 378: "M. Chambon, the successor of Bailly and Pétion, was a learned and humane physician, whom public esteem rather than Revolutionary favor had raised to the dignity of the first magistrate of Paris. Of modéré principles, kind and warm-hearted, accustomed, by his profession, to sympathize with the unfortunate, compelled to execute orders repugnant to his feelings, the pity of the man was visible beneath the inflexibility of the magistrate."--Lamartine, Hist. des Girondistes, vol. ii., p. 321.]
[Footnote 379: "Barrere escaped during the different ebullitions of the Revolution because he was a man, without principle or character, who changed and adapted himself to every side. He had the reputation of being a man of talent, but I did not find him such. I employed him to write, but he displayed no ability. He used many flowers of rhetoric, but no solid argument."--Napoleon at St. Helena.]
[Footnote 380: Gamain, the locksmith, who for ten years had worked for and with the king, and who had aided him in constructing this iron safe, basely betrayed the secret. The papers were all seized and intrusted by the Convention to a committee of twelve, who were to examine and report upon them. This Judas received, as his reward from the Convention, a pension of two hundred and forty dollars a year. See France and its Revolutions, by Geo. Long, Esq., p. 241.]
XXXI. EXECUTION OF LOUIS XVI
Close of the Examination.--The King's Counsel.--Heroism of Malesherbes.--Preparations for Defense.--Gratitude of the King.--The Trial.--Protracted Vote.--The Result.--The King solicits the Delay of Execution for three Days.--Last Interview with his Family.--Preparation for Death.--The Execution.
As soon as the king had withdrawn from the Assembly, that body was thrown into great tumult in consequence of the application of Louis for the assistance of counsel. It was, however, after an animated debate, which continued until the next day, voted that the request of the king should be granted, and a deputation was immediately sent to inform the king of the vote, and to ask what counsel he would choose. He selected two of the most eminent lawyers of Paris--M. Tronchet and M. Target. Tronchet heroically accepted the perilous commission. Target, with pusillanimity which has consigned his name to disgrace, wrote a letter to the Convention stating that his principles would not allow him to undertake the defense of the king.[383] The venerable Malesherbes, then seventy years of age, immediately wrote a letter to the president, imploring permission to assume the defense of the monarch. This distinguished statesman, a friend of monarchy and a personal friend of the monarch, had been living in the retirement of his country-seat, and had taken no part in the Revolution. By permission of the Commune he was conducted, after he had been carefully searched, to the Temple. With a faltering step he entered the prison of the king. Louis XVI. was seated reading Tacitus. The king immediately arose, threw his arms around Malesherbes in a cordial embrace, and said,
"Ah, is it you, my friend! In what a situation do you find me! See to what my passion for the amelioration of the state of the people, whom we have both loved so much, has reduced me! Why do you come hither? Your devotion only endangers your life and can not save mine."
Malesherbes, with eyes full of tears, endeavored to cheer the king with words of hope.
"No!" replied the monarch, sadly. "They will condemn me, for they possess both the power and the will. No matter; let us occupy ourselves with the cause as if we were to gain it. I shall gain it in fact, since I shall leave no stain upon my memory."
The two defenders of the king were permitted to associate with them a third, M. Deséze, an advocate who had attained much renown in his profession. For a fortnight they were employed almost night and day in preparing for the defense. Malesherbes came every morning with the daily papers, and prepared for the labors of the evening. At five o'clock Tronchet and Deséze came, and they all worked together until nine.
In the mean time the king wrote his will; a very affecting document, breathing in every line the spirit of a Christian. He also succeeded in so far eluding the vigilance of his keepers as to open a slight correspondence with his family. The queen pricked a message with a pin upon a scrap of paper, and then concealed the paper in a ball of thread, which was dropped into a drawer in the kitchen, where Clery took it and conveyed it to his master. An answer was returned in a similar way. It was but an unsatisfactory correspondence which could thus be carried on; but even this was an unspeakable solace to the captives.
At length the plan of defense was completed. Malesherbes and the king had furnished the facts, Tronchet and Deséze had woven them all into an exceedingly eloquent and affecting appeal. Deséze read it aloud to the king and his associates. The pathetic picture he drew of the vicissitudes of the royal family was so touching that even Malesherbes and Tronchet could not refrain from weeping, and tears fell from the eyes of the king. At the close of the reading, the king turned to Deséze, and, in the spirit of true majesty of soul, said,
"I have to request of you to make a painful sacrifice. Strike out of your pleading the peroration. It is enough for me to appear before such judges and show my entire innocence. I will not move their feelings."[384]
Deséze was very reluctant to accede to this request, but was constrained to yield. After Tronchet and Deséze had retired that night, the king, left alone with Malesherbes, seemed to be troubled with some engrossing thought. At last he said,
"I have now a new source of regret. Deséze and Tronchet owe me nothing. They devote to me their time, exertions, and perhaps their life. How can I requite them? I possess nothing; and were I to leave them a legacy it would not be paid; besides, what fortune could repay such a debt?"
"Sire," replied Malesherbes, "their consciences and posterity will reward them. But it is in your power to grant them a favor they will esteem more than all those you had it in your power to bestow upon them formerly."
"What is it?" added the king.
"Sire, embrace them," Malesherbes replied.
The next day, when they entered his chamber, the king approached them and pressed each to his heart in silence. This touching testimonial of the king's gratitude, and of his impoverishment, was to the noble hearts of these noble men an ample remuneration for all their toil and peril.
The 26th of December had now arrived, the day appointed for the final trial. At an early hour all Paris was in commotion, and the whole military force of the metropolis was again marshaled. The sublimity of the occasion seemed to have elevated the character of the king to unusual dignity. He was neatly dressed, his beard shaved, and his features were serene and almost majestic in their expression of imperturbable resignation. As he rode in the carriage with Chambon, the mayor, and Santerre, the commander of the National Guard, he conversed cheerfully upon a variety of topics. Santerre, regardless of the etiquette which did not allow a subject to wear his hat in the presence of his monarch, sat with his hat on. The king turned to him, and said, with a smile,
"The last time, sir, you conveyed me to the Temple, in your hurry you forgot your hat; and now, I perceive, you are determined to make up for the omission."
On entering the Convention the king took his seat by the side of his counsel, and listened with intense interest to the reading of his defense, watching the countenances of his judges to see the effect it was producing upon their minds. Occasionally he whispered, and even with a smile, to Malesherbes and Tronchet. The Convention received the defense in profound silence.
The defense consisted of three leading divisions. First, it was argued that by the Constitution the king was inviolable, and not responsible for the acts of the crown--that the Ministers alone were responsible. He secondly argued that the Convention had no right to try the king, for the Convention were his accusers, and, consequently, could not act as his judges. Thirdly, while protesting, as above, the inviolability of the king, and the invalidity of the Convention to judge him, he then proceeded to the discussion of the individual charges. Some of the charges were triumphantly repelled, particularly that of shedding French blood on the 10th of August. It was clearly proved that the people, not Louis XVI., were the aggressors. As soon as Deséze had finished his defense, the king himself rose and said, in a few words which he had written and committed to memory,
"You have heard the grounds of my defense. I shall not repeat them. In addressing you, perhaps for the last time, I declare that my conscience reproaches me with nothing, and that my defenders have told you the truth. I have never feared to have my public conduct scrutinized. But I am grieved to find that I am accused of wishing to shed the blood of my people, and that the misfortunes of the 10th of August are laid to my charge. I confess that the numerous proofs I have always given of my love for the people ought to have placed me above this reproach."
He resumed his seat. The President then asked if he had any thing more to say. He declared he had not, and retired with his counsel from the hall. As he was conducted back to the Temple, he conversed with the same serenity he had manifested throughout the whole day. It was five o'clock, and the gloom of night was descending upon the city as he re-entered his prison.
No sooner had the king left the hall than a violent tumult of debate commenced, which was continued, day after day, with a constant succession of eager, agitated speakers hurrying to the tribune, for twelve days. Some were in favor of an immediate judgment, some were for referring the question to the people; some demanded the death of the king, others imprisonment or exile. On the 7th of January all seemed weary of these endless speeches, and the endless repetition of the same arguments. Still, there were many clamorous to be heard; and, after a violent contest, it was voted that the decisive measure should be postponed for a week longer, and that on the 14th of January the question should be taken.
The fatal day arrived. It was decreed that the subject should be presented to the Convention in the three following questions: First, Is Louis guilty? Second, Shall the decision of the Convention be submitted to the ratification of the people? The whole of the 15th was occupied in taking these two votes. Louis was unanimously pronounced to be guilty, with the exception of ten who refused to vote, declaring themselves incapable of acting both as accusers and judges. On the question of an appeal to the people, 281 voices were for it, 423 against it.[385] And now came the third great and solemn question, What shall be the sentence? Each member was required to write his vote, sign it, and then, before depositing it, to ascend the tribune and give it audibly, with any remarks which he might wish to add.
The voting commenced at seven o'clock in the evening of the 16th, and continued all night, and without any interruption, for twenty-four hours. All Paris was during the time in the highest state of excitement, the galleries of the Convention being crowded to suffocation. Some voted for death, others for imprisonment until peace with allied Europe, and then banishment. Others voted for death, with the restriction that the execution should be delayed. They wished to save the king, and yet feared the accusation of being Royalists if they did not vote for his death. The Jacobins all voted for death. They had accused their opponents, the Girondists, of being secretly in favor of royality, and as such had held them up to the execration of the mob. The Girondists wished to save the king. It was in their power to save him. But it required more courage, both moral and physical, than ordinary men possess, to brave the vengeance of the assassins of September who were hovering around the hall.
It was pretty well understood in the Convention that the fate of the king depended upon the Girondist vote, and it was not doubted that the party would vote as did their leader. It was a moment of fearful solemnity when Vergniaud ascended the tribune. Breathless silence pervaded the Assembly. Every eye was fixed upon him. His countenance was pallid as that of a corpse. For a moment he paused, with downcast eyes, as if hesitating to pronounce the dreadful word. Then, in a gloomy tone which thrilled the hearts of all present, he said, Death.[386] Nearly all the Girondists voted for death, with the restriction of delaying the execution. Many of the purest men in the nation thus voted, with emotions of sadness which could not be repressed. The noble Carnot gave his vote in the following terms: "Death; and never did word weigh so heavily on my heart."
When the Duke of Orleans was called, deep silence ensued. He was cousin of the king, and first prince of the blood. By birth and opulence he stood on the highest pinnacle of aristocratic supremacy. Conscious of peril, he had for a long time done every thing in his power to conciliate the mob by adopting the most radical of Jacobin opinions. The Duke, bloated with the debaucheries which had disgraced his life, ascended the steps slowly, unfolded a paper, and read in heartless tones these words:
"Solely occupied with my duty, convinced that all who have attempted, or shall attempt hereafter, the sovereignty of the people, merit death, I vote for death."
The atrocity of this act excited the abhorrence of the Assembly, and loud murmurs of disapprobation followed the prince to his seat. Even Robespierre despised his pusillanimity, and said,
"The miserable man was only required to listen to his own heart, and make himself an exception. But he would not or dare not do so. The nation would have been more magnanimous than he."[387]
At length the long scrutiny was over, and Vergniaud, who had presided, rose to announce the result. He was pale as death, and it was observed that not only his voice faltered, but that his whole frame trembled.
"Citizens," said he, "you are about to exercise a great act of justice. I hope humanity will enjoin you to keep the most perfect silence. When justice has spoken humanity ought to be listened to in its turn."
He then read the results of the vote. There were seven hundred and twenty-one voters in the Convention. Three hundred and thirty-four voted for imprisonment or exile, three hundred and eighty-seven for death, including those who voted that the execution should be delayed. Thus the majority for death was fifty-three; but as of these forty-six demanded a suspension of the execution, there remained but a majority of seven for immediate death. Having read this result, Vergniaud, in a sorrowful tone, said, "I declare, in the name of the Convention, that the punishment pronounced against Louis Capet is death."[388]
The counsel of Louis XVI., who, during the progress of the vote, had urged permission to speak, but were refused, were now introduced. In the name of the king, Deséze appealed to the people from the judgment of the Convention. He urged the appeal from the very small majority which had decided the penalty. Tronchet urged that the penal code required a vote of two thirds to consign one to punishment, and that the king ought not to be deprived of a privilege which every subject enjoyed. Malesherbes endeavored to speak, but was so overcome with emotion that, violently sobbing, he was unable to continue his speech, and was compelled to sit down. His gray hairs and his tears so moved the Assembly that Vergniaud rose, and, addressing the Assembly, said, "Will you decree the honors of the sitting to the defenders of Louis XVI.?" The unanimous response was, "Yes, yes."
It was now late at night, and the Convention adjourned. The whole of the 18th and the 19th were occupied in discussing the question of the appeal to the people. On the 20th, at three o'clock in the morning, the final vote was taken. Three hundred and ten voted to sustain the appeal; three hundred and eighty for immediate death. All the efforts to save the king were now exhausted, and his fate was sealed. A deputation was immediately appointed, headed by Garat, Minister of Justice, to acquaint Louis XVI. with the decree of the Convention.
At two o'clock in the afternoon of the 20th, Louis heard the noise of a numerous party ascending the steps of the tower. As they entered his apartment he rose and stepped forward with perfect calmness and dignity to meet them. The decree of the Convention was read to the king, declaring him to be guilty of treason, that he was condemned to death, that the appeal to the people was refused, and that he was to be executed within twenty-four hours.
The king listened to the reading unmoved, took the paper from the hands of the secretary, folded it carefully, and placed it in his portfolio. Then turning to Garat, he handed him a paper, saying,
"Monsieur Minister of Justice, I request you to deliver this letter to the Convention."
Garat hesitated to take the paper, and the king immediately rejoined, "I will read it to you," and read, in a distinct, unfaltering voice, as follows:
"I demand of the Convention a delay of three days, in order to prepare myself to appear before God. I require, farther, to see freely the priest whom I shall name to the commissaries of the Commune, and that he be protected in the act of charity which he shall exercise toward me. I demand to be freed from the perpetual surveillance which has been exercised toward me for so many days. I demand, during these last moments, leave to see my family, when I desire it, without witnesses. I desire most earnestly that the Convention will at once take into consideration the fate of my family, and that they be allowed immediately to retire unmolested whithersoever they shall see fit to choose an asylum. I recommend to the kindness of the nation all the persons attached to me. There are among them many old men, and women, and children, who are entirely dependent upon me, and must be in want."
The delegation retired. The king, with a firm step, walked two or three times up and down his chamber, and then called for his dinner. He sat down and ate with his usual appetite; but his attendants refused to let him have either knife or fork, and he was furnished only with a spoon. This excited his indignation, and he said, warmly,
"Do they think that I am such a coward as to lay violent hands upon myself? I am innocent, and I shall die fearlessly."
Having finished his repast, he waited patiently for the return of the answer from the Convention. At six o'clock, Garat, accompanied by Santerre, entered again. The Convention refused the delay of execution which Louis XVI. had solicited, but granted the other demands.
In a few moments M. Edgeworth, the ecclesiastic who had been sent for, arrived. He entered the chamber, and, overwhelmed with emotion, fell at the monarch's feet and burst into tears. The king, deeply moved, also wept, and, as he raised M. Edgeworth, said,
"Pardon me this momentary weakness. I have lived so long among my enemies that habit has rendered me indifferent to their hatred, and my heart has been closed against all sentiments of tenderness; but the sight of a faithful friend restores to me my sensibility, which I believed dead, and moves me to tears in spite of myself."
The king conversed earnestly with his spiritual adviser respecting his will, which he read, and inquired earnestly for his friends, whose sufferings moved his heart deeply. The hour of seven had now arrived, when the king was to hold his last interview with his family. But even this could not be in private. He was to be watched by his jailers, who were to hear every word and witness every gesture. The door opened, and the queen, pallid and woe-stricken, entered, leading her son by the hand. She threw herself into the arms of her husband, and silently endeavored to draw him toward her chamber.
"No, no," whispered the king, clasping her to his heart; "I can see you only here."
Madame Elizabeth, with the king's daughter, followed. A scene of anguish ensued which neither pen nor pencil can portray. The king sat down, with the queen upon his right hand, his sister upon his left, their arms encircling his neck, and their heads resting upon his breast. The dauphin sat upon his father's knee, with his arm around his neck. The beautiful princess, with disheveled hair, threw herself between her father's knees, and buried her face in his lap. More than half an hour passed during which not an articulate word was spoken; but cries, groans, and occasional shrieks of anguish, which pierced even the thick walls of the Temple and were heard in the streets, rose from the group.
For two hours the agonizing interview was continued. As they gradually regained some little composure, in low tones they whispered messages of tenderness and love, interrupted by sobs, and kisses, and blinding floods of tears. It was now after nine o'clock, and in the morning the king was to be led to the guillotine. The queen implored permission for them to remain with him through the night. The king, through tenderness for his family, declined, but promised to see them again at seven o'clock the next morning. As the king accompanied them to the staircase their cries were redoubled, and the princess fainted in utter unconsciousness at her father's feet. The queen, Madame Elizabeth, and Clery carried her to the stairs, and the king returned to the room, and, burying his face in his hands, sank, exhausted, into a chair. After a long silence he turned to M. Edgeworth and said,
"Ah! monsieur, what an interview I have had! Why do I love so fondly? Alas! why am I so fondly loved? But we have now done with time. Let us occupy ourselves with eternity."
The king passed some time in religious conversation and prayer, and, having arranged with M. Edgeworth to partake of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in the earliest hours of the morning, at midnight threw himself upon his bed, and almost immediately fell into a calm and refreshing sleep.
The faithful Clery and M. Edgeworth watched at the bedside of the king. At five o'clock they woke him. "Has it struck five?" inquired the king. "Not yet by the clock of the tower," Clery replied; "but several of the clocks of the city have struck." "I have slept soundly," remarked the king. "I was much fatigued yesterday."
He immediately arose. An altar had been prepared in the middle of the room composed of a chest of drawers, and the king, after engaging earnestly in prayer, received the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Then leading Clery into the recess of a window, he detached from his watch a seal, and took from his finger a wedding-ring, and handing them to Clery, said,
"After my death you will give this seal to my son, this ring to the queen. Tell her I resign it with pain that it may not be profaned with my body. This small parcel contains locks of hair of all my family: that you will give her. Say to the queen, my dear children, and my sister, that I had promised to see them this morning, but that I desired to spare them the agony of such a bitter separation twice over. How much it has cost me to depart without receiving their last embraces!"
He could say no more, for sobs choked his utterance. Soon recovering himself, he called for scissors, and cut off his long hair, that he might escape the humiliation of having that done by the executioner.
A few beams of daylight began now to penetrate the gloomy prison through the grated windows, and the beating of drums, and the rumbling of the wheels of heavy artillery were heard in the streets. The king turned to his confessor, and said,
"How happy I am that I maintained my faith on the throne! Where should I be this day but for this hope? Yes, there is on high a Judge, incorruptible, who will award to me that measure of justice which men refuse to me here below."
Two hours passed away, while the king listened to the gathering of the troops in the court-yard and around the Temple. At nine o'clock a tumultuous noise was heard of men ascending the staircase. Santerre entered, with twelve municipal officers and ten gens d'armes. The king, with commanding voice and gesture, pointed Santerre to the door, and said,
"You have come for me. I will be with you in an instant. Await me there."
Falling upon his knees, he engaged a moment in prayer, and then, turning to M. Edgeworth, said,
"All is consummated. Give me your blessing, and pray to God to sustain me to the end."
He rose, and taking from the table a paper which contained his last will and testament, addressed one of the municipal guard, saying, "I beg of you to transmit this paper to the queen." The man, whose name was Jacques Roux, brutally replied, "I am here to conduct you to the scaffold, not to perform your commissions."
"True," said the king, in a saddened tone, but without the slightest appearance of irritation. Then carefully scanning the countenances of each member of the guard, he selected one whose features expressed humanity, and solicited him to take charge of the paper. The man, whose name was Gobeau, took the paper.
The king, declining the cloak which Clery offered him, said, "Give me only my hat." Then, taking the hand of Clery, he pressed it affectionately in a final adieu, and, turning to Santerre, said, "Let us go." Descending the stairs with a firm tread, followed by the armed escort, he met a turnkey whom he had the evening before reproached for some impertinence. The king approached him and said, in tones of kindness,
"Mathey, I was somewhat warm with you yesterday; excuse me for the sake of this hour."
As he crossed the court-yard, he twice turned to look up at the windows of the queen's apartment in the tower, where those so dear to him were suffering the utmost anguish which human hearts can endure. Two gens d'armes sat upon the front seat of the carriage. The king and M. Edgeworth took the back seat. The morning was damp and chill, and gloomy clouds darkened the sky. Sixty drums were beating at the heads of the horses, and an army of troops, with all the most formidable enginery of war, preceded, surrounded, and followed the carriage. The noise of the drums prevented any conversation, and the king sat in silence in the carriage, evidently engaged in prayer. The procession moved so slowly along the Boulevards that it was two hours before they reached the Place de la Révolution. An immense crowd filled the place, above whom towered the lofty platform and blood-red posts of the guillotine.
As the carriage stopped the king whispered to M. Edgeworth, "We have arrived, if I mistake not." The drums ceased beating, and the whole multitude gazed in the most solemn silence. The two gens d'armes alighted. The king placed his hand upon the knee of the heroic ecclesiastic, M. Edgeworth, and said to the gens d'armes,
"Gentlemen, I recommend to your care this gentleman. Let him not be insulted after my death. I entreat you to watch over him."
"Yes, yes," said one, contemptuously; "make your mind easy, we will take care of him. Let us alone."
Louis alighted. Two of the executioners came to the foot of the scaffold to take off his coat. The king waved them away, and himself took off his coat and cravat, and turned down the collar of his shirt, that his throat might be presented bare to the knife. They then came with cords to bind his hands behind his back.
"What do you wish to do?" said the king, indignantly.
"Bind you," they replied, as they seized his hands, and endeavored to fasten them with the cords.
"Bind me!" replied the king, in tones of deepest feeling. "No, no; I will never consent. Do your business, but you shall not bind me."
The executioners seized him rudely, and called for help. "Sire," said his Christian adviser, "suffer this outrage, as a last resemblance to that God who is about to be your reward."
"Assuredly," replied the king, "there needed nothing less than the example of God to make me submit to such an indignity." Then, holding out his hands to the executioners, he said, "Do as you will! I will drink the cup to the dregs."
With a firm tread he ascended the steep steps of the scaffold, looked for a moment upon the keen and polished edge of the axe, and then, turning to the vast throng, said, in a voice clear and untremulous,
"People, I die innocent of all the crimes imputed to me! I pardon the authors of my death, and pray to God that the blood you are about to shed may not fall again on France."
He would have continued, but the drums were ordered to beat, and his voice was immediately drowned. The executioners seized him, bound him to the plank, the slide fell, and the head of Louis XVI. dropped into the basket.
No one has had a better opportunity of ascertaining the true character of the king than President Jefferson. Speaking of some of the king's measures he said, "These concessions came from the very heart of the king. He had not a wish but for the good of the nation; and for that object no personal sacrifice would ever have cost him a moment's regret; but his mind was weakness itself, his constitution timid, his judgment null, and without sufficient firmness even to stand by the faith of his word. His queen, too, haughty and bearing no contradiction, had an absolute ascendency over him; and round her were rallied the king's brother, D'Artois, the court generally, and the aristocratic part of his ministers, particularly Breteuil, Broglio, Vauguyon, Foulon, Luzerne--men whose principles of government were those of the age of Louis XIV. Against this host, the good counsels of Necker, Montmorin, St. Priest, although in unison with the wishes of the king himself, were of little avail. The resolutions of the morning, formed under their advice, would be reversed in the evening by the influence of the queen and the court."
The Royalists were exceedingly exasperated by the condemnation of the king. A noble, Lepelletier St. Fargeau, who had espoused the popular cause, voted for the king's death. The Royalists were peculiarly excited against him, in consequence of his rank and fortune. On the evening of the 20th of January, as Louis was being informed of his sentence, a life-guardsman of the king tracked Lepelletier into a restaurateur's in the Palais Royal, and, just as he was sitting down to the table, stepped up to him and said,
"Art thou Lepelletier, the villain who voted for the death of the king?"
"Yes," replied Lepelletier, "but I am not a villain. I voted according to my conscience."
"There, then," rejoined the life-guardsman, "take that for thy reward," and he plunged his sword to the hilt in his side. Lepelletier fell dead, and his assassin escaped before they had time to arrest him.
This event created intense excitement, and increased the conviction that the Royalists had conspired to rescue the king, by force of arms, at the foot of the scaffold.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 381: Hist. Parl., vol. xxi., p. 314.]
[Footnote 382: Résumé du Rapport du Commissaire Albertier, Hist. Parl., vol. xxi., p. 319.]
[Footnote 383: One of Napoleon's first acts upon becoming First Consul was to show his appreciation of the heroism of Tronchet by placing him at the head of the Court of Cassation. "Tronchet," he said, "was the soul of the civil code, as I was its demonstrator. He was gifted with a singularly profound and correct understanding, but he could not descend to developments. He spoke badly, and could not defend what he proposed."--Napoleon at St. Helena, p. 192.]
[Footnote 384: Lacretelle.]
[Footnote 385: Lamartine, History of the Girondists, vol. ii., p. 342.]
[Footnote 386: "The crowd in the galleries received with murmurs all votes that were not for death, and they frequently addressed threatening gestures to the Assembly itself. The deputies replied to them from the interior of the hall, and hence resulted a tumultuous exchange of menaces and abusive epithets. This fearfully ominous scene had shaken all minds and changed many resolutions. Vergniaud, who had appeared deeply affected by the fate of Louis XVI., and who had declared to his friends that he never could condemn that unfortunate prince, Vergniaud, on beholding this tumultuous scene, imagined that he saw civil war kindled in France, and pronounced sentence of death, with the addition, however, of Mailhe's amendment (which required that the execution should be delayed). On being questioned respecting his change of opinion, he replied that he thought he saw civil war on the point of breaking out, and that he durst not balance the life of an individual against the welfare of France."--Thiers's History of the French Revolution, vol. ii., p. 68.]
[Footnote 387: "Robespierre was by no means the worst character who figured in the Revolution. He opposed trying the queen. He was not an atheist; on the contrary, he had publicly maintained the existence of a Supreme Being, in opposition to many of his colleagues. Neither was he of opinion that it was necessary to exterminate all priests and nobles, like many others. Robespierre wanted to proclaim the king an outlaw, and not to go through the ridiculous mockery of trying him. Robespierre was a fanatic, a monster; but he was incorruptible, and incapable of robbing or of causing the deaths of others, either from personal enmity or a desire of enriching himself. He was an enthusiast, but one who really believed that he was acting right, and died not worth a sou. In some respects Robespierre may be said to have been an honest man."--Napoleon at St. Helena, p. 590.]
[Footnote 388: "Of those who judged the king many thought him willfully criminal; many that his existence would keep the nation in perpetual conflict with the horde of kings who would war against a generation which might come home to themselves, and that it were better that one should die than all. I should not have voted with this portion of the Legislature. I should have shut up the queen in a convent, putting harm out of her power, and placed the king in his station, investing him with limited powers, which I verily believe he would honestly have exercised, according to the measure of his understanding."--Thomas Jefferson, Life by Randall, vol. i., p. 533. There were obviously insuperable objections to the plan thus suggested by Mr. Jefferson.]
XXXII. THE REIGN OF TERROR
Charges against the Girondists.--Danton.--The French Embassador ordered to leave England.--War declared against England.--Navy of England.--Internal War.--Plot to assassinate the Girondists.--Bold Words of Vergniaud.--Insurrection in La Vendée.--Conflict between Dumouriez and the Assembly.--Flight of Dumouriez.--The Mob aroused and the Girondists arrested.--Charlotte Corday.--France rises en masse to repel the Allies.--The treasonable Surrender of Toulon.
The execution of the king roused all Europe against republican France. The Jacobins had gained a decisive victory over the Girondists, and succeeded in turning popular hatred against them by accusing them of being enemies of the people, because they opposed the excesses of the mob; of being the friends of royalty, because they had wished to save the life of the king; and of being hostile to the republic, because they advocated measures of moderation.[389]
Danton was now the acknowledged leader of the Jacobins. He had obtained the entire control of the mob of Paris, and could guide their terrible and resistless energies in any direction. With this potent weapon in his hand he was omnipotent, and his political adversaries were at his mercy. The Reign of Terror had now commenced. The Girondists made a heroic attempt to bring to justice the assassins of September, but the Jacobins promptly stopped the proceedings.
The aristocracy of birth was now effectually crushed, and the Jacobins commenced a warfare against the aristocracy of wealth and character. An elegant mansion, garments of fine cloth, and even polished manners, exposed one to the charge of being an aristocrat, and turned against him the insults of the rabble. Marat was particularly fierce, in his journal, against the aristocracy of the burghers, merchants, and statesmen.
Upon the arrival of the courier in London conveying intelligence of the execution of the king, M. Chauvelin, the French embassador, was ordered to leave England within twenty-four hours.
"After events," said Pitt, "on which the imagination can only dwell with horror, and since an infernal faction has seized on the supreme power in France, we could no longer tolerate the presence of M. Chauvelin, who has left no means untried to induce the people to rise against the government and the laws of this country."
The National Convention at once declared war against England.[390] Pitt, with almost superhuman energy, mustered the forces of England and Europe for the strife. In less than six months England had entered into a treaty of alliance with Russia, Prussia, Austria, Naples, Spain, and Portugal, for the prosecution of the war; and had also entered into treaties by which she promised large subsidies to Hesse Cassel, Sardinia, and Baden. England thus became the soul of this coalition, which combined the whole of Europe, with the exception of Venice, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and Turkey, against France. These combined armies were to assail the Republic by land, while the invincible fleet of England was to hurl a storm of shot and shells into all her maritime towns.
France, at this time, had but one hundred and fifty-nine vessels of war all told. England had four hundred and fifteen, and her ally, Holland, one hundred. Most of these were large ships, heavily armed; and, consequently, England had but little fear that any French armies could reach her isles.[391] Parliament voted an extraordinary supply of £3,200,000 ($16,000,000). One hundred and thirty-one thousand Austrians, one hundred and twelve thousand Prussians, and fifty thousand Spaniards were speedily on the march to assail France at every point on the frontier.[392]
The Royalists in La Vendée rose in arms against the Republic, and unfurled the white banner of the Bourbons. France was now threatened more fearfully than ever before with external and internal war. The Convention, controlled by the Jacobins and appalled by the danger, decreed a levy of three hundred thousand men to repel the assailants, and also organized an extraordinary revolutionary tribunal, invested with unlimited powers to arrest, judge, and punish any whom they should deem dangerous to the Republic. Violence filled the land, terror reigned every where, and even Robespierre was heard to exclaim, "I am sick of the Revolution."
Dumouriez had driven the Austrians out of Belgium and the Netherlands, and was at the head of an army of about seventy-five thousand men. Disgusted with the anarchy which reigned in France, he formed the bold design of marching upon Paris with his army, dispersing the Convention, abolishing the Republic, reinstituting a constitutional monarchy by establishing the Constitution of 1791, and by placing a king, probably the son of the Duke of Orleans, subsequently Louis Philippe, upon the throne. The Jacobins, goaded by these accumulating dangers--all Europe assailing France from without, and Royalists plotting within--were prepared for any measures of desperation. The Girondists, with unavailing heroism, opposed the frantic measures of popular violence, and the Jacobins resolved to get rid of them all by a decisive blow. The assassins of September were ready to ply the dagger, under the plea that murder was patriotism. A plan was formed to strike them all down, in the Convention, on the night of the 10th of March. But the Girondists, informed of the plot, absented themselves from the meeting and the enterprise failed. The bold spirit of the Girondists was avowed in the words of Vergniaud:
"We have witnessed," said he, "the development of that strange system of liberty in which we are told 'You are free, but think with us, or we will denounce you to the vengeance of the people; you are free, but bow down your head to the idol we worship, or we will denounce you to the vengeance of the people; you are free, but join us in persecuting the men whose probity and intelligence we dread, or we will denounce you to the vengeance of the people.' Citizens! we have reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, will devour successively all its children, and only engender despotism and the calamities which accompany it."
The Province of La Vendée contained a population of about three hundred thousand. It was a rural district where there was no middle class. The priests and the nobles had the unlettered peasantry entirely under their influence. Three armies were raised here against the Republic, of about twelve thousand each. Royalists from various parts of the empire flocked to this region, and emigrants were landed upon the coast to join the insurgents. For three years a most cruel and bloody war was here waged between the Royalists and the Republicans.
The intelligence of this formidable insurrection increased the panic of the Convention. A law was passed disarming all who had belonged to the privileged class, and declaring those to be outlaws who should be found in any hostile gathering against the Republic. The emigrants were forbidden to land in France under the penalty of death. Every house in the kingdom was to inscribe upon its door the names of all its inmates, and was to be open at all times to the visits of the Vigilance Committee.
Dumouriez sullied his character by surrendering to the Austrians several fortresses, and agreeing with them that he would march upon Paris and restore a monarchical government to France. The Austrians trusted that he would place upon the throne the young son of Louis XVI., though it was doubtless his intention to place there the young Duke of Chartres (Louis Philippe), who would be the representative of popular ideas.
The Jacobin Club sent a deputation of three of its members to the camp, to sound the views of Dumouriez. The general received them with courtesy, but said, with military frankness,
"The Convention is an assembly of tyrants. While I have three inches of steel by my side that monster shall not exist. As for the Republic, it is an idle word. I had faith in it for three days. There is only one way to save the country; that is, to re-establish the Constitution of 1791 and a king."
"Can you think of it!" one of the deputation exclaimed; "the French view royalty with horror. The very name of Louis is an abomination."
"What does it signify," replied Dumouriez, "whether the king be called Louis, or Jacques, or Philippe?"
"And what are your means to effect this revolution?" they inquired.
"My army," Dumouriez proudly replied. "From my camp or from the stronghold of some fortress they will express their resolve for a king."
"But your plan will peril the lives of the rest of the royal family in the Temple."
"If every member of that family in France or at Coblentz should perish," Dumouriez replied, "I can still find a chief. And if any farther barbarities are practiced upon the Bourbons in the Temple I will surround Paris with my army and starve the Parisians into subjection."
The deputation returned to Paris with their report, and four commissioners were immediately dispatched, accompanied by the Minister of War, to summon Dumouriez to the bar of the Convention. Dumouriez promptly arrested the commissioners and sent them off to the Austrians, to be retained by them as hostages.
The Convention immediately offered a reward for the head of Dumouriez, raised an army of forty thousand men to defend Paris, and arrested all the relatives of the officers under Dumouriez as hostages.
Dumouriez now found that he had not a moment to lose. Perils were accumulating thick around him. There were many indications that it might be difficult to carry the army over to his views. On the 4th of April, as he was repairing to a place of rendezvous with the Austrian leaders, the Prince of Coburg and General Mack, a battalion of soldiers, suspecting treachery, endeavored to stop him. He put spurs to his horse and distanced pursuit, while a storm of bullets whistled around his head. He succeeded, after innumerable perils, in the circuitous ride of a whole day, in reaching the head-quarters of the Austrians. They received him with great distinction, and offered him the command of a division of their army. After two days' reflection, he said that it was with the soldiers of France he had hoped to restore a stable government to his country, accepting the Austrians only as auxiliaries; but that as a Frenchman he could not march against France at the head of foreigners. He retired to Switzerland. The Duke of Chartres (Louis Philippe), in friendlessness and poverty, followed him, and for some time was obliged to obtain a support by teaching school.
The Jacobins now accused their formidable rivals, the Girondists, of being implicated in the conspiracy of Dumouriez. Robespierre, in a speech of the most concentrated and potent malignity, urged that France had relieved herself of the aristocracy of birth, but that there was another aristocracy, that of wealth, equally to be dreaded, which must be crushed, and that the Girondists were the leaders of this aristocracy. This was most effectually pandering to the passions of the mob, and directing their fury against the Girondists. The Girondists were now in a state of terrible alarm. They knew the malignity of their foes, and could see but little hope for escape. They had overturned the throne of despotism, hoping to establish constitutional liberty: they had only introduced Jacobin phrensy and anarchy. Immense crowds of armed men paraded the streets of Paris, surrounded the Convention, and demanded vengeance against the leaders of the Gironde.[393]
The moderate Republicans, enemies of these acts of violence, striving to stem the torrent, endeavored to carry an act of accusation against Marat. He was charged with having encouraged assassination and carnage, of dissolving the National Convention, and of having established a power destructive of liberty.
Marat replied to the accusation by summoning the mob to his aid. They assembled in vast, tumultuous throngs, and the tribunal, overawed, after the trial of a few moments, unanimously acquitted him. This was the 24th of April. The mob accompanied him back to his seat in the Convention. He was borne in triumph into the hall in the arms of his confederates, his brow encircled by a wreath of victory.
"Citizen President," shouted one of the burly men who bore Marat, "we bring you the worthy Marat. Marat has always been the friend of the people, and the people will always be the friends of Marat. If Marat's head must fall, our heads must fall first."
As he uttered these words he brandished a battle-axe defiantly, and the mob in the aisles and crowded galleries vehemently applauded. He then demanded permission for the escort to file through the hall. The president, appalled by the hideous spectacle, had not time to give his consent before the whole throng, men, women, and boys, in rags and filth, rushed pell-mell into the hall, took the seats of the vacant members, and filled the room with indescribable tumult and uproar, shouting hosannas to Marat. The successful demagogue could not but boast of his triumph. Ascending the tribune, he said,
"Citizens! indignant at seeing a villainous faction betraying the Republic, I endeavored to unmask it and to put the rope about its neck. It resisted me by launching against me a decree of accusation. I have come off victorious. The faction is humbled, but not crushed. Waste not your time in decreeing triumphs. Defend yourselves with enthusiasm."
Robespierre now demanded an act of accusation against the Girondists. Resistance was hopeless. The inundation of popular fury was at its flood, sweeping every thing before it. The most frightful scenes of tumult took place in the Convention, members endeavoring by violence to pull each other from the tribune.[394]
The whole Convention was now in a state of dismay, eighty thousand infuriate men surrounding it with artillery and musketry, declaring that the Convention should not leave its hall until the Girondists were arrested. The Convention, in a body, attempted to leave and force its way through the crowd, but it was ignominiously driven back. Under these circumstances it was voted that the leaders of the Girondists, twenty-two in number, should be put under arrest. This was the 2d of June, 1793.[395]
The Jacobins, having thus got rid of their enemies, and having the entire control, immediately decided to adopt a new Constitution, still more democratic in its character; and a committee was appointed to present one within a week. But the same division which existed in the Convention between the Jacobins and the Girondists existed all over France. In many of the departments fierce battles rose between the two parties.
In the mean time the Allies were pressing France in all directions. The Austrians and Prussians were advancing upon the north; the Piedmontese threading the passes of the maritime Alps; the Spaniards were prepared to rush from the defiles of the Pyrenees, and the fleet of England threatened every where the coast of France on the Mediterranean and the Channel.[396]
With amazing energy the Convention aroused itself to meet these perils. A new Constitution, exceedingly democratic, was framed and adopted. Every Frenchman twenty-one years of age was a voter. Fifty thousand souls were entitled to a deputy. There was but a single Assembly. Its decrees were immediately carried into execution.[397]
Danton, Robespierre, and Marat were now the idols of the mob of Paris and the real sovereigns of France. All who ventured opposition to them were proscribed and imprisoned. Members of the Republican or Girondist party every where, all over France, were arrested, or, where they were sufficiently numerous to resist, civil war raged.
At Caen there was a very beautiful girl, Charlotte Corday, twenty-five years of age, highly educated and accomplished. She was of spotless purity of character, and, with the enthusiasm of Madame Roland, she had espoused the cause of popular constitutional liberty. The principles of the Girondist party she had embraced, and the noble leaders of that party she regarded almost with adoration.
When she heard of the overthrow of the Girondists and their imprisonment, she resolved to avenge them, and hoped that, by striking down the leader of the Jacobins, she might rouse the Girondists scattered over France to rally and rescue liberty and their country. It was a three days' ride in the diligence from Caen to Paris. Arriving at Paris on Thursday the 11th of July, she carefully inspected the state of affairs, that she might select her victim, but confided her design to no one.
Marat appeared to her the most active, formidable, and insatiable in his proscription. She wrote him a note as follows:
"Citizen: I have just arrived from Caen. Your love for your country inclines me to suppose you will listen with pleasure to the secret events of that part of the Republic. I will present myself at your house. Have the goodness to give orders for my admission, and grant me a moment's private conversation. I can point out the means by which you can render an important service to France."
She dispatched this note from her hotel, the Inn de la Providence in the Rue des Vieux Augustins, went to the Palais Royal and purchased a large sheath knife, and, taking a hackney-coach, drove to the residence of Marat, No. 44 Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine. It was Saturday night. Marat was taking a bath and reading by a light which stood upon a three-footed stool. He heard the rap of Charlotte, and called aloud to the woman who, as servant and mistress, attended him, and requested that she might be admitted.
Marat was a man of the most restless activity. Eagerly he inquired respecting the proscribed at Caen and of others who were opposed to Jacobin rule. Charlotte, while replying coolly, measured with her eye the spot she should strike with the knife. As she mentioned some names, he eagerly seized a pencil and began to write them down, saying,
"They shall all go to the guillotine."
"To the guillotine?" exclaimed Charlotte, and, instantly drawing the knife from her bosom, plunged it to the handle directly in his heart.
The miserable man uttered one frantic shriek of "Help!" and fell back dead into the water. The paramour of Marat and a serving-man rushed in, knocked Charlotte down with a chair, and trampled upon her. A crowd soon assembled. Without the slightest perturbation she avowed the deed. Her youth and beauty alone saved her from being torn in pieces. Soldiers soon arrived and conveyed her to prison.
"The way to avenge Marat," exclaimed Robespierre from the tribune in tones which caused France to tremble, "is to strike down his enemies without mercy."
The remains of the wretched man, whom all the world now execrates, were buried with the highest possible honors. His funeral at midnight, as all Paris seemed to follow him to his grave in a torch-light procession, was one of the most imposing scenes of the Revolution.
On Wednesday morning Charlotte was led to the Revolutionary Tribunal in the Palace of Justice. She appeared there dignified, calm, and beautiful. The indictment was read, and they were beginning to introduce their witnesses, when Charlotte said,
"These delays are needless. It is I that killed Marat."
There was a moment's pause, and many deplored the doom of one so youthful and lovely. At last the president inquired, "By whose instigation?"
"By that of no one," was the laconic reply.
"What tempted you?" inquired the president.
"His crimes," Charlotte answered; and then, continuing in tones of firmness and intensity which silenced and overawed all present, she said,
"I killed one man, to save a hundred thousand; a villain, to save the innocent; a savage wild beast, to give repose to my country. I was a Republican before the Revolution. I never wanted energy."[398]
She listened to her doom of immediate death with a smile, and was conducted back to the prison, to be led from thence to the guillotine. A little after seven o'clock on this same evening a cart issued from the Conciergerie, bearing Charlotte, in the red robe of a murderess, to the guillotine. A vast throng crowded the streets, most of whom assailed her with howls and execrations. She looked upon them with a serene smile, as if she were riding on an excursion of pleasure. She was bound to the plank. The glittering axe glided through the grove, and the executioner, lifting her severed head, exhibited it to the people, and then brutally struck the cheek.
Robespierre and Danton, the idols of the mob, now divided the supreme power between them. The organization of a revolutionary government was simply the machine by means of which they operated.
On the 10th of August there was another magnificent festival in Paris to commemorate the adoption of the Jacobin Constitution. The celebrated painter David arranged the fête with great artistic skill, and again all Paris, though on the verge of ruin, was in a blaze of illumination and in a roar of triumph. The Austrian armies were now within fifteen days' march of Paris, and there was no organized force which could effectually arrest their progress. But the fear of the old Bourbon despotism rallied the masses to maintain, in preference, even the horrors of Jacobin ferocity. The aristocrats crushed the people; the Jacobins crushed the aristocrats. The populace naturally preferred the latter rule.
And now France rose, as a nation never rose before. At the motion of Danton it was decreed on the 23rd of August,
"From this moment until when the enemy shall be driven from the territory of the French Republic, all the French shall be in permanent requisition for the service of the armies. The young men shall go forth to fight. The married men shall forge the arms and transport the supplies. The women shall make tents and clothes, and attend on the hospitals. The children shall make lint out of rags; the old men shall cause themselves to be carried to the public places, to excite the courage of the warriors, to preach hatred of kings and love of the Republic."
All unmarried men or widowers without children, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, were to assemble at appointed rendezvous and march immediately. This act raised an army of one million two hundred thousand men. The men between twenty-five and thirty were to hold themselves in readiness to follow. And those between thirty and sixty were to be prepared to obey orders whenever they should be summoned to the field. There is sublimity, at least, in such energy.
All France was instantly converted into a camp, resounding with preparations for war. In La Vendée the friends of the Bourbons had rallied. The Convention decreed its utter destruction, the death of every man, conflagration of the dwellings, destruction of the crops, and the removal of the women and children to some other province, where they should be supported at the expense of the government. It was sternly resolved that no mercy whatever should be shown to Frenchmen who were co-operating with foreigners to rivet anew upon France the chains of Bourbon despotism. These decrees were executed with merciless fidelity. The illustrious Carnot, who, to use his own words, "had the ambition of the three hundred Spartans, going to defend Thermopylæ," organized and disciplined fourteen armies, and selected for them able leaders.
While matters were in this condition, the inhabitants of Marseilles, Lyons, and Toulon rose, overpowered the Jacobins, and, raising the banner of the Bourbons, invited the approach of the Allies. Toulon was the naval arsenal of France, a large French fleet crowded its port, and its warehouses were filled with naval stores. Lord Hood, with an English squadron, was cruising off the coast. The Royalists, Admiral Troyoff at their head, gave the signal to the English, and basely surrendered to them the forts, shipping, and stores. It was a fearful loss to the Revolutionists. Lord Hood, the British admiral, immediately entered with his fleet, took possession, and issued a proclamation in which he said,
"Considering that the sections of Toulon have, by the commissioners whom they have sent to me, made a solemn declaration in favor of Louis XVII. and a monarchical government, and that they will use their utmost efforts to break the chains which fetter their country, and re-establish the Constitution as it was accepted by their defunct sovereign in 1789, I repeat by this present declaration that I take possession of Toulon, and shall keep it solely as a deposit for Louis XVII., and that only till peace is re-established in France."[399]
An army of sixty thousand men was sent against rebellious Lyons. The city, after a prolonged siege and the endurance of innumerable woes, was captured. The Convention decreed that it should be utterly destroyed, and that over its ruins should be reared a monument with the inscription, "Lyons made war upon Liberty: Lyons is no more!" The cruelties inflicted upon the Royalists of this unhappy city are too painful to contemplate. The imagination can hardly exaggerate them. Fouché and Collot d'Herbois, the prominent agents in this bloody vengeance, were atheists. In contempt of Christianity, they ordered the Bible and the Cross to be borne through the streets on an ass; the ass was compelled to drink of the consecrated wine from the communion-cup. Six thousand of the citizens of Lyons perished in these sanguinary persecutions, and twelve thousand were driven into exile. The Revolutionary Tribunal was active night and day condemning to death. One morning a young girl rushed into the hall, exclaiming,
"There remain to me, of all our family, only my brothers. Mother, father, sisters, uncles--you have butchered all. And now you are going to condemn my brothers. In mercy ordain that I may ascend the scaffold with them."
Her prayer of anguish was refused, and the poor child threw herself into the Rhone.
The Royalist insurrection in La Vendée, after a long and terrible conflict, was crushed out. No language can describe the horrors of vengeance which ensued. The tale of brutality is too awful to be told. Demons could not have been more infernal in mercilessness.
"Death by fire and the sword," writes Lamartine, "made a noise, scattered blood, and left bodies to be buried and be counted. The silent waters of the Loire were dumb and would render no account. The bottom of the sea alone would know the number of the victims. Carrier caused mariners to be brought as pitiless as himself. He ordered them, without much mystery, to pierce plug-holes in a certain number of decked vessels, so as to sink them with their living cargoes in parts of the river.
"These orders were first executed secretly and under the color of accidents of navigation. But soon these naval executions, of which the waves of the Loire bore witness even to its mouth, became a spectacle for Carrier and for his courtiers. He furnished a galley of pleasure, of which he made a present to his accomplice Lambertye, under pretext of watching the banks of the river. This vessel, adorned with all the delicacies of furniture, provided with all the wines and all the necessaries of feasting, became the most general theatre of these executions. Carrier embarked therein sometimes himself, with his executioners and his courtesans, to make trips upon the water. While he yielded himself up to the joys of love and wine on deck, his victims, inclosed in the hold, saw, at a given signal, the valves open, and the waves of the Loire swallow them up. A stifled groaning announced to the crew that hundreds of lives had just breathed their last under their feet. They continued their orgies upon this floating sepulchre.
"Sometimes Carrier, Lambertye, and their accomplices rejoiced in the cruel pleasure of this spectacle of agony. They caused victims of either sex, in couples, to mount upon the deck. Stripped of their garments, they bound them face to face, one to the other--a priest with a nun, a young man with a young girl. They suspended them, thus naked and interlaced, by a cord passed under the shoulders through a block of the vessel. They sported with horrible sarcasms on this parody of marriage in death, and then flung the victims into the river. This cannibal sport was termed 'Republican Marriages.'"
Robespierre, informed of these demoniac deeds, recalled Carrier, but he did not dare to bring an act of accusation against the wretch, lest he should peril his own head by being charged with sympathy with the Royalists. It is grateful to record that Carrier himself was eventually conducted, amid the execrations of the community, to the scaffold.[400]
The prisons of Paris were now filled with victims. Municipal instructions, issued by Chaumette, catalogued as follows those who should be arrested as suspected persons: 1. Those who, by crafty addresses, check the energy of the people. 2. Those who mysteriously deplore the lot of the people, and propagate bad news with affected grief. 3. Those who, silent respecting the faults of the Royalists, declaim against the faults of the Patriots. 4. Those who pity those against whom the law is obliged to take measures. 5. Those who associate with aristocrats, priests, and moderates, and take an interest in their fate. 6. Those who have not taken an active part in the Revolution. 7. Those who have received the Constitution with indifference and have expressed fears respecting its duration. 8. Those who, though they have done nothing against liberty, have done nothing for it. 9. Those who do not attend the sections. 10. Those who speak contemptuously of the constituted authorities. 11. Those who have signed counter-revolutionary petitions. 12. The partisans of La Fayette, and those who marched to the charge in the Champ de Mars.
There were but few persons in Paris who were not liable to be arrested, by the machinations of any enemy, upon some one of these charges. Many thousands were soon incarcerated. The prisons of the Maire, La Force, the Conciergerie, the Abbaye, St. Pelagie, and the Madelonettes were crowded to their utmost capacity. Then large private mansions, the College of Duplessis, and finally the spacious Palace of the Luxembourg were converted into prisons, and were filled to suffocation with the suspected. In these abodes, surrendered to filth and misery, with nothing but straw to lie upon, the most brilliant men and women of Paris were huddled together with the vilest outcasts. After a time, however, those who had property were permitted to surround themselves with such comforts as their means would command. From these various prisons those who were to be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal were taken to the Conciergerie, which adjoined the Palace of Justice, where the tribunal held its session. A trial was almost certain condemnation, and the guillotine knew no rest. Miserable France was now surrendered to the Reign of Terror. The mob had become the sovereign.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 389: Mignet, p. 192.]
[Footnote 390: "The Convention, finding England already leagued with the coalition, and consequently all its promises of neutrality vain and illusive, on the 1st of February, 1793, declared war against the King of Great Britain and the Stadtholder of Holland, who had been entirely guided by the cabinet of St. James's since 1788."--Mignet, vol. i., p. 195.]
[Footnote 391: Lamartine, History of the Girondists, vol. ii., p. 395.]
[Footnote 392: "It was in Spain, more particularly, that Pitt set intrigues at work to urge her to the greatest blunder she ever committed--that of joining England against France, her only maritime ally."--Thiers, vol. ii., p. 82.]
[Footnote 393: In reference to the terrific conflict between the privileged classes and the enslaved people, Prof. Smyth writes, "My conclusion is that neither the high party nor the low have the slightest right to felicitate themselves on their conduct during this memorable revolution. No historian, no commentator on these times can proceed a moment, but on the supposition that, while he is censuring the faults of the one, he is perfectly aware of the antagonistic faults of the other; that each party is to take its turn; and that the whole is a dreadful lesson of instruction both to the one and the other. I have dwelt with more earnestness on the faults of the popular leaders, because their faults are more natural and more important; because the friends of freedom (hot and opinionated though they be) are still more within the reach of instruction than are men of arbitrary temperament, than courts and privileged orders, who are systematically otherwise."--Prof Smyth, Fr. Rev., vol. iii., p. 245.
The story of the French Revolution has too often been told in this spirit, veiling the atrocities of the oppressors and magnifying the inhumanity of the oppressed. While truth demands that all the violence of an enslaved people, in despair bursting their bonds, should be faithfully delineated, truth no less imperiously demands that the mercilessness of proud oppressors, crushing millions for ages, and goading a whole nation to the madness of despair, should be also impartially described.]
[Footnote 394: In the Convention, each one who addressed the body ascended to a desk on the platform, called the tribune.]
[Footnote 395: Thiers, vol. ii., p. 194.]
[Footnote 396: The Allies acted without union, and, under disguise of a holy war, concealed the most selfish views. The Austrians wanted Valenciennes; the King of Prussia, Mayence; the English, Dunkirk; the Piedmontese aspired to recover Chambéry and Nice; the Spaniards, the least interested of all, had nevertheless some thoughts of Roussillon.--Thiers, vol. ii., p. 217.]
[Footnote 397: "As the Constitution thus made over the government to the multitude, as it placed the power in a disorganized body, it would have been at all times impracticable, but at a period of general warfare it was peculiarly so. Accordingly, it was no sooner made than suspended."--Mignet.]
[Footnote 398: Procès de Charlotte Corday (Hist. Parl., vol. xxviii., p. 311, 338).]
[Footnote 399: After the death of Louis XVI. the Royalists considered the young Dauphin, then imprisoned in the tower, as the legitimate king, with the title of Louis XVII.]
[Footnote 400: Carrier was heard to say one day, while breakfasting in a restaurant, that France was too densely populated for a republic, and that it was necessary to kill off at least one third of the inhabitants before they could have a good government. It is estimated that fifteen thousand were massacred in La Vendée at his command.]
XXXIII. EXECUTION OF MARIE ANTOINETTE AND MADAME ELIZABETH
Marie Antoinette in the Temple.--Conspiracies for the Rescue of the Royal Family.--The young Dauphin torn from his Mother.--Phrensy of the Queen.--She is removed to the Conciergerie.--Indignities and Woes.--The Queen led to Trial.--Letter to her Sister.--The Execution of the Queen.--Madame Elizabeth led to Trial and Execution.--Fate of the Princess and the Dauphin.
The populace now demanded the head of Marie Antoinette, whom they had long been taught implacably to hate.[401] We left her on the 21st of January in the Temple, overwhelmed with agony. Swoon succeeded swoon as she listened to the clamor in the streets which accompanied her husband to the guillotine. The rumbling of the cannon, on their return, and the shouts of Vive la République beneath her windows announced that the tragedy was terminated. The Commune cruelly refused to allow her any details of the last hours of the king, and even Clery, his faithful servant, was imprisoned, so that he could not even place in her hands the lock of hair and the marriage ring which the king had intrusted to him.
Many conspiracies were formed for the rescue of the royal family, which led to a constant increase of the rigors of their captivity. The queen refused to resume her walks in the garden as she could not endure to pass the door of the king's apartment. But, after long seclusion, for the sake of the health of her children she consented to walk with them each day, for a few moments, on the platform of the tower. The Commune immediately ordered the platform to be surrounded with high boards, so that the captives might not receive any tokens of recognition from their friends.
For four months Marie Antoinette, Madame Elizabeth, and the children had the consolation of condoling with each other in their misery. But on the night of the 4th of July the clatter of an armed band was heard ascending the tower, and some commissioners tumultuously entered her chamber. They read to her a decree announcing that her son, the dauphin, was to be taken from her and imprisoned by himself. The poor child, as he listened to the reading of this cruel edict, was frantic with terror. He threw himself into his mother's arms and shrieked out,
"Oh! mother, mother, do not abandon me to those men. They will kill me as they did papa."
The queen, in a delirium of agony, grasped her child and placing him upon the bed behind her, with eyes glaring like a tigress, bade defiance to the officers, declaring that they should tear her in pieces before they should take her boy. Even the officers were overcome by her heart-rending grief, and for two hours refrained from taking the child by violence. The exhausted mother at length fell in a swoon, and the child was taken, shrieking with terror, from the room. She never saw her son again.
A few weeks of woe passed slowly away, when, early in August, she was awakened from her sleep just after midnight by a band of armed men who came to convey her to the prison of the Conciergerie, where she was to await her trial. The queen had already drained the cup of misery to the dregs, and nothing could add to her woe. She rose, in the stupor of despair, and began to dress herself in the presence of the officers. Her daughter and Madame Elizabeth threw themselves at the feet of the men, and implored them not to take the queen from them. They might as well have plead with the granite blocks of their prison.
Pressing her daughter for a moment convulsively to her heart, she covered her with kisses, spoke a few words of impassioned tenderness to her sister, and then, as if fearing to cast a last look upon these objects of her affection, hurried from the room. In leaving she struck her forehead against the beam of the low door.
"Did you hurt yourself?" inquired one of the men.
"Oh no!" was her reply, "nothing now can farther harm me."
A carriage was waiting for her at the door. Escorted by gens d'armes she was conducted, through the gloom of midnight, to the dungeon where she was to await her condemnation.
The world-renowned prison of the Conciergerie consists of a series of subterranean dungeons beneath the floor of the Palais de Justice. More gloomy tombs the imagination can hardly conceive. Down the dripping and slimy steps the queen was led, by the light of a tallow candle, until, through a labyrinth of corridors, she approached the iron door of her dungeon. The rusty hinges grated as the door was opened, and she was thrust in. Two soldiers accompanied her, with drawn swords, and who were commanded, in defiance of all the instincts of delicacy, not to allow her to be one moment absent from their sight. The one candle gave just light enough to reveal the horrors of her cell. The floor was covered with mud, and streams of water trickled down the stone walls. A miserable pallet, with a dirty covering of coarse and tattered cloth, a small pine table, and a chair constituted the only furniture. So deep was the fall from the saloons of Versailles.
Here the queen remained for two months, her misery being slightly alleviated by the kind-heartedness of Madame Richard, the wife of the jailer, who did every thing the rigorous rules would admit to mitigate her woes. With her own hand she prepared food for the queen, obtained for her a few articles of furniture, and communicated to her daily such intelligence as she could obtain of her sister and her children. The friends of the queen were untiring in their endeavors, by some conspiracy, to effect her release. A gentleman obtained admittance to the queen's cell, and presented her with a rose, containing a note hidden among its petals. One of the gens d'armes detected the attempt; and the jailer and his wife, for their suspected connivance, were both arrested and thrown into the dungeons.
Other jailers were provided for the prison, M. and Madame Bault; but they also had humane hearts, and wept over the woes of Marie Antoinette. The queen's wardrobe consisted only of two robes, one white, one black, and three chemises. From the humidity of her cell these rapidly decayed, with her shoes and stockings, and fell into tatters. Madame Bault was permitted to assist the queen in mending these, but was not allowed to furnish any new apparel. Books and writing materials were also prohibited. With the point of her needle she kept a brief memorandum of events on the stucco of her walls, and also inscribed brief lines of poetry and sentences from Scripture.
On the 14th of October the queen was conducted from her dungeon to the halls above for trial. Surrounded by a strong escort, she was led to the bench of the accused. Her accusation was that she abhorred the Revolution which had beheaded her husband and plunged her whole family into unutterable woe.
The queen was dressed in the garb of extreme poverty. Grief had whitened her hair, and it was fast falling from her head. Her eyes were sunken, and her features wan and wasted with woe.
"What is your name?" inquired one of the judges.
"I am called Marie Antoinette of Lorraine, in Austria," answered the queen.
"What is your condition?" was the next question.
"I am widow of Louis, formerly King of the French," was the reply.
"What is your age?"
"Thirty-seven."
The long act of accusation was then read. Among other charges was the atrocious one of attempting, by depravity and debauchery, to corrupt her own son, "with the intention of enervating the soul and body of that child, and of reigning, in his name, over the ruin of his understanding."
The queen recoiled from this charge with a gesture of horror, and, when asked why she did not reply to the accusation, she said,
"I have not answered it because there are accusations to which nature refuses to reply. I appeal to all mothers if such a crime be possible."
The trial continued for two days. When all the accusations had been heard, the queen was asked if she had any thing to say. She replied,
"I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains. Take it; but do not make me suffer long."
At four o'clock on the morning of the 16th she listened to her sentence condemning her to die. In the dignity of silence, and without the tremor of a muscle, she accepted her doom. As she was led from the court-room to her dungeon, to prepare for her execution, the brutal populace, with stampings and clappings, applauded the sentence. Being indulged with pen and paper in these last hours, she wrote as follows to her sister:
"October 16th, half past four in the morning.
"I write you, my sister, for the last time. I have been condemned, not to an ignominious death--that only awaits criminals--but to go and rejoin your brother. Innocent as he, I hope to show the same firmness as he did in these last moments. I grieve bitterly at leaving my poor children; you know that I existed but for them and you--you who have, by your friendship, sacrificed all to be with us. In what a position do I leave you. I have learned, by the pleadings on my trial, that my daughter was separated from you. Alas! my poor child. I dare not write to her. She could not receive my letter. I know not even if this may reach you. Receive my blessing for both.
"I hope one day, when they are older, they may rejoin you and rejoice in liberty at your tender care. May their friendship and mutual confidence form their happiness. May my daughter feel that, at her age, she ought always to aid her brother with that advice with which the greater experience she possesses and her friendship should inspire her. May my son, on his part, render to his sister every care and service which affection can dictate. Let my son never forget the last words of his father. I repeat them to him expressly. Let him never attempt to avenge our death."
Having finished the letter, which was long, she folded it and kissed it repeatedly, "as if she could thus transmit the warmth of her lips and the moisture of her tears to her children." She then threw herself upon the pallet and slept quietly for two or three hours. A few rays of morning light were now struggling in through the grated bars of the window. The daughter of Madame Bault came in to dress her for the guillotine. She put on her white robe. A white handkerchief covered her shoulders, and a white cap, bound around her temples by a black ribbon, covered her hair.
It was a cold autumnal morning, and a chill fog filled the streets of Paris. At eleven o'clock the executioners led her from her cell. She cordially embraced the kind-hearted daughter of the concierge, and, having with her own hands cut off her hair, allowed herself to be bound, without a murmur, and issued from the steps of the Conciergerie. Instead of a carriage, the coarse car of the condemned awaited her at the gateway of the prison. For a moment she recoiled from this unanticipated humiliation, but immediately recovering herself she ascended the cart. There was no seat in the car, and, as her hands were bound behind her, she was unable to support herself from the jolting over the pavement. As she was jostled rudely to and fro, in the vain attempt to preserve her equilibrium, the multitudes thronging the streets shouted in derision. They had been taught to hate her, to regard her not only as the implacable foe of popular liberty, which she was, but as the most infamous of women, which she was not. "These," they cried, "are not your cushions of Trianon."
It was a long ride to the scaffold, during which the queen suffered all that insult, derision, and contumely can inflict. The procession crossed the Seine by the Pont au Change, and traversed the Rue St. Honoré. Upon reaching the Place of the Revolution the cart stopped for a moment near the entrance of the garden of the Tuileries. Marie Antoinette for a few moments contemplated in silence those scenes of former happiness and grandeur. A few more revolutions of the wheels placed her at the foot of the guillotine. She mounted to the scaffold, and inadvertently trod upon the foot of the executioner.
"Pardon me," said the queen, with as much courtesy as if she had been in one of the saloons of Versailles. Kneeling, she uttered a brief prayer, and then, turning her eyes to the distant towers of the Temple, she said,
"Adieu, once again, my children; I go to rejoin your father."
She was bound to the plank, and as it sank to its place the gleaming axe slid through the groove, and the head of the queen fell into the basket. The executioner seized the gory trophy by the hair, and, walking around the scaffold, exhibited it to the crowd. One long cry of Vive la République! arose, and the crowd dispersed.
While these fearful scenes were passing, Madame Elizabeth and the princess remained in the tower of the Temple. Their jailers were commanded to give them no information whatever. The young dauphin was imprisoned by himself.
Six months of gloom and anguish which no pen can describe passed away, when, on the night of the 9th of May, 1794, as Madame Elizabeth and the young princess, Maria Theresa, were retiring to bed, a band of armed men, with lanterns, broke into their room, and said to Madame Elizabeth,
"You must immediately go with us."
"And my niece?" anxiously inquired the meek and pious aunt, ever forgetful of self in her solicitude for others. "Can she go too?"
"We want you only now. We will take care of her by-and-by," was the unfeeling answer.
The saint-like Madame Elizabeth saw that the long-dreaded hour of separation had come, and that her tender niece was to be left, unprotected and alone, exposed to the brutality of her jailers. She pressed Maria Theresa to her bosom, and wept in uncontrollable grief. But still, endeavoring to comfort the heart-stricken child, she said,
"I shall probably soon return again, my dear Maria."
"No, you won't, citoyenne," rudely interrupted one of the officers. "You will never ascend these stairs again. So take your bonnet, and come down."
The soldiers seized her, led her down the stairs, and thrust her into a carriage. It was midnight. Driving violently through the streets, they soon reached the gateway of the Conciergerie. The Revolutionary Tribunal was, even at that hour, in session. The princess was dragged immediately to their bar. With twenty-four others of all ages and both sexes, she was condemned to die. Her crime was that she was sister of the king, and in heart hostile to the Revolution. She was led to one of the dungeons to be dressed for the scaffold. In this hour Christian faith was triumphant. Trusting in God, all her sorrows vanished, and her soul was in perfect peace.
With her twenty-two companions, all of noble birth, she was placed in the cart of the condemned, her hands bound behind her, and conducted to the guillotine. Madame Elizabeth was reserved to the last. One by one her companions were led up the scaffold before her, and she saw their heads drop into the basket. She then peacefully placed her head upon the pillow of death, and passed away, one of the purest and yet most suffering of earthly spirits, to the bosom of her God.
The young dauphin lingered for eighteen months in his cell, suffering inconceivable cruelties from his jailer, a wretch by the name of Simon, until he died on the 9th of June, 1795, in the tenth year of his age. Maria Theresa now alone remained of the family of Louis XVI. She had now been in prison more than two years. At length, so much sympathy was excited in behalf of this suffering child, that the Assembly consented to exchange her with the Austrian government for four French officers.
On the 19th of December, 1795, she was led from the Temple, and, ample arrangements having been made for her journey, she was conducted, with every mark of respect and sympathy, to the frontiers. In the Austrian court, love and admiration encircled her. But this stricken child of grief had received wounds which time could never entirely heal. A full year passed before a smile could ever be won to visit her cheek. She subsequently married her cousin, the Duke of Angoulême, son of Charles X. With the return of the Bourbons she returned to her ancestral halls of the Tuileries and Versailles. But upon the second expulsion of the Bourbons she fled with them, and died, a few years ago, at an advanced age, universally respected. Such was the wreck of the royal family of France by the storm of revolution.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 401: Thomas Jefferson, during his residence in Paris, formed a very unfavorable opinion of Marie Antoinette. Speaking of the good intentions of Louis XVI., he says, "But he had a queen of absolute sway over his weak mind and timid virtue, and of a character the reverse of his in all points. This angel, as gaudily painted in the rhapsodies of Burke with some smartness of fancy but no sound sense, was proud, disdainful of restraint, indignant at all obstacles to her will, eager in pursuit of pleasure, and firm enough to hold to her desires or perish in their wreck. Her inordinate gamblings and dissipations, with those of the Count d'Artois and others of her clique, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness and dauntless spirit led herself to the guillotine, drew the king on with her, and plunged the world into crimes and calamities which will for ever stain the pages of modern history. I have ever believed that had there been no queen there would have been no revolution. The king would have gone hand in hand with the wisdom of his sounder counselors, who, guided by the increased lights of the age, wished only, with the same pace, to advance the principles of their social Constitution. The deed which closed the mortal course of these sovereigns I shall neither approve nor condemn."--Life of Jefferson, by Randall, vol i., p. 533.
As Jefferson was intimate with La Fayette and other prominent popular leaders, it is evident that these views were those which were generally entertained of the queen at that time. It is deeply to be regretted that no subsequent developments can lead one to doubt that they were essentially correct. While we weep over the woes of the queen we must not forget that she was endeavoring with all her energy to rivet the chains of unlimited despotism upon twenty-five millions of people.]
XXXIV. THE JACOBINS TRIUMPHANT
Views of the Girondists.--Anecdote of Vergniaud.--The Girondists brought to Trial.--Suicide of Valazé.--Anguish of Desmoulins.--Fonfrede and Ducos.--Last Supper of the Girondists.--Their Execution.--The Duke of Orleans; his Execution.--Activity of the Guillotine.--Humane Legislation.--Testimony of Desodoards.--Anacharsis Cloots.--The New Era.
The Jacobins now resolved to free themselves from all internal foes, that they might more vigorously cope with all Europe in arms against them. Marie Antoinette was executed the 16th of October. On the 22d, the Girondists, twenty-two in number, were brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. They were the most illustrious men of the most noble party to which the Revolution had given birth. They had demolished a despotic throne that they might establish a constitutional monarchy upon the model of that of England.[402] With great generosity they had placed Louis XVI. on that throne, and he had feigned to accept the Constitution. But with hypocrisy which even his subsequent woes can not obliterate, he secretly rallied his nobles around him, or rather allowed them to use him as their leader, and appealed to the armies of foreign despotisms to overthrow the free Constitution and re-establish the old feudal tyranny.
"The question thenceforth was, whether their sons should, as in times past (as in Mr. Burke's splendid Age of Chivalry), be sent to manure Europe with their bodies, in wars undertaken at the nod of a courtesan--whether their wives and daughters, cursed with beauty enough to excite a transient emotion of sensuality, should be lured and torn from them and debauched--whether every man who dared to utter a manly political thought or to assert his rights against rank should be imprisoned at pleasure without a hearing--whether the toiling masses, for the purpose of supporting lascivious splendor, of building Parcs aux Cerfs, of pensioning discarded mistresses, of swiftly enriching corrupt favorites and minions of every stamp, should be so taxed that the light and air of heaven hardly came to them untaxed, and that they should be so sunk by exactions of every kind in the dregs of indigence that a short crop compelled them to live on food that the hounds, if not the swine, of their task-masters would reject; and, finally, whether, when, in the bloody sweat of their agony, they asked some mitigation of their hard fate, they should be answered by the bayonets of foreign mercenaries; and a people--stout manhood, gentle womanhood, gray-haired age, and tender infancy, turned their pale faces upward and shrieked for food, fierce, licentious nobles should scornfully bid them eat grass."[403]
In this terrible dilemma, the Girondists felt compelled to abandon the newly-established Constitutional monarchy, which had proved treacherous to its trust, and to fall back upon a republic, as their only asylum from destruction, and as the only possible refuge for French liberty. But the populace of France, ignorant and irreligious, were unfitted for a republic. Universal suffrage threw the power into the hands of millions of newly-emancipated slaves. Violence and blood commenced their reign. The Girondists in vain endeavored to stem the flood. They were overwhelmed. Such is their brief history.
The Girondists had been for some time confined in the dungeons of the Conciergerie. They were in a state of extreme misery. Vergniaud, one of the most noble and eloquent of men, was their recognized leader. His brother-in-law, M. Alluaud, came to the prison to bring him some money. A child of M. Alluaud, ten years of age, accompanied his father. Seeing his uncle with sunken eyes and haggard cheeks and disordered hair, and with his garments falling in tatters around him, the child was terrified, and, bursting into tears, clung to his father's knees.
"My child," said Vergniaud, taking him in his lap, "look well at me. When you are a man you can say that you saw Vergniaud, the founder of the Republic, at the most glorious period, and in the most splendid costume he ever wore--that in which he suffered the persecution of wretches, and in which he prepared to die for liberty."
The child remembered these words, and repeated them fifty years after to Lamartine. At ten o'clock in the morning of the 26th of October the accused were brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Two files of gens d'armes conducted them into the hall of audience and placed them on the prisoners' bench.[404] The act of accusation, drawn up by Robespierre and St. Just,[405] from an exceedingly envenomed pamphlet written by Camille Desmoulins, entitled History of the Faction of the Gironde, was long and bitter. The trial lasted several days.
On the 30th of October, at eight o'clock in the evening, the debate was closed. At midnight they were summoned to the bar to hear the verdict of the jury. It declared them all guilty of treason, and condemned them to die in the morning. One of the condemned, Valazé, immediately plunged a concealed poniard into his heart, and fell dead upon the floor. Camille Desmoulins, on hearing the verdict, was overwhelmed with remorse, and cried out,
"It is my pamphlet which has killed them. Wretch that I am, I can not bear the sight of my work. I feel their blood fall on the hand that has denounced them."
There were two brothers, Fonfrede and Ducos, among the condemned, sitting side by side, both under twenty-eight years of age. Fonfrede threw his arms around the neck of Ducos, and bursting into tears said,
"My dear brother, I cause your death; but we shall die together."
Vergniaud sat in silence, with an expression of proud defiance and contempt. Lasource repeated the sententious saying of one of the ancients, "I die on the day when the people have lost their reason. You will die when they have recovered it." As they left the court to return to their cells, there to prepare for the guillotine, they spontaneously struck up together the hymn of the Marseillais:
"Allons, enfans de la patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé; Contre nous de la tyrannie L'étendard sanglant est levé."[406]
As they passed along the corridors of the prison, their sublime requiem echoed along the gloomy vaults, and awoke the sleepers in the deepest dungeons. They were all placed in one large room opening into several cells. The lifeless body of Valazé was deposited in one of the corners; for, by a decree of the Tribunal, his remains were to be taken in the cart of the condemned to be beheaded with the rest. A sumptuous banquet was sent in to them by their friends as their last repast. The table was richly spread, decorated with flowers, and supplied with all the delicacies which Paris could furnish. A Constitutional priest, the Abbé Lambert, a friend of the Girondists, had obtained admission to the prison, to administer to them the last supports of religion and to accompany them to the guillotine. To him we are indebted for the record of these last scenes.
Vergniaud, thirty-five years of age, presided. He had but little to bind him to life, having neither father nor mother, wife nor child. In quietness and with subdued tones they partook of their repast. When the cloth was removed, and the flowers and the wine alone remained, the conversation became more animated. The young men attempted with songs and affected gayety to disarm death of its terror; but Vergniaud, rallying to his aid his marvelous eloquence, endeavored to recall them to more worthy thoughts.
"My friends," said he, sorrowing more over the misfortunes of the Republic than over his own, "we have killed the tree by pruning it. It was too aged. The soil is too weak to nourish the roots of civic, liberty. This people is too childish to wield its laws without hurting itself. It will return to its kings as babes return to their toys. We were deceived as to the age in which we were born and in which we die for the freedom of the world."
"What shall we be doing to-morrow at this time?" asked Ducos. Each answered according to his skepticism or his faith. Vergniaud again spake. "Never," says the Abbé Lambert, "had his look, his gesture, his language, and his voice more profoundly affected his hearers." His discourse was of the immortality of the soul, to which all listened deeply moved, and many wept.
A few rays of morning light now began to struggle in at their dungeon windows. The executioners soon entered to cut off their hair and robe them for the scaffold. At ten o'clock they were marched in a column to the gate of the prison, where carts, surrounded by an immense crowd, awaited them. As they entered the carts they all commenced singing in chorus the Marseilles Hymn, and continued the impassioned strains until they reached the scaffold. One after another they ascended the scaffold. Sillery was the first who ascended. He was bound to the plank, but continued in a full, strong voice to join in the song, till the glittering axe glided down the groove and his head dropped into the basket. Each one followed his example. The song grew fainter as head after head fell, till at last one voice only remained. It was that of Vergniaud. As he was bound to the plank he commenced anew the strain,
"Allons, enfans de la patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé."
The axe fell, and the lips of Vergniaud were silent in death. In thirty-one minutes the executioner had beheaded them all. Their bodies were thrown into one cart, and were cast into a grave by the side of that of Louis XVI.[407]
On the 6th of November the Duke of Orleans was taken from prison and led before the Tribunal. As there was no serious charge to be brought against him, he had not apprehended condemnation. But he was promptly doomed to die. As he was conducted back to his cell to prepare for immediate death, he exclaimed, in the utmost excitement of indignation,
"The wretches! I have given them all--rank, fortune, ambition, honor, the future reputation of my house--and this is the recompense they reserve for me!"
At three o'clock he was placed in the cart with three other condemned prisoners. The prince was elegantly attired and all eyes were riveted upon him. With an air of indifference he gazed upon the crowd, saying nothing which could reveal the character of his thoughts. On mounting the scaffold the executioner wished to draw off his boots.
"No, no," said the duke, "you will do it more easily afterward."
He looked intently for a moment at the keen-edged axe, and, without a word, submitted to his fate. Madame Roland and others of the most illustrious of the friends of freedom and of France soon followed to the scaffold. And now every day the guillotine was active as the efficient agent of government, extinguishing all opposition and silencing every murmur. The prisons were full, new arrests were every day made, and dismay paralyzed all hearts. Four thousand six hundred in the prisons of Paris alone were awaiting that trial which almost surely led to condemnation.
The Jacobin leaders, trembling before Europe in arms, felt that there was no safety for France but in the annihilation of all internal foes. Danton, Marat, Robespierre, were not men who loved blood and cruelty; they were resolute fanatics who believed it to be well to cut off the heads of many thousand reputed aristocrats, that a nation of thirty millions might enjoy popular liberty. While the Revolutionary Tribunal was thus mercilessly plying the axe of the executioner, the National Convention, where these Jacobins reigned supreme, were enacting many laws which breathed the spirit of liberty and humanity. The taxes were equally distributed in proportion to property. Provision was made for the poor and infirm. All orphans were adopted by the Republic. Liberty of conscience was proclaimed. Slavery and the slave-trade were indignantly abolished. Measures were adopted for a general system of popular instruction, and decisive efforts were made to unite the rich and the poor in bonds of sympathy and alliance.[408]
We can not give a better account of the state of Paris at this time than in the words of Desodoards, a calm philosophic writer, who had ardently espoused the cause of the Revolution, and who consequently will not be suspected of exaggeration.
"What then," says he, "was this Revolutionary government? Every right, civil and political, was destroyed. Liberty of the press and of thought was at an end. The whole people were divided into two classes, the privileged and the proscribed. Property was wantonly violated, lettres de cachet re-established, the asylum of dwellings exposed to the most tyrannical inquisition, and justice stripped of every appearance of humanity and honor. France was covered with prisons; all the excesses of anarchy and despotism struggling amid a confused multitude of committees; terror in every heart; the scaffold devouring a hundred every day, and threatening to devour a still greater number; in every house melancholy and mourning, and in every street the silence of the tomb.
"War was waged against the tenderest emotions of nature. Was a tear shed over the tomb of father, wife, or friend, it was, according to these Jacobins, a robbery of the Republic. Not to rejoice when the Jacobins rejoiced was treason to freedom. All the mob of low officers of justice, some of whom could scarcely read, sported with the lives of men without the slightest shame or remorse. Often an act of accusation was served upon one person which was intended for another. The officer only changed the name on perceiving his error, and often did not change it. Mistakes of the most inconceivable nature were made with impunity. The Duchess of Biron was judged by an act drawn up against her agent. A young man of twenty was guillotined for having, as it was alleged, a son bearing arms against France. A lad of sixteen, by the name of Mallet, was arrested under an indictment for a man of forty, named Bellay.
"'What is your age?' inquired the president, looking at him with some surprise.
"'Sixteen,' replied the youth.
"'Well, you are quite forty in crime,' said the magistrate; 'take him to the guillotine.'
"From every corner of France victims were brought in carts to the Conciergerie. This prison was emptied every day by the guillotine, and refilled from other prisons. These removals were made in the dark, lest public sympathy should be excited. Fifty or sixty poor creatures, strait bound, conducted by men of ferocious aspect, a drawn sabre in one hand and a lighted torch in the other, passed in this manner through the silence of night. The passenger who chanced to meet them had to smother his pity. A sigh would have united him to the funeral train.
"The prisons were the abode of every species of suffering. The despair which reigned in these sepulchres was terrific: one finished his existence by poison; another dispatched himself by a nail; another dashed his head against the walls of his cell; some lost their reason. Those who had sufficient fortitude waited patiently for the executioner. Every house of arrest was required to furnish a certain number of victims. The turnkeys went with these mandates of accusation from chamber to chamber in the dead of night. The prisoners, starting from their sleep at the voice of their Cerberuses, supposed their end had arrived. Thus warrants of death for thirty threw hundreds into consternation.[409]
"At first the sheriffs ranged fifteen at a time in their carts, then thirty, and about the time of the fall of Robespierre preparations had been made for the execution of one hundred and fifty at a time. An aqueduct had been contrived to carry off the blood. In these batches, as they were called, were often united people of the most opposite systems and habits. Sometimes whole generations were destroyed in a day. Malesherbes, at the age of eighty, perished with his sister, his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandson, and his granddaughter. Forty young women were brought to the guillotine for having danced at a ball given by the King of Prussia at Verdun. Twenty-two peasant women, whose husbands had been executed in La Vendée, were beheaded."
Such was the thraldom from which, at last, the empire of Napoleon rescued France. Nothing less than the strength of his powerful arm could have wrought out the achievement.
In the midst of such scenes it is not strange that all respect should have been renounced for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Jacobins of Paris crowded the Convention, demanding the abjuration of all forms of religion and all modes of worship. They governed the Convention with despotic sway. The Commune of Paris, invested with the local police of the city, passed laws prohibiting the clergy from exercising religious worship outside the churches. None but friends and relatives were to be allowed to follow the remains of the dead to the grave. All religious symbols were ordered to be effaced from the cemeteries, and to be replaced by a statue of Sleep. The following ravings of Anacharsis Cloots, a wealthy Prussian baron, who styled himself the orator of the human race, and who was one of the most conspicuous of the Jacobin agitators, forcibly exhibits the spirit of the times:[410]
"Paris, the metropolis of the globe, is the proper post for the orator of the human race. I have not left Paris since 1789. It was then that I redoubled my zeal against the pretended sovereigns of earth and heaven. I boldly preached that there is no other god but Nature, no other sovereign but the human race--the people-god. The people is sufficient for itself. Nature kneels not before herself. Religion is the only obstacle to universal happiness. It is high time to destroy it."
The popular current in Paris now set very strongly against all religion. Infidel and atheistic principles were loudly proclaimed. The unlettered populace, whose faith was but superstition, were easily swept along by the current. The Convention made a feeble resistance, but soon yielded to the general impulse. In the different sections of Paris, gatherings of the populace abjured all religion. The fanaticism spread like wild-fire to the distant departments. The churches were stripped of their baptismal plate and other treasures, and the plunder was sent to the Convention. Processions paraded the streets, singing, derisively, Hallelujahs, and profaning with sacrilegious caricature all the ceremonies of religion. The sacrament of the Lord's Supper was administered to an ass.
The Convention had appointed a committee of twelve men, called the Committee of Public Safety, and invested them with dictatorial power. The whole revolutionary power was now lodged in their hands. They appointed such sub-committees as they pleased, and governed France with terrific energy. The Revolutionary Tribunal was but one of their committees. In all the departments they established their agencies. The Convention itself became powerless before this appalling despotism. This dictatorship was energetically supported by the mob of Paris; and the city government of Paris was composed of the most violent Jacobins, who were in perfect fraternity with the Committee of Public Safety. St. Just, who proposed in the Convention the establishment of this dictatorship, said,
"You must no longer show any lenity to the enemies of the new order of things. Liberty must triumph at any cost. In the present circumstances of the Republic the Constitution can not be established; it would guarantee impunity to attacks on our liberty, because it would be deficient in the violence necessary to restrain them."
This Committee, overawing the Convention, constrained the establishment of a new era. To obliterate the Sabbath, they divided the year into twelve months of thirty days each, each month to consist of three weeks of ten days each. The tenth day was devoted to festivals. The five surplus days were placed at the end of the year, and were consecrated to games and rejoicing. Thus energetically were measures adopted to obliterate entirely all traces of the Sabbath. There were thousands in France who looked upon these measures with unutterable disgust, but they were overwhelmed by the powers of anarchy. Anxiously they waited for a deliverer. In Napoleon they found one, who was alike the foe of the despotism of the Bourbons and the despotism of the mob.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 402: La Fayette was an illustrious member of this party. Even Jefferson advised to make the English Constitution the model for France. He was present at the opening of the Assembly of Notables, and soon after wrote to La Fayette, "Keeping the good model of your neighboring country before your eyes, you may get on step by step toward a good Constitution. Though that model is not perfect, yet, as it would unite more suffrages than any new one which could be proposed, it is better to make that the object."--Life of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry S. Randall, vol. i., p. 406.]
[Footnote 403: Henry S. Randall, Life of Jefferson, vol. i., p. 529.]
[Footnote 404: "Never since the Knights Templar had a party appeared more numerous, more illustrious, or more eloquent. The renown of the accused, their long possession of power, their present danger, and that love of vengeance which arises in men's hearts at the spectacle of mighty reverses of fortune, had collected a crowd in the precincts of the Revolutionary Tribunal. A strong armed force surrounded the gates of the Conciergerie and the Palais de Justice. The cannon, the uniforms, the sentinels, the gens d'armes, the naked sabres, all announced one of those political crises in which a trial is a battle and justice an execution."--Hist. Gir., Lamartine, vol. ii., p. 169.]
[Footnote 405: Such is the statement of Lamartine. Thiers, however, says that the act was drawn up by Amar, a barrister of Grenoble.]
[Footnote 406:
"Come, children of your country, come, The day of glory dawns on high, And tyranny has wide unfurl'd Her blood-stained banner in the sky."]
[Footnote 407: Edmund Burke has most unpardonably calumniated these noble men. Even Prof. Smyth, who espouses his opinions, says, "Burke was a man who, from the ardor of his temperament and the vehemence of his eloquence, might be almost said to have ruined every cause and every party that he espoused. No mind, however great, that will not bow to the superiority of his genius; yet no mind, however inferior, that will not occasionally feel itself entitled to look down upon him, from the total want which he sometimes shows of all calmness and candor, and even, at particular moments, of all reasonableness and propriety of thought."--Lectures on the French Revolution, by Wm. Smyth, vol. iii., p. 4.]
[Footnote 408: History of the Girondists, Lamartine, vol. iii., p. 291.]
[Footnote 409: "There were in the prisons of Paris on the 1st of September, 1793, 597; October 1, 2400; November 1, 3203; December 1, 4130; and in six months after, 11,400."--Hist. Phil. de la Rev. de France, par Ant. Fantin Desodoards.]
[Footnote 410: Cloots declared himself "the personal enemy of Jesus Christ." France adopted the atheistic principles of Cloots, and sent him to the guillotine. See article Cloots, Enc. Am.]