The carts were full of men and women who had just been slaughtered and whose limbs were still flexible because they had not had time to grow cold, so that legs and arms and heads nodded and dangled on either side of the carts [wrote a working girl, Marie-Victoire Monnard, who watched them being dragged away]…I can still remember those drunken men and remember in particular one very skinny one, very pale with a sharp pointed nose. The monster went to speak to another man and said, ‘Do you see that rotten old priest on the pile over there?’ He then went and hauled the priest to his feet, but the body, still warm, could not stand up straight. The drunken man held it up, hitting it across the face and shouting, ‘I had enough trouble killing the old brute.’
Equally revolting scenes were enacted elsewhere; and, while some stories can be attributed to the propaganda of the Revolution’s enemies, others no less horrifying appear to be well attested. Men were reported by reliable witnesses to have been seen drinking, eating and smoking amidst the carnage, using for tables and chairs the naked bodies of their victims whose clothes had been removed as one of the recognized perquisites of the assassins.
‘They were out of breath,’ one observer reported, ‘and they asked for wine to drink: “Wine or death!” The Civil Commissioner of the section gave them vouchers for twenty-four pints addressed to a neighbouring wine merchant. These they soon drank, and contemplated with drunken satisfaction the corpses scattered in the court.’
‘Do you want to see the heart of an aristocrat?’ asked one assassin, opening up a corpse, tearing out the heart, squeezing some blood into a glass, drinking part, and offering the rest to those who would drink with him. ‘Drink this, if you want to save your father’s life,’ commanded another, handing a pot of ‘aristocrats’ blood’ to the daughter of a former Governor of the Invalides. She put it to her lips so that her father could be spared. Women were said to have drawn up benches to watch the murders in comfort and to have cheered and clapped as at a cock fight.
Another witness, a lawyer, saw ‘a group of butchers, tired out and no longer able to lift their arms’, drinking brandy with which gunpowder had been mixed ‘to aggravate their fury’. They were ‘sitting in a circle round the corpses’. ‘A woman with a basket full of bread rolls came past. They took them from her and soaked each piece in the blood of their quivering victims.’
The Queen’s emotional friend, the Princesse de Lamballe, who had been held in La Petite Force, was one of the most savagely treated victims. She had been stripped and raped; her breasts had been cut off; the rest of her body mutilated; and ‘exposed to the insults of the populace’. ‘In this state it remained more than two hours,’ one report records. ‘When any blood gushing from its wounds stained the skin, some men, placed there for the purpose, immediately washed it off, to make the spectators take more particular notice of its whiteness. I must not venture to describe the excesses of barbarity and lustful indecency with which this corpse was defiled. I shall only say that a cannon was charged with one of the legs.’ A man was later accused of having cut off her genitals which he impaled upon a pike and of having ripped out her heart which he ate ‘after having roasted it on a cooking-stove in a wineshop’. Her head was stuck on another pike and carried away to a nearby café where, placed upon a counter, the customers were asked to drink to the Princess’s death. It was then replaced upon the pike and, its blonde hair billowing around the neck, was paraded beneath the Queen’s window at the Temple. The head of the Comte de Montmorin, the King’s former Foreign Minister, was carried, similarly impaled, to the Assembly.
In all about 1,200 prisoners were massacred, almost half the entire prison population of Paris. Thirty-seven of them were women. Of the rest, less than a third were priests, nobles or political prisoners; most were ordinary criminals, thieves, vagrants and forgers. The assassins appear to have been relatively few in number, perhaps no more than 150 or 200 in all. Some were criminals themselves, but most appear to have been the kind of citizens, butchers, shopkeepers, artisans, gendarmes and young National Guardsmen from whom the radical sections drew their enthusiastic support. Many of them, returning to work when the massacres were over, seem to have considered that they had performed a necessary public service in saving the nation from its enemies, and that they were fully entitled to the payments of twenty-four livres which were made to them by agents, it was supposed, of the Commune. Such was the regard in which they were held, in fact, that men who claimed to be of their company displayed swords and axes, stained with blood, to groups of customers in their local wine-shops. Later, when septembriseur became an insulting rather than flattering epithet, these men excused themselves by explaining that they had dipped their weapons in butchers’ buckets and pretended to be assassins in order to make an impression upon their neighbours and girl-friends.
The authorities undoubtedly did little to prevent the massacres. Indeed, the septembriseurs were given some sort of sanction not only by Marat who advocated their actions but also by Jaen-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, a deputy-commissioner of the Commune, who made a tour of the prisons, encouraging the assassins by telling them, ‘You are slaying your enemies! You are doing your duty!’ And certainly, if not given active encouragement in their murders, the assassins were never forcefully ordered to put an end to them. When a party of them arrived at the Hôtel de Ville to tell the Mayor that they had ‘dispatched those rascals’ and to ask him what should be done with eighty more with whom they had not yet dealt, Pétion merely replied, ‘I am not the person to whom you should apply’, and then gave orders for wine to be offered them. Santerre, whose ambiguous orders to the National Guard were disregarded, was equally ineffective. So was the Assembly which did little more than make half-hearted attempts to limit the atrocities by sending various deputies to talk to the assassins. And after it was all over there were those, even among the moderates, who could find excuses for what had been done. Jean-Marie Roland, while admitting that the events were no doubt better hidden by a veil, added, ‘But I know that the People, terrible as its vengeance is, has yet tempered it with a kind of justice.’ Parisians as a whole were, perhaps, able to persuade themselves that, dreadful as the massacres were, they had been necessary.
Many of them were quite unaware that they were taking place, for in those days Parisians neither knew nor very much cared what was going on outside their own particular districts. And many of those who did discover what was happening seem to have been taken by surprise. One of these was Philippe Morice who was walking home from the theatre on the night of 2 September:
I had just reached the Rue de Seine when I noticed an unusual light and heard a great clamour which seemed to come from the direction of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite. I went up to a group of women gathered on the corner of the street and asked them what all the noise was about.
‘Where on earth does this bloke come from?’ one of the women asked, looking at her neighbour. ‘Do you mean to say you don’t know that they’re taking care of the goods in the prisons? Look! Look down mere in the gutter.’
The gutter ran with blood. They were butchering me poor creatures in me Abbaye. Their cries were mingled with the yells of the executioners, and the light which I had observed came from bonfires which the murderers had lit to illuminate their exploits.
Another man who heard the screams of the victims comforted his shocked wife in words quoted by Baron Thiébault: ‘This is a very terrible business. But they are our deadly enemies, and those who are delivering the country from them are saving your life and the lives of our dear children.’
Similar sentiments were expressed by a young apprentice sempstress:
Like everyone else, I was shaking with fear lest these royalists be allowed to escape from their prison and come and kill me because I had no holy pictures to show them…While shuddering with horror, we looked upon the action as almost justified; while it was going on, we went about our own affairs, just as on any ordinary day.
Such attitudes were encouraged by the Commune whic
h sent out to all the départements of France a letter which read:
The Commune of Paris takes the first opportunity of informing its brethren of all me départements that some of the fierce conspirators detained in its prisons have been put to death by the people, who regarded this act of justice as indispensable, in order to restrain by intimidation the thousands of traitors hidden within its walls at the moment when it was marching against me enemy. And we do not doubt that the whole nation, after thee long sequence of treachery which has brought it to the edge of the abyss, will be anxious to adopt this most necessary method of public security; and that all Frenchmen will exclaim, with the people of Paris, ‘We are marching against the foe, but we will not leave these brigands behind us to cut the throats of our children and of our wives.’
Among the signatories of this letter, which led to massacres in several provincial prisons, including those at Meaux and Rheims, was Marat who, unlike most others who put their names to it, never disclaimed responsibility for what had happened in Paris when it became politic to do so.
Danton’s attitude to the massacre, however, was, as usual, ambiguous. Madame Roland, who said that the Revolution had now become ‘hideous’ to her, alleged that Danton answered the protests of a humane prison inspector with the impatient outburst, ‘I don’t give a damn for the prisoners. Let them look after themselves as best they can.’ Later, according to the Duc de Chartres, he claimed to have actually been responsible for organizing the murders which were intended to put a river of blood between the ‘youth of Paris’ and the émigrés. ‘It often happens,’ he added ‘especially in time of revolution, that one has to applaud actions that one would not have wanted or dared to perform one’s self.’ As always with Danton, though, one cannot be sure. He was preoccupied with the defence of France against the foreign enemy and may well have lamented the murders but have been reluctant to jeopardize his influence over the sans-culottes by making what may well have proved futile attempts to prevent them. Certainly he helped to protect certain men, including Charles Lameth and Duport, whom the more uncompromising of his colleagues wished to arrest or execute. And certainly, also, this violent, passionate, impulsive but never sustainedly cruel man did his best to prevent prisoners in gaols outside Paris being brought to the capital as long as the massacres lasted.
Within a fortnight of the murder of the last of the prisoners, Danton’s anxieties about the French army were for the moment dispelled. For on 20 September 1792 at Valmy in the Argonne the well-trained Prussian army of Frederick William II, officered by veterans of the King’s uncle, Frederick the Great, had faltered, halted, then turned aside, demoralized by the French artillery of the old order and the massed forces of the new. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had witnessed the engagement through the thin patches of a drifting mist and afterwards recorded how ‘the greatest consternation’ had spread throughout the German army:
In the morning we had been talking of roasting and eating the French…Now people avoided each other’s eyes and the only words uttered were curses. In the garnering darkness we sat in a circle. We did not even have a fire as we usually had. Almost everyone remained silent…then someone asked me what I thought of the events of the day…So I simply said, ‘At this place, on this day there has begun a new era in the history of the world; and you can all claim to Lave been present at its birth.’
‘You’ll see how these little cocks will strut now,’ wrote one dispirited Prussian after this devastating cannonade at Valmy. ‘We have lost more than a battle.’
While the French cannon were thundering at Valmy, the newly elected members of the National Convention assembled in the Manège in Paris. The delegates from the provinces, where, though the suffrage had been widened, voting had not been heavy, were for the most part the same kind of men who had been elected to previous assemblies. Among them were one or two workers; there were also a few former nobles, including the Duc d’Orléans who now chose to call himself Philippe Egalité, and nearly fifty clergy; but most of them were from middle-class backgrounds, lawyers as before predominating. They were inclined to support the Girondins and to deplore the septembriseurs.
In Paris, however, where the electoral assembly had been moved to the premises of the Jacobin Club, the mood of the electorate was more ardently revolutionary and care was taken to ensure that as many conservatives as possible were prevented from voting. All who had joined the Feuillant Club, for example, were deprived of the franchise, as were those who had inscribed their names upon the long petition that had been drawn up in June in protest against the invasion of the Tuileries. The result was that every Parisian candidate elected, with one single exception, was a supporter of the Jacobins.
The revolutionary atmosphere in Paris was maintained by admonitory posters and placards pasted to the walls of streets and squares, several of whose names had been changed in celebration of the death of the ancien régime; by the spread of tutoiement in conversation and the gradual abandonment of Monsieur in favour of Citoyen; by the professional classes’ widespread rejection of the elaborate clothes and powdered hair of the ancien régime for the simple carelessness of the artisan; by their disinclination to raise their hats in greeting any more and by their wives’ unwillingness to be seen wearing jewellery or using a fan which did not depict some hero or heroic event of the Revolution; by the choice of Christian names for babies which would reflect the radical nature of the age into which they had been born; and by the repudiation of surnames that carried with them regrettable echoes of the past.
One of the first acts of the Convention was to declare the monarchy abolished. This was followed by a decree that 22 September 1792 marked the beginning of Year I of the French Republic. But it soon became clear that the Convention would agree harmoniously on little else. The Girondins lost no time in mounting violent and repeated attacks on the Jacobins who, occupying the highest seats in the hall, became known as Montagnards or the Mountain. The Montagnards, deeply suspicious of the Girondins whom they believed capable of any political alliance to maintain their powerful but not impregnable position in the Convention and their control over the ministerial posts, responded no less abusively. Between them the independent members of what became known as the Plain sat, for much of the time, in brooding silence, watching and waiting.
The Girondins might well have maintained their supremacy had they taken more care to cultivate the Plain, had they not emphasized the political gulf that now separated Paris from the provinces, and had they not endeavoured to discredit the capital and its Commune in the eyes of the rest of the country. But, as it was, the Girondins succeeded only in alienating the Parisians when they might have profited by the revulsion that so many of them felt against the September Massacres – for which Vergniaud unreservedly blamed the Jacobins – and in antagonizing several members of the Plain as well as the followers of Danton whom Jean Roland, out of jealousy, and Manon Roland, from both distrust and personal distaste, vilified with increasing vehemence.
Discord in the Convention was deepened by the shadow of the King. The Girondins, who tried unsuccessfully to avert a judicial trial, would have chosen to spare him. So, it seems, would Danton who cautiously stated his belief that, without being convinced that the King was ‘entirely blameless’, it would be ‘useful to get him out of the situation’ in which he had placed himself. But, according to Théodore Lameth, who risked his life by returning to Paris from England in the hope of saving the King’s life, Danton added privately, ‘All the same, if I have to give up all hope for him, I warn you that, since I don’t want my head to fall with his, I shall join those who condemn him.’ And so in the end Danton did condemn him, declaring unequivocably, ‘The only place to strike Kings is on the head.’
Most of the Montagnards had voiced such sentiments from the beginning. Louis de Saint-Just, a hard, unsmiling, remorseless, dislikeable, clever young man from Blérancourt, spoke for many of them when, his long fair hair dancing on his shoulders, he demanded the trial and execution
of the King as an enemy of the people. Such demands gathered even wider support when a large iron box, containing compromising documents, was discovered in the Tuileries. On II December Louis Capet as he was now generally called – though Capet, so he protested, was not his name: ‘it was the surname of one of my ancestors’–was sent for by the Convention to answer the charge of ‘having committed various crimes to re-establish tyranny on the ruins of liberty’.
The King and Queen and their children had now been incarcerated in the Temple, behind a succession of locked doors, for four months. The rooms, at first oppressively hot, had become cold and damp, and the wind, blowing down the antiquated chimneys, filled them with smoke. Most of the guards were unfriendly and sometimes rude, scrawling graffiti on the walls, rattling their keys ‘in a terrible manner’ and insolently puffing their pipes in their captives’ faces. One of them, Louis Turgy, a former kitchen-boy at Versailles, less hostile than the others, recorded the ‘extremely stringent’ precautions which were always observed at the Temple:
This is the way in which my service had to be carried on. Before dinner, as before every meal, I had to go to the Council Chamber and ask for two of the officers to come, who themselves laid the dishes, and tasted the food to make sure there was nothing hidden in it…They accompanied me to the dining-room, and only allowed me to lay the table when they had examined it above and below. I had to unfold the cloth and the napkins in front of them. They cut each roll of bread in half, and searched the inside with a fork, or even with their fingers.
The Days of the French Revolution Page 18