"A man urged by hunger and misery, by the sight of his wife and children without bread, a man who has not eaten anything for three days, attempts to steal and is taken in the act, kills in order to escape the galleys and is condemned to death and executed. Then Society cries out, 'Bravo, quite right! the man was a thief, an assassin and an infamous wretch; he deserved the scaffold: long live the scaffold!' But a statesman in cold blood orders the massacre of ten thousand of his fellow-citizens, on purpose to climb to his ambitious ends across their heaped up bodies. Such a man inspires you with pity and not with horror. You would say to him, 'You wished to have our heads chopped off, but to keep your own on your shoulders, and go into a foreign country to enjoy the riches you have amassed. Time will look after such a theft, passions will die down, public and private grievances be appeased; the history of our troubles, written on our walls by the print of bullets and grapeshot, will no longer be legible; then, public compassion will rise up against the length of your exile: it will demand your respite, and, for the third or fourth time, you will bring your country to the edge of the abyss, into which you will finally succeed in flinging it.' Why should such a distinction be made? Unless it is, because, not having had the courage to strike down your victim yourself, as the poor starved wretch did, you pay soldiers and make them the instruments of your crime!"
This is what M. Salverte had said; this is what the people and the Republicans were saying.
Now, as they are soon going to begin again to fire upon the people and the Republicans; as they are going to begin July over again with diametrically opposite results; as for eighteen years it is the conquerors of the Three Days who are going to be the conquered, it is good to draw the dividing line very distinctly and not merely to state, as they did—
"The Chamber and Royalty of July desired the abolition of the death penalty, but the people and Republicans would not agree to it."
You are mistaken, they did wish it; but, as a principle which should safeguard humanity at large, and not as a means of delivering a few privileged guilty people from justice. What they did not want was that as exceptional tribunals are created for the purpose of punishing, there should not be established, this time, exceptional tribunals for absolving. They wanted the people to be looked on as a sovereign power, and that those who had caused them to be shot down, should be dealt with in the same way as those who, later, were to fire on the king. Why, therefore, should a greater indulgence be granted to MM. Polignac, de Peyronnet, de Chantelauze and de Guernon-Ranville, who killed or wounded three thousand citizens, than to Alibaud, Meunier and Lecomte, whose plot fell through, when firing on the king, and who neither killed nor wounded a single person? It will probably be argued that the difference in punishment arose from sentence being delivered by different tribunals. But this was not so: the sentence which condemned some to prison, and others to the scaffold, came from the same jury—the Court of Peers.
The people were right, then, after seeing Maréchal Ney condemned to death, to complain loudly when they knew the ministers were going to be let off. They did not wish their heads to fall, guilty though they were; no, the people wished they should do in 1830 what they failed to do in 1793. They wanted their condemnation and that they should appeal against the sentence to the people direct. Then, as M. de Kératry said, they would have received pardon. But they were not even consulted: it was the king, who owed his crown to the Revolution, his civil list of eighteen millions of income and ten or twelve royal castles, who pardoned them, and not the people who had been shot down, assassinated and decimated.
Thus an undertone of discontent spread over the city, whilst the anger that was settling in the base of the social scale began to rise to the surface in hot bubbles.
On 18 October the walls of the Luxembourg were covered in the night with menacing placards. Two or three of those bands of men, only to be found during ill-omened seasons, came out of the catacombs, so to speak, and spread through the town singing La Parisienne and crying, "Death to the ministers!" Some even went further and carried a flag on which the above bloodthirsty wish was written in huge letters.
This band started from the Panthéon, crossed the Pont Neuf and went in the direction of the Palais-Royal.