IV.
The spot chosen was most frequently the site of the Bastille, the Mons Aventinus of the people, the national camp, where the place and the stones reminded them of their servitude and their strength. Of all the men who governed the agitators of the faubourgs, Danton was the most redoubtable. Camille Desmoulins, equally bold to plan, possessed less courage to execute. Nature, which had given this young man the restlessness of the leaders of the mob, had denied him the exterior and the power of voice necessary to captivate them; for the people do not comprehend intellectual force. A colossal stature and a sonorous voice are two indispensable requisites for the favourites of the people: Camille Desmoulins was small, thin, and had but a feeble voice, that seemed to "pipe and whistle in the wind" after the tones of Danton, who possessed the roar of the populace.
Pétion enjoyed the highest esteem of the anarchists, but his official legality excused him from openly fomenting the disorder, which it was sufficient that he desired. Nothing could be done without him, and he was an accomplice. After them came Santerre, the commander of the battalion of the faubourg St. Antoine. Santerre, son of a Flemish brewer, and himself a brewer, was one of those men that the people respect because they are of themselves, and whose large fortune is forgiven them on account of their familiarity. Well known to the workmen, of whom he employed great numbers in his brewery; and by the populace, who on Sundays frequented his wine and beer establishments—Santerre distributed large sums of money, as well as quantities of provisions, to the poor; and, at a moment of famine, had distributed three hundred thousand francs' worth of bread (12,000l.). He purchased his popularity by his beneficence; he had conquered it, by his courage, at the storming of the Bastille; and he increased it by his presence at every popular tumult. He was of the race of those Belgian brewers who intoxicated the people of Ghent to rouse them to revolt.
The butcher, Legendre, was to Danton what Danton was to Mirabeau, a step lower in the abyss of sedition. Legendre had been a sailor during ten years of his life, and had the rough and brutal manners of his two callings, a savage look, his arms covered with blood, his language merciless, yet his heart naturally good. Involved since '89 in all the Revolutionary movements, the waves of this agitation had elevated him to a certain degree of authority. He had founded, under Danton, the Cordeliers club, the club of coups de main, as the Jacobins was the club of radical theories; and he convulsed it to its very centre, by his eloquence untaught and unpolished. He compared himself to the peasant of the Danube. Always more ready to strike than to speak, Legendre's gesture crushed before he spoke. He was the mace of Danton. Huguenin, one of those men who roll from profession to profession, on the acclivity of troublous times, without the power to arrest his course; an advocate expelled from the body to which he belonged; then a soldier, and a clerk at the barrière; always disliked, aspiring for power to recover his fortune, and suspected of pillage. Alexandre, the commandant of the battalion of the Gobelins, the hero of the faubourg, the friend of Legendre. Marat, a living conspiracy, who had quitted his subterranean abode in the night; a living martyr of demagogism, revelling in excitement, carrying his hatred of society to madness, exulting in it, and voluntarily playing the part of the fool of the people as so many others had played at the courts the part of the king's fool. Dubois Crancé, a brave and educated soldier. Brune, a sabre, at the service of all conspiracies. Mormoro, a printer, intoxicated with philosophy. Dubuisson, an obscure writer, whom the hisses of the theatre had forced to take refuge in intrigue. Fabre d'Eglantine, a comic poet, ambitious of another field for his powers. Chabot, a capuchin monk, embittered by the cloister, and eager to avenge himself on the superstition which had imprisoned him. Lareynie, a soldier-priest. Gonchon, Duquesnois, friends of Robespierre. Carra, a Girondist journalist. An Italian, named Rotondo. Henriot, Sillery, Louvet, Laclos, and Barbaroux, the emissary of Roland and Brissot, were the principal instigators of the émeute of the 20th of June.
V.
All these men met in an isolated house at Charenton, to concert in the stillness and secrecy of the night on the pretext, the plan, and the hour of the insurrection. The passions of these men were different, but their impatience was the same; some wished to terrify, others to strike, but all wished to act; when once the people were let loose, they would stop where destiny willed. There were no scruples at a meeting at which Danton presided; speeches were superfluous where but one feeling prevailed; propositions were sufficient, and a look was enough to convey all their meaning. A pressure of the hand, a glance, a significant gesture, are the eloquence of men of action. In a few words, Danton dictated the purpose, Santerre the means, Marat the atrocious energy, Camilla Desmoulins the cynical gaiety of the projected movement, and all decided on the resolution of urging the people to this act. A revolutionary map of Paris was laid on the table, and on it Danton traced the sources, the tributary streams, the course, and the meeting-place of these gatherings of the people.
The Place de la Bastille, an immense square into which opened, like the mouths of so many rivers, the numerous streets of the faubourg St. Antoine, which joins, by the quartier de l'Arsenale and a bridge, the faubourg St. Marceau, and which, by the boulevard, opened before the ancient fortress, has a large opening to the centre of the city and the Tuileries, was the rendezvous assigned, and the place whence the columns were to depart. They were to be divided into three bodies, and a petition to present to the king and the Assembly against the veto to the decree against the priests and the camp of 20,000 men, was the ostensible purpose of the movement; the recall of the patriot ministers, Roland, Servan, and Clavière, the countersign; and the terror of the people, disseminated in Paris and the château of the Tuileries the effect of this day. Paris expected this visit of the faubourgs, for five hundred persons had dined together the previous day on the Champs Elysées.
The chief of the fédérés of Marseilles and the agitators of the central quarters had fraternised there with the Girondists. The actor Dugazon had sung verses, denunciatory of the inhabitants of the Château; and at his window in the Tuileries the king had heard the applause and these menacing strains, that reached even to his palace. As for the order of the march, the grotesque emblems, the strange weapons, the hideous costumes, the horrible banners and the obscene language, destined to signal the apparition of this army of the faubourgs in the streets of the capital, the conspirators prescribed nothing, for disorder and horror formed a part of the programme, and they left all to the disordered imagination of the populace, and to that rivalry of cynicism which invariably takes place in such masses of men. Danton relied on this fact.
VI.
Although the presence of Panis and Sergent, two members of the municipality, gave a tacit sanction to the plan, the leaders undertook to recruit the sedition in silence, by small groups during the night, and to collect the fiercest rassemblements of the quartier Saint Marceau and the Jardin des Plantes, on the bank of the Arsenale, by means of a ferry, then the only means of communication between the two faubourgs. Lareynie was to arouse the faubourg St. Jacques and the market of the place Maubert, where the women of the lower classes came daily to make their household purchases. To sell and to buy is the life of the lower orders, and money and famine are their two leading passions. They are always ready for tumult in those places where these two passions concentrate, and no where is sedition more readily excited, or in greater masses of people.