History of the Girondists, Volume I / Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution

by Alphonse de Lamartine

V.

Camille Desmoulins, the Voltaire of the clubs, lent to the petition of the citizens of Paris that insolent raillery, which made the success of his talent.

"Worthy representatives," ran the petition[13], "applauses are the civil list of the people, therefore do not reject ours. To collect the homages of good citizens, and the insults of the bad, is, to a National Assembly, to have combined all suffrages. The king has put his veto to your decree against the emigrants, a decree equally worthy of the majesty of the Roman people and the clemency of the French people. We do not complain of this act of the king, because we remember the maxim of the great politician Machiavel, which we beg of you to meditate upon profoundly—It is against nature to fall voluntarily from such a height. Penetrated with this truth, we do not then require from the king an impossible love for the constitution, nor do we find fault that he is opposed to your best decisions. But let public functionaries foresee the royal veto, and declare their rebellion against your decree, against the priests; let them carry off public opinion; let these men be precisely the same who caused to be shot in the Champ-de-Mars the citizens who were signing a petition against a decree which was not yet decided upon; let them inundate the empire with copies of this petition, which is nothing more than the first leaf of a great counter-revolutionary register and a subscription for civil war sent for signature to all the fanatics, all the idiots, all permanent slaves. Fathers of the country! there is here such complicated ingratitude and abuse of confidence, of contradiction and chicanery, of prevarication and treason, that profoundly indignant at so much wickedness concealed beneath the cloak of philosophy and hypocritical civism, we say to you—Your decree has saved the country, and if they are obstinate in refusing you permission to save the country, well, the nation will save itself, for, after all, the power of a veto has a termination—a veto does not prevent the taking of the Bastille.

"You are told that the salary of the priests was a national debt. But when you only request the priests to declare that they will not be seditious—are not they who refuse this declaration already seditious in their hearts? And these seditious priests, who have never lent anything to the state—who are only creditors of the state in the name of benevolence—have they not a thousand times forfeited the donation through their ingratitude? Away, then, with these miserable sophisms, fathers of the country, and have no more doubt of the omnipotence of a free people. If liberty slumbers, how can the arm act? Do not raise this arm again, do not again lift the national club to crush insects. Did Cato and Cicero proceed against Cethegus or Catiline? It is the chiefs we should assail: strike at the head."

A scornful laugh echoed from the tribunes of the Assembly to the populace. The procès-verbal of this sitting was ordered to be sent to the eighty-three departments. Next day the Assembly reconsidered this, and negatived its vote of the previous evening; but publicity was still given to it, and it echoed through the provinces, carrying with it the disquietude, derision, and hatred attached to the Royal Veto. The constitution, handed over to ridicule and hooted in full assembly, had now become the plaything of the populace.

For many months the state of the kingdom resembled the state of Paris. All was uproar, confusion, denunciation, disturbance in the departments. Each courier brought his riots, seditions, petitions, outbreaks, and assassinations. The clubs established as many points of resistance to the constitution as there were communes in the empire. The civil war hatching in La Vendée burst out by massacres at Avignon.

VI.

This city and comtal, united to France by the recent decree of the Constituent Assembly, had remained from this period in an intermediary state between two dominations, so favourable to anarchy. The partisans of the papal government, and the partisans of the reunion with France, struggled there in alternations of hope and fear, which prolonged and envenomed their hate. The king, from a religious scruple, had for too long suspended the execution of the decree of reunion. Trembling to infringe upon the domain of the church, he deferred his decision, and his impolitic delays gave time for crimes.

France was represented in Avignon by mediators. The provisional authority of these mediators was supported by a detachment of troops of the line. The power, entirely municipal, was confided to the dictatorship of the municipality. The populace, excited and agitated, was divided into the French or revolutionary party, and the party opposed to the reunion by France and the Revolution. The fanaticism of religion with one, the fanaticism of liberty with the other, impelled the two parties even to crimes. The warmth of blood, the thirst of private vengeance, the heat of the climate, all added to civil passions. The violences of Italian republics were all to be seen in the manners of this Italian colony, of this branch establishment of Rome on the banks of the Rhone. The smaller states are, the more atrocious are their civil wars. There opposite opinions become personal hatreds; contests are but assassinations. Avignon commenced these wholesale assassinations by private murders.

On the 16th of October a gloomy agitation betrayed itself by the mobs of people collecting on various points, particularly consisting of persons enemies of the Revolution. The walls of the church were covered with placards, calling on the people to revolt against the provisional authority of the municipality. There were bruited about rumours of absurd miracles, which demanded in the name of Heaven vengeance for the assaults made against religion. A statue of the Virgin worshipped by the people in the church of the Cordeliers had blushed at the profanations of her temple. She had been seen to shed tears of indignation and grief. The people, educated under the papal government in such superstitious credulities, had gone in a body to the Cordeliers to avenge the cause of their protectress. Animated by fanatical exhortations, confiding in the divine interposition, the mob, on quitting the Cordeliers, and increasing as it went, hurried to the ramparts, closed the doors, turned the cannon on the city, and then spread themselves through the streets, demanding with loud clamours the overthrow of the government. The unfortunate Lescuyer, notary of Avignon, secretary (greffier) of the municipality, more particularly pointed out to the fury of the mob, was dragged violently from his residence, and along the pavement to the altar of the Cordeliers, where he was murdered by sabre-strokes and blows from bludgeons, trampled under foot, his dead body outraged and cast as an expiatory victim at the feet of the offended statue. The national guard, having despatched a detachment with two pieces of cannon from the fort, drove back the infuriated populace, and picked from the pavement the naked and lifeless carcase of Lescuyer. The prisons of the city had been broken open, and the miscreants they contained came to offer their assistance for other murders. Horrible reprisals were feared, and yet the mediators, absent from the city, were asleep, or closed their eyes upon the actual danger. The understanding between the leaders of the Paris clubs and the rioters of Avignon became more fearfully intimate.