VII.
One of those sinister persons who seem to smell blood and presage crime, reached Avignon from Versailles: his name was Jourdan. He is not to be confounded with another revolutionist of the same name, born at Avignon. Sprung from the arid and calcined mountains of the south, where the very brutes are more ferocious; by turns butcher, farrier, and smuggler, in the gorges which separate Savoy from France; a soldier, deserter, horse-jobber, and then a keeper of a low wine shop in the suburbs of Paris; he had wallowed in all the lowest vices of the dregs of a metropolis. The first murders committed by the people in the streets of Paris had disclosed his real character. It was not that of contest but of murder. He appeared after the carnage to mangle the victims, and render the assassination fouler. He was a butcher of men, and he boasted of it. It was he who had thrust his hands into the open breasts and plucked forth the hearts of Foulon and Berthier.[14] It was he who had cut off the head of the two gardes du corps, de Varicourt and des Huttes, at Versailles, on the 6th of October. It was he who, entering Paris, bearing the two heads at the end of a pike, reproached the people with being content with so little, and having made him go so far to cut off only two heads! He hoped for better things at Avignon, and went thither.
There was at Avignon a body of volunteers called the army of Vaucluse, formed of the dregs of that country, and commanded by one Patrix. This Patrix having been assassinated by his troop, whose excesses he desired to moderate, Jourdan was elevated to the command by the claims of sedition and wickedness. The soldiers, when reproached with their robberies and murders, similar to those of the Gueux of Belgium, and the sans-culottes of Paris, received the reproach as an honour, and called themselves the brave brigands of Avignon. Jourdan at the head of this band, ravaged and fired le Comtal, laid siege to Carpentras, was repulsed, lost five hundred men, and fell back upon Avignon, still shuddering at the murder of Lescuyer. He resolved on lending his arm and his troop to the vengeance of the French party. On the 30th of August Jourdan and his myrmidons closed the city-gates, dispersed through the streets, going to the houses noted as containing enemies to the Revolution, dragging out the inhabitants—men, women, aged persons, and children,—all, without distinction of age, sex or innocence, and shut them up in the palace. When night came, the assassins broke down the doors and murdered with iron crow-bars these disarmed and supplicating victims. In vain did they shriek to the national guard for aid: the city hears the massacre without daring to give any signs of animation. The daring of the crime chilled and paralysed every citizen. The murderers preluded the death of the females by derision and insults which added shame to terror, and the agonies of modesty to the pangs of murder. When there were no more to be slain they mutilated the carcases, and swept the blood into the sewer of the palace. They dragged the mutilated corpses to La Glacière, walled them up, and the vengeance of the people was stamped upon them. Jourdan and his satellites offered the homage of this night to the French mediators and the National Assembly. The scoundrels of Paris admired—the Assembly shook with indignation, and considered this crime as an outrage; whilst the president fainted on reading the recital of this night at Avignon. The arrest of Jourdan and his accomplices was commanded. Jourdan fled from Avignon, pursued by the French; he dashed his horse in to the river of the Sargue: caught in the middle of the river, by a soldier, he fired at him and missed. He was seized and bound, and punishment awarded him, but the Jacobins compelled the Girondists to agree to an amnesty for the crimes of Avignon. Jourdan making sure of impunity, and proud of his iniquities, went thither to be revenged on his denouncers.
The Assembly shuddered for a moment at the sight of this blood, and then hastily turned its eyes away. In its impatience to reign alone, it had not the time to display pity. There was, besides, between the Girondists and the Jacobins a contest for leadership, and a rivalry in going a-head of the Revolution, which made each of the two factions afraid that the other should be in advance. Dead bodies did not make them pause, and tears shed for too long a time might have been taken for weakness.
VIII.
However, victims multiplied daily, and disasters followed disasters. The whole empire seemed ready to fall and crush its founders. San Domingo, the richest of the French colonies, was swimming in blood. France was punished for its egotism. The Constituent Assembly had proclaimed, in principle, the liberty of the blacks, but, in fact, slavery still existed. Two hundred thousand slaves served as human cattle to some thousands of colonists. They were bought and sold, and cut and maimed, as if they were inanimate objects. They were kept by speculation out of the civil law, and out of the religious law. Property, family, marriage, all was forbidden to them. Care was taken to degrade them below men, to preserve the right of treating them as brutes. If some unions furtive, or favoured by cupidity, were formed amongst them, the wife and children belonged to the master. They were sold separately, without any regard to the ties of nature, all the attachments with which God has formed the chain of human sympathies were rent asunder without commiseration.
This crime en masse, this systematic brutality, had its theorists and apologists; human faculties were denied to the blacks. They were classed as a race between the flesh and the spirit. Thus the infamous abuse of power, which was exercised over this inert and servile race, was called necessary guardianship. Tyrants have never wanted sophists: on the other hand, men of right feeling towards their fellows, who had, like Grégoire, Raynal, Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, La Fayette, embraced the cause of humanity, and formed the "Society of the Friends of the Blacks" had circulated their principles in the colonies, like a vengeance rather than as justice. These principles had burst forth without preparation, and unanticipated in colonial society, where truth had no organ but insurrection. Philosophy proclaims principles; politics administer them; the friends of the blacks were contented with proclaiming them. France had not had courage to dispossess and indemnify her colonists: she had acquired liberty for herself alone: she adjourned, as she still adjourns at the moment I write these lines, the reparation for the crime of slavery in her colonies: could she be astonished that slavery should seek to avenge herself, and that liberty, warmly proclaimed in Paris, should not become an insurrection at San Domingo? Every iniquity that a free society allows to subsist for the profit of the oppressor, is a sword with which she herself arms the oppressed. Right is the most dangerous of weapons; woe to him who leaves it to his enemies!
IX.
San Domingo proved this. Fifty thousand black slaves rose in one night at the instigation, and under the command, of the mulattoes, or men of colour. The men of colour, the intermediary race, springing from white colonists and black slaves, were not slaves, neither were they citizens. They were a kind of freedmen, with the defects and virtues of the two races; the pride of the whites, the degradation of the blacks: a fluctuating race who, by turning sometimes to the side of the slaves, sometimes to that of the masters, inevitably produced those terrible oscillations which inevitably superinduce the overthrow of society.
The mulattoes, who themselves possessed slaves, had begun by making common cause with the colonists, and by opposing the emancipation of the blacks more obstinately than even the whites themselves. The nearer they were to slavery, the more doggedly did they defend their share in tyranny. Man is thus made: none is more ready to abuse his right than he who, with difficulty, has acquired it; there are no tyrants worse than slaves, and no men prouder than parvenus.