A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, Part III., 1794 / Described in a Series of Letters from an English Lady: with General and Incidental Remarks on the French Character and Manners - Charlotte Biggs

* The words despotism and tyranny are sufficiently expressive of the nature of the government to which they are applied; yet still they are words rendered familiar to us only by history, and convey no precise idea, except that of a bad political system. The condition of the French at this time, besides its wretchedness, had something so strange, so original in it, that even those who beheld it with attention must be content to wonder, without pretending to offer any description as adequate.

—The following extract from a speech of Bailleul, a member of the Convention, exhibits a picture nearer the original than I have yet seen—

"La terreur dominait tous les esprits, comprimait tous les couers— elle etait la force du gouvernement, et ce gouvernement etait tel, que les nombreux habitans d'un vaste territoire semblaient avoir perdu les qualites qui distinguent l'homme de l'animal domestique: ils semblaient meme n'avoir de vie que ce que le gouvernement voulait bien leur en accorder.—Le moi humain n'existoit plus; chaque individu n'etait qu'une machine, allant, venant, pensant ou ne pensant pas, felon que la tyrannie le pressait ou l'animait." Discours de Bailleul, 19 March 1795. "The minds of all were subdued by terror, and every heart was compressed beneath its influence.—In this consisted the strength of the government; and that government was such, that the immense population of a vast territory, seemed to have lost all the qualities which distinguish man from the animals attached to him.— They appeared to exhibit no signs of life but such as their rulers condescended to permit—the very sense of existence seemed doubtful or extinct, and each individual was reduced to a mere machine, going or coming, thinking or not thinking, according as the impulse of tyranny gave him force or animation." Speech of Bailleul, 19 March 1795.

On the twenty-second of Prairial, (June 10,) a law, consisting of a variety of articles for the regulation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, was introduced to the convention by Couthon, a member of the government; and, as usual adopted with very little previous discussion.—Though there was no clause of this act but ought to have given the alarm to humanity, "knocked at the heart, and bid it not be quiet;" yet the whole appeared perfectly unexceptionable to the Assembly in general: till, on farther examination, they found it contained an implied repeal of the law hitherto observed, according to which, no representative could be arrested without a preliminary decree for that purpose.—This discovery awakened their suspicions, and the next day Bourdon de l'Oise, a man of unsteady principles, (even as a revolutionist,) was spirited up to demand an explicit renunciation of any power in the Committee to attack the legislative inviolability except in the accustomed forms.—The clauses which elected a jury of murderers, that bereft all but guilt of hope, and offered no prospect to innocence but death, were passed with no other comment than the usual one of applause.*—

* The baseness, cruelty, and cowardice of the Convention are neither to be denied, nor palliated. For several months they not only passed decrees of proscription and murder which might reach every individual in France except themselves, but they even sacrificed numbers of their own body; and if, instead of proposing an article affecting the whole Convention, the Committee had demanded the heads of as many Deputies as they had occasion for by name, I am persuaded they would have met no resistance.—This single example of opposition only renders the convention still more an object of abhorrence, because it marks that they could subdue their pusillanimity when their own safety was menaced, and that their previous acquiescence was voluntary.