Réveillon is made to say, that a workman can live upon fifteen sous per diem, and behold his manufactory destroyed from top to bottom.
They ascribe to Foulon the barbarous vaunt; "I will force the people to eat hay;" and without any order from the constituted authorities, some peasants, neighbours of the old minister, arrest him, take him to Paris, his son-in-law experiences the same fate, and the famished populace immolates both of them.
In proportion as the multitude appear to me unjust and culpable, in attacking certain men respecting a scarcity of provisions, when it is the manifest consequence of the severity of the seasons, I should be disposed to excuse their rage against the authors of factitious scarcities. Well, Gentlemen, at the time that Foulon was assassinated, the people, deceived by some impassioned orators of the Assembly, might, or let us rather say, ought to believe, that they were wilfully famished. Foulon perished the 22d of July, 1789; on the 15th, that is to say, seven days before, Mirabeau had addressed the following incendiary words to the inhabitants of the capital, from the National Tribune:—
"Henry IV. allowed provisions to be taken into besieged and rebellious Paris; but now, some perverse ministers intercept convoys of provisions destined for famished and obedient Paris."
Yet people have been so inconsiderate as to be astonished at the assassinations of Foulon and of Berthier. Going back in thought to the month of July, 1789, I perceive in the imprudent apostrophe of the eloquent tribune, more sanguinary disorders than the contemporary history has had to record.
One of the most honourable, one of the most respectable and the most respected members of the institute, having been led, in a recent work, to relate the assassination of Foulon, has thrown on the conduct of Bailly, under those cruel circumstances, an aspersion that I read with surprise and grief. Foulon was detained in the Hôtel de Ville. Bailly went down into the square, and succeeded for a moment in calming the multitude. "I did not imagine," said the Mayor in his memoirs, "that they could have forced the Hôtel de Ville, a well-guarded post, and an object of respect to all the citizens. I therefore thought the prisoner in perfect safety; I did not doubt but the waves of this storm would finally subside, and I departed."
The honourable author of the History of the Reign of Louis XVI. opposes to this passage the following words taken from the official minutes of the Hôtel de Ville: "The electors (those who had accompanied Bailly out to the square) reported in the Hall the certainty that the calm would not last long." The new historian adds: "How could the Mayor alone labour under this delusion? It is too evident, that on such a day, the public tranquillity was much too uncertain, to allow of the chief magistrate of the town absenting himself without deserving the reproach of weakness." The remainder of the passage shows too evidently, that in the author's estimation, weakness here was synonymous with cowardice.
It is against this, Gentlemen, that I protest with heartfelt earnestness. Bailly absented himself because he did not think that the Hôtel de Ville could be forced. The electors in the passage quoted do not enunciate a different opinion: where then is the contradiction?
Bailly deceived himself in this expectation, for the multitude burst into the Hôtel de Ville. We will grant that there was an error of judgment in this; but nothing in the world authorizes us to call in question the courage of the Mayor.
To decide after the blow, with so little hesitation or consideration, that Bailly ought not to have absented himself from the House of the Commune, we must forget that, under such circumstances, the obligations of the first magistrate of the city were quite imperious and very numerous; it is requisite, above all, not to remember that each day, the provision of flour required for the nourishment of seven or eight hundred thousand inhabitants, depended on the measures adopted on the previous evening. M. de Crosne, who on quitting the post of Lieutenant of Police, had not ceased to be a citizen, was during some days a very enlightened and zealous councillor for Bailly; but on the day that Foulon was arrested, this dismissed magistrate thought himself lost. He and his family made an appeal to the gratitude and humanity of our colleague. It was to procure a refuge for them, that Bailly employed the few hours of absence with which he was so much reproached: those hours during which that catastrophe happened which the Mayor could not have prevented, since even the superhuman efforts of General Lafayette, commanding an armed force, proved futile. I will add, that to spare M. de Crosne an arbitrary arrest, the imminent danger of which alas! was too evident in the death of Berthier, Bailly absented himself again from the Hôtel de Ville on the night of the 22d to the 23d of July, to accompany the former Lieutenant of Police to a great distance from Paris.