The former gave the Mayor false, or highly coloured intelligence. The others, by long habit, did not conceive themselves obliged to communicate any thing to him.
On the bloody day of July, 1791, of all the inhabitants of Paris, perhaps Bailly was the man who knew with least detail or correctness the events of the morning and of the evening.
Bailly, with his deep horror for falsehood, would have thought that he was most cruelly insulting the magistrates, if he had not attributed to them similar sentiments to his own. His uprightness prevented his being sufficiently on the watch against the machinations of parties. It was evidently by false reports that he was induced to unfurl the red flag on the 17th of July: "It was from the reports that followed each other," he said to the Revolutionary Tribunal, on being questioned by the President, "and became more and more alarming every hour, that the council adopted the measure of marching with the armed force to the Champ de Mars."
In all his answers Bailly insisted on the repeated orders he had received from the President of the National Assembly; on the reproaches addressed to him for not sufficiently watching the agents of foreign powers; it was against these pretended agents and their creatures, that the Mayor of Paris thought he was marching when he put himself at the head of a column of National Guards.
Bailly did not even know the cause of the meeting; he had not been informed that the crowd wished to sign a petition; and that the previous evening, according to the decree of the law, there had been a declaration made to this effect before the competent authority. His answers to the Revolutionary Tribunal leave not the least doubt on this point!
Oh Eschevins, Eschevins! when your vain pretensions only were treated of, the public could forgive you; but the 17th of July, you took advantage of Bailly's confidence; you induced him to take sanguinary measures of repression, after having fascinated him with false reports; you committed a real crime. If it was the duty of the Revolutionary Tribunal, of deplorable memory, to demand in 1793 from any one an explanation of the massacres of the Champ de Mars, it was not Bailly assuredly who ought to have been accused in the first place.
The political party whose blood flowed on the 17th of July, pretended to have been the victim of a plot concocted by its adversaries. When interrogated by the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Bailly answered: "I had no knowledge of it, but experience has since given me reason to think that such a plot did exist at that time."
Nothing more serious has ever been written against the promoters of the sanguinary violences on the 17th of July.
The blame that has been thrown on the events of the Champ de Mars has not been confined solely to the fact of proclaiming martial law; the repressive measures that followed that proclamation have been criticized with equal bitterness.
The municipal administration was especially reproached for having hoisted a red flag much too small; a flag that was called in the Tribunal a pocket flag; for not having placed this flag at the head of the column, as the law commands, but in such a position, that the public on whom the column was advancing could not see it; for having made the armed force enter the Champ de Mars, by all the gates on the side towards the town, a manœuvre that seemed rather intended to surround the multitude, than to disperse it; for having ordered the National Guard to load their arms, even on the Place de Grève; for having made the guard fire before the three required summonses were made, and fire upon the people around the altar, whilst the stones and the pistol shot, which were assigned as the motive for the sanguinary order, came from the steps and benches; for allowing some people who were endeavouring to escape on the side towards l'Ecole Militaire, and others who had actually jumped into the Seine, to be pursued, shot, and bayonetted.