14. three thousand persons are arrested and led off;[3138] priests, old men, the infirm, the sick.
The action lasts from ten in the evening to five o'clock in the morning, the same as in a city taken by assault, the screams of women rudely treated, the cries of prisoners compelled to march, the oaths of the guards, cursing and drinking at each grog-shop; never was there such an universal, methodical execution, so well calculated to suppress all inclination for resistance in the silence of general stupefaction.
And yet, at this very moment, there are those who act in good faith in the sections and in the Assembly, and who rebel at being under such masters. A deputation from the Lombards section, and another from the Corn-market, come to the Assembly and protest against the Commune's usurpations.[3139] Choudieu, the Montagnard, denounces its blatant corrupt practices. Cambon, a stern financier, will no longer consent to have his accounts tampered with by thieving tricksters.[3140] The Assembly at last seems to have recovered itself. It extends its protection to Géray, the journalist, against whom the new pashas had issued a warrant; it summons to its own bar the signers of the warrant, and orders them to confine themselves in future to the exact limits of the law which they transgress. Better still, it dissolves the interloping Council, and substitutes for it ninety-six delegates, to be elected by the sections in twenty-four hours. And, even still better, it orders an account to be rendered within two days of the objects it has seized, and the return of all gold or silver articles to the Treasury. Quashed, and summoned to disgorge their booty, the autocrats of the Hôtel-de-ville come in vain to the Assembly in force on the following day[3141] to extort from it a repeal of its decrees; the Assembly, in spite of their threats and those of their satellites, stands its ground.—So much the worse for the stubborn; if they are not disposed to regard the flash of the saber, they will feel its sharp edge and point. The Commune, on the motion of Manuel, decides that, so long as public danger continues, they will stay where they are; it adopts an address by Robespierre to "restore sovereign power to the people," which means to fill the streets with armed bands;[3142] it collects together its brigands by giving them the ownership of all that they stole on the 10th of August.[3143] The session, prolonged into the night, does not terminate until one o'clock in the morning. Sunday has come and there is no time to lose, for, in a few hours, the sections, by virtue of the decree of the National Assembly, and following the example of the Temple section the evening before, may revoke the pretended representatives at the Hôtel-de-ville. To remain at the Hôtel-de-ville, and to be elected to the convention, demands on the part of the leaders some striking action, and this they require that very day.—That day is the second of September.
IV.—Date of the determination of this.—The actors and their parts.
Marat.—Danton.—The Commune.—Its co-operators.—Harmony of
dispositions and readiness of operation.
Since the 23rd of August their resolution is taken.[3144] They have arranged in their minds a plan of the massacre, and each one, little by little, spontaneously, according to his aptitudes, takes the part that suits him or is assigned to him.
Marat, foremost among them all, is the proposer and preacher of the operation, which, for him, is a perfectly natural one. It is the epitome of his political system: a dictator or tribune, with full power to slay, and with no other power but that; a good master executioner, responsible, and "tied hand and foot"; this is his program for a government since July the 14th, 1789, and he does not blush at it: "so much the worse for those who are not on a level with it!"[3145] He appreciated the character of the Revolution from the first, not through genius, but sympathetically, he himself being equally as one-sided and monstrous; crazy with suspicion and beset with a homicidal mania for the past three years, reduced to one idea through mental impoverishment, that of murder, having lost the faculty for even the lowest order of reasoning, the poorest of journalists, save for pikemen and Billingsgate market-women, so monotonous in his constant paroxysms that the regular reading of his journal is like listening to hoarse cries from the cells of a madhouse.[3146] From the 19th of August he excites people to attack the prisons. "The wisest and best course to pursue," he says, "is to go armed to the Abbaye, drag out the traitors, especially the Swiss officers and their accomplices, and put them to the sword. What folly it is to give them a trial! That is already done. You have massacred the soldiers, why should you spare the officers, ten times guiltier?"—Also, two days later, his brain teeming with an executioner's fancies, insisting that "the soldiers deserved a thousand deaths. As to the officers, they should be drawn and quartered, like Louis Capet and his tools of the Manège."[3147]—On the strength of this the Commune adopts him as its official editor, assigns him a tribune in its assembly room, entrusts him to report its acts, and soon puts him on its supervisory or executive committee.
A fanatic of this stamp, however, is good for nothing but as a mouthpiece or instigator; he may, at best, figure in the end among the subordinate managers.—The chief of the enterprise,[3148] Danton, is of another species, and of another stature, a veritable leader of men: Through his past career and actual position, through his popular cynicism, ways and language, through his capacity for taking the initiative and for command, through his excessive corporeal and intellectual vigor, through his physical ascendancy due to his ardent, absorbing will, he is well calculated for his terrible office.—He alone of the Commune has become Minister, and there is no one but him to shelter the violations of the Commune under the protection or under the passivity of the central authority.—He alone of the Commune and of the ministry is able to push things through and harmonize action in the pell-mell of the revolutionary chaos; both in the councils of the ministry which he governs, as he formerly governed at the Hôtel-de ville. In the constant uproar of incoherent discussions,[3149] athwart "propositions ex abrupto, among shouts, swearing, and the going and coming of questioning petitioners," he is seen mastering his new colleagues with his "stentorian voice, his gestures of an athlete, his fearful threats," taking upon himself their duties, dictating to them what and whom he chooses, "fetching in commissions already drawn up," taking charge of everything, "making propositions, arrests, and proclamations, issuing brevets," and drawing millions out of the public treasury, casting a sop to his dogs in the Cordeliers and the Commune, "to one 20,000 francs, and to another 10,000," "for the Revolution, and on account of their patriotism,"—such is a summary report of his doings. Thus gorged, the pack of hungry "brawlers" and grasping intriguers, the whole serviceable force of the sections and of the clubs, is in his hands. One is strong in times of anarchy at the head of such a herd. Indeed, during the months of August and September, Danton was king, and, later on, he may well say of the 2d of September, as he did of the 10th of August, "I did it!"[3150]
Not that he is naturally vindictive or sanguinary: on the contrary, with a butcher's temperament, he has a man's heart, and, at the risk of compromising himself, against the wills of Marat and Robespierre, he will, by-and-by, save his political adversaries, Duport, Brissot, and the Girondists, the old party of the "Right."[3151] Not that he is blinded by fear, enmities, or the theory; furious as a clubbist, he has the clear-sightedness of the politician; he is not the dupe of the sonorous phrases he utters, he knows the value of the rogues he employs;[3152] he has no illusions about men or things, about other people or about himself; if he slays, it is with a full consciousness of what he is doing, of his party, of the situation, of the revolution, while the crude expressions which, in the tones of his bull's voice, he flings out as he passes along, are but a vivid statement of the precise truth "We are the rabble! We spring from the gutters!" With the normal principles of mankind, "we should soon get back into them. We can only rule through fear!"[3153] "The Parisians are so many j... f...; a river of blood must flow between them and the émigrés."[3154] The tocsin about to be rung is not a signal of alarm, but a charge on the enemies of the country... What is necessary to overcome them? Boldness, boldness, always boldness![3155] I have brought my mother here, seventy years of age; I have sent for my children, and they came last night. Before the Prussians enter Paris, I want my family to die with me. Let twenty thousand torches be applied, and Paris instantly reduced to ashes!"[3156] "We must maintain ourselves in Paris at all hazards. Republicans are in an extreme minority, and, for fighting, we can rely only on them. The rest of France is devoted to royalty. The royalists must be terrified!"[3157]—It is he who, on the 28th of August, obtains from the Assembly the great domiciliary visit, by which the Commune fills the prisons. It is he who, on the 2d of September, to paralyze the resistance of honest people, causes the penalty of death to be decreed against whoever, "directly or indirectly shall, in any manner whatsoever, refuse to execute, or who shall interfere with the orders issued, or with the measures of the executive power." It is he who, on that day, informs the journalist Prudhomme of the pretended prison plot, and who, the second day after, sends his secretary, Camille Desmoulins, to falsify the report of the massacres,[3158] It is he who, on the 3rd of September, at the office of the Minister of Justice, before the battalion officers and the heads of the service, before Lacroix, president of the Assembly, and Pétion, mayor of Paris, before Clavières, Servan, Monge, Lebrun, and the entire Executive Council, except Roland, reduces at one stroke the head men of the government to the position of passive accomplices, replying to a man of feeling, who rises to stay the slaughter, "Sit down—it was necessary!"[3159] It is he who, the same day, dispatches the circular, countersigned by him, by which the Committee of Supervision announces the massacre, and invites "their brethren of the departments" to follow the example of Paris.[3160] It is he who, on the 10th of September, "not as Minister of Justice, but as Minister of the People," is to congratulate and thank the slaughterers of Versailles.[3161]—After the 10th of August, through Billaud-Varennes, his former secretary, through Fabre d'Eglantine, his Keeper of the Seals, through Tallien, secretary of the Commune and his most trusty henchman, he is present at all deliberations in the Hôtel-de-ville, and, at the last hour, is careful to put on the Committee of Supervision one of his own men, the head clerk, Desforges.[3162]—Not only was the reaping-machine constructed under his own eye, and with his assent, but, again, when it is put in motion, he holds the handle, so as to guide the scythe.