VI.—A tour of France in the cabinet of the Minister of the Interior.
From Carcassonne to Bordeaux.—Bordeaux to Caen.—The north
and the east.—Châlons-sur-Marne to Lyons.—The Comtat and
Provence.—The tone and the responses of the Jacobin
administration.—The programme of the party.
Let us enter the cabinet of Roland, Minister of the Interior, a fortnight after the opening of the Convention, and suppose him contemplating, some evening, in miniature, a picture of the state of the country administered by him. His clerks have placed the correspondence of the past few weeks on his table, arranged in proper order; his replies are noted in brief on the margin; he has a map of France before him, and, placing his finger on the southern section, he moves it along the great highway across the country. At every stage he recurs to the paper file of letters, and passing innumerable reports of violence, he merely gives his attention to the great revolutionary exploits.[3252] Madame Roland, I imagine, works with her husband, and the couple, sitting together alone under the lamp, ponder over the doings of the ferocious brute which they have set free in the provinces the same as in Paris.
Their eyes go first to the southern extremity of France. There,[3253] on the canal of the Deux-Mers, at Carcassonne, the population has seized three boats loaded with grain, demanded provisions, then a lower prices of bread, then guns and cannon from the magazine, and, lastly, the heads of the administrators; an inspector-general has been wounded by an axe, and the syndic-attorney of the department, M. Verdie; massacred.—The Minister follows with his eye the road from Carcassonne to Bordeaux, and on the right and on the left he finds traces of blood. At Castres,[3254] a report is spread that a dealer in grain was trying to raise the price, whereupon a mob gathers, and, to save the dealer, he is placed in the guard-house. The volunteers, however, force open the guard-house, and throw the man out of the first-story window; they then finish him off with "blows with clubs and weights," drag his body along the street and cast it into the river.—The evening before, at Clairac,[3255] M. Lartigue-Langa, an unsworn priest, pursued through the street by a troop of men and women, who wanted to remove his cassock and set him on an ass, found refuge, with great difficulty, in his country-house. They go there for him, however, fetch him back to the public promenade, and there they kill him. A number of brave fellows who interfered were charged with incivism, and severely handled. Repression is impossible; the department writes to the Minister that "at this time it would be impolitic to follow the matter up." Roland knows that by experience. The letters in his hands show him that there, as in Paris, murder engenders murder. M. d'Alespée; a gentleman, has just been assassinated at Nérac; "all reputable citizens formed around him a rampart with their bodies," but the rabble prevailed, and the murderers, "through their obscurity," escaped.—The Minister's finger stops at Bordeaux. There the federation festivities are marked with a triple assassination.[3256] In order to let this dangerous moment pass by, M. de Langoiran, vicar-general of the archbishopric, had retired half a league off; in the village of Cauderan, to the residence of an octogenarian priest, who, like himself; had never meddled with public matters. On the 15th of July the National Guards of the village, excited by the speeches of the previous night, have come to the residence to pick them up, and moreover, a third priest belonging in the neighborhood. There is nothing to lay to their charge; neither the municipal officers, nor the justices before whom they are brought, can avoid declaring them innocent. As a last recourse, they are conducted to Bordeaux, before the Directory of the department. But it is getting dark, and the riotous crowd becoming impatient, makes an attack on them. The octogenarian "receives so many blows that he cannot recover"; the abbé du Puy is knocked down and dragged along by a rope attached to his feet; M. de Langoirac's head is cut off, carried about on a pike, taken to his house and presented to the servant, who is told that "her master will not come home to supper." The torment of the priests has lasted from five o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock in the evening, and the municipal authorities were duly advised; but they cannot put themselves out of the way to give succor; they are too seriously occupied in erecting a liberty-pole.
Route from Bordeaux to Caen.—The Minister's finger turns to the north, and stops at Limoges. The day following the federation has been here celebrated the same as at Bordeaux.[3257] An unsworn priest, the abbé Chabrol, assailed by a gang of men and women, is first conducted to the guard-house and then to the dwelling of the juge-de-paix; for his protection a warrant of arrest is gotten out, and he is kept under guard, in sight, by four chasseurs, in one of the rooms. But the populace are not satisfied with this. In vain do the municipal officers appeal to it, in vain do the gendarmes interpose themselves between it and the prisoner; it rushes in upon them and disperses them. Meanwhile, volleys of stones smash in the windows, and the entrance door yields to the blows of axes; about thirty of the villains scale the windows, and pass the priest down like a bale of goods. A few yards off, "struck down with clubs and other instruments," he draws his last breath, his head "crushed" by twenty mortal wounds.—Farther up, towards Orleans, Roland reads the following dispatches, taken from the file for Loiret:[3258] "Anarchy is at its height," writes one of the districts to the Directory of the department; "there is no longer recognition of any authority; the administrators of the district and of the municipalities are insulted, and are powerless to enforce respect.... Threats of slaughter, of destroying houses and giving them up to pillage prevail; plans are made to tear down all the châteaux. The municipal authorities of Achères, along with many of the inhabitants, have gone to Oison and Chaussy, where everything is smashed, broken up and carried off On the 16th of September six armed men went to the house of M. de Vaudeuil and obliged him to return the sum of 300 francs, for penalties pretended to have been paid by them. We have been notified that M. Dedeley will be visited at Achères for the same purpose to-day. M. de Lory has been similarly threatened... Finally, all those people there say that they want no more local administrations or tribunals, that the law is in their own hands, and they will execute it. In this extremity we have decided on the only safe course, which is to silently accept all the outrages inflicted upon us. We have not called upon you for protection, for we are well aware of the embarrassment you labor under."—The best part of the National Guard, indeed, having been disarmed at the county-town, there is no longer an armed force to put riots down. Consequently, at this same date,[3259] the populace, increased by the afflux of "strangers" and ordinary nomads, hang a corn-inspector, plant his head on the end of a pike, drag his body through the streets, sack five houses and burn the furniture of a municipal officer in front of his own door. Thereupon, the obedient municipality sets the arrested rioters free, and lowers the price of bread one-sixth. Above the Loire, the dispatches of Orne and Calvados complete the picture. "Our district," writes a lieutenant of the gendarmerie,[3260] "is a prey to brigandage... About thirty rascals have just sacked the château of Dampierre. Calls for men are constantly made upon us," which we cannot satisfy, "because the call is general on all sides." The details are curious, and here, notwithstanding the Minister's familiarity with popular misdeeds, he cannot avoid noting one extortion of a new species. "The inhabitants of the villages[3261] collect together, betake themselves to different chateaux, seize the wives and children of their proprietors, and keep them as bail for promises of reimbursement which they force the latter to sign, not merely for feudal taxes, but, again, for expenses to which this taxation may have given rise," first under the actual proprietor and then under his predecessors; in the mean time they install themselves on the premises, demand payments for their time, devastate the buildings on the place, and sell the furniture.—All this is accompanied with the usual slaughter. The Directory of the department of Orne advises the Minister[3262] that "a former noble has been killed (homicide) in the canton of Sepf, an ex-curé in the town of Bellême, an unsworn priest in the canton of Putanges, an ex-capuchin in the territory of Alençon." The same day, at Caen, the syndic-attorney of Calvados, M. Bayeux, a man of sterling merit, imprisoned by the local Jacobins, has just been shot down in the street and bayoneted, while the National Assembly was passing a decree proclaiming his innocence and ordering him to be set at liberty.[3263]
Route of the East.—At Rouen, in front of the Hôtel-de-ville, the National Guard, stoned for more than an hour, finally fire a volley and kill four men; throughout the department violence is committed in connection with grain, while wheat is stolen or carried off by force;[3264] but Roland is obliged to restrict himself; he can note only political disturbances. Besides, he is obliged to hurry up, for murders abound everywhere. In addition to the turmoil of the army and the capital,[3265] each department in the vicinity of Paris or near the frontier furnishes its quota of murders. They take place at Gisors, in the Eure, at Chantilly, and at Clermont in the Oise, at Saint-Amand in the Pas-de-Calais, at Cambray in the Nord, at Retel and Charleville in the Ardennes, at Rheims and at Chalons in the Marne, at Troyes in the Aube, at Meaux in Seine-et-Marne, and at Versailles in Seine-et-Oise.[3266]—Roland, I imagine, does not open this file, and for a good reason; he knows too well how M. de Brissac and M. Delessart, and the other sixty-three persons killed at Versailles; it was he who signed Fournier's commission, the commander of the murderers. At this very moment he is forced to correspond with this villain, to send him certificates of "zeal and patriotism," and to assign him, over and above his robberies, 30,000 francs to defray the expenses of the operation.[3267]—But among the dispatches there are some he cannot overlook, if he desires to know to what his authority is reduced, in what contempt all authority is held, how the civil or military rabble exercises its power, with what promptitude it disposes of the most illustrious and most useful lives, especially those who have been, or are now, in command, the Minister perhaps saying to himself that his turn will come next.
Let us look at the case of M. de la Rochefoucauld. A philanthropist since he was young, a liberal on entering the Constituent Assembly, elected president of the Paris department, one of the most persistent, most generous, and most respected patriots from first to last,—who better deserved to be spared than? Arrested at Gisors[3268] by order of the Paris Commune, he left the inn, escorted by the Parisian commissary, surrounded by the municipal council, twelve gendarmes and one hundred National Guards; behind him walked his mother, eighty years of age, his wife following in a carriage; there could be no fear of an escape. But, for a suspected person, death is more certain than a prison; three hundred volunteers of the Orne and the Sarthe departments, on their way through Gisors, collect and cry out: "We must have his head—nothing shall stop us!" A stone hits M. de la Rochefoucauld on the temple; he falters, his escort is broken up, and they finish him with clubs and sabers, while the municipal council "have barely time to drive off the carriage containing the ladies."—Accordingly, national justice, in the hands of the volunteers, has its sudden outbursts, its excesses, its reactions, the effect of which it is not advisable to wait for. For example, at Cambray,[3269] a division of foot-gendarmerie had just left the town, and it occurs to them that they had forgotten "to purge the prison". It returns, seizes the keeper, takes him to the Hôtel-de-ville, examines the prison register, sets at liberty those whose crimes seem to it excusable, and provides them with passports. On the other hand, it kills a former royal procureur, on whom addresses are found tainted with "aristocratic principles," an unpopular lieutenant-colonel, and a suspected captain.—However slight or ill-founded a suspicion, so much the worse for the officer on whom it falls! At Charleville,[3270] two loads of arms having passed through one gate instead of another, to avoid a bad road, M. Juchereau, inspector of the manufacture of arms and commander of the place, is declared a traitor by the volunteers and the crowd, torn from the hands of the municipal officers, clubbed to the ground, stamped on, and stabbed. His head, fixed to a pike, is paraded through Charleville, then into Mézières, where it is thrown into the river running between the two towns. The body remains, and this the municipality orders to be interred; but it is not worthy of burial; the murderers get hold of it, and cast it into the water that it may join the head. In the meantime the lives of the municipal officers hang by a single thread. One is seized by the throat; another is knocked out of his chair and threatened with hanging, a gun is aimed at him and he is beaten and kicked; subsequently a plot is devised "to cut off their heads and plunder their houses."
He who disposes of lives, indeed, also disposes of property. Roland has only to flick through two or three reports to see how patriotism furnishes a cloak for brutal license and greed. At Coucy, in the department of Aisne,[3271] the peasantry of seventeen parishes, assembled for the purpose of furnishing their military quota, rush with a loud clamor to two houses, the property of M. des Fossés, a former deputy to the Constituent Assembly, and the two finest in the town; one of them had been occupied by Henry IV. Some of the municipal officers who try to interfere are nearly cut to pieces, and the entire municipal body takes to flight. M. des Fossés, with his two daughters, succeed in hiding themselves in an obscure corner in the vicinity, and afterwards in a small tenement offered to them by a humane gardener, and finally, after great difficulty, they reach Soissons. Of his two houses, "nothing remains but the walls. Windows, casings, doors, and wainscoting, all are shattered"; twenty thousand francs of assignats in a portfolio are destroyed or carried off; the title-deeds of the property are not to be found, and the damage is estimated at 200,000 francs. The pillage lasted from seven o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock in the evening, and, as is always the case, ended in a fête. The plunderers, entering the cellars, drank "two hogsheads of wine and two casks of brandy; thirty or forty remained dead drunk, and were taken away with considerable difficulty." There is no prosecution, no investigation; the new mayor, who, one month after, makes up his mind to denounce the act, begs the Minister not to give his name, for, he says, "the agitators in the council-general of the Commune threaten, with fearful consequences, whoever is discovered to have written to you."[3272]—Such is the ever-present menace under which the gentry live, even when veterans in the service of freedom; Roland, foremost in his files, finds heartrending letters addressed directly to him, as a last recourse. Early in 1789, M. de Gouy d'Arcy[3273] was the first to put his pen to paper in behalf of popular rights. A deputy of the noblesse to the Constituent Assembly, he is the first to rally to the Third-Estate; when the liberal minority of the noblesse came and took their seats in the hall of the Communes, he had already been there eight days, and, for thirty months, he "invariably seated himself on the side of the 'Left.'" Senior major-general, and ordered by the Legislative Assembly to suppress the outbreak of the 6,000 insurgents at Noyon, "he kept his rigorous orders in his pocket for ten days"; he endured their insults; he risked his life "to save those of his misguided fellow-citizens, and he had the good fortune not to spill a drop of blood." Exhausted by so much labor and effort, almost dying, ordered into the country by his physicians, "he devoted his income to the relief of poverty"; he planted on his own domain the first liberty tree that was erected; he furnished the volunteers with clothes and arms; "instead of a fifth, he yielded up a third of his revenue under the forced system of taxation." His children live with him on the property, which has been in the family four hundred years, and the peasantry call him "their father." No one could lead a more tranquil or, indeed, a more meritorious existence. But, being a noble, he is suspected, and a delegate from the Paris Commune denounces him at Compiègne as having in his house two cannon and five hundred and fifty muskets. There is at once a domiciliary visit. Eight hundred men, infantry and cavalry, appear before the chateau d'Arcy in battle array. He meets them at the door and tenders them the keys. After a search of six hours, they find twelve fowling pieces and thirteen rusty pistols, which he has already declared. His disappointed visitors grumble, break, eat and drink to the extent of 2,000 crowns damage.[3274] Nevertheless, urged by their leaders they finally retire. But M. de Gouy has 60,000 francs in rentals which would be so much gain to the nation if he would emigrate; this must be effected, by expelling him, and, moreover during his expulsion, they may fill their pockets. For eight days this matter is discussed in the Compiègne club, in the bars, in the barracks, and, on the ninth day, 150 volunteers issue from the town, declaring that they are going to kill M. de Gouy and all who belong to him. Informed of this, he departs with his family, leaving the doors of his house wide open. There is a general pillage for five hours; the mob drink the costly wines, steal the plate, demand horses to carry their booty away, and promise to return soon and take the owner's head.—In effect, on the following morning at four o'clock, there is a new invasion, a new pillage, and, this time, the last one; the servants escape under a fire of musketry, and M. de Gouy, at the request of the villagers, whose vineyards are devastated, is obliged to quit that part of the country.[3275]—There is no need to go through the whole file. At Houdainville, at the house of M. de Saint-Maurice, at Nointel, on the estate of the Duc de Bourbon, at Chantilly, on the estate of the Prince de Condé, at the house of M. de Fitz-James, and elsewhere, a certain Gauthier, "commandant of the Paris detachment of Searchers, and charged with the powers of the Committee of Supervision," makes his patriotic circuit, and Roland knows beforehand of what that consists, namely, a dragonnade[3276] in regular form on the domains of all nobles, absent or present.[3277]
Favorite game is still found in the clergy, more vigorously hunted than the nobles; Roland, charged with the duty of maintaining public order, asks himself how the lives of inoffensive priests, which the law recommends to him, can be protected.—At Troyes, at the house of M. Fardeau, an old non-conformist curé, an altar decked with its sacred vessels is discovered, and M. Fardeau, arrested, refuses to take the civic oath. Torn from his prison, and ordered to shout "Vive la Nation!" he again refuses. On this, a volunteer, borrowing an ax from a baker, chops off his head, and this head, washed in the river, is borne to the Hôtel-de-ville.[3278]—At Meaux, a brigade of Parisian gendarmerie murders seven priests, and, as an extra, six ordinary malefactors in confinement.[3279] At Rheims, the Parisian volunteers first make way with the post-master and his clerk, both under suspicion because the smell of burnt paper had issued from their chimney, and, next, M. de Montrosier, an old retired officer, which is the opening of the hunt. Afterwards they fall upon two ecclesiastics with pikes and sabers, whom their game-beaters have brought in from the country, then on the former curé of Saint-Jean, and on that of Rilly; their corpses are cut up, paraded through the streets in portions, and burnt in a bonfire; one of the wounded priests, the abbé Alexandre, is thrown in still alive.[3280]—Roland recognizes the men of September, who, exposing their still bloody pikes, came to his domicile to demand their wages; wherever the band passes it announces, "in the name of the people," its "plenary power to spread the example of the capital." Now, as 40,000 unsworn priests are condemned by the decree of August 26 to leave their departments in a week and France in a fortnight, shall they be allowed to depart? Eight thousand of them at Rouen, in obedience to the decree, charter transports, which the riotous population of both sides of the Seine prevent from leaving. Roland sees in his dispatches that in Rouen, as elsewhere, they crowd the municipalities for their passports,[3281] but that these are often refused. Better still, at Troyes; at Meaux, at Lyons, at Dôle, and in many other towns, the same thing is done as at Paris; they are confined in particular houses or in prisons, at least, provisionally, "for fear that they may congregate under the German eagle"; so that, made rebellious and declared traitors in spite of themselves, they may still remain in their pens subject to the knife. As the exportation of specie is prohibited, those who have procured the necessary coin are robbed of it on the frontier, while others, who fly at all hazards, tracked like wild boars, or run down like hares, escape like the bishop of Barral, athwart bayonets, or like the abbé Guillon, athwart sabers, when they are not struck down, like the abbé Pescheur, by the blows of a gun-stock.[3282]
It is soon dawn. The files are too numerous and too large; Roland finds that, out of eighty-three, he can examine but fifty; he must hasten on; leaving the East, his eyes again turn to the South.—On this side, too, there are strange sights. On the 2nd of September, at Châlons-sur-Marne[3283], M. Chanlaire, an octogenarian and deaf, is returning, with his prayer-book under his arm, from the Mall, to which he resorted daily to read his prayers. A number of Parisian volunteers who meet him, seeing that he looks like a devotee, order him to shout, "Vive la Liberté" Unable to understand them, he makes no reply. They then seize him by the ears, and, not marching fast enough, they drag him along; his old ears give way, and, excited by seeing blood, they cut off his ears and nose, and thus, the poor old man dripping with blood, they reach the Hôtel-de-Ville. At this sight a notary, posted there as sentinel, and who is a man of feeling, is horror-stricken and escapes, while the other National Guards hasten to shut the iron gates. The Parisians, still dragging along their captive, go to the district and then to the department bureau "to denounce aristocrats"; on the way they continue to strike the tottering old man, who falls down; they then decapitate him, place pieces of his body on pikes, and parade these about. Meanwhile, in this same town, twenty-two gentlemen; at Beaune, forty priests and nobles; at Dijon, eighty-three heads of families, locked up as suspected without evidence or examination, and confined at their own expense two months under pikes, ask themselves every morning whether the populace and the volunteers, who shout death cries through the streets, mean to release them in the same way as in Paris.[3284]—A trifle is sufficient to provoke a murder. On the 19th of August, at Auxerre as the National Guard is marching along, three citizens, after having taken the civic oath, "left the ranks," and, on being called back, "to make them fall in," one, either impatient or in ill-humor, "replied with an indecent gesture". The populace, taking it as an insult, instantly rush at them, and shoving aside the municipal body and the National Guards, wound one and kill the other two.[3285] A fortnight after, in the same town, several young ecclesiastics are massacred, and "the corpse of one of them remains three days on a manure heap, the relatives not being allowed to bury it." About the same date, in a village of sabot makers, five leagues from Autun, four ecclesiastics provided with passports, among them a bishop and his two grand-vicars, are arrested, then examined, robbed, and murdered by the peasantry.—Below Autun, especially in the district of Roanne, the villagers burn the rent-rolls of national property; the volunteers put property-owners to ransom; both, apart from each other or together, give themselves up "to every excess and to every sort of iniquity against those whom they suspect of incivism under pretense of religious opinions."[3286] However preoccupied or upset Roland's mind may be by the philosophic generalities with which it is filled, he has long inspected manufactures in this country; the name of every place is familiar to him; objects and forms are this time clearly defined to his arid imagination, and he begins to see things through and beyond mere words.