CHAPTER I. THE OPPRESSED.
I. Revolutionary Destruction.
Magnitude of revolutionary destructiveness.—The four ways
of effecting it.—Expulsion from the country through forced
emigration and legal banishment.—Number of those expelled.
—Privation of liberty.—Different sorts of imprisonment.
—Number and situation of those imprisoned.—Murders after
being tried, or without trial.—Number of those guillotined
or shot after trial.—Indication of the number of other
lives destroyed.—Necessity and plan for wider destruction.
—Spoliation.—Its extent.—Squandering.—Utter losses.—Ruin
of individuals and the State.—The Notables the most
oppressed.
The object of the Jacobin, first of all, is the destruction of his adversaries, avowed or presumed, probable or possible. Four violent measures concur, together or in turn, to bring about the physical or social extermination of all Frenchmen who no longer belong to the sect or the party.
The first operation consists in expelling them from the territory.—Since 1789, they have been chased off through a forced emigration; handed over to jacqueries, or popular uprisings, in the country, and to insurrections in the cities,[4101] defenseless and not allowed to defend themselves, three-fourths of them have left France, simply to escape popular brutalities against which neither the law nor the government afforded them any protection. According as the law and the administration, in becoming more Jacobin, became more hostile to them, so did they leave in greater crowds. After the 10th of August and 2nd of September, the flight necessarily was more general; for, henceforth, if any one persisted in remaining after that date it was with the almost positive certainty that he would be consigned to a prison, to await a massacre or the guillotine. About the same time, the law added to the fugitive the banished, all unsworn priests, almost an entire class consisting of nearly 40 000 persons.[4102] It is calculated that, on issuing from the reign of Terror, the total number of fugitives and banished) amounted to 150 000[4103] the list would have been still larger, had not the frontier been guarded by patrols and one had to cross it at the risk of one's life; and yet, many do risk their lives in attempting to cross it, in disguise, wandering about at night, in mid-winter, exposed to gunshots, determined to escape cost what it will, into Switzerland, Italy, or Germany, and even into Hungary, in quest of security and the right of praying to God as one pleases.[4104]—If any exiled or deported person ventures to return, he is tracked like a wild beast, and, as soon as taken, he is guillotined.[4105] For example, M. de Choiseul, and other unfortunates, wrecked and cast ashore on the coast of Normandy, are not sufficiently protected by the law of nations. They are brought before a military commission; saved temporarily through public commiseration, they remain in prison until the First Consul intervenes between them and the homicidal law and consents, through favor, to deport them to the Dutch frontier.—If they have taken up arms against the Republic they are cut off from humanity; a Pandour[4106] taken prisoner is treated as a man; an émigré made prisoner is treated like a wolf—they shoot him on the spot. In some cases, even the pettiest legal formalities are dispensed with. "When I am lucky enough to catch 'em," writes Gen. Vandamme, "I do not trouble the military commission to try them. They are already tried—my saber and pistols do their business."[4107]
The second operation consists in depriving "suspects" of their liberty, of which deprivation there are several degrees; there are various ways of getting hold of people.—Sometimes, the "suspect" is "adjourned," that is to say, the order of arrest is simply suspended; he lives under a perpetual menace that is generally fulfilled; he never knows in the morning that he will not sleep in a prison that night. Sometimes, he is put on the limits of his commune. Sometimes, he is confined to his house with or without guards, and, in the former case, he is obliged to pay them. Again, finally, and which occurs most frequently, he is shut up in this or that common jail.—In the single department of Doubs, twelve hundred men and women are "adjourned;" three hundred put on the limits of the commune, fifteen hundred confined to their houses, and twenty two hundred imprisoned.[4108] In Paris, thirty-six such prisons and more than "violins", or temporary jails, soon filled by the revolutionary committees, do not suffice for the service.[4109] It is estimated that, in France, not counting more than 40,000 provisional jails, twelve hundred prisons, full and running over, contain each more than two hundred inmates.[4110] At Paris, notwithstanding the daily void created by the guillotine, the number of the imprisoned on Floréal 9, year II., amounts to 7,840; and, on Messidor 25 following, notwithstanding the large batches of 50 and 60 persons led in one day, and every day, to the scaffold, the number is still 7,502.[4111] There are more than one thousand persons in the prisons of Arras, more than one thousand five hundred in those of Toulouse, more than three thousand in those of Strasbourg, and more than thirteen thousand in those of Nantes. In the two departments alone of Bouches du-Rhône and Vaucluse, Representative Maignet, who is on the spot, reports from 12,000 to 15,000 arrests.[4112] "A little before Thermidor," says Representative Beaulieu, "the number of incarcerated arose to nearly 400,000, as is apparent on the lists and registers then before the Committee of General Security."[4113]—Among these poor creatures, there are children, and not alone in the prisons of Nantes where the revolutionary searches have collected the whole of the rural population; in the prisons of Arras, among twenty similar cases, I find a coal-dealer and his wife with their seven sons and daughters, from seventeen down to six years of age; a widow with her four children from nineteen down to twelve years of age; another noble widow with her nine children, from seventeen down to three years of age, and six children, without father or mother, from twenty-three down to nine years of age.[4114]—These prisoners of State were treated, almost everywhere, worse than robbers and assassins under the ancient régime. They began by subjecting them to rapiotage, that is to say, stripping them naked or, at best, feeling their bodies under their shirts; women and young girls fainted away under this examination, formerly confined to convicts on entering the bagnio.[4115]—Frequently, before consigning them to their dungeons or shutting them up in their cells, they would be left two or three nights pell-mell in a lower hall on benches, or in the court on the pavement, "without beds or straw." "The feelings are wounded in all directions, every point of sensibility, so to say, being played upon. They are deprived one after the other of their property, assignats, furniture, and food, of daylight and lamp-light, of the assistance which their wants and infirmities demand, of a knowledge of public events, of all communication, either immediate or written, with fathers, sons and husbands."[4116] They are obliged to pay for their lodgings, their keepers, and for what they eat; they are robbed at their very doors of the supplies they send for outside; they are compelled to eat at a mess-table; they are furnished with scant and nauseous food, "spoilt codfish, putrid herrings and meat, rotten vegetables, all this accompanied with a mug of Seine water colored red with some drug or other."[4117] They starve them, bully them, and vex them purposely as if they meant to exhaust their patience and drive them into a revolt, so as to get rid of them in a mass, or, at least, to justify the increasing rapid strokes of the guillotine. They are huddled together in tens, twenties and thirties, in one room at La Force, "eight in a chamber, fourteen feet square," where all the beds touch, and many overlap each other, where two out of the eight inmates are obliged to sleep on the floor, where vermin swarm, where the closed sky-lights, the standing tub, and the crowding together of bodies poisons the atmosphere.—In many places, the proportion of the sick and dying is greater than in the hold of a slave-ship. "Of ninety individuals with whom I was shut up two months ago," writes a prisoner at Strasbourg, "sixty-six were taken to the hospital in the space of eight days."[4118] In the prisons of Nantes, 3000 out 13,000 prisoners die of typhoid fever and of the rot in two months.[4119] 400 priests[4120] confined on a vessel between decks, in the roadstead of Aix, stowed on top of each other, wasted with hunger, eaten up by vermin, suffocated for lack of air, half-frozen, beaten, mocked at, and constantly threatened with death, suffer still more than Negroes in a slave-hold; for, through interest in his freight, the captain of the slaver tries to keep his human consignment in good health, whilst, through revolutionary fanaticism, the crew of the Aix vessel detests its cargo of "black-frocks" and would gladly send them to the bottom.—According to this system, which, up to Thermidor 9, grows worse and worse, imprisonment becomes a torture, oftentimes mortal, slower and more painful than the guillotine, and to such an extent that, to escape it, Champfort opens his veins and Condorcet swallows poison.[4121]The third expedient consists of murder, with or without trial.—178 tribunals, of which 40 are ambulatory, pronounce in every part of the territory sentences of death which are immediately executed on the spot.[4122] Between April 6, 1793, and Thermidor 9, year II., (July 27th, 1794) that of Paris has 2,625 persons guillotined,[4123] while the provincial judges do as much work as the Paris judges. In the small town of Orange alone, they guillotine 331 persons. In the single town of Arras they have 299 men and 93 women guillotined. At Nantes, the revolutionary tribunals and military committees have, on the average, 100 persons a day guillotined, or shot, in all 1,971. In the city of Lyons the revolutionary committee admit 1,684, while Cadillot, one of Robespierre's correspondents, advises him of 6,000.[4124]—The statement of these murders is not complete, but 17,000 have been enumerated,[4125] "most of them effected without any formality, evidence or direct charge," among others the murder of "more than 1200 women, several of whom were octogenarians and infirm;"[4126] particularly the murder of 60 women or young girls, condemned to death, say the warrants, for having attended the services of unsworn priests, or for having neglected the services of a sworn priest.
"The accused, ranged in order, were condemned at sight. Hundreds of death-sentences took about a minute per head. Children of seven, five and four years of age, were tried. A father was condemned for the son, and the son for the father. A dog was sentenced to death. A parrot was brought forward as a witness. Numbers of accused persons whose sentences could not be written out were executed."
At Angers, the sentences of over four hundred men and three hundred and sixty women, executed for the purpose of relieving the prisons, were mentioned on the registers simply by the letters S or G (shot or guillotined).[4127] At Paris, as in the provinces, the slightest pretext[4128] served to constitute a crime. The daughter of the celebrated painter, Joseph Vernet,[4129] was guillotined for being a " receiver," for having kept fifty pounds of candles in her house, distributed among the employees of La Muette by the liquidators of the civil list. Young de Maillé,[4130] aged sixteen years, was guillotined as a conspirator, "for having thrown a rotten herring in the face of his jailer, who had served it to him to eat." Madame de Puy-Verin was guillotined as "guilty" because she had not taken away from her deaf, blind and senile husband a bag of card-counters, marked with the royal effigy.—In default of any pretext,[4131] there was the supposition of a conspiracy; blank lists were given to paid emissaries, who undertook to search the various prisons and select the requisite number of heads; they wrote names down on them according to their fancy, and these provided the batches for the guillotine.
"As for myself," said the juryman Vilate, "I am never embarrassed. I am always convinced. In a revolution, all who appear before this tribunal ought to be condemned."—