Robespierre, informed of these demoniac deeds, recalled Carrier, but he did not dare to bring an act of accusation against the wretch, lest he should peril his own head by being charged with sympathy with the Royalists. It is grateful to record that Carrier himself was eventually conducted, amid the execrations of the community, to the scaffold.[400]
The prisons of Paris were now filled with victims. Municipal instructions, issued by Chaumette, catalogued as follows those who should be arrested as suspected persons: 1. Those who, by crafty addresses, check the energy of the people. 2. Those who mysteriously deplore the lot of the people, and propagate bad news with affected grief. 3. Those who, silent respecting the faults of the Royalists, declaim against the faults of the Patriots. 4. Those who pity those against whom the law is obliged to take measures. 5. Those who associate with aristocrats, priests, and moderates, and take an interest in their fate. 6. Those who have not taken an active part in the Revolution. 7. Those who have received the Constitution with indifference and have expressed fears respecting its duration. 8. Those who, though they have done nothing against liberty, have done nothing for it. 9. Those who do not attend the sections. 10. Those who speak contemptuously of the constituted authorities. 11. Those who have signed counter-revolutionary petitions. 12. The partisans of La Fayette, and those who marched to the charge in the Champ de Mars.
There were but few persons in Paris who were not liable to be arrested, by the machinations of any enemy, upon some one of these charges. Many thousands were soon incarcerated. The prisons of the Maire, La Force, the Conciergerie, the Abbaye, St. Pelagie, and the Madelonettes were crowded to their utmost capacity. Then large private mansions, the College of Duplessis, and finally the spacious Palace of the Luxembourg were converted into prisons, and were filled to suffocation with the suspected. In these abodes, surrendered to filth and misery, with nothing but straw to lie upon, the most brilliant men and women of Paris were huddled together with the vilest outcasts. After a time, however, those who had property were permitted to surround themselves with such comforts as their means would command. From these various prisons those who were to be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal were taken to the Conciergerie, which adjoined the Palace of Justice, where the tribunal held its session. A trial was almost certain condemnation, and the guillotine knew no rest. Miserable France was now surrendered to the Reign of Terror. The mob had become the sovereign.
FOOTNOTES:
[389] Mignet, p. 192.
[390] "The Convention, finding England already leagued with the coalition, and consequently all its promises of neutrality vain and illusive, on the 1st of February, 1793, declared war against the King of Great Britain and the Stadtholder of Holland, who had been entirely guided by the cabinet of St. James's since 1788."—Mignet, vol. i., p. 195.
[391] Lamartine, History of the Girondists, vol. ii., p. 395.
[392] "It was in Spain, more particularly, that Pitt set intrigues at work to urge her to the greatest blunder she ever committed—that of joining England against France, her only maritime ally."—Thiers, vol. ii., p. 82.
[393] In reference to the terrific conflict between the privileged classes and the enslaved people, Prof. Smyth writes, "My conclusion is that neither the high party nor the low have the slightest right to felicitate themselves on their conduct during this memorable revolution. No historian, no commentator on these times can proceed a moment, but on the supposition that, while he is censuring the faults of the one, he is perfectly aware of the antagonistic faults of the other; that each party is to take its turn; and that the whole is a dreadful lesson of instruction both to the one and the other. I have dwelt with more earnestness on the faults of the popular leaders, because their faults are more natural and more important; because the friends of freedom (hot and opinionated though they be) are still more within the reach of instruction than are men of arbitrary temperament, than courts and privileged orders, who are systematically otherwise."—Prof Smyth, Fr. Rev., vol. iii., p. 245.
The story of the French Revolution has too often been told in this spirit, veiling the atrocities of the oppressors and magnifying the inhumanity of the oppressed. While truth demands that all the violence of an enslaved people, in despair bursting their bonds, should be faithfully delineated, truth no less imperiously demands that the mercilessness of proud oppressors, crushing millions for ages, and goading a whole nation to the madness of despair, should be also impartially described.