"From every corner of France victims were brought in carts to the Conciergerie. This prison was emptied every day by the guillotine, and refilled from other prisons. These removals were made in the dark, lest public sympathy should be excited. Fifty or sixty poor creatures, strait bound, conducted by men of ferocious aspect, a drawn sabre in one hand and a lighted torch in the other, passed in this manner through the silence of night. The passenger who chanced to meet them had to smother his pity. A sigh would have united him to the funeral train.
READING THE LIST OF THE VICTIMS IN THE PRISONS OF PARIS.
"The prisons were the abode of every species of suffering. The despair which reigned in these sepulchres was terrific: one finished his existence by poison; another dispatched himself by a nail; another dashed his head against the walls of his cell; some lost their reason. Those who had sufficient fortitude waited patiently for the executioner. Every house of arrest was required to furnish a certain number of victims. The turnkeys went with these mandates of accusation from chamber to chamber in the dead of night. The prisoners, starting from their sleep at the voice of their Cerberuses, supposed their end had arrived. Thus warrants of death for thirty threw hundreds into consternation.[409]
"At first the sheriffs ranged fifteen at a time in their carts, then thirty, and about the time of the fall of Robespierre preparations had been made for the execution of one hundred and fifty at a time. An aqueduct had been contrived to carry off the blood. In these batches, as they were called, were often united people of the most opposite systems and habits. Sometimes whole generations were destroyed in a day. Malesherbes, at the age of eighty, perished with his sister, his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandson, and his granddaughter. Forty young women were brought to the guillotine for having danced at a ball given by the King of Prussia at Verdun. Twenty-two peasant women, whose husbands had been executed in La Vendée, were beheaded."
Such was the thraldom from which, at last, the empire of Napoleon rescued France. Nothing less than the strength of his powerful arm could have wrought out the achievement.
In the midst of such scenes it is not strange that all respect should have been renounced for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Jacobins of Paris crowded the Convention, demanding the abjuration of all forms of religion and all modes of worship. They governed the Convention with despotic sway. The Commune of Paris, invested with the local police of the city, passed laws prohibiting the clergy from exercising religious worship outside the churches. None but friends and relatives were to be allowed to follow the remains of the dead to the grave. All religious symbols were ordered to be effaced from the cemeteries, and to be replaced by a statue of Sleep. The following ravings of Anacharsis Cloots, a wealthy Prussian baron, who styled himself the orator of the human race, and who was one of the most conspicuous of the Jacobin agitators, forcibly exhibits the spirit of the times:[410]
"Paris, the metropolis of the globe, is the proper post for the orator of the human race. I have not left Paris since 1789. It was then that I redoubled my zeal against the pretended sovereigns of earth and heaven. I boldly preached that there is no other god but Nature, no other sovereign but the human race—the people-god. The people is sufficient for itself. Nature kneels not before herself. Religion is the only obstacle to universal happiness. It is high time to destroy it."