CHAPTER VI.
"L'ideé de voir un massacre me remplissait de douleur."— Jules Favre, Enquête sur le 4 Septemre.
THE MAYORS, THE DEPUTIES, THE JOURNALISTS, THE ASSEMBLY COMBINE AGAINST PARIS—THE REACTION MARCHES ON THE PLACE VENDÔME, AND IS PUNISHED.
On the 21st the situation stood out in bold relief.
At Paris—the Central Committee, with it all the workmen and all the generous and enlightened men of the small middle-class. The Committee said, "We have but one object—the elections. Everybody is welcome to co-operate with us, but we shall not leave the Hôtel-de-Ville before they have been made."
At Versailles—the Assembly;—all the monarchists, all the great bourgeoisie, all the slaveholders. They yelled, "Paris is only a rebel, the Central Committee a band of brigands."
Between Versailles and Paris—a few Radical deputies, all the mayors, many adjuncts. They comprised the Liberal bourgeois, that sacred herd that makes all revolutions and allows all the empires to be made. Despised by the Assembly, disdained by the people, they cried to the Central Committee, "Usurpers!" and to the Assembly, "You will spoil all."
The day of the 21st is memorable, for on it all these voices made themselves heard.
The Central Committee: "Paris has in nowise the intention of separating from France; far from it. For France she has borne with the Empire and the Government of the National Defence, with all their treachery and defections, certainly not to abandon her now, but only to say to her as an elder sister: Sustain thyself as I have sustained myself; oppose thyself to oppression as I have done."