To the guillotine on the fatal Place de la Révolution, formerly Place Louis XV., the very scene of a terrible panic at his wedding festivities which cost the lives of hundreds of sightseers, the sixteenth Louis of France was led on the morning of 21st January 1793. As he turned to address the people, Santerre ordered the drums to beat—it was the echo of the drums reverberating through history which had smothered the cries of the Protestant martyrs sent to the scaffold by the fourteenth Louis a century before. This was the beginning of that année terrible, into which was crowded the most stupendous struggle in modern history. Threatened by the monarchies of Europe, who were united in an unholy crusade to crush the Revolution, France, in the tremendous words of Danton, flung to the coalesced kings the head of a king as gage of battle. A colossal energy, an unquenchable devotion were evoked by the supreme crisis, and directed by a committee of nine inexperienced young civilians, sitting in a room of the Tuileries at Paris, to whom later Carnot, an engineer officer, was added. “The whole Republic,” they proclaimed, “is a great besieged city: let France be a vast camp. Every age is called to defend the liberty of the Fatherland. The young men will fight: the married will forge arms. Women will make clothes and tents: children will tear old linen for lint. Old men shall be carried to the market-place to inflame the courage of all.” In twenty-four hours 60,000 men were enrolled; in two months fourteen armies organised. Saltpetre for powder failed; it was torn from the bowels of the earth. Steel, too, and bronze were lacking: iron railings were transmuted into swords, and church bells and royal statues into cannon. Paris became a vast armourer’s shop. Smithy fires in hundreds roared and anvils clanged in the open places—one hundred and forty at the Invalides, fifty-four at the Luxembourg. The women sang as they worked:—
“Cousons, filons, cousons bien,
V’là des habits de notre fabrique
Pour l’hiver qui vient.
Soldats de la Patrie
Vous ne manquerez de rien.”[163]
The smiths chanted to the rhythm of their strokes:—
“Forgeons, forgeons, forgeons bien!”
On the new standards waving in the breeze ran the legend: “The French people risen against Tyrants.” Toulon was in the hands of the English; Lyons in revolt. With enemies in her camp, with one arm tied by the insurrection in La Vendée, the Revolution hurled her ragged and despised sans-culottes, shod in pasteboard or straw bands, mantled in a piece of matting skewered above their shoulders, against her enemies. How vain is the wisdom of the great! Burke thought that the Revolution had expunged France in a political sense out of the system of Europe, and his opinion was shared by every statesman in Europe, but before the year closed the proud and magnificently accoutred armies of kings were scattered over the borders, civil war was crushed at home, the Revolution triumphant. The Convention fixed the day of victory. It ordered its generals to end the war of La Vendée by 20th October: by the 17th four defeats had been inflicted on the insurgents, and 60,000 men, women and children were driven over the Loire. Soon the “dwarfish, ragged sans-culottes, the small, black-looking Marseillaise dressed in rags of every colour,” whom Goethe saw tramping out of Mayence “as if the goblin king had opened his mountains and sent forth his lively host of dwarfs,” had forced Prussia, the arch-champion of monarchy, to make peace and leave its Rhine provinces in the hands of regicides. Meanwhile terror reigned in Paris. In the frenzy of mortal strife the Revolution struck out blindly and cut down friend as well as foe; the innocent with the guilty. At least the guillotine fell swiftly and mercifully. Gone were the days of the wheel, the rack, the boiling lead and the stake. Under the ancien régime the torture of accused persons was one of the sights shown to foreigners in Paris. Evelyn, when visiting the city in 1651, was taken to see the torture of an alleged thief in the Châtelet, who was “wracked in an extraordinary manner, so that they severed the fellow’s joints in miserable sort.” Then, failing to extort a confession, “they increased the extension and torture, and then placing a horne in his mouth, such as they drench horses with, poured two buckets of water down, so that it prodigiously swelled him.” There was another “malefactor” to be dealt with, but the traveller had seen enough, and he leaves reflecting that it represented to him “the intolerable sufferings which our Blessed Saviour must needs undergo when His body was hanging with all its weight upon the nailes of the Crosse.”