THE ASSASSINS

Who were the men that the leaders succeeded in enlisting for the hideous task ? Very great pains have been taken, Dr. John Moore wrote on the 10th of September, to urge the notion “ that the assassins were no other than a promiscuous crowd of the citizens of Paris.” [121] This was absolutely untrue. The assassins formed an organized band of not more than 300 men—a point on which all contemporaries not in collusion with the leaders agree.[122] Nor is there any mystery concerning their identity, for the names and

professions of the greater number are known, and have been published by M. Granier de Cassagnac.[123] There were then, in addition to the Marseillais and released convicts

who formed the nucleus of the gang, a certain number of men who might be described as citizens of Paris, and, strangely enough, these were not mostly rough brutes from the barges on the Seine or the hovels of Saint-Marceau, but boutiquiers or small tradesmen, bootmakers, jewellers, tailors—two of these were Germans—some, indeed, appear to have been men of education. [124] It is this latter class that seems to have lent itself most willingly to the hideous work ; the rest were persuaded by various methods to co-operate. The greater number undoubtedly yielded merely to the lust for gold, to the promise of wine and booty in addition to their salary ; others, the more ignorant no doubt, believed the story told them of the plot hatched by the prisoners to massacre their wives and children, and went forth in all good faith to destroy the supposed enemies of their country. As to the ferocity they displayed once they had set themselves to the task, it is to be explained in the same way as the outrages committed at the Tuileries on the 10th of August, by the effect of fiery liquor working on overwrought brains. Moreover, this time it was not merely alcohol that had been given to them, but something more insidious that had been purposely introduced into the drink with which they were plied incessantly. Maton de la Varenne says that Manuel had ordered gunpowder to be mixed with their brandy, so as to keep them in a state of frenzy ; but the Two Friends of Liberty declare that they were drugged :

“ It is incontestable that the drink that had been distributed to the assassins was mingled with a particular drug that inspired terrible fury, and left to those who took it no possibility of a return to reason. We knew a porter who for twenty years had carried out errands … in the Rue des Noyers. He had always enjoyed the highest reputation, and every inhabitant of the district blindly confided the most valuable parcels to him… . He was dragged off on the 3rd of September to the Convent of Saint-Firmin, where he was forced to do the work of executioner. We saw him six days later when we were http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/webster/frenchrev/fr_rev_06.html (37 of 61)5.4.2006 10:40:30

 

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ourselves proscribed, and, needing a man who could be trusted to help us move secretly, we addressed ourselves to him. He had returned to his post ; he was trembling in every limb, foaming at the mouth, asking incessantly for wine, without ever slaking his thirst and without falling a victim to ordinary drunkenness. ‘ They gave me plenty to drink,’

he said, ‘ but I worked well ; I killed more than twenty priests on my own account.’ A thousand other speeches of this kind escaped him, and each sentence was interrupted by these words, ‘ I am thirsty.’ In order that he might not feel inclined to slake his thirst with our blood, we gave him as much wine as he wished. He died a month later without ever having slept in the interval.”[125]

This circumstance explains the fact that at moments the assassins showed themselves capable of humanity—evidently, when the first effects of the drug had begun to wear off, they returned more or less to a normal frame of mind. Thus the two cut-throats, who conducted the Chevalier de Bertrand safely home, insisted on going upstairs with him to contemplate the joy of his family. The rescuers of Jourgniac de St. Meard—a Marseillais, a mason, and a wig-maker—refused the reward offered them with the words, “ We do not do this for money.” [126] Later on Beaulieu met these men at the

house of St. Méard. “ What struck me,” he says, “ was that through all their ferocious remarks I perceived generous sentiments, men determined to undertake anything to protect those whose cause they had embraced. The greater number of these maniacs, dupes of the Machiavellian beings who set them in motion, are dead or dying in misery.” [127]

 

THE RÔLE OF THE PEOPLE

 

From the point of view of the leaders, the populace proved disappointing during the massacres of September, for although it had not been thought advisable to march the Faubourgs en masse on the prisons, it was hoped that when the moment came a certain proportion of the Paris mob would join in the killing as they had done at the massacre of St. Barthélemy. “ In spite of all the activity displayed,” says Prudhomme, “ the 30,000

victims, designated by Danton himself, did not find enough executioners. They (the leaders) counted on the people ; they accredited them with more ferocity. They hoped that they would not remain idle spectators of five to six thousand [128] massacres executed before their eyes ; they supposed that they would themselves strike en masse, and that, after having emptied the prisons, they would go into the houses and repeat the same scenes, but they could never succeed in exasperating the multitude to this extent.” [129]

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On the contrary, even by the mob assembled around the prisons, every single acquittal recorded was hailed with acclamations, often with rapturous applause—a prisoner who made a dash for liberty was certain to find the crowd opening out to let him through.

The Royalist, Weber, could hardly extricate himself from the embraces of the bystanders, amongst whom savage-looking harridans, concerned for his white silk stockings, cried out reprovingly to the guards who led him, “ Take care there ! You are making Monsieur walk in the gutter! ” Yet that the mob, obedient to the suggestions of the leaders, excited with drink and attacked by that strange insanity familiar to all who have studied “ crowd psychology,” did at other moments allow itself to be carried away into applauding the massacres, did indeed throughout stand idly by and utter only occasional words of protest, is undeniable. But were these “ the people ” ? A thousand times no ! We have already seen whence they were recruited ; the true men and women of the people remained far from such scenes as these.

“ I will testify to Europe,” cries Bigot de Sainte-Croix, “ that the People of my country, that those of the capital, did not ordain, did not desire these massacres, that the People did not even see them committed. The People closed their windows, their workrooms, their shops ; they took refuge in the furthest corners of their dwellings so as to shut their ears and eyes to the uproar, and to the sight of those beings, strangers to the People and to human nature, who, armed with knives, sabres, and clubs, their faces and their arms stained with blood, carried through the streets heads and fragments of mutilated bodies, and deafened themselves with the ferocious hymn (the ‘Carmagnole’?) that had been dictated to them. Ah ! Why should the People again be calumniated ? …”[130]

And Mortimer Ternaux adds : “ Yes, it is lying to history, it is betraying the sacred cause of humanity, it is deserting the most obvious interests of democracy, to calumniate the people, to take for them a few hundred wretches … going basely to seek their victims one by one in the cells of the Abbaye or of La Force… . The people, the true people, composed of honest and industrious workmen, warm-hearted and patriotic, of young bourgeois with generous aspirations and indomitable courage, did not mingle for a moment with the scoundrels recruited by Maillard … the people, the true people, were all at the Champ de Mars or in front of the recruiting platforms, offering their best blood for the defence of the country ; they would have been ashamed to shed that of defenceless victims.” [131]

But, it will be urged, why did the people of Paris not interfere ? Why, instead of retiring into their houses and shutting their ears and eyes, did they not rush out into the streets and arrest the murderers ? instead of mustering at the Champ de Mars, march on the prisons and deliver the victims ?

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“ All Paris let it happen ( laissa faire),” Madame Roland writes indignantly ; “ all Paris is accursed in my eyes, and I hope no longer that liberty may be established amongst cowards insensible to the worst outrages that could be committed against Nature and humanity, cold spectators of crimes that the courage of fifty armed men could easily have prevented.” [132]

Madame Roland well knew the true explanation of the people’s conduct—her own behaviour during the massacres we shall refer to later ; she was perfectly aware that it was the cowardice of the authorities, of her friend Pétion, of “ the virtuous Roland ” himself that made it possible for the Commune to carry out its designs unhindered, that prevented the people from interfering.

“ If the people,” says Prudhomme, “ did not put a stop to the murders committed in their presence, it was that, on seeing that their representatives, their magistrates, and the staff of their armed force made no attempt to prevent this butchery, they could only believe that these were acts of justice of a new kind.” [133]

Here, then, is the explanation. In the first place, the people of Paris were told—and in some cases made to believe—that the massacres were a necessary act of precaution in view of the conspiracy amongst the prisoners to massacre the citizens ; secondly, the massacres were carried out officially under the eyes of the authorities, presided over by officials wearing their municipal scarves,[134] and executed in some instances by

assassins masquerading in the uniform of the National Guards ; [135] and thirdly, the people were prevented by armed force from interfering. We know from the researches of M. Mortimer Temaux and M. Granier de Cassagnac that Santerre, the commander-general, was authorized to surround the prisons with troops during the massacres, “ in order to prevent accidents,” [136] and the nature of these accidents is elsewhere very clearly revealed. Thus, as we have already seen at the Carmes, a cordon of police was provided to protect the assassins from the crowd, and Sénart relates that the same precaution was demanded at La Force : “ The butcher Legendre went to find one of the commanders of the Arsenal, and asked him for two hundred armed men to go to La Force in order to second the murderers and protect them, because the number of prisoners was very great and there were not enough massacrers ”—a request with which the honest commander indignantly refused to comply.[137] But the fact that the

massacrers were given armed protection during their hideous task received additional confirmation just a hundred years later. In the Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et Curieux for April 20, 1892, M. Alfred Bégis related that he had recently acquired a copy of a pamphlet, by Garat, that had belonged to Sergent, who, with Panis, the brother-in-law of Santerre, had been entrusted with the police and the prisons as members of the Comité http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/webster/frenchrev/fr_rev_06.html (40 of 61)5.4.2006 10:40:30

 

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de Surveillance of the Commune. Now in this pamphlet, which was annotated throughout by the hand of Sergent, Garat asked the question why the people allowed the massacres of September “ How is it that so much blood flowed under other blades than that of justice without the legislators, without the magistrates of the people, without the whole people themselves summoning all the public forces to the place of these sanguinary scenes ? ”

To this question Sergent made reply in the margin : “ The massacrers of the Abbaye asked to be protected during their dreadful work by a guard which was granted to them.” The mob of Paris collected round the prisons had then attempted to interfere, since the murderers were obliged to ask for protection, and this was the kind of “ accident ” the armed forces were sent out to prevent !

Undoubtedly we must blame the soldiers for obeying this monstrous order, but it should be remembered that all the normal elements in the army were collected on the frontier, and that the only forces remaining in Paris were those of which the revolutionary leaders had made sure—the confederates from Marseilles, or Brest, or the camp at Soissons.

The call to arms had thus admirably served their purpose by ridding them of all those loyal and patriotic citizens who might have been expected to prevent bloodshed.