XV. 1794. CHAP. assembly invested with the power of the French nation, marching with a firm and rapid step towards the completion of the public happiness-devoted to the people, and to the triumph of equality, worthy of giving to the world the signal of liberty and the example of every virtue. Complete, then, citizens, your sublime work! You have placed yourselves in the front rank, to sustain the first assault of the enemies of humanity. We will deserve that honour, and we will trace with our blood the path to immortality. May you ever display that unalterable energy, xxxiii. 132, 1 Hist. Parl. Which is required to enable you to resist the monsters of the universe combined against you, and enjoy in peace the fruits of your virtues and the blessings of the people!"1 133. 39. and increas But in the midst of these warm anticipations and Prodigious eloquent declamations, the finances of the Republic were ing issue of daily falling into a more deplorable condition, and its assignats. prodigious expenditure, external and internal, was sustained only by a ceaseless and constantly increasing issue of assignats. By a report of Cambon, the minister of finance, on 16th May 1794, it appeared that the assignats which had been created up to that period amounted to the enormous sum of 8,778,000,000 francs, (£351,120,000 sterling;) of which number there still remained in circulation 5,898,000,000 francs, or £235,920,000. So immense. a mass of paper, amounting at the very lowest estimate to three times the whole present circulation of either France or England, taking both specie and bank-notes into view, of course could not exist in circulation without producing a depreciation in its value to a ruinous extent; the more especially as the whole transactions between man and man in the country were at a stand, in consequence of the blasting operation of the law of the maximum; and foreign commerce, equally with domestic expenditure, was 22 Rapport de Cambon, annihilated. But as the assignats bore a forced circulation, Moniteur, and the refusal to take them at par would probably lead to a denunciation at the nearest revolutionary committee,2 there was no alternative but to shun the pestilence as 16 Mai. 18 Mai, p. 973. much as possible, and avoid either selling any thing, or engaging in any transaction whatever in which money was employed. But creditors could not do this, and fraudulent debtors gladly bought up assignats, and forced a discharge of their debts for a fiftieth or hundredth part of their real value. CHAP. XV. 1794. 40. executions While the assignats were thus sweeping away the whole capital of the state, the march of the Revolution was Increased equally devastating and relentless in the destruction of by the Revohuman life. The proceedings of the Revolutionary Tri-lutionary bunal, after the law of 22d Prairial had passed, were so brief as hardly to deserve the name of a trial; while the columns of the Moniteur of the following day exhibited fatal proof, that to be arraigned before that tribunal, and sent to the guillotine, were in general the same thing.* Bands of thirty, forty, and fifty persons, were successively brought up, often two sets in a day, composed of men and women, old, middle-aged, and young, generally wholly unconnected with each other, and who never knew of each other's existence till they heard each other's names in one accusation. Royalists, Dantonists, Anarchists, and Constitutionalists, were all huddled together in one indictment, under a charge of "conspiracy against the Republic ;" and that fatal word was sufficient to warrant proceeding for life and death against a crowd of men and women, total strangers to each other, but who had all, from some ground or other, awakened the jealousy of the Decemvirs. * A curious proof of this extraordinary rapidity came out subsequently on the trial of Fouquier Tinville. Wolf, one of the clerks of the Revolutionary Tribunal, being asked how it happened that some persons had been executed whose sentences had not even been signed, gave the following answer:-" No criminal could be executed without a certificate of the sentence from the principal clerk of court, and the clerk, for his own safety, would not give the certificate till he had the sentence signed by the judge. But the time being too short for copying out these judgments the same day, the clerk obtained the judge's signature to a form, which he could fill up each day at his leisure, and in the mean time he ran no risk in giving the requisite certificate. But in this instance, where the sentence produced is still blank, Legris, the clerk who wrote it, was himself arrested at five o'clock next morning, and executed at four o'clock in the afternoon."-Procès de FOUQUIER TINVILLE, Bull. du Trib. Rév. No. 22. XV. 1794. CHAP. The slightest symptom of disapprobation at the existing regime a word, a look, a gesture, a sigh, a tear, were sufficient, if deponed to by the most infamous witness, to secure an immediate condemnation; and upon a charge of conspiracy with others whose principles and connexions were diametrically opposed to theirs, thus included with them in the same doom. In this way crowds of Royalists and Anarchists were sent to the scaffold together, because the one had been connected with those who blamed the Revolution for going too far, the other for not going far enough. Even a declaration by women that they were pregnant often failed in procuring so much as a temporary suspension of their fate.* A deplorable equality was observed between the number of persons indicted one day before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and that which appeared next day in the columns of the Moniteur as having perished on the scaffold. + And so generally was * "I saw," said Wolf, a clerk of the Revolutionary Tribunal, "at least ten or twelve women executed the day they had declared themselves pregnant. Their cases were, indeed, referred to the medical men; but on their declining, through terror, to speak decidedly, they were all executed."- Réponse de WOLF; Procès de FoUqUIER TINVILLE, No. 22. The following were the numbers daily executed in Paris during the latter period of the Reign of Terror : 1 XV. 1794. Deux Amis, xii. the danger of expressing sympathy with the victims under- CHAP. stood, that no tears were shed, nor did mournful visages appear even in the streets when the melancholy procession proceeded along, conveying them to the scaffold; and if a dead body was seen on the wayside, the traveller, as in the days recorded by Tacitus, averted his eyes lest he Souv. de la should be seen to shudder, and denounced at the Jacobin 368, 372. Committee as a counter-revolutionist. 1 328, 329. Duval, Terreur, iv. brevity of The trial of these unhappy captives was as brief as 41. during the massacres in the prisons. "Did you know of Excessive the conspiracy of the prisons, Dorival ?" "No."-"I the trials. expected no other answer; but it will not avail you." To another" Are not you an ex-noble?" "Yes." To a third" Are you not a priest?" "Yes, but I have taken the oath." "You have no right to speak; be silent." -Compiled from the Moniteur of the above dates, a few days after each. CHAP. "Were not you architect to Madame?" XV. 1794. Yes, but I was disgraced in 1788."-" Had you not a father-in-law in the Luxembourg?" "Yes." Such were the questions which constituted the sole trial of the numerous accused; often no witnesses were called; their condemnations were pronounced almost as rapidly as their names were read out; the law of 22d Prairial had dispensed with the necessity of taking any evidence when the court were convinced by moral presumptions. The indictments were thrown off by hundreds at once, and the name of the individual merely filled in; the judgments were printed with equal rapidity, in a room adjoining the court; and several thousand copies circulated through Paris by little urchins, Tableau des exclaiming, amidst weeping and distracted crowds-" Here Prisons, xi, are the names of those who have gained prizes in the lottery of the holy guillotine!" The accused were executed soon after leaving the court, or at latest on the following afternoon. 1 1 Procès de Tinville, Trib. Rév. Fonquier Bull. du p. 54, 57. 98. Th. vi. 366, 367. Deux Amis, xii. 42. Since the law of the 22d Prairial had been passed, the Executions heads had fallen at the rate of thirty or forty a-day. "This is increased. Well," said Fouquier Tinville; "but we must get on more still further rapidly in the next decade; four hundred and fifty is the very least that must then be served up." To facilitate this immense increase, spies were sent into the prisons in order to extract from the unhappy wretches their secrets, and designate to the public accuser those who might first be selected. These infamous wretches soon became the terror of the captives. They were enclosed as suspected persons; but their real mission was soon apparent from their insolence, their consequential airs, the preference shown them by the jailers, and their orgies at the doors of the cells with the agents of the police. As they were sent there to get up a fresh conspiracy in the prisons, they were not long of accomplishing their purpose. A hundred and seventy were denounced at the Luxembourg alone. The spies, whose mission was soon discovered, were caressed, implored by the trembling prisoners, and received what |