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XIII.

1793.

appointed to be disarmed, and the whole city destroyed, CHAP. with the exception only of the poor's-house, the manufactories, the great workshops, the hospitals, and public monuments. A commission of five members was appointed to inflict vengeance on the inhabitants; at their head 1 Jom. iv. were Couthon and Collot d'Herbois. The former pre- 194. Monisided over the destruction of the edifices, the latter, over 12. the extermination of the inhabitants.1

teur, Oct.

94.

to rouse the people.

The means taken by these worthy proconsuls of the Convention to carry their measures into effect, and work Means taken the people up to that pitch of sanguinary enthusiasm when they might be the ready instruments of their utmost atrocities, were founded on a perfect knowledge of human nature, and were those which, in every age, have been resorted to by the democratic tyrants of mankind. The first thing they did was to re-establish the Jacobin club, formerly presided over by Chalier. The most violent speeches were there immediately made, especially by Javoignes, a popular demagogue, who had succeeded to his influence. Chalier and Riard were represented as the martyrs of liberty, the heroes of the Republic, the only friends of the people. The workmen were told of the shameful slavery in which they had so long been kept by the rich; of the fortunes which had been wrung from the sweat of their brows, and the penury which they themselves had received as the reward of their toil. Javoignes invited them to resume their rights, by rending from the rich their ill-gotten gains; and, when the decree of the riotes égorgés ou proscrits, les édifices spécialement employés à l'industrie, et les monumens consacrés à l'humanité et à l'instruction publique.

"III.-Le nom de Lyon sera effacé du tableau des villes de la République. La réunion des maisons conservées portera désormais le nom de Ville Affranchie.

“IV.—Il sera élevé sur les ruines de Lyon une colonne qui attestera à la postérité les crimes et la punition des Royalistes de cette ville, avec cette inscription

'Lyon fit la guerre à la Liberté

Lyon n'est plus.

Le 18me jour du premier mois,

L'an deuxième de la République Française,""

-Moniteur, 13 Oct. 1793.

59856

XIII.

1793.

CHAP. Convention confiscating the property of all the proprietors was promulgated, he had no difficulty in persuading them that the demolition of the houses was the first step in Prudhom the division of their effects, and essential to the establishRévolution, ment of that sacred equality which was the only secure basis of real freedom.1

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Crimes de la

vi. 30, 31.

95.

Having worked the people up, by these prospects of Commence- plunder, to a sufficient degree of revolutionary energy, the destruction commissioners of the Convention proceeded in a regular of Lyons. and systematic manner to carry its infernal decree into

ment of the

execution. Attended by a crowd of satellites, all in the most vehement state of excitement, Couthon traversed the finest quarters of the city with a silver hammer; he struck at the door of the devoted houses, exclaiming at the same time-" Rebellious house, I strike you in the name of the law!" Instantly the agents of destruction, of whom twenty thousand were in the pay of the Convention, surrounded the dwelling, and levelled it with the ground. The expense of these demolitions, which continued, without interruption, for six months, was greater than it cost to raise the princely Hotel of the Invalides: it amounted to the enormous sum of £700,000. The workmen employed in the demolition received 400,000 francs (£16,000) every ten days.* The palaces thus destroyed were the finest private buildings in France, three stories in height, adorned with noble columns, and erected in the richest style of the structures of Louis XIV. Their construction had cost £12,000,000 sterling. To the honour Abbé Guil- of Couthon, however, it must be added, his hostility was Th. v. 317, chiefly directed against the buildings, that no great Prudhom. effusion of blood attended his government, and that he gave great numbers of suspected persons the means of making their escape into the country.2

2 Lac. xi. 116, 117.

lon, ii. 392.

318, 356.

vi.63. Lam. vii. 188.

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'Quatre cent mille livres (£16,000) se dépensent par décade pour les démolitions et quelques autres objets: mais l'indolence des démolisseurs démontre clairement que leurs bras ne sont pas propres à bâtir une République.”— ACHARD à GRAVIER; Lyon, 28 Nivose, Ann. 2. Papiers Inédits trouvés chez ROBESPIERRE, ii. 232.

CHAP.
XIII.

1793. 96.

d'Her

bois' and

infamous

But this vengeance on inanimate stones was but a prelude to more bloody executions. Collot d'Herbois, the next proconsul, who along with Fouché succeeded to the government of Lyons after Couthon had been recalled, Collot was animated with an envenomed feeling towards the der inhabitants. Ten years before he had been hissed off Fouché's their stage, and the vicissitudes of the Revolution had proceedings. now placed resistless power in the hands of an indifferent provincial comedian; an emblem of the too frequent tendency of civil convulsions to elevate whatever is base, and sink whatever is noble among mankind.* The discarded actor resolved at leisure to gratify a revenge which had been cherished for so long a period. Innumerable benefits since conferred on him by the people of Lyons, and no small share of their favour, had not been able to

* J. M. Collot d'Herbois had a sallow countenance, a profusion of dark hair and eyebrows; his whole aspect was that of a sanguinary conspirator. He had been a comic actor before the Revolution, and often appeared on the boards of Geneva and Lyons, in the latter of which towns he had been hissed off the stage. When the Revolution commenced, he quitted that humble vocation and entered the Jacobin Club at Paris, where his savage gestures, thundering voice, and impetuous declamation, almost always excited by the fumes of wine, soon brought him into notice. He was first brought into celebrity, however, by gaining the prize proposed by the Jacobin Club for an essay, in 1790, "On the advantages which the people would derive from the new order of things." It was won by his pamphlet entitled-"Almanach du Père Gérard." Subsequently he distinguished himself by the lead which he took in supporting, before the Assembly, the pardon of the mutineers of the regiment of Châteauvieux, who had been subdued at Nancy by Bouillé, which that body, as might have been supposed, readily granted; and they were immediately received with civic honours, and presented to the Assembly, who decreed to them "les honneurs de la séance." Collot d'Herbois, in consequence of the lead which he took on this occasion, was made a member of the new municipality installed in power in Paris on the 10th August, which so rapidly consummated the crimes of the Revolution. He was one of the first who moved in the Assembly for the abolition of royalty, and was made a member of the Committee of Public Salvation. In the deliberations of that body, and subsequently in the Convention, he advocated the total and entire destruction of all suspected persons. "There must be no transportation," said he; "we must destroy all the conspirators; let the places where they are confined be mined; let the torches be fired to blow them into the air: it is thus alone we can get quit of the suspected." He gave such good proof of his disposition to put in practice these maxims on a mission to the Loiret and Oise, where he speedily filled the prisons with victims, that he was immediately fixed on by the Committee of Public Salvation, in November 1793, to wreak its vengeance on the unhappy inhabitants of Lyons. —See Biographie Universelle, ix. 277, 279.

XIII.

1793.

CHAP. extinguish this ancient grudge. This atrocious wretch had not a single good quality in his character. At once cowardly and cruel, spiteful and relentless, selfish and tyrannical, he united the whole vices of democratic fervour and despotic jealousy, without any of the virtues of either. His character would pass for incredible, if not clearly portrayed by his public acts and private correspondence.* Fouché, (of Nantes,t) afterwards so well known as minister of police under Napoleon, the worthy associate of Collot d'Herbois, published before his arrival a proclamation, in which he declared, "that the French people

"We are accused," said Collot d'Herbois, "of being cannibals, men of blood; but it is in counter-revolutionary petitions, drawn by aristocrats, that the charge is made. A drop of blood poured from generous veins goes to my heart, but I have no pity for conspirators. We caused two hundred to be shot at once, and it is charged upon us as a crime! When twenty persons are guillotined at once, the last dies twenty deaths. They speak of sensibility! The Jacobins are full of sensibility-they have all the virtues! They are compassionate, humane, and generous: but they reserve these sentiments for the patriots."-Débats des Jacobins, 20th Dec. 1793.

+ Joseph Fouché, afterwards Duke of Otranto, was born at Nantes on the 29th May 1763, and proved one of the most remarkable men whom the Revolution brought forward. He was the son of a captain in the merchant service at Nantes, and received the rudiments of education at the college of that town. His talents, however, were slow in developing themselves, and he passed at school for a boy of no capacity. He never could be got to comprehend the rules of grammar, and rebelled constantly against the attention to words, which unhappily form almost the sole objects, in all countries, of elementary education. While he was deemed by all an incorrigible simpleton, he was secretly devouring works of thought and reflection: and what first attracted the notice of his preceptors was the discovery that he was studying the Pensées de Pascal. He was originally destined to the merchant service; but the delicacy of his constitution caused that design to be abandoned, and he went to Paris to complete his education, with a view to a learned profession. The theological works first put into his hands excited no attention in his mind; but he fastened with avidity on the Elements of Euclid, the Essays of Nicole, and the Petit Carème of Massillon. He underwent a distinguished mathematical examination at Arras, and afterwards at Vendôme: and his contemporaries at that period are unanimous in attesting to the regularity of his manners, and the kindliness of his disposition. At the college of Arras he formed an intimacy with Robespierre, who was indebted to his friendship for the loan of some hundred francs to enable him to travel to Paris when he was first appointed deputy to the Constituent Assembly. At the age of twenty-five, his talents were so well known that he was appointed Préfet des Etudes at the college of Nantes; and he held that situation when the Revolution broke out in 1789.

Instantly he fastened with his whole heart and soul on the Revolutionary doctrines, and, as he had not yet received orders, he married, went to the bar, and soon became a leading member of the popular society at Nantes. Without

XIII.

1793.

could acknowledge no other worship but that of universal CHAP. morality; no other faith but that of its own sovereignty; that all religious emblems placed on the roads, in the houses, or on public places, should be destroyed; that the mortcloth used at funerals should bear, instead of a religious emblem, a figure of Sleep, and that over the door of the cemetery should be written-Death is an eternal sleep." The principles of these worthy successors of Chalier were, that all rebels, conspirators, and traitors, must be annihilated, if possible, at a single blow, and every vestige of the old regime destroyed.* A circular

eloquence, he signalised himself from the first by the unsparing use of that violence and exaggeration, in thought and language, which with the multitude is the surest passport to success. In September 1792, he was elected member of the Convention for the department of Loire Inférieure, and at first he took no decided part in that Assembly; he lay by and watched the course of events. His intimacy with Robespierre was revived, but their characters were too dissimilar to enable them to act long together. Robespierre was a sincere and exalted fanatic, who deemed the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands the necessary prelude to general felicity. Fouché, cool and selfish, was led away by none of these delusions, but from the first set deliberately to work to make his fortune, per fas aut nefas, by the Revolution. He attached himself in preference to the party of Danton, the profound and selfish immorality of which was much more in accordance with his views and objects. From the moment of his arrival at Paris, he was a constant attendant at the Jacobin Club, and closely connected with Marat. At first he acted with Vergniaud and the Girondists; but no sooner did the strife begin between them and the Jacobins, than with his usual prophetic acuteness he attached himself to the latter, as the party most likely to prevail in the contest. Still he shunned the extreme violence of their leaders, as likely to injure themselves; and on one occasion, when Robespierre had vehemently assailed Vergniaud in the Convention, he said to him, "Such violence will assuredly move the passions; but it will neither induce confidence nor insure esteem." He warmly supported all the extreme revolutionary measures, as the death of Louis, the sale of the emigrants' estates, and the seizure of the property of hospitals and incorporations. His first public mission of importance was as commissioner of the Convention to Lyons in September 1793, where he signalised himself equally by his atheism, his cruelty, and his rapacity. His remarkable character will come to be drawn with more propriety in a future volume, after his extraordinary career has been recounted.—See chap. xcv. § 43; and Biographie Universelle, lxiv. 293, 295. (FoUCHÉ.)

* "Let us be terrible, that we incur not the risk of being feeble. Let us annihilate in our wrath, at a single blow, all rebels, all conspirators, all traitors, to spare ourselves the long agony of punishing like kings. Let us exercise justice after the example of nature: let our vengeance be that of the people; let us strike like the thunderbolt, and let even the ashes of our enemies disappear from the soil of liberty. Let the perfidious and ferocious English be attacked from every side. Let the whole Republic form a volcano to pour devouring lava upon them: may the infamous island which produced those

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