The Days of the French Revolution (19 page)

These murders were the first of numerous other massacres which took place in the prisons of Paris over the next five days. At the seminary of St Firmin in the Rue Saint-Victor where other refractory priests were held; at La Grande and La Petite Force where men and women convicted of civil offences were incarcerated; at Les Bernardins whose prisoners were mainly men condemned to the galleys; at La Salpêtrière, a house of correction for female offenders; at Bicêtre, a prison hospital for the poor and the mad, as well as at Le Châtelet, the prison for common criminals – indeed in all the prisons of Paris except the Sainte-Pélagie, which was for debtors, and the Saint-Lazare, for prostitutes – gangs of citizens, later to be known as
septembriseurs
, broke in armed with swords, pikes, hatchets and iron bars and set about their work, resting from time to time to drink wine or eat the meals which their women brought to them ‘to sustain them, so they said, in their hard labours’.

A prisoner at the Abbaye, Jourgniac de Saint-Méard, recorded how those whose cells had not yet been broken into heard with horror the screams of the victims and waited in terror for their turn to come:

The most important matter that employed our thoughts was to consider what posture we should put ourselves into when dragged to the place of slaughter in order to suffer death with the least pain. Occasionally we asked some of our companions to go to the turret window to watch the attitude of the victims. They came back to say that those who tried to protect themselves with their hands suffered the longest as the blows of
the blades were thus weakened before they reached the head; that some of the victims actually lost their hands and arms before their bodies fell; and that those who put their hands behind their backs obviously suffered less pain. We, therefore, recognized the advantages of this last posture and advised each other to adopt it when it came to be our turn to be butchered.

As at the Carmes most murders were preceded by a rough form of trial. The prisoners were dragged into rooms lit by torches and candles to face groups of judges sitting round tables littered with papers, prison registers, bottles, pipes and jars of tobacco. In one room the judges included men with bare arms covered in blood or tattooed with the symbols of their respective trades, men with swords at their sides, wearing red woollen caps and butchers’ aprons. In another several of the judges seemed drunk and the others half asleep. At the Abbaye the president of the self-styled court was that hero of the
sans-culottes
, Stanislas Maillard, who had played so prominent a rôle both in the storming of the Bastille and the women’s march on Versailles.

Jourgniac de Saint-Méard described how he was dragged into the corridor where Maillard held his court by three men, two of whom grabbed hold of his wrists, the other of his collar. An old man, whose trial had just ended, was being killed outside the door. Saint-Méard, warned that ‘one lie meant death’, was asked why he had been arrested. While replying, some of the people in the crowded room distracted the attention of the judges by pushing papers in front of them and whispering in their ears. Then, after he had produced written evidence in his defence, Saint-Méard’s trial was interrupted again by the appearance of a priest who, following the briefest interrogation, was taken away to be stabbed to death. There was a further interruption when a gaoler rushed into the room to say that a prisoner was trying to escape up a chimney. Maillard told the gaoler to fire shots up the chimney and that, if the prisoner got away, he himself would be killed in his place. When shots failed to dislodge the fugitive, a pile of straw was set alight beneath him and when the man fell down, almost suffocated by the smoke, he was killed as he lay on the hearth. Saint-Méard’s trial was once more resumed, and, to his astonishment, his honest plea that, although he
had been a confirmed royalist until 10 August, he had never played any part in public affairs, was unanimously accepted by the tribunal and he was allowed to depart. Greeted by cries of ‘
Vive la Nation!
’ by the people outside, he was escorted to his home by men carrying torches who refused any payment for their services.

Saint-Méard’s experiences were not uncommon. Others described how men, who seemed quite prepared to murder them at one moment, were at the next hugging them enthusiastically and declining all rewards for seeing them safely home. One assassin, refusing an offer of recompense, wept with emotion as he restored a father to his children. ‘The nation pays us for killing,’ said another who also refused a reward, ‘but not for saving lives.’

Several prisoners were saved by compassionate men who risked their own lives to help them, as were both the Duchesse de Tourzel and her daughter. The Duchess herself recorded how kind were some of the people among the crowds who witnessed the massacres with apparent approval; how, when she was told to climb on to a pile of corpses to swear an oath of loyalty to the nation, several people came forward to protect her; and how, when asked to attend to a fellow-prisoner, the young wife of one of the King’s gentlemen of the bedchamber, an onlooker who supposed a medallion the girl wore round her neck was stamped with a portrait of the King or Queen, whispered to the Duchess to remove it and hide it in her pocket. Saint-Méard said that when he admitted during his trial that he had been an officer in the King’s army, someone gently trod on his toe as a warning not to say too much.

Yet most murders were committed with appalling ferocity. At the Conciergerie, which contained prisoners awaiting trial in the Palais de Justice, a gang of assassins, bursting into the courtyard which was separated from the Rue de la Barillerie by fine gilded wrought iron railings, battered down the doors behind which the prisoners had tried to barricade themselves and, sparing some, hacked others to pieces until the mangled remains of 378 of the 488 prisoners held there were piled up in heaps in the Cour du Mai. Having killed numerous prisoners in their cells, a party of assassins mounted the stairs to the courtroom where several Swiss Guards were on trial. At their approach the guards threw themselves under the benches
while their commander, Major Bachmann, rose to his feet and marched forward resolutely to the bar. The presiding judge, formidable enough in his black robes and plumed hat, held up his hand to halt the intruders whom he commanded to ‘respect the law’. They obeyed him and retreated. Bachmann was then sentenced to death and that afternoon was carried away in one of the carts to execution.

One prisoner who did not escape the assassins’ blades was Marie Gredeler, a young woman who kept an umbrella and walking-stick depository in the courtyard of the Palais Royal. Charged with having mutilated her lover, she was herself mutilated, her breasts were cut off, her feet were nailed to the ground and a bonfire was set alight between her spreadeagled legs.

As the heaps of corpses mounted, carts drawn by horses from the King’s stables were obtained to take them away to the Montrouge quarries. Women helped to load them, breaking off occasionally to dance the Carmagnole, then stood laughing on the slippery flesh, ‘like washerwomen on their dirty linen’, some with ears pinned to their dresses.

The carts were full of men and women who had just been slaughtered and whose limbs were still flexible because they had not had time to grow cold, so that legs and arms and heads nodded and dangled on either side of the carts [wrote a working girl, Marie-Victoire Monnard, who watched them being dragged away]…I can still remember those drunken men and remember in particular one very skinny one, very pale with a sharp pointed nose. The monster went to speak to another man and said, ‘Do you see that rotten old priest on the pile over there?’ He then went and hauled the priest to his feet, but the body, still warm, could not stand up straight. The drunken man held it up, hitting it across the face and shouting, ‘I had enough trouble killing the old brute.’

Equally revolting scenes were enacted elsewhere; and, while some stories can be attributed to the propaganda of the Revolution’s enemies, others no less horrifying appear to be well attested. Men were reported by reliable witnesses to have been seen drinking, eating and smoking amidst the carnage, using for tables and chairs the naked bodies of their victims whose clothes had been removed as one of the recognized perquisites of the assassins.

‘They were out of breath,’ one observer reported, ‘and they asked for wine to drink: “Wine or death!” The Civil Commissioner of the
section
gave them vouchers for twenty-four pints addressed to a neighbouring wine merchant. These they soon drank, and contemplated with drunken satisfaction the corpses scattered in the court.’

‘Do you want to see the heart of an aristocrat?’ asked one assassin, opening up a corpse, tearing out the heart, squeezing some blood into a glass, drinking part, and offering the rest to those who would drink with him. ‘Drink this, if you want to save your father’s life,’ commanded another, handing a pot of ‘aristocrats’ blood’ to the daughter of a former Governor of the Invalides. She put it to her lips so that her father could be spared. Women were said to have drawn up benches to watch the murders in comfort and to have cheered and clapped as at a cock fight.

Another witness, a lawyer, saw ‘a group of butchers, tired out and no longer able to lift their arms’, drinking brandy with which gunpowder had been mixed ‘to aggravate their fury’. They were ‘sitting in a circle round the corpses’. ‘A woman with a basket full of bread rolls came past. They took them from her and soaked each piece in the blood of their quivering victims.’

The Queen’s emotional friend, the Princesse de Lamballe, who had been held in La Petite Force, was one of the most savagely treated victims. She had been stripped and raped; her breasts had been cut off; the rest of her body mutilated; and ‘exposed to the insults of the populace’. ‘In this state it remained more than two hours,’ one report records. ‘When any blood gushing from its wounds stained the skin, some men, placed there for the purpose, immediately washed it off, to make the spectators take more particular notice of its whiteness. I must not venture to describe the excesses of barbarity and lustful indecency with which this corpse was defiled. I shall only say that a cannon was charged with one of the legs.’ A man was later accused of having cut off her genitals which he impaled upon a pike and of having ripped out her heart which he ate ‘after having roasted it on a cooking-stove in a wineshop’. Her head was stuck on another pike and carried away to a nearby café where, placed upon a counter, the customers were asked to drink to the Princess’s death. It was then replaced upon the pike
and, its blonde hair billowing around the neck, was paraded beneath the Queen’s window at the Temple. The head of the Comte de Montmorin, the King’s former Foreign Minister, was carried, similarly impaled, to the Assembly.

In all about 1,200 prisoners were massacred, almost half the entire prison population of Paris. Thirty-seven of them were women. Of the rest, less than a third were priests, nobles or political prisoners; most were ordinary criminals, thieves, vagrants and forgers. The assassins appear to have been relatively few in number, perhaps no more than 150 or 200 in all. Some were criminals themselves, but most appear to have been the kind of citizens, butchers, shopkeepers, artisans,
gendarmes
and young National Guardsmen from whom the radical
sections
drew their enthusiastic support. Many of them, returning to work when the massacres were over, seem to have considered that they had performed a necessary public service in saving the nation from its enemies, and that they were fully entitled to the payments of twenty-four
livres
which were made to them by agents, it was supposed, of the Commune. Such was the regard in which they were held, in fact, that men who claimed to be of their company displayed swords and axes, stained with blood, to groups of customers in their local wine-shops. Later, when
septembriseur
became an insulting rather than flattering epithet, these men excused themselves by explaining that they had dipped their weapons in butchers’ buckets and pretended to be assassins in order to make an impression upon their neighbours and girl-friends.

The authorities undoubtedly did little to prevent the massacres. Indeed, the
septembriseurs
were given some sort of sanction not only by Marat who advocated their actions but also by Jaen-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, a deputy-commissioner of the Commune, who made a tour of the prisons, encouraging the assassins by telling them, ‘You are slaying your enemies! You are doing your duty!’ And certainly, if not given active encouragement in their murders, the assassins were never forcefully ordered to put an end to them. When a party of them arrived at the Hôtel de Ville to tell the Mayor that they had ‘dispatched those rascals’ and to ask him what should be done with eighty more with whom they had not yet dealt, Pétion merely replied, ‘I am not the person to whom you should
apply’, and then gave orders for wine to be offered them. Santerre, whose ambiguous orders to the National Guard were disregarded, was equally ineffective. So was the Assembly which did little more than make half-hearted attempts to limit the atrocities by sending various deputies to talk to the assassins. And after it was all over there were those, even among the moderates, who could find excuses for what had been done. Jean-Marie Roland, while admitting that the events were no doubt better hidden by a veil, added, ‘But I know that the People, terrible as its vengeance is, has yet tempered it with a kind of justice.’ Parisians as a whole were, perhaps, able to persuade themselves that, dreadful as the massacres were, they had been necessary.

Many of them were quite unaware that they were taking place, for in those days Parisians neither knew nor very much cared what was going on outside their own particular districts. And many of those who did discover what was happening seem to have been taken by surprise. One of these was Philippe Morice who was walking home from the theatre on the night of 2 September: