书城公版The Origins of Contemporary France
5010600000473

第473章

Duprat assembles about thirty of the towns-people, imprisoned by him on the 31st of August, and, in addition to these, about forty artisans belonging to the Catholic brotherhoods, porters, bakers, coopers, and day-laborers, two peasants, a beggar, a few women seized haphazard and on vague denunciations, one of them, "because she spoke ill of Madame Mainvielle." Jourdan supplies the executioners; the apothecary Mende, brother-in-law of Duprat, plies them with liquor, while a clerk of Tournal, the newsman, bids them "kill all, so that there shall be no witnesses left." Whereupon, at the reiterated orders of Mainvielle, Tournal, Duprat, and Jourdan, with a complications of hilarious lewdness,[48] the massacre develops itself on the 16th of October and following days, during sixty-six hours, the victims being a couple of priests, three children, an old man of eighty, thirteen women, two of whom are pregnant, in all, sixty-one persons, with their throats slit or knocked out and then cast one on top of each other into the Glacière hole, a mother on the body of her infant, a son on the body of his father, all finished off with rocks, the hole being filled up with stones and covered over with quicklime on account of the smell.[49] In the meantime about a hundred more, killed in the streets, are pitched into the Sorgues canal; five hundred families make their escape. The ousted bandits return in a body, while the assassins who are at the head of them, enthroned by murder, organize for the benefit of their new band a legal system of brigandage, against which nobody defends himself.[50]

These are the friends of the Jacobins of Arles and Marseilles, the respectable men whom M. d'Antonelle has come to address in the cathedral at Avignon.[51] These are the pure patriots, who, with their hands in the till and their feet in gore, caught in the act by a French army, the mask torn off through a scrupulous investigation, universally condemned by the emancipated electors, also by the deliberate verdict of the new mediating commissioners,[52] are included in the amnesty proclaimed by the Legislative Assembly a month before their last crime. - But the sovereigns of the Bouches-du-Rh?ne do not regard the release of their friends and allies as a pardon:

something more than pardon and forgetfulness must be awarded to the murderers of the Glacière. On the 29th of April, 1792, Rebecqui and Bertin, the vanquishers of Arles, enter Avignon[53] along with a cortége, at the head of which are from thirty to forty of the principal murderers whom the Legislative Assembly itself had ordered to be recommitted to prison, Duprat, Mainvielle, Toumal, Mende, then Jourdan in the uniform of a commanding general crowned with laurel and seated on a white horse, and, lastly, the dames Duprat, Mainvielle and Tournal, in dashing style, standing on a sort of triumphal chariot;during the procession the cry is heard, "The Glacière will be full this time! " -- On their approach the public functionaries fly; twelve hundred persons abandon the town. Forthwith each terrorist, under the protection of the Marseilles bayonets, resumes his office, like a man at the head of his household. Raphel, the former judge, along with his clerk, both with warrants of arrest against them, publicly officiate, while the relatives of the poor victims slain on the 16th of October, and the witnesses that appeared on the trial, are threatened in the streets; one of them is killed, and Jourdan, king of the department for an entire year, begins over again on a grand scale, at the head of the National Guard, and afterwards of the police body, the same performance which, on a small scale, he pursued under the ancient régime, when, with a dozen "armed and mounted" brigands, he traversed the highways, forced open lonely houses at night, and, in one chateau alone, stole 24,000 francs.

V.

The other departments. -- Uniform process of the Jacobin conquest. --Preconceived formation of a Jacobin State.

The Jacobin conquest takes place like this: already in during April, 1792, through acts of violence almost equal to those we have just described, it spreads over more than twenty departments and, to a smaller degree, over the other sixty.[54] The composition of the parties is the same everywhere. On one side are the irresponsible of all conditions,"squanderers who, having consumed their own inheritance, cannot tolerate that of another, men without property to whom disorder is a door open to wealth and public office, the envious, the ungrateful whose obligations to their benefactors the revolution cancels, the hot-headed, all those enthusiastic innovators who preach reason with a dagger in their hand, the poor, the brutal and the wretched of the lower class who, possessed by one leading anarchical idea, one example of immunity, with the law dumb and the sword in the scabbard, are stimulated to dare all thingsOn the other side are the steady-going, peaceable class, minding their own business, upper and lower middle class in mind and spirit,"weakened by being used to security and wealth, surprised at any unforeseen disturbance and trying to find their way, isolated from each other by diversity of interests, opposing only tact and caution to persevering audacity in defiance of legitimate means, unable either to make up their mind or to remain inactive, perplexed over sacrifices just at the time when the enemy is going to render it impossible to make any in the future, in a word, bringing weakness and egoism to bear against the liberated passions, great poverty and hardened immorality."[55]