Chapter XXI: Book X: I (2)

The municipality, informed of these circumstances, entreated the _curé_ to abstain from celebrating the mass the next day, as he had announced; and he complied with their wishes. The multitude, not informed of this, filled the church, and clamoured for the priest and the promised _Te Deum_. The gentry of the neighbourhood, the aristocracy of Caen, the clients and numerous domestics of the leading families in the neighbourhood, had arms under their clothes. They insulted the grenadiers; an officer of the national guard reprimanded them. "You come to seek what you shall get," replied the aristocrats: "we are the stronger, and will drive you from the church." At these words some young men rushed on the national guards to disarm them: a struggle ensued, bayonets glittered, pistol shots resounded in the cathedral, and they made a charge, sword in hand. Companies of chasseurs and grenadiers entered the church, cleared it, and followed the crowd, step by step, who fired again upon them when in the street. Some killed and others wounded, were the sad results of the day. Tranquillity seemed restored. Eighty-two persons were arrested, and on one of them was found a pretended plan of counter-revolution, the signal for which was to be given on the following Monday. These documents were forwarded to Paris. The nonjuring priests were suspended from the celebration of the holy mysteries in the churches of Caen until the decision of the National Assembly. The Assembly heard with indignation the recital of these troubles, occasioned by the enemies of the constitution, and the adherents of fanaticism and the aristocracy. "The only part we have to take," said Cambon, "is to convoke the high national court, and send the accused before it." They deferred pronouncing on this proposition until the moment when they should be in possession of all the papers relative to the troubles in Caen.

Gensonné detailed the particulars of similar disturbances in La Vendée: the mountains of the south, La Lozère, l'Herault, l'Ardèche, which were but ill repressed by the recent dispersion of the camp of Jalès, the first act of the counter-revolutionary army, were now greatly agitated by the two-fold impulse of their priests and gentry. The plains, furnished with streams, roads, towns, and easily kept down by the central force, submitted without resistance to the _contre-coups_ of Paris. The mountains preserve their customs longer, and resist the influence of new ideas as to a conquest by armed strangers. It seems as though the appearance of these natural ramparts gave their inhabitants confidence in their strength, and a solid conviction of the unchangeableness of things, which prevents them from being so easily carried away by the rapid currents of alteration.

The mountaineers of these countries felt for their nobles that voluntary and traditional devotion which the Arabs have for their sheiks, and the Scots for the chieftains of their clans. This respect and this attachment form part of the national honour in these rural districts. Religion, more fervent in the south, was in the eyes of these people a sacred liberty, on which revolution made attempts in the name of political liberty. They preferred the liberty of conscience to the liberty as citizens. Under all these titles the new institutions were odious: faithful priests nourished this hatred, and sanctified it in the hearts of the peasantry, whilst the nobility kept up a royalism, which pity for the king's misfortunes and the royal family made more full of sympathy at the daily recital of fresh outrages.

Mende, a small village hidden at the bottom of deep valleys, half way between the plains of the south and those of the Lyonnais, was the centre of counter-revolutionary spirit. The _bourgeoisie_ and the nobility, mingled together from the smallness of their fortunes, the familiarity of their manners, and the frequent unions of their families, did not entertain towards each other that intestine envy, hatred, and malice, which was favourable to the Revolution. There was neither pride in the one nor jealousy in the other: it was as it is in Spain, one single people, where nobility is only, if we may say so, but a right of first birth of the same blood. These people had, it is true, laid down their arms after the insurrection of the preceding year in the camp of Jalès: but hearts were far from being disarmed. These provinces watched with an attentive eye for the favourable moment in which they might rise _en masse_ against Paris. The insults to the dignity of the king, and the violence done to religion by the Legislative Assembly, excited their minds even to fanaticism. They burst out again, as though involuntarily, on the occasion of a movement of troops across their valleys. The tricoloured cockade, emblem of infidelity to God and the king, had entirely disappeared for several months in the town of Mende, and they put up the white cockade, as a _souvenir_ and a hope of that order of things to which they were secretly devoted.

The directory of the department, consisting of men strangers to the country, resolved on having the emblem of the constitution respected, and applied for some troops of the line. This the municipality opposed, in a resolution addressed to the directory, and made an insurrectional appeal to the neighbouring municipalities, and a kind of federation with them to resist together the sending of any troops into their districts. However, the troops sent from Lyons at the request of the directory approached; on their appearance, the municipality dissolved the ancient national guard, composed of a few friends of liberty, and formed a fresh national guard, of which the officers were chosen by itself from amongst the gentry and most devoted royalists of the neighbourhood. Armed with this force, the municipality compelled the directory of the department to supply them with arms and ammunition.

Such were the movements of the town of Mende, when the troops entered the place. The national guard, under arms, replied to the cry of _Vive la nation_, uttered by the troops, by the cry of _Vive le roi_. Then they followed the soldiers to the principal square in the city, and there took, in presence of the defenders of the constitution, an oath to obey the king only, and to recognise no one but the king. After this audacious display, the national guard, in parties, paraded the town, insulting, braving the soldiers: swords were drawn, and blood flowed. The troops pursued made a stand, and took to their weapons. The municipality, having the directory in check, and holding it as hostage, compelled it to send the troops orders to withdraw to their quarters. The commandant of the forces obeyed. This victory emboldened the national guard; and during the night it compelled the directory to send the troops an order to leave the city and evacuate the department. The national guard, drawn up in a line of battle in the square of Mende, saw hourly its ranks increase by detachments of the neighbouring municipalities, who came down from the mountains, armed with fowling pieces, scythes, and ploughshares. The troops would have been massacred if they had not retired under cover of the night. They retreated from the city amidst victorious cries from the royalists. The following day was a series of fêtes, in which the royalists of the town and those of the city celebrated their common triumph, and fraternised together. They insulted all the emblems of the Revolution; hooted the constitution; plundered the hall of the Jacobins; burnt down the houses of the principal members of this hateful club--put some in prison. But their vengeance confined itself to outrage. The people, controlled by the gentlemen and the _curés_, spared the blood of their enemies.

XIV.

Whilst humiliated liberty was threatened by fanaticism in the south, it, in its turn, carried on the work of assassination in the north. Brest was the very focus of Jacobinism--the close proximity of La Vendeé gave this city reason to apprehend the counter-revolution that constantly threatened them--the presence of the fleet, commanded by officers suspected of favouring the aristocratic part--a population greatly composed of strangers and sailors, accessible to corruption, and capable of being readily excited to crime--rendered this city more turbulent and more agitated than any other port in the kingdom. The clubs constantly strove to work on the sailors to mutiny against their officers, whilst the revolutionists mistrusted the navy, as that was far more independent of the people than the army, for the court could at a moment change the station of the fleet, and turn their cannon against the constitution, and the feeling of discipline, of aristocracy, and of the colonies, were all contrary to the new school of ideas; and for this reason the Jacobins had for some time striven to disorganise the fleet. The appointment of M. de Lajaille to the command of one of the vessels destined to carry assistance to San Domingo, caused an outbreak of the suspicions infused into the minds of the inhabitants of Brest, and of the officers of the navy. M. de Lajaille was designated by the clubs as a traitor to the nation, who was about to introduce the counter-revolutionary feeling in the colonies. Attacked at the moment he was about to embark, by a crowd of nearly three thousand persons, he was covered with wounds, stretched senseless on the ground, and would have been killed, but for the heroic devotion of a workman, who shielded him with his own body, and defended him until the arrival of the civic guard. M. de Lajaille was, however, to appease popular feeling, imprisoned: in vain did the king order the municipal authorities of Brest to set this innocent and valuable officer free; in vain did the minister of justice demand chastisement for this attempted murder, committed in broad daylight, in the presence of the whole town; in vain was a sabre and a gold medal voted to the courageous LANVERGENT, who had saved de Lajaille; the dread of a more formidable outbreak assured the guilty of impunity, and detained the innocent in prison. On the eve of war the naval officers, threatened with mutiny on board their vessels, and assassination on shore, had as much to apprehend from their crews as from the enemy.

XV.

The same discords were fomented in all the garrisons between the soldiers and the officers, and the insubordination of the troops was, in the eyes of the clubs, the chief virtue of the army. The people every where sided with the soldiers, and the officers were constantly disturbed by conspiracies and revolts in the regiments. The fortified towns were the theatres of military outbreaks, which invariably terminated in the impunity of the soldier, and the imprisonment or the forced emigration of the officers. The Assembly, the supreme and partial judge, always decided in favour of insubordination: unable to restrain the people, it flattered their excesses. Perpignan was a new proof of this.

In the night of the 6th of December, the officers of the regiment of Cambrésis, in garrison in this town, went in a body to M. de Chollet, the general who commanded the division, and urged him to retire into the citadel, as they had learnt that a conspiracy was formed in the regiment, which threatened alike his and their lives. M. de Chollet complied with their earnest request, whilst they went to the barracks, and ordered the men to follow them to the citadel. The soldiers replied that they would only obey M. Desbordes, their lieutenant-colonel, in whose patriotism they had the greatest confidence. M. Desbordes came, and read to the soldiers the order of the general; but the inflexion of his voice, the expression of his face, his glance, alike seemed to protest against the order which his duty as a soldier compelled him to communicate to them. The troops understood this mute appeal, and declared that they would not quit their quarters, because the municipal authorities had forbidden them: the national guard joined them and patrolled the streets: the officers shut themselves up in the citadel, and shots were fired from the ramparts. Lieutenant-Colonel Desbordes, the national guard, the _gendarmerie_, and the regiments, stormed the citadel. The officers of the regiment of Cambrésis were imprisoned by their soldiers; one, however, escaped, and committed suicide on the frontiers of Spain. The unfortunate general, Chollet, victim of the violence of the officers and soldiers, was impeached with fifty officers, or inhabitants of Perpignan. They were ordered before the high national court of Orleans; and thus were fifty victims predestined to perish in the massacre at Versailles.

XVI.

Blood flowed every where. The clubs seduced the regiments; patriotic motions, denunciations against the generals, perfidious insinuations against the fidelity of the officers, were constantly instilled into the minds of the army by the people. The officer was a prey to terror, the soldier to mistrust. The premeditated plan of the Jacobins and Girondists was to destroy in concert this body that was yet attached to the king, deprive the nobility of their command, substitute plebeians for nobles as officers, and thus give the army to the nation. In the meantime they surrendered it to anarchy and sedition; but these two parties finding that the disorganisation was not sufficiently rapid, wished to sum up in one act the systematic corruption of the army, the ruin of all military discipline, and the legal triumph of the insurrection.

We have already mentioned how prominent a part the Swiss regiment of Châteauvieux had taken in the famous insurrection of Nancy during the latter period of the existence of the Constituent Assembly. An army under M. de Bouillé had been necessary to repress the armed revolt of several regiments that threatened all France with the rule of the tyrannical soldiery. M. de Bouillé, at the head of a body of troops from Metz, and the battalions of the national guard, had surrounded Nancy, and after a desperate contest at the gates, and in the streets of the town, forced the rebels to lay down their arms. These vigorous measures for the restoration of order were applauded by all parties, and reflected equal glory on M. de Bouillé and disgrace on the soldiers. Switzerland, by virtue of her treaties with France, preserved her right of federal justice over the regiments of her nation, and this essentially military country had tried by court-martial the regiment of Châteauvieux. Twenty-four of the ringleaders had been condemned and executed in expiation of the blood they had shed, and the fidelity they had violated, the remainder had been decimated, and forty-one soldiers now were undergoing their sentence on board the galleys at Brest. The amnesty proclaimed by the king for the crimes committed during the civil troubles, when he accepted the constitution, could not be applied to these foreign soldiers, for the right to pardon belongs alone to those who have the right to punish.

Sentenced by the judgment of the Helvetian jurisdiction, neither the king nor the Assembly could invalidate the judgment, or annul its effects. The king had, at the entreaty of the Constituent Assembly, in vain attempted to obtain the pardon of these soldiers from the Swiss confederation.

These fruitless negotiations served the Jacobins and the National Assembly as food for accusation against M. de Montmorin. In vain did he justify himself by alleging the impossibility of obtaining such an amnesty from Switzerland, at a moment when this country, who had suffered from civil commotions, sought to restore order by the laws of Draco. "We shall be then the compulsory gaolers of this ferocious people," cried Guadet and Collot d'Herbois. "France must then degrade herself so far as to punish in her very ports those heroes who have gained the people a triumph over the aristocratic officers, and shed their blood for the nation instead of pouring it out in the cause of despotism."

Pastoret, an influential member of the moderate party, and who was said to concert all his measures with the king, supported Guadet's motion, in order to give the king popularity by an act agreeable to the nation; and the freedom of the soldiers of Châteauvieux was voted by the Assembly. The king, having delayed his sanction for some time, in order not to wound the cantons by this violent usurpation of their rights over their own countrymen, afforded the Jacobins fresh ground for imprecation and invective against the court and the ministers. "The moment is come when one man must perish for the safety of all," cried Manuel, "and this man must be a minister; they all appear to me so guilty, that I firmly believe the Assembly would be free from crime did it cause them to draw lots for who should perish on the scaffold," "All, all," vociferated the tribunes. But at this very moment Collot d'Herbois mounted the tribune, and announced, amidst loud applause, that the royal assent to the decree for their liberation had been given the previous evening, and that in a few days he should present to his brother deputies these victims of discipline.

The soldiers of Châteauvieux were in reality advancing to Paris, having been liberated from the galleys at Brest, and their march was one continued triumph, but Paris prepared for them a still more brilliant one through the exertions of the Jacobins. In vain did the Feuillants and the Constitutionalists energetically protest, through the mouth of André Chénier, the Tyrtæus of moderation and good sense, of Dupont de Nemours, and the poet Roucher, against the insolent oration of the assassins of the generous Désilles. Collot d'Herbois, Robespierre, the Jacobins, the Cordeliers, and the very commune of Paris, clung to the idea of this triumph, which, according to them, would cover with opprobium the court and La Fayette. The feeble interposition of Pétion, who appeared as though he wished to moderate the scandal, served only to encourage it, for he of all men was most fitted to plunge the people into the last degree of excess. His affected virtue served only to cloak violence, and to cover with an hypocritical appearance of legality the outbreaks he dared not punish; and had a representative of anarchy been sought to be placed at the head of the commune of Paris, it could have found no fitter type than Pétion. His paternal reprimands to the people were but promises of impunity. The public force always arrived too late to punish; excuse was always to be found for sedition, amnesty for crime. The people felt that their magistrate was their accomplice and their slave, and yet whilst they despised they loved him.

XVII.

"This _fête_ that is preparing for these soldiers," wrote Chénier, "is attributed to enthusiasm. For my part, I confess I do not perceive this enthusiasm. I see a few men who create a degree of agitation, but the rest are alarmed or indifferent. We are told that the national honour is interested in this reparation,--I can scarcely comprehend this; for, either the national guards of Metz, who put down the revolt of Nancy, are enemies of the public weal, or the soldiers of Châteauvieux are assassins: there is no medium. How, then, is the honour of Paris interested in _fêting_ the murderers of our brothers? Other profound politicians say, this _fête_ will humiliate those who have sought to fetter the nation. What! in order to humiliate, according to their judgment, a bad government, it is necessary to invent extravagances capable of destroying every species of government--recompense rebellion against the laws--crown foreign satellites for having shot French citizens in an _émeute_. It is said, that in every place where this procession passes, the statues will be veiled:--Ah! they will do well to veil the whole city, if this hideous orgy takes place; but it is not alone the statues of despots that should be veiled, but the face of every good citizen. It will be the duty of every youth in the kingdom, of every national guard in the kingdom to assume mourning on the day when the murder of their brothers confers a title of glory on foreign and seditious soldiers; it is the eyes of the army that should be veiled, that they may not behold the reward of insubordination and revolt; it is the National Assembly--the king--the administrators--the country--that should veil their faces, in order that they may not become complaisant or silent witnesses of the outrages offered to the authorities and the country. The book of the law must be covered, when those who have torn and stained its pages by musket-balls and sabre-cuts receive the civic honours. Citizens of Paris, honest yet weak men, there is not one of you who, when he interrogates his own heart, does not feel how much the country--how much he its child--are insulted by these outrages offered to the laws,--to those who execute them, and those who are for them. Do you not blush that a handful of turbulent men, who appear numerous because they are united and make a noise, should constrain you to do their pleasure, by telling you it is your own, and by amusing your puerile curiosity by unworthy spectacles? In a city that respected itself, such a _fête_ would find before it silence and solitude, the streets and public places abandoned, the houses shut up, the windows deserted, and the flight and scorn of the passers-by would tell history what share honest and well-disposed men took in this scandalous and bacchanalian procession."

XVIII.

Collot d'Herbois insulted André Chénier and Roucher in his reply. Roucher replied by a letter full of sarcasm, in which he reminded Collot d'Herbois of his falls on the stage and his misadventures as an actor. "This personage of comic romance," said he, "who has leapt from the trestles of Punch to the tribune of the Jacobins, rushes at me, as though to strike me with the oar the Swiss have brought him from the galleys."

Placards for or against the _fête_ covered the walls of the Palais Royal, and were alternately torn down by groups of young men or Jacobins.

Dupont de Nemours, the friend and master of Mirabeau, laid aside his philosophical calm, to address a letter on the same subject to Pétion, in which his conscience, as an honest man, braved the popularity of the tribune. "When the danger is imminent, it is the duty of all honest men to warn the magistrates of it. More particularly, when the magistrates themselves create it. You told a falsehood when you asserted that these soldiers had aided the Revolution on the 14th of July, and that they had refused to combat against the people of Paris. It is untrue that the Swiss refused to combat against the people of Paris, and it is true that they assassinated the national guards of Nancy. You have the audacity to term those men patriots who dare command the legislative body to send a deputation to the _fête_ prepared for these rebels; these are the men whom you adopt as your friends; it is with them that you dine at _la Rapée_, so that the general of the national guard is obliged to gallop about for two hours to receive your orders before he can find you, and you seek in vain to conceal your embarrassment by high-flown phrases. You seek in vain to conceal this banquet given to assassins beneath the pretext of a banquet in honour of liberty. But these subterfuges are no longer available; the moment is urgent, and you will no longer deceive the sections, the army, or the eighty-three departments. Those who rule you, as they would a child, have agreed to surrender Paris to ten thousand pikes, to whom the bar of the Assembly will be thrown open the day the national guard is disarmed; the men destined to bear them arrive every day, and Paris receives an accession of twelve or fifteen hundred bandits every twenty-four hours, and beg, until the day of pillage arrives, which they await as ravens await their prey.--I have not told all;--generals are prepared for this hideous army. The friends of Jourdan, impatient to behold the man whom the amnesty had not delivered sufficiently soon, have broken open his prison at Avignon. Already, he has been received in triumph in several cities of the south, like the Swiss of the Châteauvieux, and will arrive at Paris to-morrow; Sunday he will be present at the _fête_ with his companions--with the two Mainvielle--with Pegtavin;--with all those cold-blooded scoundrels who have killed in one night sixty-eight defenceless persons, and violated females before they murdered them. Catiline!--Cethegus!--march forward, the soldiers of Sylla are in the city, and the consul himself undertakes to disarm the Romans. The measure is full,--it overflows!"

Pétion strove miserably to justify himself in a letter in which his weakness and connivance revealed themselves beneath the multiplicity of excuses. At the same time Robespierre, mounting the tribune of the Jacobins, exclaimed, "You do not trace to their source the obstacles that oppose the expansion of the sentiments of the people. Against whom think you that you have to strive? against the aristocracy?--No. Against the court?--No. Against a general who has long entertained great designs against the people. It is not the national guard that views these preparations with alarm; it is the genius of La Fayette that conspires in the staff; it is the genius of La Fayette that conspires in the directory of the department; it is the genius of La Fayette that perverts the minds of so many good citizens in the capital who would but for him be with us.

"La Fayette is the most dangerous of the enemies of liberty, because he wears the mask of patriotism; it is he who, after having wrought all the evil in his power in the Constituent Assembly, has affected to withdraw to his estates, and then comes to strive for this post of mayor of Paris, not to obtain it, but to refuse it, in order to affect disinterestedness; it is he who has been appointed to the command of the French armies, in order to turn them against the Revolution. The national guards of Metz were as innocent as those of Paris, they can be nothing but patriots; it is La Fayette who, through the medium of Bouillé his relation and accomplice, has deceived them. How can we inscribe on the banners of this fête, _Bouillé is alone guilty_? Who sought to stifle the revolt at Nancy, and cover it with an impenetrable veil? Who demands crowns for the assassins of the soldiers of Châteauvieux? La Fayette. Who prevented me from speaking? La Fayette. Who are those who now dart such threatening glances at me? La Fayette and his accomplices." (Loud applause.)

XIX.

The preparations for this ceremony gave rise to a still more exciting drama at the National Assembly. At the opening of the sitting, a member demanded that the forty soldiers of Châteauvieux should be admitted to pay their respects to the legislative body. M. de Jaucourt opposed it: "If these soldiers," said he, "are only admitted to express their gratitude, I consent to their being admitted to the bar; but I demand that afterwards they be not allowed to remain during the debate." The speaker was interrupted by loud murmurs, and cries of _à bas! à bas!_ from the tribunes. "An amnesty is neither a triumph nor a civic crown," continued he; "you cannot dishonour the names of the brave Désilles, or of those generous citizens who perished defending the laws against them; you cannot lacerate by this triumph the hearts of those among you who took part in the expedition of Nancy. Allow a soldier, who was ordered on this expedition with his regiment, to point out to you the effects this decision would have on the army. (The murmurs redouble.) The army will see in your conduct only an encouragement to insurrection; and these honours will lead the soldiers to believe that you look on these men, whom an amnesty has freed, not as men whose punishment was too severe, but as innocent victims." The tumult here became so great that M. de Jaucourt was forced to descend. But one of the members, who, it is evident to all, was almost overpowered by emotion, took his place. It was M. de Gouvion, a young officer, whose name was already gloriously inscribed in the early pages of the annals of our wars. He was clothed in deep black, and every feature of his face wore an expression of intense grief, which inspired the Assembly with involuntary interest, and the tumult was instantly changed into attention. His voice was tremulous and scarcely audible at first; it was evident that indignation as much as sorrow choked his utterance.

"Gentlemen," said he, "I had a brother, a good patriot, who, through the estimation in which he was held by his fellow citizens, had been successively elected commandant of the national guard, and member for the department. Ever ready to sacrifice himself for the revolution and the law, it was in the name of the revolution and the law that he was called upon to march to Nancy at the head of the brave national guards, and there he fell pierced by five bayonet-wounds, and by the hand of those who, ... I demand, if I am condemned to behold here the assassins of my brother." "Well, then, leave the chamber," cried a stern voice. The tribunes applauded this speech, more cruel and poignant than the thrust of a dagger. Indignation enabled M. de Gouvion to overcome his contempt. "Who is the dastard who himself in order to insult the grief of a brother?" cried he, glancing around to discover the speaker. "I will tell my name--'tis I," replied the deputy Choudieu, rising from his seat. Loud applause from the tribunes followed this insult of Choudieu's; it would seem as though this crowd had no longer any feeling, and that passion triumphed over nature. But M. de Gouvion was sustained by a sentiment stronger than popular fury--that of generous despair; he continued: "As a man, I applauded the clemency of the National Assembly when it burst the fetters of these unhappy soldiers who were misled." He was again interrupted, but continued: "the decrees of the Constituent Assembly, the orders of the king, the voice of their officers, the cries of their country, all were unavailing; without provocation on the part of the national guards of the two departments, they fired on Frenchmen, and my brother fell a victim to his obedience to the laws. No, I cannot remain silent, so long as the memory of the national guards is disgraced by the honours decreed to these men who murdered them."

Couthon, a young Jacobin, seated not far from Robespierre, from whose eyes he seemed to gain his secret inspirations, rose and replied to Gouvion, without insulting him. "Who is the slave of prejudices that would venture to dishonour men whom the law has absolved; who would not repress his personal grief in the interest and the triumph of liberty?" But Gouvion's voice touched that chord of justice and natural emotion that always vibrates beneath the insensibility of opinion. Twice did the Assembly, summoned by the president to vote for or against their admission to the debate, rise in an even number for and against this motion. And the secretaries, the judges of these decisions, hesitated to pronounce on which side the majority was; they at length, after two attempts, declared that the majority was in favour of the admission of the Swiss; but the minority protested, and the _appel nominal_ was demanded. This pronounced a feeble majority that the Swiss should be admitted; and they instantly entered, amidst the applause of the tribunes, whilst the unfortunate Gouvion left the chamber by the opposite door, his forehead scarlet with indignation, and vowing never to set foot in that Assembly, where he was forced to behold and welcome the murderers of his brother. He instantly applied to the minister of war to join the army of the north, and fell there.

XX.

The soldiers were introduced, and Collot d'Herbois presented them to the admiring tribunes. The national guard of Versailles, who had followed them to the Assembly, defiled in the hall amidst the sound of drums, and cries of "_Vive la Nation!_" Groups of citizens and females of Paris, with tricoloured flags and pikes brandished over their heads, followed them; then the members of the popular societies of Paris presented to the president flags of honour given to the Swiss by the departments which these conquerors had just traversed. The men of the 14th of July, with Gouchon, the agitator of the faubourg St. Antoine, as their spokesman, announced that this faubourg had fabricated 10,000 pikes to defend their liberties and their country. This legitimate ovation, offered by the Girondists and Jacobins to undisciplined soldiers, authorised the people of Paris to decree to them the triumph of such an infamous proceeding (_le triomphe du scandale_).

It was no longer the people of liberty, but the people of anarchy; the day of the 15th of April combined all its emblems. Revolt armed against the laws, for instance, mutinous soldiers as conquerors; a colossal galley, an instrument of punishment and shame, crowned with flowers as an emblem; abandoned women and girls, collected from the lowest haunts of infamy, carrying and kissing the broken fetters of these galley-slaves; forty trophies, bearing the forty names of these Swiss; civic crowns on the names of these murderers of citizens; busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Sidney, the greatest philosophers and most virtuous patriots, mingled with the ignoble busts of these malefactors, and sullied by the contact; these soldiers themselves, astonished if not ashamed of their glory, advancing in the midst of a group of rebellious French-guard, in all the glorification of the forsaking of flags and want of discipline; the march closed by a car imitating in its form the prow of a galley, in this car the statue of Liberty armed in anticipation with the bludgeon of September, and wearing the _bonnet rouge_, an emblem borrowed from Phrygia by some, from the galleys by others; the book of the constitution carried processionally in this fête, as if to be present at the homage decreed to those who were armed against the laws; bands of male and female citizens, the pikes of the faubourg, the absence of the civic bayonets, fierce threats, theatrical music, demagogic hymns, derisive halts at the Bastille, the Hôtel-de-Ville, the Champ-de-Mars; at the altar of the country the vast and tumultuous rounds danced several times by chains of men and women round the triumphal galley, amidst the foul chorus of the air of the _Carmagnole_; embraces, more obscene than patriotic, between these women and the soldiers, who threw themselves into each others' arms; and in order to put the cope-stone on this debasement of the laws, Pétion the Maire of Paris, the magistrates of the people assisting personally at this fête, and sanctioning this insolent triumph over the laws by their weakness or their complicity. Such was this fête: an humiliating copy of the 14th of July, an infamous parody of an insurrection, which parodied a revolution!

France blushed; good citizens were alarmed; the national guard began to be afraid of pikes; the city to fear the faubourgs, and the army herein received the signal of the most entire disorganisation.

The indignation of the constitutional party burst forth in ironical strophes in a hymn of André Chénier, in which that young poet avenged the laws, and marked himself out for the scaffold.

"Salut divin triomphe! Entre dans nos murailles!
Rends nous ces soldats, illustrés
Par le sang de Désilles et par les funérailles
De nos citoyens massacrés!"[16]