Chapter I: The White Terror

To-day, the 22nd of September, 1830, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the foundation of the French Republic in 1792, I, John Lebrenn, arrived at the sixtieth year of my life, add these pages to the legend of the Sword of Honor.

I have been for long back in Paris, established with my family in St. Denis Street. During my stay in Brittany, beginning after the days of Thermidor, 1794, I kept track of the more important historical events by means of the journals of the period. Later, on my return to Paris, I re-entered political life and took part in the events of the Eighteenth Brumaire, the Hundred Days, and the Revolution of 1830. In the following pages I shall endeavor to reproduce briefly the principal deeds of these three epochs--1800, 1815, and 1830.

Should I depart this life before the completion of my task, my son Marik Lebrenn, now arrived in his thirty-seventh year, will supply my place in the work, aided thereto by the material and notes left by me, and by his own memories. I have postponed from year to year this continuation to our family legends, awaiting the accomplishment of the two prophecies which hover ever above these accounts. One has been realized, in the period from 1800 to 1814; the other has had but one approach toward success--in July of this present year 1830.

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Alas, we have already seen the sinister fulfilment of the prophecy of Robespierre the Incorruptible, the martyr of Thermidor--'_The brigands have triumphed, the Revolution is lost._' The reins of the Revolution fell into hands that were corrupt, perfidious, criminal. The national representation was debauched, annihilated in the month of Brumaire by Bonaparte; _military despotism seized the power, and civil war desolated the country_.

The second prophecy of our family records--that there should be no more Kings--had already begun to move towards fulfilment. Since 1793 the tradition of republicanism had struck in the people's minds roots that were live, deep, and indestructible. The people protested against the Consulate of Bonaparte by the conspiracy of Topino Lebrun and Arena; it protested against the Empire by forming the secret society of the _Philadelphians_ and by the conspiracy of General Mallet; it protested against the Restoration by several conspiracies, among them that of the four sergeants of La Rochelle.

Let us rest firm in the assurance that, despite these eclipses, the star of the Republic will yet rise over France, over the world, and our children will yet greet the appearance of the United States of Europe, the Universal Republic.

Meanwhile the disinherited shuddered and trembled before the fury of the counter-revolution. At Avignon, at Lyons, at Marseilles, prisoner patriots were massacred without even the excuse the latter had when in September they put the traitors to death in the name of public safety and of the fatherland, menaced from without and within. The victims of the royalist reaction were ten times as numerous as those of the Terror. The murders of Lyons pass all belief, and that in time of peace, without provocation or cause. In one single day and in one single prison one hundred and ninety-seven prisoners, among whom were three women, were assassinated by the royalist dandies known as the Jeunesse Doree, or "Gilded Youth." At Marseilles, at the St. John Fortress, two hundred and ten patriots were slashed to pieces or burned in the same day.

But let us draw the veil over these saturnalia of blood, these orgies of the White Terror, and compose our minds in thoughts of the republican armies. Our armies learned with grief of the fall of Robespierre; but then, submissive to the civil and military powers, and respecting the decrees of the Convention, they accepted the Thermidor government; and under the command of Hoche, Marceau, Jourdan, Moreau, Augereau, and Joubert, they continued to battle against the coalized Kings. Holland, freed by our arms, set itself up anew as a Republic; Prussia and Spain sued for peace and obtained it; the royalists, encouraged by the reaction, attempted again to arouse the Vendee, with the support of the English, who made a descent upon Quiberon; but Hoche snuffed out that civil war in its first flickers. The Convention modified on the 15th Thermidor, year III (August 2, 1795), the Constitution of 1793. The mass of the proletariat was stripped of its political rights. According to the Constitution of 1793, all citizens twenty-one years old, born and living in France, were electors, and members of the sovereign people; according to the Constitution of 1795, on the contrary, it was necessary to pay a direct tax in order to be eligible to the electoral right. The Constitution of the year III, further, divided the legislative power into two bodies, the Council of Five Hundred, and the Council of Ancients; to be a member of the latter, one must have attained the age of forty. The executive power, or Directorate, was to be composed of five members, chosen by the Councils, which were themselves elected by a taxpayers' and indirect vote, in two degrees. Primary assemblies nominated electors, and these latter chose the deputies to the Councils. The imposition of a tax qualification excluded the proletariat from the count, and delivered it up to the will of a reactionary bourgeoisie; hence the royalist party had not the slightest doubt of the success of its candidates. The majority of the old Convention, composed in part of lukewarm oligarchic republicans, but in the main of corrupted legislators who were opposed to a restoration of the monarchy (whose vengeance they feared, most of them having been regicides), attempted to obviate the certain success of the royalists by decreeing that two-thirds of the old members must be re-elected. This restraint imposed upon the freedom of the ballot was at once iniquitous and absurd, and paved the way for a new civil war. The Constitution of the year III and the clause relative to the re-election of two-thirds of the members of the Convention was submitted to the sanction of the primary assemblies, composed of taxpayers. Among these, thanks to the exclusion of the proletariat, the reaction was on top. Certain of a majority in the approaching elections, and expecting consequently to control both the Councils and Directorate, the reaction had anticipated dealing the last blows to the expiring Republic, and re-establishing the monarchy. But defeated in their hope by the decree rendering obligatory the re-election of two-thirds of the Conventionals, the royalists incited the primary assemblies against this decree. On the 11th Vendemiaire, year IV (October 3, 1795) the bourgeois and aristocratic Sections of the center of Paris--Daughters of St. Thomas and Hill of the Mills among others--came to the front of the movement, and a horde of Emigrants and ex-suspects raised an insurrection. The rebels declared the decree compelling the re-election of two-thirds of the old Conventionals an assault upon the rights of the 'sovereign people'; they took up arms and organized a council of resistance under the presidency of the Duke of Nivernais. The Convention named a committee of defense and called to its assistance the patriots of the suburbs. Twelve or fifteen hundred patriots responded to the appeal. The royalists, to the number of forty thousand men, or thereabouts, under the command of Generals Danican, Duhoux, and the ex-bodyguard Lafond, marched against the troops of the Convention, and won at first some advantage over them. Barras, commander-in-chief of the forces at the disposal of the Assembly, called to his staff a young artillery officer named Bonaparte, whose military renown dated from the siege of Toulon. The latter hastily brought up the cannon from the camp of Sablons, made an able strategic disposition of his forces, and, with the aid of the patriots of '93, wiped out the royalist insurrection before the Church of St. Roche, on the 13th Vendemiaire, year IV. The Convention employed its last session in organizing the Councils; that of the Ancients was composed of two hundred and fifty members; the remaining elected deputies formed the Council of the Five Hundred.

The members of the Directorate elected by these Councils were Carnot, Rewbell, Lareveillere-Lepaux, Letourneur, and Barras--all of them, except Barras, men of honesty, only moderate republicans, but sincere.

The 4th Brumaire, year IV (October 26, 1795), the Convention pronounced its own dissolution. It had been in session since the proclamation of the Republic, September 21, 1792.