3. The Terror in the Provinces.
The executions of the Revolutionary Tribunals in the provinces
represented only a portion of the massacres effected in the
departments during the Terror. The revolutionary army, composed
of vagabonds and brigands, marched through France killing and
pillaging. Its method of procedure is well indicated by the
following passage from Taine:—
“At Bedouin, a town of 2,000 inhabitants, where
unknown hands had cut down the tree of liberty, 433 houses were
demolished or fired, 16 persons were guillotined, and 47 shot
down; all the other inhabitants were expelled and reduced to
living as vagabonds in the mountains, and to taking shelter in
caverns which they hollowed out of the earth.”
The fate of the wretches sent before the Revolutionary
Tribunals was no better. The first mockery of trial was quickly
suppressed. At Nantes, Carrier drowned and shot down according
to his fancy nearly 5,000 persons—men, women, and children.
The details of these massacres figured in the
Moniteur after the reaction of Thermidor. I cite a few
lines:—
“I saw,” says Thomas, “after the taking of
Noirmoutier, men and women and old people burned alive .
. . women violated, girls of fourteen and fifteen, and massacred
afterward, and tender babes thrown from bayonet to bayonet;
children who were taken from beside their mothers stretched out
on the ground.”
In the same number we read a deposition by one Julien,
relating how Carrier forced his victims to dig their graves and
to allow themselves to be buried alive. The issue of October 15,
1794, contained a report by Merlin de Thionville proving that the
captain of the vessel le Destin had received orders to
embark forty-one victims to be drowned—“among them a blind
man of 78, twelve women, twelve girls, and fourteen children, of
whom ten were from 10 to 6 and five at the breast.”
In the course of Carrier's trial (Moniteur,
December 30, 1794) it was proved that he “had given orders to
drown and shoot women and children, and had ordered General Haxo
to exterminate all the inhabitants of La Vendée and to
burn down their dwellings.”
Carrier, like all wholesale murderers, took an intense joy
in seeing his victims suffer. “In the department in which I
hunted the priests,” he said, “I have never laughed so
much or experienced such pleasure as in watching their dying
grimaces” (Moniteur, December 22, 1794).
Carrier was tried to satisfy the reaction of Thermidor.
But the massacres of Nantes were
repeated in many other towns. Fouché slew more than 2,000
persons at Lyons, and so many were killed at Toulon that the
population fell from 29,000 to 7,000 in a few months.
We must say in defence of Carrier, Fréron,
Fouché and all these sinister persons, that they were
incessantly stimulated by the Committee of Public Safety.
Carrier gave proof of this during his trial.
“I admit,” said he (Moniteur, December 24,
1794), “that 150 or 200 prisoners were shot every day, but it
was by order of the commission. I informed the Convention that
the brigands were being shot down by hundreds, and it applauded
this letter, and ordered its insertion in the Bulletin.
What were these deputies doing then who are so furious against me
now? They were applauding. Why did they still keep me `on
mission'? Because I was then the saviour of the country, and now
I am a bloodthirsty man.”
Unhappily for him, Carrier did not know, as he remarked in
the same speech, that only seven or eight persons led the
Convention. But the terrorised Assembly approved of all that
these seven or eight ordered, so that they could say nothing in
reply to Carrier's argument. He certainly deserved to be
guillotined, but the whole Convention deserved to be guillotined
with him, since it had approved of the massacres.
The defence of Carrier, justified by the letters of the
Committee, by which the representatives “on mission” were
incessantly stimulated, shows that the violence of the Terror
resulted from a system, and not, as has sometimes been claimed,
from the initiative of a few individuals.
The thirst for destruction during the Terror was by no
means assuaged by the destruction of human beings only; there was
an even greater destruction of inanimate things. The true
believer is always an iconoclast. Once in power, he destroys
with equal zeal the enemies of his faith and the images, temples,
and symbols which recall the faith attacked.
We know that the first action of the Emperor Theodosius
when converted to the Christian religion was to break down the
majority of the temples which for six thousand years had been
built beside the Nile. We must not, therefore, be surprised to
see the leaders of the Revolution attacking the monuments and
works of art which for them were the vestiges of an abhorred
past.
Statues, manuscripts, stained glass windows, and plate
were frenziedly broken. When Fouché, the future Duke of
Otranto under Napoleon, and minister under Louis XVIII., was sent
as commissary of the Convention to the Nievre, he ordered the
demolition of all the towers of the châteaux and the
belfries of the churches “because they wounded equality.”
Revolutionary vandalism expended itself even on the tomb.
Following a report read by Barrère to the Convention, the
magnificent royal tombs at Saint-Denis, among which was the
admirable mausoleum of Henri II., by Germain Pilon, were smashed
to pieces, the coffins emptied, and the body of Turenne sent to
the Museum as a curiosity, after one of the keepers had extracted
the teeth in order to sell them as curiosities. The moustache
and beard of Henri IV. were also torn out.
It is impossible to witness such comparatively
enlightened men consenting to the destruction of the artistic
patriotism of France without a feeling of sadness. To excuse
them, we must remember that intense beliefs give rise to the
worst excesses, and also that the Convention, almost daily
invaded by rioters, always yielded to the popular will.
This glowing record of devastation proves, not only the
power of fanaticism: it shows us what becomes of men who are
liberated from all social restraints, and of the country which
falls into their hands.
