LITMIR.BIZ

       Introduction

      In August 1792, as the French Revolution hurtled towards its years of Terror, Paris was seized by panic. Armies from Prussia and Austria were marching on the capital to restore King Louis XVI to the throne, and radicals had responded by slaughtering several hundred of his Swiss guards and placing the royal household under arrest. To the sound of boots and drums and bells, the capital mobilized, aware that the commander of the invading forces had sworn vengeance on every Parisian if the king’s person was violated. When the Germans reached Verdun, just a hundred miles east, the possibility of a bloodbath became imminent. As fear mounted, the pamphleteers and propagandists of the Revolution identified a threat even closer to home than the Prussians: the thousand or so royalists and clerics who were being held in the municipal jails. ‘You have traitors in your bosom,’ warned Danton. ‘Without them the fight would have been soon over.’ ‘The prisons are full of conspirators,’ thundered the Orateur du peuple. ‘The first battle we shall fight will be inside the walls of Paris.’ The prescription of Marat was most precise of all. ‘The people’s duty,’ he wrote, was to ‘run [the traitors] through with a sword’.

      It soon became clear that many Parisians were inclined to agree. As a train of cabs carrying some twenty captive priests inched its way through the seething capital on 2 September, one of the passengers, deluded or desperate, lashed out with a stick. It was a bad move. The man struck by his assault leapt onto the carriage step, thrust a sabre three times through its open door, and raised the glistening blade to the roaring crowd. The passengers in the cab were cut to pieces and at the convoy’s destination, a prison called the Abbaye, a mob broke down the doors and turned pikes and bayonets onto those who had survived. The murders set off a holocaust. Some twelve hundred prisoners were killed over the next four days and nights, despatched inside prisons that echoed with their screams and stacked high on streets and bridges that ran with their blood. It was the deadliest single atrocity in a Revolution that never lacked for violence – but it was distinguished by more than its scale. Almost as soon as it had begun, the Parisian authorities sent an urgent instruction to those carrying it out. The people’s enemies were not to be killed so quickly, it warned. They had to be tried first.

      One of those who faced the revolutionary music was army officer François Jourgniac de Saint-Méard, who was taken from his cell in the Abbaye during the early hours of 4 September and led into a darkened chamber. About a dozen men were present. Some stood around in bloody shirts and aprons, machetes hanging from their waists; others dozed on the sidelines. Behind a bench at the far end, his gaunt features illuminated by the smoky flames of two torches, was the tall, dark, and tubercular figure of Stanislas Maillard, a 29-year-old veteran of the storming of the Bastille who had assumed the status of tribunal president. Saint-Méard was detained behind crossed sabres as a soused sansculotte handed up a reference for the 70-year-old man whose trial was reaching its conclusion. Maillard waved it aside. ‘They are useless, these appeals for traitors,’ he grumbled. ‘My hands are washed of it; take [him] away.’ As the old man was dragged to the back of the room, he struggled furiously with his captors. ‘It is frightful!’ he protested. ‘Your judgment is murder!’ Maillard scribbled into his files as the doors were opened onto the street. Men and women outside, skulking like dogs around an abattoir, suddenly galvanized into a pack. It swallowed its prey

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