sep 2, 1792 - The September Massacres
Description:
During the first week of 1792, the Parisian masses struck again (Bastille was already looking worse for wear). The Paris commune killed 1200 people who were in city jails. They did this because it had been circulated that the Prussians who were coming in to invade Paris would find support from people who secretly opposed the revolution. Although a few were counter revolutionaries, priests, and aristocrats, many were just criminals. The mob mentality engulfed the public and lead them to murder innocents.
Intense bloodshed is a common theme in Jacobin rule. And this blame game is what allowed republican leadership to insight the Reign of Terror.
Bellow is an excerpt recounting the horrors of the massacres from Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, a French Novelist; Les nuits de Paris (Paris: Hachette, [1793] 1960), 247–53:
I arose, distressed by the horror. The night had not refreshed me at all, rather it had caused my blood to boil. . . . I go out and listen. I follow groups of people running to see the "disasters"—their word for it. Passing in front of the Conciergerie, I see a killer who I'm told is a sailor from Marseilles. His wrist is swollen from use. I pass by. Dead bodies are piled high in front of the Châtelet. I start to flee, but I follow the people instead. I come to the rue St.-Antoine, at the end of the rue des Ballets, just as a poor wretch came through the gate. He had seen how they killed his predecessor, but instead of stopping in amazement, he took to his heels to escape. A man who was not one of the killers, just one of those unthinking machines who are so common, stopped him with a pike in the stomach. The poor soul was caught by his pursuers and slaughtered. The man with the pike coldly said to us, "Well, I didn't know they wanted to kill him. . . ."
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Politics of Fear
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