Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [53]
Maximilien de Robespierre, future president of the Convention, was the first among equals in the Revolution, the engine of the terror, who argued, following Rousseau, that a “Republic of Virtue” could only be achieved by “virtue combined with terror.” Alas, the French got mostly terror. He and his fellow Jacobins took the seats high up at the Convention, for which they were nicknamed the Montagnards, or the Mountaineers.
With the royal family rotting in the Temple prison, the mob ran wild. Depressed by the news of their army’s defeat at Verdun, the French went on a murderous rampage in the fall of 1792 known as the “September massacres.”26 Propagandists of the revolution warned that traitors to the revolution were planning a comeback from their jail cells and must be given “prompt justice.” Revolutionary star Jean-Paul Marat wrote in his newspaper titled L’ami Du Peuple—Friend of the People, “Let the blood of the traitors flow! That is the only way to save the country.”
On September 2, 1792, a revolutionary mob on the outskirts of Paris surrounded a caravan of twenty-four clergymen being transported to prison and began slashing at the priests through the windows of the carts. One assailant brandished his bloody sword toward onlookers and shouted, “So this frightens you, does it, you cowards? You must get used to the sight of death.” At some point, an “ascetic priest” emerged and tried to calm the ruffians, a few of whom were his own parishioners.27 He was promptly hacked to death.
The rest of the mob joined in the slaughter, until all the carts were dripping with blood. The gruesome caravan, full of mangled carcasses, loped along to the prison, where another crowd was waiting to butcher any priests who had managed to survive the first attack.28
About the same time, another mob besieged a Carmelite convent in Paris, where 150 priests were being given revolutionary trials. Armed with guns, clubs, pikes, and axes, the hoodlums shot the first priest to approach them and demanded to see the archbishop. After saying a prayer, the archbishop presented himself and was immediately chopped to death by the crowd, whereupon the assailants began indiscriminately murdering all the priests. Some priests escaped to a nearby church just long enough to give one another last rites before the barbarians burst in and began chopping them up, too.
After the first few batches of clergymen had been killed, the revolutionaries decided to hold mock trials for those who remained. One by one, the priests were called to a makeshift court presided over by a grimy sansculottes ruffian named “Citizen Maillard.” Most of the “sansculottes” were lawyers and journalists who dressed like peasants—without the culottes, or knee breeches, worn by gentlemen—but Maillard was the real thing.
He ordered the priests to swear loyalty to the state. Not one would take the heretical oath. And so one after another, the clerics were dragged to the courtyard and sliced to pieces. Their bodies were dumped in fields or down a well, where, seventy years later, 119 skeletons were discovered.29 This account was provided by the only survivor of the massacre, Abbe Sicard.30
One deputy of the Convention, Jean Denis Lanjuinais, estimated that 8,000 Frenchmen were executed on September 2 alone. Another deputy, Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai, put the number at 28,000.31
Rabid bands of men continued the savagery for the next five days, busting into nearly every prison in Paris and carving up the inmates. Not just priests but all prisoners were killed—the poor, the mad, women, old men, and even young girls. Waiting their turns locked in their cells, the prisoners could hear the screams of those who preceded them. The mob spared only two prisons—one for prostitutes and one for debtors, the mob’s “base.” At one prison, La Conciergerie, 378 of 488 prisoners were murdered in one day.32
The killers chopped up humans without pause, except to eat and drink the provisions brought to them