The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [5]
The proposal was greeted with cries of enthusiasm. Registers were opened in all the forty-eight sections11 of Paris, which were invited to meet that night. Theaters and cabarets were shut down so that there would be no distractions, and the black flag was hoisted at the Hôtel de Ville as a distress signal.
Before midnight, thirty-five thousand names had been entered in those same registers. Yet what happened that night was a repeat of what had already happened in the bloody days of September: in every section, wherever volunteers signed up, they demanded that all traitors be punished before they themselves left for the front.
Traitors were, in effect, any counterrevolutionaries and secret conspirators who threatened from within a Revolution that was clearly threatened from without. But as you can well imagine, the term was as flexible as the extremist parties then tearing France apart wanted it to be. Traitors were whoever was the weakest. It so happened that the Girondins were the weakest, so the Montagnards12—the Mountain—decided the Girondins would be the traitors.
The next day—this particular next day being the tenth of March—all the Montagnard deputies made sure they turned up at the meeting of the Convention. The Jacobins13 came armed and had just filled the stands after chasing the women away when the mayor of Paris14 rose and presented himself alongside the council of the Commune.15 He confirmed the report of the commissioners of the Convention about the general dedication of the citizens and reiterated the wish, expressed unanimously the day before, for an extraordinary tribunal to be set up expressly to judge traitors.
Immediately the cry went up for a committee report, and immediately the committee met. Ten minutes later, Robert Lindet16 emerged to announce that a special tribunal composed of nine completely independent judges would be appointed and divided into two permanent sections, which would gain convictions by whatever means they chose and would pursue, either directly or at the request of the Convention, anyone and everyone attempting to lead the people astray.
As we know, the term “traitor” was most malleable, and the extension of these powers was far-reaching. The Girondins immediately understood that the whole point of the move was to make it easy to arrest them, and they rose as one.
“We’d rather die,” they cried, “than consent to the setting up of this Venetian Inquisition.”
In reply to this bit of invective, the Montagnards demanded the motion be put to the vote by a show of hands.
“Yes!” cried Féroud.17 “Yes, let’s vote and show the world who it is that seeks to assassinate innocence in the name of the law.”
A vote was in fact taken and, contrary to all expectations, the majority declared, first, that there would be juries; second, that these juries would be made up of equal numbers from all the departments of France; and, third, that they would be handpicked by the Convention.
The moment these three proposals were accepted, a great roar was heard. The Convention was in the habit of visits from the general public. When they asked what the racket was all about, they learned that a delegation of recruits had turned up, after dining at the wheat market, and was demanding to now parade before them.
The doors were promptly flung open and six hundred men, armed with swords, pistols, and pikes, appeared, half drunk and calling deafeningly for death to all traitors as they trotted round to the sound of wild applause.
“Yes!” Collot d’Herbois18 shouted back. “Yes, my friends, despite all the intrigues, we will save you, you