September Massacres
Crowds killed between 1,100 and 1,400 prisoners in the Paris prisons over five days in September 1792. The city was in a state that is hard to overstate. The monarchy had fallen three weeks earlier, Verdun was besieged and expected to fall, the Prussians were three days' march away, and the Brunswick manifesto had promised to destroy Paris if the royal family were harmed. Volunteers were being enrolled to march to the front, and the argument that circulated was that they could not leave their families behind with the prisons full of counter-revolutionaries waiting to be released by the invaders. Marat's paper had been calling for exactly that for weeks. The killing began on 2 September with a group of priests being transferred to the Abbaye, and spread to nine prisons over five days. What makes it particularly grim is that it was not a riot. Improvised tribunals sat at the gates, took each prisoner in turn, examined the register, and pronounced — those acquitted were embraced and released, and the rest were pushed out to men with sabres in the courtyard. Perhaps half the victims were ordinary criminals, and some were children from a reformatory and women from a hospital. The Princesse de Lamballe's head was carried on a pike to the queen's window. The Commune paid the killers by the day. The Girondins blamed the Montagnards for it for the rest of their lives, and the Montagnards guillotined them. Nobody was ever prosecuted. The Legislative Assembly was in session a few streets away and did not intervene, the ministers each blamed the others afterwards, and the episode is the strongest single argument made by everyone who has ever written against the Revolution.
- Year: 1792 CE
- Category: Social
