History of the Girondists, Volume I: Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French RevolutionLamartine, Alphonse de
History
History of the Girondists, Volume I: Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution
Lamartine, Alphonse de
France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799; Girondists
It was no longer the people of liberty, but the people of anarchy; the
day of the 15th of April combined all its emblems. Revolt armed against
the laws, for instance, mutinous soldiers as conquerors; a colossal
galley, an instrument of punishment and shame, crowned with flowers as
an emblem; abandoned women and girls, collected from the lowest haunts
of infamy, carrying and kissing the broken fetters of these
galley-slaves; forty trophies, bearing the forty names of these Swiss;
civic crowns on the names of these murderers of citizens; busts of
Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Sidney, the greatest philosophers and most
virtuous patriots, mingled with the ignoble busts of these malefactors,
and sullied by the contact; these soldiers themselves, astonished if not
ashamed of their glory, advancing in the midst of a group of rebellious
French-guard, in all the glorification of the forsaking of flags and
want of discipline; the march closed by a car imitating in its form the
prow of a galley, in this car the statue of Liberty armed in
anticipation with the bludgeon of September, and wearing the _bonnet
rouge_, an emblem borrowed from Phrygia by some, from the galleys by
others; the book of the constitution carried processionally in this
fete, as if to be present at the homage decreed to those who were armed
against the laws; bands of male and female citizens, the pikes of the
faubourg, the absence of the civic bayonets, fierce threats, theatrical
music, demagogic hymns, derisive halts at the Bastille, the
Hotel-de-Ville, the Champ-de-Mars; at the altar of the country the vast
and tumultuous rounds danced several times by chains of men and women
round the triumphal galley, amidst the foul chorus of the air of the
_Carmagnole_; embraces, more obscene than patriotic, between these women
and the soldiers, who threw themselves into each others' arms; and in
order to put the cope-stone on this debasement of the laws, Petion the
Maire of Paris, the magistrates of the people assisting personally at
this fete, and sanctioning this insolent triumph over the laws by their
weakness or their complicity. Such was this fete: an humiliating copy of
the 14th of July, an infamous parody of an insurrection, which parodied
a revolution!
France blushed; good citizens were alarmed; the national guard began to
be afraid of pikes; the city to fear the faubourgs, and the army herein
received the signal of the most entire disorganisation.
The indignation of the constitutional party burst forth in ironical
strophes in a hymn of Andre Chenier, in which that young poet avenged
the laws, and marked himself out for the scaffold.
"Salut divin triomphe! Entre dans nos murailles!
Rends nous ces soldats, illustres
Par le sang de Desilles et par les funerailles
De nos citoyens massacres!"[16]
BOOK XI.
I.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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