streets, are pitched into the Sorgues canal; five hundred families make
their escape. The ousted bandits return in a body, while the assassins
who are at the head of them, enthroned by murder, organize for the
benefit of their new band a legal system of brigandage, against which
nobody defends himself.[2450]
These are the friends of the Jacobins of Arles and Marseilles, the
respectable men whom M. d'Antonelle has come to address in the cathedral
at Avignon.[2451] These are the pure patriots, who, with their hands in
the till and their feet in gore, caught in the act by a French army, the
mask torn off through a scrupulous investigation, universally condemned
by the emancipated electors, also by the deliberate verdict of the new
mediating commissioners,[2452] are included in the amnesty proclaimed
by the Legislative Assembly a month before their last crime.--But the
sovereigns of the Bouches-du-Rhône do not regard the release of
their friends and allies as a pardon: something more than pardon and
forgetfulness must be awarded to the murderers of the Glacière. On the
29th of April, 1792, Rebecqui and Bertin, the vanquishers of Arles,
enter Avignon[2453] along with a cortége, at the head of which are from
thirty to forty of the principal murderers whom the Legislative Assembly
itself had ordered to be recommitted to prison, Duprat, Mainvielle,
Toumal, Mende, then Jourdan in the uniform of a commanding general
crowned with laurel and seated on a white horse, and, lastly, the dames
Duprat, Mainvielle and Tournal, in dashing style, standing on a sort of
triumphal chariot; during the procession the cry is heard, "The Glacière
will be full this time!"--On their approach the public functionaries
fly; twelve hundred persons abandon the town. Forthwith each terrorist,
under the protection of the Marseilles bayonets, resumes his office,
like a man at the head of his household. Raphel, the former judge, along
with his clerk, both with warrants of arrest against them, publicly
officiate, while the relatives of the poor victims slain on the 16th of
October, and the witnesses that appeared on the trial, are threatened in
the streets; one of them is killed, and Jourdan, king of the department
for an entire year, begins over again on a grand scale, at the head
of the National Guard, and afterwards of the police body, the same
performance which, on a small scale, he pursued under the ancient
régime, when, with a dozen "armed and mounted" brigands, he traversed
the highways, forced open lonely houses at night, and, in one château
alone, stole 24,000 francs.
V.--The other departments.
Uniform process of the Jacobin conquest.--Preconceived
formation of a Jacobin State.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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