Blacksmiths are condemned to death for having shod the Lyonnese cavalry, firemen for having extinguished fires kindled by republican bombshells, a widow for having paid a war-tax during the siege, market women for "having shown disrespect to patriots." It is an organized "Septembrisade" made legal and lasting; its authors are so well aware of the fact as to use the word itself in their public correspondence.[1198]--At Toulon it is worse, people are slaughtered in heaps, almost haphazard. Notwithstanding that the inhabitants the most compromised, to the number of four thousand, take refuge on board English vessels, the whole city, say the representatives, is guilty. Four hundred workmen in the navy-yard having marched out to meet Fréron, he reminds them that they kept on working during the English occupation of the town, and he has them put to death on the spot. An order is issued to all "good citizens to assemble in the Champ de Mars on penalty of death." They come there to the number of three thousand; Fréron, on horseback, surrounded by cannon and troops, arrives with about a hundred Maratists, the former accomplices of Lemaille, Sylvestre, and other well-known assassins, who form a body of local auxiliaries and counselors; he tells them to select out of the crowd at pleasure according to their grudge, fancy, or caprice; all who are designated are ranged along a wall and shot. The next morning, and on the following days, the operation is renewed: Fréron writes on the 16th of Nivose that "eight hundred Toulonese have already been shot." ... "A volley of musketry," says he, in another letter, and after that, volley after volley, until "the traitors are all gone." Then, for three months after this, the guillotine dispatches eighteen hundred persons; eleven young women have to mount the scaffold together, in honor of a republican festival; an old woman of ninety-four is borne to it in an armchair. The population, initially of twenty-eight thousand people, is reduced to six or seven thousand only.