Part 34

On the bloody day of July, 1791, of all the inhabitants of Paris, perhaps Bailly was the man who knew with least detail or correctness the events of the morning and of the evening.

Bailly, with his deep horror for falsehood, would have thought that he was most cruelly insulting the magistrates, if he had not attributed to them similar sentiments to his own. His uprightness prevented his being sufficiently on the watch against the machinations of parties. It was evidently by false reports that he was induced to unfurl the red flag on the 17th of July: "It was from the reports that followed each other," he said to the Revolutionary Tribunal, on being questioned by the President, "and became more and more alarming every hour, that the council adopted the measure of marching with the armed force to the Champ de Mars."

In all his answers Bailly insisted on the repeated orders he had received from the President of the National Assembly; on the reproaches addressed to him for not sufficiently watching the agents of foreign powers; it was against these pretended agents and their creatures, that the Mayor of Paris thought he was marching when he put himself at the head of a column of National Guards.

Bailly did not even know the cause of the meeting; he had not been informed that the crowd wished to sign a petition; and that the previous evening, according to the decree of the law, there had been a declaration made to this effect before the competent authority. His answers to the Revolutionary Tribunal leave not the least doubt on this point!

Oh Eschevins, Eschevins! when your vain pretensions only were treated of, the public could forgive you; but the 17th of July, you took advantage of Bailly's confidence; you induced him to take sanguinary measures of repression, after having fascinated him with false reports; you committed a real crime. If it was the duty of the Revolutionary Tribunal, of deplorable memory, to demand in 1793 from any one an explanation of the massacres of the Champ de Mars, it was not Bailly assuredly who ought to have been accused in the first place.

The political party whose blood flowed on the 17th of July, pretended to have been the victim of a plot concocted by its adversaries. When interrogated by the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Bailly answered: "I had no knowledge of it, but experience has since given me reason to think that such a plot did exist at that time."

Nothing more serious has ever been written against the promoters of the sanguinary violences on the 17th of July.

The blame that has been thrown on the events of the Champ de Mars has not been confined solely to the fact of proclaiming martial law; the repressive measures that followed that proclamation have been criticized with equal bitterness.

The municipal administration was especially reproached for having hoisted a red flag much too small; a flag that was called in the Tribunal a pocket flag; for not having placed this flag at the head of the column, as the law commands, but in such a position, that the public on whom the column was advancing could not see it; for having made the armed force enter the Champ de Mars, by all the gates on the side towards the town, a manoeuvre that seemed rather intended to surround the multitude, than to disperse it; for having ordered the National Guard to load their arms, even on the Place de Greve; for having made the guard fire before the three required summonses were made, and fire upon the people around the altar, whilst the stones and the pistol shot, which were assigned as the motive for the sanguinary order, came from the steps and benches; for allowing some people who were endeavouring to escape on the side towards l'Ecole Militaire, and others who had actually jumped into the Seine, to be pursued, shot, and bayonetted.

It results clearly from one of Bailly's publications, from his answers to the questions put to him by the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, from the writings of the day:

That the Mayor of Paris gave no order for the troops to be collected on the 17th of July; that he had had no conference on that day with the military authority; that if any arrangements, culpable and contrary to law were adopted, as to the situation of the cavalry, of the red flag, and of the Municipal Body, in the column marching on the Champ de Mars, they could not without injustice be imputed to him; that Bailly was not aware of the National Guard having loaded their muskets with ball before quitting the square of the Hotel de Ville; that he was not aware even of the existence of the red flag, with whose small dimensions he had been so severely reproached; that the National Guard fired without his order; that he made every effort to stop the firing, to stop the pursuit, and make the soldiers resume their ranks; that he congratulated the troops of the line, who under the command of Hulin, entered by the gate of l'Ecole Militaire, and not only did not fire, but tore many of the unfortunate people from the hands of the National Guard, whose exasperation amounted to delirium. In short, it might he asked, relative to any want of exactness attributable to Bailly in that unfortunate affair, whether it was just to impute it to him who, in his letters to Voltaire on the origin of the sciences, wrote as follows in 1776:

"I am unfortunately short-sighted. I am often humiliated in the open country. Whilst I with difficulty can distinguish a house at the distance of a hundred paces, my friends relate to me what they see at the distance of five or six hundred. I open my eyes, I fatigue myself without seeing any thing, and I am sometimes inclined to think that they amuse themselves at my expense."

You begin to see, Gentlemen, the advantage that a firm and able lawyer might have drawn from the authentic facts that I have just been relating. But Bailly knew the pretended jury before whom he had to appear. This jury was not a collection of drunken cobblers, whatever some passionate writers may have asserted; it was worse than that, Gentlemen, notwithstanding the deservedly celebrated names that were occasionally interspersed among them: it was--let us cut the subject short--an odious, commission.

The very circumscribed list from which chance in 1793 and 1794 drew the juries of the Revolutionary Tribunals, did not embrace, as the sacred word jury seems to imply, all one class of citizens. The authorities formed it, after a prefatory and very minute inquiry, of their adherents only. The unfortunate defendants were thus judged not by impartial persons free from any preconceived system, but by political enemies, which is as much as to say, by that which is the most cruel and remorseless in the world.

Bailly would not be defended. After his appearance as a witness in the trial of Marie Antoinette, the ex-Mayor only wrote and had printed for circulation, a paper entitled Bailly to his fellow-citizens. It closes with these affecting words:

"I have only gained by the Revolution that which my fellow-citizens have gained: liberty and equality. I have lost by it some useful situations, and my fortune is nearly destroyed. I could be happy with what remains of it to me and a clear conscience; but to be happy in the repose of my retreat, I require, my dear fellow-citizens, your esteem: I know well that, sooner or later, you will do me justice; but I require it while I live, and while I am yet amongst you."

Our colleague was unanimously condemned. We should despair of the future, unless such a unanimity struck all friends of justice and humanity with stupor, if it did not increase the number of decided adversaries to all political tribunals.

When the President of the Tribunal interrogated the accused, already declared guilty, as to whether he had any reclamations to make relative to the execution of the sentence, Bailly answered:

"I have always carried out the law; I shall know how to submit myself to it, since you are its organ."

The illustrious convict was led back to his cell.

Bailly had said in his eloge on M. de Tressan: "French gaiety produces the same effect as stoicism." These words occurred to my memory at the time when I was gathering from various sources the proof that on reentering the Conciergerie after his condemnation, Bailly showed himself at once both gay and stoical.

He desired his nephew, M. Batbeda, to play a game at piquet with him as usual. He thought of all the circumstances connected with the frightful morrow with such coolness, that he even said with a smile to M. Batbeda during the game: "Let us rest awhile, my friend, and take a pinch of snuff; to-morrow I shall be deprived of this pleasure, for I shall have my hands tied behind my back."

I will quote some words which, while testifying to a similar degree Bailly's serenity of mind, are more in harmony with his grave character, and more worthy of being preserved in history.

One of the companions of the illustrious academician's captivity, on the evening of the 11th of November, with tears in his eyes and moved by a tender veneration, exclaimed: "Why did you let us fancy there was a possibility of acquittal? You deceived us then?"--Bailly answered: "No, I was teaching you never to despair of the laws of your country."

In the paroxysms of wild despair, some of the prisoners reviewing the past, went so far as to regret that they had never infringed the laws of the strictest honesty.

Bailly brought back these minds, erring for the moment from the path of duty, by repeating to them maxims which both in form and substance would not disparage the collections of the most celebrated moralists:

"It is false, very false, that a crime can ever be useful. The trade of an honest man is the safest, even in times of revolution. Enlightened egotism suffices to put any intelligent individual into the path of justice and truth. Whenever innocence can be sacrificed with impunity, crime is not sure of succeeding. There is so great a difference between the death of a good man and that of a wicked man, that the multitude is incapable of estimating it."

Cannibals devouring their vanquished enemies seem to me less hideous, less contrary to nature, than those wretches, the refuse of the population of large towns, who, too often alas! have carried their ferocity so far, as to disturb by their clamorous and infamous raillery the last moments of the unhappy victims about to be struck by the sword of the law. The more humiliating this picture of the degradation of the human species may be, the more we should beware of overcharging the colouring. With few exceptions, the historians of Bailly's last agony appear to me to have forgotten this duty. Was the truth, the strict truth, not sufficiently distressing? Was it requisite, without any sort of proof, to impute to the mass of the people the infernal cynicism of cannibals? Should they lightly make just sentiments of disgust and indignation rest upon an immense class of citizens? I think not, Gentlemen, and I will therefore avoid the cruelty and poignancy of chaining the thoughts for a long time on such scenes; I will prove that by rendering the drama a little less atrocious, I have only sacrificed imaginary details, which are the envenomed fruits of the spirit of the party.