The September Massacres of the French Revolution of 1792.

Auckland Star, Volume XV, Issue 3722, 15 July 1882, Page 3 (Supplement)

The September Massacres of the French Revolution of 1792.

At two in the morning of 2nd September the city drums were beat ostensibly for the march of the Parisiau battalions to reintorce the armies of the frontier. It was the concerted signal of massacre; and the chosen assassins, liberally supplied with money and spirits, and harangued by Robespierre, Billaud Varennos, and Collot d'Herbois, were speedily ready for every atrocity. The Abbaye was the prison first attacked, the victims, seized separately, were dragged before an inexorable tribunal, and turned out among the murderers in ; the court, through whose repeated blows they were compelled to run the gauntlet till they expired—while the multitude, among whom were a vast number of women, danced like cannibals round tkeir mangled corpses.' Similar massacres took place in all the other prisons ; ia that of the Carnies, the venerable Archbishop of Aries was slaughtered, with more than 200 clersy. The Princess do Lamballe, who was a prisoner in La Petite Force, was torn to pieces, and her head, with the fragments of her bbdv, paraded before the window of the Duke of Orleans, who rose from diuner to enjoy the ghastly spectacle. Abovj 5,000 persons perished in the various prisons during this dreadful scene of carnage, which continued uninterrupted from the 2ud to the 6th of September. Even the Mons in the Bicetre, whose offence had no political character, were massacred in the indiscriminate thirst for blood, which only ceased when no more victims could be found. The confiscation of the whole effects of the slaughtered captives, and the property of the emigrants, which was sold at the same time, became_ the source of immense wealth to the municipality; but no account could ever be obtained either of the amount or disposal of this enormous plunder. The jewel office in the Tulleries was ■ also pillaged one night, and the costly ornaments of the crown disappeared for ever, but it was never known into whose hands most of the jewels fell,— Alison.