WOMEN EXECUTED DURING THE REIGN OF TERROR.

Bush Advocate, Volume IX, Issue 668, 27 August 1892, Page 6

WOMEN EXECUTED DURING THE REIGN OF TERROR.

The first capital sontanoc on a woman wan passed on 12th April, 1703. Catherine Clere, a domestio servant at Valenciennes, fiftyfive years of age, was found drunk at night in the streets of that town, shouting " Vive lo Eoi !" and singing revolutionary songs. Probably it waa a case of in vino veritas, albeit her master assured the tribunal that during- five months in hia service she had shown no anti-republi-can sentiment; and there was no evidence of her having meddled in politics. Next day two members of the convention, horrified at the initiation of death for so light an offence, urged a reapite, but the convention declined to interfere, and it is said that even while the brief disouss'on was going on the guillotine did its work. Two mouths later three Breton womeu, aged twenty-four, twentyfive and twenty-seven, implicated with twenty men in u royalist plot, detected by the digging up of papers in a garden, suff arod the same penalty. A few weeks more and it was the turn of Charlotte Corday.

By this tiraa the Parisians had become aocustomed to the " equality of the sexes'' before tho guillotine, and tho monthly statistics — I follow the Jacobin calendar — show a terrible crescendo of executions : Vendemiaire, 3 women (inoluding Mario Antoinette) and 7 men ; Brumaire, 3 women {including Mme. Roland) and 02 men ; JYimairo, 10 women (inoluding Mme. Dubarry) and 57 men ; Nlvoso, 10 women, 51 men ; Pluviose, 8 women ; GO men ; Ventose, 11 women, 105 men ; Germinal, 10 womon, 143 men ; l'lorinl, 27 women (inoluding Princess Eli2abeth), 327 men ; Prairial, 33 women, 470 men ; Mossidor, 1)3 woman, 703 men ; Xhermidor, Ist to Ofh, 59 womon, 283 men. If Robespierre had not been overturned, and if Thermidor had continued as It had begun, the monthly number of women would have risen to 177. As Edgar Quinet remarks, tho longer the system lasted the more the Terrorists wero doomed to prolong it, and eternity of murders would have been necessary before tho favorable momont forolemoacy was foundIt should also be mentioned that the acquittals, which at first considerably outnumbered tho convictions, beoame, after Pluviose, a dwindling minority, and that of the 5000 persons still in priaou when Robespierre fell, we may assume one-third to have been women. — " National Review."