Martyrs of the French Revolution: The Massacres of 1790 and 1791
Massacres of 1790 and 1791
Dr. Marie-France Hilgar
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In her article about the genocide which took place in Vendée and whichThe Angeluspublished last September, Dr. Hilgar mentioned that the French Revolution was directed against the Catholic Church more than against the aristocracy. By relating events which took place during 1793-1794, she realized suddenly that she had started almost at the end. We have asked Dr. Hilgar now to go back to the beginning and give a more complete account of the gruesome and senseless killings of priests and laity which happened earlier.
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Martyr: a person who chooses to suffer or die rather than give up his faith or his principles; a person tortured or killed because of his beliefs.
Though it is rather difficult to explain how France, the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church and how its God-loving people turned suddenly into packs of torturers and murderers, it is known that men were paid to start riots, and that it was all very well organized. According to Louis Blanc, himself a leftist, and his History of the Revolution in eleven volumes published in Paris from 1847 to 1862, the French Freemasonry, for a long time divided by rivalries, became much more powerful when the Duke of Orleans agreed to become Great Master of the Order, as early as 1772. Most of the active leaders of the Revolution were Freemasons. Every time that it was proven that the rioters were being paid by the Duke of Orleans, Louis XVI absolved them.
The storming of the Bastille in 1789 is too well known for me to spend much time on it. I would just like, for the sake a statistics, to bring up a few numbers. The Marquis de Launay, Governor of the Bastille, was at the head of one hundred and fourteen men: eighty-two invalids and thirty-two Swiss guards. Some forty to fifty thousand rioters raided the Arsenal of the Invalids where they took possession of twenty-eight thousand rifles and twenty cannons. Having been promised by the French Guard, on the honor of the French Army, that all lives would be spared, de Launay capitulated. He was shoved around, hit, insulted, wounded by small knives, finally pierced by a bayonet and shot with pistol bullets. He was decapitated by a cook named Dinot, who became the hero of the day, and put on a pitch-fork. Eighteen invalids and twelve Swiss guards survived. All others were either decapitated, strangled, or hung.
That same 14th of July, Jacques de Flesselles, who was a high magistrate, the equivalent of Mayor of Paris and chief of police, was accused of treason. Highly respected by all, he was allowed to walk away, freely. As soon as he was outside, somebody shot him in the head. Flesselles was immediately replaced as mayor by Bailly, a lackey of the Duke of Orleans. Soon "lists of proscription" were posted on the gates of the Palais Royal, home of the Duke of Orleans: it meant that anyone on the list was designated as fair game to the "justice of the people." At the top of the list were found the names of Joseph-Francois Foullon, war minister, and his son-in-law Francois Bertier de Sauvigny, intendant of Paris. The first man, seventy-eight years old, was dragged from Viry to Paris, tortured and abandoned by Lafayette, general in chief of the French Guard, to the fury of his captors. He barely had the time to make the Sign of the Cross before being hung, and following the established rite, his head was cut from the body by a butcher (by profession) and paraded on a pitch fork. Sauvigny was brought from Compie where the town council had declared that he had been arrested without just cause. The National Assembly had just judged him innocent. Then Bailly, at the head of a "Parisian Committee," started to ask him a few questions when the paid licensed killers from the Palais Royal showed up. Sauvigny was condemned. Everybody knew he would never reach his jail. As soon as he was taken out, someone shouted "Death!" and he was attacked by more than thirty men armed with bayonets. One of the assassins, making sure that Sauvigny was still alive, cut his chest open and pulled out his heart.
If I mention the cases of Foullon and Sauvigny among so many others, it is because while I was in Paris in the summer of 1989, I happened to see in the newspapers that a Mass was being celebrated in memory of the two men, and for some unexplainable reason, I cut out the announcement and brought it back with me to Las Vegas.
Soon the massacre of innocent people spread throughout the whole country. Robbers knew that they could attack and kill any aristocrat without fear of being punished. Crapulous crimes and political crimes worked together. The motives were different but the methods were the same.
The beginning of the year 1790 was fairly quiet in Paris. The Duke of Orleans had gone to England, many right-wing people had fled from France and had left the National Assembly without adversaries. But in the provinces, events took a turn for the worse. The soldiers routinely refused to obey their officers, usually aristocrats, and delivered them to the crowds who killed them: such were the cases of M. de Beausset, governor of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde in Marseille, of M. de Voisins in Valence, of the mayor of Varaise, and of many others.
The Protestants of the South jumped at the opportunity of joining in the massacres. In 1782, Louis XVI had given back to them all their civil rights, but they had always hated the Catholic monarchy. They were the first republicans in a royalist France. Those who had political aspirations wanted the fall of the royalist regime, those with religious ambition wanted to take power at the local level and install a dictatorship inspired by that of Calvin, in Geneva, which would have withdrawn all rights from Catholics. They all upheld revolutionary masonic lodges and were preparing measures which the National Assembly was going to vote for: the abolition of religious orders, the forbidding of celibate life and the taking of the clergy's property.
In Nimes, Montpelier, Toulouse, Montauban, Protestants rejoiced loudly at the news of the killings of Catholics. The Catholic population organized public prayers, processions, petitions, all with the help of the town councils. In April 1790, a resident of Nimes found out that someone in his town had ordered fifteen thousand rifles from a factory in Saint Etienne. His investigation revealed that the arms were to be delivered to the Protestant community. Feeling very threatened, a group of Catholics met in the church of the Dominicans and decided to ask for protection. They wrote a petition requesting the King and the National Assembly to keep the Catholic religion as the State Religion. This solemn request, signed by five thousand citizens, was sent to Paris on April 20. The Catholics of Montauban, Albi and Uzes did the same. The Assembly denied their request. Thus Catholics were denounced for their reactionary ideas. The mayor of Nimes, Baron de Margueritte, Catholic and monarchist, deputy at the National Assembly, was harassed by his colleagues.
On June 13, at three in the morning, an army of six thousand Protestants entered Nimes with artillery. The principal Catholic houses had been targeted for their fury. The massacre lasted three days without any type of interference. The assassins were able to strangle, disembowel, burn and profane to their hearts' content. More than eight hundred Catholics lost their lives, most often in atrocious ways.
The first building the Huguenots took was the monastery of the Capuchins. The murderers broke down the doors with their axes and rushed into the sanctuary where the monks were singing vespers. The holy men tried to escape but could not. The first one they caught up with was Father Benoit. His white beard did not earn him any respect from his executioners who aimed at him. "Please," said the priest, "give me time to finish my prayers." He was given five minutes, then he was shot. Brother Celestin Clat was caught and killed in the sacristy. He was twenty-four and still a novice. His murderers took the opportunity to steal sacred vessels, altar linens and religious ornaments. Others mutilated the altar crucifix, shot all statues and broke furniture. Father Seraphin was reached in the dormitory; he was twenty-eight. His whole body was pierced by pitch forks and bayonets. Father Simon had retired to his cell: he was followed there and cut into pieces. While going through the other cells, the Huguenots found their fifth victim in the person of Father Fidele, an old man of eighty-five, half paralyzed, deaf, and blind. He was unable to get up. They first tortured him, then set fire to his straw mattress and left him to burn on it. The assassins went on to destroy anything that could remind one of their victims' faith or charity. The library, which had been enriched through important donors, was reduced to ashes. The pharmacy, where the poor were cared for, was destroyed. All consecrated objects were taken so that they could be profaned. During the following days, in a nearby village, Huguenots dressed as Capuchins and wearing surplices and culps were seen dancing and drinking from chalices to the health of the nation.
The Protestants then turned their fury against all those who were known to have signed the petition. Lerouge was a pious layman. Father of five children whom he raised in the true Faith, he was picking flowers from a linden tree when his enemies spotted him. They unloaded their guns on him, opened his skull with a bayonet and stuck a red tuft in it, to designate him as a papist. Then they cut him up with their swords. They dragged Frances Perillier out of his house, severely wounded him, took him to the top of the wall of the arenas and threw him down. As he was not yet dead, they finished him up by pounding him with stones.
Jean-Baptiste Auzeby and Claude Dumas, thirty-six and thirty-nine, ran away to a farm close by. They were followed by two Huguenots who shot and robbed them. Jean-Baptiste Mercier, thirty, was able to hide during the first day of the massacres, but on the second day he ran into a pack of exterminators who attacked him with pitchforks, swords, guns, cut his head off and nailed it to the door of the town hall. Others were younger: Jean and Pierre Maurin, twenty-one and twenty-two; Michel Duzer, only sixteen. Pierre Rouquet was coming out of church when he was shot dead. Pierre de Froment was met at his door, wounded, dragged into his own home where they laid him on a table and mutilated him; then they cut his head off and paraded it through the city. They could not find his family but they found a friend of his, Claude Violet, twenty-one, known to have signed the petition. They stuck a butcher hook in his chin, tied it to a rope which they put through a pulley in the ceiling and left him there. They finished him off by shooting him. Jean Tribes suffered a longer agony. When he arrived at his home on June 14, they charged him so violently with their bayonets that his bowels came out of him. They did not kill him; they threw him in jail where he agonized for three days before dying.
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The killings were still continuing on the 15th when Antoine Guiraud, a traveling salesman, came home and was met by his assassins who killed him in front of his wife and his children.
Among the lay martyrs, the case of the Gas family is one of the most revolting. The father sold wine for a living. His wife, who had been raised a Protestant, had become Catholic before marrying him. As soon as he heard of the massacres he went into hiding. A group of armed Huguenots came into his house, beat his wife so badly that she was left for dead. The little girls were dragged on the floor by their hair, the oldest one pulled by a rope around her neck. They kept beating her up so that she would reveal where her father was hiding; she never uttered a sound. On the 15th, they finally found him; they hit the back of his neck with an axe, pulled their bayonets through his body and then cut off his arms and legs. One of the barbarians named Cassenac encouraged his comrades to wash their hands in the blood of a Catholic. The father-in-law of the dead man and his three sons took everything of value they could find. The martyr's body was placed across the threshold, and during the next thirty-six hours the Protestants who were going in and out of the house stepped on and kicked him. On the third day, they dragged the body to the main street, stuck a piece of bread in his mouth and said. "Eat, Catholic! Shout: 'Long live the King!'"
When all was over, two very young children of the family were still living, though forever traumatized by the atrocities they had witnessed. Not knowing what to do, they went to their grandparent's home for a piece of bread. They were chased away: "God is taking vengeance on you because your mother changed her religion."
The Baron de Margueritte who was in Paris when it all happened demanded an inquest and punishment of the guilty parties. The first set of reports disappeared. He insisted. The events were finally brought up for discussion in February, eight months later. "The Assembly," we read in le Moniteur, "forbade the prosecuting of the assassins."
Let us return to Paris and April 1791, where the religious communities which had remained faithful to their vows were going to endure great sufferings. In the chapels of the convents, many non-juried priests were saying their Mass every morning, and many fervent people—workers, bourgeois and merchants—were faithfully attending. Parish churches run by juried priests were practically deserted. This attitude of the Parisian population is a sign that the traditional faith was alive, and that the laws of the National Assembly against the clergy, far from being the expression of the national will, were in fact an unwarranted persecution and a violation of the rights of a people attached to its Church. Such a situation became unbearable to the insurrectionary forces of the capital, since their plan was not so much to get rid of the king as it was to destroy the Church. They felt it was necessary to punish the nuns who were giving shelter to the faithful priests and were following their example of faith and devotion. The Revolutionary Committee had their orders transmitted to the female riff-raff. On April 7, first Saturday of the month, at daybreak, the skirt-watching revolutionaries started watching the church of the Daughters of St. Mary. They saw many devout and and recollected people entering. Some of the bawds went into the church and counted up to twenty-two masses being celebrated until ten thirty. It was a sure sign that this convent was sheltering many non-juried priests. The women outside armed themselves with whips. The extern sisters, seeing the danger, closed all the doors. The shrews took their case to the "Popular Senate" which ordered the doors to be opened. The horde rushed in; there was no one left, except in a dark confessional, a priest listening to the confession of an old lady. She was immediately dragged into the street, stripped of her clothes and whipped until she started to bleed. The sisters received the same treatment.
The bawds soon looked for new victims to satisfy their sadistic instincts, and to put money into their pockets for they were paid for the whippings they gave. During the whole week, punitive expeditions took place in Saint-Roch, Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, Sainte-Marguerite, Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, Filles du Calvaire, Trinitaires, Recollettes, Daughters of the Precious Blood. Everywhere the same "holy anger of the people" was applied with bloody violence.
April 9 was a very busy day for those who handled the whips. Ludovic Sciout, who re searched all the memoirs of the time for his Histoire de la Constitution civilie du clergé, in four volumes, published in Paris from 1872 to 1881, described the events in the following terms: "A band of shrews who participated in all the riots with a great number of men, some of them dressed as women, invaded successfully the convents of Paris, threw themselves on all the nuns and the persons who were retired there, and took great pleasure in beating them and flogging them in public. The town council avoided disturbing them in their patriotic occupation."
The Sisters of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, who were so meek and humble, were fustigated, bloodied, by the hands of the very men and women whom they had fed, clothed and cared for. Three of the sisters died following their beatings. One of them, eighty years old, passed away ten days later.
At that time though, the rioters were not yet paid to kill. In his Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la persécution française, published as early as 1795 in Rome, Auribeau noted: "Orders were given not to make martyrs, so that the Church could not register her triumph, but to create fear and to ridicule religion." It was necessary to say, for future killings, a reserve of executioners.
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