. . . They fall like hail under the sword of the
law. Fourteen have already paid for their infamous treachery with
their heads. To-morrow, sixteen more are to be guillotined, all
chiefs of the legion, notaries, sectionists, members of the popular
tribunal; to-morrow, also, three merchants will dance the carmagnole,
and they are the ones we are after."[92]
Men and things, all must perish; he wishes to demolish the city and
proposes to fill up the harbor. Restrained with great difficulty,
Fr?ron contents himself with a destruction of "the haunts" of the
aristocracy, two churches, the concert-hall, the houses around it, and
twenty-three buildings in which the rebel sections had held their
meetings.
At Lyons, to increase the booty, the representatives had taken pains
to encourage the manufacturers and merchants with vague promises;
these opened their shops and brought their valuable goods, books and
papers out of their hiding-places. No time is lost in seizing the
plunder; "a list of all property belonging to the rich and to anti-
revolutionaries" is drawn up, which is "confiscated for the benefit of
the patriots of the city;" in addition to this a tax of six millions
is imposed, payable in eight days, by those whom the confiscation may
have still spared;[93] it is proclaimed, according to principle, that
the surplus of each individual belongs by right to the sans-culottes,
and whatever may have been retained beyond the strictly necessary, is
a robbery by the individual to the detriment of the nation.
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