" Then,
for three months after this, the guillotine dispatches eighteen
hundred persons; eleven young women have to mount the scaffold
together, in honor of a republican festival; an old woman of ninety-
four is borne to it in an armchair. The population, initially of
twenty-eight thousand people, is reduced to six or seven thousand
only.
All this is not enough; the two cities that dared maintain a siege
must disappear from the French soil. The Convention decrees that "the
city of Lyons shall be destroyed: every house occupied by a rich man
shall be demolished; only the dwellings of the poor shall remain, with
edifices specially devoted to industry, and monuments consecrated to
humanity and public education."[99] The same at Toulon: "the houses
within the town shall be demolished; only the buildings that are
essential for army and navy purposes, for stores and munitions, shall
be preserved."[100] Consequently, a requisition is made in Var and
the neighboring departments for twelve thousand masons to level Toulon
to the ground. -- At Lyons, fourteen thousand laborers pull down the
Chateau Pierre-Encize; also the superb houses on Place Bellecour,
those of the Quai St.
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