- It is this verbiage which,
authorized by the Committee of Public Safety, now forms the eloquence
of France; it is this manufacturer of phrases by the dozen, this
future informer and prison-spy under the empire, this frolicking
inventor of the blonde-wig conspiracy, that the government sends into
the tribune to announce victories, trumpet forth military heroism and
proclaim war unto death. On the 7th of Prairial,[78] Bar?re, in the
name of the committee, proposes a return to savage law : "No English
or Hanoverian prisoner shall henceforth be made;" the decree is
endorsed by Carnot and passes the Convention unanimously. Had it been
executed, as reprisals, and according to the proportion of prisoners,
there would have been for one Englishman shot, three Frenchmen hung:
honor and humanity would have disappeared from the camps; the
hostilities between Christians would have become as deadly as among
savages. Happily, French soldiers felt the nobleness of their
profession; on the order being given to shoot the prisoners, a decent
sergeant replied:
"We will not shoot - send them to the Convention. If the
representatives delight in killing prisoners - let them do it
themselves, and eat them, too, savages as they are!"
The sergeant, an ordinary man, is not on a level with the Committee,
or with Bar?re; and yet Bar?re did his best in a bill of indictment of
twenty-seven pages, full of grand flourishes, every possible
ritornello, glaring falsehood and silly inflation, explaining how "the
Britannic leopard" paid assassins to murder the representatives; how
the London cabinet had armed little C?cile Renault, "the new Corday,"
against Robespierre; how the Englishman, naturally barbarous, "is
unable to deny his origins; how he descends from the Carthaginians and
Phenicians, and formerly dealt in the skins of wild beasts and slaves;
how his trading occupation is not changed; how Cesar, formerly, on
landing in the country, found nothing but a ferocious tribe battling
with wolves in the forest and threatening to burn every vessel which
would try to land there; and how he still remains like that.
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