[9] It is estimated that,
in France, not counting more than 40,000 provisional jails, twelve
hundred prisons, full and running over, contain each more than two
hundred inmates.[10] At Paris, notwithstanding the daily void created
by the guillotine, the number of the imprisoned on Flor?al 9, year
II., amounts to 7,840; and, on Messidor 25 following, notwithstanding
the large batches of 50 and 60 persons led in one day, and every day,
to the scaffold, the number is still 7,502.[11] There are more than
one thousand persons in the prisons of Arras, more than one thousand
five hundred in those of Toulouse, more than three thousand in those
of Strasbourg, and more than thirteen thousand in those of Nantes. In
the two departments alone of Bouches du-Rh?ne and Vaucluse,
Representative Maignet, who is on the spot, reports from 12,000 to
15,000 arrests.[12] "A little before Thermidor," says Representative
Beaulieu, "the number of incarcerated arose to nearly 400,000, as is
apparent on the lists and registers then before the Committee of
General Security."[13] - Among these poor creatures, there are
children, and not alone in the prisons of Nantes where the
revolutionary searches have collected the whole of the rural
population; in the prisons of Arras, among twenty similar cases, I
find a coal-dealer and his wife with their seven sons and daughters,
from seventeen down to six years of age; a widow with her four
children from nineteen down to twelve years of age; another noble
widow with her nine children, from seventeen down to three years of
age, and six children, without father or mother, from twenty-three
down to nine years of age.
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