- In default of any pretext,[31] there was the supposition of
a conspiracy; blank lists were given to paid emissaries, who undertook
to search the various prisons and select the requisite number of
heads; they wrote names down on them according to their fancy, and
these provided the batches for the guillotine.
"As for myself," said the juryman Vilate, "I am never embarrassed. I
am always convinced. In a revolution, all who appear before this
tribunal ought to be condemned." -
At Marseilles, the Brutus Commission,[32] "sentencing without public
prosecutor or jurymen, sent to the prisons for those it wished to put
to death. After having demanded their names, professions and wealth
they were sent down to a cart standing at the door of the Palais de
Justice; the judges then stepped out on the balcony and pronounced the
death-sentence." The same proceedings took place at Cambrai, Arras,
Nantes, Le Mans, Bordeaux, N?mes, Lyons, Strasbourg, and elsewhere. -
Evidently, the judicial comedy is simply a parade; they make use of it
as one of the respectable means, among others less respectable, to
exterminate people whose opinions are not what they should be, or who
belong to the proscribed classes;[33] Samson, at Paris, and his
colleagues in the provinces, the execution-platoons of Lyons and
Nantes, are simply the collaborators of murderers properly so called,
while legal massacres complete other massacres pure and simple.
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