XIV. CHAP. of foot-soldiers might be used-not to defend—not to attack-not to fight, but to relieve the civilians from one of the duties which they are accustomed to deem most vile, by performing for them the office of the executioner; and these platoons might even be ordered to help the Government to hide the deed by doing their work in the dead hours of the night. Is it true that, with the sanction of the Home Office and of the Prefecture of Police, and under the orders of Prince Louis Bonaparte, St Arnaud, Magnan, Morny, and Maupas, a midnight work of this last kind was done by the army of Paris? To men not living in the French capital, it seems that there is a want of complete certainty about the fate of a great many out of those throngs of prisoners who were brought into the jails and other places of detention on the 4th and 5th of December. The people of Paris think otherwise. They seem to have no doubt. The grounds of their belief are partly of this sort -A family, anxious to know what had become of one of their relatives who was missing, appealed for help to a man in so high a station of life that they deemed him powerful enough to be able to question official personages, and his is the testimony which records what passed. In order, if possible, to find a clue to the fate of the lost man, he made the acquaintance of one of the functionaries who held the office of a Judge - Substitute.' The moment the subject of inquiry was touched, the 'Judge-Substi'tute' began to boil with anger at the mere thought of what he had witnessed, but it seems that his indig XIV. nation was not altogether unconnected with offended CHA P. pride, and the agony of having had his jurisdiction invaded. He said that he had been ordered to go to some of the jails and examine the prisoners, with a view to determine whether they should be detained or set free; and that, whilst he was engaged in this duty, a party of non-commissioned officers and soldiers came into the room and rudely announced that they themselves had orders to dispose of those prisoners whose fingers were black. Then, without regard to the protesting of the Judge-Substitute,' they examined the hands of the prisoners whom he had before him, adjudged that the fingers of many of them were black, and at once carried off all those whom they so condemned, with a view (as the 'Judge-Substitute' understood) to shoot them, or have them shot. That they were so shot the 'Judge'Substitute' was certain, but it is plain that he had no personal knowledge of what was done to the prisoners after they were carried off by the soldiers. Again, during the night of the 4th and the night of the 5th, people listening in one of the undisturbed quarters of Paris would suddenly hear the volley of a single platoon-a sound not heard, they say, at such hours either before or since. The sound of this occasional platoon-firing was heard coming chiefly, it seems, from the Champ de Mars, but also from other spots, and, in particular, from the gardens of the Luxembourg, and from the esplanade of the Invalides. People listening within hearing of this last spot declared, they say, that the sound of the platoon-fire XIV. CHAP. was followed by shrieks and moans; and that once, in the midst of the other cries, they caught some piteous words, close followed by a scream, and sounding as though they were the words of a lad imperfectly shot and dying hard. Partly upon grounds of this sort, but more perhaps by the teaching of universal fame, Paris came to believe—and, rightly or wrongly, Paris still believes— that during the night of the 4th, and again during the night of the 5th, prisoners were shot in batches and thrown into pits. On the other hand, the adherents of the French Emperor deny that the troops did duty as executioners. Therefore the value of an Imperialist denial, with all such weight as may be thought to belong to it, is set against the imperfect proof on which Paris founds her belief; but men must remember why it is that any obscurity can hang upon a question like this. The question whether, on the night of a given Thursday and a given Friday, whole batches of men living in Paris were taken out and shot by platoons in such places as the Champ de Mars or the Luxembourg gardens-this is a question which, from its very nature, could not have remained in doubt for forty-eight hours, unless Paris at the time had lost her freedom of speech and her freedom of printing; and even now, after a lapse of years, if freedom were restored to France, the question would be quickly and righteously determined. Now it happens that those who took away from Paris her freedom of speech and her freedom of printing are * Granier de Cassaignac, vol. ii. XIV. the very persons of whom it is said that during two CHAP. December nights they caused their fellow-countrymen to be shot by platoons and in batches. So it comes to this, that those who are charged have made away with the means by which the truth might be best established. In this stress, Justice is not so dull and helpless as to submit to be baffled. Wisely deviating in such a case from her common path, she listens for a moment to incomplete testimony against the concealer, and then, by requiring that he who hid away the truth shall restore it to light, or abide the consequence of his default, she shifts the duty of giving strict proof from the accuser to the accused. Because Prince Louis and his associates closed up the accustomed approaches to truth, therefore it is cast upon them either to remain under the charge which Paris brings against them, or else to labour and show, as best they may, that they did not cause batches of French citizens to be shot by platoons of infantry in the night of the 4th and the night of the 5th of December. of people id The whole number of people killed by the troops Uncertainty as to the during the forty hours which followed upon the number commencement of the massacre in the Boulevards, will never be known. The burying of the bodies was done for the most part at night. In searching for a proximate notion of the extent of the carnage, it is not safe to rely even upon the acknowledgments of the officers engaged in the work, for during some time they were under an impression that it was favourable to a man's advancement to be supposed XIV. CHAP. to be much steeped in what was done. The colonel of one of the regiments engaged in this slaughter spoke whilst the business was fresh in his mind. It would be unsafe to accept his statement as accurate, or even as substantially true; but as it is certain that the man had taken part in the transactions of which he spoke, and that he really wished to gain credence for the words which he uttered, his testimony has a kind of value as representing (to say the least of it) his idea of what could be put forward as a credible statement by one who had the means of knowing the truth. What he declared was that his regiment alone had killed two thousand four hundred men. Supposing that his statement was anything like an approach to the truth, and that his corps was at all rivalled by others, a very high a very high number would be wanted for recording the whole quantity of the slaughter.* Total loss of the army in killed. Effect of the massacre upon the people of Paris. In the army which did these things, the whole number of killed was twenty-five. † Of all men dwelling in cities the people of Paris are perhaps the most warlike. Less almost than any other Europeans are they accustomed to overvalue the lives of themselves and their fellow-citizens. With them the joy of the fight has power to overcome fear and grief, and they had been used to great street-battles; but they had not been used of late to witness the slaughter of people unarmed and * The number of regiments operating against Paris was between thirty and forty, and of these about twenty belonged to the divisions which were actively employed in the work. + Including all officers and soldiers killed from the 3d to the 6th of December. The official return, 'Moniteur,' p. 3062. |