406 Chapter XVII
velopment, brought on by the violent eruption of 1792, is more evident when we
remember that elsewhere in Europe, as the agrarian problem came to be dealt with
in the following century, the former lords received compensation and so remained
economically stronger than in France. After August 10 the landed property of
émigrés, which had been confiscated during the preceding months against the
king’s resistance, was put on public sale in small lots so that peasants and other
small purchasers might obtain it, in twenty- year installments without interest if
they chose.
Priests were associated in the minds of patriots with the Counter- Revolution,
both rightly and wrongly in individual cases. On August 11 the Assembly closed
the remaining monasteries. It forbade priests to wear clerical costume in public,
required them to accept the new laws of civil marriage and divorce, and imposed
upon them, as upon others, a new oath of fidelity “to liberty and equality.” Though
the Pope never officially forbade this oath, many clergy refused to take it. Shoals of
priests were ordered deported.
On August 30 Paris learned of the surrender of Longwy and the siege of Ver-
dun, so that the Prussians were known to be within the frontiers. The city was in
turmoil, with authority in collapse. To political excitement and anger were added
the fears and hatreds induced by military emergency. There were over two thou-
sand persons in the Paris prisons, most of them for ordinary crimes or offenses, but
including several hundred “politicals.” Word circulated in the heated atmosphere
of the city that the prisoners were in secret contact with the enemy and the émi-
grés. It was said that the worst enemies were not at the border but in Paris itself. A
few activists took matters into their own hands, with no attempt on the part of the
Commune to prevent them. For several days, in an orgy of what in America would
be called lynchings, and with the callous brutality and atrociousness that later
characterized American lynch mobs, these bands of marauders, for whom violence
was now a patriotic act, burst into the prisons and put to death some 1,300 in-
mates after pretended trials in the streets. These September Massacres were an in-
discriminate butchery; over two hundred priests and aristocrats perished, but most
of the victims were ordinary prisoners of the kind that any prison in any city might
contain. Respectable people, however pained, thought it wise at the moment not to
be too critical. It might be dangerous not to condone them. And it was no time to
complain about excessive zeal.
The same atmosphere that produced and excused the September Massacres sur-
rounded the elections. Voters assembled locally in thousands of primary assemblies
to choose electors who convened at regional levels to designate members of the
Convention. There seem to be no good estimates of the proportion of adult men
who participated. There is no reason to suppose it to have been especially small.
The country was aroused by the invasion, and politicized by three years of revolu-
tion. Provincials might dislike Paris, but they hardly depended on it for their ideas.
There was more indigenous vitality in the provinces than in later times, under dif-
ferent conditions of transport and communication. Every town—and there were
over seventy of them with populations of over 10,000—had its own revolution, its
own newspapers and journalists, its own political club, its own factions and quar-
rels. Even small villages were involved. Everywhere there were farm people and