against royal power. Of the revolutionaries, Danton, Robespierre,
Rossignol and Santerre were all implicated in the day's gory events.
Thousands of armed revolutionaries obeyed the tocsin call and converged
from right and left banks of the Seine on the Tuileries, defended by z,ooo
troops, half of them members of the Swiss Guard. The scenes that
followed were among the most terrible in the French Revolution.
Confused by contradictory orders, the Swiss Guards were overwhelmed
by superior numbers and slaughtered mercilessly. Six hundred died in
the palace courtyard in a hecatomb of stabbing, stoning, clubbing and
gunshot. Women stripped the bodies of clothes, and the most savage
members of the crowd gelded and mutilated the corpses. When all was
over, the dishonoured dead were carted away to mass burial in lime pits.
Napoleon was an eyewitness of these terrible events, and he later told
Joseph that no battlefield carnage ever made such an impression on him.
His words to Las Cases on St Helena are worth quoting:
I found myself lodging in Paris, at the Mail in the Place des Victoires.
At the sound of the tocsin and on learning that the Tuileries were
under attack, I ran to the Carousel to find Bourrienne's brother,
Fauvelet, who kept a furniture shop there. It was from this house that I
was able to witness at my ease all the activities of that day. Before
reaching the Carousel I had been met in the rue de Petits Champs by a
group of hideous men bearing a head at the end of a pike. Seeing that I
was presentably dressed and had the appearance of a gentleman, they
approached me and asked me to shout 'Long live the Republic!' which
you can easily imagine I did without difficulty ... With the palace
broken into, and the King there, in the heart of the assembly, I
ventured to go into the garden. The sight of the dead Swiss Guards
gave me an idea of the meaning of death such as I have never had since,
on any of my battlefields. Perhaps it was that the smallness of the area
made the number of corpses appear larger, or perhaps it was because
this was the first time I had undergone such an experience. I saw well
dressed women committing acts of the grossest indecency on the
corpses of the Swiss Guards.Some say his hatred and distrust of the mob dated from that day, and a
conviction that only a bourgeois republic could hold in check the forces of
anarchy and the dark impulses of the canaille.
Napoleon judged that a resolute defence by the King could have saved
the Tuileries and that, if he had been in charge, he could have routed the
mob. His disdain for the hydra-headed monster of the crowd was
increasing daily.