To-morrow, sixteen more are to be guillotined, all chiefs of the legion, notaries, sectionists, members of the popular tribunal; to-morrow, also, three merchants will dance the carmagnole, and they are the ones we are after."[1192] Men and things, all must perish; he wishes to demolish the city and proposes to fill up the harbor.

Restrained with great difficulty, Freron contents himself with a destruction of "the haunts" of the aristocracy, two churches, the concert-hall, the houses around it, and twenty-three buildings in which the rebel sections had held their meetings.
At Lyons, to increase the booty, the representatives had taken pains to encourage the manufacturers and merchants with vague promises; these opened their shops and brought their valuable goods, books and papers out of their hiding-places.

No time is lost in seizing the plunder; "a list of all property belonging to the rich and to anti-revolutionaries" is drawn up, which is "confiscated for the benefit of the patriots of the city;" in addition to this a tax of six millions is imposed, payable in eight days, by those whom the confiscation may have still spared;[1193] it is proclaimed, according to principle, that the surplus of each individual belongs by right to the sans-culottes, and whatever may have been retained beyond the strictly necessary, is a robbery by the individual to the detriment of the nation.[1194] In conformity with this rule there is a general rounding up, prolonged for ten months, which places the fortunes of a city of one hundred and twenty thousand souls in the hands of its scoundrels.

Thirty-two revolutionary committees "whose members are thick as thieves select thousands of guards devoted to them."[1195] In confiscated dwellings and warehouses, they affix seals without an inventory; they drive out women and children "so that there shall be no witnesses;" they keep the keys; they enter and steal when they please, or install themselves for a revel with prostitutes .-- Meanwhile, the guillotine is kept going, and people are fired at and shot down with grape-shot.

The revolutionary committee officially avow one thousand six hundred and eighty-two acts of murder committed in five months,[1196] while a confederate of Robespierre's privately declare that there were six thousand.[1197] Blacksmiths are condemned to death for having shod the Lyonnese cavalry, firemen for having extinguished fires kindled by republican bombshells, a widow for having paid a war-tax during the siege, market women for "having shown disrespect to patriots." It is an organized "Septembrisade" made legal and lasting; its authors are so well aware of the fact as to use the word itself in their public correspondence.[1198]--At Toulon it is worse, people are slaughtered in heaps, almost haphazard.