arnessed to the car of the Revolution;"
another "convicted of having shown contempt for his section and for the
poor by giving thirty livres per months," is taxed at one million two
hundred thousand livres, while the new authorities, a crooked mayor and
twelve knaves composing the Revolutionary Committee, traffic in lives
and property.[1189] At Marseilles, says Danton,[1190] the object is
"to give the commercial aristocracy an important lesson;" we must
"show ourselves as terrible to traders as to nobles and priests;"
consequently, twelve thousand of them are proscribed and their
possessions sold.[1191] From the first day the guillotine works as
fast as possible; nevertheless, it does not work fast enough for
Representative Freron who finds the means for making it work faster.

"The military commission we have established in place of the
revolutionary tribunal," he writes, "works frightfully fast against
the conspirators.... They fall like hail under the sword of the law.
Fourteen have already paid for their infamous treachery with their
heads. 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.[