rganized administration.

For a long time Marat, with whom Danton had been obliged to coalesce,
had been insisting that, if the enemy were to be resisted on the
frontier, Paris must first be purged, for Paris swarmed with Royalists
wild for revenge, and who were known to be arming. Danton was not yet
prepared for extermination. He instituted domiciliary visits. He made
about three thousand arrests and seized a quantity of muskets, but he
liberated most of those who were under suspicion. The crisis only came
with the news, on September 2, of the investment of Verdun, when no one
longer could doubt that the net was closing about Paris. Verdun was but
three or four days' march from Chalons. When the Duke of Brunswick
crossed the Marne and Brittany revolted, the government would have to
flee, as Roland proposed, and then the Royalists would burst the gates
of the prisons and there would be another Saint Bartholomew.

Toward four o'clock in the afternoon of September 2, 1792, the prison of
the Abbaye was forced and the massacres began. They lasted until
September 6, and through a circular sent out by Marat they were extended
to Lyons, to Reims, and to other cities. About 1600 prisoners were
murdered in Paris alone. Hardly any one has ever defended those
slaughters. Even Marat called them "disastrous," and yet no one
interfered. Neither Danton, nor Roland, nor the Assembly, nor the
National Guard, nor the City of Paris, although the two or three hundred
ruffians who did the work could have been dispersed by a single company
of resolute men, had society so willed it. When Robespierre's time came
he fell almost automatically. Though the head of the despotic "Committee
of Public Safety," and nominally the most powerful man in France, he was
sent to execution like the vilest and most contemptible of criminals by
adversaries who would not command a regiment. The inference is that the
September massacres, which have ever since been stigmatized as the
deepest stain upon the Revolution, were, veritably, due to the
Royalists, who made with the Republicans an issue of self-preservation.
For this was no common war. In Royalist eyes it was a servile revolt,
and was to be treated as servile revolts during the Middle Ages had
always been treated. Again and again, with all solemnity, the Royalists
had declared that were they to return as conquerors no stone of Paris
should be left standing on another, and that the inhabitants should
expire