. 'Moral unity' would have kept things quiet and comfortable
throughout the Roman Empire under Diocletian, and throughout the Low
Countries under Phillip II. and Alva, and throughout England under Henry
VIII. The Jacobins of 1792 did their best to organise 'moral unity' in
France with the help of the guillotine, and of the Committee of Public
Safety and of the hired assassins who butchered prisoners in cold blood.

Here, at Reims, in September 1792, while Marat 'the Friend of the
People' and Danton the 'Minister of Justice' were employing Maillard the
'hero of the Bastile' and his salaried cut-throats to promote public
economy and private liberty by emptying the prisons of Paris, certain
agents of Marat made a notable effort in behalf of the 'moral unity of
France.' To this effort the melodramatic historians of the French
Revolution have done scant justice. Mr. Carlyle, for example, alludes
to it only in a casual half-disdainful way, which would be almost
comical were the theme less ghastly. 'At Reims,' he observes, 'about
eight persons were killed--and two were afterwards hanged for doing it.'
The contest of this curious passage plainly shows that he imagined these
'eight persons' (more or less) to have been "killed" by the people of
Reims, roused into a patriotic frenzy by the circular which Marat, Panis
and Sergent sent out to the provinces calling upon all Frenchmen to
imitate the 'people of Paris,' and massacre all the enemies of the
Revolution at home before marching against the foreign invaders. That
the 'people' of Reims thus aroused should only have killed 'about eight
persons' really seemed to him, one would say, hardly worthy of a truly
'Titanic' and 'transcendental' epoch. There is something essentially
bucolic in the impression which mobs and multitudes always seem to make
upon Mr. Carlyle's imagination. Of what really happened at Reims in
September 1792 he plainly had no accurate notion. He obviously cites
from some second-hand contemporary accounts of the transactions there
this statement, that 'about eight persons were killed,' because, as it
happens, we have a full precise and official Report of the killing of
all these persons, with their names and details of the massacre, drawn
up on September 8, 1792, by the municipal authorities of Reims and
signed by all the members of the Council General. Had Mr. Carlyle seen
this Report, it would have shown him that Marat, Panis and Sergent knew
what they were abo