guillotine just on the establishment of their identity, and their
property confiscated. Consequently, at Bordeaux, where not a gun had
been fired, the mayor Saige, and principal author of the submission,
is at once led to the scaffold without any form of trial,[86] while
eight hundred and eighty-one others succeed him amidst the solemn
silence of a dismayed population.[87] Two hundred prominent merchants
are arrested in one night; more than fifteen hundred persons are
imprisoned; all who are well off are ransomed, even those against who
no political charge could be made; nine millions of fines are levied
against "rich egoists." One of these,[88] accused of "indifference and
moderatism," pays twenty thousand francs "not to be harnessed 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.89 At
Marseilles, says Danton,[90] 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.[91] From the first day
the guillotine works as fast as possible; nevertheless, it does not
work fast enough for Representative Fréron 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