The Musée Historique de Lyon had a particularly informative collection from the Revolutionary period; this may be because the Revolution was particularly ugly in Lyon.
In 1793 as the chaos of the revolutionary period spiraled into violence--Louis XVI was guillotined in January , Marie Antoinette in October--the citizens of Lyon chose to side with the Girondins, a moderate political faction who hesitated to kill the king and sought to contain the revolutionary chaos. They held the majority in the National Convention until May and June of 1793, when, blamed for government's failure to quickly realize the promises of revolution, popular uprisings led the Paris National Guard to purge the Girondins from the National Convention. Many were guillotined.
Because Lyon supported the purged Girondins, it was declared to be in a state of revolutionary war against the National Convention, who sent an army to punish it. Besieged for over two months; Lyon surrendered in October, 1793. The Convention ordered that Lyon's name be changed to "Liberated City," proclaiming that "Lyons made war on Liberty; Lyons no longer exists."
In November, two men arrived in Lyon to execute the reprisals of the Convention, the sinister Jean Fouché, "the Executioner of Lyon", and Jean-Marie Collot d' Herbois. They formed the "Temporary Commission for Republican Supervision" and brought in two thousand soldiers from the Parisian Revolutionary Army to help them terrorize the Lyonnais.
I'll let wikipedia describe the first horror these two inflicted on the city. "On 4 December, 60 men, chained together, were blasted with grapeshot on the plain de Brotteaux outside the city, and 211 more the following day. Grotesquely ineffective, these mitraillades resulted in heaps of mutilated, screaming, half-dead victims, who were finished off with sabres and musket fire by soldiers physically sickened at the task."
The citizens of Lyon rose up to protest the executions, leading to a massacre before the hôtel de ville on Dec 14. Soon after, Fouché and Collot d'Herbois began to use the more normal means of execution--the guillotine (set up in Place Bellecour) and firing squads on the plain of Brotteaux outside the city. Wikipedia again: "Fouché, claiming that "Terror, salutary terror, is now the order of the day here... We are causing much impure blood to flow, but it is our duty to do so, it is for humanity's sake," called for the execution of 1,905 citizens....From late 1793 until spring 1794, every day "batch after batch of bankers, scholars, aristocrats, priests, nuns, and wealthy merchants and their wives, mistresses, and children" were taken from the city jails to the plain of Brotteaux field, tied to stakes, and dispatched by firing squads or mobs." Collot d'Herbois began to dismantle the city itself.
Returning to Paris in April 1794, Fouché justified his actions with a classic authoritarian statement: "The blood of criminals fertilises the soil of liberty and establishes power on sure foundations". He would lead the overthrow of Robespierre in July 1794, and eventually would become Napoleon's minister of police and one of the most powerful men in France.
Collot d'Herbois, guilty of excessive slaughter and destruction, would be accused of complicity with Robespierre, condemned and transported to French Guiana, where he died of yellow fever in 1796.
A nightmarish time.
Image 1 & 2: Two representations of the Massacre before the Hôtel de Ville on Dec 14, 1793, in the Musée Historique de Lyon
Image 3: A display of a phrygian cap and revolutionary cockades. I've never seen these actual emblems of the revolution before.
Image 4: A polychromed wood bust depicting "La Republique" in her red phrygian cap.
Sobering thought. We'd probably have been among the moderates and vulnerable.
Posted by: Tom | January 14, 2020 at 07:57 AM