Gazette Of The United States, & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser

From the NEW-YORK GAZETTE. & EXTRACTS, translated for this Gazette from the History of Crimes, committed during the French Revolution, just published at Paris, in six volumes octavo. Volume 1st, page 1.

" Others (of the proconsuls sent into the different departments) put in requisition the best wines, and expressly forbid all citizens to buy any thing in the markets until they had supplied their tables with the greatest rarities, and those of the staff-officers of the revolutionary army which accompanied them."

" We have seen those rascals abuse their authority, I will not say to seduce, for it is necessary to please in order to corrupt, but to violate their young and innocent prisoners, to wrest from them those precious favors which love reserves only for love. Some of those prisoners, rich and interesting, but subdued by terror, have been seen to give their trembling hands to their executioners.
Alas ! some of those marriages formed under such fatal auspices, have been sometimes useful to humanity. They stopped the blood which flowed on certain occasions."

" It would not have been prudent to refuse their alliance, as many of them guillotined the fathers for having refused their daughters in marriage, whether to themselves, or their sons."

& One of them distinguished himself by a deed still more atrocious, if possible. He arrested a number of farmers. The pretext was, they had not paid their civil gift.— Their unhappy wives, at the feet of the proconsul, solicited the liberty of their husbands. " Let them pay the sum they owe and they shall be free." " But what shall we do ? We are poor and cannot." " Borrow—do as you please ; but no liberty unless you bring what I demand of you.— They went out : in fine, at the end of some days, after having exhausted every possible resource, they brought the sum. Go—says he to them, in three days you will see your husbands. Alas! what is the first object on going home which strikes their view ? It was' their husbands going to the scaffold, by order of the monster ; to whose house they went in tears. I am very sorry for it, says he; very serious denunciations have been produced to me against them ; you yourselves are very happy not to have shared the same fate. The stroke was too strong ; the number was too great—he was denounced to the committee of public safety. The proconsul was summoned to give an account of his conduct. One of his friends expressed some apprehensions of the result. " This affair," answered he, " will be soon arranged ; I will carry some money to the committee." He was right; one of the members declared that the denunciation was ill-founded, and the tyrannical monster was continued in mission.

" Others depopulated whole communes, loaded multitudes of carts with human victims, from the great grandfather to the child in the cradle, and sent them to the slaughter house, established by the revolutionary tribunal of Paris." " Brave republican," wrote they to Fouquier Tinville— Brave republican ! (the villains !)" Brave republican, I send you game for the guillotine, which soon I hope will be taken out of the bags, and they sent back for more. Take courage, support your energy ; we will not let you want employment."

" One wrote to the committee of public safety, to complain to it that the law relative to the military tribunals, was not adapted to empty the prisons promptly, and that the guillotine lost its prey."

" Another wrote to his colleague:- The guillotine continues to operate with full force. I yesterday caused 28 to be expedited in the commune of. . . . ." " In three days it will begin its exploits here" This colleague answered him: I dined with Robespierre yesterday, when we received your letter, we laughed heartily; go on as you have begun—be not alarmed ; the guillotine ought to move more rapidly than ever."

" Another said, in a popular society:- " The society reproaches me with being too tender, too moderate; they shall, damn me, they shall see, if I am not soon at the summit." The same caused a mother and her daughter to be arrested in a promenade, caused them to be stripped, and run his hand down one of their throats, under a pretext of her reading counter-revolutionary works."

" Some sans-culottes complaining to a priest who was pro-consul, that they had no work and that they were in the greatest misery. This scoundrel of a senator said to them: " You are damnation fools; don't you know some rich persons? denounce them to me; I will have them guillotined, and give you their property." One of them answered : " Representative, I have a wife and five children, and am without bread; well, I would rather that myself and my family should die of hunger, than to give them bread at that price. The rich of my neighborhood have always supported my ancestors and myself, by paying us well for our labor ; I will not repay their goodness with the foulest, blackest act that can be committed."

"A carrier of the mail saying to one of those proconsuls, that the roads were very bad, that he had much trouble in getting horses, was answered : " Address yourself to the representatives near the armies, it is their business; mine is to cause heads to be cut off."

" The same wrote to an administrator of the district, " Take courage, take energy, do not leave at liberty a single man of wealth or talents." And he answered to a keeper of the prison, who asked permission of him to get the prisoners shaved : " I will have them shaved, says he, with the national razor." He put on his door the following inscription : " Those who enter here to solicit the enlargement of the prisoners, will only go out to be put in a state of accusation." His agents observed to him the difficulty he experienced in feeding the prisoners, from the amazing quantity of them: " Oh! damn them, give them a wooden bowl of verdigris, let them eat that or nothing."

" No, No, cries another, we must make them soup in a large copper kettle; we will throw therein a quantity of verdigris, it will be thought to have come from the kettle."

" Another agent wrote: " I am at present grand seigneur, I can offer to my friends every day, on leaving the table, a large dish of men's heads."

A commander of a detachment of the revolutionary army, who was under the orders of those proconsuls, transmitted the words following as the order of the day :— PILLAGE, RALLYING, HORROR."

REMARKS.

Truth begins to appear; already in the above work has she broken her chains and begun to tear off the veil from the crimes of the Jacobins, and to expose them to the view of the world in all their horrid deformity. · France is expressing the shame it feels in having given birth to such monsters and in suffering so long a time the scourge inflicted on her by them. Americans sympathized with France in her struggles against, the combination against her; the freedom of the press being totally destroyed, and, under the direction and control of the party dominant, we, on this side the Atlantic, were ignorant to what extent the horrors of the Jacobins extended. Little did we think. that REGULATED LIBERTY. that first idol of our hearts, that object dearer to us than life, and without which life itself is a burden, was daily bathed and almost drowned in the blood of her most virtuous and zealous worshippers by hypocrites abusing and acting in her name. -Now that we know, the truth, ought not such among us who have advocated every measure adopted by the different factions, who have governed France for eight years past, candidly to confess that they had not till now the most distant idea of the excesses to which things were carried, and of the danger to which CIVIL. LIBERTY was exposed-in creating an abhorrence to it among the French themselves? Ought not our " exclusive patriots" to join the French people in execrating the monsters, who have tyrannized over France and drenched her in the blood of her best citizens? Ought they not particularly to join the Legislative Body in condemning the conduct of the jacobinic Directory, with respect to their treatment of this country ? No, my fellow citizens, we have fiends among us, who, with patricidal look and satanic grin, have expressed satisfaction at all the losses we have sustained from an arbitrary, villainous order of the Executive of a foreign nation, which the people of that country have themselves pointedly called " a piratical decree." Let no such men be trusted either in public or private life—they are not radically sound. It is remarkable that not an American privateer-man in France, not a traitor who has been in public office and betrayed and attempted to betray the interests of his country, but what has been a disorganizer, an enemy to our national government-to the virtuous Federalists who have administered it, and active promoters and insolent approvers of French depredations on our property. On the contrary, I defy our Jacobins to produce a single friend to our federal constitution and its hitherto virtuous administration, who has been concerned directly or indirectly in privateering under French colours against their countrymen, or who has abused the sacred trust reposed in them as public officers. No, my fellow countrymen, you will find privateers-men and traitors only among the " EXCLUSIVE PATRIOTS," the revilers of Washington, Adams, and some other real friends to their country and civil liberty : It is high time to detach yourselves from them, and rally round the friends of Virtue, Order, and Federalism.