On the bloody day of July, 1791, of all the inhabitants of Paris,
perhaps Bailly was the man who knew with least detail or correctness the
events of the morning and of the evening.

Bailly, with his deep horror for falsehood, would have thought that he
was most cruelly insulting the magistrates, if he had not attributed to
them similar sentiments to his own. His uprightness prevented his being
sufficiently on the watch against the machinations of parties. It was
evidently by false reports that he was induced to unfurl the red flag on
the 17th of July: "It was from the reports that followed each other," he
said to the Revolutionary Tribunal, on being questioned by the
President, "and became more and more alarming every hour, that the
council adopted the measure of marching with the armed force to the
Champ de Mars."

In all his answers Bailly insisted on the repeated orders he had
received from the President of the National Assembly; on the reproaches
addressed to him for not sufficiently watching the agents of foreign
powers; it was against these pretended agents and their creatures, that
the Mayor of Paris thought he was marching when he put himself at the
head of a column of National Guards.

Bailly did not even know the cause of the meeting; he had not been
informed that the crowd wished to sign a petition; and that the
previous evening, according to the decree of the law, there had been a
declaration made to this effect before the competent authority. His
answers to the Revolutionary Tribunal leave not the least doubt on this
point!

Oh Eschevins, Eschevins! when your vain pretensions only were treated
of, the public could forgive you; but the 17th of July, you took
advantage of Bailly's confidence; you induced him to take sanguinary
measures of repression, after having fascinated him with false reports;
you committed a real crime. If it was the duty of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, of deplorable memory, to demand in 1793 from any one an
explanation of the massacres of the Champ de Mars, it was not Bailly
assuredly who ought to have been accused in the first place.

The political party whose blood flowed on the 17th of July, pretended to
have been the victim of a plot concocted by its adversaries. When
interrogated by the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Bailly
answered: "I had no knowledge of it, but experience has since given me
reason to think that such a plot did exist at that time."

Nothing more