en shot." ... "A volley
of musketry," says he, in another letter, and after that, volley after
volley, until "the traitors are all gone." Then, for three months after
this, the guillotine dispatches eighteen hundred persons; eleven young
women have to mount the scaffold together, in honor of a republican
festival; an old woman of ninety-four is borne to it in an armchair. The
population, initially of twenty-eight thousand people, is reduced to six
or seven thousand only.

All this is not enough; the two cities that dared maintain a siege must
disappear from the French soil. The Convention decrees that "the city
of Lyons shall be destroyed: every house occupied by a rich man shall be
demolished; only the dwellings of the poor shall remain, with edifices
specially devoted to industry, and monuments consecrated to humanity and
public education."[1199] The same at Toulon: "the houses within the town
shall be demolished; only the buildings that are essential for army and
navy purposes, for stores and munitions, shall be preserved."[11100]
Consequently, a requisition is made in Var and the neighboring
departments for twelve thousand masons to level Toulon to the
ground.--At Lyons, fourteen thousand laborers pull down the Chateau
Pierre-Encize; also the superb houses on Place Bellecour, those of the
Quai St.-Clair, those of the Rues de Flandre and de Bourgneuf, and many
others; the cost of all this amounts to four hundred thousand livres
per decade; in six months the Republic expends fifteen millions in
destroying property valued at three or four hundred millions, all
belonging to the Republic.[11101] Since the Mongols of the fifth
and thirteenth centuries, no such vast and irrational waste had been
seen--such frenzy against the most profitable fruits of industry and
human civilization.--Again, one can understand how the Mongols, who
were nomads, desired to convert the soil into one vast steppe. But, to
demolish a town whose arsenal and harbor is maintained by it, to destroy
the leaders of manufacturing interests and their dwellings in a city
where its workmen and factories are preserved, to keep up a fountain and
stop the stream which flows from it, or the stream without the fountain,
is so absurd that the idea could only enter the head of a Jacobin. His
imagination has run so wild and his prevision become so limited that
he is no longer aware of contradictions; the ferocious stupidity of the
barbarian and the fixed idea of t