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Updated: May 13, 2025
``The decisions for which we are so greatly reproached, wrote Billaud-Varenne, ``were more often than otherwise not intended or desired by us two days or even one day beforehand: the crisis alone evoked them. Not that we must consider the events of the Revolution as dominated by an imperious fatality.
In ordinary times men endowed with these homicidal tendencies refrain, generally from fear of the policeman and the scaffold. When they are able to give them free vent nothing can stop them. Such was the case with Billaud-Varenne and many others.
In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these massacres numbered about two thousand. The monarchy was abolished, and France was declared a republic. Just, Billaud-Varenne, Barere, were supported by the clubs and the city council, and by the savage populace of the sections, the sans culottes.
We see him as president of the Jacobin Club, president of the Convention, and member of the Committee of Public Safety; he drags the Girondists to the scaffold: he drags the queen thither, and his former patron, Danton, said of him, `Billaud has a dagger under his tongue. He approves of the cannonades at Lyons, the drownings at Nantes, the massacres at Arras; he organises the pitiless commission of Orange; he is concerned in the laws of Prairial; he eggs on Fouquier-Tinville; on all decrees of death is his name, often the first; he signs before his colleagues; he is without pity, without emotion, without enthusiasm; when others are frightened, hesitate, and draw back, he goes his way, speaking in turgid sentences, `shaking his lion's mane' for to make his cold and impassive face more in harmony with the exuberance that surrounds him he now decks himself in a yellow wig which would make one laugh were it on any but the sinister head of Billaud-Varenne.
The mayor of Paris, Petion, received the band of assassins with respect, and gave them drink. A few Girondists protested somewhat, but the Jacobins were silent. The terrorised Assembly affected at first to ignore the massacres, which were encouraged by several of its more influential deputies, notably Couthon and Billaud-Varenne.
His statue would recall the passionate cries of admiration and enthusiasm with which the Convention acclaimed the most threatening measures of the dictator, on the very eve of the day when it was about to cast him down. Fouquier-Tinville, Marat, Billaud-Varenne, &c. I shall devote a paragraph to certain revolutionists who were famous for the development of their most sanguinary instincts.
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