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Updated: May 18, 2025
His first care was to dispatch Murat, then a major of Chasseurs, to Sablons, five miles off, where fifty great guns were posted. The Sectionaries sent a stronger detachment for these cannon immediately afterwards; and Murat, who passed them in the dark, would have gone in vain had he received his orders but a few minutes later.
This delay gave Barras a chance to insinuate that his ardent republican friend, who all the previous week had been eagerly soliciting employment, was untrustworthy in the crisis, and had been negotiating with the sectionaries. Buonaparte reported himself as having come from the section of Lepelletier, but as having been reconnoitering the enemy.
After an hour's fighting, the sectionaries were driven from Saint Roch and Rue Saint Honore, by the cannon of the convention and the battalion of patriots. The column of the Pont Royal received three discharges of artillery in front and on the side, from the bridge and the quays, which put it entirely to flight.
At seven o'clock the conventional troops, victorious on all sides, took the offensive; by nine o'clock they had dislodged the sectionaries from the Theatre de la Republique and the posts they still occupied in the neighbourhood of the Palais Royal. The next day, the 14th, the troops of the convention disarmed the Lepelletier section, and compelled the others to return to order.
Menou, general of the interior, and Laporte the representative, were entrusted with this mission. The convent of the Filles Saint Thomas was the headquarters of the sectionaries, before which they had seven or eight hundred men in battle array. These were surrounded by superior forces, from the Boulevards on each side, and the Rue Vivienne opposite.
Some of these young men and some of the sectionaries were royalists; others followed the impulse of the moment, which was anti- revolutionary. The latter acted without object or ambition, declaring in favour of the strongest party, especially when the triumph of that party promised to restore order, the want of which was generally felt.
The battalions of the Butte des Moulins, Lepelletier, des Piques, de la Fontaine-Grenelle, who were the nearest, soon occupied the Carrousel and its principal avenues. The aspect of affairs then underwent a change; Legendre, Kervelegan, and Auguis besieged the insurgents, in their turn, at the head of the sectionaries. At first they experienced some resistance.
Then came an innumerable, strange, agitated multitude, the sectionaries of the Friends of the People, the Law School, the Medical School, refugees of all nationalities, and Spanish, Italian, German, and Polish flags, tricolored horizontal banners, every possible sort of banner, children waving green boughs, stone-cutters and carpenters who were on strike at the moment, printers who were recognizable by their paper caps, marching two by two, three by three, uttering cries, nearly all of them brandishing sticks, some brandishing sabres, without order and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous rout, again a column.
From two to three o'clock, general Carteaux, who occupied the Pont Neuf with four hundred men and two four-pounders, was surrounded by several columns of sectionaries, who obliged him to retire on the Louvre. This advantage emboldened the insurgents, who were strong on all points. General Danican summoned the convention to withdraw its troops, and disarm the terrorists.
This party, impatient and unskilful, unable to employ the whole of the sectionaries, as in Vendemiaire, or the mass of the councils, as on the 18th Fructidor, made use of three men without either name or influence: the abbe Brothier, the ex-counsellor of parliament, Lavilheurnois, and a sort of adventurer, named Dunan.
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