When, after the affair of August 10, Danton and his party became masters of the incipient republic, Paris lay between two perils whose relative magnitude no one could measure.  If Chalons fell, Vendee would rise, and the Republicans of the West would be massacred.  Five months later Vendee did rise, and at Machecoul the patriots were slaughtered amidst nameless atrocities, largely at the instigation of the priests.  In March, 1793, one hundred thousand peasants were under arms.

Clearly the West could not be denuded of troops, and yet, if Chalons were to be made good, every available man had to be hurried to Kellermann, and this gigantic effort fell to the lot of a body of young and inexperienced adventurers who formed what could hardly be dignified with the name of an organized administration.

For a long time Marat, with whom Danton had been obliged to coalesce, had been insisting that, if the enemy were to be resisted on the frontier, Paris must first be purged, for Paris swarmed with Royalists wild for revenge, and who were known to be arming.  Danton was not yet prepared for extermination.  He instituted domiciliary visits.  He made about three thousand arrests and seized a quantity of muskets, but he liberated most of those who were under suspicion.  The crisis only came with the news, on September 2, of the investment of Verdun, when no one longer could doubt that the net was closing about Paris.  Verdun was but three or four days’ march from Chalons.  When the Duke of Brunswick crossed the Marne and Brittany revolted, the government would have to flee, as Roland proposed, and then the Royalists would burst the gates of the prisons and there would be another Saint Bartholomew.

Toward four o’clock in the afternoon of September 2, 1792, the prison of the Abbaye was forced and the massacres began.  They lasted until September 6, and through a circular sent out by Marat they were extended to Lyons, to Reims, and to other cities.  About 1600 prisoners were murdered in Paris alone.  Hardly any one has ever defended those slaughters.  Even Marat called them “disastrous,” and yet no one interfered.  Neither Danton, nor Roland, nor the Assembly, nor the National Guard, nor the City of Paris, although the two or three hundred ruffians who did the work could have been dispersed by a single company of resolute men, had society so willed it.  When Robespierre’s time came he fell almost automatically.  Though the head of the despotic “Committee of Public Safety,” and nominally the most powerful man in France, he was sent to execution like the vilest and most contemptible of criminals by adversaries who would not command a regiment.  The inference is that the September massacres, which have ever since been stigmatized as the deepest stain upon the Revolution, were, veritably, due to the Royalists, who made with the Republicans an issue of self-preservation.  For this was no common war.  In Royalist eyes it was a servile revolt, and was to be treated as servile revolts during the Middle Ages had always been treated.  Again and again, with all solemnity, the Royalists had declared that were they to return as conquerors no stone of Paris should be left standing on another, and that the inhabitants should expire in the ashes of their homes on the rack and the wheel.