In his History of Prisons, Riouffe says that “Bailly exhausted the ferocity of the populace, of whom he had been the idol, and was basely abandoned by the people, though they had never ceased to esteem him.”

Nearly the same idea is found expressed in The History of the Revolution, and in several other works.

What is called the populace rarely read and did not write.  To attack it and calumniate it therefore was a convenient thing, since no refutation need to be feared.  I am far from supposing that the historians whose works I have quoted, ever gave way to such considerations; but I affirm, with entire certainty, that they have deceived themselves.  In the sanguinary drama that has been unrolled before your eyes, the atrocities had a quite different source from the sentiments common to the barbarians that were swarming in the dregs of society and always ready to soil it with every crime; in plainer words, it is not to the unfortunate people who have neither property, nor capital, living by the work of their hands, to the proletaires, that we are to impute the deplorable incidents which marked Bailly’s last moments.  To put forward an opinion so remote from received opinions, is imposing on one’s self the duty of proving its truth.

After his condemnation, our colleague exclaimed, says La Fayette:  “I die for the sitting of the Jeu de Paume, and not for the fatal day at the Champ de Mars.”  I do not here intend to expound these mysterious words in the glimpses they give us by a half-light; but, whatever meaning we may attribute to them, it is evident that the sentiments and passions of the lower class have no share in them; it is a point beyond discussion.

On reentering the Conciergerie, the evening before his death, Bailly spoke of the efforts that must have been made to excite the passions of the auditors, who followed the various phases of his trial.  Factitious excitement is always the produce of corruption.  The working classes are without money;, they then cannot have been the corruptors or direct promoters of the distressing scenes of which Bailly complained.

The implacable enemies of the former President of the National Assembly had procured for pay some auxiliaries among the turnkeys of the Conciergerie.  M. Beugnot informs us that when the venerable magistrate was consigned to the gendarmes who were to conduct him to the Tribunal, “these wretches pushed him violently, sending him from one to the other like a drunken man, calling out:  Hold there, Bailly!  Catch, Bailly, there! and that they laughed and shouted at the grave demeanour the philosopher maintained amidst the insults of those cannibals.”

To confirm my statement that these violences (in comparison with which, in truth, those of the Champ de Mars lose their virulence,) were fomented by pay, I have more than the formal declaration of our colleague’s fellow prisoner.  For in fact I find that no other prisoner or convict underwent such treatment; not even the man called the Admiral, when he was taken to the Conciergerie for having attempted to assassinate Collot-d’Herbois.