These weapons did not resemble the arms of regular troops, which excite at once terror and admiration; they were strange and uncouth arms, caught up by the people in the first impulse of fury or defence.[24] Pikes, lances, spits, cutlasses, carpenters’ axes, masons’ hammers, shoemakers’ knives, paviours’ levers, saws, wedges, mattocks, crow-bars, the commonest household utensils of the poor, and the rusty iron exposed for sale on the quays, were alike seized upon by the people; and these different weapons, rusted, black, hideous, each of which presented a different manner of inflicting a wound, seemed to increase the horror of death by displaying it in a thousand terrible and unwonted forms.  The mixture of all sexes, ages, and conditions; the confusion of costumes and rags beside uniforms, old men beside young; even children, some carried in their mothers’ arms, others holding their father’s hand or his garments; common prostitutes, their silken dresses soiled and torn, indecency on their brow, and insult on their lips, hundreds of women of the lowest description, and from the dregs of the people, recruited to swell the cortege, and excite commiseration from the garrets of the faubourgs, clothed in tattered finery, pale, emaciated, their eyes hollow, and their cheeks sunken from misery, the personifications of want, in fact the people, in all the disorder, the confusion, the exposure of a city suddenly summoned from its houses, its workshops, its garrets, its scenes and haunts of debauch and infamy; such was the aspect of intimidation which the conspirators wished to give to this scene.

Here and there flags waved above the heads of the multitude.  On one was written Sanction or death; on another, The recall of the patriot ministers; on the third, Tremble tyrant, thine hour is come.  A man, his arms bared to the shoulders, bore a gibbet, from which hung the effigy of a crowned female, with the inscription, Beware the lantern.  Farther on a group of hags raised a guillotine, with a card bearing the words, National Justice on tyrants; death for Veto and his wife.  Amidst all this apparent disorder, a secret system of order was visible.  Men in rags, yet whose white hands and shirts of the finest linen pointed them out as of superior rank, wore hats, on which signs of recognition were drawn with white chalk; the crowd regulated their march by them, and followed wherever they went.

The principal body thus marched by the Rue Saint Antoine, and the dark and central avenues of Paris, to the Rue Saint Honore, the population of these quartiers swelling its numbers at each instant.  The more this living torrent increased the more furious it became.  Now a band of butchers joined it, each bearing a pike, on which was stuck the bleeding heart of a calf, with the words, Coeur d’aristocrate.  Next came a band of Chiffoniers dressed in rags, and displaying a lance, from which floated a tattered garment, with the inscription, Tremble tyrants, here are the sans culottes.  The insult which the aristocracy had cast at poverty, now, when adopted by the people, became the weapon of the nation against the rich.