A hundred of these wretches who have libeled liberty by perpetrating crimes in her name must be effectually prevented from renewing their atrocities.”  He then conversed with the Ministers, the Councillors of State, etc., on the event of the preceding day; and as all knew the First Consul’s opinion of the authors of the crime each was eager to confirm it.  The Council was several times assembled when the Senate was consulted, and the adroit Fouche, whose conscience yielded to the delicacy of his situation, addressed to the First Consul a report worthy of a Mazarin.  At the same time the journals were filled with recollections of the Revolution, raked up for the purpose of connecting with past crimes the individuals on whom it was now wished to cast odium.  It was decreed that a hundred persons should be banished; and the senate established its character for complaisance by passing a ’Senatus-consulte’ conformable to the wishes of the First Consul.

A list was drawn up of the persons styled Jacobins, who were condemned to transportation.  I was fortunate enough to obtain the erasure of the names of several whose opinions had perhaps been violent, but whose education and private character presented claims to recommendation.  Some of my readers may probably recollect them without my naming them, and I shall only mention M. Tissot, for the purpose of recording, not the service I rendered him, but an instance of grateful acknowledgment.

When in 1815 Napoleon was on the point of entering Paris M. Tissot came to the prefecture of police, where I then was, and offered me his house as a safe asylum; assuring me I should there run no risk of being discovered.  Though I did not accept the offer yet I gladly seize on this opportunity of making it known.  It is gratifying to find that difference of political opinion does not always exclude sentiments of generosity and honour!  I shall never forget the way in which the author of the essays on Virgil uttered the words ‘Domus mea’.

But to return to the fatal list.  Even while I write this I shudder to think of the way in which men utterly innocent were accused of a revolting crime without even the shadow of a proof.  The name of an individual, his opinions, perhaps only assumed, were sufficient grounds for his banishment.  A decree of the Consuls, dated 4th of January 1801, confirmed by a ‘Senates-consulte’ on the next day, banished from the territory of the Republic, and placed under special inspectors, 130 individuals, nine of whom were merely designated in the report as Septembrizers.

The exiles, who in the reports and in the public acts were so unjustly accused of being the authors of the infernal machine, were received at Nantes, with so much indignation that the military were compelled to interfere to save them from being massacred.