When Lyon surrendered on the 9th of October 1793, the fall of the city brought no end to the war; it merely altered its theatre and its instruments. Champagnac recounts that following the siege, the National Convention decreed the arrest and summary military trial of all who had borne arms, the total disarmament of the populace, and the utter demolition of the municipality, which was stripped of its very name to become Commune-Affranchie. The decree nevertheless exempted the dwellings of the poor, industrial manufactories, hospitals, and public edifices. In the chronicler’s narrative, this reservation carved out amidst an order of wholesale annihilation serves to measure the chasm between the cold language of the law and the unbridled violence that was to follow.
Scarcely had he arrived when Collot d’Herbois reputedly struck the first hammer blow upon the inaugural house condemned to fall. Champagnac relates that upon this signal, eight hundred labourers set about razing the city’s finest streets, at an ultimate cost of eleven and a half million livres. Yet the leveling of masonry was but one half of the enterprise. A five-member revolutionary commission was constituted to sit in judgment over living souls, and the chronicler portrays these arbiters arrayed in martial uniform, sporting long moustaches, red plumes, sabres at their flanks, and small axes affixed to their breasts. Two daily sessions convened at the Hôtel-de-Ville transformed the administration of justice into a precipitate conveyor of capital decrees.
The procedure recorded by Champagnac was reduced to a few perfunctory inquiries: the prisoner’s name, calling, conduct throughout the siege, followed by the denunciation. To the accused’s reply there attached no adversarial hearing or exposition of charges; the judge’s physical sign alone sealed the verdict. Champagnac writes that the presiding judge touched his breast axe to consign a prisoner to the guillotine, the second raised a hand to his brow to dispatch him before a firing squad, while the third laid his hand flat upon the table to grant exemption from death. The perilous categories enumerated in the chronicle cast an exceedingly wide net: to have borne arms during the siege, to have shown Christian charity towards non-juring priests, to have opposed the clubists, to have gone abroad without the tricolour cockade, or merely to possess wealth.
According to this same testimony, seven prisoners were brought forward every ten minutes; no sooner had their names been inscribed than they yielded their places to seven more. The subterranean vaults of the Hôtel-de-Ville soon overflowed with detainees awaiting their turn. About them, the chronicle stations troops dispatched from Paris amidst the incessant rumble of demolition orders. It even records that consideration was given to detonating a subterranean mine to accelerate the destruction and swallow up the captive multitude crammed into the cellars—a scheme purportedly mooted by Collot before the Convention. The measure was ultimately abandoned; the condemned were marched out to face the artillery instead.
A first expedition, as Champagnac relates it, began with sixty-nine young men brought forth from the prison of Roanne. They were marched to the plain of Les Brotteaux, bound two by two, and stationed between parallel ditches manned by armed troops, with cannon laid point-blank in their direction. The chronicle records that the victims advanced singing patriotic hymns, and that the initial volley struck them down without extinguishing every life. Soldiers thereupon leaped across the trenches to dispatch those still breathing with sabre strokes. Two hours later, writes the author, life had not yet fled from every frame. This account refuses to reduce the execution to the fleeting thunder of a single salvo: it dwells upon the renewal of the blows, and the stubborn persistence of life within mangled flesh.
On the morrow, an identical ordeal was prepared for a cohort of two hundred and eight souls assembled within the gaol. Fifteen captives, the relation states, made good their escape during the night. To make good the missing tally, the agents seized municipal messengers off the street and swept up other detainees; several protested vigorously that they had been taken in the room of condemned men, but they too were brought before the commission, which did not deign to question them. The reckoning itself shifted: upon the Pont Morand, the executioners tallied two hundred and ten captives. Champagnac attributes to Collot the following rejoinder when consulted upon the discrepancy: “What matters it […] that there be two too many? If they pass today, they will not have to pass tomorrow.”
The captives were bound, hands behind their backs, to a stout hawser lashed to the willow trees of an avenue; opposite them, the infantry stood in readiness, flanked by two field pieces. At the command, musketry and canister shot tore through the assembled ranks. The severed cable allowed a few maimed survivors to break away, whom the cavalry ran down, according to Champagnac, before gunstocks and bayonets were brought to bear to complete the work. Here again, the chronicler records that several victims were found still breathing on the following day. These numbers, scenes, and utterances belong to his chronicle; they must be read as the retrospective testimony he assembled, and not as contemporary trial minutes transcribed verbatim in the text.
From this unbroken succession of capital decrees, the narrative isolates specific destinies that the fleeting gesture of a judge or the arrival of a dispatch could yet overturn. Laurenson, a municipal magistrate, stood upon the roster of the condemned despite his commune having formally petitioned for his release. Champagnac depicts him already strapped to the fatal plank when a gendarme arrived bearing his pardon. He was unbound; his life was spared, but his reason had fled. The chronicler attributes to him words that bespeak not deliverance, but a torment already etched indelibly upon his mind: he frantically inquired whether his severed head did not lie upon the earth, and fancied he saw his own blood pooling over his shoes.
Another victim singled out by Champagnac is Marie Adriam, a maiden of sixteen years. She had, by his account, donned male attire to serve in the artillery throughout the siege. When taxed with having borne arms against her country, she answered simply that she had defended it. The chronicle likewise records the fate of another girl of the same age, condemned for having refused the cockade. A magistrate caused one to be pinned to her bonnet, intimating that her life would thereby be spared; she calmly unpinned it and returned it to his hands. These particular episodes momentarily divert the gaze from the nameless throng to two deliberate choices: the one proudly asserting her deeds in defence of her city, the other refusing the token that would have purchased her life.
The same chapter sets acts of heroic fraternity and self-sacrifice against the grim machinery of condemnation. The elder of the Bruyset brothers, struck down by sickness, was unable to answer the summons of the commission; his brother stepped forward in his stead. When asked whether the signature affixed to the siege-money notes was his own, he is said to have replied that it was indeed the Bruyset signature, leaving the ambiguity to shield his brother. Champagnac further relates that Badger, whose brother lay wounded, was apprehended in his place and preserved absolute silence, when a single word would have sufficed to deliver him. The chronicler presents these gestures as deliberate acts of self-sacrifice embraced under the shadow of the scaffold, seeking no other motive for the men’s conduct.
Ministers of religion likewise appear across these pages as victims pursued solely on account of their holy orders. Champagnac cites the reply of an ecclesiastic who declared he welcomed death if the judges were bound to obey their law, since his own commanded him to forgive his enemies. He attributes to a parish priest of Amplepuis this retort to the presiding officer, who had scoffingly asked whether he believed in hell: “How could I doubt it, sir, when I look upon you?” In the scene involving a young woman who pleaded for death after losing her father and brothers, the commission, according to the same narrative, dismissed her petition and had her removed from the court. Such incidents did nothing to arrest the fatal apparatus; they merely revealed its fleeting moments of hesitation, or the moral fortitude of those whom it crushed.
Champagnac subsequently extends his survey to other provincial centres, noting in particular the reprisals at Toulon following the recapture of that port in December 1793. Yet the drama of Lyon retains its singular rhythm: the siege concludes, the decree ordains total destruction, a military commission converts silent manual gestures into capital verdicts, and whole convoys of victims are driven forth to Les Brotteaux. Between the predetermined quotas and the two surplus wretches, between the tardy reprieve delivered to Laurenson and the noble silence of Badger, the chronicle unveils a form of justice wherein individual fate hung not upon an evidentiary inquest, but upon an instantaneous whim. The city might well be stripped of its ancient name; but those languishing in its subterranean vaults had no power to efface the fatal sign traced against their lives.