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French Revolution. September Massacres, mass killing of prisoners that took place in Paris from September 2 to September 6 in 1792—a major event of what is sometimes called the “First Terror” of the French Revolution. The massacres were an expression of the collective mentality in Paris in the days after the overthrow of the monarchy ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Threats Against A Kingless France
- Prisoners of Paris
- Tensions Rise
- The Massacres
- Death of Princess de Lamballe
- Significance
On the morning of 13 August 1792, the sun rose over a new, kingless France. Time and again, King Louis XVI of France had chafed against the new limitations imposed on him by the constitution and had shown signs of treacherous, counter-revolutionary intentions. A final attempt by the sans-culottes, or revolutionary lower classes, of Paris to reconci...
Paris' prisons began to fill shortly after the Storming of the Tuileries, as the new Insurrectionary Commune began to mete out justice to the nation's enemies. The arrests began with members of the Swiss Guard who had somehow managed to survive the frenzied slaughter of their comrades on 10 August. Then, the refractory priests who had failed to swe...
On 11 August, the new commander of the National Guard, Santerre, received a note from the Paris police warning that "a plan is being formed to invade the prisons of Paris in order to remove all the prisoners and to exact summary justice on them" (Davidson, 112). Santerre did not act. Later, the provocative journalist Jean-PaulMarat urged all good c...
The violence began that afternoon. A convoy of 24 prisoners, most of them priests still dressed in their clerical robes, was being escorted to the prison of Abbaye in six hackney cabs. As it went, the convoy was harassed by an ever-growing crowd of hostile sans-culottes, who clamored for justice to be done. Evidently, the citizens soon decided they...
A final anecdote that deserves mention is the fate of the massacres' most famous victim, the Princess de Lamballe. Lamballe, who was imprisoned after the fall of the Tuileries, had been close friends with Queen Marie Antoinette. Their friendship had given rise to rumors of a romantic affair between the two of them, rumors made popular in the pornog...
By the time the massacres wound down on 7 September, between 1,100 and 1,400 people had been killed, approximately half of Paris' total prison population. News of the incident shocked and horrified the rest of Europe, turning many against the Revolution who may have been ambivalent, or even supportive, before. The massacres also set off new waves o...
The September Massacres were a series of murderous riots and rampages that broke out in Paris on September 2nd 1792 and continued for several days. 2. The targets of these riots were the city’s prisons. These prisons housed, among others, suspected counter-revolutionaries, royalist soldiers, members of the Swiss Guard, clergymen and former ...
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Deaths. 1,100–1,600. The September Massacres were a series of killings and summary executions of prisoners in Paris that occurred in 1792, from Sunday, 2 September until Thursday, 6 September, during the French Revolution. Between 1,176 and 1,614 people [1] were killed by sans-culottes, fédérés, and guardsmen, with the support of gendarmes ...
- 2–6 September 1792
- Massacres de Septembre
- Paris
- Massacres
On September 3 and 4, inflamed by radical propaganda, ongoing food shortages, and fear of the invasion, crowds broke into the prisons where they attacked the prisoners, including refractory clergy, who were feared to be counterrevolutionaries who would aid the invading Prussians. The writer Nicolas–Edme Restif de la Bretonne here describes ...
The September Massacres refers to a series of mass killings that took place in the prisons of Paris between 2 and 7 September 1792, during the French Revolution (1789-99). Sometimes known as the first Terror, the massacres saw between 1,100 and 1,400 prisoners murdered by gangs of sans-culottes, driven by a fear that the prisoners would rebel ...
The September Massacres of 1792 were a series of brutal killings which murdered approximately half the prison population of Paris. The slaughter lasted from 2 September 1792 to 6 September 1792 and had a significant impact on the French Revolution. Historians debate whether or not the killings were spontaneous, although they are generally ...
