September Massacres

The September Massacres were a wave of killings in Paris (2–7 September 1792) and other cities in late summer 1792, during the French Revolution. There was a fear that foreign and royalist armies would attack Paris and that the inmates of the city's prisons would be freed and join them. Radicals called for preemptive action, especially journalist Jean-Paul Marat, who called on draftees to kill the prisoners before they could be freed. The action was undertaken by mobs of National Guardsmen and some fédérés; it was tolerated by the city government, the Paris Commune, which called on other cities to follow suit. By 6 September, half the prison population of Paris had been summarily executed: some 1200 to 1400 prisoners. Of these, 233 were Catholic priests who refused to submit to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. However, the great majority of those killed were common criminals. The massacres were repeated in many other French cities.

No one was prosecuted for the killings, but the political repercussions first injured the Girondists (who seemed too moderate) and later the Jacobins (who seemed too bloodthirsty).

The political situation in Paris on the eve of the September Massacres was highly excited and aroused by dreadful rumors of traitors and foreign invaders.

On the evening of 9 August 1792, a Jacobin insurrection overthrew the leadership of the Paris Commune headed by Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve and proclaimed a new revolutionary Commune headed by transitional authorities.

The next day the insurrectionists stormed the Tuileries Palace. King Louis XVI fled with the royal family, and his authority as King was suspended by the Legislative Assembly; a de facto executive was named, but the actual power of decision-making rested with the new revolutionary Commune, whose strength resided in the mobilized sans-culottes, the vast majority of Paris' fairly poor population. The 48 sections of Paris were fully equipped with munitions from the plundered arsenals in the days before the assault, substituting for the 60 National Guard battalions. Now, supported by a new armed force, the Commune and its sans-culottes took control of the city and dominated the Legislative Assembly and its decisions. For some weeks the Commune functioned as the actual government of France.

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