Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/163

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PRISONERS.
143

August, Simon complained of the multitude of Englishmen in Paris. They insulted the French, he said, by their anti-revolutionary redingotes, paraded their luxury at the very moment when spying on and betraying their hosts, and ridiculed Frenchmen who did not adopt their manners or dress. Every day, too, they were at the Bourse, "bearing" the market. On the 7th September a deputation pressed for the extension to the English of the confiscation already applied to Spaniards. Gaston, in supporting this, denounced the English as perfidious monsters who were employing the most atrocious means to destroy French liberty. "As to the objection that the English might retaliate by repudiating debts to Frenchmen, there was not a single honest Frenchman in London, all were traitors, and the worse the English served them the better." The Convention annulled debts to Englishmen, but the finance committee overruled this, whereupon a second deputation urged the prohibition of all British goods. "The Romans," exclaimed Germain, "were not a commercial people, yet they conquered Carthage; and London is our Carthage." The Convention, moreover, subsidised David and other artists to caricature George III.

The delivery of Toulon to the English exasperated the Convention, especially as it was led to believe that they had hung Deputy Beauvais. On the 18th October 1793 it decreed that all English,