Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/220

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200
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

England. He knew Josephine, returning with her in the same vessel from Martinique in 1791. As a "municipal," he proposed and carried a resolution, that the 6th January, the anniversary of Louis XVI.'s death, should be styled the fête des sans-culottes. He did not, however, side with Robespierre, and was imprisoned at St. Lazare during the latter part of the Terror, nor did he again figure in politics. Under the Empire he studied jurisprudence and grammar, and translated Cobbett's English Grammar. He died in 1822 in London, whither he is said to have gone to claim an inheritance.

Joseph Kavanagh, a shoemaker, though a native of Lille, was evidently of Irish extraction. He seems to have been a coward when there was danger, an assassin when there was none. On the 13th July 1789, according to a detective named Blutel, who was guillotined at Arras in 1794, Kavanagh headed a band of roughs who ransacked the Tuileries, seizing twenty-five muskets and a chest of money. Next day he intercepted five carts bearing arms from Metz for the Vincennes garrison. He erected a barricade, on a rumour that the carts would be demanded. Going to the Hotel de Ville, he found the mob, in the belief of a massacre by the soldiers in the Faubourg St. Antoine, talking of going to the Invalides for arms. "Let us march thither," shouted Kavanagh, but after going a short distance he slackened his pace