Page:History of the Guillotine.djvu/72

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FIRST POLITICAL VICTIMS.
57

them, and to notice incidentally the loose and slovenly way in which the events of the Revolution are generally recorded. We have before us that very curious publication, Liste Genérale des Condamnés par le Tribunal Révolutionnaire—an almost official list of all the sufferers by the Paris Tribunal. This list opens with the three names we have quoted.

  1. "Louis David Collenot, (dit) D'Angremont, accused of enlisting [embauchage], executed 26th August, 1792.
  2. "La Porte, superintendent of the civil list, convicted of complicity in counter-revolutionary conspiracies, executed 28th August.
  3. "Durosoi, editor of the Gazette de Paris, and of another journal called Le Royalisme, convicted of conspiracy, executed 29th August."

Dangremont was a clerk in a public office, of no weight or character, and the embauchage, on pretence of which he was executed, was the alleged employment of persons who were to distribute Royalist publications, and take the Royalist side in groups and coffee-houses, and so forth. M. La Porte was the Minister of the Civil List; and the chief allegation against him was that he had paid, out of the privy purse, for the printing and distribution of certain Royalist placards and pamphlets—a practice which Roland—whom the Assembly had forced upon the King as Minister of the Interior—had been employing against his master at the same time, and to an infinitely greater extent; but the real motive of M. La Porte's condemnation was to appease and gratify the