The parylitic Couthon, with Collot D'Herbois, and other deputies were sent to Lyons by the committee of public safety, to execute the vengeance which the Jacobins demanded; while Dubois Crance was recalled, for having put, it was thought, less energy to his proceedings than the prosecution of the siege required. Collot D'Herbois had a personal motive of a singular nature for delighting in the task intrusted to him and his colleagues. In his capacity of a play-actor, he had been hissed from the stage at Lyons, and the door to revenge was now open. The instructions of this committee enjoined them to take the most satisfactory revenge for the death of Chalier and the insurrection of Lyons, not merely on the citizens, but on the town itself. The principal streets and buildings were to be levelled with the ground, and a monument erected where they stood, was to record the cause:--"_Lyons rebelled against the Republic--Lyons is no more._" Such fragments of the town as might be permitted to remain, were to bear the name of Ville Affranchie. It will scarce be believed that a doom like that which might have passed the lips of some eastern despot, in all the frantic madness of arbitrary power and utter ignorance, could have been seriously pronounced, and as seriously enforced, in one of the most civilized nations in Europe; and that to the present enlightened age, men who pretended to wisdom and philosophy, should have considered the labours of the architect as a proper subject of punishment. So it was, however; and to give the demolition more effect, the impotent Couthon was carried from house to house, devoting each to ruin, by striking the door with a silver hammer, and pronouncing these words--"House of a rebel. I condemn thee in the name of the law." Workmen followed in great multitudes, who executed the sentence by pulling the house down to the foundations. This wanton demolition continued for six months, and is said to have been carried on at an expense equal to that which the superb military hospital, the Hotel des Invalides, cost its founder, Louis XIV. But republican vengeance did not waste itself exclusively upon senseless lime and stone--it sought out sentient victims.
The deserved death of Chalier had been atoned by an apotheosis executed after Lyons had surrendered; but Collot D'Herbois declared that every drop of that patriotic blood fell as if scalding his own heart, and that the murder demanded atonement. All ordinary process, and every usual mode of execution, was thought too tardy to avenge the death of a Jacobin proconsul. The judges of the revolutionary commission were worn out with fatigue--the arm of the executioner was weary--the very steel of the guillotine was blunted. Collot D'Herbois devised a more summary mode of slaughter. A number of from two to three hundred victims at once were dragged from prison to the place de Baotteaux, one of the largest squares in Lyons, and there subjected to a fire of grape-shot. Efficacious as this mode of execution may seem, it was neither speedy nor merciful. The sufferers fell to the ground like singed flies, mutilated but not slain, and imploring their executioners to despatch them speedily. This was done with sabres and bayonets, and with such haste and zeal, that some of the jailers and assistants were slain along with those whom they had assisted in dragging to death; and the mistake was not discerned, until, upon counting the dead bodies, the military murderers found them to amount to more than the destined tale. The bodies of the dead were thrown into the Rhone, to carry news of the republican vengeance, as Collot D'Herbois expressed himself, to Toulon, then also in a state of revolt. But the sullen stream rejected the office imposed on it, and headed back the dead in heaps upon the banks; and the committee of Representatives was compelled at length to allow the relics of their cruelty to be interred, to prevent the risk of contagion.