And, to give the finishing touch to this remarkable instance of fraud and deception, we have to add that the Committee of the Convention, to whom the examination of Robespierre's papers was referred, suppressed in their report these venal passages, which were only revealed when, after the Restoration, the original paper was brought to light.
These considerations have been recalled to our minds by the strange obscurity in which, when we happened to look into the matter, we found the early history of the Guillotine involved. We had long searched through the Moniteur and the other leading journals of the time—through the reports of the proceedings of the legislative assemblies—through the Bulletin des Tribunaux—the Bulletin des Loix, and in short wherever we thought the information most likely to be found, as to when and where this formidable engine made its first appearance, by what law it was sanctioned, and who were the earliest of that innumerable series of victims that perished by it. Little or nothing was to be found. It is only of late years that any one seems to have ventured to produce any details on the subject. In 1830 a paper, rather surgical than historical, in the 'Archives Curieuses,'[1] and in 1835 the publication in the! 'Revue Retrospective' of some documents preserved in the Hotel de Ville, threw some scanty light on this subject. A recent pamphlet of M. Du
- ↑ Afterwards published in a separate pamphlet of 16 pages, under the title of Notice Historique et Physiologique sur le Supplice de la Guillotine, Par G. D. F. [i.e. Guyot de Fère.] Pp. 16. Paris, 1830.
