#the girondins on according to legend: sings the Marseillaise

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Do you know the primary source (if there is one) for the Brissotin all going to their death singing the Marseillaise?

The best description of the execution I’ve got so far is the one published in number 64 of Bulletin du Tribunal Criminel. According to it, the girondins did sing ”the first four verses of the anthem of the Marseillaise” as they were being brought from the Revolutionary Tribunal to the Conciergerie prison right after the death sentences had been passed on October 30. When they on the next day were shipped off to their fate, the bulletin does however report that, once arrived at the Place de la Révolution, the girondins sang not the Marseillaise but rather the refrain of the one year older Veillons au salut de l'Empire, another revolutionary song.*

In number 213 of his Révolutions de Paris (October 28 1793) Louis Marie Prudhomme him too writes that it was Veillons au salut de l'Empire the condemned sang at the foot of the scaffold:

…Never, despite the bad weather, did an execution attract more spectators and appear so necessary for the maintenance of the republic. Despite what some of the condemned said on the road and on the scaffold, who shouted: long live the republic! but you will not have it, one was very convinced that their death contributed not just a little to consolidating it. Several also at the foot of the guillotine, embracing each other, sang this well-known refrain: Plutôt la mort que l’esclavage; C’est la devise des français.

Other contemporary journals mentioning the execution that I could lay my hands on only announce that the 21 girondins have been sentenced to death and the execution has taken place (Le Moniteur, number 42, November 1), Le Créole Patriote, number 99, October 31) and Journal de la Montagne, number 152, November 1).

In a letter written November 6 1793, a week after the execution, the former duchess of Elbeuf Innocente-Catherine de Rougé reported that the girondins had gone to their demise ”singing about the nation’s glory,” but without specifying which songs:

The bishop of Calvados and the count de Sillery were in the same cart along with the confessors they had asked for; the others did not request one. Brissot and one other, following in the next cart, were clearly distressed. The rest, all young people aged twenty-seven, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-two, followed on behind laughing, singing about the nation’s glory, and shouting out to the people ‘Long live the Republic’. And it is in this manner that these 21 individuals entered into the great light of eternity.

Finally, in his Memoires d'un détenu: pour servir à l'histoire de la tyrannie de Robespierre (1795) Honoré Jean Riouffe, a fellow prisoner of the Conciergerie, claims the girondins sang a modified version of the Marseillaise the night before their execution:

It was patriotic songs which burst out simultaneously, and all their voices mingled to address the last hymns to liberty; they parodied the song of the Marseillais in this way: Contre nous de la tyrannie; Le couteau sanglant est levé. etc. All this terrible night resounded with their songs, and if they interrupted them, it was to talk about their homeland, and sometimes also, for a meeting of Ducos.

*The book Brissot de Warville; a study in the history of the French revolution (1915) interestingly enough cites Bulletin du Tribunal Criminel as the source for the girondins singing the Marseillais on their way to the scaffold and not the Conciergerie…