The Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux had taken part in the rebellion at Nancy. Switzerland had reserved, by treaty, its federal jurisdiction over such of its troops as had taken service under the King of France. By virtue of this special jurisdiction the soldiers of the regiment of Chateauvieux, taken arms in hand, were tried before a council of war composed of Swiss officers. Twenty-two were condemned to death and shot. Fifty were condemned to the galleys and sent to the convict prison at Brest. It was in vain that Louis XVI. attempted to negotiate their pardon with the Swiss Confederacy. It remained inflexible, and the guilty were still undergoing their penalty when the Jacobins resolved to release them from prison in defiance of the treaties uniting Switzerland and France. "To deliver these condemned prisoners," says Dumouriez in his Memoirs, "was to insult the Cantons, attack their treaty rights, and judge their criminals. We had enemies enough already without seeking new ones among an allied people who were behaving wisely towards us, especially a free and republican people." But revolutionary passions do not reason. Collot d'Herbois, a wretched actor who had passed from the theatrical stage to that of politics, and who, not content with having bored people, wished to terrorize them also, { 113} made himself the champion of the galley-slaves of the regiment of Chateauvieux. He was the principal impresario of the lugubrious fête which disgraced Paris on April 15, 1792.
The programme was not arranged without some opposition. Public opinion was not yet ripe for saturnalia. There were still a few honest and courageous publicists who, like André Chénier, boldly lifted their voices to stigmatize certain infamies. In the tribune of the Assembly some orators were to be found who expressed their minds freely and held their own against the tempests of demagogy. There were generals and soldiers in the army for whom discipline was not an idle word; and if the fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux made the future Septembrists and furies of the guillotine utter shouts of joy, it drew from honest men a long cry of grief and indignation.
Intimidated by the menaces of the Jacobins, the Assembly voted the release of the Swiss incarcerated in the prison of Brest. But merely to deliver them was not enough: the Jacobins wanted to give them an ovation. Their march from Brest to Paris was a triumph, and Collot d'Herbois organized a gigantic fête in their honor.