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-BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
S.A. Bent, comp. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. 1887.
Charles Jean Barbaroux
[A French revolutionist, the friend of Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland, who said that artists would not have despised his head for the model of an Antinous; born 1767; deputy from Marseilles to the Legislative Assembly, 1791; voted for the death of Louis XVI., but with an appeal to the people; having been condemned with the Girondists, he was discovered near Bordeaux, and shot himself, 1794. “Over whose black doom,” says Carlyle, “there shall flit, nevertheless, a certain ruddy fervor.”]
Send me six hundred men who know how to die (qui savent mourir).
His message to the municipality of Marseilles, June, 1792, when an invasion of France by the Duke of Brunswick seemed imminent. It was for this band of revolutionists that Rouget de Lisle wrote the “Marseillaise,” called by Carlyle “the luckiest musical composition ever promulgated.”Antoine Baudin, a member of the Corps Législatif, was shot while resisting the coup d’état of 1851. To some workmen who refused to assist him in erecting barricades, saying, “Do you think that we wish to be killed, that you may retain your twenty-five francs a day?” (the salary of members), he replied, “You will see how one dies for twenty-five francs a day” (Vous allez voir comment on meurt pour vingt-cinq francs). Gambetta brought himself into notice in 1868, by defending certain opposition journals which were prosecuted for opening subscription-lists for a monument to Baudin.Barbaroux spoke with the extravagance of the revolutionists to the electoral assembly of the Bouches du Rhône, Sept. 3, 1792: “Mine is the soul of a free man; ever since my fourth year it has been nourished on hatred to kings.” He used brave words when they were dangerous, of the Jacobins in 1793: “You may compel me to sink under their daggers: you shall not make me fall at their feet;” and after the arrest of the Girondists, with whom he had acted, he refused military protection, saying, “I require no bayonets to defend the liberty of my thoughts.”
