On this day in 1792, over five days beginning 2 September, between about 1,100 and 1,600 prisoners were killed in the prisons of Paris. The city was frightened of the armies on its borders and frightened of the men behind its own locked doors, and the killing was done quickly, in courtyards, by neighbours.
Among the dead were clergy, well over a hundred of them held at the former Carmelite convent on the rue de Vaugirard, who had refused the oath required of them. The Catholic Church later placed a group of those killed that September among its beatified martyrs, and one church keeps their memory on this date. Most of the dead were not clergy at all. They were debtors and thieves and forgers, women held at the Salpêtriere, boys at Bicetre, people awaiting trials that never came. For them there is no feast day. There are the prison registers, kept by clerks who wrote down a name, an age, a trade, and then, in the days after, wrote nothing more beside it.
Both kinds of remembering are just a list of names held by someone who thought the names were worth keeping.
The Legislative Assembly sat through those days, Miriam, and sent commissioners into the prisons to plead for order. They were heard politely in some yards and ignored in others, and the killing went on around them.
Almost all we can say about those five days comes from the clerks' registers and a handful of accounts written down afterwards by people who lived. It is thin paper to carry so many names, and it is what we have.