Over five days in September 1792, mobs stormed nine prisons across Paris and carried out mass summary executions of those held within. The killings were brutal in their indiscriminate reach: roughly half the prison population was slaughtered before the violence finally subsided.
An estimated three-quarters of the victims were not political prisoners at all, but common criminals, forgers, women, and children. The September Massacres remain one of the darkest episodes of the French Revolutionary period.
