Helen Maria Williams was a British novelist, poet, and translator of French-language works. A religious dissenter, she was a supporter of abolitionism and of the ideals of the French Revolution; she was imprisoned in Paris during the Reign of Terror and spent much of the rest of her life in France. A controversial figure in her own time, the young Williams was favourably portrayed in a 1787 poem by William Wordsworth.
Helen Maria Williams
Williams' grave
Title page of Poems on Various Subjects: With Introductory Remarks on the Present State of Science and Literature in France by Helen Maria Williams (London: Whittaker, 1823)
The September Massacres were a series of killings and summary executions of prisoners in Paris that occurred in 1792, from Sunday, 2 September until Thursday, 6 September, during the French Revolution. Between 1,176 and 1,614 people were killed by sans-culottes, fédérés, and guardsmen, with the support of gendarmes responsible for guarding the tribunals and prisons, the Cordeliers, the Committee of Surveillance of the Commune, and the revolutionary sections of Paris.
Contemporary engraving depicting the killing of priests, nuns and Princess de Lamballe. Captions with poems condemning the massacres in French and German.
Anonymous caricature depicting the treatment given to the Brunswick Manifesto by the French population
115 priests were killed in the Carmes prison. Le massacre des Carmes by Marie–Marc–Antoine Bilcocq, (1820). Musée de la Révolution française
Prison de l'Abbaye where 160–220 people were killed in three days. It was located between Rue de Bussi and Rue du Four (E40), with the entrance on Rue Sainte-Marguerite, today 133, Boulevard Saint-Germain.
