22 Fred Morrozv Fling 



proccs-vcrbaux used by Bailly, and in his excellent eclaircisse- 

 inents, the editor, M. Sigismond Lacroix, has indicated most of 

 the passages in Bailly that add anything to the records. 



What is the conclusion of the whole matter? Or, in other 

 words, what is the value to the historian of the Mcuioires de 

 Bailly f It is a record made by a competent eye-witness, but by 

 a witness who followed carefully the best sources in construct- 

 ing his journal, supplementing these sources by his personal rec- 

 ollections. It is a compilation and yet not a compilation. Bailly 

 could not recall the events and the days when they occurred 

 without the use of the proccs-vcrhaux and the newspapers, but 

 when he had recalled them he seldom trusted to his memory 

 for the order of the facts and often employed in his journal the 

 very language found in the sources that he had Consulted. By 

 so doing, he gave his approval to the account, practically saying 

 so it occurred and not otherwise. This approval certainly has 

 some value, just as his corrections of the record have a value, 

 but it is not the value that we attribute to the account of an 

 independent witness. The Mcuioires may be safely used by those 

 to whom the sources from which Bailly drew are not accessible ; 

 the historian will use the work only when it corrects or supple- 

 ments the sources upon which it is based or when he wishes to 

 show the point of view of Bailly himself in 1792. Before any 

 passage of the Memoir es is attributed to Bailly it must be col- 

 lated with all the proccs-verhanx and newspapers that may have 

 served him as sources of information ; if found in none of these, 

 it may safely be treated as an independent bit of information. 

 Failure to do this in the past has led historians to quote Bailly 

 when he is not a source^ and to charge him with drawing from 



1 Louis Blanc makes use of Bailly's Meuioires in volume three of his 

 Histoire de la 1 evolution francaise, but it seems to be a mere accident when 

 he cites matter found in Bailly alone. An examination of the passages of 

 theMemoires cited by Blanc in his footnotes will show that many of the pas- 

 sages had been taken by Bailly from the procis-verbaux or from the news- 

 papers. In these cases, naturally, the Meiuoiirs should not have been cited. 

 Louis Blanc's critical work was not of the highest order. 



352 



