>>At first, 20 people were being executed by guillotine every day, but this was not fast enough for Collot and Fouché, who set up a special tribunal to speed things along. Within days of the tribunal’s creation on 27 November, 300 new death sentences were handed down and rapidly carried out. The executioners worked with great efficiency; on one day, 33 people were beheaded in only 25 minutes. A week later, 12 heads fell in just five minutes. On 4 December, it was reported back to Paris that 113 inhabitants of “this new Sodom” were dispatched in a single day (Schama, 783). Before long, citizens began complaining of the blood overflowing the drainage ditch that led from beneath the scaffold. When a German observer asked a guard if the blood would be cleared from the street, the guard allegedly responded, “Why should it be cleared? It’s the blood of aristocrats and rebels. The dogs should lick it up” (Doyle, 254). Even this astonishing speed of the guillotine was too slow for Collot and Fouché. Just as their colleague, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, was concurrently busy submerging thousands of counter-revolutionaries in the Loire River in the Drownings at Nantes, Collot and Fouché decided that they, too, needed an alternative method of execution. Eventually, they decided to take large groups of prisoners out to the Plaine des Brotteaux, just outside the city. As many as 60 prisoners at a time were roped together and fired into point blank by cannons loaded with grapeshot. Those who were not instantly killed were finished off by the sabers and bayonets of the guards. Known as mitraillades, hundreds of citizens were killed this way, mostly between 4-8 December. Politics