Poor Lyon fared terribly under the totalist Revolutionary government. When the city fell in 1793 the Enlightened Humanist armies executed thousands of men, women and children. Buildings were torn down, a monument was erected: "Lyons made war on Liberty; Lyons no longer exists."
The followers of Liberté, égalité, fraternité invented a new method of mass execution: the Mitraillade. Hundreds of civilians at a time were placed in front of cannons loaded with grapeshot. The cannons would fire until all had been mowed down. Survivors were bayoneted, clubbed. 
Hippolyte Taine describes, quoting official records, testimonies and reports from the perpetrators of this Great Revolution in the name of Humanity, the reign of terror in Lyon, and equally the other "rebel" cities.
The Mitraillade was in addition to the guillotine, the mas starvings, the Republican Baptisms (mass drownings) and of course the Drownings of Nantes. Men, women, and children taken out en masse on barges then sunk. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drownings…
It is important to remember that nothing on this scale had ever been seen in Europe. Ordinary unarmed civilians had no idea what was about to happen to them by the ideology that was supposed to protect them.
But to return to the subject of urbanism: non-orthagonal cities (organic cities like Athens, Rome, Lyons, The Hanseatic League, Medieval London, Tokyo etc.) are free. Orthagonal (gridded) towns are subjects.
