 CHAPTER XI. ENDING THE MONARCHY On the twentieth and twenty-first of September 1792, the convention met, the Bourbon monarchy fell, and the Duke of Brunswick was defeated, the coincidence of memorable events. Brunswick, pushing on from Verdun into the defiles of the Argonne, had two armies operating against him, trying to stop his march, the one under du Maurier, the other under Kellerman. He forced away, however, but at the further side, about the hills of Valmy, had to face the combined armies of his adversaries. Brunswick was now much reduced by sickness and was much worried over supplies and his lengthening line of communications. In a faint-hearted way he deployed for attack. Du Maurier for the moment checked him by a skillful disposition of his superior artillery. If the superbly-drilled Prussian infantry were sent forward it seemed as though the result could not be long in doubt. Brunswick methodically and slowly made his preparations for the attack, but just at the moment when it should have been delivered, Du Maurier, divining his opponent's hesitation, imposed on him. Riding along the French front with his staff, he placed his hat on the point of his sword and rode forward, singing the Marseillais. His whole army catching the refrain advanced towards the enemy and Brunswick at once took up a defensive attitude which he maintained till the close of the battle. The unsteady battalions and half-drilled volunteers of Du Maurier had suddenly revealed the fact that they were a national army and that they possessed the most formidable of military weapons, patriotism. That was an innovation in 18th-century warfare, an innovation that was to result in some notable triumphs. At Valmy it led to the Prussians retiring from a battlefield on which they had left only a few score of dead. Soon afterwards Brunswick began a retreat that was to lead him back to the Rhine. On the day after Valmy the convention assembled. The extreme Jacobins, soon to be known from their seats in the assembly as the Mountain, numbered about fifty. Danton and Robespierre were the two most conspicuous. Among their immediate supporters not hitherto mentioned may be noted Carnot, Fouché, Talian, and Saint-Jus. A much larger group, of which the moderate Jacobins formed the backbone, were inclined to look to bristle for leadership, and are generally described as Girondins. This name came from the small group of the deputies of the Girond, that represented perhaps better than any other the best force of provincial liberalism, but at the same time a revolt against terrorism, massacre, and the supremacy of Paris. In the last sixty years however the term Girondin has come into use as a label for all those positive political elements in the convention that attempted a struggle against the Mountain for leadership and against Paris for moderate and national government. Among the Girondins may be noted Brissot, Vernier, Condorcet, and the Anglo-American veteran of republicanism, Tom Paine. Between the Mountain and the Girond sat the plain, or the marée, as it was called, that non-committal section of the house strongest in numbers but weakest in moral courage, where sat such men as Barras, Barrère, Cambon, Grégoire, L'Anjouiné, Cies. These were the men who mostly drifted, and as the Mountain triumphed threw into it many more or less sincere recruits. The first business of the new assembly was pressing. It did not comport much variation of opinion. The constitutional question must be settled. And so a vote, immediately taken, pronounced the fall of the monarchy. Even at this moment however there was no enthusiasm for a republic, and there was no formal pronouncement that France accepted that regime. But in fact she had, and on the following day the convention in further decrees assumed the existence of the republic to be an established fact. There was a question, however, even more burning, because more debatable than the fall of the monarchy. And this was the massacres, and beyond the massacres the policy of the party that had accepted them. The great majority of the deputies on arriving in Paris from the provinces had been horror-struck. L'anguinet said, When I arrived in Paris I shuddered. Briseau and the Girondins put that feeling of the assembly behind their policy. They adopted an attitude of uncompromising condemnation towards the men of September, and attempted to rest their influence from them. To accomplish this they had, among other things, to outbid their rivals for popular support. And so it happened that many of them who were at heart constitutional monarchists adopted a strong republican attitude which went beyond their real convictions. The Girondins attacked at once. The conduct of the commune of the sectional committees was impugned. Marat, untaking his seat, was subjected to a furious onslaught that nearly ended in actual violence. But he packed the galleries with his supporters, retorted bitterly in the L'Amie du Poupre, and succeeded in weathering the storm. But the convention agreed that a committee of six should investigate and that a guard of 4,500 men should be drawn from the departments for the protection of the convention. This was a worthy beginning, but it ended as it began. In words, Paris answered the Girondins with deeds. The proposed bringing in of an armed force from the departments stirred Paris to fury once more. Briseau was expelled from the Jacobin Club. Many of the sections presented petitions protesting against the departmental guard. But for a while the moderates held their ground, even appeared to gain a little. Addresses kept reaching the assembly from the departments protesting against the domination of Paris. Small detachments of loyal national guards arrived in the city, and in November, on an election being held for the mayoralty of Paris, although very few voters went to the polls, the Jacobins failed to carry their candidate. It was to be their last defeat before the 9th of Thermidor. It was at this moment that took place the famous iron chest incident. A safe was discovered and broken open during the perquisitions made in the palace of the Tuileries. Roland placed in the custody of the house a packet of papers found in this safe, and among these papers were accounts showing the sums paid to Mirabeau and to other members of the assembly by the court. There resulted much abuse of Mirabeau, whose body was removed from the pantheon where it had been ceremoniously interred, and also much political pressure on deputies who either were or feared to be incriminated. A number of the young Girondins were now meeting constantly at Madame Roland's, and their detestation of the mountain was heightened and idealized by the enthusiasm of their charming hostess. Louvet, brilliant, ambitious, hot-headed, threw himself into the conflict, and on the 29th of October launched a tremendous attack against Philippe against Robespierre. As oratory it was successful, but it failed in political effect. After their ill success against Marat, the Girondins stood no chance of success against Robespierre unless their words led to immediate action, unless their party was solid and organized, unless they had some means of obtaining a practical result. In all this they failed. Robespierre obtained a delay to prepare his reply, and then a careful speech and packed galleries triumphed over Louvet's ill-judged attack. The mountain had survived the first storms. It was soon able to use the question of the king as a means of distracting attention from the massacres, and of giving the party a ground on which it might hope to meet the Girond on more even terms. Or any attempt at moderation on the part of the Girondins could be met with the charge of veiled royalism, of anti-patriotism, and such a charge at that moment was the most damning that a party or an individual could incur. The convention, having agreed that it would consider the question of Louis and having appointed a committee to that end, heard the report of its committee on the 3rd of November. From this it appeared that there were numerous charges that could be preferred against Louis, but what was the tribunal before which such charges could be tried? There could be but one answer. Only the people of France could judge Louis, and the convention stood for the people. Lengthy debates followed on these questions, and the speech of Robespierre, a speech in which he stood nearly alone in taking a logical view of the situation, was perhaps its most remarkable product. Robespierre said, The assembly has been drawn off on side issues. There is no question here of a legal action. Louis is not an accused person. You are not judges. You are only representatives of the nation. It is not for you to render judgment, but to take a measure of national security. Louis was king, and the republic has come into existence. The wonderful question you are debating is resolved by these debates. Louis was dethroned for his crimes. Louis denounced the people of France as rebels. He called to chastise them the armies of his brother tyrants to his help. Victory and the people have decided that he alone is the rebel. Louis therefore cannot be judged because he has been judged. He stands condemned. Or if not, then the republic stands not acquitted. Or if Louis can be the subject of an action, Louis may be pronounced guiltless. A people does not judge after the manner of a judicial body. It does not render sentence. It launches the thunderbolt. On the same day, the 3rd of December, without accepting Robespierre's point of view, the convention voted that the king should be brought to trial. The gérante, feeling the current now drawing them fast to a catastrophe, attempted in feeble fashion to change its direction, urging that an appeal should be made to the country. This failed. And a week later, Louis was brought before the assembly. The royal family had been kept in very strict confinement at the temple. The commune officials in whose charge they were placed were for the most part men of the lower classes, brutal, arrogant, suspicious, and somewhat oppressed with responsibility and the fear of possible attempts at a rescue. In these conditions, the royal family suffered severely. And under suffering rapidly began to regain some of the ground they had lost while fortune smiled. Against insult the royal dignity asserted itself. And in adversity the simplicity and kindliness of Louis began rather suddenly to look like something not so very remote from saintliness, such as the relation of surroundings and background to the effect produced by a man's life and character. Before the convention on the 11th of December, Louis, mild and dignified, listened in some bewilderment to a long list of so-called charges, of which the most salient accused him of complicity with bouillet in a plot against his subjects, and of having broken his oath to the Constitution. When asked what answer he had to make, he denied the charges and demanded time to prepare a defense and to obtain legal assistance. This was granted and an adjournment was taken, from all of which it appears that Louis accepted the false ground which the convention had marked out for him and lacked the logical sense of Robespierre. During the adjournment, which was for two weeks, the Girondins made one more attempt to dodge the issue, to refer the trial of the king to the electorate. Behind them was a great mass of opinion, the department of Finisterre passed resolutions demanding the suspension of Marat, Robespierre and Danton. It approached the neighboring departments with a view to combining their armed forces and sending them to Paris. Even with such demonstrations to strengthen their hands, the Girondins were in too false a position where too much orators and not men of action to save themselves. Paris held them inexorably to their detested task. On the 26th, the trial was resumed and save for judgment concluded. Louis was in charge of Saint-Therre, commanding the National Guard of Paris. His advocates, Maléchherbe, Tranchet and Dessès, did their duty with courage and ability, after which the king was removed and the convention resolved itself into a disorderly and clamorous meeting in which the public galleries added as much to the din as the members themselves. More debates followed, of which the turn was reached on the 3rd of January. On that day, Barrère, most astute of those who sat in the center, keenest to detect the tremor of the straw that showed which way public passion was about to blow, ascended the tribune and delivered his opinion. Anxiously the house hung on the words of the Oracle of Moral Cowardice and heard that Oracle pronounced the destruction of the king as a measure of public safety. From that moment all attempts to save him were in vain. The Girondins did not confine themselves to numerous efforts to displace the responsibility of judging from the convention to the people. Three days after Barrère's speech, du Morier arrived in Paris. As Lafayette had a few months before, so did du Morier now appear to be the man of the sword so dreaded by Robes Pierre, the successful soldier ready to convert the revolution to his own prophet, or if not to his own, to that of his party, the Girondins. More than two weeks du Morier remained in the city, casting about for some means of saving the king, but constantly checked by the Jacobins who, through Pâche, minister of war, kept control of the artillery and troops near Paris. On the fifteenth of January the convention came to a vote, amid scenes of intense excitement. Was Louis guilty? And if so, what should be his punishment? Six hundred and eighty-three members voted affirmatively to the first question. Three hundred and sixty-one voted the penalty of death. About the same number equivocated in a variety of forms, the most popular proving the one that declared for imprisonment or exile to be changed to death in case of invasion. Van Yo as president, at the end of a session that lasted thirty-six hours, declared the sentence of the convention to be death. On the nineteenth of January one last effort was made, a motion for a respite was proposed, but was rejected, three hundred eighty to three hundred ten, and the convention then fixed the twenty-first as the day for the king's execution. On that day Louis accordingly went to the scaffold. The guillotine was set up in the great open space known at various apexes as the Place Louis XV, de la Révolution, and de la Concorde. Louis, after retouching farewell from his family, and after confessing whatever he imagined to be his sins, was driven from the temple to the place of execution. He was dressed in white. The streets were thronged, the National Guard was out in force, and when Louis from the platform attempted to speak, Sainte ordered his drums to roll. A moment later the head of King Louis XVI had fallen, and many mourning royalists were vowing loyalty in their hearts to the little boy of eight, imprisoned in the temple, who to them was King Louis XVII. CHAPTER XII. The Fall of the Gironde. The disappearance of Louis XVI from the scene left the mountain and the Gironde face to face, to wage their faction fight, a fight to the knife, while France in her armies more nobly maintained her greater struggle on the frontier. There for a while after Valmy all had prospered, Brunswick had fallen back to Koblenz, a French army under the Marquis de Cousteen had overrun all the Rhineland as far as mines. Du Maurier, transferred from the Ardennes to the Belgian frontier, had invaded the Austrian Netherlands. On the 6th of November he won a considerable victory at Jemop, and towards the end of December he controlled most of the province. The convention elated at these successes, issued decrees proclaiming a crusade against the European tyrannies, and announcing the propaganda of the principles of liberty. But in practice the French invasion did not generally produce very edifying results. Generals and troops plundered unmercifully to make up for the disorganization of their own service and lack of pay, and even the French government imposed the expenses of war on the countries that had to support its horrors. The close of the year 1792 marked a period of success. The opening of 1793, however, saw the pendulum swing back. New enemies gathered about France. Sardinia, whose province of Savoy had been invaded, now had a considerable army in the field. At short intervals after the execution of Louis, England, Holland, Spain joined the coalition. And the convention lightheartedly accepted this accumulation of war. To face the storm it appointed in January a committee of general defence of twenty-five members. But Danton alone would have done better than the twenty-five. While the trial of the king proceeded he was casting about for support in the assembly for a constructive policy. He stretched a hand to the Girondins. They refused it. And Danton turned back to the mountain once more, compelled to choose between two factions, the one that was for the moment willing to act with him. Through February and into March the military situation kept getting worse, and the mountain made repeated attacks on the Girond. On the fifth of March news reached Paris that the Austrians had captured Ex-La Chapelle, and that the French general Miranda had been compelled to abandon his guns and to retire from before Maastricht, which he was besieging. Danton, who was in the north arranging for the annexation of the Netherlands to France, started for Paris at once. On the fourteenth the capital heard with amazement and alarm that the Vendée had risen in arms for God and King Louis the seventeenth. The Vendée was a large district of France, a great part of the ancient province of Poitou, lying just to the south of the Loire and near the Atlantic Ocean. A great part of the country was cut up by tracts of forest and thick and numerous hedges. The peasants were fairly prosperous and well-affected to the priests and seniors. The latter were mostly resident landlords, holders of small estates, living near and on kindly terms with their peasantry. The priests and nobles had long viewed the revolution with a version, an aversion intensified by the proclamation of the Republic and the execution of the King. And when, on the twenty-sixth of February, the convention passed an army ballot law and sent agents to press recruits among the villages of the Vendée. The peasants joined their natural leaders and rose in arms against the government. The Vendéans were, in their own country, formidable opponents. They had born leaders, men who showed wonderful courage, dash and loyalty. They prayed before charging an enemy, and on the march or in battle sang hymns, always the most irresistible of battle songs. Their badges were the white flag, the bourbon lilies, and the cross. For a while they swept everything before them. Danton arrived in Paris on the eighth of March. He immediately attempted to reconcile the factions of the assembly and to persuade its members to turn their wasted vigor into war measures. From neither side did he receive much encouragement. To his demands for new levies and volunteer regiments, robes pierre replied that the most urgent step was to purify the army of its anti-revolutionary elements. To his proposal that the executive should be strengthened by composing the ministry of members of the convention, the Girondins opposed their implacable suspicion and hatred. But Paris had long been working up its hostility to the Gironde. An insurrectional committee had just come into existence that aimed at dealing with them after the fashion in which it had dealt with Louis on the 10th of August, and the Girondins stand against Danton precipitated the outbreak. On the ninth of March a premature and imperfectly organized insurrection occurred, directed against the Gironde. The demonstrators marched against the convention, but were held in check by a few hundred well-affected provincial national guards. On the 10th it became known that de Montréal was severely pressed by the Austrians, and in danger of being cut off. Under the influence of this news and with the Girondins showing little fight because of the event of the day before, the convention passed a measure of terrorism. It voted the establishment of a revolutionary tribunal to judge traitors, conspirators, and anti-revolutionists. In vain, Buzot and other Girondins pointed out that this meant establishing a despotism worse than the old. Danton, unquenchably opportunist, supported the measure, and it was carried. Immediately after this he left Paris for the frontier once more. On the 18th of March du Montréal was severely defeated at near Vinton. And now not only was the Vendée in arms, but Lyon, Marseille, Normandy appeared on the point of throwing off the yoke of Paris and of the Jacobins. The situation looked well nigh desperate. A week later the papers published letters of de Montréal which showed that ever since the trial of the king the Girondins general had been factious, that is, had been as much inclined to turn his arms against Paris as against the Austrians. Danton was now back from the frontier. He and Robespierre were at once elected to the Committee of General Defense, and that committee declared itself in continuous session. Extraordinary measures were now passed in quick succession, which added to the creation of the revolutionary tribunal, made up a formidable machinery of terrorism. These of the convention were sent out on mission to superintend the working of the armies and of the internal police. They were given the widest powers, were virtually made pro-dictators. On the 1st of April was passed a new law of suspects to reinforce the action of the representatives on mission and of the revolutionary tribunal. On the 6th of April was created the executive power that Danton urged the need of so pertinaciously. This was the Committee of Public Safety, a body of nine members of the convention, acting secretly, directing the ministers, and having general control of the executive functions. The Girondins had to submit to the measure, and their opponents secured control of the committee. Among its first members were Danton, Cambon, and Barrère. Just as the Committee of Public Safety came into existence, the situation on the frontier was getting even worse. On the 4th of April, Du Maurier, fearing that the convention would send him to the revolutionary tribunal, made an attempt to turn his army against the government, and failing rode over into the Austrian lines. At the same time, Kustin was being driven out of Alsace by the Prussians, who on the 14th of April laid siege to Mainz. With the mountain immensely strengthened by the formation of the Committee of Public Safety, the attack on the Girondins increased in vigor. Robespierre accused them of complicity with Du Maurier and treasonable intentions against the Republic. The Gironde retaliated, and on the 13th of April succeeded in rallying a majority of the convention in a second onslaught against Marat for his incendiary articles. It was decreed that the Amid-e-Puple should be sent to the revolutionary tribunal. It was the last success of the Girondins, and it did not carry them far. The Jacobins closed their ranks against this assault. They had the commune and the revolutionary tribunal under their control. The former body sent a petition to the convention, demanding the exclusion of twenty-two prominent Girondins as enemies of the revolution, and a few days later the tribunal absolved Marat of all his sins. Incidentally to the bitter struggle between the two factions, great questions, social, political, economic, were being debated, though not with great results. They could really all be brought back to the one fundamental question which the course of the revolution had brought to the surface. What was to be the position of the poor man, and especially of the poor man in the modern city and under industrial surroundings? What was to be his position in the new form of social adjustment which the revolution was bringing about? What about the price of food, the monopoly of capital, the private ownership of property? Such were some of the questions that underlay the debates of the convention in the spring of 1793. The food question was dealt with in various ways. The famous law of the maximum, passed on the third of May, attempted to regulate the prices of food by a sliding scale tariff. The measure was economically unsound, and in many ways worked injustice. It alarmed property holders and alienated them from the government. On its own initiative the commune made great efforts and with some success to maintain the food supply of the city and to keep down the price of bread. Spending about 12,000 francs a day, less than half a zoo per head, it succeeded for the most part in keeping bread down to about three sews per pound. But by virtue of what theory of government were the poor entitled to this special protection, was the Jacobin party prepared to advance towards a socialist or collectivist form of government? Of that there was no sign, and several years were yet to pass before Babouf was to give weight to a collectivist theory of the state. There were special reasons of some force to explain why the convention, however much it might be addicted to humanitarian theories, however anxious it might be to curry favor with the lowest class, should keep a stiff attitude on the question of collectivism and property. The whole financial system of the revolution, endorsed by the convention as by its predecessors, was based on the private proprietorship of land and on increasing the number of small proprietors. Not only was the convention bound to maintain the effect of the large sales of national lands that had already taken place, but the prejudices and temper of its members made in the same direction. Babouf's Pierre, trying to reconcile the narrow logic of a lawyer with the need of pleasing his ardent supporters, based his position on a charitable and not on a political motive. Public assistance is a sacred debt of society. Society is under the obligation of securing a living for all its members, either by procuring work for them or by securing the necessaries of existence to those who are at work. Although the convention maintained a conservative attitude in regard to the question of real property, it was decidedly inclined towards a confiscatory policy in all that related to personal wealth. This did not, however, become well marked until after the conclusion of the great struggle between the mountain and the gironne, which entered its last phase in May. On the twelfth of that month, the convention voted the formation of an army of Saint-Coulotte for the defense of Paris, a measure of more significance for the internal than for the external affairs of France. On the fourteenth, the gironne made their reply by reading an address of the city of Bordeaux, offering to march to Paris to help the convention. On the fifteenth, the commune proceeded to appoint one of its nominees as provisional general of the National Guard of Paris, and on the following day the girondins, alarmed into an attempt at action, proposed to the assembly that the municipal authorities of Paris should be removed from office, and that the substitutes for the deputies to the convention should be assembled at Bourges, in case the convention itself should be attacked and destroyed. This last proposal was highly characteristic of the girondins. Public as orators, but as members of a political party always timid of action. The Committee of Public Safety, already tuned to its higher duties and viewing the faction fight of the assembly with some slight degree of detachment, steered a middle and politic course. Valer proposed a compromise, which the girondins weakly accepted. But its enemies continued strenuous action, formed anew in the insurrectional committee, and set Ebert's infamous sheet, The Père du Chain, howling for their blood. This newspaper deserves a few lines. Ebert, a man of the middle class, after a stormy youth drifted into revolutionary journalism. With much verve and a true Voltarian spirit, he at first took up a moderate attitude. But being a time-server, soon discovered that his interest lay in another direction. From the middle of 1792 he rose rapidly to great popularity by his loud defense of extreme courses. The Père du Chain, copies of which are at this day among the greatest of bibliographical curiosities, was written for the people, and in a jargon outheriting their own, a compound of oaths and obscenities. The Père du Chain was nearly always in a state of grand joie or of grand colère, and at the epoch we have reached his anger is being continuously poured out, the filthiest stream of invective conceivable against the Girondins. With Marat and Ebert fanning the flames, the insurrectional committee drew up a new list of thirty-two suspect deputies. The Committee of Public Safety, appealed to by the Girondins, ordered the arrest of Ebert. On the following day, the twenty-fifth of May, the Commune demanded his release. Isnaud, one of the Girond, that day acting as president of the convention, answered the deputation of the Commune with unbridled anger, and concluded by declaring that if Paris dared to lay one finger on a member of the convention, the city would be destroyed. There was in this an unfortunate echo of the Duke of Brunswick's manifesto. On the twenty-sixth, Robespierre, at the Jacobin Club, gave his formal assent to the proposal that an insurrection should be organized against the Girond. Two days later, Ebert was released, and the Commune and the committees of the sections began organizing the movement. As a first step, Henriot, a soughtish but very determined battalion leader, was placed in supreme command of the National Guard. The movement took place on the thirty-first of May. On that day the convention was subjected to the organized pressure of a mob of about thirty thousand men, the greater part National Guards. The convention was not invaded, however, nor was there any attempt, any desire, to suppress it as an institution, for the leaders fully realized that it was by maintaining the convention as a figurehead that they could continue the fiction that the government of France was not local or Parisian, but national or French. But while refraining from a direct attack on the convention, they subjected it to a pressure so strong and so long continued that they converted it, as they intended, into an organ of their will. For three days, Henriot and his men remained at the doors of the convention. And for three days, with growing agitation, the members within wrestled with the problem thus insistently presented at the point of bayonets and at the mouth of cannon. Motions of all sorts, some logical, some contradictory, were presented. Robespierre moved the arrest of twenty of his colleagues, the committee of public safety, anxious to retain supreme power, tried for some middle course that might satisfy the mob. Barrere proposed that to relieve the convention from its difficulty the Girondins should pronounce their own exclusion from the assembly. The impetuous Isnar, one of the few attacked members present, accepted. This was on the second of June. On the basis of the self-exclusion of the Girondin deputies, the committee of public safety now believed it could regain control of the situation, thereby demonstrating that it had formed an inadequate estimate of Henriot. It decided to proclaim the suppression of the insurrectional committee, and it announced this to Henriot at the same time as the self-exclusion of the Girondins. But Henriot, sitting his horse at the doors of the convention, was resolute and tipsy, a man of the sword not to be moved by parliamentary eloquence. He declined to accept any compromise, and ordered his guns to be brought up and unlimbered. The convention was immediately stampeded by this act of drunken courage. The members attempted to escape, but every avenue, every street was closed by Henriot's National Guard, and Marat, blandly triumphant, led the members back to the Hall Sacred to their deliberations. There, ashamed and exhausted at eleven o'clock that night, the convention mutilated itself, suspended twenty-two of its members, and ordered the arrest of twenty-nine others. CHAPTER XIII. THE RAIN OF TERROR For six weeks after the fall of the Girond, until the thirteenth of July, the course of events in France, both in Paris and in the provinces, reflected the bitterness of the two factions, conqueror and conqueror. In a minor way it also revealed the fundamental difference of attitude between the two wings of the successful party, between Danton, content to push the Girondins out of the way of the national policy, and Robespierre, rankling to destroy those who offended his puritanical and exclusive doctor. The Girondins had behind them a strong country backing. They had always been the advocates of the provinces against Paris. Some of them had declared for federalism, for local republics, semi-independent states centering about Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux. Those who succeeded in escaping from Paris made their way to where they might obtain support, and found, here and there, arms open to receive them. Lyon had risen against the government on the twenty-ninth of May, and had rid itself of the Jacobin Committee headed by Chalierre. That had so far held it under control. Marseille followed the example of Lyon, Normandy, where a considerable group of the fugitive deputies sought refuge, began to make preparations for marching on the capital. This was serious enough, but two other dangers each greater threatened Paris. The military situation on the northern frontier was still no better, while the Vendions were advancing from success to success, were increasing the size, the confidence, the efficiency of their armies. In such a desperate situation, Danton seemed the only possible saviour, and for a few weeks he had his way. New generals were appointed, Cousteen to the Netherlands, Poignet to the Rhine, Burlon to the Vendies, and, at the same time, negotiations were opened with the powers. But fortune refused to smile on Danton. Il's success met him at every turn, and opened the way to power for Robespierre. On the tenth of June, the Vendions captured the town of Samur on the Loire, giving them a good passage for carrying operations to the northern side of the river. A council of oars decided that an advance should be made into Brittany and Normandy, both strongly disaffected to the convention. In the latter province, Bersault and Boussot were already actively forming troops for the projected march against Paris. But before advancing to the north, the Vendions, generals, decided that it was imperative they should capture the city of Nantes, which controls all the country about the mouth of the Loire. Preparations were made accordingly, and, as the Vendions had no siege train, Catalinio and Charette headed a desperate assault against the city on the 29th of June. Catalinio was killed, not defended itself bravely. The Vendions were thrown back, and, as many writers have thought, their failure at that point and, at that moment, saved the Republic. Apart from this one success, everything had been going ill with Danton's measures, and the Robespierres were making corresponding headway. On the tenth of July, the Committee of Public Safety was reconstituted, and Danton was not re-elected. Couton and Saint-Just joined it, and Robespierre himself went on two weeks later. Among the other members, Béritre, for the moment, followed Robespierre, while Carnot accepted every internal measure, concentrating all his energy on the administration of the War Department. It was just at this instant, with the Vendions, for the moment, checked that Normandy made its effort. On the thirteenth of July, its army, under the Baron de Wimphen, a constitutional monarchist, was met by a Parisian army at Pacy, thirty miles from the capital. The Normans met with defeat, a defeat they were never able to retrieve. On the same day a dramatic event was occurring at Paris, the last despairing stroke of the Gironde against its detested opponents, from Cannes, where Bressot and Buzot had been helping to organize Wimphen's army. There had started for the capital a few days previously a young woman, Charlotte Corday. Full of enthusiasm, like Madame Roland, for the humanitarian ideals that blended so largely with the passions of the Revolution, she represented, in its noblest, most fervent form, that French provincial liberalism that looked to the Girondins for leadership. Like them, she detested the three great figures who had led the Parisian democracy through massacre to its triumph. Danton, Robespierre, Marat. And of the three it was Marat who worked deepest on her imagination. Marat always banging for blood, always senting fresh victims, always corrupting opinion with his scum of printer's ink and poison. To Charlotte Corday it appeared that in this one individual all that was noble and beautiful in the Revolution was converted to all that was hideous and ignoble. And she slowly began to perceive that even a feeble woman like herself could remove that blot from France, if only she could find the courage. On the thirteenth of July, Charlotte Corday accomplished her twofold sacrifice. She gained admission to Marat's house and stabbed him in his bath. She meekly but courageously accepted the consequences. After being nearly lynched by the mob, she was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal and sent to the guillotine. The Prussians captured minds on the 23rd of July, the Austrians of El Ancien on the 28th. These disasters enabled Robespierre and the Commune to impose their views as to the conduct of the military affairs of the Republic. Decrees were passed for purifying the army. The aristocrat generals, Buanes, Buron, Custin, were removed, and eventually were all sent to the scaffold. San culot, some honest, some capable, many dishonest, many incapable, replaced them. San culotism reigned supreme. Civic purity became the universal test, and on this chivaleth, the Commune inaugurated a system of politics of which the Tammany organization in New York offers the most conspicuous example at the beginning of the 20th century. Heber was the party boss. His nominees filled the offices. Graff was placed on the order of the day. The Ministry of War and its numerous contracts became the happy hunting ground of the Parisian politician. Heber himself, on one occasion, working off an addition of 600,000 copies of his Pierre Duchenne through that ministry. And lastly one must add that the army of the interior, the army facing the Vendee, fell into the hands of the politicians. An incapable drunkard, Rossignol, was placed in command instead of Buron, who, after two victories over the Vendion, was dismissed, imprisoned and sent to the guillotine. It was perhaps necessary that a brave and dashing soldier of the old school, like Buron, should be removed from command, if the decrees of the convention for prosecuting the war against the Vendee were to be carried out. One of those decrees ordered that, quote, the forests shall be raised, the crops cut down, the cattle seized, the minister of war shall send combustible materials of all sorts to burn the woods, brush, and heath, unquote. That was the spirit now entering the revolution, the fury of destruction, the dementia of suspicion, the reign of terror. The terrorists were of two sorts, the men of faction, like Hibbert, together with those who accepted terrorism reluctantly but daringly like Denton. With them terror was a political weapon. With Robespierre, however, and his Jacobin stalwarts, it was something more, a strangely compounded thing, a political weapon in a sense, but a weapon behind which stood a bigot, a fanatic, a temperament governed by jealous fears and by the morbid revengefulness of the man of feeble physique. It was Robespierre who always stood for the worst side of terrorism, for all that was most insidious and deep-seated in it, and after its failure and the reaction in the summer of 1794, it was his name that was deservedly associated with the reign of terror. Robespierre in the summer of 1793 was still logically maintaining his attitude, while Denton fought the enemies of the Republic he fought Denton's measures. He told the Jacobin Club that it was always the same proposal they had to face, new levees, new battalions to feed the great butchery. The plan of the enemies of the people, he did not yet dare declare that Denton was one of them, was to destroy the Republic by civil and foreign war. In a manuscript note found after his death, he says, quote, the interior danger comes from the bourgeois, to conquer them one must rally the people. The convention must use the people and must spread insurrection, unquote. In August, carrying his thought a step further, he appeals to the Jacobin Club against the traders whom he sees in everyone whose opinion diverges a hare's breath from his own. There are traders, he declares, even on the committee of public safety, and all traders must go to the guillotine. At the moment this speech was delivered, Admiral Lord Hood had just captured Toulon, while Marseille was being attacked by Carteau at the head of an army acting for the convention. Coburg, commanding the Austrian forces in the Netherlands, was gaining a series of minor successes, and his cavalry was not much more than four days' march from Paris. Provisions were being gathered into the city by requisition, that is, by armed columns operating in the neighboring departments. Confiscatory measures passed the convention for raising a forced loan of one billion francs for converting, quote, superfluous, unquote, income to the use of the state, a policy of poor man against rich. Alongside of these measures, terrorism was getting into full swing. The revolutionary tribunal had its staff quadrupled on the 5th of September. Within a few days, the sections were given increased political powers. And Coulou-de-Hebois and Beard-Veren, the two strongest supporters of Hebert in the convention, were elected to the Committee of Public Safety. On the 17th was passed the famous Loire-de-Suspé, the most dramatic, if not the first, decree on that burning question. It provided that all partisans of federalism and tyranny, all enemies of liberty, all Sédévan nobles not known for their attachment to the new institutions, must be arrested, and further that the section committees must draw up lists of suspects residing within their districts. All this meant a repetition on a larger and better-organized plan of the massacres of a year before. As Danton had said in the debates on the revolutionary tribunal, quote, this tribunal will take the place of that supreme tribunal, the vengeance of the people. Let us be terrible so as to dispense the people from being terrible, unquote. Judicial organized terror was to replace popular chaotic terror. With terror now organized, the prisons filled. And the revolutionary tribunal sending victims to the guillotine daily, the internal struggle became one between two terrorist parties, of Hebert and of Robespierre, both committed to the policy of the day, but with certain differences. Hebert viewed the system as one affording personal safety, the executioner being safer than the victim, and the best opportunity for graft. The man of means was singled out by his satellites for suspicion and arrest, and was then informed that a judicious payment in the right quarter would secure release. Beyond that, Hebert probably cared little enough one way or the other. He was merely concerned in extracting all the material satisfaction he could out of life. With Robespierre the case was different. It was a struggle for a cause, for a creed, a creed of which he was the only infallible prophet. Poor, neat, respectable, unswerving, but jealous, he commanded wide admiration as the type of the incorruptible Democrat. Stiffly and self-consciously he was reproducing the popular prose of Benjamin Franklin. Between him and Hebert there could be no real union. He was willing, while Hebert remained strong in his hold on the public, to act alongside of him. But that was all. Under the pressure of the Commune and the Mountain, the convention put the laws of terror and force against the defeated Gironde on the 3rd of October. Forty-three deputies, including Philip E. Galatay, were sent to the tribunal, and about one hundred others were outlawed or ordered under arrest. The convention, having thus washed its hands before the public, now felt able to make a stand against the increasing encroachments of the Commune. And on the 10th, Saint-Juszt proposed that the government should continue revolutionary till the peace, which meant that the Committee of Public Safety should govern, and the Constitution remained suspended. The Committee showed as much vigor in dealing with the provinces as it showed feebleness in dealing with Paris. Through August and September, rebellious Lyon had been besieged. Early in October it fell. The Committee proposed a decree which the convention accepted. From June 1793 to July 1794 it accepted everything, declaring that Lyon should be razed to the earth. Couton was sent to carry out this draconian edict, but proved too mild. At the end of October, Couleau de Herroix, Fouché, and 3,000 Parisians sans Couleau were sent down, and for a while all went well. Houses were demolished, and executions were got in hand with so much energy that cannon and grapeshot had to be used to keep pace with the rapidity of the sentences. About 3,000 persons in all probably perished. It was at this moment that in Paris the guillotine, working more slowly but more steadily than Fouché's cannon and grape, was claiming some of its most illustrious victims. From the 12th to the 15th of October, the Revolutionary Tribunal had to deal with the case of Marie Antoinette. The Queen, who had been treated with increased severity since the execution of the King, supported the attacks of the pitiless public prosecutor Fouché ton vieux, with firmness and dignity. The accusations against her were of the same general character as those against Louis, and will require no special comment. But an incident of the trial brought out some of the most nauseous aspects of the Hebert regime. The Commune had introduced men of the lowest type at the temple, had placed the Dolphin in the keeping of the infamous Cobbler Simon, had attempted to manufacture filthy evidence against the Queen. Hebert went into the witness box to sling mud at her in person, and it was at that moment only, with a look and a word of reply that no instinct could mistake, that she forced a murmur of indignation or sympathy from the public. Robespierre was dining when he heard of the incident, and in his anger with Hebert broke his plate over the table. The Queen went to the guillotine, driven in an open cart on the 16th. A week later the Gérondins went to trial, twenty-one deputies, among them Brussot, Vernier, Jensen, and Boyer von Fried. Their trial lasted five days, and among its auditors was Camilleau de Moulin. De Moulin, whose pamphlets had helped place his unfortunate opponents where they stood. De Moulin, whose heart, whose generosity was stirred, who already was revolting against terrorism, who was suddenly overwhelmed with a wave of remorse when sentence of death was pronounced against the men of the Gérond. It was the first revolt of opinion against the reign of terror, the first perceptible movement of the conscience of France, and it was to send De Moulin himself to the guillotine. The Gérondins went to the scaffold on the 31st of October. The duke de Leon on the 6th of November. Four days later Madame Rolande, who met death, perhaps, a little pedantically but quite nobly, then, on the 12th, Bailey. Of the Gérondins who had escaped from Paris, several committed suicide. Roland on receiving news of his wife's death, others within the next few months. Condorcet, Pétion, Bousseau. In the same month of November 1793 was introduced the revolutionary calendar, of which more will be said in the last chapter. The Holy Seventh Day disappeared in favor of the anti-clerical Tenth Day. Decadie, Saint's Days, and church festivals were wiped out. This new departure was a step forward on the religious question which, a few weeks later, brought about an acute crisis. Between October and December, the climax and the turn were reached in the Vindian War. After heavy fighting in October, Henri de la Roche Jacqueline had invaded Brittany, defeating the Republicans at Chateau Gontier on the 25th. Rossignol now had under his orders the garrison of Mainz and two excellent subordinates in Claibor and Marceau, who succeeded, in spite of their commander, in resting success at last. On the 13th of December, a tremendous struggle took place at Le Mans, in which the Vendine were beaten after a loss of about 15,000 men. Claibor gave them no respite, but a few days later cut up the remnants at Sabanet. Although fighting continued long afterwards, this proved the end of the Vendian Grand Army. These victories were immediately followed by judicial repression. The conventional carrier organized a revolutionary tribunal at Nantes, and committed worse horrors than Fouché had at Lyon. Finding a rate of 200 executions a day insufficient, he invented the Noyade. River barges were taken, their bottoms were hinged so as to open conveniently, and prisoners, tied in pairs, naked and regardless of sex, were taken out in them and released into the water. At Nantes, like Etta Ross and several other points, the proceedings of the revolutionary tribunals and of the gangs who worked the prisons were marked by gross immorality in dealing with the women prisoners. At Nantes, carrier, most thorough and most infamous of the terrorists, is said to have caused the death of 15,000 persons in four months. The fury of the revolution, which turned to frenzy and dementia at Nantes, blazed into a marvelous flame of patriotic energy on the frontiers. Nearly half a million men were enrolled in the course of 1793. A new volunteer battalion was added to each battalion of the old army, the new unit being named a Demi Brigade. Rankers were pushed up to high command, partly by political influence, partly for merit. Jordan, an old soldier, a shopkeeper, became general of the army of the north and on the 15th of October defeated Coburg at Vatinez. The brilliant Hoch, ex-corporeal of the French guards, was placed at the head of the army of the Moselle. Pichegrew, the son of a peasant, took over the army of the Rhine. Under these citizen generals, new tactics replaced the old. Pipe Clay and Method gave way to Sans Collotism and Dash. The greatest of the generals of the revolution said, quote, I had sooner see a soldier without his breeches than without his bayonet, unquote. Rapidity, surprise, the charging column, the helter-skelter pursuit with the innovations of the new French generals. They translated into terms of tactics and strategy, Danton's famous apostrophe, quote, audacity, more audacity, yet more audacity, unquote. End of chapter 13. Chapter 14 of the French Revolution. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kay Hand. The French Revolution by Robert Madison Johnson. Chapter 14, Thermador. Danton had fallen fast in popularity and influence since the moment when, after the fall of the Gironde, he had appeared to dominate the situation. On the 12th of October, weary, sick at heart, disgusted at the triumph of the Abeir tests, he had left Paris and apparently retiring from politics had gone back to his little country town of Arsice-sur-Aiub. There a month later, Robespierre sought him out and invited him to joint action for pulling down Abeir. With Robespierre, this meant no more than that Danton could help him, not that he would ever help Danton and doubtless, the latter realized it. But the bold course always drew him and he accepted. Danton returned to Paris on the 21st of November. Robespierre had been moved to this step by an alarming development of the Abeiratism. Anti-clericalism, hatred of the priest and among other things the priest stood behind in the Vendine. Voltarianism, materialism, all these elements had come to a head and the clique who worked with the commune had determined that the triumph of the revolution demanded the downfall of Catholicism which was, as it seemed, equivalent to religion. A wave of atheism swept through Paris. To be atheistic became the mark of a good citizen. Goebel, the archbishop and many priests accepted it and renounced the church. Then a further step was taken. On the 10th of November, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame was dedicated to reason, a handsome young woman from the opera personifying the goddess. Two weeks later, just as Danton reached Paris, the commune closed all the churches of the city for the purpose of dedicating them to the cult of reason. Robespierre, like most of the men of the revolution, was an enemy of the church, but he was not an atheist. On the contrary, he accepted in a very literal, dogmatic, and zealous way the doctrines of Rousseau, his prophet not only in politics, but in religion. To Robespierre, the abertist cult of reason was as gross blasphemy as it was to the most ardent Catholic and the Jacobin leader had nerfed himself for a struggle to destroy that cult. That was why he had appealed to Danton, though he knew that if Danton joined him in the fight, it would not be for conscience, for religious motive, but solely to destroy a bear and perhaps to regain control of the Committee of Public Safety. This last possibility Robespierre risked. The two allies immediately opened their campaign against a bear. In the convention, Danton, with rather hollow rhetoric declaimed in favor of popular festivals at which incense should be offered to the supreme being. Robespierre, at the Jacobins, allowing his venom to master his logic, declared, atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a supreme being who guards injured innocence and who punishes triumphant crime is democratic. If God did not exist, we should have to invent him. It was just at this moment when abertism and terrorism appeared interchangeable terms. And when the two most powerful men of the assembly had simultaneously turned against abertism, that de Molin stepped forward as the champion of the cause of mercy to pull down a bear and with a bear, the guillotine. Early in December, he brought out a newspaper once more, Le Vie Corriere, and in that boldly attacked the gang of thieves and murderers who were working the politics of the city of Paris. Public opinion awakened, voices were raised here and there. Presently, petitions began to flow into the convention. The tide was unloosened, how far would it go? Robespierre, crafty, cunning, shifty, at first cautiously used de Molin for his purposes. But when Danton himself, the arch-terrorist, bravely accepted the doctrine of clemency, Robespierre began to draw back. At the end of December, the return of Colo de Herbois from his massacres at Lyon stiffened Robespierre and rallied the Committee of Public Safety more firmly to the policy of terror. For some weeks, a desperate campaign of words was fought out inch by inch. Danton and de Molin lashing out desperately as the net closed slowly in on them. And it was not until the 20th of February 1794 that they received the death stroke. It was dealt by Saint Hust. Saint Hust, a doctrinaire and Puritan nearly as fanatical as his chief possessed what Robespierre lacked, decision, boldness, and a keen political sense. On his return from a mission to the armies he had found in Paris the situation already described and incited immediately to strike hard at once and at all the opponents of his party. The first measures were aimed at a bear and the commune for Saint Hust judged that they were right for the guillotine. A decree was pushed through the convention whereby it was ordered that the property of all individuals sent to the scaffold under the Loi des suspects should be distributed to the poor sans culasse. This infamous enactment was intended to cut from under the feet of the commune any popular support it still retained. As Saint Hust's provocation, the attacked party closed its ranks. The commune, the ministers, the Cordilliers, Abert, Henriot, proclamations were issued for a new insurrection. But Paris was getting weary of insurrections. Weary are still of the obvious black guardism and peculation of the Abertists, weary of the perpetual drip of blood from the guillotine. No insurrection could be organized. For some days, the opponents remained at arm's length. Finally, on the 17th of March, the Committee of Public Safety ordered the arrest of Abert, Pash, Chalmet, and a number of their prominent supporters and was almost surprised to find that the arrest was carried out with virtually no opposition. Paris raised not a finger to defend them and contentedly watched them go to the guillotine a week later. It was otherwise with Denton. Saint Hust gave him no time. With the Committee and the convention well in hand, he struck at once, less than a week after Abert had been dispatched. He read a long accusation against Denton to the convention, and that body weekly voted his arrest. Denton, de-mooning, and some of their chief supporters were hurried to prison and from prison to the revolutionary tribunal. On the second, third, and fourth day of April, they were tried by the packed bench and packed jury of that expeditious institution. But so uncertain was the temper of the vast throng that filled the streets outside, so violently did Denton struggle to burst his bonds that for a moment it seemed as though the immense reverberations of his voice heard it is said, even across the same, might awaken the force of the people as so often before and overthrow the Jacobin rule. A hasty message to the Committee of Public Safety. A hasty decree rushed through the convention and Denton's voice was quelled. Judgment delivered before the accused had finished his defense. On the next day, Denton and de-mooning went to the guillotine together. Paris very hushed at the immensity and suddenness of the catastrophe. De-mooning was gone, the leader of the revolt against the monarchy in 1789. The generous defender of the cause of mercy in 1794. And Denton was gone with all his sins, with all his venality. The most powerful figure of the revolution, more nearly the revolution itself than any man of his time. Complete triumph. As Robespierre, Saint-Yulest and Couthon looked about them, the three apostles leading France down the narrow path of civic virtue, they saw nothing but prostrate enemies. The power of the commune was gone and in its stead, the Committee of Public Safety virtually ruled Paris. Denton, the possible dictator, the impure man ready to adjust compromises with the enemies of liberty, lax in conscience and in action, Denton too was down. The solid phalanx of the Jacobin Club, the remnant of the commune, the revolutionary tribunal, stood solidly arrayed behind Robespierre and the convention voted with perfect regularity and unanimity every decree it was asked for. But this attitude of the convention only represented the momentary paralysis of fear. No one would venture on debate, leave alone opposition. Men like Saez attended punctiliously day after day, month after month and never opened their lips, only their eyes watching the corner of the mountain once the reeking oracle was delivered. In the city it was the same. The cafes, so tumultuous and excited at the opening of the revolution are oppressively silent now. A crowd gathers in the evening to hear the Gazette read, but in that crowd few dare to venture a word and opinion. Occasional whispers are exchanged, the list of those sent to the guillotine is eagerly listened to and then all disperse. And the prisons are full of aristocrats of suspects of wealthy bourgeois, those who have money occasionally by themselves out and generally succeed in living well. While outside the prison doors angry half-demented women revile the aristocrats who betray the people and who even in prison eat delicate food and drink expensive wines. Among the prisoners there is some light heartedness, much demoralization, with here and there at rare intervals a Madame Roland or an André Chene to keep high above degradation their minds and their characters. And every day comes a heart-rending hour of the roll call for the revolutionary tribunal with which so many means death. The tribunal itself loses more and more any sense of legality it had at the outset. Its procedure still carries a semblance of legal method, but it is really an automatic machine for affixing a legal label on political murders. And the tribunal as it progresses in its career becomes more and more insane in its hatred of the party it seeks to destroy of the anti-revolutionist of the aristocrat. It is not recorded that it ordered the arrest of a little girl of 13, Mamoiselle de Chabon's suspect because she had sucked the aristocratic milk of her mother. The tribunal acquitted one person in every five. Up to the fall of Denton, it had sent about 1,000 persons to guillotine. During the three months of Robespierre's domination it was to send another 1,600, increasing its activity by hysterical progression. When Thermador was reached about 30 individuals was the daily toll of the executioner. Robespierre triumphant immediately revealed all his limitations. He was not a successful statesman. He was only a successful religionist. His first care therefore was to attend to the dogma of the French people. He proposed that Ducati should be converted into a new Sabbath. He caused the drags of the abaritists, including Goebel, to be indicted for atheism when their turn came for the revolutionary tribunal. Robespierre sending a renegade Archbishop of Paris to the scaffold for atheism marks how very far the revolution had moved since the days of the state's general at Versailles. On the 7th of May, a month after Denton's death Robespierre delivered a long speech before the convention, a speech that marks his ebbing. It was a high-flowing rhapsody on civic morality and purism. Voltaire and the encyclopedists were bitterly attacked. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was deified. The state should adopt his a religious attitude, his universal church of nature. In that church, nature herself is the chief priest and there is no need of an infamous priesthood. Its ritual is virtue, its festivals the joy of the great people. Therefore, let the convention decree that the cult of the supreme being be established, but the duty of every citizen is to practice virtue, to punish tyrants and traitors, to sucker the unfortunate, to respect the weak, to defend the oppressed, to do good unto others. Let the convention institute competitions for hymns and songs to adorn the new cult, and let the committee of public safety that harassed and overburdened committee adjudicate and reward the successful hymnologists. The convention listened in silence, discussed, silent rebellion, but bowed its head. The new cult appealed to very few. Here and there, an intellectual Rousseauist accepted it, but the mass did what mankind in all countries and ages has done, refused to reason out what was a religious and therefore an emotional question. To the vast majority of Frenchmen, there was only one choice, Catholicism or non-Catholicism. And the cult of the supreme being was just as much non-Catholicism as that of reason. Robespierre, blind and satisfied, went on his way rejoicing. On the 8th of June, as president of the convention, he took the chief part in a solemn inauguration of the new religion. There were statues, processions, bonfires, speeches, and Robespierre be flowered, radiant in a new purple coat, pontificating over all. But beneath the surface, all was not well. The convention had not been led through the solemn farce without protest. Words of insult were hissed by more than one deputy as Robespierre passed with an earshot, and the Jacobin leader realized fully that behind the docile votes and silent faces, currents of rage and protest were stirring. For this, as for every ill, there was but one remedy, to sharpen the knife. Two days later, on the 10th, new decrees were placed before the convention for intensifying the operations of the revolutionary tribunal. New crimes were invented, spreading discouragement, perverting public opinion. The prisoner's defense was practically taken away from him, and most important, members of the convention lost their inviolability. The convention voted to decree, but terror had now pushed it to the wall and self-defense automatically sprang up. From that moment, the convention nerfed itself to the inevitable struggle. Biyad, Kayo, and Baray, the impurers of the Committee of Public Safety, looked despairingly on all sides of the convention for help to rid themselves of the monster, whose tentacles they already felt beginning to twine about them. Just at this critical moment, a trivial incident arose that pierced Robespierre's armor in its weakest joint, and that crystallized the fear of the convention into ridicule, ridicule that proved the precursor of revolt. Catherine Teot, a female spiritualist, or medium as we should call her at the present day, highly elated at the triumph of the supreme being over the unemotional goddess of reason, had made Robespierre the hero of her half-insane inspirations. She now announced to her credulous devotees that she was the mother of God, and that Robespierre was her son. It became the sensation of the day. Profiting by the temporary absence of saints used with the army in the Netherlands, the Committee of Public Safety decided that Catherine Teot was a nuisance and a public danger and must be arrested. Robespierre, intensely susceptible to ridicule, not knowing what to do, pettishly withdrew from the convention, confined himself to his house and the Jacobin Club, and left the Committee to carry out its intention. Every member of the convention realized that this was a distinct move against Robespierre. Saints used was with Jordan's army in the north and for the moment all eyes were fixed on that point. The campaign of 1794 might be decisive. France and Austria had put great armies in the field. The latter now controlled the belt of frontier fortresses and if pushing beyond these, she destroyed the French army. Paris and the revolution might soon be at an end. As the campaign opened, however, fortune took her place with the tricolor flag. Minor successes fell to Le Roe, Soham, McDonald's, Van Damme. In June, the campaign culminated. The armies met south of Brussels at Fleurus on the 25th of that month. For 15 hours, the battle raged. Clébert, with the French right wing holding his ground, the center and left slowly driven back. But at the close of the day, the French, not to be denied, came again. Jordan, with saints just by his side, drove his troops to a last effort, regained the lost ground and more. The Austrians gave way, turned to flight and one of the great victories of the epoch had been won. In a few hours, the glorious news had reached Paris and in Paris it was interpreted as an evil portent for Robes Pierre. For if there existed something that could possibly be described as a justification for terrorism, that something was national danger and national fear. Ever since the month of July, 1789, there had been a perfect correspondence between military pressure on Paris and the consequent outbreak of violence. But this great victory, Fleurus, seemed to mark the complete triumph of the armies of the Republic. All danger had been swept away, so why should terror and the guillotine continue? As the captured Austrian standards were paraded in the Thulière's gardens and presented to the convention on a lovely June afternoon, every inclination, every instinct was for rejoicing and goodwill. The thought that the cart was steadily, leguberously wending its way to the insatiable guillotine appeared unbearable. From this moment, the fever of conspiracy against Robes Pierre coursed rapidly through the convention. Some, like Cies, were statesmen and judged that the turn of the tide had come. Others, like Tallien or Joseph Cheney, were touched in their family, a brother, a wife, a sister, awaiting judgment and the guillotine. Others feared, others hoped, and yet others had vengeance to satisfy, especially the remnants of Danton's, a Brissau's, and a Baer's party. Saint Just saw the danger of the situation and attempted to cal opposition. He spoke threateningly of the necessity for a dictatorship and for a long list of proscriptions. It was the most silent member of the Committee of Public Safety, Carneau, who brought on the crisis, affecting an exclusive concern for the conduct of the war and perfunctorily signing that all related to internal affairs. He was secretly restless and anxious to escape from the horrible situation. Prompted by some of his colleagues, he ordered on the 24th of July that the Paris National Guard artillery should go to the front. This was taking the decisive arms out of the hands of Henriot, for Henriot had made his peace with Robespierre, had survived the fall of A-Bear and was still in command of the National Guard. There could be no mistaking the significance of Carneau's step. On the same night, Calfon loudly denounced it at the Jacobins and the club decided that it would petition the Convention to take action against Robespierre's enemies. The next day, Barreur replied. He read a long speech to the Convention in which, without venturing names, he blamed citizens who were not heartened by the victories of the army and who meditated further prescriptions. On the 26th, the 8th of Thermidor, Robespierre reappeared in the Assembly and ascended the Tribune to reply to Barreur. Robespierre felt that the tide was flowing against him. Instinct, premonitions, warned him that perhaps his end was not far off. In this speech, it was to be his last before the Convention. The melancholy note prevailed. There was no effort to conciliate, no attempt at being politic, only a slightly disheartened tone backed by the iteration which France already knew so well. The remedy for the evil must be sought in purification. The Convention, the Committee of Public Safety must be purged. Under the accustomed spell, the Convention listened to the end. The usual motions were put. Robespierre left the Assembly. It was voted that his speech should be printed and that it should be posted in all the communes of France. For a moment, it looked as though the iron yoke were immovably fixed. Then Cumbone went to the Tribune and ventured to discuss Robespierre's views. The odd followed and presently, the Convention, hardly realizing what it had done, rescinded the second of its two votes. Robespierre's speech should be printed but it should not be placarded on the walls. At the Jacobin Club, the rescinded vote of the Convention conveyed a meaning not to be mistaken. Robespierre repeated his Convention speech, which was greeted with acclamations. Beaud and Calot were received with hoots and groans, were driven out, and were erased from the list of members. Through the night, the Jacobins were beating up their supporters, threatening insurrection, and on their side, the leaders of the revolt attempted to rally the members of the Convention to stand firmly by them. The next day was the ninth of Thermidor. St. Jus made a bold attempt to control the situation. Early in the morning, he met his colleagues of the Committee of Public Safety and making advances to them, promised to lay before them a scheme that would reconcile all the divergent interests of the Convention. While the Committee awaited his arrival, he proceeded to the body of the Convention, obtained the Tribune, and began a speech. Releasing how far the temper of the Assembly was against him, he boldly opened by denouncing the personal positions of Robespierre and by advocating moderate courses. But he had not gone far when the members of the Committee, discovering the truth, returned to the Convention, and set to work with the help of the revolted members to disconcert him. St. Jus had perhaps only one weakness, but it was fatal to him on the ninth of Thermidor, for it was a weakness of voice. He was silenced by interruptions that constantly grew a storm air. Beaud followed him and made an impassioned attack on the Jacobins. Robespierre attempted to reply. But Colau de Herbois was presiding and Colau declined to give Robespierre the Tribune. The dinner rose, shouts of down with the tyrant, down with the dictator were raised. Tallien demanded a decree of accusation. Members pressed around the Jacobin leader, who at this last extremity tried to force his way to the Tribune. But the way was barred, he could only clutch the railings and asking for death, looking into despair at the public galleries that had so long shouted their Jacobin approval to him, he kept crying, La mort, la mort, he had fallen. The whole convention was roaring when Colau from the presidential chair announced the vote whereby Robespierre, St. Jus, Calthon, Henriot and several others were ordered under arrest. Henriot at this crisis again displayed his qualities of action. While the members of the convention were wasting time in talk and self-congratulation, he was getting his forces together. He succeeded in freeing the accused deputies from their place of temporary arrest and by the evening all were gathered together at the Hotel de Ville. The Jacobins declared for Robespierre, the party made determined efforts through the evening to raise insurrection. But only a small bodies of national guards could be kept together at the Hotel de Ville and these began to dwindle away rapidly late in the evening when heavy rain fell. Meanwhile, the convention had met again in evening session. It appointed one of its own members, Barras, to command all the military forces that could be mustered and then voted the escaped deputies outlaws for having broken arrest. The Western districts of the city rallied to the convention. Barras showed energy and courage. Information reached him of the state of affairs of the Hotel de Ville and at one o'clock in the morning of the 29th, he rallied several sectional battalions and marched quickly against the Robespierreists. At the Hotel de Ville, there was little resistance. It was raining hard and few remained with the Jacobin leaders. There was a short scuffle in which Robespierre apparently attempted to kill himself and lodged a bullet in his jaw. The arrests were carried out and a few hours later, no trial being necessary for outlaws, Robespierre, Saint-Justes-Henriot, Kaothon and about 20 more were driven through the streets to the guillotine. End of chapter 14. Chapter 15 of the French Revolution. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kay Hand. The French Revolution by Robert Madison Johnston. Chapter 15, The Last Days of the Convention. It is hard when considering the extraordinary features of the reign of terror to realize that in some directions it was accomplishing a useful purpose. If the revolution had been maintained so long in the face of anarchy, of reaction and of foreign pressure, it was only by a policy of devouring flames and demented angels. And meanwhile, whatever might be the value or the fate of Republican institutions, unconsciously the great social revolution had become an accomplished fact. In the short space of five years, but such years, social equality, freedom of opportunity, a new national attitude, a new national life had become ineradicable custom. The assemblies and their calmer moments had passed laws for educating and humanizing the French people. And every six months snatched from time and from Bourbon reaction for this purpose was worth some sort of price. When France rubbed her eyes after Thermador, drew breath and began to consider her situation, she found herself a vastly different France from that of 1789. The whole course of the revolution was like that of a rocket, rushing and whirring upwards, hesitating a moment, then bursting and scattering its fragments in a downward course to Earth. Thermador was the bursting point of the revolution and after Thermador we enter into a descending period when the shattered fragments gradually lose their flame, the great inspiration of the revolution dies out and only the less grand, less terrible, less noble, less horrifying things remain. The track of those shattered fragments must now be followed. The public interpreted the fall of Robespierre more accurately than did the convention and saw in it the end of the reign of terror rather than the end of an individual dictatorship. The nightmare was over, men began to breathe to talk. From day to day, almost from hour to hour, the tide rose, rejoicing quickly showed signs of turning into reaction. Within two weeks of the fall of Robespierre, it became necessary for the men who had pulled him down to affirm solemnly that the revolutionary government still existed and would continue to exist. This the convention declared by a formal vote on the 12th of August. At the same time the convention was returning to life, its members to self-assertion and if its measures were chiefly directed to preventing for the future any such preponderance as Robespierre had exercised, they also rapidly tended to get in line with the opinion now loudly proclaimed in all directions against terrorism. Within a few weeks, the Committee of Public Safety was increased in numbers and changed in personnel. Among its new members, Cambesers, Ciaz, Rubel, other committees took over enlarged powers. The commune was suppressed, Paris being ruled by officials chosen by the convention, but the sections were allowed to remain for it was their support had given Varys victory on the 9th of Thermidor and no one foresaw as yet that it was from the sections that the next serious danger would come. The National Guards by a series of measures were purged and converted into an exclusively middle-class organization, the revolutionary tribunal after disposing of several large batches from the Robespierreists and the commune was reorganized though not suppressed. Its worst judges and officials were removed, its procedure was strictly legalized and its activity was greatly moderated. It continued in existence however for about a year and almost for lack of business came to an end in the spring of 1795. The terrorists who had really led the revolt against Robespierre by gradual stages sank back. At the end of August, Colot, Belod, Embraer went off the Committee of Public Safety. Two weeks later, Carrier's conduct at Nantes incidentally came before the revolutionary tribunal and a storm arose about him that finally destroyed any power the terrorists still retained. The press was seething with recovered freedom and the horrors of Carrier gave the journalists a tremendous text. A long struggle was waged over him. In the convention, Belod and Colot, feeling that the attack on Carrier was in reality and attack against them and every other terrorist tried hard to save him. It was not till December that the convention finally decided to hand him over to justice and not till the 16th of that month that the revolutionary tribunal sent him to the guillotine. Among the striking changes brought about by the reaction after Thermador was that it put two extreme parties in violent antagonism with the convention and reasonable public opinion as a great neutral ground between them. One of these was the party of the defeated Jacobins, raging at their downfall, convinced that without their guidance the Republic must perish. The other was that of the Muscadines, the scented and pampered golden youth led by the convention in Al Ferron, asserting loudly their detestation of sans-culatism and democratic raggedness, breaking heads with their sticks when opportunity offered. During the excitement of Carrier's trial, the Muscadines made such violent demonstrations against the Jacobins that the Committee of Public Safety ordered the closing of the club. But neither the committee nor the Muscadines could destroy the Jacobin himself. Fleurus had been followed by continued success. Jordan and Pichagru drove the Austrians before them and overran the low countries to the Rhine. Then in October Pichagru opened a winter campaign, invaded Holland, and pushing on through snow and ice occupied Amsterdam in January and captured the Dutch fleet caught in the ice with his cavalry under Marot. At the same time Jordan was operating further east and sweeping up the valley of the Rhine, cleared the Austrians from Cologne and Koblenz. Further along the Rhine, the Prussians now only held mains on the French side of that river. To the south, the generals of the Republic occupied all the passes of the Alps into Italy and pushed triumphantly into Spain. With their hand full of these successes, the Committee of Public Safety opened peace negotiations at the turn of the year. With peace established, the committee would be able to transmit its power to a regular constitutional government. As the year 1795 opened, the interior situation began to get acutely troublesome once more. Although the convention was pursuing a temperate course, relaxing the rigor of the revolutionary legislation on all sides, its concessions did not satisfy but only encouraged the reactionary party. Worse than this, however, the winter turned out the worst since 1788 for shortage of food. The Parisian mob, however much it had now lost of its insurrectional vigor, felt starvation no less keenly than before and hunger made doubly dangerous the continued struggleings of Jacobins and Muscadines for power. The convention tried hard to steer a safe course between them. Toward the middle of February, it was the Jacobins who appeared the more dangerous. In their irritation in fear of the collapse of the Republic, they organized revolt. At Toulon, at Marseille, they seized control and were suppressed, not without difficulty. The convention thereupon ordered that the conduct of Biaud, Barre and Collot should be investigated. A few days later, it recalled the members of the Gironde who had succeeded in escaping from the operations of the revolutionary tribunal, among them Louvet, Issnard, Lan, Juinain. Alarmed at these steps, supported by the clamors of the starving for bread, the Paris Jacobins rose against the convention. On the 1st of April, the 12th of Germany, the assembly was invaded and for four hours was in the hands of a mob shouting for bread and the constitution. Then the National Guard rallied and restored order and the convention immediately decreed that Biaud, Barre and Collot should be deported to the colony of Guyana. Guyana, the mitigated guillotine for nearly a century, the vogue in French politics. The guillotine, Sèche. Barre's sinister saying, only the dead never come back, was not justified in his case. He alone of the three succeeded in evading the decreed punishment and lived, always plausible and always finding supporters, to the days of Louis Philippe when he died obscurely. This was a great success for the moderates, but two observers of the revolution from a distance, from London, Berlin or Vienna, the event appeared under a slightly different light. Pisa Gru happened to be in Paris at the moment and Pisa Gru had been made military commander of the city. In reality, he had little to do with suppressing the insurrection, but from a distance it appeared that the Republic had found in its democratic general, the conqueror of Holland, that solid support of force without which the establishment of law and order in France appeared impossible. A few days later, the pacification began. At Basel, Bartolome had been negotiating for months past, and now on the 5th of April, he signed a treaty with Hardenburg, the representative of Prussia. The government of King Frederick William was far too much interested in the third partition of Poland, then proceeding far too little interested in the Rhineland, to maintain the war longer. It agreed to give the French Republic a free hand to the south of the Rhine in return for which it was to retain a free hand in northern Germany, an arrangement which was to underline many important phases of Franco-Prussian relations from that day until 1871. The peace with Prussia was followed by one with Holland on the 16th of March, which placed the smaller state under conditions approaching Vassalage to France. But with England and Austria closely allied, the war still continued, and that not only because Austria was as yet unwilling to face so great a territorial loss as that of the Netherlands, but also because the Committee of Public Safety was not yet anxious for a complete pacification. Already it was clear that the real force of the Republic lay in her armies, and the convention did not desire the presence of those armies and their generals in Paris. In the capital, the situation continued bad from winter to spring, from spring to summer. As late as May, famine was severe and people were frequently found in the streets, dead of starvation. To meet the general dissatisfaction, embassiers brought in a proposal for a new constitution. But nothing could allay the agitation, and in May the reactionary party, now frankly royalist, caused serious riots in the South. At Marseille, AI and other towns, many Jacobins were killed, and so grave did the situation appear that on the 10th, the Committee of Public Safety was given enlarged powers and throwing itself back relaxed its severity against the Jacobins. 10 days later came a second famine riot, the insurrection of the first of prairie, a mob honeycombed with Jacobin and reactionary agitators, invading the convention as in germinal and clamoring for bread into constitution. The disorder in the assembly was grave and long continued. One member was killed, but the government succeeded in getting national guards to the scene, and in the course of the next two days, poured 20,000 regular troops into the city. Order was easily restored, several executions took place, and the convention voted the creation of a permanent guard for its protection. Royalism had been raising its head fast since Thermidor. The blows of the convention, even after the first of prairie, had been mostly aimed at Jacobinism. The royalists were looking to a new constitution as an opportunity for a moderate monarchical form of government, with the little Dauphine as king, under the tutelage of a strong regency that would maintain the essential things of the revolution. Their aspirations were far from unreasonable, far from impossible, until on the 10th of June, death barred the way by removing the young prince. The details of his detention at the temple are perhaps the most repellent in the whole history of the revolution, separated from his mother and his aunt, the princess Elizabeth, who followed the queen to the scaffold. He was deliberately ill-used by Simone and those who followed him as custodians, so that after Thermidor, he was found in an indescribable state of filth and ill-health. His treatment after that date was improved, but his health was irretrievably broken, so that when, in the early part of 1795, the royalists and many moderates began to look towards the temple for the solution of the constitutional question, the Committee of Public Safety began to hope for the boy's death. This hope was in part translated into action. The Dauphin was not given such quarters, such food or such medical attendance as his condition required, and his death was willfully hastened by the government. How important a factor he really was appeared by the elation displayed by the Republicans over the event. For Louis the 17th was a possible king, while Louis the 18th, for the moment, was not. It was the Comte de Proven, brother of Louis the 16th, who succeeded to the claim. He was one of the old court, he had learned nothing in exile, he was associated with the detested emigrés, the men who had fought in Condes battalions against the armies of the Republic. And as if all this were not enough to make public opinion hostile, he issued proclamations on the death of his nephew, announcing his assumption of the title of King of France, and his determination to restore the old order. Within a few days a royalist expedition, conveyed on English ships, landed at Kiberon on the Breton coast, and fanned to fresh flame the embers of revolt, still smoldering in Brittany and the Vendee. Hosh had been placed in charge of western France some months before this, and by judicious measures had fairly succeeded in pacifying the country. He met the new emergency with quick response. Collecting a sufficient force with great promptness he merged against the royalists who had been joined by three or four thousand Breton peasants. He fought them back to Kiberon, cooped them up, stormed their position, gave no quarter, and drove a remnant of less than two thousand back to their ships. That was almost the end of the trouble in the west of France. There was still a little fighting in the Vendee, but after the capture and execution of Charette and Stofflet, in the early part of 1796, Hosh was left master of the situation. While the royalists were being shot down at Kiberon, the convention was debating a new constitution for France, a constitution no longer theoretical, no longer a political weapon with which to destroy the monarchy, but practical, constructive, framed by the light of vivid political experience, intended to maintain the republic and to make of it an acceptable working machine. What was decided on was this. The franchise which the legislative had extended to the working class after the 10th of August was to be withdrawn from them and restricted once more to the middle class. There were to be two houses. The lower was to be known as the Corps Lejustif or Council of 500. The upper was to be chosen by the lower, was to number only 250, and was to be known as the Ancients. The lower house was to initiate legislation. The upper one was to do little more than to exercise the Suspensive Vito which the Constitution of 1791 had given to the king. Then there was to be an executive body and that was merely the Committee of Public Safety modified. There were to be five directors elected for individual terms of five years and holding general control over foreign affairs, the Army and Navy, high police, and the ministries. The constitution further reaffirmed the declaration of the rights of man and guaranteed the sales of the national lands. This constitution had many good points, was not ill adapted to the needs and aspirations of France in the year 1795 and it was hailed with delight by the public. This at first seemed a good symptom, but the convention soon discovered that this delight was founded not so much on the excellence of the Constitution as on the fact that putting it into force would enable France to get rid of the convention of the men of the revolution. This was a sobering thought. After some consideration of this difficult point the convention decided about the end of August on a drastic step. To prevent the country from excluding the men of the convention from the Council of 500 it enacted that two-thirds of the members of the new body must be taken from the old. This was the famous decree of the two-thirds or decree of fructidor. Now there was something to be said for this decree. It was, of course, largely prompted by the selfish motive of men who having power wished to retain it. But it could be urged that since the fall of Robespierre the convention had steered a difficult course with some ability and moderation and had evolved a reasonable Constitution for France. Was it not therefore necessary to safeguard that Constitution by preventing the electors from placing its execution into the hands of a totally untried body of men? Whatever there might be to say in favor of the decrees of fructidor they provoked an explosion of disgust and disappointment on the part of the public. The sections of Paris protested loudly sent petitions to the convention asking for the withdrawal of the decrees and getting no satisfaction took up a threatening attitude. The convention had weathered worst-looking storms, however it held on its course and appointed the 12th of October for the elections. The sections led by the section La Pella-Tier thereupon organized resistance. On the 4th of October, 12th of Venda Maire the sections of Paris called out their National Guard. The convention replied by ordering General Minot in command of the regular troops in the city to restore order. Minot had few troops and was weak. He failed and that night the convention suspended him and, as in Thermidor, gave Barris supreme command. Barris acted promptly. He called to his help every regular army officer in Paris at that moment, among others a young Corsican brigadier blown apart by name and assigned troops and a post to each. He hastily dispatched another young officer, Mirat, with his hasars, to bring some field pieces into the city and so it passed the night. On the next day the crisis came to a head. The National Guards, between 20,000 and 30,000 strong, began their march on the convention. They were firmly met at various points by the government troops. General Bonaparte caught the insurgents in the rue Saint Honoré at just a nice range for his guns and promptly poured grape in and completely dispersed to them. Once more the convention had put down insurrection and once more it showed moderation in its victory. It only allowed two executions to take place but held Paris down firmly with regular troops. Bonaparte, whom Barris already knew favorably, had made so strong an impression and had rendered such good service that he was appointed second in command and not long after got Barris's reversion and became general-in-chief of the army of the interior. With this last vigorous stroke the convention closed its extraordinary career, a career that began with a monarchy, passed through the reign of terror and finished in the directoir. End of chapter 15