captivity, subject to every description of privation, kept in ignorance of the state of his country and of liberty, with no prospect before him but that of perpetual and harsh imprisonment, he displayed the most heroic courage. He might have obtained his liberty by making certain retractations, but he preferred remaining buried in his dungeon to abandoning in the least degree the sacred cause he had embraced.
There have been in our day few lives more pure than Lafayette’s; few characters more beautiful; few men whose popularity has been more justly won and longer maintained. After defending liberty in America at the side of Washington, he desired to establish it in the same manner in France; but this noble part was impossible in our revolution. When a people in the pursuit of liberty has no internal dissension, and no foes but foreigners, it may find a deliverer; may produce, in Switzerland a William Tell, in the Netherlands a prince of Orange, in America a Washington; but when it pursues it against its own countrymen and foreigners, at once amidst factions and battles, it can only produce a Cromwell or a Bonaparte, who become the dictators of revolutions when the struggle subsides and parties are exhausted. Lafayette, an actor in the first epoch of the crisis, enthusiastically declared for its results. He became the general of the middle class, at the head of the national guard under the constituent assembly, in the army under the legislative assembly. He had risen by it, and he would end with it. It may be said of him, that if he committed some faults of position, he had ever but one object, liberty, and that he employed but one means, the law. The manner in which, when yet quite young, he devoted himself to the deliverance of the two worlds, his glorious conduct and his invariable firmness, will transmit his name with honour to posterity, with whom a man cannot have two reputations, as in the time of party, but his own alone.
The authors of the events of the 10th of August became more and more divided, having no common views as to the results which should arise from that revolution. The more daring party, which had got hold of the commune or municipality, wished by means of that commune to rule Paris; by means of Paris, the national assembly; and by means of the assembly, France. After having effected the transference of Louis XVI. to the Temple, it threw down all the statues of the kings, and destroyed all the emblems of the monarchy. The department exercised a right of superintendence over the municipality; to be completely independent, it abrogated this right. The law required certain conditions to constitute a citizen; it decreed the cessation of these, in order that the multitude might be introduced into the government of the state. At the same time, it demanded the establishment of an extraordinary tribunal to try _the conspirators of the 10th of August_. As the assembly did not prove sufficiently docile, and endeavoured by proclamations to recall the people to more just and moderate sentiments, it received threatening messages from the Hôtel de Ville. “As a citizen,” said a member of the commune, “as a magistrate of the people, I come to announce to you that this evening, at midnight, the tocsin will sound, the drum beat to arms. The people are weary of not being avenged; tremble lest they administer justice themselves.” “If, before two or three hours pass, the foreman of the jury be not named,” said another, “and if the jury be not itself in a condition to act, great calamities will befall Paris.” To avert the threatened outbreaks, the assembly was obliged to appoint an extraordinary criminal tribunal. This tribunal condemned a few persons, but the commune having conceived the most terrible projects, did not consider it sufficiently expeditious.
At the head of the commune were Marat, Panis, Sergent, Duplain, Lenfent, Lefort, Jourdeuil, Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, Tallien, etc.; but the chief leader of the party at that time was Danton. He, more than any other person, had distinguished himself on the 10th of August. During the whole of that night he had rushed about from the sections to the barracks of the Marseillais and Bretons, and from these to the Faubourgs. A member of the revolutionary commune, he had directed its operations, and had afterwards been appointed minister of justice.
Danton was a gigantic revolutionist; he deemed no means censurable so they were useful, and, according to him, men could do whatever they dared attempt. Danton, who has been termed the Mirabeau of the populace bore a physical resemblance to that tribune of the higher classes; he had irregular features, a powerful voice, impetuous gesticulation, a daring eloquence, a lordly brow. Their vices, too, were the same; only Mirabeau’s were those of a patrician, Danton’s those of a democrat; that which there was of daring in the conceptions of Mirabeau, was to be found in Danton, but in another way, because, in the revolution, he belonged to another class and another epoch. Ardent, overwhelmed with debts and wants, of dissolute habits, given up now to his passions, now to his party, he was formidable while in the pursuit of an object, but became indifferent as soon as he had obtained it. This powerful demagogue presented a mixture of the most opposite vices and qualities. Though he had sold himself to the court, he did not seem sordid; he was one of those who, so to speak, give an air of freedom even to baseness. He was an absolute exterminator, without being personally ferocious; inexorable towards masses, humane, generous even towards individuals. [Footnote: At the time the commune was arranging the massacre of the 2nd September, he saved all who applied to him; he, of his own accord, released from prison Duport, Barnave, and Ch. Lameth, his personal antagonists.] Revolution, in his opinion, was a game at which the conqueror, if he required it, won the life of the conquered. The welfare of his party was, in his eyes, superior to law and even to humanity; this will explain his endeavours after the 10th of August, and his return to moderation when he considered the republic established.
At this period the Prussians, advancing on the plan of invasion described above, passed the frontier, after a march of twenty days. The army of Sedan was without a leader, and incapable of resisting a force so superior in numbers and so much better organised. On the 20th of August, Longwy was invested by the Prussians; on the 21st it was bombarded, and on the 24th it capitulated. On the 30th the hostile army arrived before Verdun, invested it, and began to bombard it. Verdun taken, the road to the capital was open. The capture of Longwy, and the approach of so great a danger, threw Paris into the utmost agitation and alarm. The executive council, composed of the ministers, was summoned by the committee of general defence, to deliberate on the best measures to be adopted in this perilous conjuncture. Some proposed to wait for the enemy under the walls of the capital, others to retire to Saumur. “You are not ignorant,” said Danton, when his turn to speak arrived, “that France is Paris; if you abandon the capital to the foreigner, you surrender yourselves, and you surrender France. It is in Paris that we must defend ourselves by every possible means. I cannot sanction any plan tending to remove you from it. The second project does not appear to me any better. It is impossible to think of fighting under the walls of the capital. The 10th of August has divided France into two parties, the one attached to royalty, the other desiring a republic. The latter, the decided minority of which in the state cannot be concealed, is the only one on which you can rely to fight; the other will refuse to march; it will excite Paris in favour of the foreigner, while your defenders, placed between two fires, will perish in repelling him. Should they fall, which seems to me beyond a doubt, your ruin and that of France are certain; if, contrary to all expectation, they return victorious over the coalition, this victory will still be a defeat for you; for it will have cost you thousands of brave men, while the royalists, more numerous than you, will have lost nothing of their strength and influence. It is my opinion, that to disconcert their measures and stop the enemy, we must make the royalists fear.” The committee, at once understanding the meaning of these words, were thrown into a state of consternation. “Yes, I tell you,” resumed Danton, “we must make them fear.” As the committee rejected this proposition by a silence full of alarm, Danton concerted with the commune. His aim was to put down its enemies by terror, to involve the multitude more and more by making them his accomplices, and to leave the revolution no other refuge than victory.
Domiciliary visits were made with great and gloomy ceremony; a large number of persons whose condition, opinions, or conduct rendered them objects of suspicion, were thrown into prison. These unfortunate persons were taken especially from the two dissentient classes, the nobles and the clergy, who were charged with conspiracy under the legislative assembly. All citizens capable of bearing arms were enrolled in the Champ de Mars, and departed on the first of September for the frontier. The générale was beat, the tocsin sounded, cannon were fired, and Danton, presenting himself to the assembly to report the measures taken to save the country, exclaimed: “The cannon you hear are no alarm cannon, but the signal for attacking the enemy! To conquer them, to prostrate them, what is necessary? Daring, again daring, and still again and ever daring!” Intelligence of the taking of Verdun arrived during the night of the 1st of September. The commune availed themselves of this moment, when Paris, filled with terror, thought it saw the enemy already at its gates, to execute their fearful projects. The cannon were again fired, the tocsin sounded, the barriers were closed, and the massacre began.
During three days, the prisoners confined in the Carmes, the Abbaye, the Conciergérie, the Force, etc., were slaughtered by a band of about three hundred assassins, directed and paid by the commune. This body, with a calm fanaticism, prostituting to murder the sacred forms of justice, now judges, now executioners, seemed rather to be practising a calling than to be exercising vengeance; they massacred without question, without remorse, with the conviction of fanatics and the obedience of executioners. If some peculiar circumstances seemed to move them, and to recall them to sentiments of humanity, to justice, and to mercy, they yielded to the impression for a moment, and then began anew. In this way a few persons were saved; but they were very few. The assembly desired to prevent the massacres, but were unable to do so. The ministry were as incapable as the assembly; the terrible commune alone could order and do everything; Pétion, the mayor, had been cashiered; the soldiers placed in charge of the prisoners feared to resist the murderers, and allowed them to take their own course; the crowd seemed indifferent, or accomplices; the rest of the citizens dared not even betray their consternation. We might be astonished that so great a crime should, with such deliberation, have been conceived, executed, and endured, did we not know what the fanaticism of party will do, and what fear will suffer. But the chastisement of this enormous crime fell at last upon the heads of its authors. The majority of them perished in the storm they had themselves raised, and by the same violent means that they had themselves employed. Men of party seldom escape the fate they have made others undergo.
The executive council, directed, as to military operations by general Servan, advanced the newly-levied battalions towards the frontier. As a man of judgment, he was desirous of placing a general at the threatened point; but the choice was difficult. Among the generals who had declared in favour of the late political events, Kellermann seemed only adapted for a subordinate command, and the authorities had therefore merely placed him in the room of the vacillative and incompetent Luckner. Custine was but little skilled in his art; he was fit for any dashing _coup de main_, but not for the conduct of a great army intrusted with the destiny of France. The same military inferiority was chargeable upon Biron, Labourdonnaie, and the rest, who were therefore left at their old stations, with the corps under their command. Dumouriez alone remained, against whom the Girondists still retained some rancour, and in whom they, moreover, suspected the ambitious views, the tastes, and character of an adventurer, while they rendered justice to his superior talents. However, as he was the only general equal to so important a position, the executive council gave him the command of the army of the Moselle.
Dumouriez repaired in all haste from the camp at Maulde to that of Sedan. He assembled a council of war, in which the general opinion was in favour of retiring towards Châlons or Rheims, and covering themselves with the Marne. Far from adopting this dangerous plan, which would have discouraged the troops, given up Lorraine, Trois Evêchés, and a part of Champagne, and thrown open the road to Paris, Dumouriez conceived a project full of genius. He saw that it was necessary, by a daring march, to advance on the forest of Argonne, where he might infallibly stop the enemy. This forest had four issues; that of the Chêne-Populeux on the left; those of the Croix-au-Bois and of Grandpré in the centre, and that of Les Islettes on the right, which opened or closed the passage into France. The Prussians were only six leagues from the forest, and Dumouriez had twelve to pass over, and his design of occupying it to conceal, if he hoped for success. He executed his project skilfully and boldly. General Dillon, advancing on the Islettes, took possession of them with seven thousand men; he himself reached Grandpré, and there established a camp of thirteen thousand men. The Croix-au-Bois, and the Chêne-Populeux were in like manner occupied and defended by some troops. It was here that he wrote to the minister of war, Servan:–“Verdun is taken; I await the Prussians. The camps of Grandpré and Les Islettes are the Thermopylae of France; but I shall be more fortunate than Leonidas.”
In this position, Dumouriez might have stopped the enemy, and himself have securely awaited the succours which were on their road to him from every part of France. The various battalions of volunteers repaired to the camps in the interior, whence they were despatched to his army, as soon as they were at all in a state of discipline. Beurnonville, who was on the Flemish frontier, had received orders to advance with nine thousand men, and to be at Rhétel, on Dumouriez’s left, by the 13th of September. Duval was also on the 7th to march with seven thousand men to the Chêne-Populeux; and Kellermann was advancing from Metz, on his right, with a reinforcement of twenty-two thousand men. Time, therefore, was all that was necessary.
The duke of Brunswick, after taking Verdun, passed the Meuse in three columns. General Clairfait was operating on his right, and prince Hohenlohe on his left. Renouncing all hope of driving Dumouriez from his position by attacking him in front, he tried to turn him. Dumouriez had been so imprudent as to place nearly his whole force at Grandpré and the Islettes, and to put only a small corps at Chêne-Populeux and Coix-au- Bois–posts, it is true, of minor importance. The Prussians, accordingly, seized upon these, and were on the point of turning him in his camp at Grandpré, and of thus compelling him to lay down his arms. After this grand blunder, which neutralized his first manoeuvres, he did not despair of his situation. He broke up his camp secretly during the night of the 14th September, passed the Aisne, the approach to which might have been closed to him, made a retreat as able as his advance on the Argonne had been, and concentrated his forces in the camp at Sainte-Menehould. He had already delayed the advance of the Prussians at Argonne. The season, as it advanced, became bad. He had now only to maintain his post till the arrival of Kellermann and Beurnonville, and the success of the campaign would be certain. The troops had become disciplined and inured, and the army amounted to about seventy thousand men, after the arrival of Beurnonville and Kellermann, which took place on the 17th.
The Prussian army had followed the movements of Dumouriez. On the 20th, it attacked Kellermann at Valmy, in order to cut off from the French army the retreat on Châlons. There was a brisk cannonade on both sides. The Prussians advanced in columns towards the heights of Valmy, to carry them. Kellermann also formed his infantry in columns, enjoined them not to fire, but to await the approach of the enemy, and charge them with the bayonet. He gave this command, with the cry of _Vive la nation!_ and this cry, repeated from one end of the line to the other, startled the Prussians still more than the firm attitude of our troops. The duke of Brunswick made his somewhat shaken battalions fall back; the firing continued till the evening; the enemy attempted a fresh attack, but were repulsed. The day was ours; and the success of Valmy, almost insignificant in itself, produced on our troops, and upon opinion in France, the effect of the most complete victory.
From the same epoch may be dated the discouragement and retreat of the enemy. The Prussians had entered upon this campaign on the assurance of the emigrants that it would be a mere military promenade. They were without magazines or provisions; in the midst of a perfectly open country, they encountered a resistance each day more energetic; the incessant rains had broken up the roads; the soldiers marched knee-deep in mud, and, for four days past, boiled corn had been their only food. Diseases, produced by the chalky water, want of clothing, and damp, had made great ravages in the army. The duke of Brunswick advised a retreat, contrary to the opinion of the king of Prussia and the emigrants, who wished to risk a battle, and get possession of Châlons. But as the fate of the Prussian monarchy depended on its army, and the entire ruin of that army would be the inevitable consequence of a defeat, the duke of Brunswick’s opinion prevailed. Negotiations were opened, and the Prussians, abating their first demands, now only required the restoration of the king upon the constitutional throne. But the convention had just assembled; the republic had been proclaimed, and the executive council replied, “that the French republic could listen to no proposition until the Prussian troops had entirely evacuated the French territory.” The Prussians, upon this, commenced their retreat on the evening of the 30th of September. It was slightly disturbed by Kellermann, whom Dumouriez sent in pursuit, while he himself proceeded to Paris to enjoy his triumph, and concert measures for the invasion of Belgium. The French troops re-entered Verdun and Longwy; and the enemy, after having crossed the Ardennes and Luxembourg, repassed the Rhine at Coblentz, towards the end of October. This campaign had been marked by general success. In Flanders, the duke of Saxe-Teschen had been compelled to raise the siege of Lille, after seven days of a bombardment, contrary, both in its duration and in its useless barbarity, to all the usages of war. On the Rhine, Custine had taken Trèves, Spires, and Mayence. In the Alps, general Montesquiou had invaded Savoy, and general Anselme the territory of Nice. Our armies, victorious in all directions, had everywhere assumed the offensive, and the revolution was saved.
If we were to present the picture of a state emerging from a great crisis, and were to say: “There were in this state an absolute government whose authority has been restricted; two privileged classes which have lost their supremacy; a vast population, already freed by the effect of civilization and intelligence, but without political rights, and who have been obliged, by reason of repeated refusals, to gain these for themselves”; if we were to add: “The government, after opposing this revolution, submitted to it, but the privileged classes constantly opposed it,”–the following would probably be concluded from these data:
“The government will be full of regret, the people will exhibit distrust, and the privileged classes will attack the new order of things, each in its own way. The nobility, unable to do so at home, from its weakness there, will emigrate, in order to excite foreign powers, who will make preparations for attack; the clergy, who would lose its means of action abroad, will remain at home, where it will seek out foes to the revolution. The people, threatened from without, in danger at home, irritated against the emigrants who seek to arm foreign powers, against foreign powers about to attack its independence, against the clergy, who excite the country to insurrection, will treat as enemies clergy, emigrants, and foreign powers. It will require first surveillance over, then the banishment of the refractory priests; confiscation of the property of the emigrants; war against allied Europe, in order to forestall it. The first authors of the revolution will condemn such of these measures as shall violate the law; the continuators of the revolution will, on the contrary, regard them as the salvation of the country; and discord will arise between those who prefer the constitution to the state, and those who prefer the state to the constitution. The monarch, induced by his interests as king, his affections and his conscience, to reject such a course of policy, will pass for an accomplice of the counter-revolution, because he will appear to protect it. The revolutionists will then seek to gain over the king by intimidation, and failing in this, will overthrow his authority.”
Such was the history of the legislative assembly. Internal disturbances led to the decree against the priests; external menaces to that against the emigrants; the coalition of foreign powers to war against Europe; the first defeat of our armies, to the formation of the camp of twenty thousand. The refusal of Louis XVI. to adopt most of these decrees, rendered him an object of suspicion to the Girondists; the dissensions between the latter and the constitutionalists, who desired some of them to be legislators, as in time of peace, others, enemies, as in time of war, disunited the partisans of the revolution. With the Girondists the question of liberty was involved in victory, and victory in the decrees. The 20th of June was an attempt to force their acceptance; but having failed in its effect, they deemed that either the crown or the revolution must be renounced, and they brought on the 10th of August. Thus, but for emigration which induced the war, but for the schism which induced the disturbances, the king would probably have agreed to the constitution, and the revolutionists would not have dreamed of the republic.
THE NATIONAL CONVENTION
CHAPTER VI
FROM THE 20TH OF SEPTEMBER, 1792, TO THE 21ST OF JANUARY, 1793
The convention was constituted on the 20th of September, 1792, and commenced its deliberations on the 21st. In its first sitting it abolished royalty, and proclaimed the republic. On the 22nd, it appropriated the revolution to itself, by declaring it would not date from _year IV. of Liberty_; but from _year I. of the French Republic_. After these first measures, voted by acclamation, with a sort of rivalry in democracy and enthusiasm in the two parties, which had become divided at the close of the legislative assembly, the convention, instead of commencing its labours, gave itself up to intestine quarrels. The Girondists and the Mountain, before they established the new revolution, desired to know to which of them it was to belong, and the enormous dangers of their position did not divert them from this contest. They had more than ever to fear the efforts of Europe. Austria, Prussia, and some of the German princes having attacked France before the 10th of August, there was every reason to believe that the other sovereigns of Europe would declare against it after the fall of the monarchy, the imprisonment of the king, and the massacres of September. Within, the enemies of the revolution had increased. To the partisans of the ancient regime, of the aristocracy and clergy, were now to be added the friends of constitutional monarchy, with whom the fate of Louis XVI. was an object of earnest solicitude, and those who imagined liberty impossible without order, or under the empire of the multitude. Amidst so many obstacles and adversaries, at a moment when their strictest union was requisite, the Gironde and the Mountain attacked each other with the fiercest animosity. It is true that these two parties were wholly incompatible, and that their respective leaders could not combine, so strong and varied were the grounds of separation in their rivalry for power, and in their designs.
Events had compelled the Girondists to become republicans. It would have suited them far better to have remained constitutionalists. The integrity of their purposes, their distaste for the multitude, their aversion for violent measures, and especially the prudence which counselled them only to attempt that which seemed possible–every circumstance made this imperative upon them; but they had not been left free to remain what they at first were. They had followed the bias which led them onward to the republic, and they had gradually habituated themselves to this form of government. They now desired it ardently and sincerely, but they felt how difficult it would be to establish and consolidate it. They deemed it a great and noble thing; but they felt that the men for it were wanting. The multitude had neither the intelligence nor the virtue proper for this kind of government. The revolution effected by the constituent assembly was legitimate, still more because it was possible than because it was just; it had its constitution and its citizens. But a new revolution, which should call the lower classes to the conduct of the state, could not be durable. It would injuriously affect too many interests, and have but momentary defenders, the lower class being capable of sound action and conduct in a crisis, but not for a permanency. Yet, in consenting to this second revolution, it was this inferior class which must be looked to for support. The Girondists did not adopt this course, and they found themselves placed in a position altogether false; they lost the assistance of the constitutionalists without procuring that of the democrats; they had a hold upon neither extreme of society. Accordingly, they only formed a half party, which was soon overthrown, because it had no root. The Girondists, after the 10th of August, were, between the middle class and the multitude, what the monarchists, or the Mounier and Necker party, had been after the 24th of July, between the privileged classes and the bourgeoisie.
The Mountain, on the contrary, desired a republic of the people. The leaders of this party, annoyed at the credit of the Girondists, sought to overthrow and to supersede them. They were less intelligent, and less eloquent, but abler, more decided, and in no degree scrupulous as to means. The extremest democracy seemed to them the best of governments, and what they termed the people, that is, the lowest populace, was the object of their constant adulation, and most ardent solicitude. No party was more dangerous; most consistently it laboured for those who fought its battle.
Ever since the opening of the convention, the Girondists had occupied the right benches, and the Mountain party the summit of the left, whence the name by which they are designated. The Girondists were the strongest in the assembly; the elections in the departments had generally been in their favour. A great number of the deputies of the legislative assembly had been re-elected, and as at that time connexion effected much, the members who had been united with the deputation of the Gironde and the commune of Paris before the 10th of August, returned with the same opinions. Others came without any particular system or party, without enmities or attachments: these formed what was then called the _Plaine_ or the _Marais_. This party, taking no interest in the struggles between the Gironde and the Mountain, voted with the side they considered the most just, so long as they were allowed to be moderate; that is to say, so long as they had no fears for themselves.
The Mountain was composed of deputies of Paris, elected under the influence of the commune of the 10th of August, and of some very decided republicans from the provinces; it, from time to time, increased its ranks with those who were rendered enthusiastic by circumstances, or who were impelled by fear. But though inferior in the convention in point of numbers, it was none the less very powerful, even at this period. It swayed Paris; the commune was devoted to it, and the commune had managed to constitute itself the supreme authority in the state. The Mountain had sought to master the departments, by endeavouring to establish an identity of views and conduct between the municipality of Paris and the provincial municipalities; they had not, however, completely succeeded in this, and the departments were for the most part favourable to their adversaries, who cultivated their good will by means of pamphlets and journals sent by the minister Roland, whose house the Mountain called a _bureau d’esprit public_, and whose friends they called _intrigants_. But besides this junction of the communes, which sooner or later would take place, they were adopted by the Jacobins. This club, the most influential as well as the most ancient and extensive, changed its views at every crisis without changing its name; it was a framework ready for every dominating power, excluding all dissentients. That at Paris was the metropolis of Jacobinism, and governed the others almost imperiously. The Mountain had made themselves masters of it; they had already driven the Girondists from it, by denunciation and disgust, and replaced the members taken from the bourgeoisie by sans-culottes. Nothing remained to the Girondists but the ministry, who, thwarted by the commune, were powerless in Paris. The Mountain, on the contrary, disposed of all the effective force of the capital, of the public mind by the Jacobins, of the sections and faubourgs by the sans-culottes, of the insurrectionists by the municipality.
The first measure of parties after having decreed the republic, was to contend with each other. The Girondists were indignant at the massacres of September, and they beheld with horror on the benches of the convention the men who had advised or ordered them. Above all others, two inspired them with antipathy and disgust; Robespierre, whom they suspected of aspiring to tyranny; and Marat, who from the commencement of the revolution had in his writings constituted himself the apostle of murder. They denounced Robespierre with more animosity than prudence; he was not yet sufficiently formidable to incur the accusation of aspiring to the dictatorship. His enemies by reproaching him with intentions then improbable, and at all events incapable of proof, themselves augmented his popularity and importance.
Robespierre, who played so terrible a part in our revolution, was beginning to take a prominent position. Hitherto, despite his efforts, he had had superiors in his own party: under the constituent assembly, its famous leaders; under the legislative, Brissot and Pétion; on the 10th of August, Danton. At these different periods he had declared himself against those whose renown or popularity offended him. Only able to distinguish himself among the celebrated personages of the first assembly by the singularity of his opinions, he had shown himself an exaggerated reformer; during the second, he became a constitutionalist, because his rivals were innovators, and he had talked in favour of peace to the Jacobins, because his rivals advocated war. From the 10th of August he essayed in that club to ruin the Girondists, and to supplant Danton, always associating the cause of his vanity with that of the multitude. This man, of ordinary talents and vain character, owed it to his inferiority to rank with the last, a great advantage in times of revolution; and his conceit drove him to aspire to the first rank, to do all to reach it, to dare all to maintain himself there.
Robespierre had the qualifications for tyranny; a soul not great, it is true, but not common; the advantage of one sole passion, the appearance of patriotism, a deserved reputation for incorruptibility, an austere life, and no aversion to the effusion of blood. He was a proof that amidst civil troubles it is not mind but conduct that leads to political fortune, and that persevering mediocrity is more powerful than wavering genius. It must also be observed that Robespierre had the support of an immense and fanatical sect, whose government he had solicited, and whose principles he had defended since the close of the constituent assembly. This sect derived its origin from the eighteenth century, certain opinions of which it represented. In politics, its symbol was the absolute sovereignty of the _Contrat social_ of J.J. Rousseau, and for creed, it held the deism of _la Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard_; at a later period it succeeded in realizing these for a moment in the constitution of ’93, and the worship of the Supreme Being. More fanaticism and system existed in the different epochs of the revolution than is generally supposed.
Whether the Girondists distinctly foresaw the dominion of Robespierre, or whether they suffered themselves to be carried away by their indignation, they accused him, with republicans, of the most serious of crimes. Paris was agitated by the spirit of faction; the Girondists wished to pass a law against those who excited disorders and violence, and at the same time to give the convention an independent force derived from the eighty-three departments. They appointed a commission to present a report on this subject. The Mountain attacked this measure as injurious to Paris; the Gironde defended it, by pointing out the project of a triumvirate formed by the deputation of Paris. “I was born in Paris,” said Osselin; “I am deputy for that town. It is announced that a party is formed in the very heart of it, desiring a dictatorship, triumvirs, tribunes, etc. I declare that extreme ignorance or profound wickedness alone could have conceived such a project. Let the member of the deputation of Paris who has conceived such an idea be anathematized!” “Yes,” exclaimed Rebecqui of Marseilles, “yes, there exists in this assembly a party which aspires at the dictatorship, and I will name the leader of this party; Robespierre. That is the man whom I denounce.” Barbaroux supported this denunciation by his evidence; he was one of the chief authors of the 10th of August; he was the leader of the Marseillais, and he possessed immense influence in the south. He stated that about the 10th of August, the Marseillais were much courted by the two parties who divided the capital; he was brought to Robespierre’s, and there he was told to ally himself to those citizens who had acquired most popularity, and that Paris expressly named to him, _Robespierre, as the virtuous man who was to be dictator of France_. Barbaroux was a man of action. There were some members of the Right who thought with him, that they ought to conquer their adversaries, in order to avoid being conquered by them. They wished, making use of the convention against the commune, to oppose the departments to Paris, and while they remained weak, by no means to spare enemies, to whom they would otherwise be granting time to become stronger. But the greater number dreaded a rupture, and trembled at the idea of energetic measures.
This accusation against Robespierre had no immediate consequences; but it fell back on Marat, who had recommended a dictatorship, in his journal “L’Ami du Peuple,” and had extolled the massacres. When he ascended the tribune to justify himself, the assembly shuddered. “_A bas! à bas_!” resounded from all sides. Marat remained imperturbable. In a momentary pause, he said: “I have a great number of personal enemies in this assembly. (_Tous! tous!_) I beg of them to remember decorum; I exhort them to abstain from all furious clamours and indecent threats against a man who has served liberty and themselves more than they think. For once let them learn to listen.” And this man delivered in the midst of the convention, astounded at his audacity and sangfroid, his views of the proscriptions and of the dictatorship. For some time he had fled from cellar to cellar to avoid public anger, and the warrants issued against him. His sanguinary journal alone appeared; in it he demanded heads, and prepared the multitude for the massacres of September. There is no folly which may not enter a man’s head, and what is worse, which may not be realized for a moment. Marat was possessed by certain fixed ideas. The revolution had enemies, and, in his opinion, it could not last unless freed from them; from that moment he deemed nothing could be more simple than to exterminate them, and appoint a dictator, whose functions should be limited to proscribing; these two measures he proclaimed aloud, with a cynical cruelty, having no more regard for propriety than for the lives of men, and despising as weak minds all those who called his projects atrocious, instead of considering them profound. The revolution had actors really more sanguinary than he, but none exercised a more fatal influence over his times. He depraved the morality of parties already sufficiently corrupt; and he had the two leading ideas which the committee of public safety subsequently realized by its commissioners or its government– extermination in mass, and the dictatorship.
Marat’s accusation was not attended with any results; he inspired more disgust, but less hatred than Robespierre; some regarded him as a madman; others considered these debates as the quarrels of parties, and not as an object of interest for the republic. Moreover, it seemed dangerous to attempt to purify the convention, or to dismiss one of its members, and it was a difficult step to get over, even for parties. Danton did not exonerate Marat. “I do not like him,” said he; “I have had experience of his temperament; it is volcanic, crabbed and unsociable. But why seek for the language of a faction in what he writes? Has the general agitation any other cause than that of the revolutionary movement itself?” Robespierre, on his part, protested that he knew very little of Marat; that, previous to the 10th of August, he had only had one conversation with him, after which Marat, whose violent opinions he did not approve, had considered his political views so narrow, that he had stated in his journal, _that he had neither the higher views nor the daring of a statesman_.
But he was the object of much greater indignation because he was more dreaded. The first accusation of Rebecqui and Barbaroux had not succeeded. A short time afterwards, the Minister Roland made a report on the state of France and Paris; in it he denounced the massacres of September, the encroachments of the commune, and the proceedings of the agitators. “When,” said he, “they render the wisest and most intrepid defenders of liberty odious or suspected, when principles of revolt and slaughter are boldly professed and applauded in the assemblies, and clamours arise against the convention itself, I can no longer doubt that partisans of the ancient regime, or false friends of the people, concealing their extravagance or wickedness under a mask of patriotism, have conceived the plan of an overthrow in which they hope to raise themselves on ruins and corpses, and gratify their thirst for blood, gold, and atrocity.”
He cited, in proof of his report, a letter in which the vice-president of the second section of the criminal tribunal informed him, that he and the most distinguished Girondists were threatened; that, in the words of their enemies, _another bleeding was wanted_; and that these men would hear of no one but Robespierre.
At these words the latter hastened to the tribune to justify himself. “No one,” he cried, “dare accuse me to my face!” “I dare!” exclaimed Louvet, one of the most determined men of the Gironde. “Yes, Robespierre,” he continued, fixing his eye upon him; “I accuse you!” Robespierre, hitherto full of assurance, became moved. He had once before, at the Jacobins, measured his strength with this formidable adversary, whom he knew to be witty, impetuous, and uncompromising. Louvet now spoke, and in a most eloquent address spared neither acts nor names. He traced the course of Robespierre to the Jacobins, to the commune, to the electoral assembly: “calumniating the best patriots; lavishing the basest flatteries on a few hundred citizens, at first designated as the people of Paris, afterwards as the people absolutely, and then as the sovereign; repeating the eternal enumeration of his own merits, perfections, and virtues; and never failing, after he had dwelt on the strength, grandeur, and sovereignty of the people, to protest that he was the people too.” He then described him concealing himself on the 10th of August, and afterwards swaying the conspirators of the commune. Then he came to the massacres of September, and exclaimed: “The revolution of the 10th of August belongs to all!” he added, pointing out a few of the members of the Mountain in the commune, “but that of the 2nd of September, that belongs to them–and to none but them! Have they not glorified themselves by it? They themselves, with brutal contempt, only designated us as the patriots of the 10th of August. With ferocious pride they called themselves the patriots of the 2nd of September! Ah, let them retain this distinction worthy of the courage peculiar to them; let them retain it as our justification, and for their lasting shame! These pretended friends of the people wish to cast on the people of Paris the horrors that stained the first week of September. They have basely slandered them. The people of Paris can fight; they cannot murder! It is true, they were assembled all the day long before the château of the Tuileries on the glorious 10th of August; it is false that they were seen before the prisons on the horrible 2nd of September. How many executioners were there within? Two hundred; probably not two hundred. And without, how many spectators could be reckoned drawn thither by truly incomprehensible curiosity? At most, twice the number. But, it is asked, why, if the people did not assist in these murders, did they not hinder them? Why? Because Pétion’s tutelary authority was fettered; because Roland spoke in vain; because Danton, the minister of justice, did not speak at all,… because the presidents of the forty-eight sections waited for orders which the general in command did not give; because municipal officers, wearing their scarfs, presided at these atrocious executions. But the legislative assembly? The legislative assembly! representatives of the people, you will avenge it! The powerless state into which your predecessors were reduced is, in the midst of such crimes, the greatest for which these ruffians, whom I denounce, must be punished.” Returning to Robespierre, Louvet pointed out his ambition, his efforts, his extreme ascendancy over the people, and terminated his fiery philippic by a series of facts, each one of which was preceded by this terrible form: “_Robespierre, I accuse thee!_”
Louvet descended from the tribune amidst applause, Robespierre mounted it to justify himself; he was pale, and was received with murmurs. Either from agitation or fear of prejudice, he asked for a week’s delay. The time arrived; he appeared less like one accused than as a triumpher; he repelled with irony Louvet’s reproaches, and entered into a long apology for himself. It must be admitted that the facts were vague, and it required little trouble to weaken or overturn them. Persons were placed in the gallery to applaud him; even the convention itself, who regarded this quarrel as the result of a private pique, and, as Barrère said, did not fear _a man of a day, a petty leader of riots_, was disposed to close these debates. Accordingly, when Robespierre observed, as he finished: “For my part, I will draw no personal conclusions; I have given up the easy advantage of replying to the calumnies of my adversaries by more formidable denunciations; I wished to suppress the offensive part of my justification. I renounce the just vengeance I have a right to pursue against my calumniators; I ask for no other than the return of peace and triumph of liberty!” he was applauded, and the convention passed to the order of the day. Louvet in vain sought to reply; he was not allowed. Barbaroux as vainly presented himself as accuser and Lanjuinais opposed the motion for the order without obtaining the renewal of the discussion. The Girondists themselves supported it: they committed one fault in commencing the accusation, and another in not continuing it. The Mountain carried the day, since they were not conquered, and Robespierre was brought nearer the assumption of the part he had been so far removed from. In times of revolution, men very soon become what they are supposed to be, and the Mountain adopted him for their leader because the Girondists pursued him as such.
But what was much more important than personal attacks, were the discussions respecting the means of government, and the management of authorities and parties. The Girondists struck, not only against individuals but against the commune. Not one of their measures succeeded; they were badly proposed or badly sustained. They should have supported the government, replaced the municipality, maintained their post among the Jacobins and swayed them, gained over the multitude, or prevented its acting; and they did nothing of all this. One among them, Buzot, proposed giving the convention a guard of three thousand men, taken from the departments. This measure, which would at least have made the assembly independent, was not supported with sufficient vigour to be adopted. Thus the Girondists attacked the Mountain without weakening them, the commune without subduing it, the Faubourgs without suppressing them. They irritated Paris by invoking the aid of the departments, without procuring it; thus acting in opposition to the most common rules of prudence, for it is always safer to do a thing than to threaten to do it.
Their adversaries skilfully turned this circumstance to advantage. They secretly circulated a report which could not but compromise the Girondists; it was, that they wished to remove the republic to the south, and give up the rest of the empire. Then commenced that reproach of federalism, which afterwards became so fatal. The Girondists disdained it because they did not see the consequences; but it necessarily gained credit in proportion as they became weak and their enemies became daring. What had given rise to the report was the project of defending themselves behind the Loire, and removing the government to the south, if the north should be invaded and Paris taken, and the predilection they manifested for the provinces, and their indignation against the agitators of the capital. Nothing is more easy than to change the appearance of a measure by changing the period in which the measure was adopted, and discover in the disapprobation expressed at the irregular acts of a city, an intention to form the other cities of the state into a league against it. Accordingly, the Girondists were pointed out to the multitude as federalists. While they denounced the commune, and accused Robespierre and Marat, the Mountain decreed _the unity and indivisibility of the republic_. This was a way of attacking them and bringing them into suspicion, although they themselves adhered so eagerly to these propositions that they seemed to regret not having made them.
But a circumstance, apparently unconnected with the disputes of these two parties, served still better the cause of the Mountain. Already emboldened by the unsuccessful attempts which had been directed against them, they only waited for an opportunity to become assailants in their turn. The convention was fatigued by these long discussions. Those members who were not interested in them, and even those of the two parties who were not in the first rank, felt the need of concord, and wished to see men occupy themselves with the republic. There was an apparent truce, and the attention of the assembly was directed for a moment to the new constitution, which the Mountain caused it to abandon, in order to decide on the fate of the fallen prince. The leaders of the extreme Left were driven to this course by several motives: they did not want the Girondists, and the moderate members of the Plain, who directed the committee of the constitution, the former by Pétion, Condorcet, Brissot, Vergniaud, Gensonné, the others by Barrère, Sieyès, and Thomas Paine, to organize the republic. They would have established the system of the bourgeoisie, rendering it a little more democratic than that of 1791, while they themselves aspired at constituting the people. But they could only accomplish their end by power, and they could only obtain power by protracting the revolutionary state in France. Besides the necessity of preventing the establishment of legal order by a terrible coup d’état, such as the condemnation of Louis XVI., which would arouse all passions, rally round them the violent parties, by proving them to be the inflexible guardians of the republic, they hoped to expose the sentiments of the Girondists, who did not conceal their desire to save Louis XVI., and thus ruin them in the estimation of the multitude. There were, without a doubt, in this conjuncture, a great number of the Mountain, who, on this occasion, acted with the greatest sincerity and only as republicans, in whose eyes Louis XVI. appeared guilty with respect to the revolution; and a dethroned king was dangerous to a young democracy. But this party would have been more clement, had it not had to ruin the Gironde at the same time with Louis XVI.
For some time past, the public mind had been prepared for his trial. The Jacobin club resounded with invectives against him; the most injurious reports were circulated against his character; his condemnation was required for the firm establishment of liberty. The popular societies in the departments addressed petitions to the convention with the same object. The sections presented themselves at the bar of the assembly, and they carried through it, on litters, the men wounded on the 10th of August, who came to cry for vengeance on Louis Capet. They now only designated Louis XVI. by this name of the ancient chief of his race, thinking to substitute his title of king by his family name.
Party motives and popular animosities combined against this unfortunate prince. Those who, two months before, would have repelled the idea of exposing him to any other punishment than that of dethronement, were stupefied; so quickly does man lose in moments of crisis the right to defend his opinions! The discovery of the iron chest especially increased the fanaticism of the multitude, and the weakness of the king’s defenders. After the 10th of August, there were found in the offices of the civil list documents which proved the secret correspondence of Louis XVI. with the discontented princes, with the emigration, and with Europe. In a report, drawn up at the command of the legislative assembly, he was accused of intending to betray the state and overthrow the revolution. He was accused of having written, on the 16th April, 1791, to the bishop of Clermont, that if he regained his power he would restore the former government and the clergy to the state in which they previously were; of having afterwards proposed war, merely to hasten the approach of his deliverers; of having been in correspondence with men who wrote to him– “War will compel all the powers to combine against the seditious and abandoned men who tyrannize over France, in order that their punishment may speedily serve as an example to all who shall be induced to trouble the peace of empires. You may rely on a hundred and fifty thousand men, Prussians, Austrians, and Imperialists, and on an army of twenty thousand emigrants;” of having been on terms with his brothers, whom his public measures had discountenanced: and, lastly, of having constantly opposed the revolution.
Fresh documents were soon brought forward in support of this accusation. In the Tuileries, behind a panel in the wainscot, there was a hole wrought in the wall, and closed by an iron door. This secret closet was pointed out by the minister, Roland, and there were discovered proofs of all the conspiracies and intrigues of the court against the revolution; projects with the popular leaders to strengthen the constitutional power of the king, to restore the ancient régime and the aristocrats; the manoeuvres of Talon, the arrangements with Mirabeau, the proposition accepted by Bouillé, under the constituent assembly, and some new plots under the legislative assembly. This discovery increased the exasperation against Louis XVI. Mirabeau’s bust was broken by the Jacobins, and the convention covered the one which stood in the hall where it held its sittings.
For some time there had been a question in the assembly as to the trial of this prince, who, having been dethroned, could no longer be proceeded against. There was no tribunal empowered to pronounce his sentence, no punishment which could be inflicted on him: accordingly, they plunged into false interpretations of the inviolability granted to Louis XVI., in order to condemn him legally. The greatest error of parties, next to being unjust, is the desire not to appear so. The committee of legislation, commissioned to draw up a report on the question as to whether Louis XVI. could be tried, and whether he could be tried by the convention, decided in the affirmative. The deputy Mailhe opposed, in its name, the dogma of inviolability; but as this dogma had influenced the preceding epoch of the revolution, he contended that Louis XVI. was inviolable as king, but not as an individual. He maintained that the nation, unable to give up its guarantee respecting acts of power, had supplied the inviolability of the monarch by the responsibility of his ministers; and that, when Louis XVI. had acted as a simple individual, his responsibility devolving on no one, he ceased to be inviolable. Thus Mailhe limited the constitutional safeguard given to Louis XVI. to the acts of the king. He concluded that Louis XVI. could be tried, the dethronement not being a punishment, but a change of government; that he might be brought to trial, by virtue of the penal code relative to traitors and conspirators; that he could be tried by the convention, without observing the process of other tribunals, because, the convention representing the people–the people including all interests, and all interests constituting justice–it was impossible that the national tribunal could violate justice, and that, consequently, it was useless to subject it to forms. Such was the chain of sophistry, by means of which the committee transformed the convention into a tribunal. Robespierre’s party showed itself much more consistent, dwelling only on state reasons, and rejecting forms as deceptive.
The discussion commenced on the 13th of November, six days after the report of the committee. The partisans of inviolability, while they considered Louis XVI. guilty, maintained that he could not be tried. The principal of these was Morrison. He said, that inviolability was general; that the constitution had anticipated more than secret hostility on the part of Louis XVI., an open attack, and even in that case had only pronounced his deposition; that in this respect the nation had pledged its sovereignty; that the mission of the convention was to change the government, not to judge Louis XVI.; that, restrained by the rules of justice, it was so also by the usages of war, which only permitted an enemy to be destroyed during the combat–after a victory, the law vindicates him; that, moreover, the republic had no interest in condemning Louis; that it ought to confine itself with respect to him, to measures of general safety, detain him prisoner, or banish him from France. This was the opinion of the Right of the convention. The Plain shared the opinion of the committee; but the Mountain repelled, at the same time, the inviolability and the trial of Louis XVI.
“Citizens,” said Saint-Just, “I engage to prove that the opinion of Morrison, who maintains the king’s inviolability, and that of the committee which requires his trial as a citizen, are equally false; I contend that we should judge the king as an enemy; that we have less to do with trying than with opposing him: that having no place in the contract which unites Frenchmen, the forms of the proceeding are not in civil law, but in the law of the right of nations; thus, all delay or reserve in this case are sheer acts of imprudence, and next to the imprudence which postpones the moment that should give us laws, the most fatal will be that which makes us temporize with the king.” Reducing everything to considerations of enmity and policy, Saint-Just added, “The very men who are about to try Louis have a republic to establish: those who attach any importance to the just chastisement of a king, will never found a republic. Citizens, if the Roman people, after six hundred years of virtue and of hatred towards kings; if Great Britain after the death of Cromwell, saw kings restored in spite of its energy, what ought not good citizens, friends of liberty, to fear among us, when they see the axe tremble in your hands, and a people, from the first day of their freedom, respect the memory of their chains?”
This violent party, who wished to substitute a coup d’état for a sentence, to follow no law, no form, but to strike Louis XVI. like a conquered prisoner, by making hostilities even survive victory, had but a very feeble majority in the convention; but without, it was strongly supported by the Jacobins and the commune. Notwithstanding the terror which it already inspired, its murderous suggestions were repelled by the convention; and the partisans of inviolability, in their turn, courageously asserted reasons of public interest at the same time as rules of justice and humanity. They maintained that the same men could not be judges and legislators, the jury and the accusers. They desired also to impart to the rising republic the lustre of great virtues, those of generosity and forgiveness; they wished to follow the example of the people of Rome, who acquired their freedom and retained it five hundred years, because they proved themselves magnanimous; because they banished the Tarquins instead of putting them to death. In a political view, they showed the consequences of the king’s condemnation, as it would affect the anarchical party of the kingdom, rendering it still more insolent; and with regard to Europe, whose still neutral powers it would induce to join the coalition against the republic.
But Robespierre, who during this long debate displayed a daring and perseverance that presaged his power, appeared at the tribune to support Saint-Just, to reproach the convention with involving in doubt what the insurrection had decided, and with restoring, by sympathy and the publicity of a defence, the fallen royalist party. “The assembly,” said Robespierre, “has involuntarily been led far away from the real question. Here we have nothing to do with trial: Louis is not an accused man; you are not judges, you are, and can only be, statesmen. You have no sentence to pronounce for or against a man, but you are called on to adopt a measure of public safety; to perform an act of national precaution. A dethroned king is only fit for two purposes, to disturb the tranquillity of the state, and shake its freedom, or to strengthen one or the other of them.
“Louis was king; the republic is founded; the famous question you are discussing is decided in these few words. Louis cannot be tried; he is already tried, he is condemned, or the republic is not absolved.” He required that the convention should declare Louis XVI. a traitor towards the French, criminal towards humanity, and sentence him at once to death, by virtue of the insurrection.
The Mountain by these extreme propositions, by the popularity they attained without, rendered condemnation in a measure inevitable. By gaining an extraordinary advance on the other parties, it obliged them to follow it, though at a distance. The majority of the convention, composed in a large part of Girondists, who dared not pronounce Louis XVI. inviolable, and of the Plain, decided, on Pétion’s proposition, against the opinion of the fanatical Mountain and against that of the partisans of inviolability, that Louis XVI. should be tried by the convention. Robert Lindet then made, in the name of the commission of the twenty-one, his report respecting Louis XVI. The arraignment, setting forth the offences imputed to him, was drawn up, and the convention summoned the prisoner to its bar.
Louis had been confined in the Temple for four months. He was not at liberty, as the assembly at first wished him to be in assigning him the Luxembourg for a residence. The suspicious commune guarded him closely; but, submissive to his destiny, prepared for everything, he manifested neither impatience, regret, nor indignation. He had only one servant about his person, Cléry, who at the same time waited on his family. During the first months of his imprisonment, he was not separated from his family; and he still found solace in meeting them. He comforted and supported his two companions in misfortune, his wife and sister; he acted as preceptor to the young dauphin, and gave him the lessons of an unfortunate man, of a captive king. He read a great deal, and often turned to the History of England, by Hume; there he read of many dethroned kings, and one of them condemned by the people. Man always seeks destinies similar to his own. But the consolation he found in the sight of his family did not last long; as soon as his trial was decided, he was separated from them. The commune wished to prevent the prisoners from concerting their justification; the surveillance it exercised over Louis XVI. became daily more minute and severe.
In this state of things, Santerre received the order to conduct Louis XVI. to the bar of the convention. He repaired to the Temple, accompanied by the mayor, who communicated his mission to the king, and inquired if he was willing to descend. Louis hesitated a moment, then said: “This is another violence. I must yield!” and he decided on appearing before the convention; not objecting to it, as Charles I. had done with regard to his judges. “Representatives,” said Barrère, when his approach was announced, “you are about to exercise the right of national justice. Let your attitude be suited to your new functions;” and turning to the gallery, he added, “Citizens, remember the terrible silence which accompanied Louis on his return from Varennes; a silence which was the precursor of the trial of kings by nations.” Louis XVI. appeared firm as he entered the hall, and he took a steady glance round the assembly. He was placed at the bar, and the president said to him in a voice of emotion: “Louis, the French nation accuses you. You are about to hear the charges of the indictment. Louis, be seated.” A seat had been prepared for him; he sat in it. During a long examination, he displayed much calmness and presence of mind, he replied to each question appropriately, often in an affecting and triumphant manner. He repelled the reproaches addressed to him respecting his conduct before the 14th of July, reminding them that his authority was not then limited; before the journey to Varennes, by the decree of the constituent assembly, which had been satisfied with his replies; and after the 10th of August, by throwing all public acts on ministerial responsibility, and by denying all the secret measures which were personally attributed to him. This denial did not, however, in the eyes of the convention, overthrow facts, proved for the most part by documents written or signed by the hand of Louis XVI. himself; he made use of the natural right of every accused person. Thus he did not admit the existence of the iron chest, and the papers that were brought forward. Louis XVI. invoked a law of safety, which the convention did not admit, and the convention sought to protect itself from anti-revolutionary attempts, which Louis XVI. would not admit.
When Louis had returned to the Temple, the convention considered the request he had made for a defender. A few of the Mountain opposed the request in vain. The convention determined to allow him the services of a counsel. It was then that the venerable Malesherbes offered himself to the convention to defend Louis XVI. “Twice,” he wrote, “have I been summoned to the council of him who was my master, at a time when that function was the object of ambition to every man; I owe him the same service now, when many consider it dangerous.” His request was granted, Louis XVI. in his abandonment, was touched by this proof of devotion. When Malesherbes entered his room, he went towards him, pressed him in his arms, and said with tears:–“Your sacrifice is the more generous, since you endanger your own life without saving mine.” Malesherbes and Tronchet toiled uninterruptedly at his defence, and associated M. Desèze with them; they sought to reanimate the courage of the king, but they found the king little inclined to hope. “I am sure they will take my life; but no matter, let us attend to my trial as if I were about to gain it. In truth, I shall gain it, for I shall leave no stain on my memory.”
At length the day for the defence arrived; it was delivered by M. Desèze; Louis was present. The profoundest silence pervaded the assembly and the galleries. M. Desèze availed himself of every consideration of justice and innocence in favour of the royal prisoner. He appealed to the inviolability which had been granted him; he asserted that as king he could not be tried; that as accusers, the representatives of the people could not be his judges. In this he advanced nothing which had not already been maintained by one party of the assembly. But he chiefly strove to justify the conduct of Louis XVI. by ascribing to him intentions always pure and irreproachable. He concluded with these last and solemn words:– “Listen, in anticipation, to what History will say to Fame; Louis ascending the throne at twenty, presented an example of morals, justice, and economy; he had no weakness, no corrupting passion: he was the constant friend of the people. Did the people desire the abolition of an oppressive tax? Louis abolished it: did the people desire the suppression of slavery? Louis suppressed it: did the people solicit reforms? he made them: did the people wish to change its laws? he consented to change them: did the people desire that millions of Frenchmen should be restored to their rights? he restored them: did the people wish for liberty? he gave it them. Men cannot deny to Louis the glory of having anticipated the people by his sacrifices; and it is he whom it is proposed to slay. Citizens, I will not continue, I leave it to History; remember, she will judge your sentence, and her judgment will be that of ages.” But passion proved deaf and incapable of foresight.
The Girondists wished to save Louis XVI., but they feared the imputation of royalism, which was already cast upon them by the Mountain. During the whole transaction, their conduct was rather equivocal; they dared not pronounce themselves in favour of or against the accused; and their moderation ruined them without serving him. At that moment his cause, not only that of his throne, but of his life, was their own. They were about to determine, by an act of justice or by a coup d’état, whether they should return to the legal regime, or prolong the revolutionary regime. The triumph of the Girondists or of the Mountain was involved in one or the other of these solutions. The latter became exceedingly active. They pretended that, while following forms, men were forgetful of republican energy, and that the defence of Louis XVI. was a lecture on monarchy addressed to the nation. The Jacobins powerfully seconded them, and deputations came to the bar demanding the death of the king.
Yet the Girondists, who had not dared to maintain the question of inviolability, proposed a skilful way of saving Louis XVI. from death, by appealing from the sentence of the convention to the people. The extreme Right still protested against the erection of the assembly into a tribunal; but the competence of the assembly having been previously decided, all their efforts were turned in another direction. Salles proposed that the king should be pronounced guilty, but that the application of the punishment should be left to the primary assembly. Buzot, fearing that the convention would incur the reproach of weakness, thought that it ought to pronounce the sentence, and submit the judgment it pronounced to the decision of the people. This advice was vigorously opposed by the Mountain, and even by a great number of the more moderate members of the convention, who saw, in the convocation of the primary assemblies, the germ of civil war.
The assembly had unanimously decided that Louis was guilty, when the appeal to the people was put to the question. Two hundred and eighty-four voices voted for, four hundred and twenty-four against it; ten declined voting. Then came the terrible question as to the nature of the punishment. Paris was in a state of the greatest excitement: deputies were threatened at the very door of the assembly; fresh excesses on the part of the populace were dreaded; the Jacobin clubs resounded with extravagant invectives against Louis XVI., and the Right. The Mountain, till then the weakest party in the convention, sought to obtain the majority by terror, determined, if it did not succeed, none the less to sacrifice Louis XVI. Finally, after four hours of nominal appeal, the president, Vergniaud, said: “Citizens, I am about to proclaim the result of the scrutiny. When justice has spoken, humanity should have its turn.” There were seven hundred and twenty-one voters. The actual majority was three hundred and sixty-one. The death of the king was decided by a majority of twenty-six votes. Opinions were very various: Girondists voted for his death, with a reservation, it is true; most of the members of the Right voted for imprisonment or exile; a few of the Mountain voted with the Girondists. As soon as the result was known, the president said, in a tone of grief: “In the name of the convention, I declare the punishment, to which it condemns Louis Capet, to be death.” Those who had undertaken the defence appeared at the bar; they were deeply affected. They endeavoured to bring back the assembly to sentiments of compassion, in consideration of the small majority in favour of the sentence. But this subject had already been discussed and decided. “Laws are only made by a simple majority,” said one of the Mountain. “Yes,” replied a voice, “but laws may be revoked; you cannot restore the life of a man.” Malesherbes wished to speak, but could not. Sobs prevented his utterance; he could only articulate a few indistinct words of entreaty. His grief moved the assembly. The request for a reprieve was received by the Girondists as a last resource; but this also failed them, and the fatal sentence was pronounced.
Louis expected it. When Malesherbes came in tears to announce the sentence, he found him sitting in the dark, his elbows resting on a table, his face hid in his hands, and in profound meditation. At the noise of his entrance, Louis rose and said: “For two hours I have been trying to discover if, during my reign, I have deserved the slightest reproach from my subjects. Well, M. de Malesherbes, I swear to you, in the truth of my heart, as a man about to appear before God, that I have constantly sought the happiness of my people, and never indulged a wish opposed to it.” Malesherbes urged that a reprieve would not be rejected, but this Louis did not expect. As he saw Malesherbes go out, Louis begged him not to forsake him in his last moments; Malesherbes promised to return; but he came several times, and was never able to gain access to him. Louis asked for him frequently, and appeared distressed at not seeing him. He received without emotion the formal announcement of his sentence from the minister of justice. He asked three days to prepare to appear before God; and also to be allowed the services of a priest, and permission to communicate freely with his wife and children. Only the last two requests were granted.
The interview was a distressing scene to this desolate family; but the moment of separation was far more so. Louis, on parting with his family, promised to see them again the next day; but, on reaching his room, he felt that the trial would be too much, and, pacing up and down violently, he exclaimed, “I will not go!” This was his last struggle; the rest of his time was spent in preparing for death. The night before the execution he slept calmly. Cléry awoke him, as he had been ordered, at five, and received his last instructions. He then communicated, commissioned Cléry with his dying words, and all he was allowed to bequeath, a ring, a seal, and some hair. The drums were already beating, and the dull sound of travelling cannon, and of confused voices, might be heard. At length Santerre arrived. “You are come for me,” said Louis; “I ask one moment.” He deposited his will in the hands of the municipal officer, asked for his hat, and said, in a firm tone: “Let us go.”
The carriage was an hour on its way from the Temple to the Place de la Revolution. A double row of soldiers lined the road; more than forty thousand men were under arms. Paris presented a gloomy aspect. The citizens present at the execution manifested neither applause nor regret; all were silent. On reaching the place of execution, Louis alighted from the carriage. He ascended the scaffold with a firm step, knelt to receive the benediction of the priest, who is recorded to have said, “Son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven!” With some repugnance he submitted to the binding of his hands, and walked hastily to the left of the scaffold; “I die innocent,” said he; “I forgive my enemies; and you, unfortunate people…” Here, at a signal, the drums and trumpets drowned his voice, and the three executioners seized him. At ten minutes after ten he had ceased to live.
Thus perished, at the age of thirty-nine, after a reign of sixteen years and a half, spent in endeavouring to do good, the best but weakest of monarchs. His ancestors bequeathed to him a revolution. He was better calculated than any of them to prevent and terminate it; for he was capable of becoming a reformer-king before it broke out, or of becoming a constitutional king afterwards. He is, perhaps, the only prince who, having no other passion, had not that of power, and who united the two qualities which make good kings, fear of God and love of the people. He perished, the victim of passions which he did not share; of those of the persons about him, to which he was a stranger, and to those of the multitude, which he had not excited. Few memories of kings are so commendable. History will say of him, that, with a little more strength of mind, he would have been an exemplary king.
CHAPTER VII
FROM THE 21ST OF JANUARY, 1793, TO THE 2ND OF JUNE
The death of Louis XVI. rendered the different parties irreconcilable, and increased the external enemies of the revolution. The republicans had to contend with all Europe, with several classes of malcontents, and with themselves. But the Mountain, who then directed the popular movement, imagined that they were too far involved not to push matters to extremity. To terrify the enemies of the revolution, to excite the fanaticism of the people by harangues, by the presence of danger, and by insurrections; to refer everything to it, both the government and the safety of the republic; to infuse into it the most ardent enthusiasm, in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity; to keep it in this violent state of crisis for the purpose of making use of its passions and its power; such was the plan of Danton and the Mountain, who had chosen him for their leader. It was he who augmented the popular effervescence by the growing dangers of the republic, and who, under the name of revolutionary government, established the despotism of the multitude, instead of legal liberty. Robespierre and Marat went even much further than he. They sought to erect into a permanent government what Danton considered as merely transitory. The latter was only a political chief, while the others were true sectarians; the first, more ambitious, the second, more fanatical.
The Mountain had, by the catastrophe of the 21st of January, gained a great victory over the Girondists, whose politics were much more moral than theirs, and who hoped to save the revolution, without staining it with blood. But their humanity, their spirit of justice, proved of no service, and even turned against them. They were accused of being the enemies of the people, because they opposed their excesses; of being the accomplices of the tyrant, because they had sought to save Louis XVI.; and of betraying the republic, because they recommended moderation. It was with these reproaches that the Mountain persecuted them with constant animosity in the bosom of the convention, from the 21st of January till the 31st of May and the 2nd of June. The Girondists were for a long time supported by the Centre, which sided with the Right against murder and anarchy, and with the Left for measures of public safety. This mass, which, properly speaking, formed the spirit of the convention, displayed some courage, and balanced the power of the Mountain and the Commune as long as it possessed those intrepid and eloquent Girondists, who carried with them to prison and to the scaffold all the generous resolutions of the assembly.
For a moment, union existed among the various parties of the assembly. Lepelletier Saint Fargeau was stabbed by a retired member of the household guard, named Pâris, for having voted the death of Louis XVI. The members of the convention, united by common danger, swore on his tomb to forget their enmities; but they soon revived them. Some of the murderers of September, whose punishment was desired by the more honourable republicans, were proceeded against at Meaux. The Mountain, apprehensive that their past conduct would be inquired into, and that their adversaries would take advantage of a condemnation to attack them more openly themselves, put a stop to these proceedings. This impunity further emboldened the leaders of the multitude; and Marat, who at that period had an incredible influence over the multitude, excited them to pillage the dealers, whom he accused of monopolizing provisions. He wrote and spoke violently, in his pamphlets and at the Jacobins, against the aristocracy of the burghers, merchants, and _statesmen_ (as he designated the Girondists), that is to say, against those who, in the assembly or the nation at large, still opposed the reign of the Sans-culottes and the Mountain. There was something frightful in the fanaticism and invincible obstinacy of these sectaries. The name given by them to the Girondists from the beginning of the convention, was that of Intrigants, on account of the ministerial and rather stealthy means with which they opposed in the departments the insolent and public conduct of the Jacobins.
Accordingly, they denounced them regularly in the club. “At Rome, an orator cried daily: ‘Carthage must be destroyed!’ well, let a Jacobin mount this tribune every day, and say these single words, ‘The intrigants must be destroyed!’ Who could withstand us? We oppose crime, and the ephemeral power of riches; but we have truth, justice, poverty, and virtue in our cause. With such arms, the Jacobins will soon have to say: ‘We had only to pass on, they were already extinct.'” Marat, who was much more daring than Robespierre, whose hatred and projects still concealed themselves under certain forms, was the patron of all denouncers and lovers of anarchy. Several of the Mountain reproached him with compromising their cause by his extreme counsels, and by unseasonable excesses; but the entire Jacobin people supported him even against Robespierre, who rarely obtained the advantage in his disputes with him. The pillage recommended in February, in _L’Ami du Peuple_, with respect to some dealers, “by way of example,” took place, and Marat was denounced to the convention, who decreed his accusation after a stormy sitting. But this decree had no result, because the ordinary tribunals had no authority. This double effort of force on one side, and weakness on the other, took place in the month of February. More decisive events soon brought the Girondists to ruin.
Hitherto, the military position of France had been satisfactory. Dumouriez had just crowned the brilliant campaign of Argonne by the conquest of Belgium. After the retreat of the Prussians, he had repaired to Paris to concert measures for the invasion of the Austrian Netherlands. Returning to the army on the 20th of October, 1792, he began the attack on the 28th. The plan attempted so inappropriately, with so little strength and success, at the commencement of the war, was resumed and executed with superior means. Dumouriez, at the head of the army of Belgium, forty thousand strong, advanced from Valenciennes upon Mons, supported on the right by the army of the Ardennes, amounting to about sixteen thousand men, under general Valence, who marched from Givet upon Namur; and on his left, by the army of the north, eighteen thousand strong, under general Labourdonnaie, who advanced from Lille upon Tournai. The Austrian army, posted before Mons, awaited battle in its intrenchments. Dumouriez completely defeated it; and the victory of Jemappes opened Belgium to the French, and again gave our arms the ascendancy in Europe. A victor on the 6th of November, Dumouriez entered Mons on the 7th, Brussels on the 14th, and Liége on the 28th. Valence took Namur, Labourdonnaie Antwerp; and by the middle of December, the invasion of the Netherlands was completely achieved. The French army, masters of the Meuse and the Scheldt, went into their winter quarters, after driving beyond the Roër the Austrians, whom they might have pushed beyond the Lower Rhine.
From this moment hostilities began between Dumouriez and the Jacobins. A decree of the convention, dated the 15th of September, abrogated the Belgian customs, and democratically organized that country. The Jacobins sent agents to Belgium to propagate revolutionary principles, and establish clubs on the model of the parent society; but the Flemings, who had received us with enthusiasm, became cool at the heavy demands made upon them, and at the general pillage and insupportable anarchy which the Jacobins brought with them. All the party that had opposed the Austrian army, and hoped to be free under the protection of France, found our rule too severe, and regretted having sought our aid, or supported us. Dumouriez, who had projects of independence for the Flemings, and of ambition for himself, came to Paris to complain of this impolitic conduct with regard to the conquered countries. He changed his hitherto equivocal course; he had employed every means to keep on terms with the two factions; he had ranged himself under the banner of neither, hoping to make use of the Right through his friend Gensonné, and the Mountain through Danton and Lacroix, whilst he awed both by his victories. But in this second journey he tried to stop the Jacobins and save Louis XVI.; not having been able to attain his end, he returned to the army to begin the second campaign, very dissatisfied, and determined to make his new victories the means of suspending the revolution and changing its government.
This time all the frontiers of France were to be attacked by the European powers. The military successes of the revolution, and the catastrophe of the 21st of January, had made most of the undecided or neutral governments join the coalition.
The court of St. James’, on learning the death of Louis XVI., dismissed the ambassador Chauvelin, whom it had refused to acknowledge since the 10th of August and the dethronement of the king. The convention, finding England already leagued with the coalition, and consequently all its promises of neutrality vain and elusive, on the 1st of February, 1793, declared war against the king of Great Britain and the stadtholder of Holland, who had been entirely guided by the English cabinet since 1788. England had hitherto preserved the appearances of neutrality, but it took advantage of this opportunity to appear on the scene of hostilities. For some time disposed for a rupture, Pitt employed all his resources, and in the space of six months concluded seven treaties of alliance, and six treaties of subsidies. [Footnote: These treaties were as follows: the 4th March, articles between Great Britain and Hanover; 25th March, treaty of alliance at London between Russia and Great Britain; 10th April, treaty of subsidies with the landgrave of Hesse Cassel; 25th April, treaty of subsidies with Sardinia; 25th May, treaty of alliance at Madrid with Spain; 12th July, treaty of alliance with Naples, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies; 14th July, treaty of alliance at the camp before Mayence with Prussia; 30th August, treaty of alliance at London with the emperor; 21st September, treaty of subsidies with the margrave of Baden; 26th September, treaty of alliance at London with Portugal. By these treaties England gave considerable subsidies, more especially to Austria and Prussia.] England thus became the soul of the coalition against France; her fleets were ready to sail; the minister had obtained 3,200,000l. extraordinary, and Pitt designed to profit by our revolution by securing the preponderance of Great Britain, as Richelieu and Mazarin had taken advantage of the crisis in England in 1640, to establish the French domination in Europe. The court of St. James’ was only influenced by motives of English interests; it desired at any cost to effect the consolidation of the aristocratical power at home, and the exclusive empire in the two Indies, and on the seas.
The court of St. James’ then made the second levy of the coalition. Spain had just undergone a ministerial change; the famous Godoy, duke of Alcudia, afterwards Prince of the Peace, had been placed at the head of the government by means of an intrigue of England and the emigrants. This power came to a rupture with the republic, after having interceded in vain for Louis XVI., and made its neutrality the price of the life of the king. The German empire entirely adopted the war; Bavaria, Suabia, and the elector palatine joined the hostile circles of the empire. Naples followed the example of the Holy See; and the only neutral powers were Venice, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and Turkey. Russia was still engaged with the second partition of Poland.
The republic was threatened on all sides by the most warlike troops of Europe. It would soon have to face forty-five thousand Austro-Sardinians in the Alps; fifty thousand Spaniards on the Pyrenees; seventy thousand Austrians or Imperialists, reinforced by thirty-eight thousand English and Dutch troops, on the Lower Rhine and in Belgium; thirty-three thousand four hundred Austrians between the Meuse and the Moselle; a hundred and twelve thousand six hundred Prussians, Austrians and Imperialists on the Middle and Upper Rhine. In order to confront so many enemies, the convention decreed a levy of three hundred thousand men. This measure of external defence was accompanied by a party measure for the interior. At the moment the new battalions, about to quit Paris, presented themselves to the assembly, the Mountain demanded the establishment of an extraordinary tribunal to maintain the revolution at home, which the battalions were going to defend on the frontiers. This tribunal, composed of nine members, was to try without jury or appeal. The Girondists arose with all their power against so arbitrary and formidable an institution, but it was in vain; for they seemed to be favouring the enemies of the republic by rejecting a tribunal intended to punish them. All they obtained was the introduction of juries into it, the removal of some violent men, and the power of annulling its acts, as long as they maintained any influence.
The principal efforts of the coalition were directed against the vast frontier extending from the north sea to Huninguen. The prince of Coburg, at the head of the Austrians, was to attack the French army on the Roër and the Meuse, to enter Belgium; while the Prussians, on the other point, should march against Custine, give him battle, surround Mayence, and after taking it, renew the preceding invasion. These two armies of operation were sustained in the intermediate position by considerable forces. Dumouriez, engrossed by ambitious and reactionary designs, at a moment when he ought only to have thought of the perils of France, proposed to himself to re-establish the monarchy of 1791, in spite of the convention and Europe. What Bouillé could not do for an absolute, nor Lafayette for a constitutional throne, Dumouriez, at a less propitious time, hoped alone to carry through in the interest of a destroyed constitution and a monarchy without a party. Instead of remaining neutral among factions, as circumstances dictated to a general, and even to an ambitious man, Dumouriez preferred a rupture, in order to sway them. He conceived a design of forming a party out of France; of entering Holland by means of the Dutch republicans opposed to the stadtholdership, and to English influence; to deliver Belgium from the Jacobins; to unite these countries in a single independent state, and secure for himself their political protectorate after having acquired all the glory of a conqueror. To intimidate parties, he was to gain over his troops, march on the capital, dissolve the convention, put down popular meetings, re-establish the constitution of 1791, and give a king to France.
This project, impracticable amidst the great shock between the revolution and Europe, appeared easy to the fiery and adventurous Dumouriez. Instead of defending the line, threatened from Mayence to the Roër, he threw himself on the left of the operations, and entered Holland at the head of twenty thousand men. By a rapid march he was to reach the centre of the United Provinces, attack the fortresses from behind, and be joined at Nymegen by twenty-five thousand men under General Miranda, who would probably have made himself master of Maestricht. An army of forty thousand men was to observe the Austrians and protect his right.
Dumouriez vigorously prosecuted his expedition into Holland; he took Breda and Gertruydenberg, and prepared to pass the Biesbos, and capture Dordrecht. But the army of the right experienced in the meantime the most alarming reverses on the Lower Meuse. The Austrians assumed the offensive, passed the Roër, beat Miazinski at Aix-la-Chapelle; made Miranda raise the blockade of Maestricht, which he had uselessly bombarded; crossed the Meuse, and at Liège put our army, which had fallen back between Tirlemont and Louvain, wholly to the rout. Dumouriez received from the executive council orders to leave Holland immediately, and to take the command of the troops in Belgium; he was compelled to obey, and to renounce in part his wildest but dearest hopes.
The Jacobins, at the news of these reverses, became much more intractable; unable to conceive a defeat without treachery, especially after the brilliant and unexpected victories of the last campaign, they attributed these military disasters to party combinations. They denounced the Girondists, the ministers, and generals who, they supposed, had combined to abandon the republic, and clamoured for their destruction. Rivalry mingled with suspicion, and they desired as much to acquire an exclusive domination, as to defend the threatened territory; they began with the Girondists. As they had not yet accustomed the multitude to the idea of the proscription of representatives, they at first had recourse to a plot to get rid of them; they resolved to strike them in the convention, where they would all be assembled, and the night of the 10th of March was fixed on for the execution of the plot. The assembly sat permanently on account of the public danger. It was decided on the preceding day at the Jacobins and Cordeliers to shut the barriers, sound the tocsin, and march in two bands on the convention and the ministers. They started at the appointed hour, but several circumstances prevented the conspirators from succeeding. The Girondists, apprised, did not attend the evening sitting; the sections declared themselves opposed to the plot, and Beurnonville, minister for war, advanced against them at the head of a battalion of Brest federalists; these unexpected obstacles, together with the ceaseless rain, obliged the conspirators to disperse. The next day Vergniaud denounced the insurrectional committee who had projected these murders, demanded that the executive council should be commissioned to make inquiries respecting the conspiracy of the 10th of March, to examine the registers of the clubs, and to arrest the members of the insurrectional committee. “We go,” said he, “from crimes to amnesties, from amnesties to crimes. Numbers of citizens have begun to confound seditious insurrections with the great insurrection of liberty; to look on the excitement of robbers as the outburst of energetic minds, and robbery itself as a measure of general security. We have witnessed the development of that strange system of liberty, in which we are told: ‘you are free; but think with us, or we will denounce you to the vengeance of the people; you are free, but bow down your head to the idol we worship, or we will denounce you to the vengeance of the people; you are free, but join us in persecuting the men whose probity and intelligence we dread, or we will denounce you to the vengeance of the people.’ Citizens, we have reason to fear that the revolution, like Saturn, will devour successively all its children, and only engender despotism and the calamities which accompany it.” These prophetic words produced some effect in the assembly; but the measures proposed by Vergniaud led to nothing.
The Jacobins were stopped for a moment by the failure of their first enterprise against their adversaries; but the insurrection of La Vendée gave them new courage. The Vendéan war was an inevitable event in the revolution. This country, bounded by the Loire and the sea, crossed by few roads, sprinkled with villages, hamlets, and manorial residences, had retained its ancient feudal state. In La Vendée there was no civilization or intelligence, because there was no middle class; and there was no middle class because there were no towns, or very few. At that time the peasants had acquired no other ideas than those few communicated to them by the priests, and had not separated their interests from those of the nobility. These simple and sturdy men, devotedly attached to the old state of things, did not understand a revolution, which was the result of a faith and necessities entirely foreign to their situation. The nobles and priests, being strong in these districts, had not emigrated; and the ancient regime really existed there, because there were its doctrines and its society. Sooner or later, a war between France and La Vendée, countries so different, and which had nothing in common but language, was inevitable. It was inevitable that the two fanaticisms of monarchy and of popular sovereignty, of the priesthood and human reason, should raise their banners against each other, and bring about the triumph of the old or of the new civilization.
Partial disturbances had taken place several times in La Vendée. In 1792 the count de la Rouairie had prepared a general rising, which failed on account of his arrest; but all yet remained ready for an insurrection, when the decree for raising three hundred thousand men was put into execution. This levy became the signal of revolt. The Vendéans beat the gendarmerie at Saint Florent, and took for leaders, in different directions, Cathelineau, a waggoner, Charette, a naval officer, and Stofflet, a gamekeeper. Aided by arms and money from England, the insurrection soon overspread the country; nine hundred communes flew to arms at the sound of the tocsin; and then the noble leaders Bonchamps, Lescure, La Rochejaquelin, d’Elbée, and Talmont, joined the others. The troops of the line and the battalions of the national guard who advanced against the insurgents were defeated. General Marcé was beaten at Saint Vincent by Stofflet; general Gauvilliers at Beaupréau, by d’Elbée and Bonchamps; general Quetineau at Aubiers, by La Rochejaquelin; and general Ligonnier at Cholet. The Vendéans, masters of Châtillon, Bressuire, and Vihiers, considered it advisable to form some plan of organization before they pushed their advantages further. They formed three corps, each from ten to twelve thousand strong, according to the division of La Vendée, under three commanders; the first, under Bonchamps, guarded the banks of the Loire, and was called the _Armée d’Anjou_; the second, stationed in the centre, formed the _Grande armée_ under d’Elbée; the third, in Lower Vendée, was styled the _Armée du Marais_, under Charette. The insurgents established a council to determine their operations, and elected Cathelineau generalissimo. These arrangements, with this division of the country, enabled them to enrol the insurgents, and to dismiss them to their fields, or call them to arms.
The intelligence of this formidable insurrection drove the convention to adopt still more rigorous measures against priests and emigrants. It outlawed all priests and nobles who took part in any gathering, and disarmed all who had belonged to the privileged classes. The former emigrants were banished for ever; they could not return, under penalty of death; their property was confiscated. On the door of every house, the names of all its inmates were to be inscribed; and the revolutionary tribunal, which had been adjourned, began its terrible functions.
At the same time, tidings of new military disasters arrived, one after the other. Dumouriez, returned to the army of Belgium, concentrated all his forces to resist the Austrian general, the prince of Coburg. His troops were greatly discouraged, and in want of everything; he wrote to the convention a threatening letter against the Jacobins, who denounced him. After having again restored to his army a part of its former confidence by some minor advantages, he ventured a general action at Neerwinden, and lost it. Belgium was evacuated, and Dumouriez, placed between the Austrians and Jacobins, beaten by the one and assailed by the other, had recourse to the guilty project of defection, in order to realize his former designs. He had conferences with Colonel Mack, and agreed with the Austrians to march upon Paris for the purpose of re-establishing the monarchy, leaving them on the frontiers, and having first given up to them several fortresses as a guarantee. It is probable that Dumouriez wished to place on the constitutional throne the young duc de Chartres, who had distinguished himself throughout this campaign; while the prince of Coburg hoped that if the counter-revolution reached that point, it would be carried further and restore the son of Louis XVI. and the ancient monarchy. A counter-revolution will not halt any more than a revolution; when once begun, it must exhaust itself. The Jacobins were soon informed of Dumouriez’s arrangements; he took little precaution to conceal them; whether he wished to try his troops, or to alarm his enemies, or whether he merely followed his natural levity. To be more sure of his designs, the Jacobin club sent to him a deputation, consisting of Proly, Péreira, and Dubuisson, three of its members. Taken to Dumouriez’s presence, they received from him more admissions than they expected: “The convention,” said he, “is an assembly of seven hundred and thirty-five tyrants. While I have four inches of iron I will not suffer it to reign and shed blood with the revolutionary tribunal it has just created; as for the republic,” he added, “it is an idle word. I had faith in it for three days. Since Jemappes, I have deplored all the successes I obtained in so bad a cause. There is only one way to save the country–that is, to re-establish the constitution of 1791, and a king.” “Can you think of it, general?” said Dubuisson; “the French view royalty with horror–the very name of Louis–” “What does it signify whether the king be called Louis, Jacques, or Philippe?” “And what are your means?” “My army–yes, my army will do it, and from my camp, or the stronghold of some fortress, it will express its desire for a king.” “But your project endangers the safety of the prisoners in the Temple.” “Should the last of the Bourbons be killed, even those of Coblentz, France shall still have a king, and if Paris were to add this murder to those which have already dishonoured it, I would instantly march upon it.” After thus unguardedly disclosing his intentions, Dumouriez proceeded to the execution of his impracticable design. He was really in a very difficult position; the soldiers were very much attached to him, but they were also devoted to their country. He was to surrender some fortresses which he was not master of, and it was to be supposed that the generals under his orders, either from fidelity to the republic, or from ambition, would treat him as he had treated Lafayette. His first attempt was not encouraging; after having established himself at Saint Amand, he essayed to possess himself of Lille, Condé, and Valenciennes; but failed in this enterprise. The failure made him hesitate, and prevented his taking the initiative in the attack.
It was not so with the convention; it acted with a promptitude, a boldness, a firmness, and, above all, with a precision in attaining its object, which rendered success certain. When we know what we want, and desire it strongly and speedily, we nearly always attain our object. This quality was wanting in Dumouriez, and the want impeded his audacity and deterred his partisans. As soon as the convention was informed of his projects, it summoned him to its bar. He refused to obey; without, however, immediately raising the standard of revolt. The convention instantly despatched four representatives: Camus, Quinette, Lamarque, Bancal, and Beurnonville, the war minister, to bring him before it, or to arrest him in the midst of his army. Dumouriez received the commissioners at the head of his staff. They presented to him the decree of the convention; he read it and returned it to them, saying that the state of his army would not admit of his leaving it. He offered to resign, and promised in a calmer season to demand judges himself, and to give an account of his designs and of his conduct. The commissioners tried to induce him to submit, quoting the example of the ancient Roman generals. “We are always mistaken in our quotations,” he replied; “and we disfigure Roman history by taking as an excuse for our crimes the example of their virtues. The Romans did not kill Tarquin; the Romans had a well ordered republic and good laws; they had neither a Jacobin club nor a revolutionary tribunal. We live in a time of anarchy. Tigers wish for my head; I will not give it them.” “Citizen general,” said Camus then, “will you obey the decree of the national convention, and repair to Paris?” “Not at present.” “Well, then, I declare that I suspend you; you are no longer a general; I order your arrest.” “This is too much,” said Dumouriez; and he had the commissioners arrested by German hussars, and delivered them as hostages to the Austrians. After this act of revolt he could no longer hesitate. Dumouriez made another attempt on Condé, but it succeeded no better than the first. He tried to induce the army to join him, but was forsaken by it. The soldiers were likely for a long time to prefer the republic to their general; the attachment to the revolution was in all its fervour, and the civil power in all its force. Dumouriez experienced, in declaring himself against the convention, the fate which Lafayette experienced when he declared himself against the legislative assembly, and Bouillé when he declared against the constituent assembly. At this period, a general, combining the firmness of Bouillé with the patriotism and popularity of Lafayette, with the victories and resources of Dumouriez, would have failed as they did. The revolution, with the movement imparted to it, was necessarily stronger than parties, than generals, and than Europe. Dumouriez went over to the Austrian camp with the duc de Chartres, colonel Thouvenot, and two squadrons of Berchiny. The rest of his army went to the camp at Famars, and joined the troops commanded by Dampierre.
The convention, on learning the arrest of the commissioners, established itself as a permanent assembly, declared Dumouriez a traitor to his country, authorized any citizen to attack him, set a price on his head, decreed the famous committee of public safety, and banished the duke of Orleans and all the Bourbons from the republic. Although the Girondists had assailed Dumouriez as warmly as the Mountain, they were accused of being his accomplices, and this was a new cause of complaint added to the rest. Their enemies became every day more powerful; and it was in moments of public danger that they were especially dangerous. Hitherto, in the struggle between the two parties, they had carried the day on every point. They had stopped all inquiries into the massacres of September; they had maintained the usurpation of the commune; they had obtained, first the trial, then the death of Louis XVI.; through their means the plunderings of February and the conspiracy of the 10th of March, had remained unpunished; they had procured the erection of the revolutionary tribunal despite the Girondists; they had driven Roland from the ministry, in disgust; and they had just defeated Dumouriez. It only remained now to deprive the Girondists of their last asylum–the assembly; this they set about on the 10th of April, and accomplished on the 2nd of June.
Robespierre attacked by name Brissot, Guadet, Vergniaud, Pétion, and Gensonné, in the convention; Marat denounced them in the popular societies. As president of the Jacobins, he wrote an address to the departments, in which he invoked the thunder of petitions and accusations against the traitors and faithless delegates who had sought to save the tyrant by an appeal to the public or his imprisonment. The Right and the Plain of the convention felt that it was necessary to unite. Marat was sent before the revolutionary tribunal. This news set the clubs in motion, the people, and the commune. By way of reprisal, Pache, the mayor, came in the name of the thirty-five sections and of the general council, to demand the expulsion of the principal Girondists. Young Boyer Fonfrède required to be included in the proscription of his colleagues, and the members of the Right and the Plain rose, exclaiming, “All! all!” This petition, though declared calumnious, was the first attack upon the convention from without, and it prepared the public mind for the destruction of the Gironde.
The accusation of Marat was far from intimidating the Jacobins who accompanied him to the revolutionary tribunal. Marat was acquitted, and borne in triumph to the assembly. From that moment the approaches to the hall were thronged with daring sans-culottes, and the partisans of the Jacobins filled the galleries of the convention. The clubists and Robespierre’s _tricoteuses_ (knitters) constantly interrupted the speakers of the Right, and disturbed the debate; while without, every opportunity was sought to get rid of the Girondists. Henriot, commandant of the section of sans-culottes, excited against them the battalions about to march for La Vendée. Gaudet then saw that it was time for something more than complaints and speeches; he ascended the tribune. “Citizens,” said he, “while virtuous men content themselves with bewailing the misfortunes of the country, conspirators are active for its ruin. With Caesar they say: ‘Let them talk, we will act.’ Well, then, do you act also. The evil consists in the impunity of the conspirators of the 10th of March; the evil is in anarchy; the evil is in the existence of the authorities of Paris–authorities striving at once for gain and dominion. Citizens, there is yet time; you may save the republic and your compromised glory. I propose to abolish the Paris authorities, to replace within twenty-four hours the municipality by the presidents of the sections, to assemble the convention at Bourges with the least possible delay, and to transmit this decree to the departments by extraordinary couriers.” The Mountain was surprised for a moment by Guadet’s motion. Had his measures been at once adopted, there would have been an end to the domination of the commune, and to the projects of the conspirators; but it is also probable that the agitation of parties would have brought on a civil war, that the convention would have been dissolved by the assembly at Bourges, that all centre of action would have been destroyed, and that the revolution would not have been sufficiently strong to contend against internal struggles and the attacks of Europe. This was what the moderate party in the assembly feared. Dreading anarchy if the career of the commune was not stopped, and counter-revolution if the multitude were too closely kept down, its aim was to maintain the balance between the two extremes of the convention. This party comprised the committees of general safety and of public safety. It was directed by Barrère, who, like all men of upright intentions but weak characters, advocated moderation so long as fear did not make him an instrument of cruelty and tyranny. Instead of Guadet’s decisive measures, he proposed to nominate an extraordinary commission of twelve members, deputed to inquire into the conduct of the municipality; to seek out the authors of the plots against the national representatives, and to secure their persons. This middle course was adopted; but it left the commune in existence, and the commune was destined to triumph over the convention.
The Commission of Twelve threw the members of the commune into great alarm by its inquiries. It discovered a new conspiracy, which was to be put into execution on the 22nd of May, and arrested some of the conspirators, and among others, Hébert, the deputy recorder, author of _Père Duchesne_, who was taken in the very bosom of the municipality. The commune, at first astounded, began to take measures of defence. From that moment, not conspiracy, but insurrection was the order of the day. The general council, encouraged by the Mountain, surrounded itself with the agitators of the capital; it circulated a report that the Twelve wished to purge the convention, and to substitute a counter-revolutionary tribunal for that which had acquitted Marat. The Jacobins, the Cordeliers, the sections sat permanently. On the 26th of May, the agitation became perceptible; on the 27th; it was sufficiently decided to induce the commune to open the attack. It accordingly appeared before the convention and demanded the liberation of Hébert and the suppression of the Twelve; it was accompanied by the deputies of the sections, who expressed the same desire, and the hall was surrounded by a large mob. The section of the City even presumed to require that the Twelve should be brought before the revolutionary tribunal. Isnard, president of the assembly, replied in a solemn tone: “Listen to what I am about to say. If ever by one of those insurrections, of such frequent recurrence since the 10th of March, and of which the magistrates have never apprised the assembly, a hostile hand be raised against the national representatives, I declare to you in the name of all France, Paris will be destroyed. Yes, universal France would rise to avenge such a crime, and soon it would be matter of doubt on which side of the Seine Paris had stood.” This reply became the signal for great tumult. “And I declare to you,” exclaimed Danton, “that so much impudence begins to be intolerable; we will resist you.” Then turning to the Right, he added: “No truce between the Mountain and the cowards who wished to save the tyrant.”
The utmost confusion now reigned in the hall. The strangers’ galleries vociferated denunciations of the Right; the Mountain broke forth into menaces; every moment deputations arrived without, and the convention was surrounded by an immense multitude. A few sectionaries of the Mail and of the Butte-des-Moulins, commanded by Raffet, drew up in the passages and avenues to defend it. The Girondists withstood, as long as they could, the deputations and the Mountain. Threatened within, besieged without, they would have availed themselves of this violence to arouse the indignation of the assembly. But the minister of the interior, Garat, deprived them of this resource. Called upon to give an account of the state of Paris, he declared that the convention had nothing to fear; and the opinion of Garat, who was considered impartial, and whose conciliatory turn of mind involved him in equivocal proceedings, emboldened the members of the Mountain. Isnard was obliged to resign the chair, which was taken by Hérault de Séchelles, a sign of victory for the Mountain. The new president replied to the petitioners, whom Isnard had hitherto kept in the background. “The power of reason and the power of the people are the same thing. You demand from us a magistrate and justice. The representatives of the people will give you both.” It was now very late; the Right was discouraged, some of its members had left. The petitioners had moved from the bar to the seats of the representatives, and there, mixed up with the Mountain, with outcry and disorder, they voted, all together, for the dismissal of the Twelve, and the liberation of the prisoners. It was at half-past twelve, amidst the applause of the galleries and the people outside, that this decree was passed.
It would, perhaps, have been wise on the part of the Girondists, since they were really not the strongest party, to have made no recurrence to this matter. The movement of the preceding day would have had no other result than the suppression of the Twelve, if other causes had not prolonged it. But animosity had attained such a height, that it had become necessary to bring the quarrel to an issue; since the two parties could not endure each other, the only alternative was for them to fight; they must needs go on from victory to defeat, and from defeat to victory, growing more and more excited every day, until the stronger finally triumphed over the weaker party. Next day, the Right regained its position in the convention, and declared the decree of the preceding day illegally passed, in tumult and under compulsion, and the commission was re- established. “You yesterday,” said Danton, “did a great act of justice; but I declare to you, if the commission retains the tyrannical power it has hitherto exercised; if the magistrates of the people are not restored to their functions; if good citizens are again exposed to arbitrary arrest; then, after having proved to you that we surpass our enemies in prudence, in wisdom, we shall surpass them in audacity and revolutionary vigour.” Danton feared to commence the attack; he dreaded the triumph of the Mountain as much as he did that of the Girondists: he accordingly sought, by turns, to anticipate the 31st of May, and to moderate its results. But he was reduced to join his own party during the conflict, and to remain silent after the victory.
The agitation, which had been a little allayed by the suppression of the Twelve, became threatening at the news of their restoration. The benches of the sections and popular societies resounded with invectives, with cries of danger, with calls to insurrection. Hébert, having quitted his prison, reappeared at the commune. A crown was placed on his brow, which he transferred to the bust of Brutus, and then rushed to the Jacobins to demand vengeance on the Twelve. Robespierre, Marat, Danton, Chaumette, and Pache then combined in organising a new movement. The insurrection was modelled on that of the 10th of August. The 29th of May was occupied in preparing the public mind. On the 30th, members of the electoral college, commissioners of the clubs, and deputies of sections assembled at the Evêché, declared themselves in a state of insurrection, dissolved the general council of the commune, and immediately reconstituted it, making it take a new oath; Henriot received the title of commandant-general of the armed force, and the sans-culottes were assigned forty sous a day while under arms. These preparations made, early on the morning of the 31st the tocsin rang, the drums beat to arms, the troops were assembled, and all marched towards the convention, which for some time past had held its sittings at the Tuileries.
The assembly had met at the sound of the tocsin. The minister of the interior, the administrators of the department, and the mayor of Paris had been summoned, in succession, to the bar. Garat had given an account of the agitated state of Paris, but appeared to apprehend no dangerous result. Lhuillier, in the name of the department, declared it was only a _moral_ insurrection. Pache, the mayor, appeared last, and informed them, with an hypocritical air, of the operations of the insurgents; he pretended that he had employed every means to maintain order; assured them that the guard of the convention had been doubled, and that he had prohibited the firing of the alarm cannon; yet, at the same moment, the cannon was heard in the distance. The surprise and excitement of the assembly were extreme. Cambon exhorted the members to union, and called upon the people in the strangers’ gallery to be silent. “Under these extraordinary circumstances,” said he, “the only way of frustrating the designs of the malcontents is to make the national convention respected.” “I demand,” said Thuriot, “the immediate abolition of the Commission of Twelve.” “And I,” cried Tallien, “that the sword of the law may strike the conspirators who profane the very bosom of the convention.” The Girondists, on their part, required that the audacious Henriot should be called to the bar, for having fired the alarm cannon without the permission of the convention. “If a struggle take place,” said Vergniaud, “be the success what it may, it will be the ruin of the republic. Let every member swear to die at his post.” The entire assembly rose, applauding the proposition. Danton rushed to the tribune: “Break up the Commission of Twelve! you have heard the thunder of the cannon. If you are politic legislators, far from blaming the outbreak of Paris, you will turn it to the profit of the republic, by reforming your own errors, by dismissing your commission.–I address those,” he continued, on hearing murmurs around him, “who possess some political talent, not dullards, who can only act and speak in obedience to their passions.–Consider the grandeur of your aim; it is to save the people from their foes, from the aristocrats, to save them from their own blind fury. If a few men, really dangerous, no matter to what party they belong, should then seek to prolong a movement, become useless, by your act of justice, Paris itself will hurl them back into their original insignificance. I calmly, simply, and deliberately demand the suppression of the commission, on political grounds.” The commission was violently attacked on one side, feebly defended on the other; Barrère and the committee of public safety, who were its creators proposed its suppression, in order to restore peace, and to save the assembly from being left to the mercy of the multitude. The moderate portion of the Mountain were about to adopt this concession, when the deputations arrived. The members of the department, those of the municipality, and the commissaries of sections, being admitted to the bar, demanded not merely the suppression of the Twelve, but also the punishment of the moderate members, and of all the Girondist chiefs.
The Tuileries was completely blockaded by the insurgents; and the presence of their commissaries in the convention emboldened the extreme Mountain, who were desirous of destroying the Girondist party. Robespierre, their leader and orator, spoke: “Citizens, let us not lose this day in vain clamours and unnecessary measures; this is, perhaps, the last day in which patriotism will combat with tyranny. Let the faithful representatives of the people combine to secure their happiness.” He urged the convention to follow the course pointed out by the petitioners, rather than that proposed by the committee of public safety. He was thundering forth a lengthened declamation against his adversaries, when Vergniaud interfered: “Conclude this!”–“I am about to conclude, and against you! Against you, who, after the revolution of the 10th of August, sought to bring to the scaffold those who had effected it. Against you, who have never ceased in a course which involved the destruction of Paris. Against you, who desired to save the tyrant. Against you, who conspired with Dumouriez. Against you, who fiercely persecuted the same patriots whose heads Dumouriez demanded. Against you, whose criminal vengeance provoked those cries of vengeance which you seek to make a crime in your victims. I conclude my conclusion is–I propose a decree of accusation against all the accomplices of Dumouriez, and against those who are indicated by the petitioners.” Notwithstanding the violence of this outbreak, Robespierre’s party were not victorious. The insurrection had only been directed against the Twelve, and the committee of public safety, who proposed their suppression prevailed over the commune. The assembly adopted the decree of Barrère, which dissolved the Twelve, placed the public force in permanent requisition, and, to satisfy the petitioners, directed the committee of public safety to inquire into the conspiracies which they denounced. As soon as the multitude surrounding the assembly was informed of these measures, it received them with applause, and dispersed.
But the conspirators were not disposed to rest content with this half triumph: they had gone further on the 30th of May than on the 29th; and on the 2nd of June they went further than on the 31st of May. The insurrection, from being moral, as they termed it, became personal; that is to say, it was no longer directed against a power, but against the deputies; it passed from Danton and the Mountain, to Robespierre, Marat, and the commune. On the evening of the 31st, a Jacobin deputy said: “We have had but half the game yet; we must complete it, and not allow the people to cool.” Henriot offered to place the armed force at the disposition of the club. The insurrectional committee openly took up its quarters near the convention. The whole of the 1st of June was devoted to the preparation of a great movement. The commune wrote to the sections: “Citizens, remain under arms: the danger of the country renders this a supreme law.” In the evening, Marat, who was the chief author of the 2nd of June, repaired to the Hôtel de Ville, ascended the clock-tower himself, and rang the tocsin; he called upon the members of the council not to separate till they had obtained a decree of accusation against the traitors and the “statesmen.” A few deputies assembled at the convention, and the conspirators came to demand the decree against the proscribed parties; but they were not yet sufficiently strong to enforce it from the convention.
The whole night was spent in making preparations; the tocsin rang, drums beat to arms, the people gathered together. On Sunday morning, about eight o’clock, Henriot presented himself to the general council, and declared to his accomplices, in the name of the insurrectionary people, that they would not lay down their arms until they had obtained the arrest of the conspiring deputies. He then placed himself at the head of the vast crowd assembled in the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, harangued them, and gave the signal for their departure. It was nearly ten o’clock when the insurgents reached the Place du Carrousel. Henriot posted round the château bands of the most devoted men, and the convention was soon surrounded by eighty thousand men, the greater part ignorant of what was required of them and more disposed to defend than to attack the deputation.
The majority of the proscribed members had not proceeded to the assembly. A few, courageous to the last, had come to brave the storm for the last time. As soon as the sitting commenced, the intrepid Lanjuinais ascended the tribune. “I demand,” said he, “to speak respecting the general call to arms now beating throughout Paris.” He was immediately interrupted by cries of “Down! down! He wants civil war! He wants a counter-revolution! He calumniates Paris! He insults the people.” Despite the threats, the insults, the clamours of the Mountain and the galleries, Lanjuinais denounced the projects of the commune and of the malcontents; his courage rose with the danger. “You accuse us,” he said, “of calumniating Paris! Paris is pure; Paris is good; Paris is oppressed by tyrants who thirst for blood and dominion.” These words were the signal for the most violent tumult; several Mountain deputies rushed to the tribune to tear Lanjuinais from it; but he, clinging firmly to it, exclaimed, in accents of the most lofty courage, “I demand the dissolution of all the revolutionist authorities in Paris. I demand that all they have done during the last three days may be declared null. I demand that all who would arrogate to themselves a new authority contrary to law, be placed without the law, and that every citizen be at liberty to punish them.” He had scarcely concluded, when the insurgent petitioners came to demand his arrest, and that of his colleagues. “Citizens,” said they, “the people are weary of seeing their happiness still postponed; they leave it once more in your hands; save them, or we declare that they will save themselves.”
The Right moved the order of the day on the petition of the insurgents, and the convention accordingly proceeded to the previous question. The petitioners immediately withdrew in a menacing attitude; the strangers quitted the galleries; cries to arms were shouted, and a great tumult was heard without: “Save the people!” cried one of the Mountain. “Save your colleagues, by decreeing their provisional arrest.” “No, no!” replied the Right, and even a portion of the Left. “We will all share their fate!” exclaimed La Réveillère-Lépaux. The committee of public safety, called upon to make a report, terrified at the magnitude of the danger, proposed, as on the 31st of May, a measure apparently conciliatory, to satisfy the insurgents, without entirely sacrificing the proscribed members. “The committee,” said Barrère, “appeal to the generosity and patriotism of the accused members. It asks of them the suspension of their power, representing to them that this alone can put an end to the divisions which afflict the republic, can alone restore to it peace.” A few among them adopted the proposition. Isnard at once gave in his resignation; Lanthénas, Dussaulx, and Fauchet followed his example; Lanjuinais would not. He said: “I have hitherto, I believe, shown some courage; expect not from me either suspension or resignation. When the ancients,” he continued, amidst violent interruption, “prepared a sacrifice, they crowned the victim with flowers and chaplets, as they conducted it to the altar; but they did not insult it.” Barbaroux was as firm as Lanjuinais. “I have sworn,” he said, “to die at my post; I will keep my oath.” The conspirators of the Mountain themselves protested against the proposition of the committee. Marat urged that those who make sacrifices should be pure; and Billaud-Varennes demanded the trial of the Girondists, not their suspension.
While this was going on, Lacroix, a deputy of the Mountain, rushed into the house, and to the tribune, and declared that he had been insulted at the door, that he had been refused egress, and that the convention was no longer free. Many of the Mountain expressed their indignation at Henriot and his troops. Danton said it was necessary vigorously to avenge this insult to the national majesty. Barrère proposed to the convention to present themselves to the people. “Representatives,” said he, “vindicate your liberty; suspend your sitting; cause the bayonets that surround you to be lowered.” The whole convention arose, and set forth in procession, preceded by its sergeants, and headed by the president, who was covered, in token of his affliction. On arriving at a door on the Place du Carrousel, they found there Henriot on horseback, sabre in hand. “What do the people require?” said the president, Hérault de Séchelles; “the convention is wholly engaged in promoting their happiness.” “Hérault,” replied Henriot, “the people have not risen to hear phrases; they require twenty-four traitors to be given up to them.” “Give us all up!” cried those who surrounded the president. Henriot then turned to his people, and exclaimed: “Cannoneers, to your guns.” Two pieces were directed upon the convention, who, retiring to the gardens, sought an outlet at various points, but found all the issues guarded. The soldiers were everywhere under arms. Marat ran through the ranks, encouraging and exciting them. “No weakness,” said he; “do not quit your posts till they have given them up.” The convention then returned within the house, overwhelmed with a sense of their powerlessness, convinced of the inutility of their efforts, and entirely subdued. The arrest of the proscribed members was no longer opposed. Marat, the true dictator of the assembly, imperiously decided the fate of its members. “Dussaulx,” said he, “is an old twaddler, incapable of leading a party; Lathénas is a poor creature, unworthy of a thought; Ducos is merely chargeable with a few absurd notions, and is not at all a man to become a counter-revolutionary leader. I require that these be struck out of the list, and their names replaced by that of Valazé.” These names were accordingly struck out, and that of Valazé substituted, and the list thus altered was agreed to, scarcely one half of the assembly taking part in the vote.
These are the names of the illustrious men proscribed: the Girondists Gensonné, Guadet, Brissot, Gorsas, Pétion, Vergniaud, Salles, Barbaroux, Chambon, Buzot, Birotteau, Lidon, Rabaud, Lasource, Lanjuinais, Grangeneuve, Lehardy, Lesage, Louvet, Valazé, Lebrun, minister of foreign affairs, Clavières, minister of taxes; and the members of the Council of Twelve, Kervelegan, Gardien, Rabaud Saint-Etienne, Boileau, Bertrand, Vigée, Molleveau, Henri La Rivière, Gomaire, and Bergoing. The convention placed them under arrest at their own houses, and under the protection of the people. The order for keeping the assembly itself prisoners was at once withdrawn, and the multitude dispersed, but from that moment the convention ceased to be free.
Thus fell the Gironde party, a party rendered illustrious by great talents and great courage, a party which did honour to the young republic by its