1758. The first number of Johnson's Idler appeared.
1762. Granada surrendered to the British.
1776. Grainger, vicar of Shiplake and author of the Biographical History of England, died suddenly while administering the sacrament.
1779. The refugees plundered Nantucket and carried off with them two loaded brigs, and several other vessels.
1780. Alexis Hubert Jaillot, a French geographer, and sculptor to the king, died.
1790. Elizabeth Welsh died at New York, aged 104.
1794. George James Danton, a French Revolutionary Leader, guillotined. Robespierre, dreading the dauntless intrepidity of Danton, Fabre d'Eglantine, Bazire, Chabot, and others of the most noted of his fellow desperadoes in the convention, caused them to be arrested as conspirators against the republic, and after a summary trial, they were executed by the guillotine
on this day. The government of France was now almost entirely vested in one man, under whose sanguinary administration the prisons of Paris contained at one time more than seven thousand persons, and a day seldom passed without sixty or eighty executions by the revolutionary axe.
1794. Marie Jean Herault de Sechelles, a French statesman, guillotined. He conducted before the revolution as an able and upright officer; but as the scene progressed he became identified with the terrorists, and went to the scaffold with Danton, Desmoulins, (q. v.) and others. The two conducted with as much levity in their last moments as if they had been going to a party of pleasure.
1794. Benedict Camille Desmoulins, one of the founders of the Jacobin club in France, guillotined. He was the friend of Danton, and one of the most bloody and reckless of the revolutionists. When arraigned by order of Robespierre, he was asked his age, to which he replied "33 ans, l'age du sans culotte Jesus Christ." His wife, whom he adored, a beautiful, courageous and spirited woman, desired to share her husband's fate, which Robespierre seems not to have been slow to grant.