She was sent to the guillotine with all her family relations. The conduct of this girl is quite inexplicable, and it is doubted whether she seriously contemplated any crime. When she called to see Robespierre she left her knife in her room in a basket! Eight carts were filled with victims to avenge this crime.[421]
Robespierre was now so popular with the multitude that all Paris rallied around him with congratulations.
The 8th of May was appointed as a festival in honor of the Supreme Being. Robespierre, the originator of the movement, was chosen President of the Convention, that he might take the most conspicuous part on the occasion. The morning dawned with unusual splendor. For that one day the guillotine was ordered to rest. An amphitheatre was erected in the centre of the garden of the Tuileries, and the spacious grounds were crowded with a rejoicing concourse. The celebrated painter David had arranged the fête with the highest embellishments of art. At twelve o'clock Robespierre ascended a pavilion and delivered a discourse.
"Republican Frenchmen," said he, "the ever fortunate day which the French people dedicated to the Supreme Being has at length arrived. Never did the world which he created exhibit a spectacle so worthy of his attention. He has beheld tyranny, crime, and imposture reigning on earth. He beholds at this moment a whole nation, assailed by all the oppressors of mankind, suspending the course of its heroic labors to lift its thoughts and its prayers toward the Supreme Being who gave it the mission to undertake and the courage to execute them."
Having finished his brief address, he descended and set fire to a colossal group of figures representing Atheism, Discord, and Selfishness, which the idea of a God was to reduce to ashes. As they were consumed, there appeared in their place, emerging from the flames, the statue of Wisdom. After music, songs, and sundry symbolic ceremonies, an immense procession was formed, headed by Robespierre, which proceeded from the Tuileries to the Champ de Mars. Here, after the performance of pageants as imposing as Parisian genius could invent and Parisian opulence execute, the procession returned to the Tuileries, where the festival was concluded with public diversions.[422]
The pre-eminence which Robespierre assumed on this occasion excited great displeasure, and many murmurs reached his ears. Robespierre, the next day, entered complaints against those who had murmured, accused them of being Dantonists and enemies of the Revolution, and wished to send them to the guillotine. Each member of the Convention began to feel that his head was entirely at the disposal of Robespierre, and gradually became emboldened to opposition.
The legal process by which victims were arrested and sent to the guillotine had now become simple and energetic in the extreme. Any man complained to the Committee of Public Safety of whom he would, as suspected of being unfriendly to the Revolution. The committee immediately ordered the arrest of the accused. The eighteen prisons of Paris were thus choked with victims. Each evening Fouquier Tinville, the public accuser, received from the Committee of Public Safety a list of those whom he was to take the next day to the Revolutionary Tribunal. If the committee, for any reason, had not prepared a list, Fouquier Tinville was allowed to select whom he pleased. To be suspected was almost certain death. From the commencement of this year (1794) the executions had increased with frightful rapidity. In January eighty-three were executed; in February, seventy-five; in March, one hundred and twenty-three; in April, two hundred and sixty-three; in May, three hundred and twenty-four; in June, six hundred and seventy-two; in July, eight hundred and thirty-five.[423]
Carts were continually passing from the gates of the Conciergerie loaded with prisoners, who were promptly condemned and sent immediately to the scaffold. Malesherbes, the intrepid and venerable defender of Louis XVI., living in retirement in the country, was dragged, with all his family, to the scaffold. If a man were rich, he was suspected of aristocracy and was sent to the guillotine. If he were learned, his celebrity exposed him to suspicion, and his doom was death. If he were virtuous, he was accused of sympathy for the victims of the guillotine, and was condemned to the scaffold. There was no longer safety but in vice and degradation. The little girls who had been led by their fathers to attend a ball given by the King of Prussia at Verdun were all arrested, brought to Paris, and condemned and executed. "The eldest," says Lamartine, "was eighteen. They were all clothed in white robes. The cart which carried them resembled a basket of lilies whose heads waved to the motion of the arm. The affected executioners wept with them." Josephine Beauharnais, afterward the bride of Napoleon, was at this time in one of the dungeons of Paris, sleeping upon a wretched pallet of straw, and expecting daily to be led to execution.
Robespierre, St. Just, and Couthon were the three leading men in the Committee of Public Safety, and were hence called the Triumvirate. All began now to be weary of blood, and yet no one knew how to stem the torrent or when the carnage would cease. The Reign of Terror had become almost as intolerable as the tyranny of the old kings, but not fully so; the Reign of Terror crushed thousands who could make their woes heard; despotism crushed millions who were dumb. There was no hope for France but in some energetic arm which, assuming the dictatorship, should rescue liberty from the encroachments of kings and from being degraded by the mob. Robespierre was now the most prominent man in France and the most popular with the multitude. His friends urged him to assume the dictatorship.
Jealousy of Robespierre's ambition now began to arise, and his enemies rapidly increased. Whispers that he had become a traitor to the Republic and was seeking kingly power began to circulate. Popular applause is proverbially fickle. Robespierre soon found that he could not carry his measures in the Committee of Public Safety, and, disgusted and humiliated, he absented himself from the sittings. He attempted to check the effusion of blood, but was overruled by those even more pitiless than himself. He now determined to crush the committee. Political defeat was death. He must either send the committee to the scaffold or bow his own head beneath the knife. It was a death-struggle short and decisive. Pretended lists were circulated of the heads Robespierre demanded. Many in the Convention were appalled. Secret nightly councils were held to array a force against him. The mob of Paris he could command. Henriot, the chief of the military force, was entirely subservient to his will. He reigned supreme and without a rival in the Jacobin Club. His power was apparently resistless. But despair nerved his foes.