All these views at once guided the policy of the committee of public safety, a policy of vengeance, of terror, and of self-preservation. This was the maxim upon which it proceeded in reference to insurgent towns: "The name of Lyons," said Barrère, "must no longer exist. You will call it Ville Affranchie, and upon the ruins of that famous city there shall be raised a monument to attest the crime and the punishment of the enemies of liberty. Its history shall be told in these words: 'Lyons warred against liberty; Lyons exists no more.'" To realise this terrible anathema, the committee sent to this unfortunate city Collot-d'Herbois, Fouché, and Couthon, who slaughtered the inhabitants with grape shot and demolished its buildings. The insurgents of Toulon underwent at the hands of the representatives, Barras and Fréron, a nearly similar fate. At Caen, Marseilles, and Bordeaux, the executions were less general and less violent, because they were proportioned to the gravity of the insurrection, which had not been undertaken in concert with foreign foes.
In the interior, the dictatorial government struck at all the parties with which it was at war, in the persons of their greatest members. The condemnation of queen Marie-Antoinette was directed against Europe; that of the twenty-two against the Girondists; of the wise Bailly against the old constitutionalists; lastly, that of the duke of Orleans against certain members of the Mountain who were supposed to have plotted his elevation. The unfortunate widow of Louis XVI. was first sentenced to death by this sanguinary revolutionary tribunal. The proscribed of the 2nd of June soon followed her. She perished on the 16th of October, and the Girondist deputies on the 31st. They were twenty-one in number: Brissot, Vergniaud, Gensonné, Fonfrède, Ducos, Valazé, Lasource, Silléry, Gardien, Carra, Duperret, Duprat, Fauchet, Beauvais, Duchâtel, Mainvielle, Lacaze, Boileau, Lehardy, Antiboul, and Vigée. Seventy-three of their colleagues, who had protested against their arrest, were also imprisoned, but the committee did not venture to inflict death upon them.
During the debates, these illustrious prisoners displayed uniform and serene courage. Vergniaud raised his eloquent voice for a moment, but in vain. Valazé stabbed himself with a poignard on hearing the sentence, and Lasource said to the judges: "I die at a time when the people have lost their senses; you will die when they recover them." They went to execution displaying all the stoicism of the times, singing the Marseillaise, and applying it to their own case:
"Allons, enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé:
Contre nous de la tyrannie
Le couteau sanglant est levé," etc.
Nearly all the other leaders of this party had a violent end. Salles, Guadet, and Barbaroux, were discovered in the grottos of Saint-Emilion, near Bordeaux, and died on the scaffold. Pétion and Buzot, after wandering about some time, committed suicide; they were found, dead in a field, half devoured by wolves. Rabaud-Saint-Etienne was betrayed by an old friend; Madame Roland was also condemned to death, and displayed the courage of a Roman matron. Her husband, on hearing of her death, left his place of concealment, and killed himself on the high road. Condorcet, outlawed soon after the 2nd of June, was taken while endeavouring to escape, and saved himself from the executioner's knife only by poison. Louvet, Kervelegan, Lanjuinais, Henri La Rivière, Lesage, La Réveillère-Lépeaux, were the only leading Girondists who, in secure retreat, awaited the end of the furious storm.
The revolutionary government was formed; it was proclaimed by the convention on the 10th of October. Before the 31st of May, power had been nowhere, neither in the ministry, nor in the commune, nor in the convention. It was natural that power should become concentrated in this extreme situation of affairs, and at a moment when the need for unity and promptitude of action was deeply felt. The assembly being the most central and extensive power, the dictatorship would as naturally become placed in its bosom, be exercised there by the dominant faction, and in that faction by a few men. The committee of public safety of the convention created on the 6th of April, in order, as the name indicates, to provide for the defence of the revolution by extraordinary measures, was in itself a complete framework of government. Formed during the divisions of the Mountain and the Gironde, it was composed of neutral members of the convention till the 31st of May; and at its first renewal, of members of the extreme Mountain. Barrère remained in it; but Robespierre acceded, and his party dominated in it by Saint-Just, Couthon, Collot-d'Herbois, and Billaud-Varennes. He set aside some Dantonists who still remained in it, such as Hérault de Séchelles and Robert Lindet, gained over Barrère, and usurped the lead by assuming the direction of the public mind and of police. His associates divided the various departments among themselves. Saint-Just undertook the surveillance and denouncing of parties; Couthon, the violent propositions which required to be softened in form; Billaud- Varennes and Collot-d'Herbois directed the missions into the departments; Carnot took the war department; Cambon, the exchequer; Prieur de la Côte- d'Or, Prieur de la Marne, and several others, the various branches of internal administration; and Barrère was the daily orator, the panegyrist ever prepared, of the dictatorial committee. Below these, assisting in the detail of the revolutionary administration, and of minor measures, was placed the committee of general safety, composed in the same spirit as the great committee, having, like it, twelve members, who were re-eligible every three months, and always renewed in their office.
The whole revolutionary power was lodged in the hands of these men. Saint- Just, in proposing the establishment of the decemviral power until the restoration of peace, did not conceal the motives nor the object of this dictatorship. "You must no longer show any lenity to the enemies of the new order of things," said he. "Liberty must triumph at any cost. In the present circumstances of the republic, the constitution cannot be established; it would guarantee impunity to attacks on our liberty, because it would be deficient in the violence necessary to restrain them. The present government is not sufficiently free to act. You are not near enough to strike in every direction at the authors of these attacks; the sword of the law must extend everywhere; your arm must be felt everywhere." Thus was created that terrible power, which first destroyed the enemies of the Mountain, then the Mountain and the Commune, and, lastly, itself. The committee did everything in the name of the convention, which it used as an instrument. It nominated and dismissed generals, ministers, representatives, commissioners, judges, and juries. It assailed factions; it took the initiative in all measures. Through its commissioners, armies and generals were dependent upon it, and it ruled the departments with sovereign sway. By means of the law touching suspected persons, it disposed of men's liberties; by the revolutionary tribunal, of men's lives; by levies and the maximum, of property; by decrees of accusation in the terrified convention, of its own members. Lastly, its dictatorship was supported by the multitude, who debated in the clubs, ruled in the revolutionary committees: whose services it paid by a daily stipend, and whom it fed with the maximum. The multitude adhered to a system which inflamed its passions, exaggerated its importance, assigned it the first place, and appeared to do everything for it.
The innovators, separated by war and by their laws from all states and from all forms of government, determined to widen the separation. By an unprecedented revolution they established an entirely new era; they changed the divisions of the year, the names of the months and days; they substituted a republican for the Christian calendar, the decade for the week, and fixed the day of rest not on the sabbath, but on the tenth day. The new era dated from the 22nd of September, 1792, the epoch of the foundation of the republic. There were twelve equal months of thirty days, which began on the 22nd of September, in the following order:— Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire, for the autumn; Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse, for the winter; Germinal, Floréal, Prairial, for the spring; Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor, for the summer. Each month had three décades, each décade ten days, and each day was named from its order in the décade:—Primidi, Duodi, Tridi, Quartidi, Quintidi, Sextidi, Septidi, Octidi, Nonidi, Decadi. The surplus five days were placed at the end of the year; they received the name of Sans-culottides, and were consecrated, the first, to the festival of genius; the second, to that of labour; the third, to that of actions; the fourth, to that of rewards; the fifth, to that of opinion. The constitution of 1793 led to the establishment of the republican calendar, and the republican calendar to the abolition of Christian worship. We shall soon see the commune and the committee of public safety each proposing a religion of its own; the commune, the worship of reason; the committee of public safety, the worship of the Supreme Being. But we must first mention a new struggle between the authors of the catastrophe of the 31st of May themselves.
The Commune and the Mountain had effected this revolution against the Gironde, and the committee alone had benefited by it. During the five months from June to November, the committee, having taken all the measures of defence, had naturally become the first power in the republic. The actual struggle being, as it were, over, the commune sought to sway the committee, and the Mountain to throw off its yoke. The most intense manifestation of the revolution was found in the municipal faction. With an aim opposed to that of the committee of public safety, it desired instead of the conventional dictatorship, the most extreme local democracy; and instead of religion, the consecration of materialism. Political anarchy and religious atheism were the symbols of this party, and the means by which it aimed at establishing its own rule. A revolution is the effect of the different systems which have agitated the age which has originated it. Thus, during the continuance of the crisis in France, ultra-montane catholicism was represented by the nonjuring clergy; Jansenism by the constitutionist clergy; philosophical deism by the worship of the Supreme Being, instituted by the committee of public safety; and the materialism of Holbach's school by the worship of Reason and of Nature, decreed by the commune. It was the same with political opinions, from the royalty of the Ancien Régime to the unlimited democracy of the municipal faction. The latter had lost, in Marat, its principal support, its true leader, while the committee of public safety still retained Robespierre. It had at its head men who enjoyed great popularity with the lower classes; Chaumette, and his substitute Hébert, were its political leaders; Ronsin, commandant of the revolutionary army, its general; the atheist, Anacharsis Clootz, its apostle. In the sections it relied on the revolutionary committees, in which there were many obscure foreigners, supposed, and not without probability, to be agents of England, sent to destroy the republic by driving it into anarchy and excess. The club of the Cordeliers was composed entirely of its partisans. The Vieux Cordeliers of Danton, who had contributed so powerfully to the 10th of August, and who constituted the commune of that period, had entered the government and the convention, and had been replaced in the club by members whom they contemptuously designated the patriotes de la troisième réquisition.
Hébert's faction, which, in a work entitled Père Duchêsne, popularised obscene language and low and cruel sentiments, and which added derision of the victims to the executions of party, in a short time made terrible progress. It compelled the bishop of Paris and his vicars to abjure Christianity at the bar of the convention, and forced the convention to decree, that the worship of Reason should be substituted for the catholic religion. The churches were shut up or converted into temples of reason, and fêtes were established in every town, which became scandalous scenes of atheism. The committee of public safety grew alarmed at the power of this ultra-revolutionary faction, and hastened to stop and to destroy it. Robespierre soon attacked it in the assembly, (15th Frimaire, year II., 5th Dec., 1793). "Citizens, representatives of the people," said he, "the kings in alliance against the republic are making war against us with armies and intrigues; we will oppose their armies by braver ones; their intrigues, by vigilance and the terror of national justice. Ever intent on renewing their secret plots, in proportion as they are destroyed by the hand of patriotism, ever skilful in directing the arms of liberty against liberty itself, the emissaries of the enemies of France are now labouring to overthrow the republic by republicanism, and to rekindle civil war by philosophy." He classed the ultra-revolutionists of the commune with the external enemies of the republic. "It is your part," said he to the convention, "to prevent the follies and extravagancies which coincide with the projects of foreign conspiracy. I require you to prohibit particular authorities (the commune) from serving our enemies by rash measures, and that no armed force be allowed to interfere in questions of religious opinions." And the convention, which had applauded the abjurations at the demand of the commune, decreed, on Robespierre's motion, that all violence and all measures opposed to the liberty of religion are prohibited.