The conspirators, finding they were lost, sought to escape the violence of their enemies. A gendarme named Méda, who first entered the room where the conspirators were assembled, fired a pistol at Robespierre and shattered his jaw; Lebas wounded himself fatally; Robespierre the younger jumped from a window on the third story, and survived his fall; Couthon hid himself under a table; Saint-Just awaited his fate; Coffinhal, after reproaching Henriot with cowardice, threw him from a window into a drain and fled. Meantime, the conventionalists penetrated into the Hôtel de Ville, traversed the desolate halls, seized the conspirators, and carried them in triumph to the assembly. Bourdon entered the hall crying "Victory! victory! the traitors are no more!" "The wretched Robespierre is there," said the president; "they are bringing him on a litter. Doubtless you would not have him brought in." "No! no!" they cried; "carry him to the Place de la Révolution!" He was deposited for some time at the committee of general safety before he was transferred to the Conciergerie; and here, stretched on a table, his face disfigured and bloody, exposed to the looks, the invectives, the curses of all, he beheld the various parties exulting in his fall, and charging upon him all the crimes that had been committed. He displayed much insensibility during his last moments. He was taken to the Conciergerie, and afterwards appeared before the revolutionary tribunal, which, after identifying him and his accomplices, sent them to the scaffold. On the 10th Thermidor, about five in the evening, he ascended the death cart, placed between Henriot and Couthon, mutilated like himself. His head was enveloped in linen saturated with blood; his face was livid, his eyes almost visionless. An immense crowd thronged around the cart, manifesting the most boisterous and exulting joy. They congratulated and embraced each other, loading him with imprecations, and pressed near to view him more closely. The gendarmes pointed him out with their sabres. As to him, he seemed to regard the crowd with contemptuous pity; Saint-Just looked calmly at them; the rest, in number twenty-two, were dejected. Robespierre ascended the scaffold last; when his head fell, shouts of applause arose in the air, and lasted for some minutes.
With him ended the reign of terror, although he was not the most zealous advocate of that system in his party. If he sought for supremacy, after obtaining it, he would have employed moderation; and the reign of terror, which ceased at his fall, would also have ceased with his triumph. I regard his ruin to have been inevitable; he had no organized force; his partisans, though numerous, were not enrolled; his instrument was the force of opinion and of terror; accordingly, not being able to surprise his foes by a strong hand, after the fashion of Cromwell, he sought to intimidate them. Terror not succeeding, he tried insurrection. But as the convention with the support of the committees had become courageous, so the sections, relying on the courage of the convention, would naturally declare against the insurgents. By attacking the government, he aroused the assembly; by arousing the assembly, he aroused the people, and this coalition necessarily ruined him. The convention on the 9th of Thermidor was no longer, as on the 31st of May, divided, undecided, opposed to a compact, numerous, and daring faction. All parties were united by defeat, misfortune, and the proscription ever threatening them, and would naturally cooperate in the event of a struggle. It did not, therefore, depend on Robespierre himself to escape defeat; and it was not in his power to secede from the committees. In the position to which he had attained, one is consumed by one's passions, deceived by hopes and by fortune, hitherto good; and when once the scaffolds have been erected, justice and clemency are as impossible as peace, tranquillity, and the dispensing of power when war is declared. One must then fall by the means by which one has arisen; the man of faction must perish by the scaffold, as conquerors by war.
CHAPTER X
FROM THE 9TH THERMIDOR TO THE 1ST PRAIRIAL, YEAR III. (20TH MAY, 1795). EPOCH OF THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
The 9th of Thermidor was the first day of the revolution in which those fell who attacked. This indication alone manifested that the ascendant revolutionary movement had reached its term. From that day the contrary movement necessarily began. The general rising of all parties against one man was calculated to put an end to the compression under which they laboured. In Robespierre the committees subdued each other, and the decemviral government lost the prestige of terror which had constituted its strength. The committees liberated the convention, which gradually liberated the entire republic. Yet they thought they had been working for themselves, and for the prolongation of the revolutionary government, while the greater part of those who had supported them had for their object the overthrow of the dictatorship, the independence of the assembly, and the establishment of legal order. From the day after the 9th of Thermidor there were, therefore, two opposite parties among the conquerors, that of the committees, and that of the Mountain, which was called the Thermidorian party.
The former was deprived of half its forces; besides the loss of its chief, it no longer had the commune, whose insurgent members, to the number of seventy-two, had been sent to the scaffold, and, which, after its double defeat under Hébert and under Robespierre, was not again re-organized, and remained without direct influence. But this party retained the direction of affairs through the committees. All its members were attached to the revolutionary system; some, such as Billaud-Varennes, Collot-d'Herbois, Barrère, Vadier, Amar, saw it was their only safety; others, such as Carnot, Cambon, the two Prieurs, de la Marne, and de la Côte-d'Or, etc., feared the counter-revolution, and the punishment of their colleagues. In the convention it reckoned all the commissioners hitherto sent on missions, several of the Mountain who had signalized themselves on the 9th Thermidor, and the remnant of Robespierre's party. Without, the Jacobins were attached to it; and it still had the support of the faubourgs and of the lower class.
The Thermidorian party was composed of the greater number of the conventionalists. All the centre of the assembly, and what remained of the Right, joined the Mountain, who had abated their former exaggeration of views. The coalition of the Moderates, Boissy d'Anglas, Sieyès, Cambacérès, Chénier, Thibeaudeau, with the Dantonists, Tallien, Fréron, Legendre, Barras, Bourdon de l'Oise, Rovère, Bentabole, Dumont, and the two Merlins, entirely changed the character of the assembly. After the 9th of Thermidor, the first step of this party was to secure its empire in the convention. Soon it found its way into the government, and succeeded in excluding the previous occupants. Sustained by public opinion, by the assembly, by the committees, it advanced openly towards its object; it proceeded against the principal decemvirs, and some of their agents. As these had many partisans in Paris, it sought the aid of the young men against the Jacobins, of the sections against the faubourgs. At the same time, to strengthen it, it recalled to the assembly all the deputies whom the committee of public safety had proscribed; first, the seventy-three who had protested against the 31st of May, and then the surviving victims of that day themselves. The Jacobins exhibited excitement: it closed their club; the faubourgs raised an insurrection: it disarmed them. After overthrowing the revolutionary government, it directed its attention to the establishment of another, and to the introduction, under the constitution of the year III., of a feasible, liberal, regular, and stable order of things, in place of the extraordinary and provisional state in which the convention had been from its commencement until then. But all this was accomplished gradually.
The two parties were not long before they began to differ, after their common victory. The revolutionary tribunal was an especial object of general horror. On the 11th Thermidor it was suspended; but Billaud- Varennes, in the same sitting, had the decree of suspension rescinded. He maintained that the accomplices of Robespierre alone were guilty, that the majority of the judges and jurors being men of integrity, it was desirable to retain them in their offices. Barrère presented a decree to that effect: he urged that the triumvirs had done nothing for the revolutionary government; that they had often even opposed its measures; that their only care had been to place their creatures in it, and to give it a direction favourable to their own projects; he insisted, in order to strengthen that government, upon retaining the law des suspects and the tribunal, with its existing members, including Fouquier-Tinville. At this name a general murmur rose in the assembly. Fréron, rendering himself the organ of the general indignation, exclaimed: "I demand that at last the earth be delivered from that monster, and that Fouquier be sent to hell, there to wallow in the blood he has shed." His proposition was applauded, and Fouquier's accusation decreed. Barrère, however, did not regard himself as defeated; he still retained toward the convention the imperious language which the old committee had made use of with success; this was at once habit and calculation on his part; for he well knew that nothing is so easily continued as that which has been successful.
But the political tergiversations of Barrère, a man of noble birth, and who was a royalist Feuillant before the 10th of August, did not countenance his assuming this imperious and inflexible tone. "Who is this president of the Feuillants," said Merlin de Thionville, "who assumes to dictate to us the law?" The hall resounded with applause. Barrère became confused, left the tribune, and this first check of the committees indicated their decline in the convention. The revolutionary tribunal continued to exist, but with other members and another organization. The law of the 22nd Prairial was abolished, and there were now as much deliberation and moderation, as many protecting forms in trials, as before there had been precipitation and inhumanity. This tribunal was no longer made use of against persons formerly suspected, who were still detained in prison, though under milder treatment, and who, by degrees, were restored to liberty on the plan proposed by Camille Desmoulins for his Committee of Clemency.
On the 13th of Thermidor the government itself became the subject of discussion. The committee of public safety was deficient in many members; Hérault de Séchelles had never been replaced; Jean-Bon-Saint-André and Prieur de la Marne were on missions; Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just had perished on the scaffold. In the places of these were appointed Tallien, Bréard, Echassériaux, Treilhard, Thuriot, and Laloi, whose accession lessened still more the influence of the old members. At the same time, were reorganized the two committees, so as to render them more dependent on the assembly, and less so on one another. The committee of public safety was charged with military and diplomatic operations; that of general safety with internal administration. As it was desired, by limiting the revolutionary power, to calm the fever which had excited the multitude; and gradually to disperse them, the daily meetings of the sections were reduced to one in every ten days; and the pay of forty sous a day, lately given to every indigent citizen who attended them, was discontinued.