At the moment this speech was delivered Admiral Lord Hood had just captured Toulon, while Marseilles was being attacked by Carteaux at the head of an army acting for the Convention. Coburg, commanding the Austrian forces in the Netherlands, was gaining a series of minor successes, and his cavalry was not much more than four days' march from Paris. Provisions were being gathered into the city by requisition, that is, by armed columns operating in the neighbouring departments. {193} Confiscatory measures passed the Convention for raising a forced loan of 1,000,000,000 francs, for converting "superfluous" income to the use of the State,—a policy of poor man against rich.
Alongside of these measures terrorism was getting into full swing. The revolutionary tribunal had its staff quadrupled on the 5th of September; within a few days the sections were given increased police powers; and Collot d'Herbois and Billaud-Varennes, the two strongest supporters of Hébert in the Convention were elected to the Committee of Public Safety. On the 17th was passed the famous Loi des suspects, the most drastic, if not the first, decree on that burning question. It provided that all partisans of federalism and tyranny, all enemies of liberty, all ci-devant nobles not known for their attachment to the new institutions, must be arrested; and further that the section committees must draw up lists of suspects residing within their districts. All this meant a repetition on a larger and better organized plan of the massacres of a year before. As Danton had said in the debates on the Revolutionary Tribunal: "This tribunal will take the place of that supreme tribunal, the vengeance of the people; let us be terrible so {194} as to dispense the people from being terrible." Judicial, organized terror was to replace popular, chaotic terror.
With terror now organized, the prisons filled, and the Revolutionary Tribunal sending victims to the guillotine daily, the internal struggle became one between two terrorist parties, of Hébert and of Robespierre, both committed to the policy of the day, but with certain differences. Hébert viewed the system as one affording personal safety,—the executioner being safer than the victim,—and the best opportunity for graft. The man of means was singled out by his satellites for suspicion and arrest, and was then informed that a judicious payment in the right quarter would secure release. Beyond that, Hébert probably cared little enough one way or the other; he was merely concerned in extracting all the material satisfaction he could out of life. With Robespierre the case was different; it was a struggle for a cause, for a creed, a creed of which he was the only infallible prophet. Poor, neat, respectable, unswerving but jealous, he commanded wide admiration as the type of the incorruptible democrat; stiffly and self-consciously he was reproducing the popular pose of Benjamin Franklin. {195} Between him and Hébert there could be no real union. He was willing, while Hébert remained strong in his hold on the public, to act alongside of him, but that was all.
Under the pressure of the Commune and the Mountain, the Convention put the laws of terror in force against the defeated Gironde on the 3rd of October. Forty-three deputies, including Philippe Egalité, were sent to the tribunal, and about one hundred others were outlawed or ordered under arrest. The Convention, having thus washed its hands before the public, now felt able to make a stand against the increasing encroachments of the Commune, and on the 10th St. Just proposed that the Government should continue revolutionary till the peace, which meant that the Committee of Public Safety should govern and the constitution remain suspended.
The Committee showed as much vigour in dealing with the provinces as it showed feebleness in dealing with Paris. Through August and September, rebellious Lyons had been besieged; early in October it fell. The Committee proposed a decree which the Convention accepted,—from June 1793 to July 1794 it accepted everything,—declaring that Lyons should be razed to the earth. Couthon was {196} sent to carry out this draconian edict, but proved too mild. At the end of October Collot d'Herbois, Fouché and 3,000 Parisian sans-culottes were sent down, and for awhile all went well. Houses were demolished, and executions were got in hand with so much energy that cannon and grape shot had to be used to keep pace with the rapidity of the sentences. About three thousand persons in all probably perished.
It was at this moment that in Paris the guillotine, working more slowly but more steadily than Fouché's cannon and grape, was claiming some of its most illustrious victims. From the 12th to the 15th of October, the Revolutionary Tribunal had to deal with the case of Marie Antoinette. The Queen, who had been treated with increased severity since the execution of the King, supported the attacks of the pitiless public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, with firmness and dignity. The accusations against her were of the same general character as those against Louis, and require no special comment. But an incident of the trial brought out some of the most nauseous aspects of the Hébert régime. The Commune had introduced men of the lowest type at {197} the Temple, had placed the Dauphin in the keeping of the infamous cobbler Simon, had attempted to manufacture filthy evidence against the Queen. Hébert went into the witness box to sling mud at her in person, and it was at that moment only, with a look and a word of reply that no instinct could mistake, that she forced a murmur of indignation or sympathy from the public. Robespierre was dining when he heard of the incident, and in his anger with Hébert broke his plate over the table.
The Queen went to the guillotine, driven in an open cart, on the 16th. A week later the Girondins went to trial, twenty-one deputies, among them Brissot, Vergniaud, Gensonné and Boyer Fonfrède. Their trial lasted five days, and among its auditors was Camille Desmoulins,—Desmoulins, whose pamphlets had helped place his unfortunate opponents where they stood, Desmoulins, whose heart, whose generosity was stirred, who already was revolting against terrorism, who was suddenly overwhelmed with a wave of remorse when sentence of death was pronounced against the men of the Gironde. It was the first revolt of opinion against the reign of terror, the first {198} perceptible movement of the conscience of France, and it was to send Desmoulins himself to the guillotine.
The Girondins went to the scaffold on the 31st of October. The Duc d'Orléans on the 6th of November; four days later Madame Roland, who met death perhaps a little pedantically but quite nobly; then, on the 12th, Bailly. Of the Girondins who had escaped from Paris several committed suicide, Roland on receiving news of his wife's death; others within the next few months, Condorcet, Pétion, Buzot.
In this same month of November 1793 was introduced the Revolutionary Calendar, of which more will be said in the last chapter.[1] The holy seventh day disappeared in favour of the anti-clerical tenth day, Décadi; Saints' days and Church festivals were wiped out. This new departure was a step forward in the religious question which, a few weeks later, brought about an acute crisis.
Between October and December the climax and the turn were reached in the Vendean war. After heavy fighting in October Henri de La Rochejacquelein had invaded Brittany, defeating the Republicans at Chateau Gontier {199} on the 25th. Rossignol now had under his orders the garrison of Mainz and two excellent subordinates in Kléber and Marceau, who succeeded, in spite of their commander, in wresting success at last. On the 13th of December a tremendous struggle took place at Le Mans in which the Vendéens were beaten after a loss of about 15,000 men. Kléber gave them no respite but a few days later cut up the remnants at Savenay. Although fighting continued long afterwards this proved the end of the Vendean grand army.