Said one of the Mountain: "The blood of Danton chokes you!" His arrest was demanded, and supported on all sides. It was now half-past five, and the sitting was suspended till seven. Robespierre was transferred to the Luxembourg. The commune, after having ordered the gaolers not to receive him, sent municipal officers with detachments to bring him away. Robespierre was liberated, and conducted in triumph to the Hôtel de Ville. On arriving, he was received with the greatest enthusiasm. "Long live Robespierre! Down with the traitors!" resounded on all sides. But the Convention marched upon the Hôtel de Ville.
The conspirators, finding they were lost, sought to escape the violence of their enemies by committing violence on themselves. Robespierre shattered his jaw with a pistol shot. He was deposited for some time at the Committee of Public 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.
On Thermidor 10, 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 were almost visionless. An immense crowd thronged round the cart, manifesting the most boisterous and exulting joy. He ascended the scaffold last. When his head fell, shouts of applause arose in the air, and lasted for some minutes.
Thermidor 9 was the first day of the revolution it 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.
From Thermidor 9, 1794, to the summer of 1795, the radical Mountain, in its turn, underwent the destiny it had imposed on others--for in times when the passions are called into play parties know not how to come to terms, and seek only to conquer. From that period the middle class resumed the management of the revolution, and the experiment of pure democracy had failed.
THOMAS CARLYLE
History of the French Revolution
Carlyle's "History of the French Revolution" appeared in 1837, some three years after the author had established himself in London. Never has the individuality of a historian so completely permeated his work; it is inconceivable that any other man should have written a single paragraph, almost a single sentence, of the history. To Carlyle, the story presents itself as an upheaval of elemental forces, vast elemental personalities storming titanically in their midst, vividly picturesque as a primeval mountain landscape illumined by the blaze of lightning, in a night of storms, with momentary glimpses of moon and stars. Although it was impossible for Carlyle to assimilate all the wealth of material even then extant, the "History," considered as a prose epic, has a permanent and unique value. His convictions, whatever their worth, came, as he himself put it, "flamingly from the heart." (Carlyle, biography: see vol. ix.)