ness,' he said to them; 'hold firm until they are delivered up to you. No resource was left but to return in dejection and mortification to the hall of sitting. Further resistance was not attempted, and the decrees of impeachment were forthwith passed. Marat was the true lord of the ascendant. He dispensed condonation or proscription at his pleasure. This man he absolved, that condemned. Dusaulx was merely an old driveller, he said; Lanthenas was stupid enough to be of no account; Ducos had erroneous notions, but he could never be a leader. He proposed, therefore, that these should be omitted from the list of proscripts, and that Valazé and Fermont should be added to it instead. Silence expressed acquiescence, and the secretaries took down the names as he enunciated them. The decree bore, that the accused deputies should be placed under arrest at their own houses; and the amended list contained the names of twenty-nine such deputies, the flower of the Gironde; two of the committee of twelve, Boyer-Fonfrede and St Martin, being pardoned, as not having signed the warrant for Hebert's arrest. The ministers Claviere and Lebrun were involved in the fate of their stricken allies.

Such was the first mutilation of the National Convention, whereby it was shorn of its most illustrious members. It was not effected without great difficulty, and required two armed insurrections, in which the great bulk of the people acted as mere passive instruments. Not more than 4000 or 5000 men of all the 80,000 encompassing the palace of the Tuileries could be relied on for proceeding to extremities against the Convention, and these were carefully posted in the front ranks. The measures on the part of the Anarchists were no doubt skilfully taken and resolutely prosecuted, for they had to contend against many powerful obstacles. The imposing prestige of the Convention itself, as the depository of the national sovereignty, was an element of great gravity in frustration of their schemes; the sluggishness of the multitude was to be continually stimulated by energetic exertions in lying and slandering;* the sans-culottes could be kept to their colours only by a pay of forty sous a day, which the Convention suicidally undertook to furnish; above all, the want of an influential leader was a serious drawback to them. Robespierre at the utmost would give a tacit consent and approval; he harangued at the Jacobins upon the necessity of purging the Convention of traitors, but carefully abstained from committing himself to the plan of effecting it by main force. He hoped to accomplish his purpose by intimidation alone, and not

Even the faubourg St Antoine could not be stimulated to action on the 31st May, until it was assured that the section Butte-des-Moulins had hoisted the white cockade, and intrenched itself in the Palais Royal. The plunder of the rich shops and magazines in that celebrated enclosure was held out as an additional incitement.

too palpably by the agency of men whose rise he had cause to dread; thus he was active on the 31st May, and laboured hard to extort the required decree from the Convention when there was a shadow of pretence that it might act with freedom; whereas on the 2d June, he took no part in the proceedings. Danton shared the wish of Robespierre to get rid of the Girondins; not like the latter, to gratify personal hatred and ambition, but really because he viewed them as impediments to the salvation of the Revolution, to which he was heart and soul devoted. He was even content to sacrifice himself, if he could thereby insure the unity he so desiderated; and he had entertained with ingenuous fervour a suggestion of Garat, the successor of Roland in the ministry of the interior, to take a leaf from the history of Athens, and execute a mutual ostracism. Aristides had proposed to the Athenians that they should banish both him and his rival Themistocles; if the chiefs of the Mountain and the Gironde would voluntarily retire from the scene, it was supposed all strife would cease, and parties harmoniously blend to resist the foreign foe. The idea was generous, and seduced the imagination of Danton; but it was sufficiently chimerical, and Robespierre turned up his nose at it with scorn. Actuated by such sentiments, Danton might regard the movement of the 31st May with some favour; but on the 2d June his indignation was loudly expressed. Marat, it is true, gave himself frankly to the Anarchists, for they might well rank as his especial disciples; but by all above the refuse of the population he was looked upon with loathing as a veritable monster. The shopkeepers naturally abhorred him; and if the sections had been fairly represented in their assemblies, they would have rather sided with the Convention than with the faction of Anarchists headed by Marat. But bands of brigands overrode those assemblies, and often the result of their deliberations was reversed after it had been pronounced, nay, even entries in their registers forged, so representing them as adverse to the Convention, when in reality they had declared their adherence to it. Hence many of the deputations that professed to speak in the name of the sections were absolutely fictitious, but had not the less the effect of giving to them the appearance of unanimity. If the Girondins had united firmly, and, without using the disgraceful arts of their adversaries, descended into these lower arenas of controversy, they might have reared a barrier of defence too strong to be forced, and averted the ruin that overtook them. Nevertheless, it was better for the interests of the Revolution that they did not do so; mournful as was their fall, it proved beneficial in the main; for if it entailed on France unspeakable horrors, they were temporary, and it saved her from a subjugation which would have crushed her for ever.

It was precisely in the essential of union that the Girondins

most signally failed. Attracted together by community of views and congenial sentiments, they never acted with the concert of a compact party. Against the concentrated organisation of the Jacobins they opposed nothing but desultory individual efforts, which sometimes had a momentary success, but were always in the end defeated. They had, in truth, no leaders to sustain a party. Vergniaud, the most eloquent amongst them, was deficient in firmness of character, and relapsed into almost torpid inertness when not stirred by excitement. Guadet was hightoned and animated, arguing with the closest logic, but irritable and intemperate; and he, more than any of the rest, provoked the animosity of the Jacobins. Gensonné was intellectual and impassioned, and had the obstinacy which is readily mistaken for firmness; but he was an indifferent orator, and devoid of the qualities fitting him for active strife. Brissot, the object of Marat's incessant denunciation, possessed great abilities and much practical knowledge; but he was of simple mind, and of a facility that wholly disqualified him for ruling others. Roland was honest, zealous, indefatigable; but stern, repulsive, and impracticable from the very excess of his austerity. His wife was more adapted than any of the Girondins to be the vital spirit of a party. Dauntless, confident, unbending, impulsive, clever in the highest sense of the term, she mourned the weaknesses of her friends, and was sometimes tempted to break through the restraining modesty of her sex.* Others there were in the list of lesser note, all excellent rhetoricians, good philosophers, proud in the consciousness of intellectual superiority, but unsuited either to exercise mastery over men or to maintain a successful stand in civil broils. Hence the Girondins formed a loose collection of men, who refused to be bound by what they stigmatised as the ties and trammels of party, holding that such combinations were degrad

*On the 31st May, the Commune sent a body of men to arrest her husband; she hastened to the Convention, and making her way through the armed multitude who surrounded it, she gained the inner vestibule, overcoming all the obstacles of opposing sentries. The storm within was at its height when she arrived it was with difficulty she could send a message to Vergniaud, who at length came to her. In a few words he related the violence that reigned in the Convention, and the perilous state of their cause; she fired with indignation, and insisted upon his conducting her to the bar. He represented the futility of such a step, but she urged him vehemently. If I am admitted,' she said, 'I will venture to say what you could not express unless you were yourself attacked; I fear nothing in the world, and if I fail to save Roland, I will give utterance to truths which will be useful to the republic. Go and prepare your colleagues: an outburst of courage may produce a great effect, and will be at least a great example.' Vergniaud assured her that the bar was so crowded with petitioners that she could not hope to be heard for some hours. She conBented to retire; but, full of her heroic purpose, she returned to the Tuileries in the evening, when she had the mortification to find the sitting broken up. That same night she was herself torn from bed, and conveyed to prison by order of the Commune: her husband succeeded in making his escape. She gives an extraordinary account of her adventures on this eventful day in her Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 64. et seq.

ing to the independence of their minds, and contrary to the purity of republican government. In this they deceived themselves, as in many other illusions; for though the virulence and dissensions of parties are to be deplored, yet in popular assemblies nothing can be achieved without organisation, and in political as in military warfare it is the primary condition of success.

With all their frailties, with all their aberrations, with all their deficiencies, which sprung from noble sources, the fate of the Girondins excites general sympathy and commiseration among mankind. Young for the most part, virtuous, highly-gifted, the graces of nature vying with the adornments of culture, they composed an interesting band of martyrs immolated in a glorious cause-that of order against anarchy, of freedom against tyranny. With them not only liberty was extinguished in France, but everything that is held respectable among men. Kings have exercised despotisms iron and grinding; aristocracies have emulated them in cruelties and oppressions; sans-culottes leave them both in the distance. The realities of their sway surpass imagination; the mind grows sceptical at the narrative, and doubts that the whole is a dream of hideous fancy. The madness of violence in its wildest paroxysm is shown; cities blown into the air; rivers turned red with blood; provinces devastated with fire and sword; murder the engrossing occupation of the government, and of all in authority under it: such the characteristics of what, in the poverty of language, has been inadequately styled the Reign of Terror.

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CHAPTER VIII.

THE REIGN OF TERROR-GENERAL INVASION OF FRANCE BY THE ALLIES -FEROCITIES OF THE JACOBINS IN LA VENDEE, AT LYONS, AND ELSEWHERE JUNE TO DECEMBER 1793.

The Anarchists achieved the victory of the 2d of June; the Jacobins appropriated its results. The former had only one decided representative in the Convention-Marat-and even he held aloof from a perfect identification with them; the latter had all its principal leaders, Robespierre, St Just, Couthon, Collot d'Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, who, now at the summit of power, were intent, like its various possessors, to fix the Revolution definitively in their own persons and principles. These men were associated by a community of sentiments and dispositions, by a concord of fanaticism, which armed them with a resolution and ferocity rigid and remorseless, whilst it rendered them superior

to all the allurements of life, and left them sensible only to the impulses of ambition and vengeance. Danton, who had been the first to proclaim 'terror' as the rule of government, was of a soft and relenting complexion in comparison with such men ; moreover, grosser passions mastered him, and weaned him from that absorbing lust of dominion and persecution which animated them, insomuch that he became discredited for inertness and moderation, delinquencies sufficient to blast even his high revolutionary character. Still he was a great athlete not to be lightly slighted; if irritated and aroused, he might be urged to an effort of desperate energy, which, although desultory, must prove dangerous to the objects of his attack. Hence to him and his friends Camille-Desmoulins, Herault de Séchelles, Lacroix, Legendre--a seeming participation was at first left in the conduct of affairs. Danton retained his seat in the Committee of Public Safety, and Séchelles was appointed reporter of the committee for the digest of a constitution. The Anarchists were chiefly dreaded by Robespierre at the moment, and he took an early opportunity of checking their presumption. After the executive power was secured by the nomination of Jacobin ministers, and the remodelling of all the committees of the Convention, except that of Public Safety, the new constitution was eliminated with extraordinary rapidity, in order both to manifest that the Girondins had hitherto obstructed the completion of that important work, and to provide a rallying point round which the whole nation might cleave. It is true that the Girondins had laboured earnestly to expedite this very work, seeing in its consummation an end to the domination of Paris; and the philosophic Condorcet had framed a constitution in accordance with their views, which the Mountain, for the opposite reason, combated, and defeated by studied procrastination. Condorcet's scheme was now wholly discarded, and a genuine Jacobin formula propounded in its stead. The loosest possible texture was given to the government; an assembly was to be elected annually, directly by the citizens, who were to meet for the purpose on the 1st of May in each year; the right of suffrage was universal in all males above twentyone, and eligibility was unqualified; a council of twenty-four persons, chosen by the Assembly from a leet presented by the electors, was to exercise the functions of executive government. Supremely democratical as was this chimera of a constitution, it failed to satisfy the Anarchists. Adopted by the Convention without discussion, it was sent to the primary assemblies for ratification. Those bodies throughout the country generally approved it, and it received all the force of a national sanction; but the Anarchists of Paris found it defective, and moved the Cordelier Club to petition against it. The omission that offended them was the want of a provision against forestallers, the sworn