CHAP. ordained the same. The convention was epurated even Amar, one of the tremblers of the centre, was employed to draw up the act of accusation against the Girondists; its purpose was made known early in October. Although it demanded the heads of some sixty members implicated in the resistance of the Gironde, it no longer agitated the convention or satisfied the clubs. This first batch of victims was expected; they were long since abandoned to their fate. But Amar, in addition, pointed out seventy-three more members, principally of the centre, guilty, as he represented, of having signed in June a petition against the act of the 2nd of that month ejecting the Girondists from the assembly. It was upon this occasion that a change in the sentiments of Robespierre first became apparent. Whilst the more violent Jacobins were for sending seventy-three moderate members of the centre to the scaffold along with the Girondists, Robespierre interfered. He pointed out to the convention that it was merely necessary to strike down the chiefs, without immolating those who had been but led astray (égarés); of these there were several in the list just read; it was quite right to place all under arrest, but the committee of public safety would examine each case, and not confound all degrees of crime in one sweeping accusation. Notwithstanding this the more rabid members carried a vote that the seventy-three should be committed to La Force and other prisons; whilst the younger Girondists, such as Ducos and Fonfrède, as well as Isnard, and those who had proffered their resignation on the 31st of May, were sent for immediate trial with Vergniaud and Brissot. The events of September, and his own promised accession to the responsibilities of office and of power, had their effect upon Robespierre; he was out-Heroded by the enragés, and overborne by the commune, whilst the populace murmured against the governing committee XL. for not warding off famine, and providing for popular CHAP. necessities. To blunt this appetite of the rabble, and deprive it of its leaders, Billaud and Collot had been admitted to the committee of public safety, and these it was, more than Robespierre, who had decided the proscription of the seventy-three. Robespierre, on the contrary, felt the want of the old centre, and would gladly have preserved all the members of it who were willing to transfer to the Mountain that allegiance which they had previously paid to the Gironde. Unfortunately some members of the centre, and indeed their chief, Barère, who had sought to screen the Girondists quite as much as the seventy-three, had now come round, not so much to Robespierre, as to Collot and Billaud, and the more rabid members of the committee. These men loved destruction and massacre for destruction and massacre's sake. Robespierre's principles were to crush royalty and extirpate aristocracy, sending everyone who claimed or inherited a privilege, whether of birth, position, or talent, to the scaffold. He was deeply envious of superiority, and could not pardon it. But he saw no use in immolating the common crowd of adherents even to dangerous parties and culpable opinions. He was for sparing Lyons, and for not annihilating its wealth, but forcing it to change hands. Couthon shared these ideas, and would have acted upon them towards the fallen city. But Collot and Billaud prevailed, and wrung from the convention a decree of sweeping destruction, not only to the rich and their houses, but even to the public buildings of the devoted city. The act of accusation against the Girondists principally imputed to them the crime of having from the first conspired in favour of royalty against the republic. Brissot and Condorcet were represented as accomplices of Lafayette; Pétion as conspiring at the Tuileries against the people on the 10th of August. Vergniaud, Guadet, and Gensonné gave the tyrant king advice. XL. CHAP. Carra, confounded with the Girondists, was accused, and they with him, of having conspired to offer the crown of France to the Duke of York and the Duke of Brunswick. So on, the Girondists had tried to save the life of Louis, and, when proscribed, had raised an insurrection in the provinces. The witnesses brought forward were not the friends of Robespierre, but taken from the enragés. They were Hébert, Chaumette, Chabot. The accused evidently had hope of an acquittal, trying several of them to shake the evidence, and assert their innocence of the crimes charged against them. Boileau alone, however, made base excuses, declaring himself Jacobin and Montagnard. The young men Ducos and Fonfrède, not arrested on the 2nd of June, but allowed to sit in the convention since, would, it was thought, be acquitted. But the revolutionary jury, after a mock trial, condemned all indiscriminately to death. It was between 10 and 11 o'clock at night on the 31st of October that the Girondists were called in to receive their sentence. Some of them heard it with surprise, others with impatience. Valaze, who had been so rude to Louis on his trial, now struck a poniard into his own heart. Vergniaud and his brother chiefs heard their fate with heroic impassibility. But, as others were turbulent and threatened the jury, all were removed. As they descended the stone stairs, leading from the tribunal to the prisons of the Conciergerie below, the condemned raised the song of the Marseillaise: Pour nous de la tyrannie Le couteau sanglant est levé. According to some accounts, a rich and well-served banquet was prepared for them in their large common cell, before and since the chapel of the prison. As all Paris was then pinched with famine, a sumptuous banquet was unlikely. But no doubt they had refreshment of some kind served to them, and tradition recounts that they partook of it in solemn and philosophic dis course. The habits and ideas of the ancients were then the vogue, and the example of Socrates was familiar to them. Philosophy and religion were, indeed, wrecked in these days, as well as monarchy and humanity, but there were still fragments which floated for such men as the Girondists to catch at, on the eve of being engulphed for ever. Executed on the following morn, all met their fate with courage. * The members of the Gironde who had escaped were not more fortunate. Pétion, Guadet, Barbaroux, long obliged to hide themselves in caverns, beyond the light of day, perished with their companions-some by their own hands, others by the guillotine. In Paris the executions continued without intermission. It had been proposed in the convention to include the Duke of Orleans in the trial of the Girondists. The public accuser would have lumped them altogether, though Philip Égalité was detested by the Gironde, and detested it. He had behaved as a franc Montagnard, but Robespierre could not forgive him his birth. He had suffered months of severe imprisonment at Marseilles. A week after the death of the Girondists he appeared before the revolutionary tribunal. The accusation had really no crime to lay to his charge. No one had been more true to the revolution or more prominent in it than he. The tribunal sent him to the scaffold. Reynold's pencil has preserved his rubicund visage and sunken eye. He showed perfect impassiveness going to the scaffold. The executioner wanted to take off his boots. "You may as well take them off after," was the remark. General Coustard perished at the same time. Some days after Madame Roland was brought on the same errand to * We need scarcely refer to the works of Lamartine, Barante, Granier de Cassagnac, and Michelet, for the different views taken of the Girondists. Their trial is printed at length in the Hist. Parlementaire. СНАР. XL. XL. CHAP. the Place de la Revolution. A statue of liberty had been lately made to adorn it, and preside over executions. Oh, liberty," exclaimed she, "what crimes are committed in thy name!" Her husband, on learning her fate, rushed forth from his hiding-place at Rouen, and was discovered near the high-road, the sword on which he had flung himself traversing his body. Bailly was another of the victims of this epoch. He who bore the red flag when the anarchists were first fired upon in the Champ de Mars could not escape, yet he had taken no trouble to conceal himself. Death was welcome at that time to every Frenchman, and woman too, who had a station or a thought above the popular dregs. Bailly was brought to be executed, and was dragged from place to place, on an extremely cold day, ere one was found to the taste of his immolators. The old man trembled from the fatigue and the weather. The ruffians taunted him with it. "It is but from the cold," said Bailly. Numerous and indiscriminate as were the executions in Paris, they were far surpassed in the provinces. At Lyons Collot and Fouché presided, with a staff of Jacobins and a revolutionary army. The guillotine was in continual activity, but it did not suffice for the extermination of all the respectable inhabitants of the city. Other supplementary means were employed. Victims were drawn up in files before the mouth of cannon, which still did not prostrate all, and the sabre and axe had to complete the butchery. Then musketry was preferred, and there was a regular battue on the great Plain des Terreaux, shooting the non-Jacobin population like pheasants in close covert. Robbery kept pace with murder, and was often the real cause. Robespierre would divide the wealth of Lyons amongst its poor and real sans-culottes; the leading Jacobins were for transferring it to their own pockets.* The greatest atrocities committed by the proconsuls |