CHAP. that of Fréron, the most obnoxious of the thermidorians. The head soon reappeared upon a pike, and was thrust into the face of the president, Boissy d'Anglas. He saluted the terrible symbol of revolution. The death of Feraud was no doubt accidental. The most hated of the conventionalists were for hours at the mercy of the mob, and none thought of imbruing his hands in blood. One indeed proposed, that the list of members should be called over, in order to recognise the coquins. But it was not insisted on. The Montagnard deputies at last undertook to regularise the tumult-and to collect the members in the centre, whilst the people partly withdrew and partly occupied the benches round, when divers motions were made and of course voted. The first was the liberation of the patriots from prison and. accusation. The next was the restoration of their arms to the people. It was forbidden to use flour except in making bread. The nomination of a new committee of public safety was decreed; then the arrest of all journalists, and the abolition of the pain of death, except for émigrés and the forgers of assignats. The most important motion was that of Duquesnoy, to appoint four members to replace instantly the committees. This was carried, and Duquesnoy himself, with Prieur de la Marne, Bourbette, and Duroi, were nominated. Hitherto the governing committees had remained quiescent. Afraid to attempt to put down the population by force, they awaited, in hopes that the insurrection would pass off in smoke like that of germinal. But the motion of Duquesnoy showed the contrary. They, therefore, determined to act. The sections, which hitherto held back, were summoned at all risks to advance.* Legendre and another member were sent to * The sections of Lepelletier and La Butte aux Moulins, congratulating the convention after its victory, said they had been in communica tion with the neighbouring sections, whilst the convention was under durance, to march to its succour. tell the convention in the name of the committee to aid!" cried Prieur. This was an appeal to civil war made by the Montagnards. The sectionist force answered by advancing with fixed bayonets, before the points of which the populace fled, and once more evacuated the hall. No sooner was it free, after having had for so many hours the knife on its throat, than the most moderate broke forth in cries of vengeance upon those who had so nearly restored the reign of terror and the mob. The most furious was Thibaudeau, a moderate man. He asked how it was that the members who had shown themselves accomplices of the disorder were still allowed to retain their seats. Tallien then raised his voice to second the motion. The blood of Feraud, he said, demanded vengeance. Accordingly the four members who had been appointed to supersede the government were arrested and afterwards formally accused. To their names were added those of Romme, Soubrany, Goujon, Albitte, Rhul, and several others, who, if not privy to the insurrection, certainly sympathised with and lent their aid to the mob, in their attempt to annihilate convention and government. The insurrection was not over. the mob had been beaten late at night out of the assembly, it was that the insurgents of the faubourgs had most of them returned home to bed. When they arose the next morning and found their cause lost, and the If CHAP. XLI. XLI. CHAP. Montagnards arrested, they mustered again and marched to the Carrousel. The sections which held for the convention did the same. And for some hours the population of the eastern district of Paris stood in arms facing those of the west.* Both sides shrunk from such a conflict of brethren. The officers of those who came to defend the convention went through the ranks of their antagonists and persuaded them that the dispute was an idle one, that the convention and its committee could best give them bread, and prepare for them a new constitution. There was no chief or commander, no Henriot or Pache, to keep the faubouriens true to their purpose. These were talked over, and consented to return to their districts. The morning of the next day passed off tranquilly, but in the evening, as the authorities were proceeding to the execution of Quinet, found guilty of having carried the head of Feraud upon a bayonet, the populace rose in tumult, and liberated the criminal. The committees had by this time brought to Paris some 8,000 of regular troops. And it was resolved to march against the faubourg. About 1,200 of the reactionary youth, the jeunesse dorée, thought fit to act as vanguard, and advanced up the Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine. But surrounded on all sides, and menaced by the artillery which they could not take, they were obliged to beat a hasty retreat. They were allowed to escape. But when General Menou approached with almost an army, and was going to bombard the faubourg, it submitted, and the insurgent sections gave up their cannon. The renewal of resistance greatly increased the anger and vindictiveness of the convention. Numbers more were arrested. Robert Lindet, David, Jean Bon-St.André, and many of the commissaries in the provinces. All were ordered for trial before courts-martial. Collot, Billaud, and Barère, instead of being embarked, were * Beaulieu's Essais historiques. Aubry's Report. XLI. ordered to be kept back, and brought before the tribunal CHAP. of the Charente for treason. The military court of Paris, thought less sanguinary than the old revolutionary tribunal, still denounced and sent to the guillotine all those convicted of being paramount in the late insurrection. Of the eight Montagnard deputies accused, the commission condemned three of those who had accepted the post of the executive (Prieur had fled), and three others who had heartily joined in the counter-revolution. Although the mildest of their party, who had lived through the terror without being its instruments, they allowed themselves to be carried away at the last critical moment, into what certainly was treason, and what would have been a resuscitation of the late sanguinary régime. Their death greatly added to the commiseration felt for them by their friends. As they were led down the stairs of the Conciergerie, Romme, Goujon, and Duquesnoy stabbed themselves mortally one after the other with a pair of scissors. Bourbotte and Soubrany did not fully succeed in their attempt at suicide, and were drawn faint and bleeding to the guillotine. * These men must have felt that they were the last of the Mountain, of the Holy Mountain, as its admirers did not scruple to call it; and their aim, no doubt, was to perish in a way that glorified their cause as well as themselves. Their execution, accompanied as it was by similar successes and vengeance over and upon the sans-culottes of the provinces, especially of Toulon, put an end to that party not only in legislative assemblies but amongst the populace. The people of Paris had indeed been long weary of revolution, and its miserable result. Still famine and incitement prompted them to make another trial, badly organised, feebly supported, and despairingly abandoned. It was six years from the time when the Parisian women marched upon Versailles to *Account in the Moniteur. СНАР. XLI. humble the king until their last insurrection, when they were whipped out of the tribunes of the convention. They had gained little but six years' starvation, As to the generation of that day, massacring and massacred, few probably survived. Yet they had got all they asked. A republic, equality, the sweeping away of every class from above them, still they found that others, not they, had taken the upper places. Contractors and money jobbers, proconsuls and functionaries, generals and commissaries, maintained the same ascendency that men of birth had done, without being less arbitrary or less insolent. As to means of life and material condition, people were reduced to rations of two ounces of bread per day. It was time for the popular dream to vanish, and for democracy, at least the democracy of the lowest ranks, to become defunct. If the working classes thus gained nothing by the revolution, a fact which was brought home to them by some writers in their interest, who reproached them with not having operated a division of property when they could, the middle class began to derive sensible advantages from the great subversion. They had suffered more indeed than the people during the incandescence of the revolution, with its maximum, its requisitions, and its vindictive blows against the bourgeoisie. But the revolution of thermidor set them free from these extortions and this tyranny, whilst finally it opened to them that division of property which was denied to the boor. The assignats were at the last gasp, when Bourdon de l'Oise proposed that all the confiscated property, the lands and houses of the émigrés, and other outlaws, including those of church and state, should be purchasable at three times the prices of 1790, payable in assignats. But this was far lower than the prices of 1790, paid in money. This financial measure, which raised the value of its paper money for the state, enabled the middle class, agriculturist as well as commercial, to become |