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The Senate were not unanimous in rendering the 'Senatus-consulte'. The three votes given against it were said to have been Gregoire, the former constitutional Bishop of Blois, Carat, who as Minister of Justice had read to Louis XVI. the sentence of death, and Lanjuinais, one of the very few survivors of the Girondists, Thiers says there was only one dissentient voice.
After the fall of the Girondists the Convention submitted itself completely to the injunctions of the omnipotent Commune. The latter decreed the levy of a revolutionary army, to be accompanied by a tribunal and a guillotine, which was to traverse the whole of France in order to execute suspects.
The magnanimity of Vergniaud was excited against this step of the powerful Girondist minister: Dumouriez's military loyalty was roused by it: the king listened to the reading of it with the calmness of a man accustomed to put up with insult. The Girondists were informed of it in the secret councils at Madame Roland's, and Roland kept a copy to cover himself at the hour of his fall.
The commissioners withdrew, admiring her heroism, and convinced that she was still able to wield an influence which might yet bring the guillotine upon their own necks. Her doom was sealed. Her heroism was her crime. She was too illustrious to live. Fate of the Girondists. Their heroic courage. The Girondists in the Conciergerie. Their miserable condition. Youthful hopes cut short. State of Paris.
The revolution had entered into a new phase, the Legislative Assembly had become the Constituent Assembly, which despoiled the monarchy of the last appearance of power and degraded it to a mere insignificancy. The Girondists, those ideal fanatics, who wanted to regenerate France after the model of the states of antiquity, had seized the power and the ministerial portefeuilles.
"The Girondists are starving us!" was the cry in the workmen's quarters in 1793, and thereupon the Girondists were guillotined, and full powers were given to "the Mountain" and to the Commune. The Commune indeed concerned itself with the question of bread, and made heroic efforts to feed Paris.
The personal arrangements of the emperor Leopold aided him in his plans; he had only to contend against the fatality which urges men and things to their dénouement. The Girondists, and Brissot especially, overwhelmed him with accusations, inasmuch as he was the man who could most retard their triumph.
The beautiful, witty, and noble Madame Roland ruled, by means of her husband, the Minister Roland, and was striving to realize in France the ideal of a republic after the pattern of Greece; she was the very soul of the new cabinet, the soul of the Girondists, the rulers of France; in her drawing-room, during the evening, the new laws to be proposed next day in the Constituent Assembly, were spoken of, and the government measures discussed.
because the future laborers in this immense work, from the village mayor to the state-senator and state-councilor, had borne a part in the Revolution, either in effecting it or under subjection to it Monarchists, Feuillantists, Girondists, Montagnards, Thermidorians, moderate Jacobins or desperate Jacobins, all oppressed in turn and disappointed in their calculations.
Moreover, as has been shown, Vergniaud and his party had friends in the council. M. de Narbonne and the Girondists met and concerted their plans at Madame de Stäel's, whose salon, in which some warlike measure was always being discussed, was called the camp of the Revolution: the Abbé Fauchet, the denouncer of M. de Lessart, here imbibed fresh ardour for the overthrow of this minister.