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Their second line of attack was not better chosen. Party politics were new, and the science of understanding the other side was not developed; and the Girondins were persuaded that the Montagnards were at heart royalists, aiming at the erection of an Orleanist throne. Marat received money from the Palais Royal; and Sieyès to the last regarded him as a masked agent of monarchy.
He pleaded that he was but an instrument in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety, and that as the three members of it, whom he had obeyed, were only transported, no more could be done to himself. The tribunal was not bound by the punishments decreed by the Assembly, and in May Fouquier was executed. The Montagnards resolved that they would not perish without a struggle.
The Montagnards overran the departments to deceive or intimidate the people. "Since the adoption of the Constitution," he says, "Feuillantism has raised its head; a struggle has arisen between energetic and moderate patriots.
A powerful coalition, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, paid by English gold, was pledged to furnish seven hundred thousand men under arms. At the same time a formidable conspiracy was throwing a network over the whole of France, including among its members montagnards, chouans, royalists, and their princes.
All of them menaced, at first the hundred and eighty autocrats who, before the concentration of the revolutionary government, ruled for eight months boundlessly in the provinces; next, and above all, the fifty hard-fisted "Montagnards," unscrupulous fanatics or authoritarian high livers, who, at this moment, tread human flesh under foot and spread out in arbitrariness like wild boars in a forest, or wallow in scandal, like swine in a mud-pool.
Napoleon, who understood talent and said that no men were so vigorous and efficient as those who had gone through the Revolution, gave office to 127 regicides, most of whom were Montagnards. The Girondins, vacillating and divided, would never have made the Republic triumph over the whole of Europe and the half of France.
During the hottest time of the Revolution, the three men most distinguished as Montagnards and Jacobins were Marat, Danton, and Robespierre. Mirabeau, the orator of the Revolution, had already disappeared, being so fortunate as to die naturally, before the practice of mutual guillotining was established.
When Silvere reached his sixteenth year, Macquart had him admitted into the secret society of the Montagnards, a powerful association whose influence extended throughout Southern France. From that moment the young Republican gazed with longing eyes at the smuggler's carbine, which Adelaide had hung over her chimney-piece.
As his retreat was known to one, at least, of the Montagnards, he feared to compromise those who had taken him in at the risk of their life. Condorcet assumed a disguise, and crept out of the house with a Horace in one pocket and a dose of poison in the other. When it was dark, he came to a friend's door in the country.
Is it not inevitable that we shall have revolution after revolution, if there is a determination never to stop till this contradiction is realised: "To give nothing to Government and to receive much from it?" If the Montagnards were to come into power, would they not become the victims of the means which they employed to take possession of it? Citizens!
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