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The law of the twenty-second of Prairial is also repealed, but the Revolutionary Tribunal is preserved, and the necessity of suspending the old jury, as being the creatures of Robespierre, has not prevented the tender solicitude of the Convention for a renovated activity in the establishment itself.
On the 9th Thermidor it had been driven from the government; on the 2nd Prairial, from society; and it had lost both power and insurrections. But though disorganized and proscribed, it was far from having disappeared. After the unfortunate attempt of the royalists in Vendemiaire, it arose through their abasement.
At the Jacobins and in the convention his preservation was attributed to the good genius of the republic, and to the Supreme Being, whose existence he had decreed on the 18th Floreal. The celebration of the new religion had been fixed for the 20th Prairial throughout France.
Paris in those days was like a city beleaguered, and the world does not use very harsh words about the commandant of a besieged town who puts to death traitors found within his walls. Opinion in England at this very epoch encouraged the Tory government to pass a Treason Bill, which introduced as vague a definition of treasonable offence as even the Law of Prairial itself.
No sooner did he utter these words, than a member of the Ancients, named, I think, Linglet, interrupting him, exclaimed, "You forget the Constitution!" His countenance immediately lighted up; yet nothing could be distinguished but, "The 18th Fructidor the 30th Prairial hypocrites intriguers I will disclose all!
It was then were invented the alleged conspiracies of the inmates of the prisons, crowded under the law des suspects, or emptied by that of the 22nd Prairial, which might be called the law des condamnes; then the emissaries of the committee of public safety entirely replaced in the departments those of the Mountain; and Carrier, the protege of Billaud, was seen in the west; Maigret, the protege of Couthon, in the south; and Joseph Lebon, the protege of Robespierre, in the north.
The long processions of carts carrying victims to the guillotine, these increasing in number until after the Law of Prairial they averaged sixty or seventy a day in Paris alone, while in the provinces there was no end. At Nantes, Carrier could not work fast enough by a court, so he sank boat loads of prisoners in the Loire.
After the revolutionary struggle which had occurred between the 14th of July, 1789, and the 9th Thermidor, 1794; after the days of the 5th and 6th of October, of the 21st of June, of the 10th of August, of the 2d and 3d of September, of the 21st of May, of the 29th Thermidor and the 1st Prairial; after seeing fall the heads of the King and his judges, and the Queen and her accusers, of the Girondins and the Cordeliers, the Moderates and the Jacobins, France experienced that most frightful and most nauseous of all lassitudes, the lassitude of blood!
Robespierre, like Mary and like Philip, would have been as well pleased if all the world would have come round to his mind without the destruction of a single life. The true inquisitor is a creature of policy, not a man of blood by taste. What, then, was the policy that inspired the Law of Prairial? To us the answer seems clear.
"At all events," added he, "I have a strong desire that future generations, upon reading the Mécanique Céleste, shall not forget the esteem and friendship which I have entertained towards its author." On the 17th Prairial in the year XIII., the general, now become emperor, wrote from Milan: "The Mécanique Céleste appears to me destined to shed new lustre on the age in which we live."
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