Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 14, 2025
If the world revolves this way much longer, the Man of the People will not be asked to write the next Declaration of Independence, and the country west of the Ohio will be celebrating not the Fourth of July but an eighteenth Prairial. Aaron Burr and his confederates intend an Empire.
We have no sympathy with the spirit of paradox that has arisen in these days, amusing itself by the vindication of bad men. We think that the author of the Law of Prairial was a bad man. But it is time that there should be an end of the cant which lifts up its hands at the crimes of republicans and freethinkers, and shuts its eyes to the crimes of kings and churches.
Consequently, its executive committee suspends all proceedings begun against the principal "Montagnards;" a number of terrorists, former presidents of the sections, "the matadors of the quarter," arrested after Prairial 1, are set free at the end of a month.
It might still be possible, disregarding the false move of Prairial, to obtain the authority of the Convention for the arrest, that is, for the trial and execution of some of its members. They had delivered up Danton and Desmoulins, Hérault and Chaumette. They would perhaps abandon Cambon or Fouché, Bourdon or Tallien, four months later.
That wonderfully dramatic, if sometimes contested episode, of the Vengeur going down into the waves with all her crew, sooner than surrender, is supposed to have taken place at the close of the battle of the 13th Prairial. I have often heard the story attributed to Barrere, who, being obliged to give an account of the lost battle to the Convention, endeavoured thus to gild the pill.
Floreal 28, "numbers of people sink down for lack of something to eat; yesterday, a man was found dead and others exhausted through want." * Prairial 24, "Inspector Laignier states that the indigent are compelled to seek nourishment in the piles of garbage on the corners."
This was the substantial wisdom and real interest of the position. The task was difficult, because his hearers had the best possible reasons for knowing that the author of the Law of Prairial was a Terrorist on principle. And in truth we know that Robespierre had no definite intention of erecting clemency into a rule.
The latter, taking advantage of the terrible facilities accorded by the law of Prairial, sat in judgment on those supposed prison plots which, coming after the proscriptions of the Dantonists and the Commune, were made to seem their outcome by the insinuations of cunning adversaries.
Then his action became animated, and we lost him comprehending nothing beyond 18th Fructidor, 30 Prairial, hypocrites, intriguers; I am not so; I shall declare all; I will abdicate the power when the danger which threatens the Republic has passed. Then, after further instances of Napoleon's falsehood, and the self-contradictory movements of his disjointed babble, the secretary goes on thus: 'These interruptions, apostrophes, and interrogations, overwhelmed him; he believed himself lost.
Each week, on reading the daily reports of its agents, it finds itself on the verge of explosion; twice, in Germinal and Prairial, a popular outbreak does overthrow it for a few hours, and, if it maintains itself, it is on the condition of either giving the needy a piece of bread or the hope of getting it.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking