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The younger Robespierre threw himself from the window, but had not the good fortune to perish on the spot. It seemed as if even the melancholy fate of suicide, the last refuge of guilt and despair, was denied to men who had so long refused every species of mercy to their fellow-creatures. Le Bas alone had calmness enough to despatch himself with a pistol-shot.
But whether he was the incarnation of good or of evil, the world is still in doubt;-and also whether he could have guided the forces he had invoked, if a premature death had not swept him off from the scene, leaving Robespierre, a man concerning whom there is no disagreement of opinion, to guide the storm. Paris was becoming wild with excitement.
The first had industriously desecrated the churches, and consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the public worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set up for deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries of the Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism as the crime of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed.
I must explain to you, that the Jacobins have lately been composed of two parties the avowed adherents of Collot, Billaud, &c. and the concealed remains of those attached to Robespierre; but party has now given way to principle, a circumstance not usual; and the whole club of Paris, with several of the affiliated ones, join in censuring the innovating tendencies of the Convention.
The former Master of petitions was now one of the most ferocious presidents of the Revolutionary tribunals of that period; he became the terror of Normandy, and was able to satisfy all his passions. Imprisoned in his turn after the fall of Robespierre, the hatred of his department doomed him to certain death.
Her age was not precisely known, but when a schoolgirl in Paris she had seen Robespierre executed, and distinctly recollected the appearance of his bandaged face. Her granddaughters, Mr.
But so it is; and Dumont himself, fearful that he has not exercised his mission with sufficient severity, has ordered every kind of indulgence to cease, the prisons to be more strictly guarded, and, if possible, more crowded; and he is now gone to Paris, trembling lest he should be accused of justice or moderation! The pretended plots for assassinating Robespierre are, as usual, attributed to Mr.
He had been very active on the 10th of August; and even in the papers which have given him a comparative reputation, he is the panegyrist of Marat, and recommends "une Guillotine economique;" that is, a discrimination in favour of himself and his party, who now began to fear they might themselves be sacrificed by the Convention and deserted by Robespierre after being the accomplices and tools of both.
The operations of a campaign, in which the untaught and ill-fed army of republican France had to meet the troops of England, Flanders, Prussia, Austria, Sardinia, and Spain, besides those of royalist France, were sufficient to occupy even the energies of Carnot. Robespierre, in the Convention and in the Committee, was omnipotent; but he also had his master, and he knew it.
The Jacobins insisted on the sovereign power of the Convention, Robespierre protesting in the name of the people against an appeal to the people. Supported by the noisy outcries not only of the Parisian populace, but of their followers elsewhere, the radicals prevailed.
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