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The principal conspirators were Saint-Just, and Couthon in the committee; Fleuriot the mayor, and Payan the national agent in the commune; Dumas the president, and Coffinhal the vice-president, in the revolutionary tribunal; Henriot, the commander of the armed force, and the popular society.
In the same court, Lavoisier, the founder and organizer of chemistry, the great discoverer, and condemned to death, asks for a reprieve of his sentence for a fortnight to complete an experiment, and the president, Coffinhal, another Auvergnat, replies, "The Republic has no need of savants." And it has no need of poets.
Aided by its police gang, the Committee of Public Safety itself selects the sixteen judges and sixty jurymen from among the most servile, the most furious, or the most brutal of the fanatics: Fouquier-Tinville, Hermann, Dumas, Payan, Coffinhal, Fleuriot-Lescot, and, lower down on the scale, apostate priests, renegade nobles, disappointed artists, infatuated studio-apprentices, journeymen scarcely able to write their names, shoemakers, joiners, carpenters, tailors, barbers, former lackeys, an idiot like Ganney, a deaf man like Leroy-Dix-Aout; their names and professions indicate all that is necessary to be told: these men are licensed and paid murderers.
Henriot, confused and terrified, sought his safety in flight, and was stealing along one of the galleries of the Maison Commune when he met Coffinhal, who was also flying. At the sight of Henriot, who on coming from the Committee, had pledged his life on the success of his measures, Coffinhal was unable to check his rage.
It is an incontestable fact that had either Coffinhal or Henriot imitated the conduct of Cromwell in regard to the Levellers, and marched at the head of their troops into the hall of the Convention, he might have carried all before him, and Robespierre's tyranny would have been henceforth established on a basis not to be shaken.
He felt safer under arrest; but he advised his friends at the Commune to ring the tocsin, close the barriers, stop the Press, seize the post, and arrest the deputies. The position of the man of peace encouraging his comrades to break the law, and explaining how to do it, was too absurd to be borne. Coffinhal, who was a much bigger man, came and carried him away by friendly compulsion.
A little before, Coffinhal had departed, at the head of two hundred cannoneers, to release Henriot, who was detained at the committee of general safety. It was now seven o'clock, and the convention had resumed its sitting. Its guard, at the most, was a hundred men. Coffinhal arrived, made his way through the outer courts, entered the committee chamber, and delivered Henriot.
The Club, divided at first, went over to him, gave him an ovation, and expelled Collot and Billaud-Varennes with violence and contumely. Robespierre, encouraged by his success, exhorted the Jacobins to purify the Convention by expelling bad men, as they had expelled the Girondins. It was his first appeal to the popular forces. Coffinhal, who was a man of energy, implored him to strike at once.
Trenchard and Coffinhal, Lavoisier and Andre Chenier. Here we have, on one side, the elite of France, almost every person of rank, fortune, family, and merit, those eminent for intelligence, culture, talent and virtue, all deprived of common rights, in exile, in prison, under pikes, and on the scaffold.
Here, Henriot, one of his most devoted creatures, whom he had raised to the situation of commandant general of the Parisian guard, after having been carried prisoner before the Committee of Public Safety, then sitting in the palace of the Tuileries, was released by Coffinhal, the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who suddenly made his appearance at the head of a large body of horse and foot, supported by four pieces of cannon served by gunners the most devoted to Robespierre.
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