proposed and carried on the 10th of June the outrageous law of 22nd Prairial, by which even the appearance of justice was taken from the tribunal, which, as no witnesses were allowed, became a simple court of condemnation. The result of this law was that between the 12th of June and the 28th of July, the day of Robespierre's death, no less than 1285 victims perished by the guillotine in Paris. It was the bloodiest and the least justifiable period of the Terror. But before this there had taken place in Robespierre's life an episode of supreme importance, as illustrating his character and his political aims: on the 7th of May he secured a decree from the Convention recognizing the existence of the Supreme Being. This worship of the Supreme Being was based upon the ideas of Rousseau in the Social Contract, and was opposed by Robespierre to Catholicism on the one hand and the Hébertist atheism on the other. In honour of the Supreme Being a great fête was held on the 8th of June; Robespierre, as president of the Convention, walked first and delivered his harangue, and as he looked around him he may well have believed that his position was secured and that he was at last within reach of a supreme power which should enable him to impose his belief on all France, and so ensure its happiness. The majority of the Committee found his popularity — or rather his ascendancy, for as that increased his personal popularity diminished — useful to them, since by increasing the stringency of the Terror he strengthened the position of the Committee, whilst attracting to himself, as occupying the most prominent position in it, any latent feeling of dissatisfaction at such stringency. Of the issue of a struggle between themselves and Robespierre they had little fear: they controlled the Committee of General Security through their alliance with its leaders, André Amar and Marc Guillaume Alexis Vadier; they were hopeful of obtaining a majority in the Convention; for they knew that the chief deputies on the left, or “the Mountain,” were Dantonists, who burned to avenge Danton's death; while they felt sure also that the mass of the deputies of the centre, or “the Marsh,” could be hounded on against Robespierre if they were to accuse him of aiming at the dictatorship and pour on him the obloquy of having increased the Terror when victory on the frontier rendered it less necessary; and they knew finally that his actual adherents, though devoted to him, were few in number. The devotion of these admirers had been further excited by the news that a half-witted girl, named Cécile Renault, had been found wandering near his house, with a knife in her possession, intending to play the part of Charlotte Corday. She was executed on the 17th of June, on the very day that Vadier raised a laugh at Robespierre's expense in the Convention by his report on the conspiracy of Catherine Théot (q.v.), a mad woman, who had asserted that Robespierre was a divinity.
Robespierre felt that he must strike his blow now or never. Yet he was not sufficiently audacious to strike at once, as Payan and Jean Baptiste Coffinhal, the ablest of his adherents, would have had him do, but retired from the Convention for some weeks, as he had done before the overthrow of the Hébertists and the Dantonists, to prepare his plan of action. This retirement seemed ominous to the majority of the Committee, and they too prepared for the struggle by communicating with the deputies of the Mountain, who were either friends of Danton or men of proved energy like Barras, Fréron and Tallien. These weeks, the last of his life, Robespierre passed very peacefully, according to his wont all through the Revolution. He continued to live with the Duplays, with whose daughter Éléonore he had fallen in love, and used to wander with her and his favourite dog, a great Danish hound, named Bruant, in the Champs Élysées during the long summer evenings. At last, on the 26th of July, Robespierre appeared, for the first time for more than four weeks, in the Convention and delivered a carefully studied harangue, which lasted for more than four hours, in which he declared that the Terror ought to be ended, that certain deputies who had acted unjustly and exceeded their powers ought to be punished, and that the Committees of Public Safety and General Security ought to be renewed. Great was the excitement in the Convention: all wondered who were the deputies destined to be punished; all were surprised that the Terror should be imputed as a fault to the very Committee of which Robespierre had been a member. The majority of the Committee of Public Safety determined to act promptly. The Convention, moved by Robespierre's eloquence, at first passed his motions; but he was replied to by Joseph Cambon the financier, Billaud-Varenne, Amar and Vadier, and the Convention rescinded their decrees and referred Robespierre's question to their committees. On the following day, the 27th of July, or in the revolutionary calendar the 9th Thermidor, Saint-Just began to speak on behalf of the motions of Robespierre, when violent interruptions showed the temper of the Convention. Jean Lambert, Tallien, Billaud-Varenne and Vadier again attacked Robespierre; cries of “Down with the tyrant!” were raised; and, when Robespierre hesitated in his speech in answer to these attacks, the words “C'est le sang de Danton qui t'étouffe” showed what was uppermost in the minds of the Mountain. Robespierre tried in vain to gain a hearing, the excitement increased and at five in the afternoon Robespierre, Couthon and Saint-Just, with two young deputies, Augustin Robespierre (younger brother of Maximilien) and Philippe François Joseph Lebas, the only men in all the Convention who supported them, were ordered to be arrested. Yet all hope for Robespierre was not gone; he was speedily rescued from his prison, with the other deputies, by the troops of the Commune and brought to the Hôtel de Ville. There he was surrounded by his faithful adherents, led by Payan and Coffinhal. But the day was past when the Commune could overawe the Convention; for now the men of action were hostile to the Commune, and its chief was not a master of coups d'état. On the news of the release of Robespierre, the Convention had again met, and declared the members of the Commune and the released deputies outlawed. The national guards under the command of Barras had little difficulty in making their way to the Hôtel de Ville; Robespierre was shot in the lower jaw by a young gendarme named Meda while signing an appeal to one of the sections of Paris to take up arms for him, though the wound was afterwards believed to have been inflicted by himself; and all the released deputies were again arrested. After a night of agony, Robespierre was the next day taken before the tribunal, where his identity as an outlaw was proved, and without further trial he was executed with Couthon and Saint-Just and nineteen others of his adherents on the Place de la Révolution on the 10th Thermidor (28th July) 1794.
The character of Robespierre, when looked upon simply in the light of his actions and his authenticated speeches, and apart from the innumerable legends which have grown up about it, is not a difficult one to understand. A well-educated and accomplished young lawyer, he might have acquired a good provincial practice and lived a happy provincial life had it not been for the Revolution. Like thousands of other young Frenchmen, he had read the works of Rousseau and taken them as gospel. Just at the very time in life when this illusion had not been destroyed by the realities of life, and without the experience which might have taught the futility of idle dreams and theories, he was elected to the states-general. At Paris he was not understood till he met with his audience of fellow disciples of Rousseau at the Jacobin Club. His fanaticism won him supporters; his singularly sweet and sympathetic voice gained him hearers; and his upright life attracted the admiration of all. As matters approached nearer and nearer to the terrible crisis, he failed, except in the two instances of the question of war and of the king's trial, to show himself a statesman, for he had not the liberal views and practical instincts which made Mirabeau and Danton great men. His admission to the Committee of Public Safety gave him power, which he hoped to use for the establishment of his favourite theories, and for the same purpose he acquiesced in and even heightened the horrors of the Reign of Terror. It is here that the fatal mistake of allowing a theorist to have power appeared:
