16th, 1793. Does he consider that these dates, which he doubtlessly has purposely omitted, should be also reckoned amongst the great dates of the Revolution? It was Vergniaud who presided at that terrible night sitting where the judges, without warrant to summon him before them, sentenced Louis XVI. to death.
A description of this gloomy sitting, taken from contemporary accounts, should be read at the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris) in a book called Art de Verifier les Dates. The ballot remained open for four-and-twenty hours. The voters, filled instinctively with a sort of shame and terror at the thought of the monstrous deed they were about to do, glided one by one and at long intervals through the darkness into the hall of suffrage and dropped their solitary vote into the urn.
When Vergniaud, in his turn, mounted the scaffold, Oct. 31st, 1793, he must have remembered with deep remorse the court where he had sat as President and proclaimed the result of the ballot: "Death without delay." He then certainly did not exclaim that Sept. 21st, 1792 had saved the Revolution; he must have told himself that the proclamation of the Republic had ruined liberty. It had, in fact, been abolished with Royalty, it had been beheaded with Louis XVI.
Liberty remained long suspended. Royalty, re-established on April 6th, 18 14, restored it to France. The Charter of Louis XVIII. contained the germ of the right government of the country by itself. This germ was developed by the Charter of August 7th, 1830. In the course of time, and under favourable circumstances, it might have received further developments without any danger to order. The catastrophe of February, 1848, put a stop to the movement.
To-day order is threatened, liberty is outraged, and soon perhaps the Opportunists, with their leader M. Gambetta, who did not attend the banquet at Lake Saint Fargeau, from being persecutors may become the persecuted, as befell the Girondists. They will be persecuted by the modern Terrorists, who will not send them to the guillotine, but who might possibly send them to La Roquette as hostages. There is no need to say what the Commune, which M. Guesde blames for not having broken into the
