of the Committee of Public Safety. He frequently absented himself from the sessions of the Constituent Assembly, but rarely from those of the Jacobins, where he presided day after day. He never proposed any measures in the Convention, never seconded any motions in the Committee of Public Safety, unless such measures had been previously discussed at the Jacobins. Having attained the culmination of his power, he attempted to guide the Jacobins of the Province Centrale from his stronghold in Paris, and demanded from them their talents, their men.
The Jacobins exercised an illegal control over all the representatives of the Convention. This right was never "constitutionally" provided in any regulation, but exclusion from the Club of the Jacobins was equivalent to a letter of introduction to the guillotine. Without the support of the Club of the Jacobins, Robespierre was a nobody; without it he had no power at all; only in combination with it can we understand his importance. The task of the Jacobins was the creation of a unified French state in the stormy days of the Revolution. They were the veins in the revolutionary body, the blood-vessels. When centrifugal forces threatened to disrupt France altogether, they, a unified state within the state, saved the Revolution. Robespierre's relation to all the other parties of the Convention can best be understood after a study of the transactions of
