the cannon, by which Henriot, the commandant-general, in the midst of his staff seemed to await them. Herault de Séchelles ordered Henriot to withdraw this formidable array, and to grant a free passage to the national representation! Henriot, who felt in himself the omnipotence of armed insurrection, caused his horse to prance, whilst receding some paces, and then said in an imperative tone to the Convention, "You will not leave this spot, until you have delivered up the twenty-two!" "Seize this rebel!" said Herault de Séchelles, to the soldiers, pointing with his finger to Henriot. The soldiers remained immovable. "Gunners, to your pieces! Soldiers, to arms!" cried Henriot to the troops. At these words, repeated by the officers along the whole line, a motion of concentration around the guns took place. The Convention retrograded. Herault de Séchelles passed with the deputies by the archway of the palace into the garden. There the faithful troops, posted at the end of the great walk upon the Place of the Revolution, called to the members of the Assembly with shouts, swearing to protect them with their bayonets. Herault de Séchelles directed his steps towards them. A troop of the insurgent sections barred his passage before attaining the Pont Tournant. The Convention, grouped around their president, hesitated and halted.

Marat, issuing then from a cross-walk, escorted by a column of young Cordeliers, who cried out " Vive l'ami du peuple," summoned the deputies, who had abandoned their posts, to return to them. The Convention, captives, but affecting to be somewhat satisfied with the step they were permitted to take, re-entered the hall. Couthon added derision within to the violence they had experienced without.

XII. A feigned, but unanimous, applause attested that nothing now remained to the Convention, not even the respect due to its situation. Legendre, Couthon, and Marat uttered, however, exclamations of pity in favour of those members of the Commission of Twelve who had protested against the arrest of Hébert and Varlet. They effaced from the list of the proscribed Fonfrède, Saint Martin, and some others.

Petitioners offered themselves as hostages to the departments whose deputies were to be imprisoned. "I require no bayonets to defend the liberty of my thoughts," answered

Barbaroux: "I have no need of hostages to protect my life. My hostages are the purity of my conscience, and the loyalty of the people of Paris, in whose hands I place myself." "And I," said Lanjuinais,-"I demand hostages, not for myself, who have long since made my life a sacrifice, but to prevent civil war from breaking out, and to maintain the unity of the republic." Not one insulting murmur responded to these last words of the twenty-two.

Barbaroux, Lanjuinais, Vergniaud, Mollevault, and Gardien, remained on their benches, vainly expecting the armed men who were to secure their persons, but not seeing them arrive, they retired to their own homes.

Gens d'armes were sent by the revolutionary committee, to watch over them in their dwellings.

XIII. Such was the political catastrophe of this party. It died as it was born - from sedition legalised by victory. The day of the 2d of June is still called the 31st of May, because the struggle, which lasted during three days, was to La Gironde the 10th of August. This party fell from weakness and indecision, as did the king, whom they had overthrown. The republic, which they had founded, crushed them after only eight months' existence. This group of republicans was honoured for their intentions, admired for their talents, deplored for their misfortunes, and regretted on account of their successors, and because their chiefs, by their fall, opened the lengthened vista to the scaffold.

There are two requisites for statesmen in order to direct the great movements in which they participate: perfect intelligence of those movements, and the feeling of which these impulses are the expression in a people. The Girondists had not thoroughly one or the other. In the Legislative Assembly they had long covenanted with the monarchy, badly received by them, and had not comprehended that a nation can scarcely ever be transformed and regenerated under the hand and under the name of the power from which it has just escaped. The republic, timidly planned by some amongst them, had been entertained rather as a fatal necessity than embraced as a system by the others. From the morrow of its proclamation, they had dreaded the fruit of their labour, as a mother who had been delivered of a monster. Instead of endeavouring to strengthen the rising republic, they had

been solicitous of weakening it. The constitution which they proposed to it, bore the semblance of regret, rather than that of hope. They contested with it, one by one, each organ of its life and strength. Aristocracy revealed itself, under another form, in all their civic institutions. The popular cause felt itself from the first suppressed thereby. They defied the people. The people in their turn defied them. The head dreaded the arm, the arm feared the head. Society was compelled to be in tumult, or to languish.

The Girondists, also, after their accession, had defied concession, and resisted defeat. The 10th of August had wrested from them the throne, the preservation of which they still dreamt of, even in the decree wherein Vergniaud proclaimed the dethronement of the king. Danton had snatched from them the proscriptions of September, which they had not known how to prevent by a display of force, or to punish by protecting the victims of their own body. Robespierre had exacted from them the head of Louis XVI., cowardly surrendered in exchange for their own. Marat had wrested from them his impunity and triumph after his accusation on the 10th of March. The Jacobins had deprived them of the ministry in the person of Roland. Lastly, Pache, Hébert, Chaumette, and the Commune now wrung from them their abdication, and left them only their lives. Feeble within, they had been unfortunate without. Dumouriez, their warrior, had betrayed the republic, and cast upon them, by his treason, the suspicion of their participation. Their armies without chiefs, without discipline, and without recruits, fell from defeat to defeat. The fortified towns of the north were given up, or protected only by their walls. Royalism conquered the west, federalism dislocated the south, anarchy paralysed the centre, and factions tyrannised over the capital. The Convention, rich in orators, but without political leaders, wavered in their hands, admiring their discourses, but ridiculing their acts.

XIV. With some more months of such a government, France, half conquered by the foreigner, reconquered by the counter-revolution, torn to pieces by her own hands, and devoured by anarchy, would have ceased to exist, either as a republic or a nation. All must have perished in the hands of these declaimers.

It was necessary either for resignation to perish with them, or to strengthen the government. Force acquired the upper hand. It seized, as it had done on the 10th of August, on that dictatorship which no one as yet had dared to assume in the Convention. The insurrection of the Commune, although fomented and directed by evil passion, was presented to the eyes of the patriots as the insurrection of public safety. The people, seeing clearly that they were about to perish, seditiously seized the helm with their own hands, and wrested it from those who shrank from it. The people considered they exercised in this their supreme right, the right of existence. They were accused of having arrogated to themselves the initiative over the departments, and of having substituted the will of Paris for the will of France. What could the departments do, said the patriots of the 31st of May, at the distance they were situated from passing events? Before they could have been consulted, before they could have answered, before their weight of opinion, or armed bodies, could have reached Paris, the coalesced forces would have been at its gates; the Vendeans at the gates of Orleans, the republic smothered in its cradle. In extreme danger, proximity constitutes a right. It belongs to that party of the people most approximated to public danger, first to provide against it. In such a case, the reach of the arm is the measure of power. A town then exercises the dictature of its position, relying upon ratification afterwards. Paris had exercised it several times before and after 1789. France did not reproach her either for the 11th of July, the Tennis Court, or even for the 10th of August, when Paris had acquired for her, without consulting or awaiting her, the Revolution, and the republic.

Besides, whatever may be the theories of abstract equality amongst the towns of an empire, these theories unfortunately yield to fact under exceptional circumstances; and that fact possesses its own right, for it is justified by its necessity. Without doubt those cities which are the seats of government are but members of the national body; but this member is the head. The capital of a nation exercises over its members an initiative power, that of leading and resolving, connected with the most energetic feelings, of which the head is the seat, in a nation as well as in an individual. Strict polemics may with reason contest this right:

history cannot deny it. In times of no excitement, a government is everywhere equally proportioned. In the hour of extremity, the government is, not by right, but by fact, everywhere, where it is in possession. The 31st of May was illegal: who justified it? But was the 10th of August legal? It was, however, the title of the Girondists. What party could then legitimately invoke the law? None. All had violated it. Law there was not, in this reciprocal and continued usurpation, either in La Montagne, in La Gironde, in the Commune, in Paris, or in Bordeaux. The law existed no longer, or rather, the law was the instinct of preservation in a great people. The law was the Revolution itself! A people, led astray by their patriotism, thought to promulgate it in the midst of the tumult and sedition of these three days. It was disorder; but in their eyes, however, it was the law, for this violence appeared to them the only measure which could save the country and the Revolution. "The 10th of August," said they, in speaking of it, "alone saved liberty; the 31st of May saved the nation."

BOOK XLIII.

I. AFTER this day, when the people made no other use of their power than to display and to exercise the pressure of Paris over the representation, they separated without committing any excess.

They considered they had delivered the Convention from the yoke of the ambitious, and the plots of traitors. That sufficed them. They were ready to obey the Convention, provided they thought it free. No endeavour to urge them further could have led them to establish a tyranny.

One man only wished, for his personal ambition, to render the motion abortive. That man was Marat. He was baffled, and was obliged to exonerate himself to the Jacobins from the accusation of aspiring to the dictatorship.