According to a characteristic common to the Assemblies of the Revolution, that of yielding to threats and always doing the contrary of what they wished, the men of the Convention dared not resist.The trial was decided upon.
The Girondists, who individually would not have wished for the death of the king, voted for it out of fear once they were assembled.Hoping to save his own head, the Duc d'Orleans, Louis' cousin, voted with them.If, on mounting the scaffold on January 21, 1793, Louis had had that vision of the future which we attribute to the gods, he would have seen following him, one by one, the greater number of the Girondists whose weakness had been unable to defend him.
Regarded only from the purely utilitarian point of view, the execution of the king was one of the mistakes of the Revolution.
It engendered civil war and armed Europe against France.In the Convention itself his death gave rise to intestine struggles, which finally led to the triumph of the Montagnards and the expulsion of the Girondists.
The measures passed under the influence of the Montagnards finally became so despotic that sixty departments, comprising the West and the South, revolted.The insurrection, which was headed by many of the expelled deputies, would perhaps have succeeded had not the compromising assistance of the royalists caused men to fear the return of the ancien regime.At Toulon, in fact, the insurgents acclaimed Louis XVII.
The civil war thus begun lasted during the greater part of the life of the Revolution.It was fought with the utmost savagery.
Old men, women, children, all were massacred, and villages and crops were burned.In the Vendee alone the number of the killed was reckoned at something between half a million and a million.
Civil war was soon followed by foreign war.The Jacobins thought to remedy all these ills by creating a new Constitution.It was always a tradition with all the revolutionary assemblies to believe in the magic virtues of formula.In France this conviction has never been affected by the failure of experiments.
``A robust faith,'' writes one of the great admirers of the Revolution, M.Rambaud, ``sustained the Convention in this labour; it believed firmly that when it had formulated in a law the principles of the Revolution its enemies would be confounded, or, still better, converted, and that the advent of justice would disarm the insurgents.''
During its lifetime the Convention drafted two Constitutions--that of 1793, or the year I., and that of 1795, or the year III.
The first was never applied, an absolute dictatorship very soon replacing it; the second created the Directory.
The Convention contained a large number of lawyers and men of affairs, who promptly comprehended the impossibility of government by means of a large Assembly.They soon divided the Convention into small committees, each of which had an independent existence--business committees, committees of legislation, finance, agriculture, arts, &c.These committees prepared the laws which the Assembly usually voted with its eyes closed.
Thanks to them, the work of the Convention was not purely destructive.They drafted many very useful measures, creating important colleges, establishing the metric system, &c.The majority of the members of the Assembly, as we have already seen, took refuge in these committees in order to evade the political conflict which would have endangered their heads.
Above the business committees, which had nothing to do with politics, was the Committee of Public Safety, instituted in April, 1793, and composed of nine members.Directed at first by Danton, and in the July of the same year by Robespierre, it gradually absorbed all the powers of government, including that of giving orders to ministers and generals.Carnot directed the operations of the war, Cambon the finances, and Saint-Just and Collot-d'Herbois the general policy.
Although the laws voted by the technical committees were often very wise, and constituted the lasting work of the Convention, those which the Assembly voted in a body under the threats of the delegations which invaded it were manifestly ridiculous.
Among these laws, which were not greatly in the interests of the public or of the Convention itself, were the law of the maximum, voted in September, 1793, which pretended to fix the price of provisions, and which merely established a continual dearth; the destruction of the royal tombs at Saint-Denis; the trial of the queen, the systematic devastation of the Vendee by fire, the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal, &c.
