1793 enforced. The result of that day | tional guard, thirty thousand strong, demonstrated that the physical force of supported by four thousand troops of the populace, however formidable, be- the line, surrounded the revolutionary ing deprived of the guidance of leaders quarter; the avenues leading to it were of ability, could not contend with the planted with cannon, and mortars dispermanent influence of the government. posed on conspicuous situations to ter33. Instructed by so many disasters, rify the inhabitants into submission. and such narrow escapes from utter Alarmed at the prospect of a bombardruin, the Convention resolved on the ment, by which their property would most decisive measures. Eleven of have been endangered, the master manuthe most obnoxious members of the facturers and chiefs of the revolt had Mountain-viz., Rhul, Romme, Goujon, a conference, at which it was resolved Duquesnoy, Duroy, Soubrani, Bour- to make an unconditional surrender. botte, Peyssard, Forrestier, Albitte, and They submitted without restriction to Prieur de la Marne, were delivered over the terms of the Convention. Their to a military commission, or the ordin- cannon were taken from them, the arary tribunals, by whom they were all tillerymen disbanded; the revolutioncondemned, except the three last, who ary committees suppressed; the conescaped. Three of them, Romme, Gou- stitution of 1793 abolished; and the jon, and Duquesnoy, stabbed them- formidable pikes, which since the 14th selves at the bar on receiving sentence, July 1789 had so often struck terror and expired in presence of the judges; into Paris, finally given up. Shortly several of the others mortally wounded after, the military force was taken out themselves, and were led, still bleed- of the hands of the populace. The naing, to the scaffold. They all died with tional guards were organised on a new a stoical firmness, so often displayed, footing; the workmen, the valets, the during those days of anarchy, by the indigent citizens, were excluded from victims of political, worse than any their ranks; and the new members, rereligious fanaticism. Barère, Collot gularly organised by battalions and brid'Herbois, Billaud Varennes, and Va- gades, were subjected to the orders of dier, were ordered to be tried by the the Military Committee. At the same criminal tribunal of Charente-Inferi- time, in accordance with an earnest petieure; but before the decree arrived at tion from the few remaining Catholics, Rochefort, they had all, except Barère, they were permitted to make use of the been transported or escaped. churches, on condition of maintaining them at their own expense.

34. At length the period had arrived when the faubourgs, whose revolts had so often proved fatal to the tranquillity of France, were to be finally subdued. The murderer of the deputy Féraud had been discovered, and condemned by a military commission. When the day of his punishment approached, the Convention, to prevent another revolt, ordered the disarming of the faubourgs. A band of the most intrepid of the Troupe Dorée imprudently advanced into that thickly-peopled quarter; and, after seizing some guns, found themselves surrounded by its immense population. They owed their safety to the humanity or prudence of the leaders of the revolt, who hesitated to imbrue their hands in the blood of the best families of Paris. But no sooner were they permitted to retire, than the na-made vacant.

Thus TERMINATED THE REIGN OF THE MULTITUDE, six years after it had been first established by the storming of the Bastile. From the period of their being disarmed, the populace took no further share in the changes of government; these were brought about solely by the middle classes and the army. It is the arming of the people in troubled times which is the fatal step; for it at once renders the mob of the capital the masters of the state. After the populace were disarmed, the grand source of disorder and suffering was closed. The Revolution, considered as a movement of the people, was thereafter at an end; the subsequent struggles were merely the contests of other powers for the throne which they had

ment, was again permitted. The inextricable question of the assignats next occupied the attention of the Convention, for the suffering produced by their depreciation had become absolutely intolerable to a large portion of the people. Being still a legal tender at par, all those who had money to receive lost eleven-twelfths of their property. The salaries of the public functionaries, and the payments to the public creditors, were to a certain degree augmented, but by no means in proportion to the depreciation of the paper. But this was a trifling remedy; the great evil still remained unmiti

The gradual relaxation of the extra- | abolition of the maximum and forced ordinary rigour of government erected requisitions was demanded in the Conby the Convention presents an interest-vention. Public feeling revolted against ing epoch in the history of the Revo- their continuance, and they were put lution. an end to almost by acclamation. The 35. After the overthrow of Robes-powers of the Committee of Subsistence pierre, the Convention endeavoured to and Provisions were greatly circumretrace their steps towards the natural scribed; the right of making forced reorder of society; but they experienced quisitions was continued only for a the utmost difficulty in the attempt. month, and its army of ten thousand To go on with the maximum, forced re- employés restricted to a few hundred. quisitions, and general distribution of At the same time, the free circulation food, was impossible; but how to relax of gold and silver, which had been arthese extreme measures was the ques-rested by the Revolutionary_governtion, when the general industry of the country was so grievously reduced, and the usual supplies so much straitened, both by the abstraction of agricultural labourers, the terror excited by the requisitionists, and the forced sales at a nominal and ruinous price. The first step towards a return to the natural state was an augmentation of the price fixed as a maximum by two-thirds, and alimitation of the right of making forced requisitions. But these oppressive exactions were in fact abandoned by the reaction in the public feeling, and the cessation of terror, after the fall of the Dictatorial government. The assignats going on continually declining, the aver-gated in all payments between man and sion of all the industrial classes to the maximum was constantly increas- 37. The only way of withdrawing the ing, because the losses they sustained assignats from circulation, and in conthrough the forced sales were thereby sequence enhancing their value, was daily augmented; and the persons in- by the sale of the national domains, trusted with the administration of the when, according to the theory of their laws, being of a more moderate and formation, they should be retired by humane character, were averse to have government, and destroyed. But how recourse to the sanguinary means which were purchasers to be found? That still remained at their disposal. Thus was the eternal question which conthere was everywhere in France a gen- stantly recurred, and never could be eral endeavour to elude the maximum, answered. The same national convuland the newly constituted authorities sion which had confiscated two-thirds winked at frauds which they felt to be of the land of France belonging to the the necessary consequence of so unjust emigrants, the clergy, and the crown, a law. No one, during the Reign of had destroyed almost all the capital Terror, ventured openly to resist regu- which could be employed in its purlations which rendered the industrial chase. Sales to any considerable exand commercial classes tributary to the tent were thus totally out of the quessoldiers and the multitude; but when tion, the more especially as the estates the danger of the guillotine was at an thus brought all at once to sale, conend, the reaction against them was ir-sisted in great part of sumptuous palresistible. aces, woods, parks, and other domains,

man over the whole country.

36. Many months had not elapsed in circumstances, of all others, the after the 9th Thermidor, before the total | worst adapted for a division among the

industrial classes. It was not the ca-tributed, to the six hundred and thirtypitals of a few shopkeepers and farmers which had escaped the general wreck that could produce any impression on such immense possessions. The difficulty, in truth, was inextricable. No sales to any extent went on; the assignats were continually increasing with the vast expenditure of government; and at length it was got over, as will appear in the sequel, by forced means, and the proclamation of a national bankruptcy of the very worst kind.

six thousand inhabitants of the capital, eighteen hundred and ninety-seven casks of flour. But small as this quantity was, it was soon found necessary to reduce it still further; and at length, for several weeks, each citizen received only two ounces of black and coarse bread a-day. Small as this pittance was, it could be obtained only by soliciting tickets from the committees of government, and after waiting at the doors of the bakers from eleven at night till seven in the morning, during the rigour of an arctic winter. The citizens of Paris were for months exposed to the horrors of a state of siege; numbers perished of famine, and many owed their existence to the kindness of some friend in the country, and the introduction of the potato, which already began to assuage this artificial, as it has so often since done the most severe natural scarcities.

38. But the attention of the Convention was soon drawn to evils of a still more pressing kind. The abolition of the maximum, and of the forced requisitions, had deprived government of its violent means of feeding the citizens, while, in consequence of the shock which these tyrannical proceedings had given to industry, the usual sources of supply were almost dried up. The consequence was a most severe scarcity of every kind of provisions, which 40. The abolition of the maximum, went on increasing during the whole of the requisitions, and of all the forced of the winter of 1794-5, and at length, methods of procuring supplies, proin March 1795, reached the most alarm-duced, as might have been anticipated, ing height. To the natural evils of famine were superadded the horrors of a winter of uncommon severity, such as had not been experienced in Europe for a hundred years. The roads, covered with ice, soon became impassable for carriages; the canals were frozen up; and the means of subsistence to the metropolis seemed to be totally exhausted. In this extremity every family endeavoured to lay in stores for a few days, and the few convoys which approached Paris were besieged by crowds of famishing citizens, who proceeded twenty and thirty miles to anticipate the ordinary supplies. Nothing remained for government, who still adhered, though with weakened powers, to the system of distributing food to the people, but to diminish the rations daily issued; and on the report of Boissy-d'Anglas, the quantity served out from the public magazines was diminished to one-half, or a pound of bread a-day for each person above the working classes, and a pound and a half to those actually engaged in labour.

39. At this rate there was daily dis

a most violent reaction on the price of every article of consumption, and, by consequence, on the value of the assignats. Foreign commerce having begun to revive with the cessation of the Reign of Terror, sales being no longer forced, the assignat was brought into comparison with the currency of other countries, and its enormous inferiority precipitated still further its fall. The rapidity of its decline gave rise to numerous speculations on the Exchange of Paris; and the people, in the midst of the horrors of famine, were exasperated by the sight of fortunes made out of the misery which they endured. Government, to provide for the necessities of the inhabitants, had no other resource but to increase the issue of assignats for the purchase of provisions; three milliards more of francs (£120,000,000) were issued for this necessary purpose, and the consequence was, that the paper money fell almost to nothing. Bread was exposed for sale at twenty-two francs the pound in assignats, and what formerly cost 100 francs was now raised to 4000. In the

course of the year the depreciation | government paper, the Directory adoptbecame such, that 28,000 francs in paper were exchanged for a louis d'or, and a dinner for five or six persons cost 60,000 francs in assignats. A kind of despair seized every mind at such prodigious and apparently interminable losses; and it was the force of this feeling which produced the great revolts already mentioned, which had so nearly proved fatal to the Thermidorians, and restored the whole forced system of the Reign of Terror.

found the treasury filled with a mass of sterile assignats. But for the half of the land-tax, which was received in kind, the government would have been literally without the means of feeding either Paris or the armies. The excess of the paper circulation had.rendered it valueless, and in effect reduced the transactions of men to barter.

ed a scale by which the assignats were taken as worth a fifth of their nominal value; but this was an inconsiderable relief, as they had fallen to a hundredand-fiftieth part of the sum for which they had been originally issued. The consequence of this excessive depreciation in a paper which was still a legal tender was, that the whole debts of individuals were extinguished by a payment worth nothing; that the income of the fundholders was annihilated; and 41. The overthrow of this insurrec- the state itself, compelled to receive its tion led to several laws which power-own paper in payment of the taxes, fully tended to diminish the destructive ascendancy of the people in the government. The national guards were reorganised on the footing on which they had been before the 10th August; the labouring and poorer classes were excluded, and the service was confined to the more substantial citizens. At Paris this important force was placed under the orders of the military committee. The government got quit at the same time of a burdensome and ruinous custom, which the Convention had borrowed from the Athenian democracy, of allowing every indigent citizen fifty sous a-day, while they were engaged at their respective sections—a direct premium on idleness, and a constant inducement to the turbulent and restless to assemble at these great centres of democratic power. The churches were restored to the anxious wishes of the Catholics, on the condition that they should maintain them themselves the first symptom of a return to religious feeling in that infidel age.

42. All the evils, the necessary result of an excessive and forced paper circulation, went on increasing after the government, which had returned to moderate measures, was installed in power. Subsistence was constantly wanting in the great towns; the treasury was empty of all but assignats; the great bulk of the national domains remained unsold; the transactions, debts, and properties of individuals were involved in inextricable confusion. Sensible of the necessity of doing something for those who were paid in the

43. Hitherto the reaction had been in favour of constitutional and moderate measures; but the last great victory over the Jacobins revived the hopes of the Royalists. The emigrants and the clergy had returned in great numbers since the repeal of the severe laws passed against them during the Reign of Terror, and contributed powerfully to incline the public mind to a moderate and constitutional monarchy. The horror excited by the sanguinary proceedings of the Jacobins was so strong and universal, that the reaction naturally was in favour of a royalist government. The recent successes of the Troupe Dorée, who formed the flower of the youth of Paris, had awakened in them a strong esprit de corps, and prepared the great and inert body of the people to follow a banner which had so uniformly led to victory. So strong was the feeling at that period, from recent and grievous experience of the danger of popular tumults, that, after the disarming of the faubourgs, several sections made a voluntary surrender of their artillery to the government. A large body of troops of the line, supported by a considerable train of artillery, was brought to Paris, and encamp