[26] "Unanimously," with approving and
enthusiastic cheers, manifesting the warmest sympathy for Collot
d'Herbois, Couthon, and Robespierre,[27] the Convention, through
multiplied and spontaneous re-elections, maintains the homicidal
government which the Plain detests, because it is homicidal, and which
the Mountain detests, because it is decimated by it. Plain and
Mountain, by virtue of terror, majority after majority, end in
consenting to and bringing about their own suicide: on the 22nd of
Prairial, the entire Convention has stretched out its neck;[28] on the
8th of Thermidor, for a quarter of an hour after Robespierre's
speech,[29] it has again stretched this out, and would probably have
succumbed, had not five or six of them, whom Robespierre designated or
named, Bourdon de l'Oise, Vadier, Cambon, Billaud and Panis,
stimulated by the animal instinct of self-preservation, raised their
arms to ward off the knife. Nothing but imminent, personal, mortal
danger could, in these prostrated beings, supplant long-continued fear
with still greater fear. Later on, Si?y?s, on being asked how he
acted in these times, replied, "I lived." In effect, he and others
are reduced to that; they succeeded in doing this, at all costs, and
at what a price![30] His secret notes, his most private sketches
confirm this[31].
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