The End of the Revolutionary Government.
CHAPTER I.
I. The Convention.
The Convention after Thermidor 9. - Reaction against the Terrorists.
- Aversion to the Constitutionalists. - The danger they run if they
lose power.
Nevertheless they too, these glutted sovereigns, are anxious, and very
much so, we have just seen why; it's a question of remaining in office
in order to remain alive, and henceforth this is their sole concern.
- A good Jacobin, up to the 9th of Thermidor, could, by shutting his
eyes, still believe in his creed.[1] After the 9th of Thermidor,
unless born blind, like Soubrany, Romme and Goujon, a fanatic whose
intellectual organs are as rigid as the limbs of a fakir, nobody in
the Convention can any longer believe in the Contrat-Social, in a
despotic equalizing socialism, in the merits of Terror, in the divine
right of the pure. For, to escape the guillotine of the pure, the
purest had to be guillotined, Saint-Just, Couthon and Robespierre, the
high-priest of the sect. That very day the "Montagnards," in giving
up their doctor, abandoned their principles, and there is no longer
any principle or man to which the Convention could rally.
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