ght poured
incessant malediction on the Left, and the wild shrieking hate with
which the Left retaliated on the Right. The battle was to the death, and
it was the Girondins who first menaced their political foes with
vengeance and the guillotine. As it happened, the treason of Dumouriez
and their own ineptitude destroyed them before revenge was within reach.
Such a consummation was fortunate for their country. It was the
Girondins whose want of union and energy had by the middle of 1793
brought France to distraction and imminent ruin. It was a short year of
Jacobin government that by the summer of 1794 had welded the nation
together again, and finally conquered the invasion. The city of the
Seine had once more shown itself what it had been for nine centuries,
ever since the days of Odo, Count of Paris and first King of the French,
not merely a capital, but France itself, 'its living heart and surest
bulwark.'

The immediate instrument of so rapid and extraordinary an achievement
was the Committee of Public Safety. The French have never shown their
quick genius for organisation with more triumphant vigour. While the
Girondins were still powerful, nine members of the Convention had been
constituted an executive committee, April 6, 1793. They were in fact a
kind of permanent cabinet, with practical irresponsibility. In the
summer of 1793 the number was increased from nine to twelve, and these
twelve were the centre of the revolutionary government. They fell into
three groups. First, there were the scientific or practical
administrators, of whom the most eminent was Carnot. Next came the
directors of internal policy, the pure revolutionists, headed by Billaud
de Varennes. Finally, there was a trio whose business it was to
translate action into the phrases of revolutionary policy. This famous
group was Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint Just.

Besides the Committee of Public Safety there was another chief
governmental committee, that of General Security. Its functions were
mainly connected with the police, the arrests, and the prisons, but in
all serious affairs the two Committees deliberated in common. There were
also fourteen other groups of various size, taken from the Convention;
they applied themselves with admirable zeal, and usually not with more
zeal than skill, to schemes of public instruction, of finance, of
legislation, of the administration of justice, and a host of other civil
reforms, of all of which Napoleon Bo