melodrama, the
Reign of Terror has been popularly taken for the central and most
important part of the revolutionary epic. This is nearly as absurd as it
would be to make Gustave Flourens' manifestation of the Fifth of
October, or the rising of the Thirty-first of October, the most
prominent features in a history of the war of French defence in our own
day. In truth, the Terror was a mere episode; and just as the rising of
October 1870 was due to Marshal Bazaine's capitulation at Metz, it is
easy to see that, with one exception, every violent movement in Paris,
from 1792 to 1794, was due to menace or disaster on the frontier. Every
one of the famous days of Paris was an answer to some enemy without. The
storm of the Tuileries on the Tenth of August, as we have already said,
was the response to Brunswick's proclamation. The bloody days of
September were the reaction of panic at the capture of Longwy and Verdun
by the Prussians. The surrender of Cambrai provoked the execution of
Marie Antoinette. The defeat of Aix-la-Chapelle produced the abortive
insurrection of the Tenth of March; and the treason of Dumouriez, the
reverses of Custine, and the rebellion in La Vendee, produced the
effectual insurrection of the Thirty-first of May 1793. The last of
these two risings of Paris, headed by the Commune, against the
Convention which was until then controlled by the Girondins, at length
gave the government of France and the defence of the Revolution
definitely over to the Jacobins. Their patriotic dictatorship lasted
unbroken for a short period of ten months, and then the great party
broke up into factions. The splendid triumphs of the dictatorship have
been, in England at any rate, too usually forgotten, and only the crimes
of the factions remembered. Robespierre's history unfortunately belongs
to the less important battle.

II

The Girondins were driven out of the Convention by the insurgent
Parisians at the beginning of June 1793. The movement may be roughly
compared to that of the Independents in our own Rebellion, when the army
compelled the withdrawal of eleven of the Presbyterian leaders from the
parliament; or, it may recall Pride's memorable Purge of the same famous
assembly. Both cases illustrate the common truth that large deliberative
bodies, be they never so excellent for purposes of legislation, and even
for a general control of the executive government in ordinary times, are
found to be essentially unfit for d