ats_ from 27% to 48% by the end of the year. In matters of
finance Cambon was now supreme; but his independence, his hatred of
dictatorship, his protests against the excesses of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, won him Robespierre's renewed suspicion, and on the 8th
Thermidor Robespierre accused him of being anti-revolutionary and an
aristocrat. Cambon's proud and vehement reply was the signal of the
resistance to Robespierre's tyranny and the prelude to his fall. Cambon
soon had reason to repent of that event, for he became one of those most
violently attacked by the Thermidorian reaction. The royalist pamphlets
and the journals of J.L. Tallien attacked him with fury as a former
_Montagnard_. He was charged with being responsible for the discredit of
the _assignats_, and even accused of malversations. On the 21st of
February 1795 the project which he presented to withdraw four milliards
of _assignats_ from circulation, was rejected, and on the 3rd of April
he was excluded from the committee of finance. On the 16th Germinal,
Tallien procured a decree of accusation against him, but he was already
in safety, taking refuge probably at Lausanne. In any case he does not
seem to have remained in Paris, although in the riot of the 1st Prairial
some of the insurgents proclaimed him mayor. The amnesty of the 4th
Brumaire of the year IV. (the 5th of October 1795), permitted him to
return to France, and he withdrew to his estate of Terral near
Montpellier, where, during the White Terror, he had a narrow escape from
an attempt upon his life. At first Cambon hoped to find in Bonaparte the
saviour of the republic, but, deceived by the 18th Brumaire, he lived
throughout the whole of the empire in peaceful seclusion. During the
Hundred Days he was deputy for Herault in the chamber of
representatives, and pronounced himself strongly against the return of
the Bourbons, and for religious freedom. Under the Restoration the
"amnesty" law of 1816 condemned him as a regicide to exile, and he
withdrew to Belgium, to St Jean-Ten-Noode, near Brussels, where he died
on the 15th of February 1820. (R. A.*)

See Bornarel, _Cambon_ (Paris).

CAMBON, PIERRE PAUL (1843- ), French diplomatist, was born on the 20th
of January 1843. He was called to the Parisian bar, and became private
secretary to Jules Ferry in the prefecture of the Seine. After ten years
of administrative work in France as secretary of prefecture, and then as
prefect successi