efets.")]

[Footnote 42152: Lareveillere-Lepeaux, "Memoires." I, 248. (He belongs
to the Committee and is an eye-witness.)]

BOOK FIFTH. THE END OF THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT.

CHAPTER I. THE CONVENTION.

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.[5101] 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. In effect, before guillotining
Robespierre and his associates as orthodox, it guillotined the
Girondins, Hebert and Danton, as heretics. Now, "the existence of
popular idols and of head charlatans is irrevocably ended."[5102]
Ever the same conventional symbol before the empty sanctuary in the
blood-stained temple, and ever the same loud-intoned anthem; but faith
is gone, and only the acolytes remain to drone out the revolutionary
litany, old train-bearers and swingers of incense, the subaltern
butchers who, through a sudden stroke, have become pontiffs; in short,
the valets of the church who have donned the mitres and croziers of
their masters after having assassinated them.

From month to month, under the pressure of public opinion, they detach
themselves from the worship at which they have officiated, for, however
blunted or perverted their consciences, they cannot avoid admitting that
Jacobinism, as they have practiced it, was the religion of robbery and
murder. Previous to Thermidor an official phraseology[5103] drowned with
its doctrinal roar the living truth, while each Con