ir southern district, the
Gironde. A special revolutionary tribunal was instituted and twenty-one
of the leading Girondists were condemned to death. The others committed
suicide. They were capable and honest men but too philosophical and too
moderate to survive during these frightful years.

In October of the year 1793 the Constitution was suspended by the
Jacobins "until peace should have been declared." All power was placed
in the hands of a small committee of Public Safety, with Danton
and Robespierre as its leaders. The Christian religion and the old
chronology were abolished. The "Age of Reason" (of which Thomas Paine
had written so eloquently during the American Revolution) had come and
with it the "Terror" which for more than a year killed good and bad and
indifferent people at the rate of seventy or eighty a day.

The autocratic rule of the King had been destroyed. It was succeeded
by the tyranny of a few people who had such a passionate love for
democratic virtue that they felt compelled to kill all those who
disagreed with them. France was turned into a slaughter house. Everybody
suspected everybody else. No one felt safe. Out of sheer fear, a
few members of the old Convention, who knew that they were the next
candidates for the scaffold, finally turned against Robespierre, who
had already decapitated most of his former colleagues. Robespierre,
"the only true and pure Democrat," tried to kill himself but failed His
shattered jaw was hastily bandaged and he was dragged to the guillotine.
On the 27th of July, of the year 1794 (the 9th Thermidor of the year
II, according to the strange chronology of the revolution), the reign of
Terror came to an end, and all Paris danced with joy.

The dangerous position of France, however, made it necessary that the
government remain in the hands of a few strong men, until the many
enemies of the revolution should have been driven from the soil of the
French fatherland. While the half-clad and half-starved revolutionary
armies fought their desperate battles of the Rhine and Italy and
Belgium and Egypt, and defeated every one of the enemies of the Great
Revolution, five Directors were appointed, and they ruled France for
four years. Then the power was vested in the hands of a successful
general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became "First Consul"
of France in the year 1799. And during the next fifteen years, the
old European continent became the laboratory of a number