Without reasoning the subject out logically from premise to conclusion, or being, of course, capable of doing so in the mass, Frenchmen had collectively received the intuition that everything must be endured for a strong government, and that whatever obstructed that government must be eliminated.  For the process of elimination they used the courts.  Under the conditions in which they were placed by the domestic enemy, they had little alternative.  If a political party opposed the Dictatorship in the Convention, that party must be broken down; if a man seemed likely to become a rival for the Dictatorship, that man must be removed; all who conspired against the Republic must be destroyed as ruthlessly at home as on the battle-field.  The Republic was insolvent, and must have money, as it must have men.  If the government needed men, it took them,—­all.  If it needed money, and a man were rich, it did not hesitate to execute him and confiscate his property.  There are very famous examples of all these phenomena strewn through the history of the Terror.

The Girondists were liberals.  They always had been liberals; they had never conspired against the Republic; but they were impracticable.  The ablest of them, Vergniaud, complained before the Tribunal, that he was being tried for what he thought, not for what he had done.  This the government denied, but it was true.  Nay, more; he was tried not for positive but for negative opinions, and he was convicted and executed, and his friends were convicted and executed with him, because, had they remained in the Convention, the Dictatorship, through their opposition, would have lost its energy.  Also the form of the conviction was shocking in the extreme.  The defence of these twenty-one men was, practically, suppressed, and the jury were directed to bring in a verdict of guilty.  Still the prosecutions of the Girondists stopped here.  When they refrained from obstruction, they were spared.

Danton and his friends may have been, and probably were, whether intentionally or by force of circumstances, a menace to the Dictatorship.  Either Robespierre or Danton had to be eliminated.  There was not room for both.  On April 1, 1793, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and others were arrested on a warrant signed by such men as Cambaceres, Carnot, and Prieur.  Carnot in particular was a soldier of the highest character and genius.  He would have signed no such warrant had he not thought the emergency pressing.  Nor was the risk small.  Danton was so popular and so strong before a jury that the government appears to have distrusted even Fouquier-Tinville, for an order was given, and held in suspense, apparently to Henriot, to arrest the President and the Public Prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal, on the day of Danton’s trial.