All the world knows the story of the Terror.  The long processions of carts carrying victims to the guillotine, these increasing in number until after the Law of Prairial they averaged sixty or seventy a day in Paris alone, while in the provinces there was no end.  At Nantes, Carrier could not work fast enough by a court, so he sank boat loads of prisoners in the Loire.  The hecatombs sacrificed at Lyons, and the “Red Masses” of Orange, have all been described.  The population of Toulon sank from 29,000 to 7,000.  All those, in fine, were seized and slain who were suspected of having a mind tinged with caste, or of being traitors to the Republic.  And it was the Centre, or the majority of the Convention, who did this, by tacitly permitting it to be done.  That is to say, France permitted it because the onslaught of the decaying class made atrocities such as these appear to be a condition of self-preservation.  I doubt if, in human history, there be such another and so awful an illustration of the possible effects of conservative errors of judgment.

For France never loved the Terror or the loathsome instruments, such as Fouquier-Tinville, or Carrier, or Billaud-Varennes, or Collot-d’Herbois, or Henriot, or Robespierre, or Couthon, who conducted it.  On this point there can, I think, be neither doubt nor question.  I have tried to show how the Terror began.  It is easy to show how and why it ended.  As it began automatically by the stress of foreign and domestic war, so it ended automatically when that stress was relieved.  And the most curious aspect of the phenomenon is that it did not end through the application of force, but by common consent, and when it had ended, those who had been used for the bloody work could not be endured, and they too were put to death.  The procession of dates is convincing.

When, on July 27, 1793, Robespierre entered the Committee of Public Safety, the fortunes of the Republic were near their nadir, but almost immediately, after Carnot took the War Department on August 14, they began to mend.  On October 8, 1793, Lyons surrendered; on December 19, 1793, the English evacuated Toulon; and, on December 23, the insurrection in La Vendee received its death blow at Savenai.  There had also been success on the frontiers.  Carnot put Hoche in command in the Vosges.  On December 23, 1793, Hoche defeated Wurmser at Freschweiller, when the Austrians, abandoning the lines of Wissembourg, fell back across the Rhine.  Thus by the end of 1793, save for the great border fortresses of Valenciennes and Conde to the north, which commanded the road from Brussels to Paris, the soil of France had been cleared of the enemy, and something resembling domestic tranquillity had been restored at home.  Simultaneously, as the pressure lessened, rifts began to appear in the knot of men who held the Dictatorship in the Republic.  Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just coalesced, and gained control of the police, while Billaud-Varennes,