1. The activity of the Clubs and the Commune during the
Convention.
DURING the whole of its existence the Convention was governed
by the leaders of the clubs and of the Commune.
We have already seen what was their influence on the
preceding Assemblies. It became overwhelming during the
Convention. The history of this latter is in reality that of the
clubs and the Commune which dominated it. They enslaved, not
only the Convention, but also all France. Numerous little
provincial clubs, directed by that of the capital, supervised
magistrates, denounced suspects, and undertook the execution of
all the revolutionary orders.
When the clubs or the Commune had decided upon certain
measures they had them voted by the Assembly then and there. If
the Assembly resisted, they sent their armed delegations
thither—that is, armed bands recruited from the scum of the
populace. They conveyed injunctions which were always slavishly
obeyed. The Commune was so sure of its strength that it even
demanded of the Convention the immediate expulsion of deputies
who displeased it.
While the Convention was composed generally of
educated men, the members of the Commune and the clubs comprised
a majority of small shopkeepers, labourers, and artisans,
incapable of personal opinions, and always guided by their
leaders—Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre, &c.
Of the two powers, clubs and insurrectionary Commune, the
latter exercised the greater influence in Paris, because it had
made for itself a revolutionary army. It held under its orders
forty-eight committees of National Guards, who asked nothing more
than to kill, sack, and, above all, plunder.
The tyranny with which the Commune crushed Paris was
frightful. For example, it delegated to a certain cobbler,
Chalandon by name, the right of surveillance over a portion of
the capital—a right implying the power to send to the
Revolutionary Tribunal, and therefore to the guillotine, all
those whom he suspected. Certain streets were thus almost
depopulated by him.
The Convention struggled feebly against the Commune at the
outset, but did not prolong its resistance. The culminating
point of the conflict occurred when the Convention wished to
arrest Hébert, the friend of the Commune, and the latter
sent armed bands who threatened the Assembly and demanded the
expulsion of the Girondists who had provoked the measure. Upon
the Convention refusing the Commune besieged it on June 2, 1798,
by means of its revolutionary army, which was under the orders of
Hanriot. Terrified, the Assembly gave up twenty-seven of its
members. The Commune immediately sent a delegation ironically to
felicitate it upon its obedience.
After the fall of the Girondists the Convention submitted
itself completely to the injunctions of the omnipotent Commune.
The latter decreed the levy of a revolutionary army, to be
accompanied by a tribunal and a guillotine, which was to traverse
the whole of France in order to execute suspects.
Only towards the end of its existence, after the fall of
Robespierre, did the Convention contrive to escape from the yoke
of the Jacobins and the Commune. It closed the Jacobin club and
guillotined its leading members.
Despite such sanctions the leaders still continued to
excite the populace and hurl it against the Convention. In
Germinal and Prairial it underwent regular sieges. Armed
delegations even succeeded in forcing the Convention to vote the
re-establishment of the Commune and the convocation of a new
Assembly, a measure which the Convention hastened to annul the
moment the insurgents had withdrawn. Ashamed of its fear, it
sent for regiments which disarmed the faubourgs and made
nearly ten thousand arrests. Twenty-six leaders of the movement
were put to death, and six deputies who were concerned in the
riot were guillotined.
But the Convention did not resist to any purpose. When it
was no longer led by the clubs and the Commune it obeyed the
Committee of Public Safety and voted its decrees without
discussion.
“The Convention,” writes H. Williams, “which
spoke of nothing less than having all the princes and kings of
Europe brought to its feet loaded with chains, was made prisoner
in its own sanctuary by a handful of mercenaries.”
