d in
a combination strong enough to enable the Convention to crush the
Committees.

Much depended on military success. The victories of the generals were
the great strength of the Committee. For so long it would be difficult
to turn opinion against a triumphant administration. 'At the first
defeat,' Robespierre had said to Barere, 'I await you.' But the defeat
did not come. The plotting went on with incessant activity; on one hand,
Robespierre, aided by Saint Just and Couthon, strengthening himself at
the Jacobin Club, and through that among the sections; on the other, the
Mountain and the Committee of General Security trying to win over the
Right, more contemptuously christened the Marsh or the Belly, of the
Convention. The Committee of Public Safety was not yet fully decided how
to act.

At the end of the first week of Thermidor, Robespierre could endure the
tension no longer. He had tried to fortify his nerves for the struggle
by riding, but with so little success that he was lifted off his horse
fainting. He endeavoured to steady himself by diligent pistol-practice.
But nothing gave him initiative and the sinews of action. Saint Just
urged him to raise Paris. Some bold men proposed to carry off the
members of the Committee bodily from their midnight deliberations.
Robespierre declined, and fell back on what he took to be his greatest
strength and most unfailing resource; he prepared a speech. On the
Eighth of Thermidor he delivered it to the Convention, amid intense
excitement both within its walls and without. All Paris knew that they
were now on the eve of one more of the famous Days; the revolution of
Thermidor had begun.

The speech of the Eighth Thermidor has seemed to men of all parties
since a masterpiece of tactical ineptitude. If Robespierre had been a
statesman instead of a phrasemonger, he had a clear course. He ought to
have taken the line of argument that Danton would have taken. That is to
say, he ought to have identified himself fully with the interests and
security of the Convention; to have accepted the growing resolution to
close the Terror; to have boldly pressed the abolition of the Committee
of General Security, and the removal from the Committee of Public Safety
of Billaud, Collot, Barere; to have proposed to send about fifty persons
to Cayenne for life; and to have urged a policy of peace with the
foreign powers. This was the substantial wisdom and real interest of the
position. The task w