rning power was
concentrated in the Committee of Public Safety by abolishing the
office of minister, instead of which there were twelve Boards of
Administration reporting to the Committee. That there might be no
rival power, the municipality was remodelled and placed in the hands
of men attached to Robespierre. The dualism remained between
representation in the Assembly and the more direct action of the
sovereign people in the Town Hall. When the tocsin rings, said a
member of the Commune, the Convention ceases to exist. In other words,
when the principal chooses to interfere, he supersedes his agent. The
two notions of government are contradictory, and the bodies that
incorporated them were naturally hostile. But their antagonism was
suspended while Robespierre stood between.

The reformed Commune at once closed all clubs that were not Jacobin.
All parties had been crushed: Royalists, Feuillants, Girondins,
Cordeliers. What remained of them in the scattered prisons of France
was now to be forwarded to Paris, and there gradually disposed of. But
though there no longer existed an opposing party, there was still a
class of men that had not been reduced or reconciled. This consisted
chiefly of deputies who had been sent out to suppress the rising of
the provinces in 1793. These Commissaries of the Convention had
enjoyed the exercise of enormous authority; they had the uncontrolled
power of life and death, and they had gathered spoil without scruple,
from the living and the dead. On that account they were objects of
suspicion to the austere personage at the head of the State; and they
were known to be the most unscrupulous and the most determined of men.

Robespierre, who was nervously apprehensive, saw very early where the
danger lay, and he knew which of these enemies there was most cause to
dread. He never made up his mind how to meet the peril; he threatened
before he struck; and the others combined and overthrew him. He had
helped to unite them by introducing a conflict of ideas at a time
when, apparently, and on the surface, there was none. Everybody was a
Republican and a Jacobin, but Robespierre now insisted on the belief
in God. He perished by the monstrous imposture of associating divine
sanction with the crimes of his sanguinary reign. The scheme was not
suggested by expediency, for he had been always true to the idea. In
early life he had met Rousseau at Ermenonville, and he had adopted the
indeterminate relig