the action of the State stood still. The fall
of the men who reigned by terror produced, at first, no great
political result. The process of change was set in motion by certain
citizens of Nantes. Carrier had sent a batch of 132 of his prisoners
to feed the Paris guillotine. Thirty-eight of them died of the
hardships they endured. The remainder were still in prison in
Thermidor; and they now petitioned to be put on their trial. The trial
took place; and the evidence given was such as made a reaction
inevitable. On September 14, the Nantais were acquitted. Then the
necessary consequence followed. If the victims of Carrier were
innocent, what was Carrier himself? His atrocities had been exposed,
and, on November 12, the Convention resolved, by 498 to 2, that he
should appear before the tribunal. For Carrier was a deputy,
inviolable under common law. The trial was prolonged, for it was the
trial not of a man, but of a system, of a whole class of men still in
the enjoyment of immunity.

Everything that could be brought to light gave strength to the
Thermidorians against their enemies, and gave them the command of
public opinion. On December 16 Carrier was guillotined, he had
defended himself with spirit. The strength of his case was that his
prosecutors were nearly as guilty as himself, and that they would all,
successively, be struck down by the enemies of the Republic. He did
his best to drag down the party with him. His associates, acquitted by
the revolutionary tribunal on the plea that their delinquencies were
not political, were then sent before the ordinary courts. On the day
on which the convention resolved that the butcher of Nantes must stand
his trial, they closed the Jacobin Club, and now the reaction was
setting in.

On December 1, after hearing a report by Carnot, the assembly offered
an amnesty to the insurgents on the Loire, and on the 8th those
Girondins were recalled who had been placed under arrest. This measure
was decisive. With the willing aid of the Plain they were masters of
the Convention, for they were seventy-three in number, and, unlike the
Plain, they were not hampered and disabled by their own iniquities.
They were not accomplices of the Reign of Terror, for they had spent
it in confinement. They had nothing to fear from a vigorous
application of deserved penalties, and they had a terrible score to
clear off. There were still sixteen deputies who had been proscribed
with Buzot and the rest.