ench
people, and every six months snatched from time and from Bourbon
reaction for this purpose was worth some sort of price. When France
rubbed her eyes after Thermidor, drew {223} breath, and began to
consider her situation, she found herself a vastly different France
from that of 1789.

The whole course of the Revolution was like that of a rocket, rushing
and whirring upwards, hesitating a moment, then bursting and scattering
its fragments in a downward course to earth. Thermidor was the
bursting point of the Revolution, and after Thermidor we enter into a
descending period, when the shattered fragments gradually lose their
flame, when the great inspiration of the Revolution dies out, and only
the less grand, less terrible, less noble, less horrifying things
remain. The track of those shattered fragments must now be followed.

The public interpreted the fall of Robespierre more accurately than did
the Convention, and saw in it the end of the reign of terror rather
than the end of an individual dictatorship. The nightmare was over;
men began to breathe, to talk. From day to day, almost from hour to
hour, the tide rose; rejoicing quickly showed signs of turning into
reaction. Within two weeks of the fall of Robespierre it became
necessary for the men who had pulled him down to affirm solemnly that
the revolutionary government still existed, and would {224} continue to
exist. This the Convention declared by a formal vote on the 12th of
August.

At the same time the Convention was returning to life, its members to
self-assertion; and if its measures were chiefly directed to preventing
for the future any such preponderance as Robespierre had exercised,
they also rapidly tended to get in line with the opinion now loudly
proclaimed in all directions against terrorism. Within a few weeks the
Committee of Public Safety was increased in numbers and changed in
personnel--among its new members, Cambaceres, Sieyes, Rewbell. Other
committees took over enlarged powers. The Commune was suppressed,
Paris being ruled by officials chosen by the Convention. But the
sections were allowed to remain, for it was their support had given
Barras victory on the 9th of Thermidor, and no one foresaw as yet that
it was from the sections that the next serious danger would come.

The national guards, by a series of measures, were purged, and
converted into an exclusively middle class organization. The
Revolutionary Tribunal, after d