ead never
come back," was not justified in his case. He alone of the three
succeeded in evading the decreed punishment and lived, always plausible
and {229} always finding supporters, to the days of Louis Philippe,
when he died obscurely.

This was a great success for the moderates. But to observers of the
Revolution from a distance, from London, Berlin or Vienna, the event
appeared under a slightly different light. Pichegru happened to be in
Paris at the moment, and Pichegru had been made military commander of
the city. In reality he had little to do with suppressing the
insurrection, but from a distance it appeared that the Republic had
found in its democratic general, the conqueror of Holland, that solid
support of force without which the establishment of law and order in
France appeared impossible.

A few days later the pacification began. At Basle Barthelemy had been
negotiating for months past, and now, on the 5th of April, he signed a
treaty with Hardenberg, the representative of Prussia. The government
of King Frederick William was far too much interested in the third
partition of Poland, then proceeding, far too little interested in the
Rhineland, to maintain the war longer. It agreed to give the French
Republic a free hand to the south of the Rhine in return for which it
was to retain a free hand in northern Germany, an arrangement which was
to underlie {230} many important phases of Franco-Prussian relations
from that day until 1871.

The peace with Prussia was followed by one with Holland on the 16th of
March, which placed the smaller state under conditions approaching
vassalage to France. But with England and Austria, closely allied, the
war still continued, and that not only because Austria was as yet
unwilling to face so great a territorial loss as that of the
Netherlands, but also because the Committee of Public Safety was not
yet anxious for a complete pacification. Already it was clear that the
real force of the Republic lay in her armies, and the Convention did
not desire the presence of those armies and their generals in Paris.

In the capital the situation continued bad from winter to spring, from
spring to summer. As late as May famine was severe, and people were
frequently found in the streets dead of starvation. To meet the
general dissatisfaction Cambaceres brought in a proposal for a new
constitution. But nothing could allay the agitation, and in May the
reactionary party, now