Fall Of The Girondists

by the middle of May 1793 I had made up my mind that the Girondists must be politically suppressed. The Convention was wasting time and force in vindictive factional recriminations, while the country was in crisis. Charles François Dumouriez, the senior commander of the Battles of Valmy and Jemappes, had deserted. The French armies were suffering a series of checks and reverses. A royalist rebellion was gaining formidable dimensions in the west. The Girondists were clamoring for the heads of me and my colleagues in the Mountain, but they would lose this struggle to the death.

 the insurrection of 31 May 1793 and 2 June 1793, which ended in the purge of the Convention and the proscription of the Girondists. I afterwards spoke of myself as the author of this revolution, stung by some trait of factious perversity in the Girondists, I had openly cried out in the midst of the Convention, that if I could only find a hundred men, they would resist the oppressive authority of the Girondist commission of twelve. At any rate, I certainly acquiesced in the violence of the commune, and I publicly gloried in the expulsion of the men who stood obstinately in the way of a vigorous and concentrated exertion of national power.

 unlike the Girondists I accepted the fury of popular passion as an inevitable incident in the work of deliverance. I as not an enthusiast of the Reign of Terror like Billaud Varenne or Jacques René Hébert; I saw it as a two-edged weapon to be used as little as necessary. at this time I was wishing to reconcile France with herself; to restore a society that, while emancipated and renewed in every part, should yet be stable; and above all to secure the independence of my country, both by a resolute defence against the invader, and by such a mixture of vigour with humanity as should reconcile the offended opinion of the rest of Europe.

The position of the Mountain had completely changed. In the Constituent Assembly its members had been a mere 30 out of the 578 of the third estate. In the Legislative Assembly they had not been numerous, and none of their chiefs held a seat. In the first nine months of the Convention they were struggling for their very lives against the Girondists. In June 1793, for the first time, they found themselves in possession of absolute power. Men who had for many months been nourished on the ideas and stirred to the methods of opposition  suddenly had the responsibility of government. Actual power was in the hands of the two Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. Both were chosen out of the body of the Convention. 

I immediately after the fall of the Girondists (28 July 1793), had thrown myself with extraordinary energy into the work to be done. I was prominent in the task of setting up a strong central authority, taming the anarchical ferment of Paris. It was I who proposed that the Committee of Public Safety be granted dictatorial powers, and that it should have copious funds at its disposal. I was not a member of the resulting committee: in order to keep myself clear of any personal suspicion, I announced my resolution not to belong to the body which I had thus done my best to make supreme in the state. My position during the autumn of 1793 was that of a powerful supporter and inspirer, from without, of the government which I had been foremost in setting up.