1793.] INSURRECTION AGAINST THE GIRONDIN DEPUTIES. 277 negotiation." The minister Le Brun is in gaol. The minister Clavière is not to be found. "Would you have recourse to Roland? Why, he is not only in gaol, but also his wife along with him, who is said to be the real minister Brissot is likewise in gaol, bearing a repetition of that sort of misfortune to which it is hoped that habit may reconcile him. Pay your addresses to Egalité, and you will find him in his dungeon at Marseilles. There then only remains my celebrated friend, the mild and merciful Marat." The Girondins, on whose authority in the Convention rested the only hope of a stable government in France,-a government not founded upon the supremacy of the rabble,-had fallen, never to rise again, on the 2nd of June. They then became wanderers in the provinces, or prisoners in the dungeons of Paris. They had relied upon their patriotic eloquence and their republican virtue. They would hold no communion with the movers of insurrection and massacre; and they found the terrible earnestness of ignorant ruffianism too strong for respectable philosophy. Their majority in the Convention availed them nothing; for that Assembly had come into open conflict with the physical force of Paris, hounded on by the Jacobin Club, when the idol of the populace, Marat, was sent for trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. As more prudent men than the Girondins might have expected, the sanguinary demagogue was acquitted; and he was carried,-as a successful candidate was formerly chaired in England-upon the shoulders of the mob, to the hall of the Convention, amidst the cry of "Death to the Girondins." Robespierre, between whom and Marat there was mutual hatred, saw that in giving his support to this "friend of the people," whose mode of testifying his friendship was to excite to plunder and butchery, he was using an instrument for the destruction of the only party that had the confidence of the middle classes. He denounced the Girondins in the Convention as men who bad wished to save the tyrant Louis, and had conspired with the traitor Dumouriez. The Commune of Paris had obtained a power which was opposed to all steady government, and the Girondins tried to bring them. under the control of a Commission of Twelve appointed by the Convention. The mob was roused to that fury which never waits to inquire and to reflect, 278 ASSASSINATION OF MARAT BY CHARLOTTE CORDAY. [1793. when victims are pointed out for its vengeance. On the 31st of May the mob declared itself in a state of permanent insurrection-a phrase which indicated that the ordinary operations of justice were suspended, in the same way that martial law supersedes the accustomed course of legal authority. On the 2nd of June, the Convention was surrounded by an armed force, whose decrees were to be pronounced by a hundred pieces of artillery. Resistance was in vain. Twenty-two of the Girondin leaders were conducted to prison. Many of their friends escaped to the provinces. Some who had fled from the guillotine died by their own hands. The political existence of the party was at an end. For the most odious of the assassins of the anarchical republic there was the vengeance of assassination also in store. The story of Charlotte Corday has been told by Lamartine with a power of picturesque narrative which few have equalled. The naked facts can only be related by ourselves. In the city of Caen resided, in 1793, a grand-daughter of the great tragic poet, Corneille. She was an enthusiast, devoted to those ideas of the new philosophy which she had derived from her father, and from the secret study of Rousseau in the convent in which she had passed her girlhood. Some of the proscribed Girondins had come to reside in Normandy; and from their eloquent invectives against the terrorists who were degrading the cause of the revolution by their crimes, she derived, in common with her neighbours, a hatred of Marat as the personification of all that was atrocious in the rulers of the populace. Pétion, Barbaroux, with many others of the fugitive deputies called up this disgust towards the ruling faction of Paris, by their oratory and their proclamations. Formidable bands of young men enrolled themselves to march to Paris, in order to rescue liberty from the assaults of anarchy. Amongst the number of these volunteers was one who aspired to Charlotte's love, but with a timid reserve. Her enthusiasm suggested that she had a higher call of duty than the indulgence of a feeling suited to more tranquil times. She felt that if the ferocity which now guided the Revolution was not arrested, her province, and the neighbouring districts now in insurrection, would become the scene of the most terrible carnage. She took her resolution. If Marat should fall there might be hope for the Republic. She travelled to Paris, which she entered on the 11th of July. With some difficulty she obtained admission to the mean lodging of Marat, on the evening of the 13th. She found him in a bath; and there she slew him. When examined, she said that she saw civil war ready to devastate France; that she deemed Marat to be the chief cause of the public calamities; and that she sacrificed her life, in taking his, to save her country. Her execution quickly followed. The wretch whom she had murdered was decreed a public funeral in the Pantheon. Danton pronounced his eulogy as "the divine Marat." 279 NOTE ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY KALENDAR. In reading the French historians of the period from the declaration of the Republic in 1792 to the end of 1805, we find the dates of events not given according to the common kalendar, but according to the most puzzling of all systems of chronology, the Republican Calendar adopted by the Convention. In our own history we give the dates, thus found in French writers, according to the Gregorian Kalendar; but it may be useful here to present a complete view of the Revolutionary Kalendar; which view we adopt, with some abridgment, from "The English Cyclopædia of Arts and Sciences." The Convention decreed, on the 24th of November, 1793, that the common era should be abolished in all civil affairs: that the new French era should commence from the foundation of the republic, namely on the 22nd of September, 1792, on the day of the true autumnal equinox, when the sun entered Libra at 9h 18m 30* in the morning, according to the meridian of Paris; that each year should begin at the midnight of the day on which the true autumnal equinox falls; and that the first year of the French republic had begun on the midnight of the 22nd of September, and terminated on the midnight between the 21st and 22nd of September, 1793. To produce a correspondence between the seasons and the civil year, it was decreed, that the fourth year of the republic should be the first sextile, or leap-year; that a sixth complementary day should be added to it, and that it should terminate the first Franciade; that the sextile or leap-year, which they called an olympic year, should take place every four years, and should mark the close of each Franciade: that the first, second, and third centurial years, namely, 100, 200, and 300 of the republic should be common, and that the fourth centurial year, namely, 400, should be sextile; and that this should be the case every fourth century until the 40th, which should terminate with a common year. The year was divided into twelve months of thirty days each, with five additional days at the end, which were celebrated as festivals, and which obtained the name of "Sansculottides." Instead of the months being divided into weeks, they consisted of three parts, called Decades, of ten days each. It is however to be observed that the French republicans rarely adopted the decades in dating their letters, or in conversation, but used the number of the day of each month of their kalendar. The republican kalendar was first used on the 26th of November, 1793, and was discontinued on the 31st of December, 1805, when the Gregorian was resumed. The decrees of the National Convention, which fixed the new mode of reckoning, were both vague and insufficient. A French work, Concordance des Calendriers Républicain et Grégorien," par L. Rondonneau, puts every day of every year opposite to its day of the Gregorian kalendar. It is to actual usage that we must appeal to know what the decrees do not prescribe-namely, the position of the leap-years. The following list, made from the work above mentioned, must be used as a correction of the usual accounts, in which the position of the leap-years is not sufficiently regarded. 280 NOTE ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY KALENDAR. When the Gregorian year is not leap-year, the beginnings of the months are as follows, according as the republican year begins on September 22, 23, or 24: But when the Gregorian year is leap-year the beginnings of the months are as follows, according as the republican year begins on September 22, 23, or 24: is Thermid. 15, 14, 13 begins Sept. For instance, what is 14 Floréal, An XII.? The republican year 24, 1803, so Floréal falls in 1804, which is Gregorian leap-year. Look at the third table, and when the year begins Sept. 24, the 1st of Floréal is April 21; consequently the 14th is May 4, 1804. Again, what is June 17, 1800, in the French kalendar? The year is not Gregorian leap-year; and An VIII. contains it, which begins Sept. 23. Look in the second table, and in such a year it appears that June 1 is the 12th of Prairial; therefore June 17 is Prairial 28. : |