Henriot out of the window into a cesspool below where
he wallowed all night, while Le Bas blew out his brains.
The next day they brought Robespierre to the Convention,
but the Convention refused to receive him. They
threw him on a table, where he lay, horrible to be
seen, his coat torn down the back, his stockings falling
over his heels, his shirt open and soaking with blood,
speechless, for his mouth was filled with splinters
of his broken jaw. Such was the man who the morning
before had been Dictator, and master of all the armies
of France. Couthon was in little better plight.
Twenty-one in all were condemned on the 10 Thermidor
and taken in carts to the guillotine. An awful
spectacle. There was Robespierre with his disfigured
face, half dead, and Fleuriot, and Saint-Just, and
Henriot next to Robespierre, his forehead gashed,
his right eye hanging down his cheek, dripping with
blood, and drenched with the filth of the sewer in
which he had passed the night. Under their feet
lay the cripple Couthon, who had been thrown in like
a sack. Couthon was paralyzed, and he howled in
agony as they wrenched him straight to fasten him
to the guillotine. It took a quarter of an hour
to finish with him, while the crowd exulted. A
hundred thousand people saw the procession and not
a voice or a hand was raised in protest. The
whole world agreed that the Terror should end.
But the oldest of those who suffered on the 10 Thermidor
was Couthon, who was thirty-eight, Robespierre was
thirty-five, and Saint-Just but twenty-seven.
So closed the Terror with the strain which produced
it. It will remain a by-word for all time, and
yet, appalling as it may have been, it was the legitimate
and the logical result of the opposition made by caste
to the advent of equality before the law. Also,
the political courts served their purpose. They
killed out the archaic mind in France, a mind too
rigid to adapt itself to a changing environment.
Thereafter no organized opposition could ever be maintained
against the new social equilibrium. Modern France
went on steadily to a readjustment, on the basis of
unification, simplification of administration, and
equality before the law, first under the Directory,
then under the Consulate, and finally under the Empire.
With the Empire the Civil Code was completed, which
I take to be the greatest effort at codification of
modern times. Certainly it has endured until
now. Governments have changed. The Empire
has yielded to the Monarchy, the Monarchy to the Republic,
the Republic to the Empire again, and that once more
to the Republic, but the Code which embodies the principle
of equality before the law has remained. Fundamentally
the social equilibrium has been stable. And a
chief reason of this stability has been the organization
of the courts upon rational and conservative principles.
During the Terror France had her fill of political
tribunals. Since the Terror French judges, under
every government, have shunned politics and have devoted
themselves to construing impartially the Code.
Therefore all parties, and all ranks, and all conditions
of men have sustained the courts. In France, as
in England, there is no class jealousy touching the
control of the judiciary.
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