Survival of the Revolution in France 463
The other “legions” and émigré groups, founded in 1792, were leading a troubled
existence. The United Belgians carried on in rooms supplied by the Paris Com-
mune. They feared infiltration by other Belgians who were really Austrian spies,
and indeed the émigré groups were natural places of concealment for the agents of
governments with which France was at war.
Among Belgians in Paris, the most notable was a man named Proly.^22 He was
supposed to be the cousin of Cloots and the illegitimate son of Prince Kaunitz by
a Belgian mother. Once rich, though no longer so in 1793, he had been active
among the Belgian Democrats of 1789. He had edited a paper called Le Cosmopo-
lite in Paris in 1792. He had served Dumouriez as a financial middleman in Bel-
gium in January 1793, and had something to do at that time with a bold scheme to
ruin the Bank of England, through counterfeit banknotes to be circulated through
Amsterdam Jews during the proposed invasion of Holland. It seems altogether
possible that, to protect Belgium from exploitation by the French, Proly had had
some share in Dumouriez’ secret plans for a separate Belgian republic. Proly was a
mysterious person, who in 1793 divided his time between the Stock Exchange and
the Commune. It is understandable that Robespierre should have suspected him,
however falsely, of being an Austrian spy.
Among other foreigners in the city was Thomas Paine, now under suspicion for
his English birth, his itinerant past, his world- revolutionism, and his friendship
with Brissotins now deceased. There was an innocuous Italian named Pio, who had
a job at the Foreign Office.^23 Considering how important the Italian revolutionar-
ies became in 1796, their absence from Paris in 1793–94 is remarkable.
Robespierre became convinced of the existence of a vast Foreign Conspiracy,
composed of all kinds of “ultras,” both of the popular and international kind,
preaching the révolution à outrance, insatiable activists, enemies of all government
and all religion, working in collusion with old Brissotins, “moderates” and ac-
complices of Dumouriez, reinforced by super- Terrorists who feared that the
Revolutionary Government would repudiate them, joined by grafters and com-
mon cheats who feared exposure, and driven frantically onward by the machina-
tions of true counter- revolutionaries, royalist agents, clandestine clergy, and for-
eign spies who wished to throw the Republic into chaos so that monarchy and
aristocracy could be restored.^24 There was no such “conspiracy.” It is true, however,
that men of the most varied stripe wished the destruction of the government. It
puts Robespierre’s “foreign conspiracy” in an intelligible light to observe that a
certain royalist spy in Paris, who had an unknown but profitable access to the
secrets of the Committee of Public Safety, came to much the same conclusion—
namely that “Hébertists,” foreigners, and spies were somehow involved with one
22 On ProIy see Tuetey, op.cit., Mathiez, “Vonck et Proli,” in Annales historiques de la Révolution
française, II (1925), 58–66; and the writings of Suzanne Tassier on Belgium, mentioned in the preced-
ing chapter.
23 Mathiez, “Le Chevalier Pio,” Annales révolutionnaires, XI (1919), 94–104.
24 “Rapport écrit de la main de Robespierre sur la faction de l’étranger” in Pièces trouvées dans les
papiers de Robespierre et complices: affaire Chabot, faction Proly (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, Brumaire
III), 90–99, which Mathiez seems to have accepted as genuine.