464 Chapter XIX
another to overthrow the ruling Committee—and so reported to Lord Grenville
in England.^25
The Committee of Public Safety struck at all its enemies together, “amalgamat-
ing” them, as it said in its instructions to the Revolutionary Tribunal. The ensuing
trials of Germinal (March 1794) marked a dramatic end to popular and interna-
tional revolutionism as they had taken form in the summer of 1792. They were
purely political trials, victories of one group of men over others, justified only by
emergency and the “public good,” and with no pretense that either the charges, the
evidence, the procedure, or the decisions would meet ordinary criteria of law.
The guillotining of Hébert, Momoro, and others, for whom the epithet
“Hébertist” was invented, coming after so much else in the way of political and ad-
ministrative subordination, reduced the spontaneous revolutionary enthusiasm of
the common people of Paris, who from now on, like ordinary people in most coun-
tries, either accepted the decisions of government, or became politically apathetic,
or, if rebellious, could hardly form more than small and sectarian movements.
Cloots and Paine were expelled from the Convention. Cloots was guillotined;
Paine sat for months in prison. Proly and some of his French associates, on the
charge of implication with Dumouriez’ defection, went to the guillotine. Kock
was arrested a week after signing the Batavian petition to the Committee of
Public Safety. He was guillotined as a friend of Hébert. Another signer, van
Hooff, was imprisoned but survived. The Batavian Revolutionary Committee and
the other émigré organizations disappeared. The Batavian, Belgian, Germanic,
and Allobrogian “legions” were dissolved. In the pursuit of foreigners three Irish-
born generals in the French army, Arthur Dillon, Thomas Ward, and James
O’Moran, went under the “popular axe.” The Prince of Hesse, another foreign
general in the French Revolutionary Army, went to prison. Various insignificant
foreigners were rounded up, like the Italian Pio, and a man named Dengs, whose
father was French Canadian.
It may be added, as a commentary on the use of such tactics in politics, that
Robespierre, when his turn came a few months later, was likewise charged with
implication in foreign conspiracy and world- revolutionism. The case concerned the
Englishman, Benjamin Vaughan. A member of Parliament, one of the Earl of
Lansdowne’s radical friends, Vaughan had defended France in the pages of the
Morning Chronicle. In 1794 the French sent William Jackson to Ireland on a secret
mission; the British discovered the plot, Wolfe Tone fled to America, and Benja-
min Vaughan to France. Robespierre protected Vaughan as he passed through
France in May. Vaughan then wrote to Robespierre from Geneva, urging that
France invite the revolutionaries of Belgium, Holland, and the German Rhineland
to form a great federation, with universal suffrage and a Congress, so that “nine
million men,” paying their own war costs, could ally with France against tyrants.
This letter reached Paris on 9 Thermidor, the day of Robespierre’s fall, and was
25 The reference is to the Dropmore Spy on whose “bulletins” much has recently been written. For
a résumé see Godechot, Contre- révolution, 186–190. For the bulletins themselves see Great Britain:
Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue Preserved at Dropmore (London,
1894), vols. II and III, and for the spy’s fantastic reports on “foreign conspiracy” see II, 548–63.