Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/364

 352 THE EUROPEAN CONVULSION guillotine. The peasants of La Vendee revolted, in the cause of Church and king. Marat, the most bloodthirsty of the 'Mountain,' was assassinated by Charlotte Corday. ' The Royalists at Toulon held the citadel and port under the pro- tection of the guns of a British fleet. But the Jacobins held the government at Paris ; the administration was entirely con- trolled by a small body called the Committee of Public Safety, on which were conferred powers more absolute than those of any dictator. Their commissioners in every district and in every camp ruled despotically ; men and women were flung into prison in thousands as ' suspects,' and murdered in hundreds by their tribunals as aristocrats. At one stage Paris provided some fifty daily victims to the guillotine for several weeks. Appalling profanities and obscenities were perpetrated in the name of the 1 Goddess of Reason ' till even Paris sickened ; and Robespierre turned on the most disgusting of his allies, only to follow up their destruction by that of Danton who had become the chief of the moderate party now called the Indulgents. But the terror had reached a pitch at which no man felt his head secure. Fall of Indulgents and Terrorists united to overthrow Robespierre, Robespierre, who followed his own victims to the 1794 - guillotine, just eighteen months after Louis had been slain. The country was sated with the horrors on which it had supped so long, and the Thermidorean reaction (so called from the name of the month 'Thermidor' in which it took place, the republic having reconstructed the calendar) brought in an administration which put an end to the Reign of Terror. Meanwhile the allies had been conducting the war without energy; the Rhine provinces and Belgium were practically in Military the hands of the French, who owed the recovery Successes. f Toulon also to the skill of the young artillery officer Napoleon Buonaparte. Their troops crossed the Pyrenees and invaded Spain. The one notable success of the allies was in a sea-fight off Ushant, won on June ist (1794) by Lord Howe. In the winter the French overran Holland, which shortly transformed itself into the Batavian Republic; the Stadtholder William of Orange fled to England, to which