Page:Voices of Revolt - Volume 1.djvu/36

 32 clared himself to be a "personal enemy of Jesus Christ," could do nothing else than throw the peasants into the camp of the counter-revolution. Maximilien said that any one attempting to use force in order to prevent religious worship was a more dangerous fanatic than the priest who carries out a ceremony. He was obliged to fight Hébert, and in those days a fight meant life or death. Hébert and his adherents went to the guillotine.

It had been declared that Sanson, the hangman, was a monarchist. No doubt he had beheaded Louis XVI, but it was only by way of a discharge of the duties of his office, and the chronicles of the times relate that the hangman on the Place de la Révolution went so far as to strike Hébert several times in the face before beheading him. Yet not only Sanson, but also the remaining Feuillants (monarchists), the Girondistes, the Dantonistes, and particularly Desmoulins, intoned songs of triumph when the cart bearing the ultra-revolutionaries was on its way to the guillotine. They recognized that the Hébertistes were revolutionaries and now began to turn their praises to Robespierre, believing that the Committee of Public Safety would now move more and more to the Right. Robespierre understood this and announced to the Dantonistes in several speeches that the necessity of the struggle against Hébert had been a measure of self-defense, and that the Republic would be able to defend itself