interesting paper, eloquent in expression and revealing in every line the pride and arrogance resulting from a newly acquired freedom, read in part as follows:

"We have revolutionized the government, the laws, the usages, manners, dress, commerce, and even thought itself. Let us also revolutionize the language which is the medium of our daily inter

course.

"The committee suggests as an urgent and a revolutionary measure that there should be sent into each designated commune an instructor in the French language, whose duty shall be to teach the youth of both sexes and to read at each decade to all the other citizens of the commune the laws, the decrees, and the instructions sent by the Convention. Rome instructed her youth in the reading of the laws of the Twelve Tables. France will teach her citizens the French language in the reading of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

'While foreign peoples everywhere on the globe study the French tongue, while our newspapers circulate in all regions, while the Journal Universal' and the Journal des Hommes Libres' are read in the homes of all nations from pole to pole, shall it be said that in France six hundred thousand Frenchmen are absolutely ignorant of the language of their native land and know neither the laws nor the purposes of the Revolution?

"Our enemies have made of the French tongue the polite language of the courts; they have de

based it. It is for us to make it the language of the people that it may be honored.

"It is a duty we owe to the republic to have the language in which is written the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the only language spoken in the territory of France."

This report of the Great Committee having been submitted to the Convention, it was decreed that an instructor of the French language should be named in each commune in the departments of Morbihan, of Finisterre, of the Cotes du Nord, and in the Lower Loire, where the inhabitants spoke an idiom called Bas Breton; also in the departments of the Upper and the Lower Rhine, in the department of Corsica, in the department of Moselle, in the department of the North, of Mont Terrible, of the Maritime Alps and of the Lower Pyrenees, in which the inhabitants spoke a foreign tongue.

The popular societies were urged to aid in the establishment of clubs for the oral translation of the decrees and of the laws of the republic, and in every way possible to multiply the means of making known the French language even in the most remote sections of the country.

The Committee of Public Safety was authorized to adopt every means that it believed necessary to carry this decree into effect.

The power of the Great Committee reached out in every direction; there was nothing too small for it to consider, nothing too great for it to attempt, and the whole country felt the force and influence of its authority.

CHAPTER XXI

EXECUTION OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

EXECUTION OF THE GIRONDINS

TRIAL AND EXECUTION

OF MADAME ROLAND.

In October, 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined; her death was a happy deliverance from her troubles and humiliations. No one can sound the depth of agony through which her soul had passed. Her beauty gone, grown old and gray before her time, almost blind, wan in feature and emaciated in figure, she sat in sackcloth and ashes and drank to the dregs the bitter cup of sorrow.

One who saw her in the last days of her imprisonment gives the following sad description of her appearance: "She was seated on a low stool mending a petticoat of coarse black serge. Her garments were ragged, her shoes were worn, across her breast was pinned a white kerchief. She stooped like an old woman, her face was deathly pale, and we could see that under her cap her hair was as white as snow."

By her extravagance and imprudent conduct she had centred upon herself the hatred of the people. All the mistakes that Louis had made were attributed to her councils. Barère, in his Memoirs, declares: "The sway she gained over

the king rendered her despotic and her influence in public affairs was fatal."

She paid, however, the full penalty for all her errors; her worst and most unforgiving enemy ought not to have wished it heavier, and when everything is taken into consideration, all her sins did not merit a punishment so severe. Even the austere St. Just, in commenting upon her, said: "She was deceived rather than deceiving, thoughtless rather than guilty; entirely devoted to pleasure, she seemed not to reign in France but at Trianon.”

On her way to the scaffold she was jeered and howled at by the women from the slums; old hags followed the cart and ridiculed her, but she was apparently oblivious to all insult and derision and went to execution with that composure that marks the conduct of one tired of life. To no person was death ever more welcome.

The Girondins soon followed in her wake. It was expected that they would make an eloquent and a heroic defence when arraigned at the bar of the Revolutionary Tribunal, for among them were some of the greatest orators and some of the ablest lawyers in France. It was thought that Vergniaud would thunder against his accusers, confound the witnesses, and with his overpowering eloquence perhaps move to mercy even the stony hearts of his inexorable judges. But from the very start the accused knew they were doomed, and they bowed their heads to the inevitable. The trial lasted for a week, the proceedings were noisy and tumultuous, and con

ducted without any regard for judicial decorum, dignity, or fairness.

Fouquier Tinville, the public prosecutor,1 disregarding every principle of decency and fair play, plagued the prisoners with insolent questions and irritated them beyond endurance by the introduction of false and irrelevant testimony. This creature who was dead to every sentiment of justice cannot better be described than by the words in which Macaulay pictured that brutal barrister of the Old Bailey, George Jeffreys, afterwards Lord Chancellor of England. Impudence and ferocity sat upon his brow, while all tenderness for the feelings of others, all self-respect, all sense of the becoming were obliterated from his mind. He had a forehead of brass and a tongue of venom."

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With a prejudicial court and a relentless prosecutor, the Girondins had no opportunity to set up a legal and an orderly defence. Immediately upon the rendition of the verdict, Valazé drew a dirk from his pocket and stabbed himself to the heart, falling dead in the midst of his companions. This act, however, did not cheat the guillotine of its victim, for the inexorable tribunal directed that the corpse should be decapitated; and, on the day set apart for the execution of the Girondins, the body was carried in a tumbril to the scaffold and beheaded. The Revolution like a vampire was sucking the blood even of the dead.

After the conviction of the Girondins, their 1 See "Danton and the French Revolution," p. 410.