ABSTRACT
Early in the morning of 14 November 1793, Maximilien Robespierre was woken from his sleep by his colleague in the national convention, the former Capuchin monk François Chabot, with an extraordinary tale about a vast financial and political conspiracy to destroy the revolutionary government. Chabot's motives, of course, were neither so pure nor so simple. This 'foreign plot' conjured up by Chabot and Fabre, English or Austrian or both, may seem absurdly fanciful today. Yet its importance for the French Revolution was huge. Even today, much about the foreign plot remains mysterious. As with most conspiracies, the remaining evidence is inconclusive and fragmentary. Chabot's chief role in the fraud was to bribe the one hostile member of the commission charged with drawing up the decree, Fabre d'Eglantine, not to oppose the plot, and in this he succeeded; Fabre's signature appears along with all the others at the foot of the page.
