ABSTRACT
D U R I N G the six weeks that followed the inconclusive journees of 31st May-2nd June life continued very much as before. In the Convention, Ducos and Boyer-Fonfr£de courageously kept up the fight in the name of their arrested Girondin colleagues. On 6th June seventy-five deputies signed a protest against the purge of the Assembly. With a good deal of sympathy from the Centre, or Maraist the remaining Girondins campaigned for the recall of the arrested deputies and debates were at times as noisily inconclusive as in previous months. The Committee of Public Safety, preoccupied with justifying the recent journees to the nation as a whole, and genuinely anxious for compromise, was more suspicious of the Commune than of the defeated Girondins. Bar&re's report on the recent insurrection, read on 6th June and mainly directed against the Commune, concluded with a demand for the dismissal of Hanriot and all comites revolutionnaires, and for an end to the Commune's censorship of newspapers and letters. Even Saint-Just, as uncompromising a Montagnard as any, when he presented to the Assembly on 8 th July the proposals of the Committee for dealing with the
Girondins, appealed for unity and reconciliation: 'Proscribe those who have fled from us to take up arms . . . not for what they have said but for what they have done. Judge the rest and pardon the majority. Mistakes must not be confused with crimes and you have no wish to be severe. The time has come at last when the people may hope for happiness, when liberty is no longer a matter of party faction. No, you have not come here to disturb the land but to comfort it after the long misery of its enslavement. Let us restore domestic peace. . . .' Montagnards such as Chabot and Billaud-Varenne who demanded a combination of violence and social levelling-the arrest of suspects, progressive taxation of the rich and the creation of a well-paid sans-culotte militia-were isolated and without much influence. The majority hoped that the new constitution, drafted in great haste and voted on 24th June, would reunite the various revolutionary factions and win back all but the most irreconcilable Girondins.
