on the 25th February 1793 he was decreed accused on account of some passages in his journal approving of the bread riots which had taken place, and suggesting the hanging of a forestaller or two. On the other hand, on the 10th March the section Bonconseil demanded the arrest of the prominent Girondins. Meantime, Danton had been trying all along to keep the peace between the two parties, but on 1st April the Girondins accused him of complicity with Dumouriez, 153 who had now fled over the frontier, and so forced him into becoming one of their most energetic enemies. The position of the Girondins was now desperate. On the 24th March Marat was acquitted and brought back in triumph to the Convention.
The Girondins got a packed committee of twelve appointed in the interest of the Convention as against the Paris sections. As an answer to this a central committee of the sections was formed, which on 31st May dominated the Municipality (not loth to be so dealt with) and surrounded the Convention with troops. After an attempt on the part of the Girondins to assert their freedom of action, the Convention decreed them accused, and they were put under arrest. They died afterwards, some by the guillotine, some even more miserably, within a few months; but their party is at an end from this date. All that happened in the Convention from this time to the fall of Robespierre in “Thermidor” was the work of a few revolutionists, each trying to keep level with the proletarian instinct, and each 154 falling in turn. They had not the key to the great secret; they were still bourgeois, and still supposed that there must necessarily be a propertiless proletariat led by bourgeois, or at least served by them; they had not conceived the idea of the extinction of classes, and the organisation of the people itself for its own ends.
Marat’s death at the hand of Charlotte Corday, on 14th July, removed the only real rival to Robespierre, and the only man who could have modified the extravagance of the Terror.