When the tribunal pronounced the sentence of death, Valazé collapsed. At the gates of the Conciergerie, he had slipped a pair of scissors to his friend Riouffe, jesting over the prohibition against taking one's own life; he had then dealt himself a mortal blow. The gendarmes hauled him to his feet. The tribunal ordered that his corpse should follow the others upon the tumbril. As they filed out, the Girondins struck up the hymn of the Marseillais in unison.
They were one-and-twenty to stand before the bar. Brissot, Vergniaud, Gensonné, Valazé, Ducos, Fonfrède, and their companions stood accused of conspiracy and of fomenting civil war. Champagnac portrays them as adversaries of the insurrection of the tenth of August and of the September massacres; he denounces the evidence and the witnesses as fabricated. Such is the chronicler’s own judgment. What he proceeds to relate is a trial whose outcome, by his account, had already been sealed.
The Convention had placed several deputies under arrest following the political clashes of the spring and summer. The Girondins most deeply implicated in the provincial uprisings had eluded capture; vengeance was thereupon wreaked upon their friends and those who harbored their convictions. The collective trial opened in the autumn. At the Conciergerie, the prisoners were searched before each sitting. Every implement with which they might make an attempt upon their lives was confiscated. It was there that Valazé had passed his scissors to Riouffe, beneath the very eyes of the gendarmes, as if to mock their vigilance.
The chronicle depicts, moreover, a court wherein the very identity of the accused afforded no man protection. A bailiff is said to have warned Fouquier-Tinville that one Gamache had been brought forth in the stead of another. The public prosecutor reportedly retorted that the blunder mattered little, and that this fellow was as good as the other. A widow Maillet appeared in the place of the Duchess of Maillé; when Fouquier perceived the mistake, he is alleged to have told her that they had not intended to try her, yet she might just as well pass through that day. Champagnac adduces these scenes as illustrative of the workings of the Revolutionary Tribunal. For the Girondins, the charge of conspiracy was superadded to a procedure whose verdicts the author describes as predetermined.
On the eve of the sentence, several of the accused harbored no further illusions as to their fate. They repaired to the final sitting of the court with countenances described by Champagnac as serene. Vergniaud had vehemently protested against being confounded with the pillagers and assassins of the September days. Fonfrède had pleaded for his friends; in the chronicler’s eyes, he had thereby earned the right to share their doom. The two young men deemed least compromised, Ducos and Fonfrède, were condemned alongside the rest.
On the thirtieth of October, 1793, the verdict fell. Brissot let his arms drop and bowed his head. Gensonné sought to speak on the application of the law, but his voice was drowned out. Sillery, crippled by palsy, let fall his crutches and cried aloud that this was the fairest day of his life. Fonfrède embraced Ducos, lamenting that it was he who brought about his death. Ducos answered that they would die together. Lasource hurled a prophecy at the crowd: he was dying on the day the people had lost their reason; his judges would die on the day they recovered it.
All protested their innocence, crying out that the populace was being deceived. A few cast assignats toward the spectators, in the desperate hope of inciting them to their rescue. The attempt proved futile. The gendarmes hemmed them in and led them back to their cells. Valazé had just stabbed himself to the heart with a concealed poniard; the tribunal commanded that his corpse be laid upon the cart, in the train of the condemned.
Their final night was passed amid songs and colloquies. Champagnac here adopts the account of an earlier historian: Vergniaud is said to have cast away the poison he had kept, choosing rather to die with his companions. The prisoners shared a final repast. They were by turns grave and playful; Vergniaud spoke of liberty and human destiny, while Ducos recited verses composed within his cell. Together they sang hymns to France and to freedom. On the morrow, the thirty-first of October, crowds lined their route. They struck up the Marseillaise once more within the cart, and upon reaching the Place de la Révolution, embraced one another, crying, "Long live the Republic!"
Sillery mounted the scaffold first. The others followed. In the space of some thirty minutes, the twenty men were dispatched. Champagnac’s narrative then turns to other victims and other scenes, yet pursues the selfsame thread: an engine of political prosecution that transformed speech, fellowship, and even silence into tokens of guilt.
On the tenth of November, Madame Roland was conducted to the scaffold. She had been condemned for her intimacy with the Girondins. Champagnac observes that she left behind a young daughter, whilst her husband lay concealed near Rouen. He relates the testimony of a woman who, upon the road to execution, sustained the flagging spirits of a weaker companion. Champagnac records that, having arrived before the statue of Liberty, she bowed her head and uttered the words attributed to her: "O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" Thereupon she mounted the scaffold. Her husband, learning of her demise, took his own life upon the highway, beside the tree against which he had braced the pommel of his sword.
Two days later, Bailly, formerly Mayor of Paris, was executed in his turn. His conduct during the fusillade on the Champ-de-Mars, when he had caused martial law to be proclaimed, had been converted into the pretext for his condemnation. The authorities sought to conduct him to the Champ-de-Mars, but the populace clamored against it. The guillotine was dismantled and dragged to the banks of the Seine. The red flag, once unfurled at the Hôtel de Ville, was waved before his face. The old man was compelled to traverse the Champ-de-Mars repeatedly, then to trail the scaffold’s relocation toward the quarter of Chaillot. For hours on end, he was forced to march through the rain and the biting cold, pelted with mud and buffeted with blows. According to Thiers’s narrative, cited by Champagnac, a soldier remarked that he was trembling. "My friend," replied the old man, "it is from the cold." He perished far from the spot where his execution had been decreed.
Champagnac’s gaze does not rest solely upon the Girondins, Madame Roland, and Bailly. He recalls the successive waves of convictions that followed, notably that of Malesherbes, the defender of Louis XVI, led to the block alongside his kin. He relates likewise the tale of the elder Loizerolles, who answered to his son’s name when it was called, and died in his stead. These annals, like those of Chénier and Roucher upon the tumbril, lay bare the diversity of destinies swallowed up by the tribunal: deputies, witnesses, women, old men, and whole households together.
The chieftains of the Terror finished in their turn upon the scaffold, as the chronicle does not fail to observe. The men who had instituted political terror were purged by those who had shared their power, once their pacts fell asunder. Yet the trial of the Girondins retains a singular place in this record: the charge of conspiracy struck down an entire political opposition, and the one-and-twenty accused rode out toward death without a single verdict cleaving their fates apart. Valazé, who had yielded his scissors to his friend, did not escape his sentence. Madame Roland bequeathed her lamentation to Liberty; Bailly, shuddering beneath the gale, offered another to account for his tremors. In both instances, their words outlived the judgment fashioned to reduce them to silence.