Thomas Shaw

“ Early in October the Convention brought forward its indictment of the twenty-two Girondists. They were sent for trial to the Revolutionary tribunal, before which they appeared on the 27th of October. The procedure was a travesty of justice. Early on the morning of the 31st of October 1793 the Girondists were conveyed to the scaffold, singing on the way the Marseillaise and keeping up the strain till one by one they were guillotined. Vergniaud was executed last. He died unconfessed, a philosopher and a patriot. ”

“ In language sometimes turgid, but nearly always of pure and powerful eloquence, he worked at the theme of the émigrés, as it developed into that of the counter-revolution; and in his occasional appearances in the tribune, as well as in the project of an address to the French people which he presented to the Assembly on the 27th of December 1791, he shook the heart of France, and, especially by his call to arms on the 18th of January, shaped the policy which culminated in the declaration of war against the king of Bohemia and Hungary on the 20th of April. ”

“ This weakness appears equally in his political and in his professional life: he would refuse practice if his purse were moderately well filled; he would sit for weeks in the Assembly in listlessness and silence, while the policy he had shaped was being gradually undermined, and then rise, brilliant as ever, but too late to avert the calamities which he foresaw. In 1789 Vergniaud was elected a member of the general council of the department of the Gironde. ”