You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [23]
Buttressed by fears of invasion from abroad as well as widespread corruption within France, Robespierre and his followers established the so-called Reign of Terror, during which they systematically set about purifying France of its enemies and those who weakened the public safety (this included anyone who did not embrace the Rousseauian philosophies as eloquently espoused by their oratorical leader). In no time at all former friends and associates found themselves marching to Madame Guillotine due to disagreements with the party will.
Robespierre ascended to the presidency of the Convention on June 4, 1794, and quickly engineered reforms to accelerate the system of justice he had put in place. Courts were replaced by tribunals, and the calling of witnesses on behalf of the accused was virtually eliminated. In roughly a month, about a thousand people were executed for various political crimes against the state, with nary a voice spoken in opposition to the silken tones of the bloodstained president.
The other members of the ruling convention began to fear the hold that this man had on the crowd and, further encouraged by French military victories abroad, which seemed to have eliminated the fear of invasion by the monarchies that controlled the rest of Europe, moved to have him overthrown.
By the end of July, Robespierre and some of his followers were arrested and held incommunicado while charged with tyranny under the same code of silence that had functioned during his Reign of Terror.
Robespierre was not worried. Barred from speaking in his own defense to the Convention, he would address his own power base — the mob in the streets.
Quickly he and the other prisoners engineered an escape with the help of soldiers loyal to the Commune of Paris rather than the Convention itself, and the group quickly retreated to the Hotel de Ville, where Robespierre made ready the speech with which he would once again woo the crowd to his will.
The officers of the Convention dispatched the National Guard to recapture this most dangerous of agitators and most gifted of orators as soon as possible. Robespierre was injured during the scuffle, though there is some debate over whether the gunshot that hit him was fired by accident by one of his supporters, by himself, or by the National Guardsmen.
The delay of preparation for his speech and the duress of their defense during the recapture had deprived the orator from having his say to the crowd, and the wound he sustained made any attempt to talk his way back into the favor of those really in control, the mob and military, impossible because the pistol round had shattered his jaw. The next day the gilded tongue was silenced forever as Robespierre and twenty-one of his followers made their acquaintance with Madame Guillotine without a single word spoken in their defense.
You Are Shocking
There are many stories of great minds believing pure hogwash. Physicists of great stature have believed in séances. It just goes to show that even the sharpest mind can have a few blunt edges.
DR. ELISHA PERKINS AND GALVANISM
EUROPE, 1796
Jody Lynn Nye
Most people of today are familiar with the scene made famous in the 1931 movie Frankenstein: a monster, assembled from the parts of corpses, animated by the application of lightning. Mary Shelley, the author of the 1818 novel and widely held to be the mother of science fiction, knew of experiments going on throughout Europe that made use of the discoveries of Luigi Galvani. As do modern science fiction writers, she took the basic concept and extrapolated upon it to suggest that with the aid of another scientist’s invention, Alessandro Volta’s “Voltaic pile,” or, as we know it today, the battery, one could revive dead tissue not only to move but to think. To the horror of many contemporary readers, Mary