Amid these surroundings stood, in the spring of 1793, the terrible and awe-inspiring figure of the French Revolution. The Corsican revolt against the Convention reflected but faintly the passions agitating that body itself, and which were rapidly dividing all France into hostile camps. The four months following the execution of the king were one long strife between the party of the Gironde and the Jacobins; but the revolutionary fury demanded an expression more vigorous and more concentrated than could be had from a contest of parties in a popular assembly. The Girondists, men of lofty sentiment rather than of energetic action, steadily lost ground in the capital and in the legislative body, though retaining the allegiance of the provinces, with which they were identified. Embittered words and feelings took material shape in acts as violent as themselves. On the 9th of March was decreed the Revolutionary Tribunal, the great instrument of the Terror, from whose decisions there was no appeal. On the 13th of the same month, La Vendée rose for its long and bloody struggle in the royal cause. On the 18th, the Army of the North, which only four weeks before had invaded Holland, was signally defeated at Neerwinden, and its general, Dumouriez, the victor of Valmy and Jemappes, the most successful leader the war had yet produced, was forced to retreat upon France. On the 30th, he evacuated the Austrian Netherlands, the prize of the last campaign, and his army took positions within the frontiers, upon which the enemy advanced. On the 1st of April, Dumouriez, long since violently dissatisfied with the course of the Convention, arrested the four commissioners and the minister of war that had been sent to his headquarters. The next day he delivered them to the Austrians; and on the 4th, finding that the blind attachment of his army could no longer be depended upon, he completed his treason by flying to the enemy.
While disorganization, treason, and fear were spreading throughout France, from the capital to the frontiers, and seemed about to culminate in universal anarchy, an important measure was adopted, destined eventually to restore discipline and order, though at the expense of much suffering. On the 6th of April the Committee of Public Safety was reconstituted. Composed previously of twenty-five members who met in open session, it was now reduced to nine, a more manageable body, who sat in secret. To it was given authority over the ministers, and it was empowered to take all measures necessary for the general defence. The republic was thus provided with an efficient, though despotic, executive power which it had before lacked. The creature of the Convention, it was destined soon to become its master; being, as a French historian has aptly termed it, "a dictatorship with nine heads."
Time was still needed for the new authority to make itself felt, and the strife between the parties waxed more and more bitter. On the 15th of April the city of Lyon demanded permission to investigate the conduct of the municipality appointed by the Jacobin commissioners. The request, being denied, became the signal for civil war. On the 26th of May the "sections" of the city rose against the mayor. At the same time the scenes in Paris and in the Convention were becoming more and more tumultuous, and on the 31st the sections of the capital also rose, but against the Girondists. After two days of strife in the streets and in the legislative halls, the Convention decreed the arrest, at their own houses, of thirty-two members of the party. Thus, on the 2d of June, 1793, fell the Girondists, but their fall was followed by the revolt of their partisans throughout France. Marseille, Toulon, Bordeaux and Lyon all declared against the Convention; and movements in the same direction were manifested in Normandy and Brittany. In the western provinces, however, the attempts at resistance were chilled among the republicans by the proximity of the royalist insurrection in La Vendée. They were forced to reflect that armed opposition to the Convention, even as mutilated by the events of June 2, was a virtual alliance with royalism. In Bordeaux, likewise, the movement, though prolonged for some weeks, did not take shape in vigorous action. Words, not arms, were the weapons used; and the Girondist representatives were forced to fly the very department from which they took their name.
In the east and south conditions were far more threatening. The rising of the sections in Lyon had been followed by fighting in the streets on the 29th of May, and the triumphant party, after the events of June 2, refused to acknowledge the Convention. The latter sought to gain over the city peaceably; but its overtures were rejected, a departmental army was formed, and the leading member of the Jacobin party formally tried and executed. The Lyonnese also stopped supplies being carried to the Army of the Alps. On the 12th of July a decree was issued to reduce the place by force. The troops of the Convention appeared before it in the latter part of the month; but resistance was firm and well organized, and the siege dragged, while at the same time the departments of the south in general rejected the authority of the central government. The two seaboard cities, Marseille and Toulon, entered into correspondence with Lord Hood, commanding the British fleet, who arrived off the coast of Provence in the middle of August, 1793. The party of the Convention, favored by that want of vigor which characterized most of the measures of their opponents, got possession of Marseille before the treason was consummated; but in Toulon, which had long suffered from the violence of a Jacobin municipality, the reaction swung to the opposite extreme. A movement, beginning in honest disgust with the proceedings in Paris and with the conduct of the dominant party in their own city, insensibly carried its promoters further than they had intended; until a point was reached from which, before the savage spirit of the capital, it became dangerous to recede. Long identified with the royal navy, as one of the chief arsenals of the kingdom, there could not but exist among a large class a feeling of loyalty to the monarchy. Submissive to the course of events so long as France had a show of government, now, in the dissolution of civil order, it seemed allowable to choose their own path.
With such dispositions, a decree of the Convention declaring the city outlawed enabled the royalists to guide the movement in the direction they desired. The leading naval officers do not appear to have co-operated willingly with the advances made to the British admiral; but for years they had seen their authority undermined by the course of the national legislature, and had become accustomed to yield to the popular control of the moment. The news of the approach of the Conventional army, accompanied by the rush into the place of terror-stricken fugitives from Marseille, precipitated Toulon into the arms of Great Britain. The sections declared that the city adopted the monarchical government as organized by the Constituent Assembly of 1789; proclaimed Louis XVII. king; ordered the disarmament of the French fleet in the port, and placed in the hands of the British admiral the works commanding the harbor. Lord Hood undertook that the forts and ships should be restored unharmed to France, when peace was made. On the 27th, the British and Spanish fleets anchored in the outer harbor of Toulon, and the city ran up the white flag of the Bourbons. There were in the port at the time of its delivery to the British admiral thirty ships-of-the-line of seventy-four guns and upward, being rather more than one third the line-of-battle force of the French navy. Of these, seventeen were in the outer harbor ready for sea. There were, besides, twenty-odd frigates or smaller vessels.
While one of the principal naval arsenals of France, and the only one she possessed on the Mediterranean, was thus passing into the hands of the enemy, disasters were accumulating on her eastern borders. On the 12th of July, the fortified town of Condé, on the Belgian frontier, surrendered. This was followed on the 28th by the capitulation of the first-class fortress of Valenciennes in the same locality, after six weeks of open trenches. These two prizes fell to the allied Austrians, British and Dutch, and their submission was followed by an advance of the combined armies and retreat of the French. Shortly before, on the 22d of July, Mayence, a position of the utmost importance on the Rhine, had yielded to the Prussians; and here also the enemy advanced into the Vosges mountains and toward the upper Rhine, the French receding gradually before them. The great inland city of Lyon was at the same time holding out against the central government with a firmness which as yet needed not the support of despair. In its resistance, and in the scarce smothered discontent of the southern provinces, lay the chief significance and utility of the British hold on Toulon. As a point upon which insurrection could repose, by which it could be supported from without, Toulon was invaluable; but with rebellion put down, surrounded by a hostile army and shut up to itself, the city would become a useless burden,