36 CARNOT. 



Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon, Billaud-Varennes, and 

 Collot d'Herbois, reserved to themselves politics, general 

 police, and measures of security. In each species of 

 subject one signature alone was important, and .carried 

 responsibility ; the others, though requii^ed by law, were 

 to be regarded as the accomplishment of a simple for- 

 mality : it was evident, indeed, that they would have to 

 be given without discussion and even without examina- 

 tion. 



Such were. Gentlemen, the bases of the agreement 

 which Robert Lindet, for his personal security, caused 

 to be put down in a written declaration, and by the aid 

 of which the members of the Committee of Public Safety 

 expected to be able, without passing beyond the terms of 

 their mandate, to exorcise the storms which were menac- 

 ing the country from all sides. This confiding arrange- 

 ment will doubtless be blamed : some will cry out at its 

 illegality, others at its imprudence. I will remind the 

 first, that the members of the Committee, entangled in a 

 faulty organization, were every day at issue with an im- 

 possibility, and that the w^ord impossible is French, what- 

 ever national amour propre may have said of it at a 

 period when the admirable triumphs of our armies seemed 

 to warrant all hyperbolic speeches. The reproach of im- 

 prudence I admit without reserve. I add that, on the 

 part of Carnot, this imprudence was voluntary ; that in 

 resigning himself to signing, without examination, the 

 decisions of all his colleagues, he wittingly made the 

 greatest of all sacrifices to France ; that he placed his 

 honour in the hands of several of his declared enemies ; 

 that, counting eventually on the tardy justice of posterity, 

 he hoisted that almost superhuman motto of one of the 

 most powerful organizations which the Revolution brought 



