Robespierre and Miraheau at the Jacobins 19 



incident is incomprehensible when viewed merely as an attempt 

 on the part of Miraheau to restrain a violent orator. There is 

 no evidence even that Robespierre was anything more than radical 

 in his logic and not at all incendiary in the ordinary manner of 

 the street agitator. He was reading from his manuscript and 

 therefore not giving way under the applause of his auditors. Are 

 we, then, to believe that Miraheau, supposed by his most intimate 

 friend La Marck to be so solicitous about his popularity that he 

 would scarcely risk it for the most important objects, interfered 

 in this instance merely to protect a Jacobin rule of conduct which 

 was in reality no longer being observed and which he himself had 

 upon a previous occasion helped to infringe? Not only this; by 

 his intervention he indirectly sustained his enemy Lafayette who 

 was directly menaced. Stranger still, Charles Lameth, an enemy 

 of both Lafayette and Mirabeau, came to the rescue of the latter 

 at the imminent peril of involving himself in the catastrophe 

 which threatened to overwhelm the president. It is necessary to 

 assume, on the contrary, that not only Mirabeau, but the rela- 

 tively conservative party of the Lameths as well, saw in the 

 endeavor of Robespierre the near approach of a new revolution 

 which would have swept the middle class out of control and with 

 it the new constitution. As if a premonition, an apparition of the 

 Terror had come to frighten them, they forgot all the everyday 

 animosities and ordinary considerations of individual advantage 

 and hazarded everything in order to stifle the danger in its 

 incipiency. 



361 



