But the armies of Austria and Prussia continued their advance
and the panic changed into hysteria and turned men and
women into wild beasts. In the first week of September of
the year 1792, the crowd broke into the jails and murdered all
the prisoners. The government did not interfere. The Jacobins,
headed by Danton, knew that this crisis meant either the
success or the failure of the revolution, and that only the most
brutal audacity could save them. The Legislative Assembly
was closed and on the 21st of September of the year 1792, a
new National Convention came together. It was a body composed
almost entirely of extreme revolutionists. The king was
formally accused of high treason and was brought before the
Convention. He was found guilty and by a vote of 361 to 360
(the extra vote being that of his cousin the Duke of Orleans)
he was condemned to death. On the 21st of January of the
year 1793, he quietly and with much dignity suffered himself
to be taken to the scaffold. He had never understood what all
the shooting and the fuss had been about. And he had been too
proud to ask questions.
Then the Jacobins turned against the more moderate element
in the convention, the Girondists, called after their southern
district, the Gironde. A special revolutionary tribunal was
instituted and twenty-one of the leading Girondists were
condemned to death.
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