His arrest was proposed, immediately seconded and voted without a dissentient voice. His brother, Augustin, a handsome, pleasure-loving man whose tastes and temperament were so unlike his, courageously insisted on being arrested too. So did the Duplays’ son-in-law, Philippe Lebas, when the Convention also decreed the arrest of his friend, Saint-Just, and that of Couthon. An usher, too frightened to hand the decree directly to Robespierre, placed it on the seat next to him. Robespierre ignored it. Eventually he and Saint-Just were escorted from the Convention by a party of gendarmes, one of whom carried the crippled Couthon on his shoulders.
As the prisoners were being marched away to the offices of the Committee of General Security a meeting of the Commune was urgently called at the Hôtel de Ville. It was agreed at this meeting that the Commune should declare itself in a state of revolt against both Committees and the Convention in protest against the arrest of the Robespierrists, and orders were issued calling upon the National Guard to muster on the Place de Grève. Less than half the Guard obeyed the summons. And when Hanriot, their commander, followed by a few of his men, drunkenly rode his horse through the streets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, brandishing a sword and calling out ‘To arms! To arms!’, his pleas were ignored. A man out walking with his wife heard Hanriot’s loud, slurred shouts: ‘Today must be another 31 May. Three hundred bastards sitting in the Convention must be exterminated!’ ‘You aren’t a general anymore, Hanriot,’ the man called back. ‘You’re a brigand. Don’t listen to him. He’s under arrest.’
At this moment [recorded Charles-André Merda, one of Hanriot’s men] the General’s aide-de-camp struck the citizen a blow with his sabre, ordering him to be taken to the guard-room of the Commune. And we pursued our course at the gallop [to the Committee of General Security]…knocking down a lot of citizens with our horses…and spreading terror around us…Hanriot rode into the courtyard and, dismounting with his aides-de-camp, advanced towards the offices. The guards refused to let us in; and so he marched up to us in a fury, shouting ‘Dismount! Come on! Help me release the patriots from these fucking bastards.’…Six or seven of us followed the General. The guards crossed their bayonets in front of us; and a fight was on the point of breaking out when an usher from the Convention threw himself in front of us and said, ‘Stop! He’s no longer your General. He’s under arrest. Here is the law. Obey it.’ These words brought Hanriot to a halt.
To thwart any further attempts to rescue the prisoners they were now sent to separate prisons in different parts of Paris, Robespierre to the Luxembourg. But the gate-keeper there, in obedience to an order from the Commune, refused to admit him, and he sought refuge instead at the Mairie on the Quai des Orfèvres; but, at the insistence of his former henchman, Jean-Baptiste Lescot-Fleuriot, the Mayor, who did not want the responsibility of dealing with the situation himself, he was taken instead to the Hôtel de Ville. By now all was confusion. No one was sure who was in authority, who were considered traitors, who patriots. Robespierre’s colleagues who had been taken to prison were released by order of the Commune and taken to Robespierre at the Hôtel de Ville. From there Robespierre himself, apparently confident that the Convention’s vote against him would be reversed and that he would soon be called upon once more to guide the Revolution, sent a series of notes to the Commune urging them to close ‘the city gates, to shut down all newspapers, to order the arrest of all journalists and traitorous deputies’. Couthon, carried to the Hôtel from the Port-Libre, advised an appeal to the army. Saint-Just spoke of a new dictatorship. Lescot-Fleuriot, exasperated by Robespierre’s ‘splitting hairs at such a time about small details of phraseology’, boldly wrote out and signed a decree, outlawing Collot d’Herbois, Carnot, Fréron, Tallien, Fouché and other ‘enemies of the people’, which Robespierre could not bring himself to promulgate.
Meanwhile Hanriot and his men surrounded the Convention where Collot d’Herbois cried out dramatically, ‘This is the time to die at our posts!’ But Hanriot, unsure of his authority and too drunk to concentrate, refused to enter the building without specific orders and so the opportunity to occupy it was lost. Inside the hall arguments raged as to the best course to adopt Fréron advised conferring the military command upon Barras who would be able to muster almost as many men from sections loyal to the Convention as Hanriot could from those supporting the Commune. Barras accepted the command and proposed to defend the Tuileries against possible assault. Billaud-Varenne argued that it was a time for attack not defence: the Convention’s forces should advance upon the Hôtel de Ville and bring out Robespierre and his friends by force. ‘The Hôtel de Ville must be surrounded at once,’ he urged. ‘We can’t give Robespierre and the Commune an opportunity to murder us all.’
This suggestion was finally adopted in the early hours of the following morning. Two columns accordingly marched towards the Place de Grève, one of them led by Barras, the other by Léonard Bourdon, a leading Montagnard deputy and former Hébertist Bourdon’s column arrived first at the Place de Grève which they found deserted: Hanriot’s men, having grown tired of waiting about in the now pouring rain and discouraged by reports that most sections had declared their support of the Convention, had gone home to bed.
Charles-André Merda, according to his own vainglorious account which has been largely discredited but not entirely disproved, was one of the first to enter the building:
The staircase was filled with supporters of the conspirators. We could hardly get by, marching three abreast. I was very excited…The conspirators were in the secretariat to which all the approaches were closed. I got into the council chamber on the pretext that I was an orderly with secret despatches. I then took the passage to the left…and reached the door of the secretariat…Eventually the door was opened. I saw about fifty people inside in a state of great excitement…I recognized Robespierre in the middle. He was sitting in an armchair with his left elbow on his knee and his head supported by his left hand. I leapt at him pointing my sword at his heart and crying, ‘Surrender, you traitor!’ He raised his head and replied, ‘It is you who are the traitor. I shall have you shot’ At these words I reached for one of my pistols…and fired. I meant to shoot him in the chest but the ball struck his chin and smashed his lower jaw. He fell out of his chair.
Robespierre had at last made up his mind to sign an appeal to arms. The pen had been in his hand. He had inscribed the first two letters of his name, Ro——-, but there the writing stops. The bottom of the document is marked with blood.
Augustin Robespierre tried to escape by jumping out of a window, but he slipped and broke a leg. Couthon, helped to the top of a flight of stairs, fell to the bottom of them and cut open his forehead. Hanriot was hurled out of a window by Pierre Coffinhal, the immensely strong Vice-President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who was enraged by the so-called General’s incompetence; he fell on a dunghill from which he escaped to a builder’s yard thence to a sewer where ‘he was discovered by some soldiers who struck him with their bayonets and thrust out one of his eyes which then hung by the ligaments down his cheek’. Philippe Lebas shot himself. Saint-Just fingered a pistol as though toying with the idea of suicide himself but in the end he did not use it and quietly submitted to the gendarmes who escorted him with the other prisoners to the Convention. ‘The coward Robespierre is outside,’ Barras announced to the deputies. ‘Do you wish him to enter?’ ‘To bring a man covered with crime into our hall would be to diminish the glory of this great day,’ was the response. ‘The body of a tyrant can only bring contagion with it. The proper place for Robespierre and his accomplices is the Place de la Révolution.’