the guillotine, itself a harrowing portrait of the former queen.
She's not the only one.
Leading Girondins, such as Brissot, people who have been expelled from the
Convention in the middle of 1793 are also put on trial, found guilty and executed.
Manon Roland, one of the key Girondin organizers similarly,
put on trial and found guilty of undermining the unity, the
purpose of the Republic by her incessant attacks on the
Jacobins who are passing the laws inside the National Convention.
Bailly is also put on trial and found guilty.
He's the man, you might remember, who had administered the oath
of the National Assembly at the Tennis Court in June 1789.
By now, he's regarded as a counter-revolutionary, one of the reasons
why Jacques-Louis David never completes that painting of the Tennis Court Oath.
Barnave, a prominent Revolutionary in the early years, who
in July of 1791, had called for the troops to
be sent to the Champ de Mars, where people are
signing a petition for the abdication of Louis the XVI.
Barnave is seen to be the person who has
blood on his hands over that episode, as well.
He too is tried and sent to the guillotine.
This is to be a regime which is uncompromising, therefore, in the
measures it takes to deal with the military crisis, the economic crisis, the
political crisis but also uncompromising in the way that it deals with those who
would overthrow the Revolution, who are effectively in league with the enemy.
It's a remarkable period, the second half of 1793, as some of the measures that are
being taken by the Committee of Public Safety
in the National Convention, start to bear fruit.
There are a series of very significant military
victories, across the last few months of 1793.
Up here, in the Northeast, the battle of
Wattignies effectively halts the advance of Austrian troops.
They're still on French soil but their advance has been halted.
Just as down in the South, The Battle of Peyrestortes,
near Perpignan, does the same with the advance of Spanish troops.
Over in the West of France, the great city of Nantes holds firm against
the great rural insurrection against the authority of the National Convention.
The onward march of Vendean rebels is checked
on the banks of the River Loire at Nantes.
Toulon, the great naval port on the Mediterranean, which had been surrendered
to Britain by its officers, mainly aristocrats, in August 1793,
is recaptured at the end of the year by the
French army, headed by a young artillery lieutenant named Napoleon Bonaparte.