All through September and a great part of October the Mountain held its ground, and prevented the reform of the government. Billaud, gaining courage, declared that the lion might slumber, but would rend his enemies on awaking. By the lion, he meant himself and his friends of Thermidor. The governing Committees were reconstructed on the principle of frequent change; the law of Prairial, which gave the right of arbitrary arrest and unconditional gaol delivery, was abrogated; and commissaries were sent out to teach the Provinces the example of Paris. Beyond these measures, the action of the State stood still. The fall of the men who reigned by terror produced, at first, no great political result. The process of change was set in motion by certain citizens of Nantes. Carrier had sent a batch of 132 of his prisoners to feed the Paris guillotine. Thirty-eight of them died of the hardships they endured. The remainder were still in prison in Thermidor; and they now petitioned to be put on their trial. The trial took place; and the evidence given was such as made a reaction inevitable. On September 14, the Nantais were acquitted. Then the necessary consequence followed. If the victims of Carrier were innocent, what was Carrier himself? His atrocities had been exposed, and, on November 12, the Convention resolved, by 498 to 2, that he should appear before the tribunal. For Carrier was a deputy, inviolable under common law. The trial was prolonged, for it was the trial not of a man, but of a system, of a whole class of men still in the enjoyment of immunity. Everything that could be brought to light gave strength to the Thermidorians against their enemies, and gave them the command of public opinion. On December 16 Carrier was guillotined, he had defended himself with spirit. The strength of his case was that his prosecutors were nearly as guilty as himself, and that they would all, successively, be struck down by the enemies of the Republic. He did his best to drag down the party with him. His associates, acquitted by the revolutionary tribunal on the plea that their delinquencies were not political, were then sent before the ordinary courts. On the day on which the convention resolved that the butcher of Nantes must stand his trial, they closed the Jacobin Club, and now the reaction was setting in.