The result of the dictatorship of the committee and of Robespierre’s ascendancy was, therefore, that the Terror was reduced to a system. Those who hoped for a return to a more clement policy were grievously disappointed. The revolutionary army of Paris was disbanded. Special courts in the departments, with the exception of some twenty, were suppressed, and political prisoners sent to Paris for trial. Justice, probity, and virtue were declared to be the order of the day, and the penalties of imprisonment and death were suspended over the heads of those who defrauded the Republic. The bands of villains, which, under the name of revolutionary armies, were still the curse of several departments, were broken up and their leaders sent to the scaffold. Encouragement was promised to trade and agriculture, and the release ordered of artisans and labourers in country districts against whom no definite charges had been brought. The number of executions at Paris rose in proportion as it decreased in the departments, from 60 to 155, and then to 354 a month. In Bordeaux, Arras, and other towns where special courts were retained, executions were recommenced. A new court was established by the committee at Orange, which in forty-two sittings condemned to death 331 persons, imprisoned 98, and acquitted 159. Five Girondist outlaws still hiding in the Gironde were hunted out. Guadet and Barbaroux were executed at Bordeaux, the bodies of Pétion and Buzot were found dead in a field. ♦War in La Vendée.♦ In La Vendée a war of extermination was being carried on. After the destruction of the great Vendean army in December, the country was quiet through exhaustion, and by the adoption of a clement policy the insurrection might have been brought to an end. But at the Commune, where Hébert was still in power, the idea had been entertained of annihilating the inhabitants and of confiscating their land. Under the command-in-chief of Turreau, a man as brutal as Collot himself, twelve columns marched into the interior from different points, killing all living things that came in their way, and destroying villages, farms, crops, ovens, and corn-mills. Even towns which they did not occupy were pillaged and burnt, and those inhabitants who had throughout supported the Republic were required to quit the country on pain of being themselves treated as brigands. The war flared up again on all sides. The population of entire villages, taking their goods and stock with them, sought refuge in their forests, whence they carried on an incessant guerilla warfare against the enemy. The isolated republican posts were either stormed or starved out. If the soldiers had corn they had no means of grinding it, because all the mills had been destroyed. Supplies from Saumur and Nantes were cut off on the way. The men fell ill by thousands, and the reduction of the country appeared less near completion than when Turreau’s columns first began their work of destruction. ♦The Hague Treaty.♦