Upon the destruction of the dictatorship of the committees, supreme power reverted to the Convention. That body, however, had as little coherence now as it had had in the first months of its existence. The restitution of its liberty split it into numerous sections. It was torn by violent party spirit, and had no determinate policy or aim, but drifted onwards, following not directing the course of events. All agreed in condemnation of Robespierre, but in that alone. The Montagnards were divided amongst themselves. Only a small minority was prepared to maintain in its entirety the Terror as a system of government--Billaud and Collot and their companions in office, who feared for their own lives. A few, such as Romme and Soubrany, resolutely opposed social and economical changes which would, in the end, lead to the return of the middle-class to power. Others again, as the financier Cambon and the Dantonist Thuriot, struggled to maintain the ascendancy of the Mountain over the Plain, but declared war on Billaud and Collot, who, following in the course of Hébert and Robespierre, sought, by aid of clubs and revolutionary committees, to tyrannise over the Mountain. The Thermidorians, so-called from the name of the revolutionary month in which the new revolution had been effected, Tallien, Fréron, and others of the men who had conspired to destroy Robespierre, took up a position between the Mountain and the Plain, and for the time possessed the leadership of the Convention; but they had no policy except that of yielding sufficiently to public opinion to maintain ascendancy, and at the same time of holding in check the reaction so as to prevent its reaching themselves. One after another demands made by the anti-Terrorist press and by gatherings in the Palais Royal were complied with. The Jacobin Club, the resort of Collot, Billaud, and their partisans, was closed (November 12). The Revolutionary Committees were reduced in number and shorn of their powers. Thousands of prisoners were released and their property restored to them. Throughout the country new men were placed in office, while members of revolutionary committees and other inferior tools of the Terror were imprisoned by hundreds. A trial going on before the Revolutionary Court at Paris revealed in all their horrible details the massacres committed at Nantes, and raised a cry for vengeance against Carrier. Abandoned by the Thermidorians and almost the entire Mountain, Carrier was sent before the court for trial, and thence in his turn to the scaffold (December). Billaud, Collot, and other marked Terrorists, already denounced in the Convention by Danton’s friends, felt that danger was every day drawing nearer to themselves. Their fate was to all appearance sealed by the readmission to the Convention (December 8) of seventy-three deputies of the right, imprisoned in 1793 for signing protests against the expulsion of the Girondists.