Towards the middle of February it was the {228} Jacobins who appeared the more dangerous. In their irritation and fear of the collapse of the Republic they organized revolt. At Toulon, at Marseilles, they seized control, and were suppressed not without difficulty. The Convention thereupon ordered that the conduct of Billaud, Barere and Collot should be investigated. A few days later it recalled the members of the Gironde who had succeeded in escaping from the operations of the Revolutionary Tribunal, among them Louvet, Isnard, Lanjuinais. Alarmed at these steps, supported by the clamours of the starving for bread, the Paris Jacobins rose against the Convention. On the 1st of April,--the 12th of Germinal,--the assembly was invaded, and for four hours was in the hands of a mob shouting for bread and the Constitution. Then the national guard rallied, and restored order, and the Convention immediately decreed that Billaud, Barere and Collot should be deported to the colony of Guiana,--Guiana, the mitigated guillotine for nearly a century the vogue in French politics, the _guillotine seche_. Barere's sinister saying: "Only the dead never come back," was not justified in his case. He alone of the three succeeded in evading the decreed punishment and lived, always plausible and {229} always finding supporters, to the days of Louis Philippe, when he died obscurely. This was a great success for the moderates. But to observers of the Revolution from a distance, from London, Berlin or Vienna, the event appeared under a slightly different light. Pichegru happened to be in Paris at the moment, and Pichegru had been made military commander of the city. In reality he had little to do with suppressing the insurrection, but from a distance it appeared that the Republic had found in its democratic general, the conqueror of Holland, that solid support of force without which the establishment of law and order in France appeared impossible. A few days later the pacification began. At Basle Barthelemy had been negotiating for months past, and now, on the 5th of April, he signed a treaty with Hardenberg, the representative of Prussia. The government of King Frederick William was far too much interested in the third partition of Poland, then proceeding, far too little interested in the Rhineland, to maintain the war longer. It agreed to give the French Republic a free hand to the south of the Rhine in return for which it was to retain a free hand in northern Germany, an arrangement which was to underlie {230} many important phases of Franco-Prussian relations from that day until 1871.