The Prussians captured Mainz on the 23rd of July, the Austrians Valenciennes on the 28th. These disasters enabled Robespierre and the Commune to impose their views as to the conduct of the military affairs of the Republic. Decrees were passed for purifying the army. The aristocrat generals, Beauharnais, Biron, Custine, were removed, and, eventually, were all sent to the scaffold. _Sans-culottes_, some honest, some capable, many dishonest, many {190} incapable, replaced them. Sans-culottism reigned supreme. Civic purity became the universal test; and on this shibboleth the Commune inaugurated a system of politics of which the Tammany organization in New York offers the most conspicuous example at the beginning of the 20th century. Hebert was the party boss; his nominees filled the offices; graft was placed on the order of the day. The ministry of war and its numerous contracts became the happy hunting ground of the Parisian politician,--Hebert himself, on one occasion, working off an edition of 600,000 copies of his _Pere Duchesne_ through that ministry. And lastly one must add that the army of the interior, the army facing the Vendee fell into the hands of the politicians. An incapable drunkard, Rossignol, was placed in command instead of Biron who, after two victories over the Vendeens, was dismissed, imprisoned and sent to the guillotine. It was perhaps necessary that a brave and dashing soldier of the old school like Biron should be removed from command, if the decrees of the Convention for prosecuting the war against the Vendee were to be carried out. One of those decrees ordered that "the forests shall be razed, the crops cut down, the cattle {191} seized. The Minister of War shall send combustible materials of all sorts to burn the woods, brush, and heath." That was the spirit now entering the Revolution, the fury of destruction, the dementia of suspicion, the reign of terror. The terrorists were of two sorts, the men of faction like Hebert; together with those who accepted terrorism reluctantly but daringly like Danton; with them terror was a political weapon. With Robespierre, however, and his Jacobin stalwarts, it was something more, a strangely compounded thing, a political weapon in a sense, but a weapon behind which stood a bigot, a fanatic, a temperament governed by jealous fears and by the morbid revengefulness of the man of feeble physique. It was Robespierre who always stood for the worst side of terrorism, for all that was most insidious and deep seated in it; and after its failure and the reaction in the summer of 1794, it was his name that was deservedly associated with the reign of terror.