Yes, I think if you ever want to give schoolkids or students a masterclass in the unreliability of 'witness accounts', give them the mass of 'accounts ' of 8/9/10 Thermidor to sift some truth out of! It's 'Rashomon' stuff! I get the sense that in the hysteria the plotters were simply were thinking one step at a time, and the events - the opportunity to declare them outlaws and Robespierre being silenced but alive - just extraordinarily lucky for them. I keep reading accounts saying that animosity was caused by the various Revolutionary bodies being filled by Robespierre's supporters, but if that was really the case - and the accounts are obviously post-Thermidor - it would have been madness to try to get Robespierre held and convicted by them. At the same time, Elisabeth LeBas says her husband was considering suicide a few days prior to the 9th (how many days isn't clear from her account) so maybe their group position was a lot weaker even before the speech of the 8th than other accounts suggest?
Robespierre's injuries vary according to the animosity of the teller, it seems - I've read one where his jaw's hanging off by a few ligaments! Ditto, in some he's guillotined quickly, but in one account (a footnote in Thiers, I think) his bandages are removed so the executioner can show him to the crowd for a while - look, it's really him - not simply to provide a clean cut. I think there's a nerve in the lower jaw that if severed causes paralysis (at any rate, I had to sign a document on this when I had a jaw operation when I was a teenager - and my god there was a lot of blood, too!) so the account of him thanking the person who gives him some paper is an odd one - it's not hostile, unless his saying 'monsieur' is implying he's dodgy - though I've read other non-hostile accounts of him saying he carried on using 'monsieur' and 'vous' in speech, so...later on, he indicated he wanted pen and paper, though his head was bound up by then so even if he was capable of speech at this point he presumably couldn't because of the bandages.
Yes, I love speculating on that - I suppose by that point all the Robespierristes would have been doomed, as Elisabeth LeBas' suicide story suggests: Mathiez records regional Jacobins killing themselves in sorrow when the news reached them. I wonder what would have happened if Robespierre had been assassinated in the street beforehand? Would the left have survived, and Saint-Just etc. been able to stay in the CPS? Or if - as Napoleon commented later, he had been in Paris, as he had had the option of being, on the 9th? His political allegiances seem pretty flexible, but the comment suggests he'd have fought with the Robespierristes at that point (with what result? destruction of the Convention, chaos in Paris, civil war, and the foreign powers moving in to take advantage, I suppose?)
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Robespierre's injuries vary according to the animosity of the teller, it seems - I've read one where his jaw's hanging off by a few ligaments! Ditto, in some he's guillotined quickly, but in one account (a footnote in Thiers, I think) his bandages are removed so the executioner can show him to the crowd for a while - look, it's really him - not simply to provide a clean cut. I think there's a nerve in the lower jaw that if severed causes paralysis (at any rate, I had to sign a document on this when I had a jaw operation when I was a teenager - and my god there was a lot of blood, too!) so the account of him thanking the person who gives him some paper is an odd one - it's not hostile, unless his saying 'monsieur' is implying he's dodgy - though I've read other non-hostile accounts of him saying he carried on using 'monsieur' and 'vous' in speech, so...later on, he indicated he wanted pen and paper, though his head was bound up by then so even if he was capable of speech at this point he presumably couldn't because of the bandages.
Yes, I love speculating on that - I suppose by that point all the Robespierristes would have been doomed, as Elisabeth LeBas' suicide story suggests: Mathiez records regional Jacobins killing themselves in sorrow when the news reached them. I wonder what would have happened if Robespierre had been assassinated in the street beforehand? Would the left have survived, and Saint-Just etc. been able to stay in the CPS? Or if - as Napoleon commented later, he had been in Paris, as he had had the option of being, on the 9th? His political allegiances seem pretty flexible, but the comment suggests he'd have fought with the Robespierristes at that point (with what result? destruction of the Convention, chaos in Paris, civil war, and the foreign powers moving in to take advantage, I suppose?)