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Robespierre with the handkerchief at his mouth. The next day a torn bandage would make the same gesture involuntary.

In the summer of 1794 the Terror had reached the stage of eating on momentum: the law of 22 Prairial had stripped trials down to accusation and sentence, the guillotine was clearing its 1,400 in six weeks in Paris alone, and the machine's manager, Maximilien Robespierre, rose in the Convention on 26 July to announce that a new list of traitors existed, in his pocket so to speak, names withheld for now. It was the one speech he could not afford. Every deputy with a conscience, a bribe, or a nervous disposition, which among them covered everyone, spent the night concluding that the list contained himself, and men who are all on the same list stop being afraid of one another. The next day, 9 Thermidor by the Republic's own calendar, Saint-Just got three sentences into the defense before the interruptions began, staged and then real. Tallien waved an actual dagger; the hall chanted down the tyrant; and Robespierre, the most listened-to voice of the Revolution, stood at the tribune opening and closing his mouth against a wall of orchestrated noise. When he finally forced a sound out, it cracked, and a deputy supplied the epitaph from the benches: the blood of Danton chokes you. The arrest decree passed at a run, brothers and lieutenants included. The night turned it from parliament to street theater: the Paris Commune freed the prisoners and gathered them at the Hôtel de Ville; the Convention declared them outlaws, dead men legally; and toward two in the morning troops took the building, where a gendarme's pistol shot, or his own, shattered Robespierre's jaw mid-proclamation. He spent his last hours on a table in the Committee of Public Safety's antechamber, bandaged, silent, examined by the curious. At the scaffold on 28 July the executioner tore the bandage away before the blade, and the scream that followed was, witnesses agreed, the only sound he had completed in two days. Twenty-one heads followed his; the Terror's machinery was dismantled within weeks by men who had operated it without complaint, which is its own lesson in institutions. Adamo painted the Convention scene in 1870 from Munich, with a German history painter's appetite for crowd mechanics: the galleries jubilant, the benches lunging, the fallen chair, and at the center the man with the handkerchief pressed to his mouth, as if the voice had begun failing a day early. The picture hangs in Berlin, a study of the exact moment a parliament discovers that fear, pooled, becomes courage.