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Soldiers were sent to kill them, and the people of Paris covered their ears at the sound of scattered shots. Three thousand canine carcasses lay around the streets until the authorities came to collect them—using the confiscated carriages of the aristocracy and piling them high with dead dogs.
    At the beginning of March, the first pro-monarchy uprising took place in the Vendée area. The Committee of Public Safety was instituted as the government, and in July, Maximilien de Robespierre was elected to its ranks. With his installation, France careered toward disaster.
    The National Convention had proposed that slaves be freed in the French dominions. A settler representative at the assembly declared that he and his fellow white islanders would “rather die than assent to this infamy!” He was uncompromising in his threats. “If France sends troops for the execution of this decree, it is likely that we will decide to abandon France.” 8 In 1793, the plantation owners of Martinique made a preemptive strike. Rather than submit to a France abolishing slavery, they gave up their island to Britain. Marie-Josèphe’s birthplace was now British. The change hit her finances hard. With the British fleet blocking the island traffic, there was no chance of receiving money from her family or the estates belonging to Alexandre. The kindness of men sufficed again; she borrowed from friends and admirers and engaged in black-market trading with a network selling Parisian goods to Belgium.
    Matters went little better for Alexandre. In 1793, he was appointed commander in chief of the army, but his election coincided with terrible failures. On July 23, the Austrians recaptured Mainz, and the French general was forced to retreat, leaving behind twenty thousand troops to be killed. Alexandre offered his resignation, and it was promptly accepted on the basis that he had “neither the strength nor the moral energy necessary in a General of the Republican army.” 9 The previous day, the convention had decreed that no one of aristocratic birth could hold office.
    The failures of the Austrian campaign reminded everyone of their former queen, still locked up in the Temple. On August 1, wearing a plain black gown, her belongings reduced to little more than a handkerchief and some smelling salts, Marie Antoinette was taken to a cell in the public prison of the Conciergerie. There the jailers showed off Prisoner280 to the eager public for money. She held her head high, accepted favors from still-loyal shopkeepers, and hoped that her relations would come to rescue her. But the Committee of Public Safety believed the only way to bind the working classes to the Republic was to execute the queen.
    On Monday, October 14, 1793, she was brought in front of the revolutionary tribunal. Gaunt, white-haired, and dressed in her threadbare black gown, thirty-eight-year-old Marie Antoinette was put on trial for treason—accused of giving money to her brother, the emperor of Austria, of engaging in orgies and other terrible acts. She denied everything. “If I have not replied, it is because Nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother,” she said when accused of incest with her son. Composed and dignified, she felt sure she would be exiled as a punishment. At nearly four in the morning, she was handed her verdict and forced to read it aloud. She was found guilty on every charge.
    At seven A.M. on the sixteenth, her faithful maid came to her cell and tried to give the doomed queen some food. Marie Antoinette donned a plain white gown while the warders watched. Her hair was hacked off and her hands were bound, despite her protests that her husband had not suffered a similar humiliation. As she passed the Tuileries, her eyes filled with tears. At twelve-fifteen, the crowd jeered as her head fell into the basket. When her body arrived at the mass graveyard where her husband was buried, it received no special treatment. The gravediggers