When the Committee of Public Safety, under Robespierre's direction, levelled accusations of treason against the Hébertists, they also implicated Cloots to give substance to their charge of a foreign plot.
Appointed to the Committee of Public Safety on 7 April 1793, he became involved in foreign affairs, and joined Robespierre's faction, the Jacobin Club, playing an important part in the second Committee of Public Safety after 17 July 1793.
During the French Revolution, the Club de Clichy formed in 1794, following the fall of Robespierre, 9 Thermidor an II (27 July 1794).
This was no longer Robespierre's Republic, which was more radical, or the oligarchic liberal Republic of the Directory, but the autocratic Roman Republic of Caesar Augustus, a Conservative Republic, which reminded the French of stability, order, and peace.
On Robespierre's fall Grieve was arrested at Amiens, and was taken to Versailles, where twenty-two depositions were taken against him, but the prosecution was dropped.
The Cult of Reason was finally ended by Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety through their execution of Hébert and several of his followers on March 24, 1794 having ascended just seven months earlier.
He became part of the opposition to Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety and played an important role in the overthrow of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor.
This energetic protest against mob rule, with its scarcely veiled characterizations of Robespierre as Nomophage and of Marat as Duricrne, was an act of the highest courage, for the play was produced at the Théâtre Français (temporarily Théâtre de la Nation) only nineteen days before the execution of Louis XVI.
He was elected in March 1793 to the first Committee of Public Safety; and he attacked Robespierre, who had accused him of having known and having kept secret Dumouriez's project of treason.
Jullien then became a protégé of Robespierre, and was sent by the Committee of Public Safety on a mission to several Atlantic ports, beginning on September 10, 1793.
Merlin de Douai was closely allied with his namesake Merlin of Thionville and, after the start of the Thermidorian Reaction which brought about the fall of Robespierre in 1794, he became president of the Convention and a member of the Committee of Public Safety.
Contesting Robespierre's legacy is Slavoj Žižek, who argues that terror in the cause of virtue is justifiable, and Simon Schama, who believes the road from Robespierre ran straight to the gulag and the 20th-century concentration camp.
Fiercely Jacobin, Marat and Robespierre's most faithful adherent, Évariste Gamelin soon becomes a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal.
With Robespierre the sole remaining strong-man of the Revolution following the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat (13 July 1793), and the executions of Jacques Hébert (24 March 1794) and Georges Danton (5 April 1794), his apparently total grasp on power became in fact increasingly illusory, especially insofar as he seemed to have support from factions to his right.