Madame Champagneux lived to be nearly seventy-seven years old, dying in Paris July 19, 1858. The last years of her life were clouded by the death of one of her daughters, a loss from which she is said never fully to have recovered.
Of the three left behind, the fate of Buzot was saddest. At the moment that he escaped to Evreux, the northwest departments felt that the Convention had been coerced into the decree against the Gironde and there was a general revolt against the tyranny of Paris. Buzot and his friends who had escaped decided, on sounding this feeling, that it was sufficiently wide-spread and profound to justify them in undertaking a campaign against the Convention and in favor of federalism. Buzot began by speaking in the cathedral at Evreux and here he was joined by Pétion, Barbaroux, and Louvet. The agitators were not long unmolested. The Convention turned its fiercest anathemas against the “traitors,” as it called them, and the Revolutionary authorities of the northwest were ordered to crush them. At first they fled into Brittany, evidently hoping to find a vessel there for America, but disappointed in this, they made their way to Gascogne, where one of their number had friends.
While Buzot was escaping, the patriotic saviours of their country were exhausting themselves in fantastic efforts to show their hatred of his “treason.” His house was demolished amid civic rejoicings. His effigy was burned and riddled with bullets in the process. On the walls near his residence could be still read a few years ago an inscription written in the excitement.
“Buzot le scélérat trahit la liberté; Pour ce crime infâme, il sera decapité.”
This effectual and dignified way of dealing with a political opponent reached its climax on December 30, 1793, when Evreux held a fête of rejoicing over the recapture of Toulon. The cathedral in which, six months before, Buzot had spoken had become a “temple of reason and philosophy.” On the altars were the busts of Marat, Lepelletier, and Brutus, where once were the forms of Virgin and Child and peaceable saint. The latter had been transferred to the Place de la Fédération, where, together with effigies of Buzot and other local celebrities who had refused to believe and vote as the authorities desired, they were burned.