As a wartime measure, the committee was given broad supervisory and administrative powers over the armed forces, judiciary and legislature, as well as the executive bodies and ministers of the convention.

As the committee, restructured in July, raised the defense (levée en masse) against the monarchist coalition of European nations and counter-revolutionary forces within France, it became more and more powerful.

[12] On 5 April 1793, the French military commander and former minister of war General Charles François Dumouriez defected to Austria following the publication of an incendiary letter in which he threatened to march his army on the city of Paris if the National Convention did not accede to his leadership.

[citation needed] On 5 December 1793, journalist Camille Desmoulins began publishing Le Vieux Cordelier with the approval of Robespierre and the Committee.

[18] This newspaper was initially aimed against the ultrarevolutionary Hébertist faction, whose extremist demands, anti-religious fervor and propensity for sudden insurrections troubled the committee.

[20] Arguments within the Committee of Public Safety itself had grown so violent that it relocated its meetings to a more private room to preserve the illusion of agreement.

[21] On 21 May 1794 the revolutionary government decided that the judicial system would be centralised, with almost all the tribunals in the provinces closed and all the capital trials held in Paris.

[24] Robespierre, a fervent supporter of the theistic Cult of the Supreme Being, found himself frequently in conflict with anti-religious Committee members Collot d'Herbois and Billaud-Varenne.

Moreover, Robespierre's increasingly extensive absences from the Committee due to illness (he all but ceased to attend meetings in June 1794) created the impression among some members that he was isolated and out of touch.

[25] When it became suspected in mid-July 1794 that Robespierre and Saint-Just were planning to strike against their political opponents Joseph Fouché, Jean-Lambert Tallien and Marc-Guillaume Alexis Vadier (the latter two members of the Committee of General Security), the fragile truce within the government was dissolved.

The Convention ordered the arrest of Robespierre, his brother Augustin, and Saint-Just, along with that of their supporters, including Philippe Le Bas and Georges Couthon.

A period of intense civil unrest ensued, during which the members of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security were forced to seek refuge in the convention.

[28] The ensuing period of upheaval, dubbed the Thermidorian Reaction, saw the repeal of many of the previous year's most unpopular laws and the restriction of the Committees of General Security and Public Safety.