some
favoured orators pressed in order to speak. A crowd of citizens of all
classes, of all costumes, rich, poor, soldiers, workpeople; women, to
create excitement, enthusiasm, tenderness, tears whenever they enter;
children, whom they raise in their arms as if to make them inspire, with
their earliest breath, the feelings of an irritated people: a gloomy
silence interrupted by shouts, applause, or hisses, just as the speaker
is loved or hated: then inflammatory discourses shaking to the very
centre by phrases of magical effect, the passions of this mob new to all
the effects of eloquence. The enthusiasm real in some, feigned in
others; stirring propositions, patriotic gifts, civic crowns, busts of
leading republicans paraded round, symbols of superstition, and
aristocracy burnt, songs loudly vociferated by demagogues in chorus at
the opening of each sitting. What people, even in a time of
tranquillity, could have resisted the pulsations of this fever, whose
throbbings were daily renewed from the end of 1790 in every city in the
kingdom? It was the rule of fanaticism preceding the reign of terror.

Thus was the Jacobin Club organised.

XXI.

The club of the Cordeliers, which is sometimes confounded with that of
the Jacobins, even surpassed it in turbulence and demagogism. Marat and
Danton ruled there.

The moderate constitutional party had also attempted its clubs, but
passion is wanting to defensive societies; it is only the offensive that
groups in factions; and thus the former expired of themselves until the
establishment of the Club of Feuillants. The people drove away with a
shower of stones the first meeting of the deputies, at M. De Clermont
Tonnerres. Barnave reproached his colleagues in the tribune, and
devoted them to public execration with the same voice which had raised
and rallied the _Friends of the Constitution_. Liberty was as yet but a
partial arm, which was unblushingly broken in the hands of an opponent.

What remained to the king thus pressed between an assembly, which had
usurped all the executive functions, and those factious clubs, which
usurped to themselves all the rights of representation? Placed without
adequate strength between two rival powers, he was only there to receive
the blows of each in the struggle, and to be cast as a daily sacrifice
to popularity by the National Assembly; one power alone still maintained
the shadow of the throne and exterior order, the national guard of
Pa