epared to
inflict on the population of Paris.

Beyond the rest of France the Parisians were interested in the
creation of a power equal to the danger, and were ready to be saved
even by a dictatorship. The need was supplied by the members of the
new municipality who expelled the old on the night of August 9. They
were instituted by Danton. They appointed Marat their organ of
publicity. Robespierre was elected a member of the body on August 11.
It was the stronghold of the Revolution. Strictly, they were an
illegal assembly, and their authority was usurped; but they were
masters of Paris, and had dethroned the king. The _Legislative_,
having accepted their action, was forced to obey their commandments,
and to rescind its decrees at their pleasure. By convoking the
constituencies to elect a Convention, it had annulled itself. It was
no more than a dying assembly whose days were exactly numbered, and
whose credit and influence were at an end.

Between a king who was deposed and an assembly that abdicated, the
Commune alone exhibited the energy and force that were to save the
country. Being illegitimate, they could quell opposition only by
violence; and they made it clear what violence they meant to use when
they gave an office to Marat. This man had been a writer on science,
and Goethe celebrates his sagacity and gift of observation in a
passage which is remarkable for the absence of any allusion to his
public career. But he considered that the rich have no right to
enjoyments of which the masses are deprived, and that the guilt of
selfishness and oppression could only be expiated by death. A year
before he had proposed that obnoxious deputies should be killed by
torture, and their quarters nailed to the walls as a hint to their
successors. He now desired to reconcile mercy with safety, and
declared himself satisfied if the Assembly was decimated. For
royalists, and men who had belonged to privileged orders, he had no
such clemency. If, he said, the able-bodied men become soldiers and
are sent to guard the frontier, who is to protect us from traitors at
home? Either thousands of fighting men must be kept away from the army
in the field, or the internal enemy must be put out of the way. On
August 10 Marat began to employ this argument, and a company of
recruits protested against being sent to the front whilst their
families were at the mercy of the royalists. The cry became popular
that France would be condemned to fight