e up from different parties. A proposal was made to
reduce the number, and on April 6 a new committee of nine, the real
Committee of Public Safety, was elected, and no Girondins were
included in it. On the same day the first execution took place of a
prisoner sentenced by the new tribunal. The two chief instruments of
the revolutionary government were brought into action at the same
time. But they did not enable the Jacobins to reach their enemies in
the Assembly, for the deputies were inviolable. Everybody else was at
the mercy of the public accuser.

The Girondins, having failed in their attack on Danton, now turned
against Marat, and by 220 to 132 votes sent him before the
revolutionary tribunal to be tried for sedition. On the 24th he was
acquitted. Meantime his friends petitioned against the Girondins, and
demanded that twenty-two of them should be expelled. The petition was
rejected, after a debate in which Vergniaud refused to have the fate
of his party decided by primary assemblies, on the ground that it
would lead to civil war. Vendee was in flames, and the danger of
explosion was felt in many parts of France.

Down to the month of May, the Girondins had failed in their attacks
on individual deputies, but their position in the Assembly was
unshaken. By their divisions, and by means of occasional majorities,
especially by the uncertain and intermittent help of Danton,
Robespierre had carried important measures--the Revolutionary
Tribunal, the Committee of Public Safety, the employment of
commissaries from the Convention to enforce the levies in each
department. By a series of acceptable decrees in favour of the
indigent, he had established himself and his friends as the authors of
a new order of society, against the representatives of the middle
class. The people of Paris responded by creating an insurrectionary
committee to accomplish, by lawful pressure or otherwise, the purpose
of the deputation which had demanded the exclusion of the twenty-two.
On May 21 a commission of twelve was appointed to vindicate the
supremacy of the Convention against the municipality. The Girondins
obtained the majority. Their candidates received from 104 to 325
votes. No Jacobin had more than 98. It was their last parliamentary
victory. There was no legal way of destroying them. The work had to be
left to agitators like Marat, and the committee of insurrection. When
this came to be understood, the end was very near. The committe