ssembly differed totally from that of its
predecessor, because of a self-denying ordinance whereby the members of
the _Constituante_ had excluded themselves from the new assembly. Yet
there were many notable men among the new deputies, nearly all,
however, Jacobins:--Brissot, the journalist, soon to be leader of a
wing of the party that detaches itself from the one that follows
Robespierre; Vergniaud, great as an orator; Isnard, Guadet, Gensonne;
Condorcet, marquis and mathematician, philosopher, physicist and
republican, noble mind and practical thinker; Cambon, stalwart in
politics as in finance; Couthon, hostile to Brissot, later to be one of
the Robespierre triumvirate.

{129} This Jacobin group nearly at once established its influence over
the more flaccid part of the assembly. Through its club organization
it packed the public galleries of the house, and from that point
directed the current of opinion by the judicious application of
applause or disapproval. This was reinforced by the _appel nominal_,
the manner of voting whereby each individual deputy could be compelled
to enter the speaker's rostrum and there declare and explain his vote.

To check the efforts of this dominating party, there was little but the
inertia of the Court, and what the _Feuillants_ might accomplish.
Bailly, La Fayette, Lameth, La Rochefoucauld Liancourt, Clermont
Tonnerre were among the conspicuous men of the club, but whatever their
worth most of them were associated with a too narrow, unyielding
attitude to obtain any wide support. The popular force was not behind
them, but, for the moment, behind the Jacobins, and the instant the
Jacobins became engaged in a struggle against the _Feuillants_, it
pushed against the latter and presently toppled them over. Had the
_Feuillants_ and the Court come together, there was yet a chance that
the tide would be stemmed. But that proved impossible. To the royal
{130} family foreign help, foreign intervention, appeared the only
chance of relief, and Marie Antoinette had long been urging her brother
Leopold to come to her assistance. No course could have been more
fatal, and the more probable intervention became, the more the
democratic party appeared a patriotic party, and the more the King and
Queen seemed traitors to the national cause.

It was the foreign question that immediately engrossed the chief
attention of the _Legislative_, and the foreign question always led
back to the great i