of June.

The action of La Rochefoucauld in suspending Petion took place on the 7th
of July, a moment at which the advance of the Duke of Brunswick was
momentarily expected and at which the national excitement was tending to
overpower the royalist reaction. This reaction was now checked. The
Jacobins were resolved to use mob pressure to whatever extent was
necessary for accomplishing their purpose. On the 11th they passed
through the assembly a declaration that the country was in danger, and
two days later imposed a vote quashing the {141} action of the Department
and reinstating Petion.

The ferment now blended inextricably the war fever and the action against
the King. Volunteers were enrolling for the army. National guards were
being summoned from the provinces to renew the federation of 1791, and
the violent section of the agitators saw in these national guards the
means for pushing over the royal authority. A demonstration better
organized than that of the 20th of June, and armed, could rid France of
the Bourbon incubus. Preparations for such a demonstration were at once
taken in hand.

Among the provincial troops now assembled in or marching towards Paris,
there was no body more remarkable than the battalion of the 300
Marseillais. Like a whirlwind of patriotic emotion they swept through
France, dragging the cannon with which they meant to knock at the gates
of the Tuileries, chanting Rouget's new song forever to be associated
with the name of their own city. These Marseillais were red-hot
republicans, and in judging the political situation of that moment this
constitutes one of the salient points. The Parisian patriots were on the
whole far less republican than those of the provinces. {142} Among the
men who were organizing the new demonstration the greater part meant
nothing more than ridding themselves of Louis, of an executive officer
whom they regarded as treacherous and as secretly in league with the
enemy. What should come after him they did not much consider. In the
forming of this state of opinion the individual action of Robespierre had
played a great part. Robespierre, who feared in war the opportunity for
the soldier, saw in republicanism merely the triumph of a Cromwell; to
him La Fayette was a tangible danger, the word _republic_ an empty
formula. And so, with an influence still widening, despite his
opposition to the war, he steadily preached the doctrine that the form of
governmen