e house strongest in numbers but weakest in moral courage, where sat
such men as Barras, Barere, Cambon, Gregoire, Lanjuinais, {160} Sieyes.
These were the men who mostly drifted, and, as the Mountain triumphed,
threw into it many more or less sincere recruits.

The first business of the new assembly was pressing; it did not comport
much variation of opinion. The constitutional question must be
settled; and so a vote, immediately taken, pronounced the fall of the
monarchy. Even at this moment, however, there was no enthusiasm for a
republic and there was no formal pronouncement that France accepted
that regime. Yet in fact she had; and on the following day the
Convention, in further decrees, assumed the existence of the Republic
to be an established fact.

There was a question, however, even more burning, because more
debatable, than the fall of the monarchy; and this was the massacres,
and beyond the massacres, the policy of the party that had accepted
them. The great majority of the deputies on arriving in Paris from the
provinces had been horror-struck. Lanjuinais said: "When I arrived in
Paris, I shuddered!" Brissot and the Girondins put that feeling of the
assembly behind their policy. They adopted an attitude of
uncompromising condemnation towards the men of September, and attempted
to wrest their influence from {161} them. To accomplish this they had
among other things to outbid their rivals for popular support, and so
it happened that many of them who were at heart constitutional
monarchists adopted a strong republican attitude which went beyond
their real convictions.

The Girondins attacked at once. The conduct of the Commune, of the
sectional committees was impugned. Marat, on taking his seat, was
subjected to a furious onslaught that nearly ended in actual violence.
But he packed the galleries with his supporters, retorted bitterly in
the _Ami du peuple_, and succeeded in weathering the storm. But the
Convention agreed that a committee of six should investigate, and that
a guard of 4,500 men should be drawn from the departments for the
protection of the Convention. This was a worthy beginning, but it
ended, as it began, in words. Paris answered the Girondins with deeds.

The proposed bringing in of an armed force from the departments stirred
Paris to fury once more. Brissot was expelled from the Jacobin Club.
Many of the sections presented petitions protesting against the
departmental guard