the movement. As a first
step Hanriot, a sottish but very determined battalion leader, was
placed in supreme command of the national guard.

The movement took place on the 31st of May. On that day the Convention
was subjected to the organized pressure of a mob of about 30,000 men,
the greater part national guards. The Convention was not invaded,
however, nor was there any attempt, any desire, to suppress it as an
institution. For the leaders fully realized that it was by maintaining
the Convention as a figurehead that they could continue the fiction
that the Government {183} of France was not local, or Parisian, but
national, or French. But while refraining from a direct attack on the
Convention they subjected it to a pressure so strong and so long
continued that they converted it, as they intended, into an organ of
their will.

For three days Hanriot and his men remained at the doors of the
Convention, and for three days, with growing agitation, the members
within wrestled with the problem thus insistently presented at the
point of bayonets and at the mouth of cannon. Motions of all sorts,
some logical, some contradictory, were presented. Robespierre moved
the arrest of twenty of his colleagues. The Committee of Public
Safety, anxious to retain supreme power, tried for some middle course
that might satisfy the mob. Barere proposed that, to relieve the
Convention from its difficulty, the Girondins should pronounce their
own exclusion from the assembly. The impetuous Isnard, one of the few
attacked members present, accepted. This was on the 2d of June.

On the basis of the self-exclusion of the Girondin deputies the
Committee of Public Safety now believed it could regain control of the
situation, thereby demonstrating that it {184} had formed an inadequate
estimate of Hanriot. It decided to proclaim the suppression of the
insurrectional committee, and it announced this to Hanriot at the same
time as the self-exclusion of the Girondins. But Hanriot, sitting his
horse at the doors of the Convention, was resolute and tipsy, a man of
the sword not to be moved by parliamentary eloquence. He declined to
accept any compromise, and ordered his guns to be brought up and
unlimbered. The Convention was immediately stampeded by this act of
drunken courage. The members attempted to escape. But every avenue,
every street was closed by Hanriot's national guard, and Marat, blandly
triumphant, led the members back to