and hostile to it as the home of fickleness, of
irresponsibility, and of mob rule. They were largely provincial lawyers
and rural landed gentry, conservative and clerical, who felt that too
much importance had been usurped by the Parisian Government of National
Defence.

[Illustration: ADOLPHE THIERS]

The new Assembly, therefore, gradually fell into several groups. On the
conservative side came the Extreme Right, made up of out-and-out
Legitimists, believing in absolutism and the divine right of kings; the
Right, composed of monarchists desirous of conciliating the old regime
with the demands of modern times and of making it a practical form of
government; the Right Centre, consisting of constitutional monarchists
and followers of the Orleans branch of the house of Bourbon. Among the
anti-republicans the Bonapartists were almost negligible. Next came the
Left Centre of conservative Republicans, the republican Left, and the
radical Union republicaine, partisans of Gambetta and advanced
"reformers."

At the first public session of the Assembly Jules Grevy was chosen
presiding officer. A former leader of the opposition to the Empire, he
had not participated in affairs since the Fourth of September, and,
therefore, had not yet identified himself with any set. Among the
Republicans he was averse to Gambetta and remained so even when the
latter became moderate. On February 17, Adolphe Thiers, the
"peace-maker," was by an almost unanimous vote elected "Chief of the
Executive Power of the French Republic." It was he who, thirty years
before, had fortified Paris that had now fallen only by famine, who had
opposed the war when it might yet have been averted, who had travelled
over Europe to defend the interests of France, who had been elected
representative by the choice of twenty-six departments.

M. Thiers formed a coalition cabinet representing different shades of
political feeling, and in one of his early speeches, on March 10, he
formulated a plan of party truce for the purpose of national
reorganization. This plan was acquiesced in by the Assembly and bears in
history the name of the Compact of Bordeaux (_pacte de Bordeaux_).
France was to continue under a republican government, without injury to
the later claims of any party. Thiers, himself, as a former Orleanist,
advocated, at least in his relations with the monarchists, a
Restoration, with the _sine qua non_ that an attempt should be made at a
fusion of the Legit