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The only resource of the Gironde, in its present situation, was the abdication of the king; Vergniaud, it is true, as yet only expressed himself ambiguously, but all the popular party attributed to Louis XVI. projects which Vergniaud had only expressed in the form of suppositions. In a few days, Brissot expressed himself more openly.
I obtained a similar promise from the Marquis de Condorcet, and Clavière and Brissot, as members selected from the committee of the Friends of the Negroes. And Messieurs de Roveray and Du Monde, two Genevese gentlemen at Versailles, men of considerable knowledge and interest, and who had heard of our intended meeting, were to join us at their own request.
Robespierre and Brissot were politicians who did not shrink from crime, but it was in the service of some form of the democratic system. Even Marat, the most ghastly of them all, who demanded not only slaughter but torture, and whose ferocity was revolting and grotesque, even Marat was obedient to a logic of his own.
He has been convicted by rival factions of the most shameful robberies, and his infamy and depravity were so notorious that neither Murat, Brissot, Robespierre, nor the Directory would or could employ him. After the Revolution of the 9th of November, 1799, Bonaparte gave him the office of judge of the criminal tribunal, and in 1804 made him a Commander of his Legion of Honour.
He obstinately continues to consider the great and growing vices, crimes, and disorders of that country as only evils of passage, which are to produce a permanently happy state of order and freedom. He represents these disorders exactly in the same way and with the same limitations which are used by one of the two great Jacobin factions: I mean that of Pétion and Brissot.
Brissot, and the whole Jacobin party, with equal effrontery and vehemence, insisted that the papers thus secretly burnt could be no other than the registers and documents of the correspondence of the Austrian committee. M. de Laporte was ordered to the bar, and there gave the most precise account of the circumstances. Riston was also called up, and confirmed M. de Laporte's deposition.
The intrigues of Chauvelin, their ambassador, to verify this prediction, are well known. Brissot, Le Brun, &c. who have since been executed, were particularly charged by the adverse party with provoking the war with England. Robespierre, and those who succeeded, were not so desirous of involving us in a foreign war, and their humane efforts were directed merely to excite a civil one.
The map of the Turkish Empire explains what maybe though absurd or nugatory in this assertion. As soon as a war with Austria was resolved on by the Brissot faction in 1792, emissaries were despatched to Constantinople to engage the Divan to invade the provinces of Austria and Russia, thereby to create a diversion in favour of this country.
But it is allowing a triumph to the enemies of the people, to repulse thus a man who fearlessly attacks them. They give me votes, in spite of my drivellings, and my love of the bottle. Leave 'Père Duchesne' alone, and let us nominate Brissot; he is a better man than I am."
Within the last sixty years, however, the term Girondin has come into use as a label for all those positive political elements in the Convention that attempted a struggle against the Mountain for leadership and against Paris for moderate and national government. Among the Girondins may be noted Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet; and the Anglo-American veteran of republicanism, Tom Paine.
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