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At the head of this motley assemblage of Brissotins, Orleanists, and Robespierrians, is Sieyes who, with perhaps less honesty, though more cunning, than either, despises and dupes them all.

Camille Desmoulins published the History of the Brissotins in answer to this very address of Brissot. It was the counter-manifesto of the last holy revolution of the 31st of May; and the flagitious orthodoxy of his writings at that period has been admitted in the late scrutiny of him by the Jacobin Club, when they saved him from that guillotine "which he grazed."

Marat thundered away in his paper against Brissotins, Girondins, federalism, and moderantism. The minority members, thus unpleasantly noticed, went armed; many of them dared not sleep at home. Soon came the arrest of the suspects. The 31st of May, cette insurrection toute morale, as Robespierre called it, followed next. The Convention was stormed by the mob and purged of Brissotins and Girondins.

Yet, where are they now? Wandering, proscribed, and trembling at the fate of their followers and accomplices. The Brissotins, sacrificed by a party even worse than themselves, have died without exciting either pity or admiration.

It is not improbable, that the Convention, by suffering the clubs still to exist, after reducing them to nullity, may hope to preserve the institution as a future resource against the people, while it represses their immediate efforts against itself. The Brissotins would have attempted a similar policy, but they had nothing to oppose to the Jacobins, except their personal influence.

See the translation of the History of the Brissotins by Camille Desmoulins, printed for Owen, p. 2. Three sorts of anarchy have ruined our affairs in Belgium.

Yet, where are they now? Wandering, proscribed, and trembling at the fate of their followers and accomplices. The Brissotins, sacrificed by a party even worse than themselves, have died without exciting either pity or admiration.

Under the Brissotins it was fatal to write, and hazardous to read, any work which tended to exculpate the King, or to censure his despotism, and the massacres that accompanied and followed it.* * I appeal for the confirmation of this to every person who resided in France at that period.

* This last reason might afterwards have given way to their apprehensions, and the Brissotins have preferred the creation of new civil wars, to a confidence in the royalists.

A stout, rosy-faced man, the citoyen Dupont senior, a joiner living in the Place de Thionville, mounted the Tribune, announcing that he wished to ask a question of the new juror. Then he demanded of Gamelin what attitude he meant to take up in the matter of the Brissotins and of the widow Capet. Évariste was timid and unpractised in public speaking. But indignation gave him eloquence.