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Of the various parties or groups in the Legislative Assembly, the best organized was the Girondist. Its members, recruited chiefly from the provinces, were young, enthusiastic, and filled with noble, if somewhat unpractical, ideas borrowed from the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. They were cultured, eloquent, and patriotic.
As this individual was the root of the Girondist party, the first apostle and first martyr of the republic, we ought to know him. Brissot was the son of a pastrycook at Chartres, and had received his education in that city with Pétion, his fellow countryman. An adventurer in literature, he had begun by assuming the name of Warville, which concealed his own.
Achille Viard, one of those unprincipled adventurers with which the stormy times had filled the metropolis, was employed, as a spy, to feign attachment to the Girondist party, and to seek the acquaintance, and insinuate himself into the confidence of Madame Roland.
The strife continued for two or three days, with that intense excitement which a conflict for life or death must necessarily engender. The question between the Girondist and the Jacobin was, "Who shall lie down on the guillotine?" For some time the issue of the struggle was uncertain. The Jacobins summoned their allies, the mob.
From the 9th Thermidor to the 1st Prairial, the Mountain was treated as the Girondist party had been treated from the 2nd of June to the 9th Thermidor. Seventy-six of its members were sentenced to death or arrest. In its turn, it underwent the destiny it had imposed on the other; for in times when the passions are called into play, parties know not how to come to terms, and seek only to conquer.
Beyond the mountains, he had to bring this home to men to whom American nationality was such a dead letter that they were willing to defy their own government, throw off their allegiance, and enlist for an offensive war under the banners of a crazy French Girondist.
Great efforts had for some time been made, by his adversaries, to turn the tide of popular hatred against him, and especially against his wife, whom Danton and Robespierre recognized and proclaimed as the animating and inspiring soul of the Girondist party. The friends of Roland urged, with high encomiums upon his character, that he should be invited to retain his post.
After all, whether the Queen had lovers; whether Dumouriez, since Valmy, intended to betray her; whether in Prairial it was the Mountain or the Girondist party that began, and in Thermidor the Jacobins or the Plain; what matters it to the development of the Revolution, of which the causes were far to seek and the results incalculable?
In the excitement the Girondists obtained control of the government and demanded of the emperor that the Austrian troops be withdrawn from the frontier and that the emigres be expelled from his territories. As no action was taken by the emperor, the Girondist ministers prevailed upon Louis XVI to declare war on 20 April, 1792.
Barère was again summoned to his duty. Only four days after he had proposed the decrees against the Girondist deputies he again mounted the tribune, in order to move that the Queen should be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was improving fast in the society of his new allies.
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