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Updated: June 23, 2025
The moment that they obtained the undisputed ascendency, they trampled it underfoot in every one of its provisions. The wolf never yet wanted a plea for devouring the lamb. One of the first fruits of the union between the Jacobins and the Girondins was the preparation of an insurrection. The Assembly did not move fast enough for them.
When he came back, after the execution of the queen, of Madame Roland, and the Girondins, he took the side of the proscribed clergy, and encouraged the movement in favour of clemency. In this way he lost his popularity and influence, and refused to adopt the means of recovering power. He neglected even to take measures for his personal safety, like a man who was sick of his life.
Louis Napoleon, entering like the cut-purse King in Hamlet, who stole a crown and put it in his pocket, the flight of Kossuth, the surrender or the treason of Gorgei, the coup d'état of December, 1851, shattered these airy imaginings. Yet Napoleon III understood at least one aspect of the change which the years had brought better than the rhetorician of the Girondins or the poet of Hernani.
The Committee of Public Safety, now installed in power at Paris, decreed a levée en masse of able-bodied patriots to defend the sacred soil of the Republic, and the "organizer of victory," Carnot, soon drilled into a terrible efficiency the hosts that sprang from the soil. On their side the Girondins had no organization whatever, and were embarrassed by the adhesion of very many royalists.
Behind this awful display marched a dense mass of National Guards, succeeded by a countless mass of the people armed with, guns, swords, clubs and bars of iron, chanting forth in full chorus, not the inspiring Marseillaise or the Parisienne, but in awful concert sending upon the night air the deep and dreadful notes of the death-hymn of the Girondins, "Mourir pour la Patrie," intermingled with yells for vengeance.
Robespierre, through the Jacobin Club, which now recovered much of the ground it had lost in July, became the manager of the Extreme Left, which gradually separated from Brissot and the Girondins. The ministry was in the hands of the Feuillants, who were guided by Lameth, while Barnave was the secret adviser of the queen.
He stretched a hand to the Girondins; they refused it; and Danton turned back to the Mountain once more, compelled to choose between two factions the one that was for the moment willing to act with him. Through February and into March the military situation kept getting worse, and the Mountain made repeated attacks on the Gironde.
But to the Girondins he appeared by far the most formidable and ruthless and implacable of the three, whilst to Charlotte Corday the friend and associate now of the proscribed Girondins who had sought refuge in Caen he loomed so vast and terrible as to eclipse his associates entirely.
But, as has been said before, disaster was almost as favorable to the political views of the Girondins as success, while it added to the dangers of the sovereigns by encouraging the Jacobins, who were elated at the failure of a general so hateful to them as La Fayette.
The Girondins thought that the war would not be popular in England, that the Whigs, the revolutionary societies, and the Irish, would bring it to an early termination. Marat, who knew this country, affirmed that it was an illusion.
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