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Four-fifths of the primary electors abstained. The Convention began its sittings, September 20, in the Riding School, where the Législative had met; in the month of May 1793 it adjourned to the Tuileries. There were about fifty or sixty Jacobins. The majority, without being Girondins, were prepared generally to follow, if the Girondins led.
Mirande, as one of the few surviving Girondins and as a man still possessing friends and influence was peculiarly obnoxious to suspicion. The slightest accusation, the word of a servant, the hint of a rival, would suffice to despatch him also along the path which so many trod daily. The Vicomte, therefore, on rising in the morning, proposed to withdraw to his hiding-place.
The two notions of government are contradictory, and the bodies that incorporated them were naturally hostile. But their antagonism was suspended while Robespierre stood between. The reformed Commune at once closed all clubs that were not Jacobin. All parties had been crushed: Royalists, Feuillants, Girondins, Cordeliers.
The priest showed himself much more humane and broad-minded than his military interlocutor, who could only repeat the one refrain, 'Il faut en finir. I now had a look at Lyons, and in a walk round the town tried to recall the scenes in Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins, where he so vividly describes the siege and surrender of the town during the period of the Convention Nationale.
After the banquet, which was held with much state and ceremony in a hall of the Conciergerie, now shown to travellers, the twenty-seven Girondins discoursed in Platonic fashion upon the subjects nearest their hearts, namely, the future of Republican ideas and the immortality of the soul.
To accomplish this they had among other things to outbid their rivals for popular support, and so it happened that many of them who were at heart constitutional monarchists adopted a strong republican attitude which went beyond their real convictions. The Girondins attacked at once. The conduct of the Commune, of the sectional committees was impugned.
Their malignity even went the length of resolving to separate the dauphin from his mother, on the plea of providing for his education; but the means which the Girondins took to secure their triumph for the moment defeated them. La Fayette did not keep the secret.
Suppose the Gunpowder plot had succeeded, and set a Fawkes dynasty permanently on the throne, would it have made any difference to the present state of the nation? The guillotine was used in France up to the limit of human endurance, both on Girondins and Jacobins.
These he forsook in time for Danton, whose facile corruptibility made him a seductive patron. He was a large purchaser in the sale of the emigrant property; he obtained a contract for the supply of the army in the Netherlands; he abandoned Danton as he had abandoned the Girondins, but without taking any active part in the after-proceedings of the Jacobins.
Nothing could be done until the contingents from the seaports arrived. The crisis was postponed, and some weeks of July were spent in parliamentary warfare. Here the Girondins had the lead; but the Feuillants were the majority in the Assembly, while the Jacobins were supreme in Paris. The Girondins were driven into a policy both tortuous and weak.
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