The elections were held in hot haste. The short time allowed before the convening of the Assembly made the usual campaign impossible. It met at Bordeaux on February 13, 1871. The peace party was in very considerable majority, and though Gambetta received the distinction of a multiple election in nine separate districts, Thiers was chosen in twenty-six. The radicals and advocates of guerilla warfare and of a "guerre à outrance" found themselves few in numbers. Many of the representatives had only local or rural reputation. They were new to parliamentary life, and in the majority of cases were averse to a permanent republican form of government. They would have preferred a monarchy, but they were ready to accept a provisional republic which would incur the task of settling the war with Germany and bear the onus of defeat. They were especially suspicious of Paris, and hostile to it as the home of fickleness, of irresponsibility, and of mob rule. They were largely provincial lawyers and rural landed gentry, conservative and clerical, who felt that too much importance had been usurped by the Parisian Government of National Defence. [Illustration: ADOLPHE THIERS] The new Assembly, therefore, gradually fell into several groups. On the conservative side came the Extreme Right, made up of out-and-out Legitimists, believing in absolutism and the divine right of kings; the Right, composed of monarchists desirous of conciliating the old régime with the demands of modern times and of making it a practical form of government; the Right Centre, consisting of constitutional monarchists and followers of the Orléans branch of the house of Bourbon. Among the anti-republicans the Bonapartists were almost negligible. Next came the Left Centre of conservative Republicans, the republican Left, and the radical Union républicaine, partisans of Gambetta and advanced "reformers." At the first public session of the Assembly Jules Grévy was chosen presiding officer. A former leader of the opposition to the Empire, he had not participated in affairs since the Fourth of September, and, therefore, had not yet identified himself with any set. Among the Republicans he was averse to Gambetta and remained so even when the latter became moderate. On February 17, Adolphe Thiers, the "peace-maker," was by an almost unanimous vote elected "Chief of the Executive Power of the French Republic." It was he who, thirty years before, had fortified Paris that had now fallen only by famine, who had opposed the war when it might yet have been averted, who had travelled over Europe to defend the interests of France, who had been elected representative by the choice of twenty-six departments.