Against that impression all policy and wisdom broke. He demanded unity; he checked the growing attack on the rich; he said things that were like France speaking. But the voice was harsh and loud; they heard it in their minds at the head of mobs; they fled from him to the Girondins; they forced him back upon the Mountain, and he had to do his work alone in spite of those orators whom he would have befriended and whose genius he loved—in spite of those madmen who surrounded him, and who later killed him and the Republic with one axe. It was on the 25th of September, a Thursday, that the Convention met in the Tuilleries; on the Friday, in the same place, with doors shut and with the galleries empty, they declared the Republic, and moved off to the Manège, where their predecessors had sat. In those two days the violent quarrel between Paris and France was hushed for a moment. Danton, in the lull, said all he could to define his own position and to prevent that quarrel from ever reaching a head. He went out to meet the Moderates. He declared, with the common sense of the peasant, that property must first be declared inviolable; and it is curious that the Convention, the majority that misunderstood him and broke with him, was yet less moderate than he; it passed the resolution, but in the form, “property is under the safeguard of the nation.” In order to calm opinion he resigned the Ministry of Justice on the spot;[128] he did everything to make his position clear and true, and to save the unity of the Parliament.