The discussion commenced on the 13th of November, six days after the report of the committee. The partisans of inviolability, while they considered Louis XVI. guilty, maintained that he could not be tried. The principal of these was Morrison. He said, that inviolability was general; that the constitution had anticipated more than secret hostility on the part of Louis XVI., an open attack, and even in that case had only pronounced his deposition; that in this respect the nation had pledged its sovereignty; that the mission of the convention was to change the government, not to judge Louis XVI.; that, restrained by the rules of justice, it was so also by the usages of war, which only permitted an enemy to be destroyed during the combat--after a victory, the law vindicates him; that, moreover, the republic had no interest in condemning Louis; that it ought to confine itself with respect to him, to measures of general safety, detain him prisoner, or banish him from France. This was the opinion of the Right of the convention. The Plain shared the opinion of the committee; but the Mountain repelled, at the same time, the inviolability and the trial of Louis XVI. "Citizens," said Saint-Just, "I engage to prove that the opinion of Morrison, who maintains the king's inviolability, and that of the committee which requires his trial as a citizen, are equally false; I contend that we should judge the king as an enemy; that we have less to do with trying than with opposing him: that having no place in the contract which unites Frenchmen, the forms of the proceeding are not in civil law, but in the law of the right of nations; thus, all delay or reserve in this case are sheer acts of imprudence, and next to the imprudence which postpones the moment that should give us laws, the most fatal will be that which makes us temporize with the king." Reducing everything to considerations of enmity and policy, Saint-Just added, "The very men who are about to try Louis have a republic to establish: those who attach any importance to the just chastisement of a king, will never found a republic. Citizens, if the Roman people, after six hundred years of virtue and of hatred towards kings; if Great Britain after the death of Cromwell, saw kings restored in spite of its energy, what ought not good citizens, friends of liberty, to fear among us, when they see the axe tremble in your hands, and a people, from the first day of their freedom, respect the memory of their chains?"