History of the Girondists, Volume I: Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French RevolutionLamartine, Alphonse de
History
History of the Girondists, Volume I: Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution
Lamartine, Alphonse de
France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799; Girondists
Whilst the revolutionary press thus infused the spirit of resentment
into the people, the clubs, reassured by the indolence of the Assembly,
and by the scrupulous legality of La Fayette, suffered but slightly the
effects of this body blow of the victory of the Champ-de-Mars. A schism
took place in the assembly of the Jacobins between the intolerant
members and its first founders, Barnave, Duport, and the two
Lameths. This schism took its rise in the great question of the
non-re-eligibility of the members of the National Assembly for the
Legislative Assembly which was so soon to succeed. The pure Jacobins,
together with Robespierre, wished that the National Assembly should
abdicate, _en masse_, and voluntarily sentence themselves to a political
ostracism, in order to make room for men of newer ideas and more imbued
with the spirit of the time. The moderate and constitutional Jacobins
looked upon this abdication as equally fatal to the monarch, as it dealt
a mortal blow to their ambition, for they wished to seize on the
direction of the power they had just created; they deemed themselves
alone competent to control the movement that they had excited, and they
sought to rule in the name of those laws of which they were the framers.
Robespierre, on the contrary, who felt his own weakness in an assembly
composed of the same elements, wished these elements to be excluded
from the new assembly: he himself suffered by the law that he laid down
for his colleagues; but with scarcely a rival to dispute his authority
at the Jacobins, they formed his assembly. His instinct or calculation
told him that the Jacobins must have supreme sway in a newly formed
assembly composed of men whose very names were unknown to the nation.
One of the faction himself, it was enough for him that the factions
reigned; and the tool he possessed in the Jacobins, and his immense
popularity, gave him the positive assurance that he should rule the
factions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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