The departments accepted passively the results of the insurrection of August 10. Men feared lest by offering opposition they might render easier the advance of the allies. Lafayette, while he prepared to defend the road to Paris, refused to recognise the validity of what had been done. The Assembly declared him a traitor, his soldiers abandoned him, and, in company with three other members of the late constituent Assembly, he fled across the frontier, where all four were arrested and imprisoned by the Austrians. The Assembly itself had lost all control over the course of events. The men who had refused to take the right step of deposing Louis had now to pay the penalty. That which might have been effected without shock by the constituent or legislative Assembly had been done by a violent explosion of popular wrath. The Assembly had failed to take the lead, and after its flagrant subjection to mob dictation, it was without moral energy or force. Yet a mob, however powerful to destroy, is powerless to reconstruct. The one organised force in Paris which could translate the feelings of the populace into action was that of the sixty or seventy commissioners who had dispersed the legal Municipal Council on the night before the insurrection. A few days afterwards they raised their number by fresh elections to 288. From henceforth this irregularly-elected body is known to history as the Commune of Paris. With this new Commune supreme power for the moment practically resided. It was strong because it knew its own mind, and because it fully accepted the work of those of its members who had swept away a king suspected of being in alliance with a foreign enemy. Among the newly-chosen members was Robespierre, the only one who had hitherto been of note. Other names, such as those of Billaud-Varennes, Collot d’Herbois, Hébert and Chaumette now rose first into prominence. Of the mass many were unprincipled adventurers, others timid timeservers. ♦The insurrectionary Commune.♦ To a few the holding of municipal office was merely a step in their career upwards. The better men resigned office or kept out of sight, the more ruffianly and unscrupulous came to the front. The ministers were thwarted and disobeyed, the Assembly threatened, public property plundered, numbers of arrests made, liberty of speech suppressed. Constitutionalists for the most part kept away from the Assembly, and laws were passed which before the insurrection had been rejected by large majorities. Nonjurors were required to leave the country within fifteen days on pain of ten years’ imprisonment; and unbeneficed ecclesiastics, on whom the oath had never been imposed, were subjected to the same fate whenever six citizens of their department joined in demanding their exile. Emigrants’ property was confiscated and offered for sale. Administrative bodies and municipalities were authorised to issue warrants of arrest against persons suspected of political crime. This