Neither deputies in mission nor administrative officers attempted to arrest the assassins or to bring them to justice. The Convention expressed indignation, but took no active measures for the maintenance of law and order. In fact, men still lived in incessant fear of a revival of the Terror, and hence for the time they regarded with indifference the reaction in the south, in spite of its Royalist tendencies. After the insurrection of Germinal, the condition of the people at Paris remained unchanged. The rations of bread on occasions fell as low as a couple of ounces. Jacobins and other agents of the Terror did their utmost to direct the ever-swelling flood of discontent against the Convention. On May 20, or Prairial 1, a second insurrection broke out, fiercer, more extended, and more persistent than the preceding one. The insurgents, men and women, broke into the Convention clamouring for bread, and insulting and reproaching the deputies without distinction of party. With cries for bread were joined cries for the Constitution of 1793, but the crowd was without leaders, and barely knew its own ends, still less by what means to seek their realisation. On the arrival of battalions of the national guard in support of the Convention, a general combat took place within the Chamber, in which the defenders of the Convention were at first worsted. A deputy, Feraud, who sought to protect the President, Boissy d’Anglas, from insult, was wounded by the populace and dragged outside, his head cut off and paraded on a pike through the streets. Many deputies fled. A few Montagnards, threatened by the mob and urged by the frightened deputies on the right, put to the vote the demands raised by voices in the crowd, such as the release of imprisoned patriots and the reconstitution of the Committees of Government. The insurgents, who were now appeased, began to disperse, when more national guards arrived and drove away those who still remained. Victory, however, was not secured. The Faubourg St. Antoine remained in insurrection, and the next day directed the mouths of its cannon upon the Tuileries. The Convention only secured its safety by promising to provide bread, and to put in force the Constitution of 1793. In the meantime, however, 4,000 troops of the line were being brought to Paris. These, with a selected force of national guards, surrounded the insurgent faubourg. To a population supported upon rations, there was no choice between yielding or starving. They yielded, giving up arms and cannon (May 23). The Convention made use of its triumph to destroy the Mountain and to secure itself against a repetition of the late scenes. A decree for the disarmament of agents of the Terror furnished a pretext for taking pikes and guns from the hands of the people, and the national guard was reorganised so as to exclude from active service the poorer sections of the population. Many hundred persons were imprisoned. The revolutionary court had already been dissolved.