The movement of events was rapid. At the end of April, the campaign opened with an attempted invasion of Belgium. But the French troops were disorganised; their commanders were timid and incapable; two French divisions were shamefully defeated, and the general of one was murdered by his men. 'You marched out like madmen,' wrote Dumouriez bitterly, 'and you returned like fools.' The bad news from the front intensified the excitement in Paris. Another Ministerial crisis resulted in the appointment of Servan, a stern Republican, as Minister of War. The attacks upon the Queen redoubled. The lawlessness of the politicians of the streets increased. The Girondists, determined to weaken the Monarchy, abolished the King's constitutional guard, voted the banishment of all refractory priests, and decreed that a camp of twenty thousand men from the departments should be formed in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital. Since the winter, the Parisian mobs had been armed with pikes; and it seems that the Girondists, knowing that the influence of the Jacobin leaders with the populace of Paris was greater than their own, desired to have at hand a strong force of ardent revolutionists, distinct from the Parisians, on whom they could rely. The King, however, disliking these proposals, and wearied by the studied rudeness of his Ministers, refused to sanction the formation of the camp and the persecution of the refractory priests. Then Madame Roland, in her husband's name, attacked him in a foolish and impertinent letter, and Louis, roused to unusual irritation, dismissed his Girondist advisers on the 12th June. For a moment Dumouriez remained at the head of affairs; but finding that he could not induce Louis to accept his views, he too resigned a few days later, and accepted a command in the army. Lafayette took advantage of the occasion to make a violent attack upon Dumouriez, thus converting into an enemy a man whom he might have found an invaluable ally. Louis fell back on a new Ministry of personal friends of Lafayette, and the General wrote to the Assembly denouncing and threatening the Jacobin party. Thereupon the mob forces of Paris, equally alarmed by the dismissal of the Girondists and by the tone of Lafayette, broke into insurrection and invaded the Tuileries on the 20th June.