These events caused great excitement. The assembly, now alarmed at the result of its own work of disintegration, passed a formal vote {109} of thanks to Bouille. The democratic party, however, took the opposite side, strongly led by the Cordeliers, a popular sectional club. Noisy demonstrations followed in favour of the defeated soldiers, and license and indiscipline were extolled as the virtues of free men. This more than anything else broke down the old royal army, and from this moment the cavalry and infantry officers began to throw up their commissions and emigrate. And, incidentally, another fragment of the old regime disappeared in the same storm; Necker, still a royal minister, unimportant and discredited, was mobbed on the 2d of September, and as a result resigned and ingloriously left France for his native Switzerland. Until the winter of 1790 the Revolution had not shown signs of becoming anti-monarchical, but at the turn of the year republicanism at last raised its head. In the attitude of the French towards this question one must bear in mind the historical precedents before them. French opinion was strongly impregnated with the apparent lessons of the great revolution that had occurred in England a little more than one hundred years before. There a republic, founded in revolt from incompetent {110} monarchy, had failed, and had made way for a military dictatorship, which also had failed, to be replaced by the restored monarchy. And, last of all, eventual success had come from a bargain or compromise between the upper and middle class on the one hand and the King on the other. This was the historic precedent best known and generally uppermost in the minds of the men of the national assembly. But there was another precedent, that of the American revolution, and it tended in the opposite direction. Few, indeed, perceived that Washington had succeeded where Cromwell had failed; and the event was too near in time, too distant in space, too remote in surroundings, to have as much bearing as it should. Yet the impression made was considerable. Benjamin Franklin's picturesque and worthy republicanism was not forgotten: his plain clothes and robust sense, his cheerful refrain of _ca ira_,--it's all right,--so soon to be the song of the French republicans themselves. The men of Rochambeau's army too, had caught the infection, had seen republicanism in war, the brave and capable commanding whatever their station in life; and in that army were many rankers, held down by the Bourbon regime, who were soon to become the {111} victorious generals of the French Republic. Again the constitutional documents of the Americans had been consulted, studied,--declarations of right, State constitutions. And all this tended towards republicanism.