There was one question, however, on which the _Feuillants_ and Brissot's wing of the Jacobins agreed; both wanted war. La Fayette, chief figure among the _Feuillants_, had sunk rapidly in popularity since his repression of the mob in July. In October he had resigned his command of the national guard. In November he had been defeated by the Jacobin Petion for the mayoralty of Paris. He now hoped for a military command, and saw in war the opportunity for consolidating a victorious army by means of which the King and Constitution might be imposed on Paris. Brissot, ambitious and self-confident, his {132} head turned at the prospect of a conflagration, saw in a European war a field large enough in which to develop his untried statesmanship. The pretexts for war lay ready to hand. There was not only the tense situation arising between Austria and France because of the relation between the two reigning families, but there was also acute friction over certain territories belonging to German sovereign princes, such as those of Salm or Montbeliard, that were enclaved within the French border. Could the extinction of the feudal rights hold over such territory as German princes held within the borders of France? Such was the vexatious question which those princes were carrying to their supreme tribunal, that of the Emperor at Vienna. The opposition to the war was not so weighty. Louis realized the danger clearly enough, and knew that Austrian success would be visited on his head. Yet he was so helpless that he had to call the _Feuillant_ nominee, Count Louis de Narbonne, his own natural cousin, to the ministry of war. The King was not alone in his opposition to the war,--Robespierre and Marat, nearly in accord, both stood for peace. Robespierre, from the first, had foreseen the course of the Revolution, had {133} prophetically feared the success of some soldier of fortune,--he was at this moment that unknown lieutenant of artillery, Napoleone Buonaparte,--who should with a stroke of the sword convert the Revolution to his purposes. Marat, in his more hectic, malevolent, uncertain way, was haunted by the same presentiment, and what he saw in war was this: "What afflicts the friends of liberty is that we have more to fear from success than from defeat . . . the danger is lest one of our generals be crowned with victory and lest . . . he lead his victorious army against the capital to secure the triumph of the Despot. I invoke heaven that we may meet with constant defeat . . . and that our soldiers . . . drown their leaders in their own blood."--This Marat wrote on the 24th of April 1792, in his little pamphlet newspaper _l'Ami du peuple_.