On the day after Valmy, the Convention assembled. The extreme Jacobins, soon to be known from their seats in the assembly as the Mountain, numbered about fifty. Danton and {159} Robespierre were the two most conspicuous; among their immediate supporters not hitherto mentioned may be noted Carnot, Fouche, Tallien, and St. Just. A much larger group, of which the moderate Jacobins formed the backbone, were inclined to look to Brissot for leadership and are generally described as Girondins. This name came from the small group of the deputies of the Gironde, that represented perhaps better than any other, the best force of provincial liberalism but at the same time a revolt against terrorism, massacre and the supremacy of Paris. Within the last sixty years, however, the term Girondin has come into use as a label for all those positive political elements in the Convention that attempted a struggle against the Mountain for leadership and against Paris for moderate and national government. Among the Girondins may be noted Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet; and the Anglo-American veteran of republicanism, Tom Paine. Between the Mountain and the Gironde sat the Plaine, or the Marais, as it was called, that non-committal section of the house strongest in numbers but weakest in moral courage, where sat such men as Barras, Barere, Cambon, Gregoire, Lanjuinais, {160} Sieyes. These were the men who mostly drifted, and, as the Mountain triumphed, threw into it many more or less sincere recruits. The first business of the new assembly was pressing; it did not comport much variation of opinion. The constitutional question must be settled; and so a vote, immediately taken, pronounced the fall of the monarchy. Even at this moment, however, there was no enthusiasm for a republic and there was no formal pronouncement that France accepted that regime. Yet in fact she had; and on the following day the Convention, in further decrees, assumed the existence of the Republic to be an established fact. There was a question, however, even more burning, because more debatable, than the fall of the monarchy; and this was the massacres, and beyond the massacres, the policy of the party that had accepted them. The great majority of the deputies on arriving in Paris from the provinces had been horror-struck. Lanjuinais said: "When I arrived in Paris, I shuddered!" Brissot and the Girondins put that feeling of the assembly behind their policy. They adopted an attitude of uncompromising condemnation towards the men of September, and attempted to wrest their influence from {161} them. To accomplish this they had among other things to outbid their rivals for popular support, and so it happened that many of them who were at heart constitutional monarchists adopted a strong republican attitude which went beyond their real convictions.