In this design the party of Roland and Brissot succeeded in a great
degree. They obtained a majority in the National Convention. Composed,
however, as that assembly is, their majority was far from steady. But
whilst they appeared to gain the Convention, and many of the outlying
departments, they lost the city of Paris entirely and irrecoverably: it
was fallen into the hands of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton. Their
instruments were the _sans-culottes_, or rabble, who domineered in that
capital, and were wholly at the devotion of those incendiaries, and
received their daily pay. The people of property were of no consequence,
and trembled before Marat and his janizaries. As that great man had not
obtained the helm of the state, it was not yet come to his turn to act
the part of Brissot and his friends in the assertion of subordination
and regular government. But Robespierre has survived both these rival
chiefs, and is now the great patron of Jacobin order.
To balance the exorbitant power of Paris, (which threatened to leave
nothing to the National Convention but a character as insignificant as
that which the first Assembly had assigned to the unhappy Louis the
Sixteenth,) the faction of Brissot, whose leaders were Roland, Petion,
Vergniaud, Isnard, Condorcet, &c., &c., &c., applied themselves to gain
the great commercial towns, Lyons, Marseilles, Rouen, Nantes, and
Bordeaux. The republicans of the Brissotin description, to whom the
concealed royalists, still very numerous, joined themselves, obtained a
temporary superiority in all these places.
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