nts soon revealed violent dissents between
the Girondins and the Jacobins, but, for some months after the meeting
of the Legislative, Girondins and Jacobins represented together in
unbroken unity the great popular party. From this time until the fall of
the monarchy, the whole of this popular party in all its branches found
their rallying-place, not in the Assembly, but in the Jacobin Club; and
the ascendancy of the Jacobin Club embodied the dictatorship of Paris.
It was only from Paris that the whole circle of events could be
commanded. When the peasants had got what they wanted, that is to say
the emancipation of the land, they were ready to think that the
Revolution was in safety and at an end. They were in no position to see
the enmity of the exiles, the dangerous selfishness of Austria and
Prussia, the disloyal machinations of the court, the reactionary
sentiment of La Vendee, the absolute unworkableness of the new
constitution. Arthur Young, in the height of the agitations of the
Constituent Assembly, found himself at Moulins, the capital of the
Bourbonnais, and on the great post-road to Italy. He went to the best
coffee-house in the town, and found as many as twenty tables spread for
company, but as for a newspaper, he says he might as well have asked for
an elephant. In the capital of a great province, the seat of an
intendant, at a moment like that, with a National Assembly voting a
revolution, and not a newspaper to tell the people whether Fayette,
Mirabeau, or Lewis XVI. were on the throne! Could such a people as this,
he cries, ever have made a revolution or become free? 'Never in a
thousand centuries: the enlightened mob of Paris have done the whole.'
And that was the plain truth. What was involved in such a truth, we
shall see presently.

Robespierre had now risen to be one of the foremost men in France. To
borrow the figure of an older chief of French faction, from trifling
among the violins in the orchestra, he had ascended to the stage itself,
and had a right to perform leading parts. Disqualified for sitting in
the Assembly, he wielded greater power than ever in the Club. The
Constituent had been full of his enemies. 'Alone with my own soul,' he
once cried to the Jacobins, 'how could I have borne struggles that were
beyond any human strength, if I had not raised my spirit to God?' This
isolation marked him with a kind of theocratic distinction. These
communings with the unseen powers gave a certain ind