hemselves
alone competent to control the movement that they had excited, and they
sought to rule in the name of those laws of which they were the framers.
Robespierre, on the contrary, who felt his own weakness in an assembly
composed of the same elements, wished these elements to be excluded
from the new assembly: he himself suffered by the law that he laid down
for his colleagues; but with scarcely a rival to dispute his authority
at the Jacobins, they formed his assembly. His instinct or calculation
told him that the Jacobins must have supreme sway in a newly formed
assembly composed of men whose very names were unknown to the nation.
One of the faction himself, it was enough for him that the factions
reigned; and the tool he possessed in the Jacobins, and his immense
popularity, gave him the positive assurance that he should rule the
factions.

This question, at the time of the events of the Champ-de-Mars, agitated,
and already tended to dissolve the Jacobins. The rival club of the
Feuillants, composed almost entirely of constitutionalists and members
of the National Assembly, had a more legal and monarchical appearance.
The irritation caused by the popular excesses, and their hatred for
Robespierre and Brissot, induced the ancient founders of the club to
join the Feuillants. The Jacobins trembled lest the empire of the
factions should escape them, and that division would weaken them. "It is
the court," said Camille Desmoulins, the friend of Robespierre, "it is
the court that foments this schism amongst us, and has invented this
perfidious stratagem to destroy the popular party. It knows the two
Lameths, La Fayette, Barnave, Duport, and the others who first figured
in the Jacobin assembly. 'What,' the court asked itself, 'is the aim of
all these men? their aim was to be elevated to rank and station, by the
voice of the people, and by the gales of popularity, of command of the
ministers, of gold: what they needed was court favour to serve as the
sails of their ambition; and, wanting these sails, they use the oars of
the people. Let us prove to Lameth and Barnave that they will not be
re-elected, that they cannot fill any important place before four years
have passed away. They will be indignant, and return to our party. I saw
Alexandre and Theodore Lameth the evening of the day on which
Robespierre's motion of the non-re-eligibility was carried. The Lameths
were then patriots, but the next day they were no longer the