ttempted to
provoke demonstrations in his favour. And now, on the 21st of June,
with the throne derelict, he thought his opportunity had come, and
ostentatiously paraded through {120} the central quarters of the city
in hopes of a popular movement. But the popular movement would not
come. The duke was too well understood; his vices were too well known;
his treachery to his cousin aroused no enthusiasm; the people wanted a
more complete solution.

That more complete solution was voiced by the Club of the Cordeliers
and by its formidable spokesman Danton. Like Mirabeau, Danton was of
large physique and stentorian voice, an orator by nature, a man whose
unusual if far from handsome features fascinated the crowd. But,
unlike his great predecessor, he could hold the affection of the
people, indeed, he proved one of the few conspicuous leaders against
whom the people did not turn on the day of going to the guillotine. A
lawyer, and of a lawyer's family, he was in lucrative practice when the
Revolution broke out, a fine advocate, not overscrupulous in method,
flexible, but large in view, generous in heart, irresistible in
courage, strong in political instincts, a man of the greatest
possibilities. He espoused the popular cause, and the popular cause in
the democratic sense. He stood for the sections against the central
Commune; he defended Marat and the liberty of the press; he opposed the
bourgeois regime and La Fayette {121} at every step; he led the
battalion of the Cordeliers section to the Tuileries to prevent Louis'
visit to St. Cloud in April 1791. Such was the man who now headed a
deputation of the Cordeliers Club to the assembly and presented a
petition demanding the deposition of Louis XVI.

The demand of the Cordeliers for the deposition of the King was not the
thing to please the assembly. The situation was doubly difficult, for
apart from the uncertainty as to the whereabouts of the King and the
possibility of civil war, there was a difficulty in regard to the
Constitution. For two years past the assembly had been labouring hard
to complete the work it had sworn to accomplish by the oath of the _Jeu
de Paume_. That work was now nearly completed, but was almost as
unpopular with the masses as it was hateful to the King. It had not
even been elaborated in a spirit of compromise between the extreme
claims of autocracy on the one hand and of democracy on the other, but
was frankly middle-class legislati