already within a few days’ march of the city; that nothing 149 was between Paris and destruction but undisciplined levies and the rags of the neglected army formed under the old regime; while at the same time the famous royalist insurrection had broken out in La Vendée. Every republican in Paris, therefore, had good reason to feel that both his own life and the future of his country were in immediate danger at the hands of those who did not care what became of France and her people so long as the monarchy could be restored.
Danton now demanded a search for arms, which was carried out on 29th August; and the prisons were filled with prisoners suspected of royalist plotting, and many of them surely guilty of it.
Verdun fell on the 2nd September, and the Duke of Brunswick boasted that he would presently dine in Paris; and on the same night the irregular trials and slaughter of the prisoners in Paris, known as the September Massacres, took place.
The next day a circular was issued by the Committee of Public Safety, approving of the massacre, signed by Sergent, 150 Panis (Danton’s friend), and Marat, with seven others.
The Girondins in the Assembly and elsewhere kept quiet for the time, though they afterwards used the event against the Jacobins.
Meanwhile the French army, under Dumouriez, had seized on the woodland hills of the Argonne, checked Brunswick, defeated him at Valmy, and Paris was saved.
The Convention now met—on the 20th September—and the parties of the Girondins and the Mountain, or extreme revolutionists, were at once formed in it. It is noteworthy that while it declared as its foundation the sovereignty of the people and the abolition of royalty, it also decreed that landed and other property was sacred for ever. Apropos of which, it may