208 BAILLY. 
moderate members of the National Assembly, and we 
now know that the Duke de La Rochefoucauld and 
Dupont (de Némours) for example, were decidedly in 
favour of a republic. But it was chiefly in the clubs 
that the idea of such a radical change had struck root. 
When the Commission of the National Assembly had 
expressed itself, through M. Muguet, at the sitting of 
the 13th of July, 1791, against the forfeiture of Louis 
XVI., there was a great fermentation in Paris. Some 
agents of the Cordeliers (Shoemakers’) Club were the 
first to ask for signatures to a petition on the 14th of 
July, against the proposed decision. The Assembly re- 
fused to read and even to receive it. On the motion of 
Laclos, the club of the Jacobins got up another. This, 
after undergoing some important modifications, was to 
be signed on the 17th on the Champ de Mars, on the 
altar of their country. These projects were discussed 
openly, in full daylight. The National Assembly deemed 
them anarchical. On the 16th of July it called to its bar 
the municipality of Paris, enjoining it to have recourse to 
force, if requisite, to repress any culpable movements. 
The Council of the Commune on the morning of the 
17th placarded a proclamation that it had prepared ac- 
cording to the orders of the National Assembly. Some 
municipal officers went about preceded by a trumpeter, 
to read it in various public squares. Around the Hotel 
de Ville, the military arrangements, commanded by La 
Fayette, led to the expectation of a sanguinary conflict. 
All at once, on the opening of the sitting of the National 
Assembly, a report was circulated that two good citizens 
having dared to tell the people collected around their 
country’s altar, that they must obey the law, had been 
put to death, and that their heads, stuck upon pikes, _ 
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