On the Conflict of Parties in the Jacobin Club 1 1 



Society of the Friends of the Constitution," they declared, 

 "knows all the measures which are being employed to mislead 

 public opinion and divide good citizens. It knows the libels with 

 which the capital and the departments are inundated, and it was 

 not surprised to rediscover the language of them in the letter 

 signed 'Duquesnoy,' As the only answer it declares that the 

 declamations of the intriguers are in its eyes honorable titles for 

 the friends of liberty; that the letter it has just heard read adds 

 to its esteem and attachment for M. Alexander Lameth and for 

 those who, like him, have begun the revolution and have sus- 

 tained it without vacillating. It declares that all attacks upon 

 individuals will serve only to bind closer the ties by which they 

 are united in all parts of the kingdom."^ 



This was the last triumph of the "Triumvirate." 

 It seems that Mirabeau and Montmorin intended to ask depu- 

 ties of the center, such as D'Andre and Beaumetz, to return to 

 the Jacobins, presumably to aid in overturning the leaders, but 

 the Duquesnoy incident caused them to abandon this design.^ 

 Yet neither La Marck nor Montmorin shared Mirabeau's ex- 

 treme discouragement, being convinced that the rule of the 

 Jacobin leaders was near its end.^ "Moreover," wrote La Marck, 

 "these [the Jacobin leaders] no longer sustain themselves except 

 by the use of cordials, and such remedies have never cured those 

 in their death agonies."* 



Events soon justified this belief. Barnave and the Lameths 

 with their friends had begun to fear the results of their own 

 excesses and the "cordials" they had used were to prove a factor 

 in their undoing, for the suspicions and passions they had helped 

 to arouse overpowered them when they wished to allay them. 

 Below them a group of radicals had formed in the society, ready 

 to attack them at the first sign of weakness or the first opportu- 

 nity that offered success. The character of the men in the so- 

 ciety in the spring of 1791 was not that of the spring of 1790. 



'Aulard, 11,153-54. 



^Bacourt, III, Montmorin to Mirabeau, March 3, 1791. 



*Bacourt, III 79, La Marck to Mirabeau. 



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