In this awful contest, thus brought to issue, the great mother club of the Jacobins was entirely in the Parisian interest.  The Girondins no longer dared to show their faces in that assembly.  Nine tenths at least of the Jacobin clubs, throughout France, adhered to the great patriarchal Jacobiniere of Paris, to which they were (to use their own term) affiliated.  No authority of magistracy, judicial or executive, had the least weight, whenever these clubs chose to interfere:  and they chose to interfere in everything, and on every occasion.  All hope of gaining them to the support of property, or to the acknowledgment of any law but their own will, was evidently vain and hopeless.  Nothing but an armed insurrection against their anarchical authority could answer the purpose of the Girondins.  Anarchy was to be cured by rebellion, as it had been caused by it.

As a preliminary to this attempt on the Jacobins and the commons of Paris, which it was hoped would be supported by all the remaining property of France, it became absolutely necessary to prepare a manifesto, laying before the public the whole policy, genius, character, and conduct of the partisans of club government.  To make this exposition as fully and clearly as it ought to be made, it was of the same unavoidable necessity to go through a series of transactions, in which all those concerned in this Revolution were, at the several periods of their activity, deeply involved.  In consequence of this design, and under these difficulties, Brissot prepared the following declaration of his party, which he executed with no small ability; and in this manner the whole mystery of the French Revolution was laid open in all its parts.

It is almost needless to mention to the reader the fate of the design to which this pamphlet was to be subservient.  The Jacobins of Paris were more prompt than their adversaries.  They were the readiest to resort to what La Fayette calls the most sacred of all duties, that of insurrection.  Another era of holy insurrection commenced the 31st of last May.  As the first fruits of that insurrection grafted on insurrection, and of that rebellion improving upon rebellion, the sacred, irresponsible character of the members of the Convention was laughed to scorn.  They had themselves shown in their proceedings against the late king how little the most fixed principles are to be relied upon, in their revolutionary Constitution.  The members of the Girondin party in the Convention were seized upon, or obliged to save themselves by flight.  The unhappy author of this piece, with twenty of his associates, suffered together on the scaffold, after a trial the iniquity of which puts all description to defiance.