Whilst the revolutionary press thus infused the spirit of resentment into the people, the clubs, reassured by the indolence of the Assembly, and by the scrupulous legality of La Fayette, suffered but slightly the effects of this body blow of the victory of the Champ-de-Mars.  A schism took place in the assembly of the Jacobins between the intolerant members and its first founders, Barnave, Duport, and the two Lameths.  This schism took its rise in the great question of the non-re-eligibility of the members of the National Assembly for the Legislative Assembly which was so soon to succeed.  The pure Jacobins, together with Robespierre, wished that the National Assembly should abdicate, en masse, and voluntarily sentence themselves to a political ostracism, in order to make room for men of newer ideas and more imbued with the spirit of the time.  The moderate and constitutional Jacobins looked upon this abdication as equally fatal to the monarch, as it dealt a mortal blow to their ambition, for they wished to seize on the direction of the power they had just created; they deemed themselves alone competent to control the movement that they had excited, and they sought to rule in the name of those laws of which they were the framers.  Robespierre, on the contrary, who felt his own weakness in an assembly composed of the same elements, wished these elements to be excluded from the new assembly:  he himself suffered by the law that he laid down for his colleagues; but with scarcely a rival to dispute his authority at the Jacobins, they formed his assembly.  His instinct or calculation told him that the Jacobins must have supreme sway in a newly formed assembly composed of men whose very names were unknown to the nation.  One of the faction himself, it was enough for him that the factions reigned; and the tool he possessed in the Jacobins, and his immense popularity, gave him the positive assurance that he should rule the factions.

This question, at the time of the events of the Champ-de-Mars, agitated, and already tended to dissolve the Jacobins.  The rival club of the Feuillants, composed almost entirely of constitutionalists and members of the National Assembly, had a more legal and monarchical appearance.  The irritation caused by the popular excesses, and their hatred for Robespierre and Brissot, induced the ancient founders of the club to join the Feuillants.  The Jacobins trembled lest the empire of the factions should escape them, and that division would weaken them.  “It is the court,” said Camille Desmoulins, the friend of Robespierre, “it is the court that foments this schism amongst us, and has invented this perfidious stratagem to destroy the popular party.  It knows the two Lameths, La Fayette, Barnave, Duport, and the others who first figured in the Jacobin assembly.  ‘What,’ the court asked itself, ’is the aim of all these men? their aim was to be elevated to rank and station, by the voice of the people, and by the gales of popularity,