Doubtless the royalists strove to drive on the discontent to the desired goal, and in many parts they tinged the movement with an unmistakably Bourbon tint.

But it is fairly certain that in Paris they could not alone have fomented a discontent so general as that of Vendemiaire.

That they would have profited by the defeat of the Convention is, however, equally certain.

The history of the Revolution proves that those who at first merely opposed the excesses of the Jacobins gradually drifted over to the royalists.

The Convention now found itself attacked in the very city which had been the chosen abode of Liberty and Equality.
Some thirty thousand of the Parisian National Guards were determined to give short shrift to this Assembly that clung so indecently to life; and as the armies were far away, the Parisian malcontents seemed masters of the situation.