Accordingly, local magnates were preferred to the barristers and pressmen, whose oratorical and literary gifts usually carry the day in France; and more than 200 noblemen were elected.

They were chosen not on account of their nobility and royalism, but because they were certain to vote against the _fou furieux_.
Then, too, the Royalists knew very well that time would be required to accustom France to the idea of a King, and to adjust the keen rivalries between the older and the younger branches of the Bourbon House.
Furthermore, they were anxious that the odium of signing a disastrous peace should fall on the young Republic, not on the monarch of the future.

Just as the great Napoleon in 1814 was undoubtedly glad that the giving up of Belgium and the Rhine boundary should devolve on his successor, Louis XVIII., and counted on that as one of the causes undermining the restored monarchy, so now the Royalists intended to leave the disagreeable duty of ceding the eastern districts of France to the Republicans who had so persistently prolonged the struggle.

The clamour of no small section of the Republican party for war _a outrance_ still played into the hands of the royalists and partly justified this narrow partisanship.

Events, however, were to prove here, as in so many cases, that the party which undertook a pressing duty and discharged it manfully, gained more in the end than those who shirked responsibility and left the conduct of affairs to their opponents.