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.