On the 6th of July, in all towns of 50,000 souls and over, they strike down the National Guard by discharging its staff, "an aristocratic corporation," says a petition,[2627] "a sort of modern feudality composed of traitors, who seem to have formed a plan for directing public opinion as they please." Early in August,[2628] they strike into the heart of the National Guard by suppressing special companies, grenadiers, and chasseurs, recruited amongst well-to-do-people, the genuine elite, stripped of its uniform, reduced to equality, lost in the mass, and now, moreover, finding its 'ranks degraded by a mixture of interlopers, federates, and men armed with pikes.

Finally, to complete the pell-mell, they order that the palace guard be hereafter composed daily of citizens taken from the sixty battalions,[2629] so that the chiefs may no longer know their men nor the men their chiefs; so that no one may place confidence in his chief, in his subordinate, in his neighbor, or in himself; so that all the stones of the human dike may be loosened beforehand, and the barrier crumble at the first onslaught .-- On the other hand, they have taken care to provide the insurrection with a fighting army and an advanced guard.

By another series of legislative acts and municipal ordinances, they authorize the assemblage of the Federates at Paris; they allow them pay and military lodgings;[2630] they allow them to organize under a central committee sitting at the Jacobin club, and to take their instructions from that club.

Of these new-comers, two-thirds, genuine soldiers and true patriots, set out for the camp at Soissons and for the frontier; one-third of them, however, remain at Paris,[2631] perhaps 2,000, the rioters and politicians, who, feasted, entertained, indoctrinated, and each lodged with a Jacobin, become more Jacobin than their hosts, and incorporate themselves with the revolutionary battalions, so as to serve the good cause with their guns.[2632]--Two squads, late comers, remain separate, and are only the more formidable; both are dispatched by the towns on the sea-cost in which, four months before this, "twenty-one capital acts of insurrection had occurred, all unpunished, and several under sentence of the maritime jury."[2633] The first, numbering 300 men, comes from Brest, * where the municipality, as infatuated as those of Marseilles and Avignon, engages in armed expeditions against its neighbors; where popular murder is tolerated; * where M.de la Jaille is nearly killed; * where the head of M.de la Patry is borne on a pike; * where veteran rioters compose the crews of the fleet, * where "workers paid by the State, clerks, masters, non-commission officers, converted into agitators, political stump-speakers, movers, and critics of the administration," ask only to be given roles to perform on a more conspicuous stage.
The second troop, summoned from Marseilles by the Girondins, Rebecqui, and Barbaroux,[2634] comprises 516 men, intrepid, ferocious adventurers, from everywhere, either Marseilles or abroad, Savoyards, Italians, Spaniards, driven out of their country, almost all of the vilest class, or gaining a livelihood by infamous pursuits, "hit-men and their henchmen of evil haunts," used to blood, quick to strike, good cut-throats, picked men out of the bands that had marched on Aix, Arles, and Avignon, the froth of that froth which, for three years, in the Comtat and in the Bouches-du-Rhone, boiled over the useless barriers of the law .-- The very day they reach Paris they show what they can do.[2635] Welcomed with great pomp by the Jacobins and by Santerre, they are conducted, for a purpose, to the Champs-Elysees, into a tavern, near the restaurant in which the grenadiers of the Filles St.Thomas, bankers, brokers, leading men, well-known for their attachment to a monarchical constitution, were dining in a body, as announced several days in advance.

The mob which had formed a convoy for the Marseilles battalion, gathers before the restaurant, shouts, throws mud, and then lets fly a volley of stones; the grenadiers draw their sabers.