This news created the greatest excitement in Paris—an excitement at once twofold and varied in character. There was joy among the patriots who sided with the Convention, and fury among the royalist Sections.
Then it was that the Section Le Peletier, known during the Revolution as the Section of the Daughters of Saint Thomas, the most reactionary of all the Sections, and the one whose grenadiers had resisted the men from Marseilles on the 10th of August, set up this decree:
"The power of every constituted body ceases before that of the assembled people."
This decree, favorably voted upon by the Section, was converted into a resolution, and sent to the forty-seven other Sections, who received it with favor. It was a simple method of proclaiming the dissolution of the Assembly.
The Convention was not intimidated. It replied by a declaration and a decree. It declared that if its power was threatened it would retire to one of the provincial towns and there continue to exercise its functions. It decreed that all the territory conquered on the French side of the Rhine, as well as Belgium, Liège, and Luxemburg, should thereafter belong to France. Thus did it reply to the threat of its overthrow by a proclamation of its grandeur.
The Section, treating with the Convention as power with power, then sent its president, at the head of six members, to notify it of what it termed a Measure of Protection; namely, of a decree issued by the Section declaring that, before the will of the assembled people, the powers of all the constituent bodies should cease.
The president was a young man of twenty-four or five, and although he was dressed quietly, a supreme elegance, due more to his bearing than to his garments, was manifest in his whole person. He was attired fashionably, without exaggeration, in a frock-coat of dark red velvet with jet buttons, and buttonholes worked in black silk. A cravat of white foulard with floating ends swathed his neck; a waistcoat of white piqué with bright blue flowers, trousers of pearl-gray tricot, white silk stockings, pumps, and a low, broad-brimmed hat with a pointed crown, completed his attire. He had the clear, fair complexion of a man of the North or East, eyes both piercing and earnest, and fine white teeth, with full red lips. A tri-color sash, folded in such a way that very little of it was visible save the white, girdled his waist, which was admirably shaped; a sword hung from this sash, and he carried two pistols stuck in it.
He advanced alone to the bar of the Convention, and in that tone of lofty insolence which had not yet descended to the bourgeoisie, or to which that class had not attained, he said in a loud voice, addressing the president, Boissy d'Anglas:
"Citizen-Representative, in the name of the Mother Section, of which I have the honor to be president, and in the name of the forty-seven other Sections—the Section of the Quinze-Vingts alone excepted—I come to announce to you that you are deprived of your powers and that your reign is over. We approve of the Constitution, but we reject the decrees; you have no right to nominate yourselves. It is for you to deserve our choice, and not to command it."
"The Convention recognizes no power, either that of the Mother Section or of any other," said Boissy d'Anglas; "and it will treat as rebels all who refuse to obey its decrees."