a new body, the Commission populaire du salut publique de la Gironde (People’s commission for public safety of the Gironde) which assumed the powers of government in the city and its environs, as well as sending out messages to neighbouring départements calling for unity. As it had done with Lyon, the Convention responded by sending two commissioners to Bordeaux, Jean Baptiste Treilhard and Jean-Baptiste Charles Matthieu, to see whether Bordeaux could be persuaded to abandon its course of action. The city made its hostility clear to them. The Federalists considered holding the commissioners hostage as their counterparts in Normandy had done, but eventually decided against this. Instead, they escorted them to the boundary of the département and sent them on their way. Despite the broad support for the Federalists in the city, it proved remarkably difficult for the insurrectionaries to recruit people to actively support their cause. The attempt to raise an army and march on Paris produced a force of just 400 men, who reached Langon. Here, less than 50 km from Bordeaux, their numbers depleted by desertions, they learned that Commissioners from the Convention had arrived at Bordeaux, and promptly disbanded themselves. Faced with this abject military failure, on 2 August the Federalist Commission populaire dissolved itself, four days before it was outlawed by the Convention and its members declared traitors. Whereas the others Federalist cities were taken by force or surrendered to the armies of the Convention, in Bordeaux no military force was employed to end the Federalist revolt. Two new commissioners sent by the Convention, Claude-Alexandre Ysabeau and Marc Antoine Baudot, arrived unescorted on 18 August. However the crowds that greeted them were so hostile they decided to leave a once rather than stay in Bordeaux, so they went to La Réole and reported to the Convention on the mood in the city. There they were soon joined by two new commissioners, Jean-Lambert Tallien and :fr:Guillaume Chaudron-Rousseau, who brought instructions from Paris to impose revolutionary order in no uncertain terms. Lacking the military means to achieve this, the four commissioners isolated Bordeaux by persuading the neighbouring areas from selling food to the city, and by working with the small Jacobin faction in the city to prepare the ground for their return. As hunger spread in Bordeaux, the radical section Francklin took the lead, on 9 September, by demanding that the Convention's decrees against the Federalist authorities