The total membership of the National Convention was to have been 433 delegates, but the French authorities in charge of the troops occupying Alsace-Lorraine refused to permit elections to be held there, which reduced the assembly's membership to 421. A majority was thus 211, and the two Socialist parties, with a combined total of 185, could accomplish nothing without 26 additional votes from some _bourgeois_ party. As it later developed, moreover, the government party could count on the support of the Independents only in matters where Socialist solidarity was sentimentally involved; on matters affecting economic policies there was much more kinship between the Majority Socialists and the Democrats than between them and the followers of Haase.
The Democrats, with 75 delegates, were the second strongest non-Socialist party, the former Clericals having 88. By virtue of their position midway between Right and Left they held the real balance of power.
The National People's Party, the former Conservatives and Free Conservatives, made a surprisingly good showing in the elections, securing 42 delegates. This number, however, included the delegates of the Middle and the National-Liberal parties of Bavaria and the Citizens' Party and Peasants' and Vineyardists' League of Württemberg. The remnant of the old National-Liberal Party was able to elect only 21 delegates.
There were, in addition to the parties enumerated, the Bavarian Peasants' League with 4 delegates, the Schleswig-Holstein Peasants' and Farm-Laborers' Democratic League with 1 delegate, the Brunswick State Election Association with 1 and the German-Hanoverian Party (Guelphs) with 4 delegates. Not even the urgent need of uniting dissevered elements so far as possible could conquer the old German tendency to carry metaphysical hairsplitting into politics. The German Reichstags regularly had from twelve to sixteen different parties, and even then there were generally two or three delegates who found themselves unable to agree with the tenets of any one of these parties and remained unattached, the "wild delegates" (_die Wilden_), as they were termed. There were ten parties in the National Assembly, and one of these, as has been said, was a combination of five parties.