Now the course of events started to speed up. The new French ambassador Charles-François Delacroix took the side of the radicals. His behavior sufficiently intimidated the opponents of the radical proposals to actually fall in line. The coup that was to follow was therefore in reality superfluous. Nevertheless, the radicals, led by Wybo Fijnje and Anthonie Willem Ockerse, in cohorts with Pierre Auguste Brahain Ducange, the secretary of the French ambassador, now started to plot the coup d'état of 21–22 January 1798, which, with the assistance of general Daendels, put the radicals in power. A rump assembly of about fifty radicals declared itself a , which in one fell swoop enacted the entire radical program, while the other members of the Assembly were forcibly detained. All provincial sovereignties were repealed; the dissident members of the Assembly expelled; an "interim Executive Directory" empowered; and the constitutional commission reduced to seven radical members.