 6. From Versailles to Paris. The effect of the insurrection of Paris was immediate. Bézonval, lacking instructions, and intimidated by the violence of the rising, held his troops back, while Louis, shrinking from violence as he always did, and alarmed that the desertion in the army decided to bow before the storm. He had nerved himself to a definite and resilient policy, but the instant that policy had come to the logical proof of bloodletting, he had fallen away. His kindliness, his incapacity for action, had asserted themselves strongly. Nacca was once more recalled, and once more weakly lent himself to what was rapidly becoming a farcical procedure. The king, without ceremony, presented himself to the National Assembly, and announced that in view of the events of the day before, he had recalled his minister, and ordered Bézonval's troops to be withdrawn. The Assembly manifested its satisfaction, and sent a deputation, headed by Baye, to communicate this good news to Paris, and on the same day began the first movement of emigration of the defeated courtier caste, headed by the Compe d'Artois and de Bruteuil. The deputation from the Assembly presently reached Paris, and was received by the Committee of the Sections at the Hôtel de Vie. Their followed congratulation, speechmaking, disorder, and excitement. And out of it, the insurrection evolved a political head and a military leader, Baye and Lafayette. Baye was proposed and acclaimed as Mayor of Paris. This office was new, and therefore revolutionary. But as the provost of the merchants had clearly gone for all time, it was necessary to find something to replace him. And what could be better than this? The new Mayor had, as qualifications for his office, two facts only. He was the senior deputy of the city to the National Assembly. He possessed an unquenchable supply of civic and complementary eloquence. Behind this figurehead, the Sections soon built up a new municipality or town council made up of delegates from the Sections, and that varied in numbers at different times. Paris also required a military leader, and for that post the name of the Marquis de Lafayette was acclaimed. Lafayette is a personage easy to praise or to blame, but not to estimate justly. At this moment he enjoyed all the prestige of his brilliant connection with the cause of American independence ten years before, and of his constancy to the idea of liberty. His enemies, and there were many in court circles, could detect easily enough the vanity that entered into his composition, but neither they nor his friends could recognize or appreciate in him that truest liberalism of all, which is toleration. Lafayette had already learnt the lesson it took France a century to learn, that liberty implies freedom of opinion for others, and that reasonable compromise is the true basis of constructive politics. When later he appeared to swerve or to contradict himself, it was often enough merely because he felt the scruples of a true devotee of liberty, against imposing a policy. For the moment he had become a popular idol, the generous, brave, high-minded young knight, champion of the popular cause. He was to command the civic guards of the city of Paris forty thousand armed citizens, the national guards as they became owing to the rest of France following the example of Paris. His first act was to give them a cockade by adding the king's white to the city's red and blue, thus forming the same tricolor that he had already fought under in another struggle for liberty ten years before. The king's withdrawal of the troops implied a policy of conciliation, and he was therefore unable to resist the demand that he should demonstrate his acceptance of the events of Paris by a formal visit to the city. Reluctant and half-expecting violence, he made his entry on the seventeenth between lines of armed citizens representing every class of his Parisian subjects, and proceeded to the Hotel de Vie. It was an occasion on which a little kingly grace, or a little kingly boldness, which so many of his ancestors commanded, might have fired the flame of pent-up popular emotion. But there was nothing of this sort to be found in the apathetic Louis. Baillie's stores of honratry had to be drawn on freely for what the king found himself unable to supply. And the honours of the day which he might so easily have had were heaped instead on the dashing Lafayette. As it was, Louis returned safely to Versailles having met with a not unfriendly reception, but having failed to adjust himself to the new situation, which was what he was bound to attempt, having once abandoned the policy of repression by force. The uproar of the fourteenth of July could not be suddenly changed to a calm, whatever Louis the sixteenth Lafayette and Baillie might do. Grave disorders broke out in many parts of France, and scenes of violence continued in Paris. On the twentieth Count Lallie moved a resolution for the repression of the excesses that were being committed, but the assembly, with no sense of responsibility for the conduct of affairs, directly interested on the contrary in weakening the executive, defeated it. In Paris these scenes culminated on the twenty-third when Foulon, who had been contrôler des finances, was brought into the city from his country of state where he had been seized. Foulon represented all that was worst in the old regime. As commissary with the French armies, and later in the internal administration of the country, he had displayed the most heartless rapacity. His attitude towards the lower classes was echoed in utterances that were popularly quoted. The people, he declared, might feed on hay while he was minister. The people had now got him in their clutches. In vain, Baillie and Lafayette, during a long agony at the Hôtel de Vie, attempted to save him. The mob would not be denied. Finally Foulon was seized. He was strung up to a street lantern, and later his head, the mouth stuffed full of hay and nettles, was paraded in triumph through the streets. While such scenes were being enacted in Paris, and while all through France the large class of poor and criminals created by Bourbonism was committing even worse excesses, the assembly was addressing itself to the task of regenerating France, by endowing her with a constitution. This task appeared comparatively simple, and was taken up with a light heart. It was only by degrees that the assembly discovered the difficulties in the way, and it proved to be only after two years of hard labour that it could get its constitution accomplished, and even then it proved almost useless. The constitution may be left for the present to be considered when in 1791 it became operative. The general trend of the assembly, however, was to disassociate itself from practical concerns of government, to interest itself in the theories of politics, and both in its attitude towards the events of the day, and in its constitutional policy, to weaken the executive. The executive and the Bourbon regime were synonymous, and so the men of the National Assembly, with no responsibility as it seemed for the good government of France, tried hard at the moment when a vigorous and able executive was more than necessary to pull down the feeble one that existed. It was the nemesis that Bourbonism had brought on itself. In the midst of these debates the practical question of disorder thrust itself forward once more in very insistent form and with very remarkable results on the night of the 4th of August. In parts of France the excitement had taken the form of a regular Jacquerie in which the isolated country houses and families of the aristocracy had suffered most. Details were accumulating and a terrible picture was unfolded before the assembly that night. How was the evil to be dealt with? It was the injured themselves who indicated the remedy at their own personal sacrifice. The nobles of the assembly, led by Noaille, Daguillon, Boarnet, La Met, La Rochefoucault, declared that if the people had attacked the property of the nobles it was because that property represented the iniquities of feudalism. That the fault lay there, and that the remedy was not to repress the people, but to suppress the institution. They therefore proposed to the assembly that instead of issuing proclamations calling on the people to restore order it should vote decrees for the abolition of feudalism. And so feudalism, or what passed by the name, went by the board amid scenes of wild enthusiasm. All the seniorial rights accumulated during a thousand years by the dominant military cast, the right of justice, the privilege of commanding armies, the hunting privileges, the warren, the dove-cut, the surfage, were sacrificed on the altar of patriotic regeneration. The burden of the centuries was suddenly lifted from the shoulders of Jacques Bonhomme. The men who proposed this surrender of their rights, who had already, by joining the tière, done so much to accomplish the great social revolution, deserve greater consideration as a class than history has as a rule, meted out to them. The French nobility at the close of the 18th century counted in its ranks a great number of admirable men, admirable for loyalty, for intellectuality, for generosity. It is true that the most conspicuous, those who made up the court, or who secured the lucrative appointments, had caught the plague of Versailles, and that even in the provincial nobility there was much copying of the fashion of the courtiers. But there were other representatives of the order. Most conspicuous was that large class of liberal nobles who played so great a part in the early days of the revolution. The ten deputies elected by the nobility of Paris to the state's general all belonged to that category. Grave, educated men, writers and thinkers, versed in questions of politics, economics, religion and education, experienced in many details a practical government. Soldiers and local administrators penetrated with the thought of a protesting and humanitarian age. Some, like Lafayette, had played conspicuous roles and proved revolution in the making. Others, like La Roche Foucault, had mastered every intricacy of political and philanthropic thought, and some, like Condor Kay, had proved themselves among the masters of science of their time. Kant's, Marquis's, Dukes, they were prepared to lay all aside in the overwhelming demand of its suffering humanity made for release from all its troubles. And alongside of these, more loyal to their king, if less loyal to humanity, no less admirable if lagging a little in knowledge and development were those hundreds of country gentlemen, many of them poor, who when the day of adversity came, rallied to their sovereigns, faced the guillotine for them, or laid down their lives following the fearless standard of Henri de la Roche Jacqueline. The position of the French nobility, and the part it played, has been too much forgotten. Its most intelligent section nearly led the revolution, which later fell into the hands of lawyers and theorists, then of demagogues, and lastly of soldiers. What has just been said does not imply that the action of the National Assembly on the night of the 4th of August was altogether admirable. The example of the nobles was infectious. A consuming fervour of self-sacrifice seized every member of the house. Archbishops, bishops, and abbots rushed to the tribune and offered all they could. Tithes, pluralities, and every sort of ecclesiastical privilege were sacrificed. The unprivileged class attempted desperately, but in vain, to hold its own in the contest. I could find nothing more to surrender than some of the special privileges and franchises attached to certain provinces and cities of the kingdom. Now all this was generous and admirable. It forms one of the most generous and admirable pages in history. It was even more. It was the emphatic and right declaration that privilege and class distinction was the root of all the evils of the old system, and had been condemned by the French nation. But it had none of the qualities of practical statesmanship. It did not tend to decrease disorder, but the contrary, and for the moment, with reform advancing so prosperously, order was the first consideration. The effects of the decrees were disastrous and intensified the bad conditions of the country. The woodlands were immediately invaded by armies of timber and fuel-cutters. Game was killed off. The poor country priest found his salary gone. The gobel itself was disregarded. Local justice came to an end. And so the government, with all its extra load, found the already failing revenue almost entirely cut off. The peasants and people of France interpreted the decrees after their fashion, refused to pay taxes, and abused the surrendered privileges. Through August and September, the Assembly continued its constitutional debates, one of the three actors in this great political tragedy. The other two, Paris and King Louis, watched its proceedings with growing impatience. Uneasy at the increasing unrest of the capital, had the now popular cry that the King ought to reside in Paris, and at the constitutional demands which the Assembly was gradually formulating and accumulating, Louis decided to bring some troops into Versailles for his protection, this duty being assigned to the regiment of Flanders. This was a small enough matter when compared with the formidable preparations of de Broglie and Bezondval three months before. Yet it served the purpose of immediately crystallising two opposite currents of opinion. In Paris, suffering was intense. There had been a good harvest, and in many respects, the economic situation was better, but there was a drought, and the millers, depending on water to drive their mills, could not produce flour. There had been a sudden curtailment of court and aristocratic expenditure, so that the Parisian wage earner was unemployed. The emigration had thrown many retainers out of their places. Paris was starving even before the summer months were over, and the agitators and political leaders were not slow to point to Versailles as the cause. That city, owing to the King's presence, was always comparatively well supplied with provisions. If only Louis could be brought to the capital, Versailles might starve, and Paris would fatten. And winter was fast coming on. At the palace of Versailles, offended pride and rebounding hope were going out to the regiment of Flanders. On the 1st of October, the crisis was reached. On that day, the assembly sent to the King a declaration of rights to which his assent was demanded. In the evening a banquet was given in the palace to bring together the officers of the King's bodyguard of the regiment of Flanders and of the National Guards of Versailles, and it resulted in a demonstration. The King and Queen visited the assembled officers and were received with great enthusiasm. Au Richard, au Mordlois, the heir that Blondel sings to Richard, the imprisoned King of England, in the then popular opera by Great Tree, was sung. And officers of the National Guard were moved to change their tricolor cocade for the white one of the King. All this, if not very dangerous, was exciting. It was immensely magnified by rumour. In Paris, the popular orators soon conjured up visions of a great royalist plot and the renewal of military operations against the city. On the 5th of October, the King, struggling against the pressure of the assembly, sent in a conditional acceptance of the proposals of the First, making some reservations as to the declaration of rights. He did not know that at the very moment Paris had risen once more and was already marching out to Versailles to carry him off and bring him back to the capital. The insurrection of the 5th of October had rather obscure origins. Some of its leading factors, however, stand out clearly enough. First, there was the slowly rising tide of the popular impatience, the feeling that after all the efforts and success of the spring and summer, the situation of affairs was still no better, and that to improve it, the King must come to Paris. All this increasing vastly enforced since the 1st of October. Then there was the fact that Paris knew on the evening of the 4th that Louis would refuse, or in part refuse, the demands of the assembly, and that it was necessary therefore to find a reply to the King's move. Last of all was hunger, and it was the part of the Parisian people most nearly touched by hunger that actually raised the standard of revolt. The women felt the pinch of famine more bitterly than the men, and the women played a noteworthy part in the formation of those deep strata of popular opinion, or instinct, on which in turn each of the revolutionary parties had to build their power. The women were the first to turn the cannon against the King, and they were the last to raise the horrible howl of the guillotine at the prisoners as they passed the prison gates to go to the scaffold. And the reason is not far to seek. It was they who had to look after the household, to tend the sick, to feed the children, and it was they who day after day, year after year, formed in the long procession waiting to reach the bakers or the butcher's stall. After enough they stood and struggled for hours, sometimes through the whole night, their hearts aching for the loved ones at home, at the end of all to find nothing left, to return empty-handed. So late as the year 1795 there was a period of several months during which the individual ration, for those who could pay and for those who were lucky, was but two ounces of black bread a day, while butcher's meat failed completely on many occasions and was always a costly luxury. The details of the famine are scattered broadly through the pages of the contemporaries, and at every point the woman appears, wretched, lamenting, furious, ravenous for food, fighting for it and plundering, her heart dulled with bitterness, and her mouth distorted with curses for those pointed out to her as the cause of all her sufferings. Louis, Marie Antoinette, Briso, Venio, Abert. She cared little what the name was, but was equally ready to rend them when told that they stood for the starvation of her children, her sick or her husband, and she was easily enough persuaded that some one person was responsible. In the morning hours of the 6th of October she was convinced that Louis was that person. In the early hours of that day a knot of women, one of them beating a drum, others leguberously chanting dupin, dupin, bread, bread, appeared in the streets of Paris. Growing in numbers as they advanced, an incoate mob of women, men, and boys, they proceeded to the Hotel de Vie. There perhaps they would find relief. But there was no relief, only tumult, until Maillard, a patriot agitator, conspicuous as one of the captors of the Bastille and since, harangued them. Maillard, who was in touch with the leading spirits among the politicians of the sections, told the women that there was nothing to do with the Hotel de Vie, but that he would lead them to Versailles, where they could see the king and persuade him to give them bread and to come back with them to Paris. A motley procession poured out from Paris following Maillard into the country roads and villages on the way to Versailles. Armed men had joined the women, and a few cannon had been found and were dragged by hand. Meanwhile Lafayette, always sent for in emergencies, had arrived to the Hotel de Vie, while alarming reports began to reach Versailles of the approach of the women of Paris. Lafayette was quickly joined by a large force of national guards, and while he awaited instructions and pacified them with occasional harangs, Baillie and his cancelers debated as to what course to take. Finally, at about five in the afternoon, it was decided that Lafayette and his men should proceed to Versailles to preserve order and act according to circumstances. Long before the Parisian troops could arrive, Versailles had been taken by storm by the women. They tramped in under a beating rain, many having lagged or fallen exhausted by the way, and at once sent deputations to the assembly and the king. They wanted food, and they wanted decrees that would put an end to starvation. To the men of the regiment of Flanders, drawn up to protect the palace, they announced the same thing, and their appeals were so irresistible that after some hours the colonel of the regiment, on declaring that he could not answer for his men any longer, got permission to return to Barracks. But by this time Lafayette had reached the scene, and had stationed his battalions so as to protect the palace. An anxious night was past. In the mob were very dangerous elements. The grills and walls, the courts, the grounds, and the buildings of the palace covered a wide area. The organisation for defence was defective. The guard du corps were trustworthy but not numerous. The king gave few orders, and those benevolent or timid. The unrest and pressure of the mob was irresistible. In the early hours of the morning, a determined group of men got into the palace, and immediately began to force their way towards the queen's apartment. As the 6th of October opened, a scene of great excitement took place within the palace. Guard du corps were cut down while protecting the queen's flight to the king's apartments. Lafayette was sent for in haste, and some sort of order was restored. But meanwhile the mob had invaded the main courtyard, and it required all of Lafayette's great popularity and tact to avert a fatal outbreak. As it was, he persuaded Louis that the only course was to accept the popular demand for his removal to Paris. He harangued the mob. He induced the king and queen to show themselves at a window. He gracefully kissed the queen's hand, and he eventually prevailed. At noon Paris began to flow back from Versailles to the capital once more. But now Louis and his family were in the midst of the throng. In a great lumbering coach surrounded by the populace, Louis and his wife and children were proceeding from the palace of Versailles to that of the Tuileries. An epoch of French history was coming to a close. The Austrian princess, looking out and seeing a man of the people riding on the steppe of her coach, declared contemptuously that this was the first occasion on which an individual not wearing knee-bridges, an individual sans coulotte, had occupied so honorable a position. The cry of sans coulotte was taken up and approved on the spot as the symbol of worthy citizenship. But the Kant phrase that belongs most closely to the event of the 6th of October was that whereby the Parisians declared triumphantly that they had now brought into their midst la boulanger, la boulangère, et le petit mitron, the baker, the baker's wife, and the little cookboy. End of chapter six. Chapter seven of the French Revolution. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Richard Aughty. The French Revolution by Robert Madison Johnston. Chapter seven. The assembly demolishes privilege. In the preceding chapter stress has been laid on the economic causes that had led to the rooting up of the bourbon from Versailles. In this one the political significance of the event must be accentuated. In the history of the revolution it is always so. The political and the economic factors are constantly fusing the one in the other. In a sense what had happened was that the poor people, the democracy let us say of Paris, had now got the king in the city and under their influence. Not only the king but also the assembly. For it had followed Louis and was installed in a building adjacent to the Tuileries. And the assembly became quickly conscious of the fact that Paris was now unduly weighing on the representation of France and under the lead of Mirabeau attempted to assert itself. This was the first feeble step towards the assumption of power that culminated three years later in the appointment of the Committee of Public Safety. The assembly assumed a middle position between the king on the one hand and the mob on the other. It voted the change of Louis's title from King of France by the Grace of God to King of the French by virtue of the Constitution. It repressed disorder by proclaiming martial law but in the continuation of its constitutional debates it asserted unequivocally its middle class composition. A handful of Democrats Robespierre, Grégoire and less than a dozen others pleaded the rights of the many but the assembly declined to listen to them and confirmed by a nearly unanimous vote the recommendations of its committees for drawing up the Declaration of Rights and Constitution. The greater part of French citizens were thereby declared to have only passive not active rights and were excluded from the franchise. The qualification for voting was placed at the paying of taxes equal to three days labour and for being a deputy paying in taxes one mark of silver about 54 francs. The outcry against this legislation was so loud and so widespread as to show what genuine political aspirations were to be found in the mass of the Parisian population. The greater part of that population was excluded from voting. For to say nothing of the fact that about 120,000 inhabitants were classed as paupers it so happened that the capitation tax had been remitted for a term of years leaving only the well-to-do shopkeeper some part of the professional and the capitalist class on the voter's list. Workmen of the Faux-Bourg Saint-Antoine signed a petition to be allowed to pay taxes so as to obtain a vote. Robespierre, a narrow, prudish, jealous, puritanical but able lawyer from Ara with journalists like de Moulin and L'Ouestalot invade against what they described as iniquitous class legislation that would have excluded from the councils of the French nation Jean-Jacques Rousseau and even that pauvre Saint-Coulotte, Jesus Christ. But the assembly was obturant and in fact remained middle class in its point of view all through the revolution except when irresistible pressure was brought to bear against it. The journalists however tended far more rapidly towards democracy than the deputies. Journalism had sprung from the events of July. The pamphlets of Camille de Moulin had by a natural metamorphosis become journals after that date. Their popularity did not however attain that of L'Ouestalot's Révolution de Paris of which one number is said to have reached a circulation of 200,000. Maraz Amid du Purple, first published in September, soon became the most formidable organ of opinion and remained so until the rise of Ebert and his atrocious paire duchenne at a later period. These papers and their editors played a great part and will often be noticed but for the present all that need be said is that their rise at this period is one of the symptoms of the tremendous change that had come over the city of Paris. Paris before 1789 was in a sense medieval, provincial. Although the largest city of France, it's capital, the centre of thought and art, the resort of many French and foreign visitors, the city was still in a way a local centre and isolated, unrelated with the rest of France. The court did not reside there. The administration, especially of justice, was in large measure decentralised and Paris was the abode of the Parisian almost in the same narrow sense that the province was the abode of the provincial but now all this was rapidly changing. The arrival of the court and of the national assembly suddenly made of Paris the heart of France. The fever of revolution made that heart beat faster and a rapid current of the best lifeblood of the nation began circulating from the provinces to Paris and from Paris back again to the provinces, bringing energy and a broadening of sympathy with it. A different glance is taken at Europe during the same period. During the 25 years that follow the outbreak of the French Revolution the same process may be seen at work but on a larger scale. The old stagnation, the feudal congestion of Germany and Italy, the immobility of the population is broken through. The old barriers are shaken down. Great centralised states sending official, economic and national actions sweeping back and forth. Great armies tramped through the whole breadth of Europe. Roads are built in all directions to facilitate their movements. People begin to know one another, to mix, to form larger conceptions of humanity. The most potent of the agencies that affected this change in Paris was the direct work of the deputies themselves. The move to the capital had been attended by the formation of several well-marked currents of opinion among the deputies. One of these had been a movement of protest, of protest and in part of timidity. The violence and compulsion applied to the king and all the removal to Paris implied under such circumstances had led to the withdrawal of about 200 members of the assembly. Of these, Mounier was the chief. He returned to his province of Dauphiné and attempted to provoke constitutional action to free the king from the domination of Paris. His efforts were unsuccessful and he eventually had to leave the country. This group, however, of which Mounier was the boldest member, represented merely a negative force, dispersion. Another equally large stood for something more concrete. The club Briton began to develop very rapidly after the removal to Paris. Its members, styling themselves Amis de la Constitution, eventually settled themselves in quarters conveniently near the palace at the Jacobin Monastery. Here the club quickly became a debating association and the headquarters of a party. Early in 1790 it began to develop a system of affiliating clubs all through France and by August of that year had planted 150 Jacobin colonies in direct correspondence with the Mother Society. By 1794 this number had grown to a thousand and Jacobinism had become a creed. But in 1789 and 1790 the Jacobins were as yet moderate in their views. They were the men who wanted to create a constitution under the monarchy. They were presided during that period by such men as the Duke de Noy, the Duke de Guillaume and Mirabeau. Mirabeau stood out in the assembly as the one constructive statesman, the one man who might bridge the gulf that still separated the deputies from the responsibility of power and the practice of government. If a constitutional or parliamentary ministry were possible, if both King and Assembly would recognise in that the practical step towards re-establishing order and making reform effective, Mirabeau was the necessarily leader of such a ministry. In the period that followed the arrival of the King in Paris he amply demonstrated both his qualifications and his defects for such a position. Urgent questions pressed the Assembly from all sides and in debating them Mirabeau took a lion's share. Finance was the most urgent of all. Nécoe could do no more. A fundamental remedy for the needs of the Exchequer must be found. On the 7th of October the Assembly had voted that the crown lands should become the property of the nation, in return for which a civil list would be assigned to the King. Three days later, Taliroon Perigor, the sceptical but able Bishop of Hautea, proposed that the property of the church should be similarly dealt with. This was in one sense, as the previous step had been, the assertion of the national interest over the special privilege. In another sense it was merely one step more in those numerous secularizations of church property which the utilitarian and unreligious 18th century had carried out. It was proposed to take over for the use of the state all the property of the church and in return to pay salaries to its priests. This represented the acquisition of real property valued at the capital sum of 2,100,000 of francs. But as it only brought in capital value, not cash in hand, it did not afford any immediate relief for the needs of the government. Then another expedient was tried. The appeal for patriotic gifts and that, though it resulted in a good deal of patriotic emotionalism, did little to fill the yawning gulf of bankruptcy. Finally, in December drastic measures were taken. Some of the state's payments were provisionally suspended. The sale of church and other lands to the value of 400 millions was ordered. A loan of 80 millions was sanctioned and 400 millions of assignments were issued. The assignments in this first form was an inchoate mortgage bond. It bore interest, it was guaranteed by the state, it purported to be secured in a general way on the national property and it was to circulate as money and to be accepted in payment for the national lands. If it had been strictly secured on a close valuation and by a registered claim against specified property, it would doubtless have given a permanent support to the finances of the government. As it was it proved at first a successful step and it was only by gradual stages and from unwise measures that it eventually failed. In April 1790, assignments were made legal tender. A few months later they ceased to bear interest. In other words, those still bonds on their face, they really became paper money. In September 1790, another 800 millions were issued and in June another 600 and in small denominations and from that moment they began to sink in value rapidly. Until the month of January 1791, they stood at over 90. In July 1791 they were at 87. During 1792 to 3, years of the greatest crisis, they fell fast. In 1795 they had almost lost value and during the directoire period the assignage becomes almost worthless. One recorded transaction giving 3,080 francs in paper for 20 in gold. Behind the financial policy of the assembly was millable. He had long been connected with the bankers and promoters of Paris. Had produced pamphlets to serve their financial projects. The bond issues of the assembly and the probable sales of large blocks of real property were of great interest to these groups and Mirabeau was their natural connecting link with the assembly. He was the strongest advocate of the assignage measures and whatever interest his friends took in them, it need not be doubted that he believed them salutary and wise. The court in its new perplexity, helplessly entangled in Paris, having learned just a little from experience, now turned to Mirabeau for assistance. He secretly advised that the king should take the initiative and should put forward the policy of a moderate constitution on the English model with a responsible ministry. If this brought on a conflict or if his situation otherwise made it advisable to leave Paris, he should seek refuge in the well-disposed province of Normandy and not with the army on the German frontier. The advice of Mirabeau was not unsound but it implied as a step the formation of a Mirabeau Necker Lafayette ministry. But Mirabeau was too much handicapped by his past. The assembly viewed him with rooted suspicion and dislike and for this reason the court could not have chosen a worse agent. At the end of November the assembly voted decrees excluding its members from the king's ministry, thus barring Mirabeau's path and thus accentuating once more its own destructive attitude towards the government. If it would not participate even indirectly in the executive, it was partly because it was at heart anxious to pull that executive down to earth. Notwithstanding this check, Mirabeau continued to impose on the assembly by his tremendous personality and by his statesmanship. He struggled hard in the early part of 1790 to bring the deputies into line on a question of foreign affairs that then arose, the Newt-Cassan question. This involved all the traditions of France's foreign policy and her system of alliances, the Pact de Famille. But the assembly saw merely a text on which to formulate the limitations it intended to impose on the royal power in the matter of foreign relations. At this moment the court had renewed its clandestine communications with Mirabeau. There was even one secret interview between him and the queen, and large sums were given him as payment for his advice. These sums he squandered profusely, thus advertising a fact that was already more than suspected by the public and rapidly destroying his hold on opinion. The winter was a much milder one than the preceding. Food was less scarce, money more plentiful owing to the issue of assignments, public confidence greatly increased. But the tension between the king and the assembly did not relax. There was no serious attempt on either side to take advantage of the improved situation for affecting a reconciliation. The assembly, legislated against the members of the aristocracy, who, following the example of the Comte d'Artois, had emigrated. Instead of helping the government to enforce police measures that would have made their residence in France secure, it decreed the confiscation of their rents unless they returned within three months. This was the first of a long series of laws aimed against the emigrate. Turning from one privileged order to the other, the assembly continued the attacks on the fabric of the church, which had been begun by the churchmen themselves in August and October 1789. The surrender of the tithes, 70 million francs annually, had told most heavily against the poor country priest and in favour of the landowner who bore the burden of his salary. The taking over of the church lands by the state had been most felt by the higher ecclesiastics and the monastic orders. In February 1790 the latter were suppressed and their members were relieved of their vows by the assembly, which had now frankly embarked on an anti-clerical policy. It would not recognise of itself that it was less representative of France in the matter of religion than in any other, for it was the intellectual and professional class only, to which nearly all the deputies belonged that was Voltaire or anti-Catholic. The mass of the people of France was still attached to their ancient faith. During the protracted debates that took place on the church question in the spring of 1790, the assembly attempted several times to evade the question of the Catholic members as to whether or not it would recognise the existence of the church. At last, with great reluctance, in June the assembly voted that the Catholic religion was that of France, but it followed this up by passing what was known as the constitution civil du clergé. This decree provided that all priests should receive their salaries from the state, that the old dioceses of France should be broken up and made to fit the new departmental division that had supplanted the old provincial one, that the bishop should be created by the vote of the electors of his department, and that the pope should exercise no authority over bishops or priests. It needs but little acquaintance with history to realise how willfully subversive this plan was. The maintenance of the clergy by the tithes placed it outside the sphere of government control and helped to maintain the ancient Roman internationalism, whereas the breaking off of the pope's direct connection with the bishops was Galicanism of the most pronounced character. Pope Pius VI unequivocally declared that the carrying through of any such law in France would amount to a schism and transmitted that opinion to Louis XVI. The falseness of the king's position was made intolerable by their dilemma in which he was now placed. There was as yet no formal constitution, only a revolutionary situation in which the assembly had usurped a large part of the king's prerogative. It was however virtually accepted by both sides that under the constitution, when passed, the king should have the power of veto, and by tacit accord that arrangement had been from the first put into force. The assembly voted decrees and sent them to the king for his signature, but in reality the veto even before its strict constitutional existence was little more than a sham. The situation was revolutionary. Both parties were hostile and almost without exception every signature of the king was an act of moral compulsion. In the two however his acceptance of the situation had not involved more than bowing before a political storm. Now the matter was graver. The question was of schism and therefore of heresy. Louis was a faithful believer in the Roman theology as well as in the divine right of kings, and he struggled hard to withhold his signature from the civil constitution of the clergy, and when after some weeks he finally gave in it was under protest. From that moment he adopted the attitude of the man acting under restraint who ascribed no binding force to acts and deeds resulting from compulsion. The acceptance of the civil constitution of the clergy by the king did not conclude the matter. Furious protests arose. In the south of France, bishops, priests and national guards for some weeks threatened an outbreak of religious war. The assembly met this disorder more firmly than that proceeding from economic and political reasons. Towards the close of the year it imposed on the clergy an oath of adhesion to the civil constitution, and this only four bishops were found to accept. In January 1791 elections were ordered fulfilling the places of those members of the church who had refused the oath and presently France found herself with two bodies of clergy official and non-official constitutional and anti-constitutional. To close a chapter dealing so largely with the destructive efforts of the middle class assembly against the prerogatives of the king and of the two privileged orders it may be noted that on the 19th of June 1790 on the proposal of members of the nobility all titles were abolished. Hereafter Mirabeau is Honoré Riquetti, the Sirevon Compte de Mirabeau, and Camille Desmoulins, prompt, picturesque, and impertinent, logically applies the process to the king himself, and rechristen's Louis Monsieur Capet Léné. End of chapter seven. Chapter eight of the French Revolution. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Michael Fascio. The French Revolution by Robert Madison Johnston. Chapter eight. The Flight to Varend. On the 14th of July 1790 was held the first great festival of the revolution, the Federation of the National Guards at the Chendimar in Paris. Federation was the name that had been given all through France the previous year to district or departmental gatherings or reviews, at which the newly raised National Guards had paraded and, with great ceremony, sworn patriotic oaths. This was now repeated on a grander and more centralized scale to commemorate the fall of the Bastille twelve months before. On military exercise ground just outside Paris, 14,000 National Guards assembled. An altar was erected at which Talleyrand, Bishop of Auton, and Deputy, officiated. Lafayette led the military procession. Louis was made to play an almost subordinate role. The National Guards took an oath of fidelity to Lafayette, the law and Louis the 16th. The gradation was intended and significant. The festival was, in a sense, merely an echo of the policy which the Assembly was pursuing in regard to the Army. The Army was a great factor in the situation. Sooner or later, as in most revolutions, it was likely to prove the decisive one. From the first, the pressure of the armed force on Paris had acted as a powerful irritant, and in reducing the power of the King, nothing seemed more important than to detach the Army from its allegiance. The mutiny and desertion of July 1789 gave the Assembly a good starting point. In the spring of 1790, the troops were placed under oath to obey the law and the King, and not to act against the citizens. This, however, was not decisive, for on the northeastern frontier, far from Paris, among the fortresses of Alsace and Lorraine, a considerable part of the Army was assembled. There, French and foreign regiments were well mixed, a spree decor was maintained, staunch loyalists were in command, and it was conceivable that the troops would respond to Louis' appeal if the King summoned them to his help. So thought Marat and many others. The author of the Amie du Poble voiced the popular fear that the Army on the northeastern frontier would destroy the national cause. Everything in Marat's career tended to make him the accredited prophet of the reign of suspicion now fast becoming established. He had, during many years, studied science and philosophy, and had acquired the knack of writing while unsuccessfully knocking at the doors of the academies. The outbreak of the revolution found him soured, and ready to turn a venomous pen against all detainers of power. A morbid streak fast developed into a mania of persecution and suspicion, and it was by giving free reign to his imagination in that respect that he came into line with the frenzy of starving women and declaiming demagogues ready to believe every accusation and to rend every a capore. Marat's violence had become so great shortly after the taking of the Bastille that he had been preceded against by the new municipality of Paris. He then began a life of hiding, flitting obscurely from point to point, dwelling in cellars, even at one time concealing himself in a drain. For a few weeks he fled to London, but in the spring of 1790 he was back in Paris, and at the crisis of the mid-summer he published a violent pamphlet, son effet de nœud. It's all up with us. In which he hysterically demanded the massacre of all traitors and conspirators as the only means of preserving Paris from the vengeance of the king and the operations of his army. The assembly denounced the pamphlet and steps were taken for the prosecution of its author. Marat had chosen the moment of his denunciations badly, for within a few days of the publication of his pamphlet the army had broken out an open mutiny against its generals. Boulay, a staunch royalist and experienced soldier, was in command. His men were being gradually demoralized by democratic propaganda. At last, on the 31st of August, several regiments in garrison at Nancy broke out in mutiny. Boulay displayed great vigor in dealing with the difficult and dangerous crisis. He forced his way into Nancy after severe fighting, and dealt summarily with the offenders when once he had reigned control. One French regiment he disbanded. The Swiss regiment of Chateauvue, he handed over to a court-martial of its officers, who ordered a great number of their men to be shot, or to be sent to the galleys. These events caused great excitement. The assembly, now alarmed at the result of its own work of disintegration, passed a formal vote of thanks to Boulay. The democratic party, however, took the opposite side, strongly led by the court-à-laires, a popular sectional club. Noisy demonstrations followed in favor of the defeated soldiers, and license and discipline were extolled as the virtues of free men. This, more than anything else, broke down the old royal army, and from this moment the cavalry and infantry officers began to throw up their commissions and emigrate. And, incidentally, another fragment of the old regime disappeared in the same storm. Necker, still a royal minister, unimportant and discredited, was mobbed on the 2nd of September, and as a result resigned and ingloriously left France for his native Switzerland. Until the winter of 1790 the revolution had not shown signs of becoming anti-monarchical, but at the turn of the year republicanism at last raised its head. In the attitude of the French towards this question one must bear in mind the historical precedents before them. French opinion was strongly impregnated with the apparent lessons of the great revolution that had occurred in England a little more than one hundred years before. There a republic, founded in revolt from incompetent monarchy, had failed, and had made way for a military dictatorship, which also had failed, to be replaced by the restored monarchy. And, last of all, eventual success had come from a bargain or compromise between the upper and middle class on the one hand and the king on the other. This was a historical precedent best known and generally uppermost in the minds of the men of the National Assembly. But there was another precedent, that of the American Revolution, and attended in the opposite direction. Few indeed perceived that Washington had succeeded where Cromwell had failed, and the event was too near in time, too distant in space, too remote in surroundings to have as much bearing as it should. Yet the impression made was considerable. Benjamin Franklin's picturesque and worthy republicanism was not forgotten. His plain clothes and robust scents, his cheerful refrain of It's All Right, so soon to be the song of the French Republicans themselves. The men of Rochambeau's army, too, had caught the infection, had seen republicanism in war, the brave and capable commanding whatever their station in life, and in that army were many rankers, held down by the bourbon regime, who were soon to become the victorious generals of the French Republic. Again the constitutional documents of the Americans had been consulted, studied, declarations of right, state constitutions, and all this tended toward republicanism. Yet even the American example did not mean republicanism in the democratic sense, and the movement that became so marked about December 1790 was distinctly towards a democratic republic. Many prominent journalists were of that way of thought. Des Moulins had been, even, in 1789. The franchise restrictions which the assembly was drafting into the constitution gave the papers a good text. It was pointed out that where at all Frenchmen had been admitted to vote for the state general, under the proposed constitution there would be but two million voters. Why should not the poor man have a vote? Why should not even women have a vote? Should there not be a quality of rights and no invidious distinctions? Pamphlets began to appear in favor of a republic. Popular societies were formed and became the vogue, with a program of universal suffrage and fraternization as a social characteristic. Women, occasionally children, were admitted. The members called one another brother and sister, having discarded more formal modes of address. Popular banquets were held. The influence of women, of which something has already been said, was widened by the action of these societies. That influence a little later tended to give the revolution the hysterical turn which it took. The professional politicians showed little inclination to follow the lead of the société populaire. The assembly remained rigidly middle class in its attitude. The Jacobin Club maintained the same position, although a few of its members were now inclining towards democracy, and one of them, Robespierre, not quite so isolated as a few months earlier, came forward as its official mouthpiece. In April 1791 he issued a speech, printed in pamphlet form in which he ably argued the case for democratic suffrage. He was hailed as the champion and friend of the poor man, the apostle of fraternity. Since he had been compelled to accept the civil constitution of the clergy, the king's revolt had become more marked. He declared to his friends that he would sooner be king of Metz than the king of France under such terms. The rise of the democratic movement in the winter had not tended to allay his fears, and by the spring of 1791 he was decided, so far as it was in his nature ever to be decided, to remove from Paris and find some way out of his difficulties. His hopes of escape centered on the northeastern frontier. There, at Metz, two hundred miles from Paris were the headquarters of the energetic boulet, and beyond Metz was the Rhine, where the Emperor Leopold, his brother-in-law, was already assembling troops that might prove a further support. With such an outlook it was natural that the court, and in this case the court meant the Queen, should attempt to concert measures with Vienna. The Phantom of the Austrian Alliance, so detested at the time of the Seven Years' War, was reappearing. Marie Antoinette held numerous conferences with the foreign ambassadors on the subject, and wrote frequent letters to her brother invoking his aid, all of which was more or less suspected or known by the public outside the palace walls. Paris was indeed guarding her king very jealously. Marat constantly preached suspicion. Zealous sections formed watch committees that kept the palace under keen observation. If the king attempted to leave Paris, violence must be used to keep him there. Royalists offered their protection to the king, and in February a bad brawl took place within the palace walls between the two factions. Incidents kept occurring. In March the assembly voted that the king was the first public functionary, and therefore, like other functionaries, responsible for carrying out certain duties. One of these was declared to be that he must reside within twenty leagues of the assembly. This measure wasn't one sense restrictive. In another it seemed slightly to loosen the king's fetters. To test whether he could not take advantage of this decree to enlarge his radius of movement, it was decided that Louis should attempt an afternoon's excursion as far as St. Cloud. In all this matter Mirabeau had been consulted. His advice had been constant and correct. If the king would make his departure from Paris coincide with taking the lead in a real reform, he might get most support, and rouse least opposition by going to Rouen, the capital of Normandy, a very accessible point. To go to Metz was to touch the self-same cord that had whipped Paris into open revolt in July 1789. But although Mirabeau's advice was asked, what he said was only half listened to, no one could trust him now, and no one could believe him, and besides, he was dying. Battling in the assembly for measures of constructive statesmanship, spending his life outside with profusal extravagance, his vitality was now gone, and a fever carried him off on the 2nd of April. His death caused a great sensation, though few would say a word of praise for the great orator. He realized that his death removed the last possible hope for the monarchy, and Louis himself, when Marie Antoinette showed her satisfaction at the news, rebuked her and declared that he had lost a friend. Friendless, what could Louis do now? The obscure Robespierre torches, fanatical and tenacious, had risen to importance. Hitherto, the giant Mirabeau, had held down the smaller man in his little group by his breath, his vigor, and his crushing apostrophes. Now that Mirabeau was gone, Robespierre suddenly appeared almost the first figure of the assembly, and Robespierre stood for the rising tide of democracy. What could Louis do? To escape from Paris seemed the only course. The king had occasionally been to St. Cloud in the year 1790, and the recent edict of the assembly formally assured his freedom of movement for a much greater distance. It only remained a test whether the people of Paris would attempt to restrain him from acting in a manner that was customary and within his constitutional rights. The test proved conclusive. A large mob, including a number of national guards, assembled at the palace on Easter Sunday. It had been announced that on this day the king would visit St. Cloud to hear mass performed by priests who had not accepted the civil constitution. He was not allowed to proceed. After sitting in his carriage, several hours awaiting the moment when the mob would give him passage, he returned to his apartments, defeated. Louis was a prisoner. Not only was he a prisoner, but he was compelled by the assembly to have within the palace only priests whom he considered schismatic, and compelled to appear in the assembly and there declare solemnly that he was a free agent and enjoyed entire liberty of action. This drove him to a definite purpose, and preparations were now secretly begun for the flight to Metz. On the 20th of June the attempt was made. The king's brother, the Comte Provence, who afterwards became Louis the Eighteenth, managed to escape well, and was driven over the frontier into the Netherlands, an experience he was to repeat in 1815. The king's arrangements had been placed in the hands of a Swedish nobleman attached to the queen, Count Fersen. False passports were obtained. The royal family was smuggled out of the palace in disguise. Several bodyguards dressed as couriers acted as escort. A large traveling carriage was ready. A start was successfully made on the great northeastern road. All went prosperously until the fugitives reached Ferenne, a village in the frontier district not more than 15 miles from Verdun, where Bouli had a strong garrison. At this point the scheme broke down. Bouli should have been able to place a large cavalry escort about the king's carriage at Ferenne, but his arrangements were defective and went wrong. This was not altogether his fault, for Louis had wasted much precious time on the way, and had shown no sense of the resolution required by the circumstances. And lastly the patriots had discovered who the traveler was. The postmaster of St. Minnehuild had recognized the king, had ridden on ahead, had aroused the National Guard of Ferenne, and now the game was up. After a slight skirmish between the detachment of Bouli's cavalry and the National Guard of Ferenne, Louis was started back for Paris, surrounded by armed contingents from all the nearby villages. The whole course of the revolution had for an instant wavered, hesitating whether to turn this way or that. Now it had turned in a direction that could not be mistaken. Louis himself, speaking to one of the officials of Ferenne, said to him, if we return to Paris, we shall die. He was early on the morning of the twenty-fourth stabune that Paris learned that the king had left the capital. Intense excitement resulted. No doubt could be felt as to the significance of the event. The king himself had taken care that there should be none by leaving behind a lengthy proclamation of which the upshot was that all the decrees he had signed were null and void because of compulsion. The people answered this in the way that might be expected. Every emblem of royalty was torn down through the city. The assembly was in a state of the greatest uncertainty. It had two dangers to face, one from the king, immediate, another from the people, less immediate yet calling for much prudence. In this moment of crisis and doubt numerous solutions of the political problem were put forward, of which several demand noticed. Marat, in La Mille du peuple, declared that a military dictator was the only remedy for the situation, a curiously logical perception of what was to be the outcome of the revolution. This opinion did not obtain any success. The Duke de Orleans proposed another solution. This personage was the head of the branch of the French bourbons that stood next to that holding the throne. He had long been on bad terms with the court and had assiduously cultivated popularity among the Parisians. During the winter of 1788-89 he had spent much money and effort in charity and the relief of distress, and had his reward on the assembly of the state's general, at which, while the queen was received in Stoney's silence, he had met with an ovation. He did his best to create an Orléans party, to push for the throne, and devoted to the purpose the large sums of money which his great fortune placed at his disposal. At every crisis in the revolution small groups, mostly subsidized, attempted to provoke demonstrations in his favour. And now, on the 21st of June, with the throne derelict, he thought his opportunity had come, and ostentatiously paraded through the central quarters of the city in hopes of a popular movement. But the popular movement would not come. The Duke was too well understood. His vices were too well known. His treachery to his cousin aroused no enthusiasm. The people wanted a more complete solution. That more complete solution was voiced by the club of the court-a-lairs, and by its formidable spokesman, Danton. Like Mirabeau, Danton was of large physique and stentorian voice, an orator by nature, a man who's unusual afar from handsome features fascinated the crowd. But, unlike his great predecessor, he could hold the affection of the people. Indeed, he proved one of the few conspicuous leaders against whom the people did not turn on the day of going to the guillotine. A lawyer, and of a lawyer's family, he was in lucrative practice when the revolution broke out, a fine advocate, not overscrupulous in method, flexible, but large in view, generous in heart, irresistible in courage, strong in political instincts, a man of the greatest possibilities. He espoused the popular cause, and the popular cause in the democratic sense. He stood for the sections against the Central Commune. He defeated Marat and the liberty of the press. He opposed the bourgeois regime and Lafayette at every step. He led the battalion of the Cordillaires section to the Tuileries to prevent Louis's visit to St. Cloud in April 1791. Such was the man who now headed a deputation of the Cordillaires Club to the Assembly and presented a petition demanding the deposition of Louis XVI. The demand of the Cordillaires for the deposition of the King was not the thing to please the Assembly. The situation was doubly difficult, for apart from the uncertainty as to the whereabouts of the King and the possibility of civil war, there was a difficulty in regard to the Constitution. For two years past the Assembly had been laboring hard to complete the work it had sworn to accomplish by the Oath of the Jeu de Paume. That work was now nearly completed, but was almost as unpopular with the masses as it was hateful to the King. It had not even been elaborated in the spirit of compromise between the extreme claims of autocracy, on the one hand, and of democracy on the other, but was frankly middle-class legislation. But the King was an essential part of the constitutional mechanism, and his flight had occurred just in time to wreck the Constitution as it was coming into port. That was the prevailing sentiment of the members of the Assembly. When on the 24th it was known that Louis had been stopped and was returning to Paris, the relief of the deputies was great. Their long labored Constitution was safe, after all. It was not till the next day that the royal family reached the capital, and before their arrival more than one exciting scene occurred. The Duc Liorlion was admitted a member of the Jacobin Club. Danton, apparently not unfriendly for the moment to Diorlion, harangued the Jacobins in favor of the appointment of a regency. But the Assembly maintained a negative attitude. It seized control of the administration by ordering the ministers, now little more than chief clerks and departments, to report to it for orders, and for the rest awaited the return of the King. On the 25th Louis and his family reached Paris. The whole population turned out to watch his return, but it gave him no greeting. The crowd, obeying a common instinct, received the King in dead silence. Not a voice was heard. Not a hat was raised, as Louis once more passed into his palace of the Tuileries. CHAPTER IX. War breaks out. From the 25th of June to the 17th of July the conflict between the middle class and the Democratic Party continued with great intensity. Louis was in reality less the object than the pretext of their quarrel. The court-a-lairs urged that France and not the Assembly should pronounce the King's fate and to effect that it would be necessary to proceed to referendum to demand a popular vote. But this was precisely what the Constitution refused to permit, and hence the demand was in reality an attack on the Constitution. Day after day the agitation grew, changing slightly in form. Finally the Democrats decided on a monster petition to be signed at the altar of the Chant de Mar on the 17th of July. Danton himself stood at one of the corners of the platform that day to help on the signing of the protest of the Parisian democracy. But Bailey, Lafayette, and the mass of the Assembly had decided on a policy of repression. The National Guards arrived in strong force. Confusion followed, volleys were fired. The mob, after losing many dead, fled for safety. Danton, escaping, left Paris and proceeded to London, where he remained until the storm had blown over. By this stroke the Assembly for the moment retained control. But the situation was profoundly changed. If Danton and the popular insurrectional force were for the moment defeated, Robespierre and intellectual democracy were making rapid headway. The center of gravity of revolutionary opinion was shifting in his direction. Just before the crisis the Jacobins had been invaded by a palais royal mob who had hooded down the constitutionalist speakers and imposed their opinion on the club. This led to disruption. The moderate Jacobins left and, at the neighboring Foulon, founded a new society that was gradually to become more and more retrograde. The few advanced Jacobins retained possession of the old club, with its great affiliation of country clubs, infused a radical element into its membership, and soon, making of Robespierre its mouthpiece and its profit, advanced in the direction of imposing his doctrine of political salvation on France. Meanwhile the Assembly, with its constitutional keystone securely locked up in the Tuileries, was hastening to profit by its victory. The opportunity for completing the constitution might never recur, and was eagerly seized. Louis, a necessary prop to the elaborate structure devised by the wisdom of the deputies, was deliberately made use of. Discredited, a virtual prisoner, finished as a monarch, he was converted into a constitutional fiction, and was compelled by his circumstances to resume the farce of kingship, and to put his signature to the constitution, which, on the 3rd of September, was sent to him. The constitution of 1791 was compounded partly of political theory, partly of revolutionary effort, of desire to pull down the prerogatives of the monarchy in favor of the middle class. It was prefaced by a declaration of the rights of man that stamps the whole as a piece of class legislation. By this, all Frenchmen were guaranteed certain fundamental rights of justice, of opinion, of speech, of opportunity. These were passive rights. There were, however, active rights as well, and those were reserved for a privileged class. Only those paying taxes equivalent to three days labor had active political rights, that is, the right to vote. In primary and secondary assemblies they were to elect the 750 deputies who were to constitute the sole representative chamber. This chamber was to sit for two years, the king having no authority to dissolve or prorogate, and it was to possess full legislative power subject to the king's suspensive veto. The king was chief executive official, with a large power of appointment, and general control of matters of foreign policy. He was not to choose his ministers from among the deputies, and he lost all direct administrative control in the local sense. The intendents and the provinces and the generalities were gone. Instead of them was a new territorial division into departments in which local elective self-government was established. Communes and departments were to choose their own governing committees, and the old centralized administration of the Bourbons had for the moment to make way for an opposite conception of government. The signing of the Constitution by the king brought it into effect, and thereby an election became necessary for constituting the new representative body, a body that was to be known as the legislative. Before leaving, its parent body, however, that began as stage general, became a national assembly and was later known as a constituant, a word or two maybe added to emphasize points not yet sufficiently indicated. The assembly changed an opinion and attitude during the course of its history, and was vastly different in September 1791 from what it had been in May 1789. It did achieve the purpose of translating a large part of the demands of the Cahiers into legislative enactments, yet it did not learn the meaning of the word toleration, and it did not pave the way for liberty, but only for a doctrine of liberty. The elections to the Legislative took place in September, under the influence of several cross currents of opinion. There was a slight reaction among certain classes in Paris in favor of the king, and several demonstrations took place which an abler and more active monarch might have turned to advantage. On the other hand, the Jacobin Club attempted to use its machinery to influence the action of the electoral meetings. As a result, when the deputies met on the first of October, it was calculated that about 400 belonged to the floating central mass, 136 to the Jacobins, that is, Jacobins and the new Robespierre Danton since, 264 to the Foulon. Among the latter there was a general inclination towards a policy of rehabilitating the royal power. The personnel of the new assembly differed totally from that of its predecessor, because of a self-denying ordinance whereby the members of the constituant had excluded themselves from the new assembly. Yet, there were many notable men among the new deputies, nearly all, however, Jacobins. Brissaut, the journalist, soon to be a leader of a wing of the party that detaches itself from the one that follows Robespierre, Bernaud, great as an orator, Isnard, Guadet, Jensen, Condorcet, Marquis, and mathematician, philosopher, physicist and republican, noble mind and practical thinker, Cambon, stalwart in politics as in finance, Couton, hostile to Brissaut, later to become one of the Robespierre triumvirate. This Jacobin group nearly at once established its influence over the more flaccid part of the assembly. Through its club organization it packed the public galleries of the house, and from that point directed the current of opinion from the judicious application of applause or disapproval. This was reinforced by the appell nominal, the manner of voting whereby each individual deputy could be compelled to enter the speaker's rostrum and there declare and explain his vote. To check the effects of this dominating party there was little but the inertia of the court and what the fulant might accomplish. Bailey, Lafayette, La Meff, La Rochefoucauld, Lyon-Court, Clermont-Tonaire were among the conspicuous men of the club, but whatever their worth most of them were associated with a too narrow, unyielding attitude to obtain any wide support. The popular force was not behind them, but for the moment behind the Jacobins, and the instant the Jacobins became engaged in a struggle against the fulant, it pushed against the latter and presently toppled them over. Had the fulant and the court come together there was yet a chance that the tide would be stemmed, but that proved impossible. To the royal family, foreign help, foreign intervention appeared the only chance of relief, and Marie Antoinette had long been urging her brother Leopold to come to her assistance. No chorus could have been more fatal, and the more probable intervention became, the more the Democratic Party appeared a patriotic party, and the more the king and queen seemed traitors to the national cause. It was the foreign question that immediately engrossed the chief attention of the legislative, and the foreign question always led back to the great internal one represented by the king. At Koblen's, in the dominions of the Archbishop of Trierre, the Comte Provence had set up what was virtually a government of his own. The emigres had 3,000 or 4,000 men under arms, and a royal council organized, all that was necessary to administer France if she could be regained. The legislative now aimed a blow at them. The emigres were to return to France before the 1st of January 1792, and those failing to do this were to be punishable by death. The decree was sent to the king, who, unwilling to sign, is sent to the death of his brother and nobles, used his constitutional right of veto. This was the beginning of a conflict between the Assembly and the King, a struggle that showed the determination of the former not to recognize the right of veto prescribed by the constitution. The legislative followed its attack on the emigres by one on the priests. The clergy was discontented, and in the west showed signs of inciting the peasantry to revolt. It was therefore decreed that every member of the clergy might be called on to take the oath to the civil constitution. This again the King vetoed, encouraged in his attitude by the fulon. The old struggle was being renewed. Jackabins and fulon were fighting one another over the person of the King. There was one question, however, on which the fulon and Bressot's wing of the Jackabins agreed. Both wanted war. Lafayette, chief figure among the fulon, had sunk rapidly in popularity since his repression of the mob in July. In October he had resigned his command of the National Guard. In November he had been defeated by the Jackabin Petion for the mayoralty of Paris. He now hoped for a military command and saw in war the opportunity for consolidating a victorious army by means of which the king and constitution might be imposed on Paris. Bressot, ambitious and self-confident, his head turned at the prospect of a conflagration, saw in a European war a field large enough in which to develop his untried statesmanship. The pretext for war lay ready to hand. There was not only the tense situation arising between Austria and France because of the relation between the two reigning families, but there was also acute friction over certain territories belonging to German sovereign princes, such as those of Somme or Montpellard, that were enclaved within the French border. Could the extinction of the feudal rights hold over such territory as German princes held within the borders of France? Such was the vexatious question which those princes were carrying to their supreme tribunal, that of the emperor at Vienna. The opposition to the war was not so weighty. Louis realized the danger clearly enough and knew that Austrian success would be visited on his head. Yet he was so helpless that he had to call the Fuyant nominee Count Louis de Normand, his own natural cousin, to the Ministry of War. The king was not alone in his opposition to the war. Robespierre and Marat, nearly in accord, both stood for peace. Robespierre, from the first, had foreseen the course of the revolution, had prophetically feared the success of some soldier of fortune. He was, at this moment, that unknown lieutenant of artillery, Napoleon Bonaparte, who should with a stroke of the sword convert the revolution to his purposes. Marat, in his more hectic, malevolent, uncertain way, was haunted by the same presentiment, and what he saw in war was this. Quote, What afflicts the friends of liberty is that we have more to fear from success than from defeat. The danger is lest one of our generals be crowned with victory and lest, he'd lead his victorious army against the capital to secure the triumph of the despot. I invoke heaven that we may meet with constant defeat, and that our soldiers drown their leaders in their own blood. This Marat wrote on the 24th of April, 1792, in his little pamphlet newspaper, La Mille du Pople. During the first part of 1792, the popular agitation grew. France was now throwing all the enthusiasm, the vital emotion of patriotism, into her internal upheaval. Rougé de Lille, invented his great patriotic hymn, christened in the following August, the Marseillais. Men who could get no guns, armed themselves with pikes. The red Phrygine cap of liberty was adopted. The magic war was over. One cap of liberty was adopted. The magic word, citizen, became the cherished appellation of the multitude, and in the assembly the orators declaimed vehemently against the traitors, the supporters of the foreigner in their midst. Vernieux, from the tribune of the assembly menacing the Austrian princes of the Tuileries, exclaimed, quote, Through this window I perceive the palace where perfidious councils delude the sovereign. Tear and panic have often issued from its portals. This day I bid them re-enter, in the name of the law. Let all its inmates know that it is the king alone who is inviolable, that the law will strike the guilty without distinction, and that no head on which guilt reposes can escape its sword. Unquote. The thunders of Vernieux and the other Jacobin orators rolled not in vain. By March the Drissotans dominated the situation. They frightened the king into acquiescence in their war policy, and they drove Narbonne and the Fiatists, their temporary allies from office, installing a new ministry made up of their own adherents. That new ministry included Roland, Clavier, and Dumoré. Roland, a hard-headed, hard-working man of business, whose young wife with her beauty and enthusiasm was to be the soul of the unfortunate Giroudin party, Clavier, a banker, speculator, friend of Mirabeau, and generally doubtful liberal. Dumoré, a soldier, able, adventurous, of large instincts, political, and human, ambitious and forceful beyond his colleagues. The Bristleton ministry was well equipped with talent, and was intended to carry through the war, which was voted by the Assembly on the 20th of April. This step had been gradually led up to by an acrimonious exchange of diplomatic votes. The war, now that it had broken out, was found to involve more powers than Austria. The king of Prussia, unwilling to let Austria pose as a sole defender of the Germanic princes of the Rhineland, had, in August 1791, joined the Emperor in the Declaration of Pilnitz, threatening France with coercion. He now acted up to this and joined in the war as the ally of the Emperor. Louis Pold died in March and was succeeded by his son, Marie Antoinette's nephew, France's the second. Three armies were formed by France for the conflict, and were placed under the orders of Rochambeau, Lafayette, and Luckner. They were weak in numbers, as the fortresses soaked up many thousands of men, and unprepared for war. The allies concentrated their troops in the neighborhood of Koblenz. The Duke of Brunswick was placed in command, and by the end of July perfected arrangements for marching on Paris with an Austro-Prussian army of 80,000 men. The breaking out of war inflamed still further the political excitement of France. In April, a festival or demonstration was held in honor of the soldiers of Chateauvue's Swiss Regiment, now released from the galleys. Angry protests arose from the moderates, an echo of the assembly's vote of thanks to Bouli for repressing the mutineers six months before. These protests, however, went unheeded, for the Jacobins were now virtually masters of Paris. Not only did they control the public galleries of the assembly, but they had gained a majority on the Commune, and had secured for Manuel and Danton its legal executive offices of procureur and substitute. In May, difficulties arose between the king and his ministers, arising partly from the exercise of power of veto once more. On the 12th of June the ministers were forced from office, and were replaced by moderates, or phaetists. Du Maurier is going to the army to replace Rochambeau. The Burciton army, furious at this defeat, decided on a monster demonstration against the king for the 20th of June. The 20th of June 1792 was one of the great days of the revolution, but on the whole less an insurrection than a demonstration. Out of the two great faux-burgs of the working classes, Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau came processions of market porters, market women, coal heavers, workmen, citizens, with attachments of National Guards here and there. Saint-Terre, a popular brewer in National Guard commander, appeared the leader. But the procession showed little sign of having recourse to violence. Bouquets were carried, and banners with various inscriptions such as, We Want Union! Liberty! One of the most extreme said, Warning to Louis XVI. The people, weary of suffering, demand liberty or death. Proceeding to the assembly, a petition was tumultuously presented, wherein it was declared that the king must observe the law, and that if he was responsible for the continued inactivity of the armies, he must go. The mob then flowed on to the palace, was brought up by some loyal battalions of National Guards, but presently forced one of the gates, and irresistibly poured in. A disorderly scene followed. The king maintained his coolness and dignity. For four long hours the mob pushed through the palace, jostling, apostrophizing the king and queen. A few National Guards, a few members of the assembly, attempted to give Louis some sort of protection, but he was practically surrounded and helpless. What saved him was his coolness, his good sense, and the fact that there was no intent to do him bodily harm, save among some groups too unimportant to make themselves felt. To please the men of the Foeburgs, Louis consented to place a red liberty cap on his head, and to empty a bottle of wine as a sign of fraternization. Finally, Verneau and Pétion succeeded in having the palace evacuated, and the assassination of Louis, which many had feared and a few hoped, had been averted. The event of the 20th of June was like lightning flashing in darkness. Instantly people saw where they were. Moderate, loyal, reasonable men startled at the danger of the king, smarting at the indignity he had suffered. Fearful of mob rule and mob violence, rallied to the throne, signed petitions protesting against the event. Louis himself, realizing that his life was in jeopardy, made appeals both to the assembly and to his people. The first reply to the king's appeal, unsolicited and unappreciated, came from Lafayette. On receiving news of the event of the 20th, he left his headquarters and reached Paris on the 28th. He appealed to the assembly and rallied the center, still responsive if a leader could be found. He then began to concert measures for getting control of the city by means of the National Guards. At this point, however, his scheme failed. The court would not support him. The king too prudent. The queen too impolitic. Marie Antoinette herself, it is said, in her rancorous dislike of Lafayette, gave Pétion the secret as to his contemplated use of the National Guards, and this proved fatal. Checked by the action of the mayor and the Jackabins, unsupported by the Tuileries, Lafayette had to abandon his efforts. Another attempt followed. The Department of the Seine, presided by La Rochefoucault, tried to assert its constitutional authority over the great city situated within its limits. It voted the suspension of Pétion, mayor of Paris, and of Manuel, his procurator, for dereliction of duty in failing to maintain order on the 20th of June. The action of La Rochefoucault in suspending Pétion took place on the 7th of July, a moment which the advance of the Duke of Brunswick was momentarily expected, and at which the national excitement was tending to overpower the royalist reaction. This reaction was now checked. The Jackabins were resolved to use mob pressure to whatever extent was necessary for accomplishing their purpose. On the 11th, they passed through the assembly a declaration that the country was in danger, and two days later imposed a vote quashing the action of the department and reinstating Pétion. The ferment now blended inexorably the war fever and the action against the king. Volunteers were enrolling for the army. National guards were being summoned from the provinces to renew the federation of 1791, and the violent section of the agitators saw in these national guards the means for pushing over the royal authority. A demonstration better organized than that of the 20th of June, and armed, could rid France of the bourbon incubus. Preparations for such a demonstration were at once taken in hand. Among the provincial troops now assembled in or marching towards Paris, there was no body more remarkable than the battalion of the 300 Marseilles. Like a whirlwind of patriotic emotion, they swept through France, dragging the cannon with which they meant to knock at the gates of the Tuileries, chanting Rojet's new song Forever to be Associated with the name of their own city. These Marseilles were red hot Republicans, and in judging the political situation of that moment, this constitutes one of the salient points. The Parisian Patriots were on the whole far less Republican than those of the provinces. Among the men who were organizing the new demonstration, the greater part meant nothing more than ridding themselves of Louis, of an executive officer whom they regarded as treacherous and is secretly in league with the enemy. What should come after him they did not much consider. In the forming of this state of opinion, the individual action of Robespierre had played a great part. Robespierre, who feared in war the opportunity for the soldier, saw in Republicanism merely the triumph of a Cromwell. To him Lafayette was a tangible danger, the word Republic, an empty formula. And so, with an influence still widening, despite his opposition to the war, he steadily preached the doctrine that the form of government was nothing so long as civil, social, and political equality were secured. At the parade held on the 14th of July, the Marseilles had not yet arrived. There were no cries of Vive le Roy, and none of Vive la République, but Vive la Nation was the adopted formula. Yet, at the same moment, Biowarene, one of the most advanced of the Jacobins, was addressing the club in favor of a Republic. And the Fédérée formed a central committee which, on the 17th, petitioned the Assembly for the suspension of the King. To support the movement further, the section committees were decreed in continuous session, and came under the control of the organization. On the 30th of July, Brunswick crossed the frontier. The advance of his columns was heralded by a proclamation or manifesto. In this document, he announced to the people of France that he entered the country as the ally of their sovereign, and with the purpose of visiting on Paris, and, quote, exemplary and never-to-be-forgotten vengeance, military execution, and total subversion, unquote, and of bringing, quote, the guilty rebels to the death they have deserved, unquote. Copies of the manifesto reached Paris on the 3rd of August with immediate effect. To Louis, the Prussian generals under itses appeared so incredible that they were promptly disavowed as a forgery. To the people, they confirmed the suspicion that had been rankling for three long years, that had been inventum'd by all the poison of Marat. A howl of execration arose, a howl not against Brunswick, but against the inmates of the Tuileries. And in that howl, the voices of the Marseilles, who had just reached the city, were raised loudest. The inevitable result followed in just one week, a week spent in preparations by the popular leaders. At one o'clock in the morning of the 10th of August, delegates from the sections met at the Hotel de Ville and assumed control of the city. This body was joined by Danton, Marat, and Hibbert, among others, and of these Danton, more than anyone else, represented the driving power. Orders were given for ringing the toxin. All Paris knew the movement was coming, and understood the signal. At the Tuileries, preparations for resistance had been made. The Marquis de Mendat took charge of the defense. He had about 1,500 well-disposed national guards from the western or middle-class districts, and about 1,000 excellent Swiss infantry of the king's household troops. These he posted to good advantage, guarding the palace and the bridges over the Seine to the south. For a while all went well. The insurrection began slowly, and when it did roll up as far as the bridges, Mendat's musketry held it easily at bay. The insurrectional commute now realized that Mendat was a considerable obstacle, and set to work to remove him. In his official station as a national guard commander, he was under the jurisdiction of the mayor, so Pétion was made to write, ordering him to report at the Hotel de Ville. Mendat declined to obey. The attack still hung fire. The order was repeated. Mendat this time weakly allowed himself to be persuaded into compliance. He proceeded to the Hotel de Ville, and was butchered on the stairs by a band of insurgents. After the defense had lost its general, and with daylight over the Seine, events moved fast. The national guards at the palace could not be kept to their posts in the absence of their chief, and in presence of the swelling numbers of the attackers. The defense of the bridges had to be given up, and the Swiss withdrew into the palace. A lull followed while the insurrection gathered up its strength for the attack on the Tuileries itself. During that lull, at half-past eight, Louis with his family left the palace. He believed resistance useless. He feared a massacre might occur. He was averse as ever to bloodshed, and so was persuaded that his best course would be to seek refuge in the assembly. Just as Louis left, the real attack was delivered on the palace. The Swiss replied with musketry, sallied out, charged the insurgents, and drove them across the carousel. Then they returned, and presently received a written order from the king bidding them not to fire. This momentarily paralyzed the defense. The insurgents, led by the provincial Fédérée, were not yet beaten, but flowed back once more to the attack. Some field pieces, which they had, breached the palace doors. A sharp struggle followed, and soon the insurgents had got a foothold. What followed was a massacre. Many of the Swiss were cut down in corridors and rooms of the palace. Others were moaned down by musketry trying to escape across the Tuileries' gardens. A few got away, and sought refuge in a nearby church. But were there overtaken by the popular fury, and butchered. The rage of the people was unbridled, and success turned it into ferocity, even bestiality. The bodies of the Swiss were mutilated in an atrocious fashion. While the triumphant insurgents were sacking the palace, and committing their barbarities on the unfortunate Swiss, Louis and his family remained unmolested in the assembly. They were to remain there for three days while their fate was being decided. Temporary accommodation being found for them. The situation was really this, that no party was yet quite prepared for the destruction of the king himself, only of the royal power. The assembly which, a year earlier, had assumed the position that the king was necessary to the constitution had now virtually abandoned it. And the commune, while going much further than the assembly, was not yet ready to strike Louis. But it did claim the custody of the royal family, and that, after a three-day struggle, the assembly conceded. On the 13th of August, the royal family went into imprisonment in the temple, a small medieval dungeon in the center quarter of Paris. Only about 300 members of the assembly were present to face the storm when Louis sought refuge in its midst. Verneau was president. Presently the commune sent a request that the assembly should depose the king. Verneau, thereupon, proposed a middle course. The assembly could suspend the king from his functions and call together a convention to solve the constitutional question that the suspension of the executive presented. In the meanwhile, ministers elected by the assembly should constitute a provisional executive council. These proposals were carried, and the executive council was elected. It contained most of the members of the recitin ministry, but with a new member. At the head of the poll was Danton, and Danton was made minister of justice. Danton now clearly appears as the man of the situation. The people had triumphed, and Danton was the statesman of the people. He bridged the gap between the commune and the assembly. He gave reign to the popular fury and to the destruction of every anti-popular influence, and he attempted, by placing himself at the head of the flood, to direct it against the great external danger that menaced France. On the 11th of August, the assembly decreed that universal suffrage should be put in force for the elections to the convention. Large police powers were voted to the commune, which Robespierre now joined, and laws were passed aimed against those suspected of being in sympathy with the advancing army or with Louis. The Appel Nominal was placed in force in many of the sections, and Danton put the machinery of his ministry at work to reinforce these measures, to convert them to use for terrorizing the moderates, for satisfying the popular suspicions against the aristocrats, for weighing on the elections. The primaries were to begin on the 27th of August, those for Paris on the 2nd of September. The meeting of electors for nominating the deputies of Paris was to take place on the 5th of September. Meanwhile, Brunswick's columns were making a steady, methodical progress through the hills of Lorraine, through the frontier belt of fortresses. The French armies in their front were weak in numbers, even weaker in leadership. Lafayette, who had attempted to reaffirm the constitution on hearing of the event of the 10th of August, deemed it prudent to ride over the frontier when commissioners of the assembly reached his camp. He was seized as a prisoner by the Allies to remain their captive for many years. On the 20th, the Prussian guns opened on Longwy. On the 23rd, it surrendered. On the 30th, the siege of Verdun was begun, Verdun which Louis had so nearly reached the year before. It was generally known that the fortress could not stand more than a few days. Between it and Paris there was only the Argonne, a few miles of hilly passes, and then a hundred miles of open country. The steady advance of Brunswick drove Paris into a state approaching Delirium. On the news of the fall of Longwy reaching the city, the extremists, their appetites wedded by the butchery of the Swiss, began to plot a massacre of the political prisoners, of the royalists, of the suspect. On the 28th of August, Danton, riding on the wings of the storm, asked power from the Commune to carry out domiciliary visits for the purpose of arresting suspects. This power was granted, and in three days, the prisons were filled to overflowing, priests and persons of title being specially singled out for arrest. By the 1st of September, Paris was ready to answer the Duke of Brunswick, was ready for the stroke that was to destroy the anti-revolutionists, that was to strike terror to the hearts of all enemies of the people. But the awfulness of the deed delayed its execution. The day passed in high, wrought excitement. At any moment news might arrive of the fall of Verdun. That might be the signal for the explosion of the popular fury. On the 2nd, there was still no news of Verdun, but the moment could not be delayed much longer. In the night, preparations had been made. Men to do the business of popular execution had been approached. Some had been offered pay. The leaders were determined to carry through their enterprise. In the assembly, Danton thundered from the Tribune. Verdun has not yet surrendered. One part of the people will march to the frontier, another will throw up entrenchments, and the rest will defend our cities with pikes. Paris will second these great efforts. The assembly will become a war committee. We demand that whoever refuses to serve shall be punished by death. The toxin you will hear presently is not a signal of alarm. It is ringing the charge against the enemies of our country. To conquer them we must be audacious, yet more audacious, and still more audacious, and France is saved." The toxin rang as Danton had ordered. Alarm guns were fired. Drummers woke the echoes of the streets and of the squares, and presently the deed of supreme audacity and of supreme horror began to come into being. Crowds collected about the prisons. Groups forced the way in. More or less improvised committees took possession, and massacre began. The massacre of September is one of the most lurid events of the revolution, easier therefore for the Romanticists to deal with than for the Historian. Its horrors are quite beyond question. At one point be set. The killing continued until late on the 6th, nearly four days. The total number of victims was very large, possibly between 2000 and 3000. At many places the slaughter was indiscriminate, accompanied by nameless barbarities, carried out by gangs of brutal Ruffians who were soon intoxicated with gore and with wine. But alongside of these aspects were others more difficult to do justice to, but the careful weighing of which is necessary if any just estimate of the event is to be reached. The massacring was carried out by a small number of individuals, perhaps two or three hundred in all, and of these a considerable proportion undoubtedly acted in a spirit of blind political and social rage, and in the belief that they were carrying out an act of justice. A large mass of citizens gave the massacres their approval by forming crowds about the prison doors. As to these crowds there are two salient facts. The first is that on the first day they were large and excited, and afforded that moral support without which the massacres could hardly have been carried out. After the first day they diminished rapidly, and by the end of the third day all popular support was gone, and a feeling of horror had seized on the city and supplanted everything else. Then again the mob, as it crowded about the prison doors, showed a marked attitude. Many of the prisoners, those who were so lucky as to pass for good citizens and friends of the people, were released. As these came out the crowd received them with every sign of joy and a fraternization. When, on the contrary, it was a victim coming out to be slaughtered, there was silence, no shouting, no exultation. In other words, the event was, with most, an act of popular justice, and this was the appearance it had even when seen from the interior of the prisons. At La Baye, Meyar presided over the self-appointed tribunal, and it is impossible to doubt that whenever he was satisfied that the prisoner deserved his freedom he attempted to secure his life. The case of Saint-Mierre, an aristocrat, a colonel, who had enough good sense encouraged to speak plainly to the judges, avowing himself a royalist but persuading them that he took no part in anti-revolutionary schemes is most illuminating. Meyar declared he saw no harm in him. He was acquitted, and was fraternally embraced by the crowd when he safely passed the fatal door. All did not have the good fortune of Saint-Mierre. The case of the Princessa d'Lambal, at La Force, must serve to give the worst side of and to close this chapter of blood. Long the friend, confidant and agent of the Queen, she had followed her to the temple, and had been removed from there but a few days previously. She was too well known and too near Marie Antoinette to have any chance of escape. In a fainting condition she was dragged before the tribunal, and was soon passed out. It is not probable that she had much consciousness of what followed. The gang of murderers at this point were butchers of the Hals, and they apparently treated their victim as they might have a beast brought to the slaughter. She was carried under the arms to where a pile of bodies had accumulated, and, in a moment made ready, was butchered in the technical sense of the term. Her head was hoisted on a pike, and also other parts of her dismembered anatomy. And carried in triumph to be displayed under the windows of the prisoners at the temple. For then fell, on the 2nd of September, at the very moment when Danton was announcing its continued resistance. On the 5th the Duke of Brunswick resumed his march on Paris, and on the same day the electors of that city met and chose twenty deputies to the convention. Their choice was collared by the fact that the massacres were still continuing. At the head of the pole stood Robespierre. Danton was next. Among the others maybe noted Camille de Moulin, Marat, and last of all the Duke de Orléans, who a few days later metamorphosed his bourbon name into Philippe Egalité. Throughout France the electoral process was everywhere giving much the same result. Less than one-tenth of the electors used their franchise, and the extreme party won great successes. By the middle of September the new deputies were reaching Paris. The legislative in its last moments was feeble and undignified. Marat threatened it with massacre, and declared that its members were as much the enemies of the country as were the imprisoned aristocrats. Under this menace the legislative watched the massacres of September without raising a hand to protect its unfortunate victims. Danton did the same. As Minister of Justice the prisoners and the tribunals were under his special charge. But although he may have facilitated the escape of some individuals, and although he took no direct part, yet he believed that no government could be established strong enough to save the revolution at such a crisis as it had reached, save by paying this toll of blood to the suspicion, the vengeance, the cruelty, the justice of the people. He dared to pay the price, and later he and he alone dared to shoulder the responsibility.