THE INVASION OF THE TUILERIES

COURSE OF THE INTRIGUES IN 1790 AND 1791

A PERIOD of nearly three years elapsed between the second and third great outbreaks of the Revolution.  During this interval changes so fundamental took place among the factions that the outbreaks of 1792 must be regarded as an entirely different movement—in fact as a new and distinct revolution.

In order to understand the causes that produced this second revolution it is necessary therefore to form some idea of the course taken by the revolutionary intrigues since the march on Versailles.

With the exile of the Duc d’Orléans and his mentor Choderlos de Laclos the Orléaniste conspiracy was temporarily arrested, and by the desertion of Mirabeau in the following spring lost its principal dynamic force.  Mirabeau, it was said, had been “ bought ” by the Court ;  true, Mirabeau received payment, but this time only for the expression of his real opinions.  He had always despised the Duc d’Orléans, and once the King’s bounty had freed him from this ignoble servitude he devoted all his immense energy to building up the royal authority he had spent the previous years in overthrowing.

Louis XVI., who, as M. Sorel well expresses it, “ saw only in the Revolution a misunderstanding between himself and his people, exploited and stirred up by a band of sedition-mongers,” hoped by the capture of the chief agitator to put an end to hostilities.

On the 13th of July 1790, before taking his oath to maintain the Constitution on the following day at the Fête de la Fédération, Louis XVI. appeared at the Assembly, and delivered himself of this strangely human message to his people :

“ Tell your fellow-citizens that I wish I could speak to them all as I speak to you here ;  tell them again that their King is their father, their brother, their friend ;  that he can be happy only in their happiness, great with their glory, mighty through their liberty, rich through their prosperity, that he can suffer only in their griefs.  Make the words or rather the feelings of my heart to be heard in the humblest cottages and in the dwellings of the unfortunate ;  tell them that if I cannot go with you into their abodes, I desire to be there by my affection and by means of laws that will protect the weak, to watch with them, to live for them, to die if necessary for them. . . .”

But the return of the Duc d’Orléans two days earlier—which Lafayette was either too foolish or too cowardly to oppose—gave a fresh impetus to the conspirators, and insurrection broke out with redoubled fury at the Palais Royal.  The professional agitators of 1789—St. Huruge, Grammont, Fournier l’Américain—were now reinforced by a gang of hired brigands, known as the company of the “ Sabbat,” raised by the De Lameths and consisting mainly of Italians—notably Rotondo, Malga, and Cavallanti—whom we now find mingling in all the revolutionary mobs, and committing every form of sanguinary violence.[1]  In the summer of 1790, soon after the Fête de la Fédération, Rotondo was despatched to St. Cloud to murder the Queen whilst she was walking in the garden, and failed only because the rain kept her indoors on the day appointed ;[2]  again in the following November Rotondo and Cavallanti led a mob to pillage the house of the Duc de Castries, who had wounded one of the De Lameths in a duel.  At the same time the Duc d’Orléans entered into relations with another intriguer—Madame de la Motte, famous in the affair of the necklace, who now returned to Paris, and occupied a magnificent hotel in the Place Vendôme provided for her by the duke in return for fresh libels on the Queen.[3]

Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that he had sworn to maintain the Constitution and had placed no obstacles whatever in the way of the Assembly, the King was still kept a prisoner by Lafayette at the Tuileries in direct violation of the principles laid down by the people.[4]

It was under these circumstances that Louis XVI. decided in desperation to appeal for intervention by foreign powers.  At the end of October an envoy was despatched to the Marquis de Bouillé, in command on the frontier, to inform him that “ the King’s position under the gaolership of Lafayette had become so intolerable that he contemplated flight to the frontier to one of the places under Bouillé’s command, in order to muster around him all the troops and also those of his subjects who had remained faithful to him, to endeavour to win back the rest of his people who had been misled by sedition-mongers, and to seek support in the help of his allies if all other means to re-establish order and peace proved unavailing.” [5]

Now since the suggestion contained in this letter of an appeal to the King’s allies, the Austrians, has been made the chief ground of accusation against both Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, it is important to understand their real intentions on this question of the “ Appel à l’Étranger.”  No one has explained the matter more clearly than M. Louis Madelin, the historian who best represents modern French opinion :

“ Marie Antoinette ... appears to have thought of this appeal to Europe towards the summer of 1790.  The idea she entertained concerning it—a woman’s idea, perfectly childish—is still little known in general.  She dreamt in no way of a counter-revolution brought to Paris in the baggage-wagons of the foreigner, but of a simple manifestation on the frontiers, by means of which the Court would show that they ‘ disapproved of the way the King was treated.’  The Emperor would mass his troops, make a feint of advancing, Louis XVI. would place himself at the head of the French army, and Leopold would then retire before his brother-in-law, who, aureoled by this victory, would re-enter Paris surrounded by the love of an expectant people.”

The plan was futile, however, for the reason that the “friendly” sentiments of the European sovereigns to whom this appeal was made were outweighed by their political ambitions.  “ The cause of kings !  The cause of dynasties ! ” cries M. Madelin ;  “ that will be said hypocritically in 1792, but the Revolution neither alarms nor scandalizes Europe in 1789 and 1790, it is rather a cause for rejoicing.”  All the splendour of old France that had evoked the envy and admiration of foreign monarchs was centred not only in the Court but in the Capetian dynasty, consequently the sight of France, their eternal rival, bleeding in the dust from self-inflicted wounds, seemed to these lesser powers no occasion for knight-errantry.  As to the ties of blood which have been represented as binding together the royal families of Europe in a confraternity dangerous to the interests of their subjects, their feebleness was never better exemplified than in the French Revolution, for of all the European sovereigns Leopold II., Emperor of Austria, brother to the Queen of France, was perhaps the least eager to defend his sister’s interests or even to ensure her safety, whilst Gustavus III. of Sweden, bound by no ties of kinship, alone displayed activity in responding to her appeal.

In the case of Frederick William II. of Prussia, it was not merely a matter of passive acquiescence in the disorders of France, but, as we have already seen, of active co-operation.  The intrigue of Von den Goltz—which we must follow in the pages of Sorel—had prospered marvellously since the march on Versailles, for he had succeeded in carrying out his Prussian Majesty’s injunctions by forming a coalition with several of the most influential revolutionary leaders, notably the Orléaniste Pétion, In May of 1790 Frederick William had written to Von der Goltz ordering him “ to keep this Pétion on the alert, to express the satisfaction he (the King) feels at his conduct, and to let them know in Berlin whether it would not be expedient to give him a pension.”[6]

This letter was followed five months later by the despatch of a fresh emissary to France, a certain Jew agitator named Ephraim, who arrived in Paris on September 14, 1790, armed with a letter from the King of Prussia to Von der Goltz instructing him to put Ephraim in touch with the revolutionary leaders and pave his way for him :

“ Goltz had been preparing it for a long time.  He arranged for the admission of the royal go-between with Lafayette, with Barnave, with Lameth ;  he put him in touch with Pétion, Brissot, Gensonné, and their friends (i.e. with the future Girondins).  Ephraim found them full of animosity against Austria and full of cordiality towards Prussia.  He showed himself still more anti-Austrian than any one amongst them, and the cynicism of his language with regard to the Queen seemed a certain guarantee of the sincerity of his sympathy for France.”

Ephraim then tried to worm his way into the confidence of the King’s minister, Montmorin, but without success.  “ ‘ The object he put forward,’ said Montmorin, ‘ is a commercial treaty, but I have occasion to believe that his mission extends further and that he has been instructed to sound us on a political understanding.’ . . . Montmorin had good reasons for distrusting all these Prussian manœuvres ;  Ephraim was playing a very perfidious part in Paris.  He frequented the clubs and made himself noticed by his democratic violence.  ‘ His object,’ wrote Montmorin, ‘ is to embroil us with the Emperor of Austria, and he thinks that in stirring up the public against the Queen he will succeed in this more easily.  He goes in for underhand dealings and tries to work upon the journalists.  I am almost certain that he distributes money, and I know that he draws large sums from the banker.’ ” [7]

Montmorin’s suspicions were perfectly correct, for on this point we have the evidence of contemporaries belonging to absolutely opposite parties.  Thus the Comte de Fersen, writing to Gustavus III. of Sweden on March 8, 1791, states that Ephraim has been supplying money to the agents of revolutionary propaganda—“ not long ago he again received 600,000 louis.”[8]  And Camille Desmoulins threw further light on the matter in 1793 by this significant phrase :  “ Is it not a fact aptly brought forward by Philippeaux that the treasurer of the King of Prussia, in giving him an account of the expenses for last year, produces an item of six million écus for corruptions in France ? ”[9]  In all the sordid annals of the Hohenzollerns no greater perfidy has ever been brought to light ;  already they had embarked on the programme which in our own day they have pursued with unfailing success—the engineering of revolution in all those countries they wish to subdue.  Well might the English Jacobin Miles exclaim :  “ Of all the sceptred miscreants who have dishonoured royalty since you and I have perambulated this earth, I know of none so base, so mean, so infamous as the present King of Prussia.  He has authorized his agents throughout Europe to commit a kind of general pillage—to cajole and rob all nations.”

For Miles, revolutionary though he was, displayed no small perspicacity in seeing through the intrigues of certain so-called democrats, and he was not deceived, as are our visionaries of to-day, by protestations of sympathy with the cause of liberty emanating from the willing slaves of Prussian despotism.  “Some of the German courts,” he wrote on March 12, 1791, “have emissaries here—all apostles of liberty—preaching equal rights and assuring the giddy multitude that their example will be followed by the whole world.  Prussia for intrigue takes the lead.  She pays court to each party as appearances may seem to favour.  The Tuileries she disregards.  All her agents vociferate against the house of Austria as plotting with the Queen for the purpose of destroying the Revolution.”[10]

The skill with which this intrigue was conducted shows that the teachings of Frederick the Great had been laid to heart by his disciples.  Frederick had always believed in the dissemination of democratic doctrines abroad whilst remaining a past master in the art of counteracting their influence at home.  The rulers of the various German states had now more than ever need to exercise this talent, for the people of Germany displayed alarming symptoms of revolutionary fever.  The doctrines of the German Illuminés that had contributed so powerfully to the revolution in France were now making themselves felt in the country that gave them birth.  Burke, writing in this very year of 1791, remarks :  “ A great revolution is preparing in Germany ;  and a revolution, in my opinion, likely to be more decisive upon the general fate of nations than that of France itself. . . .”

This revolution, which might have proved the salvation of the civilized world by overthrowing the despotism of the Hohenzollerns, was averted by the revolution in France.

The death of Mirabeau in April 1791 removed a formidable obstacle from the path of Prussia.  The author of The Secret History of the Court of Berlin, who had declared that “ war is the national industry of Prussia,” was not the man to be deceived by the pacific protestations of Frederick William’s emissaries.  Mirabeau knew far more than was convenient about the intrigues of the Hohenzollerns, and he detested Hertzberg.  “ That old fox,” he declared exultingly to Dumouriez, “ had only a short time to live.”[11]

Four days later Mirabeau himself was dead.  The truth of the verdict, “ Death from natural causes,” was never proved conclusively, and the Orléanistes were strongly suspected of avenging themselves by poison for the defection of their most valuable ally.  But is it altogether impossible that Ephraim may have been concerned in the matter ?  The Jew agitator, at any rate, played an active part in the tumult that took place a fortnight later when the Orléanistes, once more hoping to achieve the King’s death at the hands of the people,[12] drove a mob to the Tuileries under the pretext of preventing the Royal Family from going to St. Cloud for Easter.  The same thing had been attempted the year before when women were sent to incite the crowd to violence, but their efforts had proved unavailing, and the King had set forth upon his journey amidst the acclamations of the Parisians and cries of “ Bon voyage au bon Papa ! ” [13]  The revolutionary leaders realized that more potent instruments must be employed if they were to bring off their coup.  Danton, the principal organizer of the movement,[14] remained as usual in the background, but Laclos disguised as a jockey and Sillery as a lackey were recognized amongst the crowd.  Again the professional agitators had been summoned—St. Huruge and the bloodthirsty members of the Sabbat ;  “ Malga gorged with gold and wine ” mingled with the troops, inciting them to murder ;  Rotondo led the rabble.[15]  But it was said to be Ephraim who had financed the movement with the funds confided to him by his royal master.[16]

This outrage finally decided Louis XVI. to carry out his plan of flight to the frontier, and on the 20th of June the Royal Family set forth on the fatal journey to Montmédy that ended in their arrest at Varennes.  The Orléanistes immediately seized the opportunity to fan up popular fury against the King ;  the gutter press in their pay poured forth pamphlets describing Louis XVI. as le gros cochon,[17] a besotted drunkard, “ a monopolizer, a swindler, a false-coiner, a devourer of men.” [18]  At the Jacobin Club, Réal, amidst furious abuse of the King, proposed that the Duc d’Orléans should be urged to accept the regency.[19]  The duke, who at the first news of the King’s flight had driven round Paris with a smile on his lips congratulating himself on his victory, now became struck with panic, and exasperated his supporters by publishing a letter composed for him by Madame de Genlis declining the regency.[20]  But Laclos, energetic as ever in the cause of his royal “ protégé,” drew up a petition in collaboration with Brissot, demanding the deposition of the King and, in spite of the protests of Brissot,[21] “ his replacement by constitutional means ”—in other words, the substitution of the Due d’Orléans for Louis XVI.

The Orléanistes, however, had over-reached themselves in degrading the King they had succeeded in degrading the monarchy, and now for the first time the cry of “ No more kings ! ” made itself heard, and the proposal was made that the phrase composed by Laclos should be replaced by one demanding the abolition of the monarchy.[22]

This suggestion of a Republic, emanating from the Club of the Cordeliers and a section of Paris entirely under their control known as the Théâtre Français,[23] met with the support of only a few isolated revolutionaries, including Brissot and Condorcet, whose Republican convictions were more than doubtful, and was violently opposed by the Jacobins, who were mainly Orléanistes.  Already at a sitting of the Club, immediately after the flight to Varennes, a member who ventured to propose a Republic had been indignantly shouted down,[24] and the amendment suggested by the so-called “ Republicans ” was therefore rejected by the Jacobins, and the original proposal of Laclos retained in the petition which was to be presented at “ the altar of the country ” erected on the Champ de Mars.

By means of cajolery, threats, and the dissemination of panic news, [25] some thousands of signatures were obtained in the Faubourgs—principally those of women and children [26]—and early in the morning of the day appointed, July 17, 1791, a disorderly crowd assembled on the Champ de Mars, and after inaugurating the ceremony by the murder of two unoffending citizens—an old soldier and a wig-maker, who had taken refuge from the rays of the sun beneath the steps of the altar in order to enjoy a frugal breakfast [27]—proceeded to the usual revolutionary pastime of pelting the troops assembled by Lafayette with stones.  Whereupon Lafayette and Bailly, the mayor, with unwonted firmness, hoisted the red flag and proclaimed martial law, but the soldiers, exasperated by the pistol shots that now succeeded to the hail of stones, without waiting for further orders fired on the rioters and killed a number of them.[28]

As in all popular tumults, the display of force brought the mob to its senses ;  in an instant the whole Champ de Mars was swept clear of insurgents, but, what was more important, the fusillade had the effect of terrifying the revolutionary leaders.  The Jacobins, assembled in their Club, hastily escaped by doors and windows, and ran for their lives amidst the jeers of the populace.[29]  Brissot, Camille Desmoulins, and Fréron “ disappeared”;[30]  Marat betook himself once more to a cellar ;[31]  Robespierre, trembling in every limb, hurriedly changed his lodgings ;[32]  Danton fled to the country, and thence to England ;[33]  whilst Hébert, the terrible Père Duchesne, who for once had ventured out into a popular tumult and heard the bullets of the soldiery whistling past his ears, never recovered from his fright “ It seems,” says his biographer, M. d’Estrée, “ that every time his pamphlets mention this fusillade . . . they sweat anguish ;  and this terror doubles his ferocity.”[34]  At the same time the Jew Ephraim, openly accused by Royalist writers of financing seditious libels and plotting the death of the Queen, was arrested and imprisoned for two days in the Abbaye, after which he was sent back to Prussia and we hear of him no more.[35]

The tumult, described henceforth by revolutionary writers as “ the massacre of the Champ de Mars,” was, moreover, not the only check received by the Orléaniste faction at this crisis ;  a more serious reverse was the defection of several of the most influential Orléaniste leaders.  Barnave, who with Pétion had been sent to escort the Royal Family on the terrible return journey from Varennes, had been won over by the sight of the Queen’s courage and suffering, and henceforth this most truculent of revolutionaries had no thought but to devote himself to the cause of the woman he admired and pitied so profoundly.  On his arrival in Paris he succeeded in detaching a number of other members from the Orléaniste conspiracy ;  amongst these were Le Chapelier, Adrien Duport, Alexandre de Lameth, the Vicomte de Noailles, Muguet de Nantou, and the Duc de Liancourt.  This party now joined itself to Bailly and Lafayette in support of the King and the Constitution.[36]

The most dangerous agitators having thus been either intimidated or won over, the Revolution was once more brought to a standstill—most contemporaries indeed believed that it had finally ended.[37]

The truth is that by this time the people were heartily sick of the Revolution, which had not only brought them perpetual unrest and alarms, but had created the serious problem of unemployment.  “ The ill effects of the Revolution,” wrote Arthur Young in 1792, “ have been felt more severely by the manufacturers of the kingdom than by any other class of the people. . . . This effect, which was absolute death by starving many thousands of families, was a result that, in my opinion, might have been avoided.  It flowed only from carrying things to extremities—from driving the nobility out of the kingdom and seizing, instead of regulating, the whole regal authority.”

For the revolutionaries of 1789, like certain Socialists of to-day, whose one idea is to clear the ground of all existing conditions, had never paused to consider what manner of social edifice could be constructed on the ruins, and the result of destroying, impoverishing, or putting to flight the wealthy and leisured classes had been simply to dislocate the whole industrial system and to ruin agriculture.  For this reason the democrats of 1789 had become the aristocrats of 1792, and it was no longer only the nobles who cursed the Revolution but the farmers, the manufacturers, and the industrious bourgeois who three years earlier had hailed “ the dawn of liberty,” and now found themselves sharing the fate of the class they had been so eager to dethrone.[38]

With the employers of labour the workers suffered to an even greater degree.  All the hands that had ministered to the needs or caprices of the rich were now idle—embroiderers, fan-makers, upholsterers, gilders, carriage-builders, bookbinders, engravers, wandered aimlessly through the streets of Paris ;  3000 tailors’ apprentices, the same number of shoemakers and barbers, 4000 domestic servants collected in crowds to deliberate on the misery of their condition.[39]

To add to their hardships the insurrection, encouraged by the revolutionaries in San Domingo, had checked the import of colonial supplies, consequently “ the carpenter, the locksmith, the mason, and the market porter no longer have their morning coffee and milk, and every morning they grumble at the thought that the reward of their patriotism is an increase of privations.” [40]

But whilst in the great upheaval many of the people had been brought down to the depths of misery, a few had risen to the height of prosperity and had become the oppressors of the poor.  When in June 1791 bands of working-men appealed to Marat for protection against their employers, it was against the masters who had been working-men themselves that their complaints were chiefly directed,[41] and against whom they could obtain no redress, for the Assembly with all its professed respect for the “ sovereignty of the people ” habitually displayed complete indifference to practical schemes of social reform.[42]  In the matter of the administration of justice throughout the country the revolutionary government had shown itself equally incapable, and the little lawyers now in power, “ proud of finding themselves invested with the authority of the old police, exercised the most vexatious tyranny, pronounced arbitrary verdicts, and ordered citizens to be arrested and imprisoned on the feeblest pretext.  Men and women were torn from their beds on the erratic order of a president of the district. . . .”[43]

In a word, the condition of the country had become perfectly chaotic ;  no one could feel any security either for their persons or their property, and the universal desire was now for a return to law and order.  The revolutionary leaders were clever enough to turn this popular unrest to their own advantage ;  all their troubles, they told the people, would end when the King had finally accepted the Constitution, which was now approaching completion, but they were careful to insinuate that the King was entirely opposed to the principles it contained.  This was, of course, absolutely untrue ;  Louis XVI. had throughout concurred with every true reform, and had already accepted the principles of the Constitution as expressed by the cahiers, but he had made no secret of the fact that he did not approve of the superstructure erected by the Assembly, which not only deprived him of the authority accorded to him by the unanimous will of the people, but which he held to be directly opposed to the interests of the people themselves.  As a matter of fact the Constitution, in its finished form, was a mass of contradictions ;  it was neither democratic nor autocratic, neither republican nor monarchic, and consequently satisfied neither Royalists nor revolutionaries.  “ To tell the truth,” Camille Desmoulins openly declared at the Jacobin Club, “ there has been such a confusion of plans, and so many people have worked at it in contrary directions, that it is a veritable Tower of Babel.”[44]

It was this Tower of Babel that Louis XVI. has been bitterly reproached for criticizing.  But by September 1791 the time had gone by for criticism ;  every remonstrance, however reasonable, made by the King met only with insolence from the revolutionary factions in the Assembly, and Louis XVI. now realized that he must either accept the Constitution in its entirety or provoke another revolution.  He decided, therefore, to accept it unconditionally, leaving it to the people to find out its imperfections for themselves.  It is this that revolutionary historians describe as the King’s “ duplicity in the matter of the Constitution ”—“ he was not sincere,” they write, “ in his acceptance.”  Now the precise attitude of the King towards the Constitution, and also towards the question of the appeal to foreign powers, is explained in a long and confidential letter that he wrote to his brothers at this date, of which the most important passages must be quoted verbatim :

“ You have no doubt been informed,” Louis XVI. wrote to the Comte de Provence and the Comte d’Artois, “ that I have accepted the Constitution, and you know the reasons that I gave to the Assembly, but these must not suffice for you ;  I wish to make known to you all my motives.  The state of France is such that she is on the verge of complete dissolution, which will only be hastened if one wishes to bring violent remedies to bear on the ills that overwhelm her.  The party spirit that divides her and the destruction of all authority are the causes of her trouble.  Divisions must be made to cease and authority re-established, but for this purpose only two means are possible—union or force.  Force can only be employed by foreign armies, and this means having recourse to war.  Can a King allow himself to carry war into his own States ?  Is not the remedy worse than the disease ? . . . I have therefore concluded that this idea must be abandoned, and that I must try the only other means left me—the union of my will with the principles of the Constitution.  I feel all the difficulties of governing so great a nation.  I might say I feel its impossibility, but any obstacle I had placed in the way would have caused the war I was anxious to avoid, and would have prevented the people from judging of the Constitution, because they would have seen nothing but my constant opposition.  By adopting their ideas and following them in all good faith they will learn the cause of their troubles ;  public opinion will change ;  and since without this change one can hope for nothing but fresh convulsions, I shall bring about a better order of things by my acceptance than by my refusal.... I wished to let you know the motives for my acceptance, so that your conduct should be in accord with mine.  Your attachment to me and your wisdom should make you renounce dangerous ideas that I do not adopt. . . . I was just finishing this letter when I received the one you sent me . . . [the two princes had written refusing to recognize the King’s acceptance of the Constitution].  You cannot believe how much this action has pained me.  I was already much grieved at the Comte d’Artois going to the Conference of Pilnitz without my consent, but I will not reproach you, my heart cannot bring itself to do so.  I will only point out to you that in acting independently of me, he thwarts my plans as I disconcert his.... I have already told you that the people endured all their privations because they have always been assured that these would end with the Constitution.  It is only two days since it was finished, and you expect that already their mind is changed.  I have the courage to accept it, so as to give the nation time to experience that happiness with which it has been deluded, and you wish me to renounce this useful experience! Sedition-mongers have always prevented it from judging of their work by talking to it incessantly of the obstacles I placed in the way of its execution ;  instead of taking from them this last resource, would you serve their fury by having me accused of carrying war into my kingdom ?  You flatter yourselves to outwit them by declaring that you are marching in spite of me, but how can one persuade them of this when the declaration of the Emperor and the King of Prussia was occasioned at your request ?  Will it ever be believed that my brothers do not carry out my orders ?  Thus you will show me to the nation as accepting (the Constitution) with the one hand and soliciting foreign powers with the other.  What upright man could respect such conduct, and do you think to help me by depriving me of the esteem of all right-thinking people ? ”

It is precisely this tortuous conduct, so strongly deprecated by the King, which has been attributed to him by the conspiracy of history, and represented to posterity as the cause of the second Revolution.  “ Louis XVI.,” we are told, “ accepted the Constitution without any intention of maintaining it, and whilst at the same time soliciting foreign intervention by force of arms.”  The truth—which no revolutionary writer has ever been able to disprove—is that, in the words of Bertrand de Molleville, from the moment of his acceptance of the Constitution “ the King never varied a single instant from the resolution of faithfully executing the Constitution by every means in his power ”;  that far from inviting foreign aggression he wrote at the same moment to the Emperor of Austria begging him to refrain from further intervention, and Leopold, only too thankful to abandon the campaign, formally undertook to interfere no further in the affairs of France.[45]

All was now peace, and the King’s acceptance of the Constitution provoked a wild burst of popular enthusiasm.

Writers who represent the flight to Varennes as having finally lost the King the affection of his people entirely disregard the unanimous evidence of contemporaries that two or three months after that fateful journey not only the King but the Queen were more popular than ever.[46]  When they appeared in public the people pursued them with “ Bravos ! ”  At the opera the Queen was greeted, particularly by the women, with frantic enthusiasm and cries of “ Vive la Reine ! ”  In the streets a new popular refrain was heard :

Not’ bon Roi
A tout fait
Et not’ bonne Reine
Qu’elle eut de la peine !
Enfin les v’là
Hors d’embarras !

The attempt of the deputies at the new Legislative Assembly to insult the King by keeping on their hats when he entered the hall, and by depriving him of his titles of honour, met with violent remonstrance from the people.  “ On Saturday at the comedy,” writes a contemporary, “ the people in the crowds around the door cried out, ‘ Long live the King and Queen !  Give us back our noblesse who provided us with a living, our clergy and our courts ! ’  And in the theatre they cried, ‘ Vive Sire,’ and ‘ Sa Majesté,’ and a patriot who called out ‘ Vive la Nation’ was roughly handled, dragged outside, and ducked in the gutter.  At the Assembly the deputies were grievously insulted and called ragamuffins (va-nu-pieds), and this because, by a decree which they were forced to revoke the next day, they had deprived the King of the name of Sire and the title of ‘ Majesté,’ of the chair of honour at the Assembly, and finally of precedence to the President.”[47]

The King, overjoyed at the renewed understanding between himself and his people, wrote thankfully :  “ The end of the Revolution has arrived ;  may the nation resume its happy character ! ”

What need was there for further agitations ?  The fear of foreign aggression had been finally removed, all the demands of the nation had been satisfied, and the only cause for popular discontent was not that the Revolution had not gone far enough, but that it had gone too far.

Why, then, did a second Revolution occur ?  For one reason only—that the factions were resolved to overthrow the King and Constitution.  Far more than at the beginning of the first Revolution were the aims of the revolutionaries opposed to those of the people.  Then the nation had unanimously demanded a change in the government, and for a time the work of revolution and of reformation had run concurrently ;  now the two were diametrically opposed, for the people had no further grievance, the existing order of things had been framed according to their will, and therefore the attempt to overthrow it was a deliberate and criminal conspiracy against the will and the liberties of the nation.

In order to understand the manner in which this conspiracy was carried on, it is necessary to form some idea of the elements that composed the National Assembly at the beginning of 1792.

Now when, on the completion of the Constitution in September 1791, the Constituent Assembly was dissolved, all its members—that is to say all the men who had framed the great reforms in the government—were, on the proposal of Robespierre, precluded from sitting in the Legislative Assembly that followed.  This measure, which excluded Robespierre himself, was less of a self-denying ordinance than might at first appear, for by 1791 it was no longer the Assembly that governed France but the Jacobin Club, of which Robespierre was a leading member.  This association, which started as the Club Breton at Versailles in 1789, where, as we have seen, the partisans of the Duc d’Orléans forgathered, had moved to Paris after the 6th of October, and installed itself in the Dominican convent in the Rue Saint-Honoré, commonly known as the Jacobins, because the principal convent of the order was in the Rue Saint-Jacques.  It was here that under the name of “ Friends of the Constitution ” a revolutionary centre was inaugurated, and before long the Jacobins, as they were popularly known, had started branches of the club in the towns and villages all over France.  By this means, at a signal from headquarters, insurrections could be organized, or addresses purporting to come from the inhabitants of country districts could be drawn up and sent to Paris by the agents of the society.

Nothing in the history of the Revolution is more surprising than the skill with which this system was carried out.  The French as a nation are notoriously unmethodical, and the fall of the Old Régime may be largely attributed to its lack of organization.  Whence, then, this talent for organization displayed by the revolutionary leaders alone ?  Robison, in his Proofs of a Conspiracy, supplies the key to the problem.  The earlier revolutionary leaders were, as we have seen, the disciples of the German Illuminés, and it was they who initiated them into the art of forming political committees “ to carry through the great plan of a general overturning of religion and government. . . . These committees arose from the Illuminati in Bavaria ... and these committees produced the Jacobin Club.”  “ The chief lesson,” Robison goes on to observe, that the revolutionary leaders took from Germany, “ was the method of doing business, of managing their own correspondence, and of procuring and training pupils.”  These propaganda were very systematically carried out amongst the people, and in the confidential memoranda sent out from headquarters was an “ earnest exhortation to establish in every quarter secret schools of political education, and schools for the public education of the children of the people, under the direction of well-principled masters,” of masters, that is to say, who would inculcate in their pupils a contempt for all religion and all government.

The Germans, as we to-day have reason to know, are past masters in the art of disseminating lying propaganda and of duping the uneducated classes, and the fact that the Jacobins of France were their disciples explains the extraordinary resemblance between the methods of the French revolutionary leaders and those of the German leaders in the recent war.  Thus the plan of committing atrocities and then attributing them to one’s enemies, of justifying aggression by the plea that one was acting merely in self-defence, of announcing sinister designs on the part of one’s own intended victim, is a form of jesuitry peculiar to the German mind, and this was throughout the plan of the French revolutionaries.  Whenever they contemplated an attack upon the King, an alarm was circulated that the King was meditating a massacre of the people ;  the unarmed citizens, the unoffending priests, the women and children who perished, were invariably “ conspirators ” harbouring dark designs, and with such skill were these propaganda carried out as to deceive not only ignorant contemporaries but educated posterity.

By means of this German system of propaganda the Assembly ceased to be democratic—that is to say, it ceased to be the expression of the people’s will.  In 1789 the people had chosen their own representatives at the Constituent Assembly ;  in 1791 the deputies of the Legislative Assembly were the choice of the Jacobin Club.  “ This society,” says Dumouriez, “ extending everywhere its numerous affiliations, made use of the provincial clubs to make itself master of the elections.  All the cranks, all the seditious scribblers, all the agitators were chosen to go and represent the nation, ‘ to defend its interests,’ it was said, ‘ against a perfidious court.’  Very few wise or enlightened men, still fewer nobles, were chosen, and the National Assembly, thus composed, assembled armed with prejudices and hostile views against the unfortunate Louis and his court.  It began by ‘ adoring ’ the Constitution so as to establish itself securely. . . .”[48]

Prudhomme, a more consistent democrat than most revolutionary writers, endorses this description :  “ This new body did not include the three castes that existed in the Constituent Assembly, it was almost half composed of lawyers who had thrown themselves into the Revolution, as we shall see, rather for personal interests than for love of their country or of Liberty.” [49]  “ These men showed very little attachment to the Constitution they had sworn to defend ”;  amongst them all Prudhomme could only mention two “ who having received powers from their constituents for the maintenance of the royal charter ... had the courage ”—and we might add the honesty—“ to carry out their instructions.” [50]

Under these circumstances the King’s situation was hopeless from the outset.  What could avail his resolution to maintain the Constitution when all the leaders of the new Assembly, with the Jacobins at their back, were secretly conspiring to overthrow both it and him ?  A further complication lay in the fact that these leaders were all divided in their aims, and the Jacobin Club itself was rent by the disputes of opposing factions.

THE FACTIONS IN 1792

In order to understand the causes that led up to the Revolution of 1792, it is important to form some idea of the policy that inspired each of these factions, yet nothing is more difficult, since their avowed opinions not only varied perpetually, but in no way coincided with their secret aims.  Afterwards, when the Republic had become an established fact, all the leading revolutionaries declared they had been Republicans from the beginning, but until that date they not only refrained from admitting to such opinions but indignantly disavowed them.

If these men were not Republicans, what, then, were they ?  As far as it is possible to form any conclusion from their ambiguous and conflicting statements, the policy of these factions may be broadly indicated as follows :,?P>

I.  The Cordeliers, who took their name from the church of the Cordelier monks where they first held their sittings, were led by Danton, and included Marat, Camille Desmoulins, Hébert—the Père Duchesne—and the Prussian Clootz.  According to Beaulieu their sympathies were divided between Orléanism and anarchy.[51]  Several of these men, as we have seen, had begun their revolutionary career as minor instruments of the Orléaniste conspiracy, and now, owing to the defection of the duke’s aristocratic allies, they had risen from the position of mere mob-orators to that of influential politicians.  Yet their allegiance to the Duc d’Orléans was evidently spasmodic ;  thus in 1791 we find Marat “ blessing Heaven for the gift of Louis XVI.,” a little later clamouring for a “ military dictator,” then in the following year publicly demanding 15,000 francs from the Duc d’Orléans for the printing of his pamphlets, and all the while crying out for “ heads ” and yet “ more heads ” with dreary reiteration.  Desmoulins, after the temporary lapse, when, according to Bouillé, he was bought over to the Court by Lafayette,[52] had returned to the Orléanistes, and showed himself indefatigable in writing furious abuse now of Louis XVI., now of his enemies the Brissotins.  Danton, less sanguinary than Marat and less vitriolic than Desmoulins, was, however, more venal than either.  Essentially a man of pleasure, he displayed all the bonhomie of the spendthrift and voluptuary when his desires were satisfied, all the fury of thwarted passion when lack of funds necessitated self-denial.  And at first the Revolution had proved disappointing.  Reduced to living on a louis a week, allowed him by his father-in-law—a prosperous limonadier—at the beginning of 1789, his activities as an Orléaniste agitator had brought him only a comfortable competence by the end of the year.[53]  But a comfortable competence was of no use to Danton, and 1791 found him once more deeply in debt.

At this juncture Louis XVI. allowed himself to be persuaded by his minister, Montmorin, to negotiate with Danton, in the hope of “ moderating his anarchic fury and his guilty intrigues.”[54]  Danton accepted the King’s money, invested part of it in a large property at Arcis-sur-Aube,[55] carried a few useless motions in the King’s favour at the Cordeliers, and then returned to his true affinity, the Duc d’Orléans.  Danton was probably the most sincere Orléaniste of all ;  henceforth we shall find him constantly attached to the interests of the duke, possibly for little or no remuneration ;  but since, in the influential posts he occupied successively, his hand was in every till, he could afford to dispense with this tangible recognition of his services.

As for the Republicanism professed by the Cordeliers on the one occasion of the petition at the Champ de Mars, we can discover no further trace of it in their speeches and writings during the year that followed.  On the contrary, three months later we find Camille Desmoulins indignantly protesting against the imputation of Republicanism.  “ Let no one slander me again ;  let no one say that I preach the Republic, and that kings should be done away with.  Those who recently called us Republicans and the enemies of kings, so as to defame us in the opinion of imbeciles, were not acting in good faith ;  they well knew that we are not ignorant enough to make out liberty to consist in having no King.” [56]

Later we find Danton declaring to Lafayette :  “ General, I am more a monarchist than you are ! ” and Marat, at the very moment that the Republic is inaugurated, passionately warning his fellow-countrymen of the disasters that must attend it :  “ Fifty years of anarchy await you, and you will only come out of it with a dictator ! ”

II.  The Brissotins, later to be known as the Girondins—by which name, to avoid confusion, it is simpler to refer to themwere, like the Cordeliers, led by a member of the Orléaniste conspiracy.  It was with Brissot, as we have seen earlier in this book, that the idea of a “ second Fronde,” with the Duc d’Orléans at its head, had first originated, whilst Buzot, Pétion, Servan, and Clavière had all taken an active part in the Revolution of 1789.  But with the advent of the deputies of the Gironde—Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonné, Ducos, and Fonfrède—at the Legislative Assembly, a new element was introduced into the faction, and a variety of aims arose which all consisted not in a change of government but only in a change of king.  Amongst the candidates proposed was still the Duc d’Orléans, but other members of the faction—notably Dumouriez—preferred his son the Duc de Chartres ;  others, again, suggested deposing Louis XVI. and placing the Dauphin on the throne, with members of their own party to exercise the power of regency.  But the most outrageous scheme of all was one on which the conspiracy of history has remained discreetly silent, for nothing is more discreditable to the Revolution.  It will be remembered that amongst the revolutionary leaders approached by Frederick William’s emissary, the Jew Ephraim, were the principal members of this faction—Brissot, Pétion, Gensonné, and their friends—and so successful were the efforts of Ephraim that a definitely pro- German party was formed amongst them, of which the policy was to consist not merely in breaking the alliance between France and Austria, but in placing a prince of German origin on the throne of France.

This prince was to be either the Duke of York, son of George III. of England, or the celebrated Duke of Brunswick, the future signatory of the famous Manifesto, who had long been revered by the exponents of “ democracy ” in France.

That this plan was seriously entertained by certain of the Girondins, and played an important part in the Revolution of 1792, cannot be doubted, from the evidence of authorities so divergent in their political bias as Montjoie, Prudhomme, Camille Desmoulins, and St. Just ;[57]  we shall, in fact, find reference to it in the works of nearly all contemporaries—several of the Girondins actually admitted it themselves.[58]

The Duke of York seems to have been the candidate first entertained by this party, and, as it was further suggested to marry him to Mlle. d’Orléans, the scheme appealed particularly to those Girondins who had retained a sympathy for the Orléaniste cause.  Brissot, who had married one of Mlle. d’Orléans’ maids, was no doubt influenced by this connection in favour of the project.  It was apparently for the purpose of effecting this change of dynasty that Pétion was sent to London in the autumn of 1791 with Mlle. d’Orléans and her governess, Madame de Sillery (alias Madame de Genlis), who had throughout played an insidious part in the Orléaniste conspiracy.  In the Correspondance secrète, under the date of November 26, 1791, we find a significant reference to this journey :

“ . . . a new plan hovers over Republicanism, and has taken birth in the midst of the Jacobins.  It consists, in the event of the deposition of Louis XVI., in calling to the throne a son of the King of England, on the condition that he upholds the Revolution against those who wish to destroy it.  It seems that this project was the reason for the journey that M. Pétion made to England, where he concerted with the ‘ Society of Friends of the Revolution of 1688.’ [59]  It has, we are assured, been warmly taken up by the Protestants and Republicans of our southern provinces.”

It will be seen, therefore, that in England it was not, as in Prussia, with the Government that the revolutionary intrigues were conducted, but with the opponents of the Government the English Jacobins.  The Duke of York himself does not appear to have been consulted in the matter, and, as we shall see later, the plot was indignantly denounced by George III. when it came to his ears.  By the beginning of 1792 this plan for a change of dynasty had matured sufficiently for a member of the conspiracy to propose it publicly at a Séance of the Jacobins.  The member who acted as the mouthpiece of the party was a certain Jean Louis Carra, who had undergone two years’ imprisonment for robbing a widow.  One of the most furious enemies of Louis XVI., Carra had long been an ardent admirer of German royal personages, and in 1783 had received from Frederick the Great the present of a gold and enamelled snuff-box set with pearls, in recognition of “ the reiterated proofs ” he had given his Prussian Majesty “ of his attachment.” [60]  The idea of a German King, even of the anglicized variety, was therefore naturally pleasing to Carra, and on the 4th of January he ascended the tribune of the Jacobin Club and definitely suggested dethroning Louis XVI. in favour of the Duke of York.[61]  The speech met with a remonstrance from Danton, and Carra was called to order, but in a manner that did not deter him from repeating his proposal five days later in print.[62]  Moreover, in Danton’s rebuke we can distinguish none of that thunderous eloquence with which he is popularly supposed to have denounced the enemies of his country.  “ Audacity and yet more audacity ” might be necessary in order to subdue the supporters of the French throne, but the mildest tones of remonstrance sufficed him when it was merely a matter of handing that throne over bodily to the foreigner.  Possibly in Carra’s suggestion Danton saw more an indiscretion than a flagrant betrayal of his country, for the truth is that Danton himself did not hesitate to make use of foreign intervention when it could serve his interests, and he was just now engaged in an intrigue with precisely the same party in England as that approached by Pétion and supported by Carra.  “ Danton,” says his panegyrist, Dr. Robinet, “ at first had hopes of Germany, where he counted on the influence of the adversaries of the Austro-Prussian alliance, but it was the English Opposition that formed his most serious support.” [63]

When, after the riot of the Champ de Mars, Danton fled to England, he had taken the opportunity to carry out a political mission.  The main object of this mission was to obtain the neutrality of England in the war that the French revolutionaries hoped to bring about with Austria, and Danton, who knew England well, was instructed to enlist the sympathies of the Whigs.  With the help of his old friend Thomas Paine, and of Christie, another English revolutionary, Danton obtained interviews with Fox, Sheridan, and Lord Stanhope, with whom he succeeded in establishing cordial relations.[64]  Danton having thus paved the way, Talleyrand—who, according to Dr. Robinet, was Danton’s political ally—went to London in the following spring and offered to hand over the Isles of France, of Bourbon, and of Tabago to England, and also to demolish the fortifications of Cherbourg—the triumph of the reign of Louis XVI.—if England would form an alliance with France and go to war with Austria.[65]  Brissot went further, and suggested ceding Calais and Dunkirk to England.[66]  And these were the men who accused Louis XVI. of intriguing with foreign powers to betray the interests of France !

The missions, both of Danton and of Talleyrand, met with very tangible success, for by the summer of 1792 a brisk correspondence had been started between the French and English Jacobins ;  a number of the latter came over to Paris—some, indeed, actually became members of the Club in the Rue Saint-Honoré—and, what is more important, English guineas were sent to finance sedition.  On April 26 the author of the Correspondance secrète writes complacently :  “ A collection has been opened in England in aid of our Revolution ;  one private person alone has written himself down for 1500 louis.”

What further proof is needed as to the origin of the “ gold of Pitt ” ?  For again with superb cunning it was to Pitt these corruptions were attributed by the revolutionary factions—to Pitt, who had resolutely refused to associate with the Duc d’Orléans, who detested Danton,[67] and who received the revolutionary deputation under Talleyrand with such undisguised aversion that Chauvelin was reduced to the dignified expedient of stamping on Pitt’s toe in revenge.[68]

The policy of both the Cordeliers and the Girondins was therefore to dethrone Louis XVI. in favour of an Orléaniste or a foreign monarch.  There was no question of a Republic.  This even the revolutionaries themselves admit ;  Brissot afterwards declared there were only three genuine Republicans at this date—Buzot, Pétion, and himself,[69] and we have already seen in what Pétion and Buzot’s “ Republicanism ” consisted.  Pétion put the number at five immediately before the 10th of August.[70]  Perhaps M. Biré is nearest the truth in saying there were exactly two—the Englishman Thomas Paine and the Prussian Baron Clootz.[71]

III.  And what of Robespierre ?  The rôle of Robespierre at this moment is of so much importance that, although he had not yet formed a definite party of his own, he must be regarded as a party in himself.  For it was Robespierre who from the end of 1791 proved the great opponent to all plans of usurpation.  Although at the beginning of the Revolution he had worked with the Orléanistes, it is probable that he had never entered into their design of placing the Duc d’Orléans on the throne ;  his plan was simply to make use of the revolutionary machinery they had constructed in order to annihilate the Old Régime.[72]  The orgies of Philippe and his boon companions held no attractions for the austere Maximilien.  “ The wine of Champagne,” he said, “ is the poison of liberty.”  It was not without reason that he earned the title of “ Incorruptible ”;  for money he had no use ;  his abnormal nervous system precluded him from all forms of excess.  No longer the aimless Subversive he had been in 1789, he now above all things desired power—a power that was to be accorded to him by the people.  For this reason Orléanistes and Girondins were alike abhorrent to him ;  with Philippe or a German prince on the throne the people would have no voice whatever—even the present monarch was preferable to such a government.  Since, therefore, he shrewdly realized that at this stage of the Revolution any attempt to dethrone Louis XVI. would inevitably lead to a government far less democratic than that of the Old Régime, he loudly proclaimed himself in favour of the existing monarchy.  His speech at the Jacobins four days before the riot of the Champ de Mars was really admirable in its common sense and logic :

“ I have been accused, in the midst of the Assembly, of being a Republican ;  they do me too much honour, I am not one.  If I had been accused of being a monarchist they would have dishonoured me ;  I am not that either.  I would first observe that for many people the words ‘ republic ’ and ‘ monarchy ’ are entirely void of meaning.  The word republic signifies no form of government in particular ;  it applies to every government of free men who own a country.  Thus one can be just as free with a monarch as with a senate.  What is the present French constitution ?  It is a republic with a monarch.  It is therefore neither a monarchy nor a republic—it is both.”[73]

Eight months later, when the Jacobin Club had fallen under the dominion of the Girondins, Robespierre indicated his policy still more clearly, disassociating himself from their schemes of usurpation :

“ As for me, I declare, and I do so in the name of the Society, which will not refute me, that I prefer the individual which chance, birth, and circumstances have given us for a king to all the kings that they would give us.” [74]

This veiled reference was characteristic of Robespierre.  It is not without reason that so many of those who knew him describe Robespierre as a “ tiger-cat ”—feline was his nature and feline were his methods.  His plan was always to make use of one faction to destroy another, and he still had need of the Girondins and the Orléanistes to destroy Lafayette, whom he suspected, not without reason, of aspiring to the rôle of Cromwell.  When, therefore, a courageous deputy of the Assembly, Raimond Ribes, denounced the attempts of the Orléanistes to effect a change of dynasty, and the intrigues of Talleyrand and Brissot to betray the interests of France by ceding ports and colonies to England,[75] Robespierre, who was later on, by the pen of Camille Desmoulins and the mouth of St. Just, to confirm all these accusations, joined with his fellow-Jacobins at the Club in declaring them to be founded on a fable.  So with superb cunning the tiger-cat lay crouching, watching with cold green eyes the manœuvres of the rival factions.  The time had not yet come to spring.

Such, then, was the complicated situation that faced the unfortunate Louis XVI. in the autumn of 1791.  As with every other concession he had made to the cause of liberty his acceptance of the Constitution was followed by a fresh outbreak of revolutionary fury, and a month later the terrible affair of the Glacière d’Avignon took place.  On this occasion it seems that the people of Avignon, hungry peasants, women, labourers out of work, indignant at the plundering of the churches by a horde of brigands—mostly foreigners, led by Jourdan Coupe-Tête—rose spontaneously against the revolutionary leaders and put one of them to death.  In retaliation Jourdan and his troop, gorged with fiery liquors, turned on the people, and a three days’ massacre began in which, amidst atrocities too horrible to record—rape and cannibalism and drunken fury [76]—the unhappy victims, old men, women, children, mothers with babies at their breasts, were flung, some dead and some alive, into a deep ditch known as the “Glacière ” and covered over with quicklime.[77]

The Girondins secured an amnesty for the perpetrators of these deeds !

The massacre of Avignon was followed by further bloodshed in the provinces, and by the end of the year it was evident that no hope remained of restoring order to the kingdom unless by help from the outside.

Marie Antoinette at this juncture no doubt believed that nothing else than open warfare could save the situation, but Louis XVI. still shrank from violent measures and now reverted to his former idea of intervention by foreign powers.  Accordingly he wrote to the principal sovereigns of Europe proposing that they should form “ a congress supported by an armed force as the best method for arresting the factions and establishing a more desirable order of things in France.” [78]  There was no question of armed aggression, of hostile legions marching against the French people, but of invoking moral support to suppress disorders, and if this failed, of summoning friendly allies to the rescue not only of the monarchy but of the people themselves.  If the King, then, appealed for support from abroad, it was not against the people but against their betrayers, the men by whom they were being starved, oppressed, imprisoned, and massacred.  Could even hostile armies have produced worse horrors than those that were already taking place ?  The King did not wish for war ;  on the contrary, he did everything in his power to prevent it by providing a peaceful solution to the crisis.[79]

When, in March 1792, the Brissotins succeeded in driving his ministers from office, the King, wishing to give his enemies no further cause de guerre, resolved on the desperate measure of forming a new ministry from among the Jacobins themselves.  “ I had chosen for my first agents,” he wrote to the Assembly, “ men known for their principles and invested with the confidence of the public ;  they have left the ministry ;  I have therefore thought it my duty to replace them by men who have obtained credit for their popular opinions.  You have often told me it was the only method to make the government work ;  I thought it my duty to employ it so as to leave to malevolence no pretext for doubting my desire to co-operate with all my might in the welfare of our country.”

Accordingly the King decided to nominate the six Girondin ministers designated for him by Brissot—the feeble and irascible Roland, the dour and atrabilious Servan, the stock-jobbing banker Clavière, Dumouriez, an Orléaniste adventurer, and—by an error of Brissot’s—two honest men, Lacoste and Duranton.

Unfortunately the King’s choice was not as “ popular ” as he imagined, for the Girondins were precisely the faction least in touch with “the people.”  It was the middle classes—not the law-abiding bourgeoisie but the visionaries of the literary world, the little lawyers, the adorers of Rousseau—amongst whom the Girondins found their following ;  for “ the people ” they had nothing but contempt.[80]

No more merciless light has ever been shed on the “ democracy ” of the Girondins than by an habituée of Madame Roland’s salon, Sophie Grandchamp.  After describing the political discussions that took place amongst the Rolands and their friends, Madame Grandchamp goes on to remark :

“ I was an interested witness of these debates, yet amidst all this fine zeal I thought I perceived that very few would have shown it if public welfare had been the sole recompense.  The austere dress that they adopted as the livery of their party seemed to me a petty ostentation for men truly enamoured of liberty, besides which it contrasted in a ridiculous way with the frivolous tone and morals they displayed.  I asked Roland what good could be expected of a people who had no respect for the most sacred social ties. . . . ‘ They will help to overthrow despotism,’ replied my friends ;  ‘ their private actions do not affect the truths they spread.’  It was, however, these private actions which propagated corruption and destroyed our hopes.  Never was the love of pleasure, of the table, of women, and of gaming greater than at the moment when they wished to improve us.  They left the precincts where the destinies of the Empire were being weighed in the balance to fly into the arms of lust and debauchery.  A few pompous phrases on liberty and the sovereignty of the people sufficed to sanction or at least to excuse the most irregular conduct. . . .”

Phrases !  Always phrases !  “ La phrase les enivre ! ” remarks M. Louis Madelin, and nothing could better describe the much-vaunted eloquence of the Girondins.  They belonged to that eternal class which proves disastrous to all sane government, “ Political Intellectuals,” adepts in word-weaving, who care nothing for the consequences to which their theories may lead, if only those theories sound plausible in speech and print.  Thus Brissot had devoted his literary talents to writing philosophical treatises in which he justified theft[81] and advocated cannibalism,[82] whilst the virtuous Roland, famous for his systems on the subject of commerce and manufacture, had drawn up a scheme in 1787 which he presented to the Academy of Lyons for utilizing the bodies of the dead by converting the fat into lampoil and the bones into phosphoric acid [83]—a proposal which Lyons, unenlightened by “ Kultur,” rejected.

If, as Madame Roland indignantly records, Louis XVI. did not take his new ministers seriously, is it altogether surprising ?  Their manners bewildered him no less than their mentalities.  Men of the people he could have understood, but these philosophers, “ dressed like Quakers in their Sunday best,” who talked him down, interrupted him in the middle of a sentence, quarrelled amongst themselves and nearly came to blows in his presence,[84] were like nothing he had ever come across before.  But Louis XVI., for all his heaviness, was not without a certain slow sense of humour, and we detect a hint of this in Madame Roland’s assertion that he treated his new ministers with the greatest goodnature (la plus grande bonhomie), and led the conversation away from all questions of political importance.  “ The council was soon nothing but a cafe where they amused themselves with chatting.” [85]

During these interviews the new ministers discovered that the King was in no way the imbecile he had been represented by his enemies, that he “ had a fine memory and showed much activity, that he was never idle and read often.  He kept in mind the various treaties made by France with neighbouring powers ;  he knew his history well ;  he was the best geographer in his kingdom.  . . . One could not present any subject to him on which he could not express an opinion founded on certain facts.” [86]

By degrees in this genial atmosphere the ministers lost some of their austerity :  Roland began to boast of the royal favour shown him ;  Clavière, encouraged by the King’s graciousness, presented a request for 95,000 livres to furnish his own apartments.[87]  For a time it seemed that the King had succeeded in disarming his opponents.  But he had counted without Madame Roland—and, except perhaps for the Duc d’Orléans, the King, and more particularly the Queen, had no bitterer enemy.

Madame Roland’s malevolence was of long standing.  Eighteen years earlier, as Manon Phlipon, the daughter of a Paris engraver, she had gone to Versailles with her mother on the invitation of an old lady in the service of the Court.  During a whole week she had looked on at the dinners of the Royal Family, the Mass, the card-playing, the presentations.  But Manon was unimpressed by these glittering functions, and when, after a few days, Madame Phlipon inquired whether her daughter was pleased with her visit, Manon bitterly replied, “ Yes, provided that it soon comes to an end ;  a few more days and I shall detest all these people so heartily that I shall not know what to do with my hatred.”

She had never known what to do with her hatred ;  all through the years that followed it had remained pent up in her heart, poisoning her youth, turning the joy of life to gall.  The remembrance of those exalted beings, whose graciousness towards herself she had interpreted as patronage, became an obsession ;  further encounters with their kind only increased her resentment.  Yet she despised the petite bourgeoisie amongst which Fate had placed her as heartily as she hated the class above it ;  the overtures of obscure lovers who presented themselves in crowds merely humiliated her.  By her marriage to dull old Roland de la Platière she saw some hope of “ rising to the rank that became her.”  Yet this too led to nothing ;  her attempt to secure for him “ a title of nobility ” met with no success ;  country life bored her to exasperation.  When at last the revolutionary storm burst over France, Manon Roland hailed it with rapture, ostensibly as the dawn of liberty, in reality as a retribution on the social system which accorded her a place of no importance.  In the terrible letter she wrote to Bosc immediately after the massacre of Foullon and Berthier all the old hatred flamed out, and under its influence this woman who had fed on the classics descended to the language of a bargee :

“ You are occupying yourself,” she wrote on July 26, 1789, “ with a municipality, and you allow heads to escape that will plot fresh horrors.  You are but children ;  your enthusiasm is a blaze of straw ;  and if the National Assembly does not formally bring to trial two illustrious heads, or some generous Decius does not strike them off, you are all f. . . .” [88]  The sentence ends with the usual revolutionary obscenity.

When at last in March 1792 Roland was elected to the Ministry, Manon knew a moment of exaltation ;  the transition to the gorgeous Hôtel de Calonne, which had been given over to the Ministry of the Interior, restored her from a state of “ consuming languor ” to sudden exuberant vitality.  But once again disillusionment awaited her.  Of what avail were gilded salons, painted ceilings, giant lackeys standing at each side of the great folding doors, to open one or both according to the rank of the arriving guest [89]—observe the equality practised by our austere exponents of democracy !—if the Tuileries ignored her ?  Over there in that remote mysterious Château, standing aloof from the noisy Paris world amidst its stately gardens, there dwelt the woman on whom Manon had resolved to wreak her vengeance.  She knew what to do with her hatred now, and from this moment she pursued her victim with a malevolence that even at the foot of the scaffold knew no relenting.

The failing of great historians is to overlook the existence of apparently unimportant details, yet many a world-shaking event can be traced to trifling causes.  The 20th of June 1792 was largely the result of a woman’s desire for revenge.

It was not that Madame Roland created the elements of revolution—these lay already to hand—but that she provided the pretexts for stirring up agitation.  As Laclos had been “ the soul of the Orléaniste conspiracy,” galvanizing into activity the idle roués of the Palais Royal, Manon Roland, with untiring ingenuity, goaded on the vain and foolish Girondins, who, but for influence, might have rested content with their accession to the Ministry.  When Roland and his colleagues returned from the councils at the Tuileries, and declared that the King was evidently sincere in his determination to maintain the Constitution, Marion Roland laughed them to scorn.  “ During three weeks,” she writes, “ I saw Roland and Clavière enchanted with the King’s attitude, dreaming only of a better order of things, and flattering themselves that the Revolution was ended.  ‘ Good God ! ’ I said to them, ‘ every time I see you start for the council full of this fine confidence, it always seems to me that you are ready to commit some folly.’  ‘ I assure you,’ Clavière answered me, ‘ that the King feels perfectly that his interest is bound up with the maintenance of the laws which have just been established ;  he reasons about them too pertinently for one not to be convinced of this truth.’  ‘ Ma foi,’ added Roland, ‘ if he is not an honest man he is the greatest rogue in the kingdom ;  no one could dissemble in that way.’  And as for me I replied that I could not believe in love of the Constitution on the part of a man nourished on the prejudices of despotism and accustomed to enjoy it, and whose conduct recently proved the absence of genius and of virtue.  The flight to Varennes was my great argument.” [90]

Because, therefore, she, Manon Roland, could not conceive it possible that any one possessing power or privileges should be willing to renounce them, the King was to be accused, without any proof whatever, of wishing to violate the Constitution.  From this moment Mme. Roland devoted all her energies to the one purpose of shaking the people’s confidence in the King.

But this, at the beginning of 1792, was no easy matter, for the public was still convinced of the King’s sincerity, as the following significant passage from the journal of a young student then in Paris—an ardent admirer of the Girondins—reveals :

“ Oh ! fatal error ! traitors have succeeded in persuading this too credulous and confiding people that a King who from his tenderest infancy has sucked the venomous juice of despotism has all of a sudden been converted to patriotism. . . . By degrees he is making numerous partisans, above all he is attaching public opinion to himself ... he will succeed in invading national liberty.  The Parisians themselves appear to wish to hasten this disastrous moment.  Listen to them in the groups at the Palais Royal and in the Tuileries ;  they are hurrying towards inevitable slavery.  Who would have thought that this people would mistake its true friends so far as to distrust the inestimable Pétion, and would lavish its confidence and its applause on those perfidious beings who, profiting by its blindness and its torpor, abuse the sacred words of law and constitution in so execrable a way as to lead it to the feet of a king, to the feet of a traitor, of a perjurer, a true tiger disguised as a pig.  The National Guards, above all, have degenerated extraordinarily. . . . They are real sbirri animated by that esprit de corps so fatal to liberty.... This is the sad state of affairs in Paris, and I see only two great ills capable of saving liberty—war or the flight of the King.  I will even say that I ardently desire one of these terrible afflictions, because, as Mirabeau foretold us, our liberty can only be ensured in so far as she has for her bed mattresses of corpses, and because, in order to ensure this liberty, I consent, if necessary, to become one of these corpses.”[91]

Madame Roland and her friends saw this pacific disposition of the people with growing alarm, and thereupon devised a scheme characteristic of their political morality.  Large placards attacking the royal authority were to be posted up all over Paris, and in order to defray the expenses necessary for this purpose they applied to their ally, Pétion, the Mayor of Paris, for a sum of money to be taken from the fund he held at the disposal of the Paris police.  Pétion proved only too willing to co-operate ;  unfortunately the police fund happened at this moment to be exhausted.  Accordingly Dumouriez, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, was deputed to ask the King to supply Pétion with a large sum for the police, which was then to be handed over to the Rolands.  Louis XVI., approached on the matter, displayed a certain perspicacity, but decided to give Pétion a chance of proving his good faith.

“ Pétion is my enemy,” he said to Dumouriez ;  “ you will see that he will spend this money on writings against me, but if you think it will be any use, give it to him.” [92]

The sum was made over and, of course, employed as the King suspected.  “ The expedient,” remarks Madame Roland, “ was simple, and it was adopted.” [93]

We marvel as we read these words, not so much at the base treachery of securing money on false pretences and, as the King himself expressed it, of “ asking him to supply rods with which to scourge himself,” but at the complete lack of all sense of honour which made it possible for Madame Roland, quite unblushingly, to admit the scheme in her memoirs.  She does not see that the manœuvre was in any way discreditable ;  to her mind it was “ quite simple.”

But defamatory placards alone would not avail to bring about a revolution ;  some definite cause de guerre must be provided.  If only the King could be represented as violating the Constitution or of plotting with the enemies of France, it would be easier to arouse popular indignation.  But the King displayed an irritating fidelity to the Constitution—indeed his habit of producing a copy of the charter from his pocket and quoting it on every possible occasion was beginning to get on the nerves of his ministers—whilst any correspondence he had been carrying on with Austria could not be described as treasonable, since Austria still remained the ally of France.

In order, therefore, to prove the King a traitor, not only must the alliance of 1756 be broken, but war must be brought about between France and Austria.  It was necessary, in the words of Brissot himself, “ to find an opportunity for setting traps for the King, in order to demonstrate his bad faith and his collusion with the princes who had emigrated.”[94]  It is well to remember this admission when reading the diatribes directed against Louis XVI. for inviting foreign invasion.  The war, which for twenty-three years was to impoverish France and decimate her population, was not declared by Austria, but was brought about by the Girondins largely in the interests of Prussia at a moment when Austria appeared reluctant to enter France.[95]  At the Jacobins both Danton and Robespierre opposed it, for they shrewdly perceived that if the foreign powers needed an incentive to march to the rescue of the Royal Family, the declaration of war was a direct invitation to them to advance.  But the pro-Prussian party carried the day, and the scheme of Frederick the Great was finally realized.

If further evidence were needed of the manœuvres of Prussia it is to be found in the debates that took place in the Assembly, for we shall notice that, although on February 7 Prussia formed an alliance with Austria, and on March 7 the Duke of Brunswick was placed at the head of the allied armies, it was against Austria alone that the Girondins desired war to be declared ;  in all their speeches it was against Austria, never against Prussia, that their invectives were directed ;  it was the Hapsburgs, not the Hohenzollerns, who inspired their fury.

The Girondins well knew they had nothing to fear from Prussia or from Brunswick.

“ The Duke Ferdinand,” writes Sorel, “ had always loved France and professed to detest Austria. . . . The revolutionary party professed a singular esteem for his person.  Far from seeing in him an abettor of tyrants many revolutionaries held him to be a friend of enlightened doctrines and a natural ally of France.  The Girondins respected him, Dumouriez admired him. . . .” [96]  So great was this admiration that at the very moment when the duke was given the supreme command the Girondins embarked on their further scheme of placing him on the throne of France.

“ I read on March the 18th,” writes Mallet du Pan, “ a writing, supported by good authority, in which it is affirmed that the plan of the leaders of the Jacobins is not exactly a republic but a change of dynasty, because they consider that the King will always be attached to the noblesse and little to the Constitution.  Consequently they have offered the crown to the Duke of Brunswick. . . . By making the duke and England adopt this project they flatter themselves to be able to detach Prussia from the House of Austria, they even offer hint other advantages.  The method devised for dethroning the King is to make the National Assembly declare that he has lost the confidence of the nation.  Messieurs Condorcet, Brissot, and others are only the instruments, the agents of the enterprise, of which the principal chief and author is the Abbé Sièyes. . . .” [97]  But Sorel is probably right in considering Mallet du Pan had been misinformed on this last point ;  no other evidence convicts Sièyes of complicity with this plot, of which the chief author was undoubtedly Carra.

In all the debates that took place in the Assembly on the subject of the “ Austrian Committee,” which the King and Queen were accused of holding at the Tuileries, and of which the Girondins attempted in vain to prove the existence, it was always Carra who inveighed most loudly against the perfidy of Marie Antoinette and her Austrian allies.  But it was not until Brunswick was actually marching against France that Carra showed his hand by publicly proposing to give him the crown.

All through the year of 1792 the French revolutionary leaders admirably served the cause of Prussia—whether as dupes or as accomplices it is impossible to say with certainty.  Even the cause of the Orléanistes was now subordinated to the purpose of carrying out the great scheme of Frederick the Great—the rupture of that alliance which barred the way to Prussian aggrandizement.  This, then, was the policy of the faction that led all the attacks on Louis XVI. for intriguing with foreign powers, and that later on had the audacity to accuse him of precipitating France into war.  Yet there were tears in his eyes when on the 20th of April he formally announced the declaration of war against Austria.[98]

The Queen, however, breathed a sigh of relief.  Anything, she felt, would be better than the present situation.  The state of Paris was growing daily more alarming.  This spring of 1792 a new and terrible element had made its appearance in the city—the band of ruffians who, from the tattered garments they wore that did duty as breeches, became known as the Sans-Culottes.  The members of this ragged legion, mostly young boys, were of a class not peculiar to revolutionary France, but corresponded to the “ hooligans ” of modern London, the Apaches of modern Paris, or the Bowery toughs of New York, and it is easy to imagine the terror they inspired amongst the peaceable citizens when formed into a corps and protected, not restrained, by the police.  Montjoie relates that at the mere sight of two Sans-Culottes armed with pikes, wearing the red caps of galley-slaves that this spring of 1792 became the badge of revolution, the inhabitants of a Paris street would fly trembling into their houses and barricade their doors.[99]

Every day two to three hundred of these Sans-Culottes invaded the gardens of the Tuileries and stirred up popular feeling against the Queen.[100]

“ You see me in despair,” she said one day to the King in the presence of Dumouriez.  “ I dare not stand at the window on the side of the gardens.  Yesterday evening to breathe the air I showed myself at the window on the side of the Court ;  a canonnier apostrophized me with a coarse insult, adding, ‘ How pleased I shall be to see your head on the point of my bayonet.’ . . . If I cast my eyes on that dreadful garden there is a man standing on a chair reading aloud horrors against us, there is a soldier or an abbé being dragged to the fountain and overwhelmed with blows and insults. . . . What an abode !  What people ! ”

“ The Queen,” says Ferrières, “ was not exaggerating :  the Orléanistes and Girondins never ceased exciting the populace against the King and Queen. . . . A crowd of hired orators daily declaimed the libels composed by the faction. . . . Louis XVI. was represented as a Nero, a sanguinary monster breathing only murder and carnage, wishing to bring foreign troops into France and use them to support him in the execution of his plans. . . . The Queen was painted either under the degrading colours of a Messalina given up to the most shameful licentiousness, or as a fury seeking only to bathe herself in the blood of the French.  These slanderous horrors were cried aloud in all the streets, were repeated at the tribune of the Jacobins, at the bar of the Assembly.”

What wonder that Marie Antoinette longed for her own people to come and deliver her ?  What wonder if she despaired of the French nation when this was the portion of it daily presented to her sight ?

Louis XVI. was even more affected by the horror of the situation, and at last, Madame Campan relates, “ fell into a state of depression which reached the point of physical collapse.  He was ten days in succession without uttering a word even in the midst of his family . . . the Queen drew him out of this disastrous condition . . . by throwing herself at his feet, now conjuring up visions calculated to alarm him, now expressing her love for him.” [101]  It was a clear case of mental break-down, and must be taken into consideration in judging the King’s conduct at this crisis.  Undoubtedly he vacillated, at one moment lending an ear to the men who would persuade him that salvation lay in this or that revolutionary faction, the next convinced by Fersen or the Queen that nothing but foreign intervention could avail to restore law and order.  So the months of spring went by and June arrived—the last June of the monarchy.

PRELIMINARIES OF THE 20TH OF JUNE

The plan of raising a mob to march on the Tuileries, one of the leaders afterwards admitted, was “ conceived and planned in the salon of Madame Roland.”  It is certain at any rate that, as Mortimer Temaux pointed out, “ the day of June the 20th had been prepared long beforehand by the agitators of the Faubourgs ;  the date had been settled—it was that of the Oath of the Tennis Court [102]—the rôles were distributed, complicity agreed on and accepted, the issue alone was uncertain ;  it depended on the degree of excitement and exasperation to which the masses could be brought.”  The reasons given by revolutionary writers for the invasion of the Tuileries are, therefore, only the pretexts that were given to the people in order to induce them to carry out the designs of the leaders.  But, as we have already seen, the people at this moment were in no mood to rise.  Even the Faubourgs of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau showed little tendency to revolt, although perpetually stirred up by Santerre and by Gonchon.

Théroigne de Méricourt, no longer the light-hearted fille de joie who had ridden with the mob to Versailles, but a haggard and embittered virago, was also hard at work in Saint-Antoine, where she had organized revolutionary clubs for women on the model of the Société Fraternelle that formed an annexe to the Jacobins and served as a training school for the future tricoteuses.  But Théroigne’s efforts met with violent remonstrance from the working-men of Saint-Antoine, who complained to Santerre that the sweetness of their wives’ tempers was not increased by attendance at these assemblies, and the Jacobins were obliged to request Mlle. Théroigne “ to moderate her activities.”[103]

Nothing, indeed, is more surprising than the resistance shown by the inhabitants of the Faubourgs to the seductions of the Jacobins—a fact of which historians give no idea, but which is only revealed by a study of contemporary literature, especially of the ultra-revolutionary variety.  It is in the pages of Prudhomme, in the reports of the Séances des Jacobins, that we discover the immense efforts made by the revolutionaries and their repeated failures to enlist the sympathies of the people.  For when we consider the wretchedness of the people at this crisis, and realize that the arms of the Jacobins were always open to receive them ;  when we remember that any deserter from the army who appealed to the Society for sympathy stood an excellent chance of receiving a civic crown, that any man or woman who entered the hall and uttered revolutionary sentiments received an ovation, and in many instances a sum of money, that any schoolboy who recited a revolutionary poem was invited to the honours of the Séance and overwhelmed with compliments, we can only wonder that the Faubourgs did not crowd en masse to the club in the Rue Saint-Honoré.  But no, only here and there does a stray dweller of the Faubourgs find his way there, and then with what triumph and at what length is the incident recorded in the journal of the Society !

True, we shall read often of deputations from the “ sections of Paris ” arriving, both at the Assembly and at the Jacobins, but we do not need the explanations of Montjoie, of Beaulieu, or the Deux Amis de la Liberté to realize that the speeches crammed with classical allusions delivered on these occasions were not the work of the poor and unlettered inhabitants of the Faubourgs, but of the revolutionary agents who distributed them to orators so unlearned that they were hardly able to read the words aloud.[104]  As to any spontaneous expressions of the people’s sentiments these were seldom accorded a hearing, and at any rate were not recorded in the press, which at this date was almost entirely in the pay of the revolutionary leaders.  Thus we read of an imposing deputation from Saint-Marceau to the National Assembly consisting of 6000 men armed with pikes and forks, and women with their arms held threateningly aloft, and children carrying naked swords, led by “ an orator in rags who spoke like Cicero ” in praise of the Revolution, but a petition signed by 30,000 citizens which was presented a few days later to protest against the tyranny of the Jacobins is not even mentioned in the reports of the debates.[105]

Adolphe Schmidt, in his studies of revolutionary Paris, has worked out by statistics that out of all the 600,000 to 800,000 inhabitants of the capital there were, in 1792, not more than 5000 to 6000 real revolutionaries—a number that diminished in the following year to nearly half—and that during the whole revolutionary period the anti-revolutionaries constituted nine-tenths of the population.  In this June of 1792 the departmental administration placed in this category of “ honest folk ” and “ young folk ” “ those useful and hard-working men attached to the State at every point of their existence and by all the objects of their affections—proprietors, cultivators, tradesmen, artisans, workmen, and all those estimable citizens whose activity and economy contribute to the public treasury, and animate all the resources of national prosperity.  All these men profess a boundless devotion to the Constitution, and principally to the sovereignty of the nation, to political equality and to constitutional monarchy.”  “The Jacobin Club,” the same report declares, “ is alone responsible for any disturbances in the city.” [106]

In order, therefore, to persuade the people of Paris to march on the Tuileries some very powerful incentive must be provided.  For some months the Girondins, Brissot, Gensonné, and above all Carra, had endeavoured to inflame the popular mind by continual declamations against the so-called “Austrian Committee,” by means of which Marie Antoinette was declared to be betraying France to the Emperor of Austria, but their efforts to prove the existence of this committee had ended in ignominious failure.  To the request for a written statement of their accusations they replied :  “ What do you wish us to prove ?  Conspiracies cannot be written down (Les conspirations ne s’écrivent pas).”  Later on at their trial, when they asked Fouquier Tinville for proofs of their guilt, Fouquier quoted these words to them and sent them to the guillotine.[107]

The scare of the “ Austrian Committee ” having failed to rouse the people, the Girondins set about devising further “ traps ” for the King.  If only Louis XVI. were to refuse his sanction to any decrees passed by the Assembly the old cry against the “ Veto ” could be raised, and an insurrection might be expected to result.  Accordingly three iniquitous decrees were placed before the Assembly.  The first enacted that all the nonjuring priests—that is to say, those who had not subscribed to the civil constitution of the clergy—should be deported ;  the second that the King should be deprived of his bodyguard of 1800 men accorded to him by the Constitution, but suspected by the revolutionaries of loyalty to his person, and the third that a camp of 20,000 men should be formed outside Paris.  Louis gave his sanction to the second decree, but withheld it from the first and third.  Now, since the first decree was mainly instigated by Roland, and the third was proposed by Servan—Madame Roland’s particular ally in the ministry—it is impossible not to recognize the hand of Madame Roland in all this.  The three decrees were, of course, directly unconstitutional, the last because, according to the terms of the Constitution, the King alone had the authority to propose any addition to the standing army, and the camp of 20,000 men was proposed by Servan entirely on his own authority, without reference to the King or even to the other ministers.  Moreover, as the 20,000 men were to consist of “ confederates ” from the provinces, that is to say, they were to be chosen by the Jacobin Clubs all over France, the plan met with immediate remonstrance, not only from the King but from sane men of every party.  Lafayette wrote to the King from his camp at Maubeuge urging him to persist in his refusal to sanction the decree ;  even Robespierre expressed his disapproval.

The ministers themselves were violently divided on the subject, Roland, Servan, and Clavière supporting the plan, Dumouriez, Lacoste, and Duranton protesting—Dumouriez, indeed, nearly came to blows with Servan in the King’s presence.[108]

But most of all was the proposal resented by the National Guard of Paris—a corps essentially representative of the people—who sent a deputation to the Assembly to protest against the imputation that they were incompetent to defend the capital.  “ Servan,” said the orator of this deputation, “ had violated the Constitution, had shown himself ‘the vile instrument of a faction that rends the kingdom.’  We citizens of Paris, we who were the first to conquer liberty, we shall know how to defend it at all times against every kind of tyrant ;  we have still the force and courage of the men of the 14th of July.”  At this Vergniaud, rising in wrath, declared that the petitioners were guilty of “ inconceivable audacity,” and should be refused “ the honours of the sitting ”—in other words, that they should be driven from the hall.  A further deputation of the National Guard, armed with a petition bearing 8000 signatures, met with a like reception, and the Assembly thereupon closed the debate.[109]

To this, then, had the “ sovereignty of the people ” been reduced.  All through the Revolution we shall find the same method employed ;  the only deputations recognized as representative of the people are those organized by the revolutionary leaders and marching to the word of command ;  spontaneous demonstrations are invariably silenced and declared to be “ seditious.”

The Jacobin Club, dominated by the Girondins, whose violence during the early part of 1792 surpassed even that of the future Terrorists, had succeeded in establishing a tyranny which roused the indignation of all true lovers of liberty.  At his camp in Maubeuge, Lafayette received from the administrative and municipal bodies all over the country further complaints of their excesses, and now once again he resolved to come to the rescue of the monarchy.  His letter to the Assembly on June 16 is one of the few admirable incidents in his vacillating career.

“ Can you deny,” he wrote indignantly, “ that a faction—and to avoid vague denominations, the Jacobin faction—has caused all the disorders ?  It is this faction that I loudly accuse.  Organized like an empire apart in its metropolis and its affiliations, blindly directed by a few ambitious leaders, this sect forms a distinct corporation in the midst of the French people, of which it usurps the powers by subjugating its representatives and its agents.  It is there that at public meetings attachment to the law is called ‘ aristocracy ’ and its infringement ‘patriotism’;  there the assassins of Desilles triumph, the crimes of Jourdan find panegyrists.... It is I who denounce this sect to you . . . and how should I delay any longer in fulfilling this duty when each day weakens constituted authority, substitutes the spirit of party for the will of the people, when the audacity of agitators imposes silence on peaceful citizens and casts aside men who could be useful.... May the royal power remain intact, for it is guaranteed by the Constitution ;  may it be independent, for that independence is one of the mainsprings of our liberty ;  may the King be revered, for he is invested with the majesty of the nation ;  may he choose a ministry that wears the chains of no party, and if there are conspirators may they perish beneath the power of the sword.

“ In a word, may the reign of the Clubs be destroyed by you and give place to the reign of law ... their disorganizing maxims (give place) to the true principles of liberty, their delirious fury to the calm and settled courage of a nation that knows its rights and defends them, may party considerations yield to the real interests of the country, which at this moment of danger should unite all those to whom its subjugation and ruin are not a matter of atrocious profit and infamous speculation.”

These courageous words of Lafayette were received with a howl of execration by the Girondins.  Vergniaud rose angrily to declare that “ it was all over with liberty if a general were allowed to dictate laws ” to the Assembly.

No less than sixty-five departments of France and several large towns hastened to endorse the sentiments of Lafayette.[110]  But it was useless indeed for any one to oppose the Girondins at this crisis ;  the power was all in their hands, and Dumouriez, realizing this, dared not stand against them, so, although he had declared that “ those who demanded the formation of a camp of 20,000 men near Paris were as much the enemies of the country as the enemies of the King,” he ended by advising Louis XVI. to sanction the decree.

It was the crowning misfortune of the unhappy King at every crisis of the Revolution to lack disinterested advisers.  Before the siege of the Bastille Necker had not dared to stand by him ;  at the march on Versailles all his ministers had distinguished themselves by their ineptitude ;  and now, before the invasion of the Tuileries, Dumouriez failed him ignominiously.

Long afterwards in his Mémoires Dumouriez completely justified the King’s conduct in refusing his sanction to the two decrees, but his tribute to the integrity of Louis XVI. only places his own perfidy in a blacker light.  One day, Dumouriez relates, the King, taking him by the hand, said, “ in accents that neither art nor dissimulation could have imitated, ‘ God is my witness that I wish for nothing but the happiness of France,’ and Dumouriez, with tears in his eyes, replied, ‘ Sire, I do not doubt it ... if all France knew you as I do all our misfortunes would be ended ! ’ ”  Yet, after this, Dumouriez betrayed him.  For Louis XVI. having refused to sanction the two decrees, Dumouriez only waited for the inevitable explosion in order to resign his post in the ministry and return to the army—and the Duc de Chartres.

Meanwhile Madame Roland had seen her opportunity to bring about the crisis for which she had so long been waiting, and before the King could announce his final decision she had devised a further trap which this time was to prove effectual.

The dismissal of Necker had served as a pretext for the Revolution of July 1789 ;  the dismissal of the three “ patriot ministers,” Roland, Servan, and Clavière, might be expected to bring about the Revolution of June 1792.  Accordingly she composed a letter [111] which Roland was to hand to the King in the council as his own composition, but of which the authorship was only too plainly visible.  Who but Madame Roland, with her insatiable greed for power, could have basely taunted Louis XVI. with the loss of those prerogatives that he had voluntarily renounced ?  “ Your Majesty has enjoyed the great prerogatives that he believed to belong to royalty.  Brought up with the idea of retaining them he could not feel any pleasure at seeing them taken from him ;  the desire to have them given back is as natural as the regret at seeing them done away with.”  Then, dropping the tone of contemptuous condolence, she proceeds to threaten him, and all the old ferocity flashes out anew :  “ Two important decrees have been drawn up, both of essential interest to the public tranquillity and the salvation of the State.  The delay to sanction them inspires distrust ;  if prolonged it will cause discontent ;  and I am forced to say that in the present agitation of all minds, discontent may lead to anything.  There is no time to draw back, it is no longer even possible to temporize—the revolution is made in the minds of the people, it will be finished at the price of blood, and will be cemented with blood, if wisdom does not prevent misfortune it is possible to avoid. . . .

“ I know that the austere language of truth is rarely welcomed near the throne ;  I know also that it is because it cannot make itself heard there that revolutions become necessary . . . and I know nothing that can prevent me from fulfilling my conscious duty,” etc.

Not content with handing this precious document to the King, Roland, obedient to Manon’s instructions, insisted on reading it aloud to him, after which he delivered himself of a violent tirade containing “ the bitterest and most insulting details ” on the conduct of the King, representing him as a “ perjurer,” reproaching him on the subject of his confessor and of his bodyguard, on the imprudences of the Queen, and the intrigues of the Court with Austria.[112]  There was a limit to the patience even of Louis XVI.;  and this attack of Roland’s had the effect of bringing things to a crisis.  On the 12th of June the King dismissed Roland, Servan, and Clavière ;  on the 19th he finally placed his “ Veto ” on the two decrees.

Nothing could have suited Madame Roland better.  For once we may believe her to be sincere when she assures us that she was enchanted at the dismissal of the three ministers, for, if the King’s action added fuel to her fury, it had provided the final pretext for insurrection.[113]

The plan concerted in Madame Roland’s salon of collecting a mob to march on the Tuileries was matured in the councils of the Orléanistes.  At Charenton, Danton, Marat, Santerre, Camille Desmoulins[114] met by night, as the Orléanistes of 1789 had met at Montrouge or Passy, for it was they alone who could control the workings of the great revolutionary machine ;  it was they who chose and paid the mob leaders, they who distributed the roles, prompted the orators, and lavished gold and strong drink on the obedient multitude they held at their command.  The Girondins could only suggest and perorate ;  the Orléanistes knew how to lead from words to action.  Then the conspirators set to work to inflame the minds of the people :  Carra, Gorsas, Brissot, and Condorcet distributed seditious pamphlets, Pétion and Manuel placarded the walls of the city with fresh calumnies against the Royal Family.[115]  A caricature was hawked on the quays representing Louis XVI. with his crown slipping from his head, seated at picquet with the Duc d’Orléans, and exclaiming, “ J’ai écarté les cœurs, il a pour lui les piques, j’ai perdu la partie.” [116]  The pikes were literally those of Orléans, for Pétion had ordered 30,000 to be forged for arming the populace, and by a refinement of brutality the points were so constructed as not only to wound but to lacerate horribly the flesh of the victims.[117]  These, together with 50,000 red caps of liberty, were distributed in the Faubourgs.  Meanwhile Gorsas paraded the streets crying out, “ My friends, we must go to-morrow to plant under the windows of fat Louis not the oak of liberty but an aspen ! ” [118]

As usual, the people were not admitted to the secrets of the leaders, whose ingenious method was invariably to propose some apparently harmless demonstration, and then to stir the people up to commit excesses.  By this means it was always possible to avoid responsibility, and to attribute the blame for any violence that took place to the uncontrollable passions of the populace.  As on the 14th of July the people had only been told to march on the Bastille in order to procure arms for their defence, and on the 5th of October to go to Versailles and ask the King for bread, so before the 20th of June the programme officially put before the inhabitants of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau was to form a procession in order to present a petition to the King and Legislative Assembly, asking for the sanction of the two decrees and the recall of the dismissed ministers.[119]  After this they were to proceed to the terrace of the Tuileries and plant a “ tree of liberty,” to commemorate the anniversary of the Oath of the Tennis Court.  Nothing more innocent could be imagined, and by way of inducement to the more peaceable amongst the people it was suggested how pleasant it would be to visit the inside of the Tuileries, and see Monsieur and Madame Veto at home.[120]  But in order to ensure the co-operation of the populace more potent methods were employed, and amongst these, as in every outbreak of the Revolution, alcohol played the principal part.  So in the Faubourgs throughout the 19th of June champagne, distributed by Santerre, flowed freely,[121] whilst the professional instigators of crime who had figured in all the former tumults—Gonchon, St. Huruge, Fournier l’Americain, and Rotondo—stirred up insurrection.  In the Champs Élysées a feast was spread to which the inhabitants of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau were bidden ;  in the surrounding cabarets half-naked Sans-Culottes collected, incendiary speeches were made, the Prussian Clootz as toast-master proposed the deposition of Louis XVI.;  and although the more prudent of the leaders affected to support this proposition, the comedian Dugazon was permitted to sing verses provoking the people to murder the King.[122]

Louis XVI. well knew what was taking place in the city.  That day he wrote to his confessor, asking him to come to him “ I have never had so great need of your consolations ;  I have done with men, it is towards Heaven that I turn my eyes.  Great disasters are announced for to-morrow ;  I shall have courage.”  And as he looked out that summer evening across the great gardens of the Tuileries to the sun sinking behind the Champs Élysées, he said to good old Malesherbes standing by him, “ Who knows whether I shall see the sun set to-morrow ? ”  Then with an untroubled conscience he went to rest, ready to welcome death that would deliver him from the hideous nightmare of life.  And in hundreds of little French homes that night the people, who still loved their King, lay down likewise to rest, little dreaming of the terrible scenes of the morrow that in the lying pages of history were to be set down to their account.

THE 20TH OF JUNE

But whilst the people slept the conspirators were all awake ;  at the house of Santerre the final touches were added to the plan of insurrection ;  Chabot, Bazire, Merlin, Lasource continued to harangue the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, three of whom, outraged by the incendiary speeches of the agitators, denounced them later on to the Assembly, declaring that Chabot had collected the people in a church of the district and had actually proposed the assassination of the King.[123]

So the match was set to the mine, and the conspirators eagerly awaited the explosion.  But, contrary to their expectations, Saint-Antoine showed no irresistible desire to rise.  At five in the morning of the 20th Santerre had only succeeded in raising a mob of 1500 people ;[124]  according to one account of the day, this number had not been exceeded by eleven o’clock, including those who had collected from curiosity, and “ it was not until the sieur Santerre had placed himself at the head of a detachment of invalides . . ., and had incited during their march all onlookers to join them, that the multitude considerably increased.” [125]  Meanwhile in Saint-Marceau a motley crowd of men, women, and children had assembled, armed with the pikes provided by Pétion, who now with consummate hypocrisy sent out commissioners to make a feint of dissuading them from bearing arms and forming a procession.  The people, well under the control of the agitators, of course refused to go back to their homes whence they had been summoned ;  some indeed answered in all good faith that they had no evil intentions, and were resolved to march.  Finally the Faubourgs, to which a number of deserters from the National Guard had joined themselves, set forth, divided into three bands led by Santerre, St. Huruge, and Théroigne de Méricourt, and now at last, as they passed through the streets, recruits began to pour in from all sides—coal-heavers, porters, chimney-sweeps—ready for the price of a day’s work [126] and the promise of free drinks to throw themselves into any tumult ;  but besides these, terrible freaks of humanity, half naked, half in rags, dregs not only of the Paris underworld but of foreign cities, Italians, negroes and negresses, brigands of the South, bearing as well as the usual revolutionary weapons—pikes, scythes, pick-axes, knotted sticks, and rusty swords—horrible emblems of their own devising—filthy trousers held aloft on poles, the badge of the Sans-Culottes, the bleeding heart of a calf labelled “ Aristocrat’s heart,” toy gibbets, hangmen’s ropes.  Eye-witnesses speak shudderingly of this procession ;  nothing so revolting had ever yet been seen in Paris.

The organizers of the movement—who as usual remained prudently in the background—had every reason to congratulate themselves on the success of their efforts ;  never before in the whole course of the Revolution had so formidable a mob been collected :  barely 1000 people had marched on the Bastille, 8000 on Versailles, but now on the 20th of June certain contemporaries declare that no less than 20,000 men, women, and children took part in the movement.[127]  Arithmetically they constituted only about one-thirtieth of the population of the city ;  still this number was sufficient to give some semblance of truth to the assertion that “ the whole people ” had risen in the cause of liberty.

It was more than sufficient to alarm the Assembly, who, hearing that the vanguard of the army consisting of 8000 people were at the door of the Assembly demanding admittance, were called upon instantly to decide whether the procession should be allowed to march through the hall with their arms.  “ Since they are 8000, and we are only 745,” cried one deputy overcome with panic, “ this is the moment to close the sitting and depart ! ”  Hua, more courageous, declared that the Assembly should stand its ground and refuse the mob admittance.  “ Who are these men calling themselves the people who bring us a petition with cannons and pikes ?  Close the doors ;  they may break them down if they wish, but at least the Assembly will not have received them and will have maintained its dignity! ”

But the Girondins—Vergniaud, Guadet, Lasource—whose collusion with the mob leaders was a guarantee for their personal safety, arose indignantly to demand that “ the people ” should be allowed to enter and place their “ sufferings and anxieties ” before the Assembly.  At this Jaucourt aptly exclaimed, “ It is evident that those who brought them here cannot send them away again ! ”

Other members rose to speak, when suddenly the waiting crowd, whose angry murmur had been growing louder, broke down the barriers and burst into the hall.  A scene of indescribable confusion followed ;  cries of protest and alarm arose from all parts of the Assembly ;  members sprang on to the benches and vainly strove to make their voices heard above the tumult.  The President hastily put on his hat to signify that the sitting was ended.  Finally the advance-guard of the mob was driven out again, and after further discussion the Assembly decided to admit a deputation of “ the people.”  The orator of the deputation, a man named Sylvestre Huguenin, formerly a deserter from the army, now an agent of brothels, was certainly not calculated to inspire confidence in the pacific disposition of his followers.  Tall and gaunt, with a bald forehead, bloodshot eyes, a dry and withered skin, his aspect was no less frightful than the tirade he now delivered to the Assembly, of which every word was a veiled provocation to assassinate the King.  “ A single man shall not influence the will of 20,000 men.  If out of consideration we maintain him in his post, it is on condition that he fills it constitutionally ;  if he fails to do this he counts for nothing to the French nation and deserves the extreme penalty.”[128]  As an address supposed to have been framed by the inhabitants of Saint-Antoine the thing was the clumsiest of frauds, for in this, as in every other bogus petition presented to the Assembly, the phraseology of the Jacobin Club was clearly recognizable.  Thus the working-men of Saint-Antoine were represented as saying “ Imitate Cicero and Demosthenes and unveil before the whole Senate the perfidious machinations of Catilina ! ” or again in a wild medley of metaphor :  “ The people will it so, and their head is of as much value as that of crowned despots.  That head is the genealogical tree of the nation, and beneath that sturdy oak the feeble reed must bend.”

At each sanguinary threat the galleries broke out into tumultuous applause, and it was then decided to allow the Faubourgs to march through the Assembly.  Immediately the wild horde, of which a great number were now reeling under the influence of drink, entered the hall led by Santerre and St. Huruge ;  first came seven or eight musicians playing the “ Ça ira ! ” and behind them women armed with sabres singing and dancing to the strains, the men brandishing their ragged banners and ghastly trophies on the end of poles, and all shrieking incoherently, “ Long live the Sans-Culottes !  Long live the nation !  Down With the Veto ! ”

“ The procession,” says the deputy Hua, “ lasted for three hours ;  hideous countenances were there ;  I can still see that moving forest of pikes, those handkerchiefs, those rags that served as standards. . . .”  Meanwhile outside the hall an immense congestion had taken place.  In order to understand this we must realize the situation of the hall occupied by the Assembly.  This hall was the royal Manège, that is to say, the riding-school of the Tuileries, and stood on the spot where at the present day the Rue Castiglione joins the Rue de Rivoli.  At the time of the Revolution neither of these streets existed, for the great gardens of the convents and private houses of the Rue Saint-Honoré stretched right up to the line now occupied by the Rue de Rivoli, and were separated from the Tuileries only by a long and narrow courtyard known as the Cour du Manège, whilst a still narrower passage—the Passage des Feuillants—took the place of the Rue Castiglione leading from the Rue Saint-Honoré to the Porte des Feuillants opening into the Tuileries gardens.  The hall of the Assembly was entered by two doors, one in the Cour du Manège, the other in the Passage des Feuillants, and it was at this latter entrance that the mob had drawn up demanding admittance.  During the delay that ensued the rearguard of the procession continued to pour into the passage which, since the Porte des Feuillants was locked, formed a blind alley, and soon became packed to suffocation.  Thereupon the crowd, stifling for want of air and wearied with inaction, began to seek an outlet, and whilst one party proceeded to break open the Porte des Feuillants and swarm into the gardens of the Tuileries, another bethought themselves of the poplar tree they had brought with them on a cart to represent the “ tree of liberty.”

Now the planting of this tree was to have formed the principal ceremony of the day, and the people, finding that their leaders had failed to carry out their programme, took the law into their own hands and, bursting into the garden of the Capucin convent next to the Assembly, amused themselves by planting there the tree of liberty.  This diversion ended, the crowd began to grow bored, and were on the point of dispersing when the roll of drums and the strains of the “ Ça ira ! ” sounding from the hall of the Assembly rallied them once more, and the whole mass moved forward through the doorway.

This long delay was undoubtedly an error on the part of the conspirators, for it had taken the first edge off the people’s frenzy, who, if they had been marched straight on the Tuileries, might have shown themselves capable of greater violence.  As it was, by the time they had finished parading through the hall, not only had they worked off a great part of their excitement, but also, no doubt, the effects of the wine that had inspired their hilarious entry to the Assembly.

It was nearly four o’clock when at last Santerre, comprehending the necessity of getting to the real business of the day, began to herd his flock towards the exit, crying out in stentorian tones, “ Forward !  March ! ”  The supreme moment had arrived.  The terrible crowd of ragged men and women, victims of vice and misery, were now to consummate the crime that for three years the conspirators had vainly striven to effect.  Three times already—on the 17th of July and the 6th of October 1789, and on the 18th of April 1791—this same rabble of Paris had been driven forward against their King, and on each occasion had refrained from violence ;  now for the last time the great attempt was to be made, and, to judge by the ferocious aspect they presented, there seemed little doubt that amongst this savage horde a murderous hand would not be wanting.[129]

Santerre and St. Huruge, indeed, were evidently so confident that “ the people ” could be depended on to carry out the crime that, instead of marching at their head as they had done in the morning when leading them to the Assembly, they prudently remained behind in the hall.  There was every reason to prefer this safe retreat, for to-day it appeared that the military authorities intended to oppose a very vigorous resistance to any invasion of the Château.  Ten battalions of the National Guard were ranged along the west terrace, two more were stationed at the south end by the river, four other battalions as well as five or six hundred mounted police and twenty cannons guarded the Cour Royale.

So on this occasion it was not merely the prime authors of the movement—Brissot, Danton, Pétion, Manuel—who according to their invariable custom remained in the background, but even the mob leaders themselves who retreated into safety, leaving it to the wretched instruments they had collected to do the deed and face the consequences.  It is remarkable that in all the accounts of the day we find no mention of any of the usual agitators—Rotondo, Grammont, Malga, or Fournier l’Americain—mingling with the crowd at this stage of the proceedings ;  even Théroigne seems to have vanished, for we hear no more of her after her start for the Assembly at the head of her contingent.

The mob, left therefore entirely to its own devices, streamed along the Cour du Manège in the direction of the Château, and then paused as if uncertain whether to go on to the Place du Carrousel or whether to break into the garden of the Tuileries by the gate on their right known as the “ Porte du Dauphin.”  It was, apparently, Mouchet, a little bandy-legged municipal officer stationed at this gateway, who persuaded them to adopt the latter course, and thereupon the whole crowd poured into the garden.[130]

But still the uncomprehending herd failed to enter into the designs of the conspirators, for they made no attempt to invade the Château—which was most accessible from this side—but proceeded along the terrace to the gate leading out on to the quay, and during this march past the troops their behaviour was so peaceable that the King with his family and entourage looking down on the procession from the windows, and watching it file through the gateway with immense relief, concluded the movement to have ended :  for a moment it appeared that the 6th of October was not to be repeated.

Once outside the garden the crowd turned to the left, but instead of continuing its way along the quay drew up outside the gateway leading into the Carrousel, where they were met by the extraordinary notice, here posted up, that only “ people armed, no matter in what way,” were to be admitted.  In response to this invitation—issued evidently by municipal officers in collusion with the leaders—the whole mob, armed and unarmed, poured into the square.  Yet even now the people showed no intention of invading the Château, but streamed onwards to the Rue Saint-Niçaise, apparently with the intention of returning whence they came.  The fact is that the day was very hot, and the people having been on their feet since dawn were growing tired of the whole performance.  The tree of liberty had been planted, the petition read aloud to the Assembly, and now they were ready to go home.[131]

But Santerre and St. Huruge had been informed of the hitch in the proceedings, and, realizing that if the invasion of the Tuileries was to be accomplished they must place themselves once more at the head of the movement, they now appeared on the scene.  Santerre, addressing his contingent from Saint-Antoine, shouted peremptorily, “ Why have you not got into the Château ?  We must get in ! it was for that we came here ! ” [132]  And turning to his gunners he ordered them to follow him with their cannons, declaring that if the doors were closed to them they must be broken down with cannon-balls.  Then the mob, rallying at the word of command, surged en masse towards the gateway of the Cour Royale.

As we have already seen, the troops ranged round the gateway were far more than enough to resist the incursion of the crowd, and although the hundred mounted police in the Carrousel showed a disinclination to use force, the National Guard at the first onslaught offered a spirited resistance.  “ We will die rather than let them enter ! ” cried some ;  and others answered, “ But we have no orders and no officers to command us ! ”  And this was true, for Ramainvilliers, their commander, remained absolutely inert, afterwards giving as his reason that having received no orders from the mayor he could not take upon himself to proclaim martial law ;  but since the mayor was Pétion, the principal organizer of the movement, this omission is hardly surprising.

The truth is evidently that, as on the 12th and 14th of July and on the 5th of October 1789, the military leaders were paralysed by their knowledge of what Mr. Croker well describes as “ the King’s unfortunate monomania that no blow should ever be struck in his defence.”  This being so they dared not offer resistance, uncertain as to the consequences if any injury were done to the people.  Maintaining, therefore, their attitude of strict neutrality, they allowed the mob to advance their cannons and point them against the great gateway of the Cour Royale.

By what perfidy was this gateway at last opened ?  It is impossible to say with certainty, for just as at the siege of the Bastille an unseen hand had let down the last drawbridge, and at the invasion of Versailles another unseen hand unlocked the gate into the Cour de Marbre, so by the same mysterious agency the courtyard of the Tuileries was thrown open to the invaders.  Santerre, says Roederer, had made sure beforehand of two municipal officers, and these men, rightly calculating on the authority inspired by their scarves of office, now came forward and in imperious tones demanded that the gates should be opened.  Whoever then obeyed this order,[133] the fact remains that the great bar fastening the gates was raised from within and instantly the crowd poured into the Cour Royale.

Then at last four officers, more courageous than their comrades—Mandat, Pinon, Vanotte, and Acloque, a brewer of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, rushed forward to close the doorway leading to the great staircase of the palace, summoning National Guards, gunners, and policemen to their aid.  But it was too late now to command obedience ;  the gunners, urged on by Santerre, were already in open rebellion and thrust aside the officers in command.

Santerre was still reluctantly compelled to remain at the head of the mob and conduct operations.  For even at this crisis the great mass of the people continued to display indifference, and seemed, says Roederer, “ to be only misled or carried away, or brought there by curiosity, and not to understand that it was an outrage on the King to violate his palace.  Several were yawning with fatigue and boredom.  It would have been easy to count the men led by violent passions and ferocious designs.”[134]

Seeing this, a group of law-abiding citizens, who had collected at the foot of the staircase, came forward and angrily apostrophized Santerre, threatening to make him responsible for all the harm that might come from this fatal day, “ because,” they said to him, “ you alone are the author of this unconstitutional assemblage, you alone have misled these good people, and amongst them all you alone are a scoundrel ! ”  At this Santerre turned pale, and exchanging a glance with his ally, the butcher Legendre, he turned to his troops and uttered these hypocritical words : “ Messieurs, draw up an official report of my refusal to march at your head into the King’s apartments ! ” [135]  Then the ruffians that composed the cowardly brewer’s following, understanding his intention, threw the honest citizens to the ground, and like a great tidal wave the mob, once more lashed to fury, burst into the Château.  So tremendous was the impetus of that mighty onrush that a cannon, carried by the invaders, was borne upon their shoulders right up the splendid staircase, wreathed with the emblems of Louis XIV. and the arms of Colbert, into the huge Salle des Cent Suisses, and there jammed in the doorway, momentarily stemming the tide.  But the obstacle was quickly removed with hatchet blows upon the woodwork, and the crowd swept onwards to the Œil de Bœuf.

Now at last they were on the threshold of that abode of mystery—the King’s apartments.  Undoubtedly, amongst the great proportion of the people, the predominating emotion at this tremendous moment was curiosity, tinged with superstitious awe, for, in the minds of many of the poor denizens of the Faubourgs, royalty had not yet lost its glamour, in spite of all the agitators’ efforts to ridicule and degrade it.  But that tumultuous sea nevertheless held dangerous elements, brains that throbbed wildly to the tune of the “ Ça ira ! ” hands that closed around murderous weapons in feverish anticipation of coming violence, and in these disordered imaginations superstition assumed a terrible form—it was not Louis XVI., the descendant of St. Louis, they were now to meet face to face, but that sinister personage “ Monsieur Veto ”—Nero, Machiavelli, and Charles IX. in one—the sanguinary monster, and his still more guilty consort, who with diabolical cunning had lulled a confiding people into security whilst planning a second massacre of St. Barthelemy—perhaps on that same Quai du Louvre their feet had traversed to the Château.  Goaded to frenzy by these visions, the leaders of the mob continued to beat on the closed doors, clamouring loudly for admittance ;  then, meeting with no response, they proceeded to attack them with their weapons ;  beneath their savage blows the lower panels yielded and fell inwards—instantly a cluster of pikes was thrust menacingly through the opening.

Suddenly from the inside a voice cried out, “ Open !  I have nothing to fear from Frenchmen ! ”  A Swiss guard threw wide the doors.  The crowd surged forward, then, like an angry wave drawing back with a roar of foam, halted in confusion, for before them stood—the King.  The sensation produced on the crowd by this sudden apparition, all contemporaries record, was one of stupor—they were utterly disconcerted, for here they saw before them no sanguinary monster but a homely personage, none the more imposing for all his powdered hair and embroidered coat, who stood regarding them with an expression of extreme benevolence obviously unmixed with fear.  Louis XVI. was not afraid at that frightful moment.  When the faithful Acloque had rushed into his room, where all the Royal Family had collected, to announce the incursion of the mob, the King had instantly decided to go forward to meet them, only insisting that the Queen, against whom the people’s hatred had been principally directed, should remain in safety ;  and whilst Marie Antoinette, finally prevented by force from following him, was hurried into the bedroom of the Dauphin, the King passed calmly to the Œil de Bœuf, with Madame Elizabeth clinging to his arm, and followed by those of his loyal defenders who had remained at his side.  Two hours earlier the King, foreseeing the invasion of the Château, had sent away nearly all his retainers lest their presence should serve to irritate the populace, but several—amongst them the old Maréchal de Mouchy, that bizarre personage the Chevalier de Rougeville, and brave young Canolles, a boy of eighteen who had belonged to the King’s old bodyguard—had refused to leave him ;  others, borrowing pikes and ragged garments from some of the insurgents, mingled with the mob, and thus disguised hovered around the King for his protection.[136]  Arrived in the Œil de Bœuf, Louis XVI. called four grenadiers of the National Guard to his side, and one of these, De la Chesnaye, seeing that the doors were about to be broken down, said to the King, “ Sire, do not be afraid.”  “ I am not afraid,” answered the King ;  “ put your hand on my heart, it is calm and tranquil,” and taking the hand of the grenadier he pressed it to his heart, which in truth beat no faster in the face of the appalling danger.

What was the secret of the King’s intrepidity ?  Revolutionaries, obliged to admit his amazing sangfroid at this crisis, have tried to explain it by the natural phlegm of his character, but in reality his courage throughout the Revolution can always be traced to the same cause—the fact that, as Bertrand de Molleville observed, he was never afraid when he was face to face with the people.  It was this conviction that from the people themselves he had nothing to fear which had nerved him to take that perilous journey to Paris on the 17th of July 1789, which had enabled him to confront the raging mob on the 6th of October, and which now again on the 20th of June inspired him with the serenity that amazed all beholders.  So, by the calm and undaunted aspect of the King, the ragged horde was momentarily brought to bay on the threshold of the Œil de Bœuf.  But certain of the brigands, having recovered from the first shock of surprise, thrust their way into the room, brandishing pikes and sabres as they called aloud for the death of the King.  The Swiss Guards drew their swords, but Louis XVI. interposed :  “ Put back your swords in their scabbards, I command you.”  Then a man, armed with a stick to which a spear had been affixed, sprang forward crying out, “ Where is Veto that I may kill him ? ”  Whereat young Canolles threw himself on the assassin, and forcing him to his knees at the King’s feet obliged him to call out, “ Vive le Roi ! ”[137]

This act of courage had the effect of once more stupefying the crowd, and the King’s defenders, profiting by the pause that ensued, succeeded in leading him to a seat in the recess of a window, forming there a rampart round him with their bodies.  The heroic band included the four grenadiers of the National Guard, the Maréchal de Mouchy, aged seventy-seven, the intrepid brewer Acloque, and Stéphanie de Bourbon-Conti, the natural daughter of the Prince de Conti, who had armed herself with a sword and sabre, and throughout the day never ceased defending the King from the onslaughts of his assassins.[138]

Meanwhile Madame Elizabeth showed herself no less heroic ;  hearing the mob crying out for the head of the Queen she came forward and, offering her breast to their daggers, said, “ Here is the Queen ! ”  Several of her retainers cried out, “ No, no, she is not the Queen, she is Madame Elizabeth ! ”

“ Ah, messieurs,” she answered, “ why undeceive them ?  Were it not better that they shed my blood than that of my sister ? ”  The murderous weapons were lowered, and Madame Elizabeth was placed by her defenders in the embrasure of the window next to the one occupied by the King.

For four terrible hours Louis XVI. and Madame Elizabeth endured the threats and insults of the crowd.  All through the hot June afternoon they breathed the fetid atmosphere exhaled by the densely packed mass of rags and nakedness that pressed around them ;  they saw before their eyes all that was basest and most degraded in human nature, the dregs of foreign countries, above all brigands from the South, vomiting imprecations, dangling before their eyes those horrible emblems—the bleeding heart labelled “Cœur d’aristocrate,” a miniature gallows to which a female figure was attached with the words “ For Antoinette,” a guillotine bearing the inscription “ For the tyrant.”

Close to the King’s side a group of men had thrown themselves into the gilded armchairs of the palace, and gathered around a table covered with bottles of wine sat smoking and drinking amidst the tumult.[139]  Some one passed a bottle to the King, ordering him to drink the health of the nation ;  at the same time a cap of liberty was thrust upon his head.[140]  Louis XVI. raised the bottle to his lips, exclaiming, “ People of Paris, I drink to your health and to the health of the French nation ! ”  This courageous action, derided by the revolutionaries, went straight to the hearts of the people,[141] who broke out into applause, crying, “ Vive la nation !  Vive la liberty !  ” and even “ Vive le Roi ! ”  If only Louis XVI. had known how to make the most of this moment, it is possible that the invasion of his palace would have turned into an ovation in his favour ;  unhappily his slow-moving mind could never devise those happy phrases that exercised so great a power over the emotional Parisians.  To this drama-loving people a King who on occasion could “ strike an attitude,” show himself commanding and heroic, must have proved irresistible.  Louis XVI. was hopelessly undramatic ;  his speech proceeded always directly from his heart, never from his imagination ;  he could not calculate effects, declaim to order, play upon the emotions of the mobile crowd as the revolutionary leaders knew so well how to do, and thus at this supreme moment he remained inarticulate, leaving it to his enemies to wrest his victory from him.  Legendre pressed forward and addressed him brutally :

“ Monsieur, you are there to listen to us.  You are a traitor, you have always deceived us, you are deceiving us still.  But have a care, the measure is overflowing, and the people are tired of being your plaything.”  And he read aloud a petition filled with threats and insults, “ expressing the wishes of the people, whose orator he declared himself to be.”  The King answered calmly :

“ I shall do that which the law and the Constitution order me to do.”

Whilst these scenes were taking place the mayor, Pétion, arrived, and making his way through the crowd addressed the King in these hypocritical words :

“ Sire, I have only this instant heard of the situation in which you have been placed.”

“ That is very surprising,” Louis XVI. interrupted brusquely, “ since this has been going on for two hours.”

“ The zeal of the mayor of Paris,” Condorcet afterwards had the effrontery to declare, “ the ascendant that his virtues and his patriotism exercised over the people, prevented all disorders ”;  as a matter of fact his presence served as a direct encouragement to disorder, for, since not a word of protest escaped him during the whole course of the afternoon, the brigands quickly recognized in him an ally and, protected by the support his official position afforded, proceeded to greater violence.  Forcing their way to the front of the crowd they lunged at the King with their weapons, which were deflected only by the bayonets of the four courageous grenadiers.  Two young men, Clément and Bourgoing, wearing long caps on which the words “ La Mort ” were inscribed in large letters, called out loudly for the death of the King and all the Royal Family.  Clément, taking up his stand beside the mayor, continued to repeat incessantly the parrot phrases composed by the authors of the agitation :  “ Sire !  Sire !  I demand in the name of the 100,000 souls around me the recall of the patriot ministers you have dismissed !  I demand the sanction of the decree on the priests and on the 20,000 men and the fulfilment of the law, or you will perish ! ”  Throughout this tirade, accompanied by furious gestures, Pétion uttered no remonstrance, and, not content with complimenting the people on their behaviour, afterwards declared to the Assembly that “ no one had been insulted, that no excess or offence had been committed, and the King himself had no cause of complaint.”

On this day, at any rate, Louis XVI. showed himself not only heroic but capable of really amazing resolution.  To the reiterated demand for the sanction of the two decrees and the recall of the ministers he replied immovably, “ This is neither the moment for you to ask nor for me to accord,” and in the matter of the decree on the priests he added, “ I would rather renounce my crown than submit to such a tyranny of consciences.”

It was at this crisis that a deputation arrived from the Assembly.  The scene that met their eyes was indescribable ;  the splendid Salle de l’Œil de Bœuf presented the appearance of a tavern—through the suffocating atmosphere, thick with the fumes of foul tobacco, Louis XVI. was seen seated in the embrasure of the window, the red cap of liberty still perched upon his powdered head, contemplating his strange guests with perfect tranquillity.

When the deputies came forward to inform him that “ the Assembly would neglect no means for ensuring his liberty,” the King, indicating by a gesture the carousing brigands, the winebottles, the guns, the pikes, and sanguinary emblems by which he was surrounded, answered briefly, “ So you see ! ”  Then turning to a member of the deputation he added with a sudden rare flash of humour, “ You who have travelled much, what do you think they would say of us in foreign countries ? ” [142]

Certain of the deputies venturing to repeat to the King that they had come to ensure his safety, Louis XVI. replied that he was in the midst of the French people and had nothing to fear.[143]  Again turning to one of the grenadiers he placed the man’s hand on his heart, saying, “ See whether this is the movement of a heart agitated by fear ! ” [144]

The intrepid attitude of the King was not without its effect on his assailants, and by eight o’clock in the evening it became evident that little hope remained of his assassination.  Pétion, therefore realizing that nothing was now to be gained by further agitation, decided that the moment had come to pose as the restorer of law and order.  Accordingly, mounting an armchair, he addressed the crowd of pikes and rags, the bearers of toy guillotines and gibbets, the drunken and half-naked brigands from the South, in the following words :

“ People, you have shown yourselves worthy of yourselves !  You have preserved all your dignity amidst acute alarms.  No excess has sullied your sublime movements.  Hope and believe that your voice will at last be heard.  But night approaches, and its shadows might favour the attempts of ill-disposed persons to glide into your bosom.  People, withdraw yourselves ! ” [145]

The mob, comprehending that this was really an order to disperse, showed themselves only too eager to comply and surged towards the doors.  But the leaders had resolved to make a further venture and, instead of herding the people towards the staircase, led them to the Council Chamber where the Queen and her children had taken refuge.  Santerre had already preceded them thither.  On the arrival of the deputies, realizing the failure of the movement, he had been heard to mutter angrily, “ Le coup est manqué ! ” [146]  But if the King had succeeded in overawing “ that foolish herd, the people,” the Queen might still serve to rouse their fury, so collecting a horde of brigands around him, and followed by a large portion of the mob, he had set forth in search of this further victim.

Now on the first incursion of the crowd into the Château, whilst the main army attacked the Œil de Bœuf, a band of furies had broken into the Queen’s apartments on the ground floor and ransacked every corner in the hunt for their prey.  Meanwhile Marie Antoinette, upstairs in the Dauphin’s bedroom, vainly endeavoured to follow Louis XVI. into the Œil de Bœuf.  “ Let me pass,” she cried to the gentlemen who barred her way, “ my place is with the King.  I will join him, or perish if necessary in defending him.”  But convinced at last that any attempt to penetrate the sea of pikes that separated her from Louis XVI. must prove the signal for bloodshed, she allowed herself to be drawn into the embrasure of the window in the Salle de Conseil.  It was here that Santerre and his horde discovered her.  Behind the great council-table Marie Antoinette sat surrounded by her ladies—Madame de Tourzel, Madame de la Roche-Aymon, Madame de Maillé, and the heroic Princesse de Tarente, ready to shed the last drop of her blood in defence of the Queen.  By the side of Marie Antoinette stood little Madame Royale ;  the Dauphin was seated on the table with his mother’s arms around him.  In front several rows of grenadiers belonging to the loyal battalion of the “ Filles-Saint-Thomas ” were drawn up.  Santerre roughly ordered this bodyguard to stand aside :  “ Make way that the people may see the Queen ! ”  Instantly the crowd rushed forward pouring forth imprecations, but at the sight of the grenadiers paused uncertainly.  One woman, bolder than the rest, flung a red cap of liberty down on the table, and in foul language ordered the Queen to place it on the head of the Dauphin.  The hideous badge of the galley-slave was drawn over the boy’s fair curls.

The Queen and the brave women around her endured their terrible ordeal without a sign of weakness.  When the main body of the ragged army, after evacuating the Œil de Bœuf, were driven through the Chambre de Conseil past the council-table, Marie Antoinette looked still unmoved at the ghastly emblems thrust before her eyes—the gibbet from which her effigy was suspended, the banners bearing obscene legends ;  she heard without a tremor the furious imprecations mouthed at her by the dishevelled furies, and, as on the 6th of October, ended by disarming her assailants.  The strange power that had touched even the corrupt heart of Mirabeau, that had changed Barnave from a sanguinary demagogue into a royalist ready to die in her defence, that later was to win reluctant admiration from her gaolers and wring pity from the tricoteuses at the Revolutionary Tribunal, gradually made itself felt amongst the women crazed with drink and revolutionary frenzy who gazed at her across the counciltable at the Tuileries.  Some of the furies in the crowd, melted to tenderness by the sight of the Queen—after all a woman and a mother like themselves, sheltering with her arm her little son who looked with wondering eyes at the strange spectacle before him—cried out that they would shed the last drop of their blood for the Queen and the Dauphin.  Another, better remembering her lesson, began to pour forth fresh invectives, whereat the Queen asked gently, “ Have I done you any injury ? ”  “ No,” said the woman, “ but it is you who cause the unhappiness of the nation.”  “ So they have told you,” answered Marie Antoinette, “ but you have been deceived.  I am the wife of the King of France, the mother of the Dauphin.  I am French ;  never again shall I see my own country.  I can only be happy or unhappy in France.  I was happy when you loved me.”

Then the fury, bursting into tears, besought the Queen’s pardon, sobbing out, “ It was that I did not know.  I see now how good you are.” [147]

At this Santerre, stupefied at the turn affairs had taken, exclaimed, “ What is the matter with this woman that she weeps thus ?  She must be drunk with wine.” [148]

But a moment later Santerre, pushing his way through the crowd, found himself face to face with the Queen and suddenly fell likewise beneath her spell.[149]  Planting his two fists on the table he roughly ordered the bystanders to take the red cap off the head of the Dauphin, who was stifling beneath its heat ;  then turning to the Queen he said, “ Ah, Madame, have no fear, I do not wish to harm you, I would rather defend you ! ” but quickly repenting of his weakness he added brutally, “ Remember that it is dangerous to deceive the people ! ”

At these words Marie Antoinette raised her head and, looking Santerre imperiously in the eye, exclaimed with indignation, “ It is not by you, monsieur, that I judge the people ! ” [150]

Santerre, utterly cowed by this reply, had no thought but to beat as hasty a retreat as possible.  Turning to his brigand horde he gave the order to march, and pushing the rest of the crowd brutally before him he drove them like trembling sheep from the room.[151]

So in the growing twilight the mighty human tide ebbed from the Château of the Tuileries, leaving the great rooms “ in solitude and stupor.”

The Royal Family, once more united, fell weeping into one another’s arms.  The terrible ordeal was at last ended.  A few moments later several deputies arrived from the Assembly ;  one turning to the Queen, standing amidst the wreckage left by the invaders—the broken furniture, the shattered panels, the doors torn from their hinges—observed with unconscious irony, “ Without excusing everything, you must admit, Madame, that the people have shown themselves to be kind-hearted ? ”

“ The King and I, monsieur,” answered Marie Antoinette, “ are persuaded of the natural kindness of the people ;  they are unkind only when they are misled.” [152]

That the King could have been assassinated on this 20th of June if the people had felt any unanimous desire for his death, there can be no doubt whatever.  What could his handful of defenders have availed against the determined onslaught of a mob numbering many thousand armed men ?  If “ the people ” had wished to kill him, he must have perished then.  But on this point all contemporaries are agreed.  The great majority of the crowd seemed throughout struck with stupor, and showed no inclination to join in the insults and bloodthirsty threats of the leaders.[153]

Santerre, driving his herd down the staircase of the Château, was heard to exclaim angrily, “ The King was difficult to move to-day, but we will return to-morrow and make him evacuate ! ” [154]  But some poor creatures, all in rags, murmured to each other, “ It would be a pity, somehow, he looks like a good sort of fellow ! ”[155]

The day after the invasion of the Tuileries a witness, who appeared before a magistrate of Paris, related that he had traversed the whole Faubourg Saint-Antoine to discover the disposition of the people, that in an inn close to the Barrière du Trône he had listened to several men talking, and overheard these words :  “ Yes, we might have been able . . . but when we saw . . . it is so imposing . . . and then we are Frenchmen . . . Sacredieu ! if it had been any one else we could have wrung his neck like a child’s . . . but he comes and he says, ‘ Here I am !  Here I am ! ’ ”  The witness added that he had seen several of these men who had been led away by Santerre, and they assured him that the majority of the citizens of the Faubourg were distressed at the action taken towards the King, that it had not been their intention, and that one could be sure it would never happen again, and that there was something behind all this.[156]

The authors of the movement, however, knew no relenting.  Madame Roland, hearing of the Queen’s sufferings on that dreadful afternoon, cried out incontrollably, “ Ah ! how I should have loved to look on at her long humiliation ! ” [157]

But Manon’s triumph was mingled with bitter disappointment.  From the point of view of both Girondins and Orléanistes the day had proved a failure ;  it was not merely to humiliate the Royal Family they had planned the invasion of the Tuileries, the great coup of the day, as Santerre said, had failed.  The people, like Balaam’s ass, had been driven forward for the fourth time against the King, and, seeing the angel with the flaming sword before them in the pathway, had refused to move in spite of blows and curses.  So the crime from which the lowest rabble of the Faubourgs had shrunk was left to men of education, to philosophers, and “ intellectuals ” to execute.

EFFECTS OF THE 20TH OF JUNE

The “ true people,” the great mass of the citizens of Paris, had, of course, taken no part in the 20th of June.  “ For the honour of our country,” cries Poujoulat, “ and for the sake of historical truth, it must be known that the crimes and ignominies of the French Revolution were not the work of the French nation. . . . The people of Paris were not beneath the filthy banners of Santerre, St. Huruge, and Théroigne, they were around the Tuileries on the 21st of June, raging against these criminal attempts, pitying the King and Queen, cursing Pétion, the Gironde, and the Jacobins, and signing their protestations.”

All over France a great storm of indignation arose ;  addresses poured in from the provinces, denouncing in vehement language the efforts of the factions to overthrow the King and Constitution.  The department of the Pas de Calais “ has learnt with horror what took place in the King’s palace on the 20th of the month ”;  Rouen declares the country to be in danger, and demands justice of the Assembly :  “ Punish the authors of the offences committed on the 20th of this month at the Château of the Tuileries.  It is a public outrage, it is an attempt on the rights of the French people who will not accept laws from a few brigands in the capital ;  we ask you for vengeance.”  The department of the Aisne urges the Assembly to suppress the Jacobins and cease from dissensions :  “ Put an end to the scandal of your divisions . . . put an end to the intolerable oppression, the revolting tyranny of the tribunes (the galleries occupied by the claques of the factions).  The factions of the capital have not the right to dictate public opinion.  The opinion of Paris is only the opinion of the 83rd part of the Empire.  We demand vengeance for the execrable day of June the 20th, day of imperishable shame for Paris, of mourning for all France.” [158]

“ The 20th of June,” Hua records, “ produced a salutary commotion in all minds. . . . The National Guards, more than ever roused, offered to the King their services and their entire devotion.  The inhabitants of Paris, who were particularly answerable to France for the King’s safety since he left Versailles . . . ashamed of the excesses that had just been committed in their name, demanded reparation and vengeance.  A petition addressed to the Assembly bore 20,000 signatures ;  it was called ‘ the petition of the 20,000.’ . . . Nearly all the departments of France set themselves to deliberate, and forwarded unanimous demands for the punishment of the outrage.  They offered to send all the forces that might be needed.  It was a universal competition ;  it seemed as if all France had raised her arm to annihilate the factions.” [159]

Needless to say, every effort was made by the Jacobins to suppress the reporting of these addresses, to silence the orators who were sent to read them aloud at the Assembly, to discredit the authors, to prove the signatures fraudulent, and also to provide counterblasts in the form of bogus addresses approving the events of June 20, and purporting to come from the provinces and from the sections of Paris.  Thus, for example, on June 25, a deputation from Saint-Antoine, calling itself “ the men of the 14th of July,” presented itself at the Assembly, led by the professional orator, Gonchon, who proceeded to deliver a furious revolutionary harangue beginning with these words :  “ Legislators, it is we fathers of families, it is we, the conquerors of the Bastille, it is we who are persecuted, outraged, and calumniated,” etc.

But where amongst this band of petitioners were the conquerors of the Bastille to be found ?  Where were “ the men of the 14th of July ”—Élie, Hullin, Tournay, Bonnemère—the real heroes of that day ?  We may look for them in vain amongst the ruffianly followers of Gonchon, but if we go into the gardens of the Tuileries we shall discover Hullin at that very moment otherwise employed.  At half-past twelve of this same day, a gendarme national reported to the Jacobin Club, he had met the King in the Tuileries followed by a crowd of “ brigands,” at the head of which was M. Hullin following the King, and calling out with all his might, “ Vive le Roi ! ”  A sub-lieutenant answered with the cry of “Vive la Nation,” whereat “ the brave Hullin ” dealt him a heavy blow on the head, and but for the interposition of the gendarme would have marched him off to prison. [160]

This, then, was the attitude of the real “ men of the 14th of July ” to the second Revolution ;  not one of their names occurs in the accounts of the outrages committed at the Tuileries or in the revolutionary deputations, and the only men of the first Revolution whose services the leaders were able to enlist were a couple of cut-throats, one of which named Soudin had distinguished himself by washing the heads of Foullon and Berthier and delivering them as trophies to the mob.[161]

As for Gonchon himself, who had now passed from the Orléanistes into the pay of the Girondins, Camille Desmoulins afterwards revealed that he had received over 2000 francs from Roland merely for reading the bogus petition to the Assembly.[162]

By methods such as these the voice of the true people was stifled, and the character of the French nation misrepresented to the whole civilized world.  Nowhere were the outrages of June 20 more bitterly resented than in the armies on the frontier.  Lafayette at last, overwhelmed with protests from his men, decided to leave Lückner in command and hastened to Paris.  Presenting himself at the bar of the Assembly he denounced, in burning words, the efforts of the conspirators to overthrow the monarchy and Constitution :  “ The violence committed at the Château on the 20th of this month has excited the alarm of all good citizens ;  I have received addresses from the different corps of my army.  Officers, non-commissioned officers, and men are one, and herein express their patriotic hatred of the factions . . . already many of them wonder whether it is really the cause of liberty they are defending. . . . I implore, in my own name and in that of all honest men, that the Assembly should take efficacious measures to make constituted authority respected, and to give the army the assurance that no attacks will be made on the Constitution from the inside, whilst they are shedding their blood to protect it from outside enemies.”

In spite of the insults with which the Girondins greeted these words, Lafayette succeeded in maintaining his popularity, and he was followed through the streets by crowds shouting, “ Down with the Jacobins ! ”  But once again “ the hero of the two worlds ” showed his lamentable weakness.  If at this crisis he had used his power and finally closed down the Jacobin Club, the whole situation might have been saved.  The plan was proposed to him by a deputation of National Guards, who declared that if he would place himself at their head and march with two cannons to the Rue Saint-Honoré, they would undertake to clear the building.  But Lafayette, always halting between two opinions—detestation of sedition-mongers on one hand and fear of the ultra-Royalists on the other—refused to accede to the proposal of his grenadiers.[163]

If, under these circumstances, the Queen declined to avail herself of his services, is it altogether surprising ?  “ It would be better to perish than to be saved by Lafayette,” she cried, when at this juncture he came forward as champion of the monarchy.  What reason, indeed, had she to trust him ?  Lafayette, who before the siege of the Bastille had declared that “ insurrection was the most sacred of duties,” and had then denounced the tumults of July ;  who had convicted the Duc d’Orléans of conspiring to usurp the throne, and had then facilitated his return to France ;  who had subjected the King and Queen to the humiliations of his intolerable gaolership, and then talked of the respect due to the person of the monarch ;  who at one moment declared himself the opponent of disorders, and the next joined in singing “ Ça ira ! ”—what dependence was to be placed on such a weathercock ?  Throughout the whole course of the Revolution it was rather as the enemy of the Duc d’Orléans than as the supporter of Louis XVI. that he had defended the throne ;  towards the Royal Family he had displayed neither sympathy nor allegiance, only when Orléanism raised its head Lafayette’s hand went to his sword and he became the champion of Royalty.  In this second Revolution he saw undoubtedly a revival of the hated conspiracy, but what guarantee was there that, once he had again succeeded in crushing it, he would not use his power to tyrannize over the King ?

So Lafayette, chilled by his reception at the Court, left Paris and returned to the frontier, whilst the Orléanistes triumphantly burnt his effigy in the Palais Royal.

Yet the 20th of June had disappointed the hopes of the conspirators, as indeed of all the revolutionary intrigues—Orléanistes, Girondins, Subversives, Prussians, English Jacobins alike had met with a severe reverse.  For not only had the invasion of the Tuileries shown the King in his true character to the nation, but in arousing public indignation all over France had revealed the true desires of the nation to the world.  So the day had ended not only in a victory for the King but for the people.

1. La Conspiration révolutionnaire de 1789, by Gustave Bord, p. 20 ;  Le Marquis de St. Huruge, by Henri Furgeot, pp. 192, 225 ;  Crimes et Forfaits de L.P.J. d’Orléans découverts par un citoyen.

2. Mémoires de Mme. Campan, p. 276.

3. Mémoires de Lafayette, iii. 157 ;  Correspondance secrète, p. 481.

4. See the Résumé of the Cahiers, p. 7, Article II.  “ The person of the King is inviolable and sacred,” Article XI. “ Individual liberty is sacred.”  Therefore either as King or subject Louis XVI. could not legally be kept a prisoner, not only without the formality of a trial but without even any reason being given for his detention.

5. Mémoires de Bouillé, p. 181.

6. All the following quotations are taken from L’Europe et la Révolution Française, by Albert Sorel, vol. ii. pp. 69, 157.

7. It was his refusal to form an alliance with Prussia at this crisis that formed the principal charge against Montmorin when he was brought to trial by the Girondins two years later.  The words in which this accusation is conveyed afford clear evidence that the Girondins were acting in the interests of Prussia, and throw a curious light on their political morality :  “ It had been assumed,” runs the official report read aloud by the Girondin, Lasource, that M. de Montmorin “ had not believed in the sincerity of the advances made by the Court of Berlin.  It was not possible that this Court should not have been of good faith, since it (the Court of Berlin !) has been so from all time, and that it can only be the natural enemy of that of Vienna. . . . M. de Montmorin . . . knew that jealousy and rivalry was fomenting more than ever between these two Courts, since he knew and admitted himself that it was the King of Prussia who had excited and fomented by his agents the insurrection of the Belgians and the Liégeois (against Austria).  He therefore knew perfectly the attitude of the King of Prussia, and if he refused to adopt his views it was not because he doubted his sincerity, but because he did not wish for an alliance with that Court. What reproaches, Messieurs, has not France to make against this ex-minister ? ” (Moniteur, xiii. 591).  Montmorin was therefore to be condemned as a traitor to France because he had refused to form an alliance with a Court that he knew to be fomenting sedition in a rival State !

8. Le Comte de Fersen et la Cour de France, i. 87.

9. Fragment de l’Histoire secrète de la Révolution, p. 44.

10. The Correspondence of William Augustus Miles on the French Revolution, i. 256.

11. Mémoires de Dumouriez.

12. “ The object of the plot was the assassination of the King ” (Choderlos de Laclos, by Émile Dard, p. 286).

13. Correspondence secrète, p. 450.

14. Danton boasted of this at his trial :  “ It was I who prevented the journey to St. Cloud.”  See Notes de Topino Lebrun ;  also Bulletin du Tribunal révolutionnaire, No. 21822, “ Défense de Danton.”

15. Émile Dard, op. cit.;  Correspondence secrète, 523 ;  Lettres d’Aristocrates, by Pierre de Vaissière, p. 291.

16. Émile Dard, op. cit.

17. Le Nouveau Paris, by Mercier, i. 192.

18. Révolutions de France et de Brabant, by Camille Desmoulins.

19. Séances des Jacobins for July 3, 1791.

20. Mémoires de Mme. de Genlis, iv. 92.

21. Mémoires de Mme. Roland, ii. 285 ;  Mémoires de Brissot, iv. 342.

22. Aulard’s Séances des Jacobins, iii. 43.

23. Buehez et Roux, x. 145.

24. See Journal des Débats de la Société des Amis de la Constitution, etc., Séance of July 1, 1791.  M. Varennes asks whether the throne shall be set up again, and whether a monarchic or republican government would be best :  “ Grand bruit, brouhahas ”;  the President calls the member to order.  Also Séance of July 8, 1791, M. Goupil in a speech refers to “ the opinions that prevail in this society in favour of Republicanism.”  The greatest tumult arises at this sentence, and a member reminds the speaker that “ all this uproar is caused by your attributing to the society sentiments it has never entertained.  (Universal applause.)”

25. Beaulieu, ii. 540.

26. Ibid. ii. 538.

27. Ibid. ii. 541.

28. Lafayette was ever after blamed for this so-called “ massacre ” by the revolutionary leaders ;  Bailly paid for it with his life. Yet it is certain that Lafayette did everything in his power to restrain the indignation of the troops. See Beaulieu, ii. 543, and the evidence of Gouverneur Morris, who was an eye-witness of the scene :  “ To be paraded through the streets through the scorching sun, and then stand like holiday turkeys to be knocked down by brickbats, was a little more than they (the troops) had the patience to bear ;  so that without waiting for orders they fired and killed a dozen or two of the ragged regiment. The rest ran off like lusty fellows,” etc. (Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, i. 434).

29. Beaulieu, ii. 545.

30. Histoire des Girondins, by Granier de Cassagnac, i. 330 ;  La Tribune des Patriotes, by Prudhomme ;  Révolutions de France, by Camille Desmoulins, No. 86 ;  Camille Desmoulins, by Édouard Fleury, i. 230.

31. Camille Desmoulins, by Édouard Fleury, i. 227 :  “ The terror of Marat seems to have begun the day after the flight (to Varennes), when he was overcome by panic lest Louis XVI. should return at the head of an army and put him ‘ in a hot oven.’ ”  See L’Ami du Peuple, No. 497.

32. Mémoires de Mme. Roland, i. 65, 209, 210 and note. Robespierre’s terror also began at the flight to Varennes (ibid. p. 204).

33. Danton Émigré, by Dr. Robinet, p. 24.

34. Le Père Duchesne, by Paul d’Estrée, p. 61.

35. Le Marquis de St. Huruge, by Henry Furgeot, p. 233.

36. Montjoie, Conjuration de d’Orléans, iii. 139 ;  Beaulieu, ii. 530 ;  Mémoives de Mme. de Campan, p. 294.  Fersen thought that this party only went over to the King out of self-interest, and neither he nor the Queen trusted them (Le Comte de Fersen et la Cour de France, ii. 7, 213).  Marie Antoinette has been bitterly reproached for this, but when we remember their former record—Barnave’s attitude to the murder of Foullon, the raising of the “ Compagnie du Sabbat ” by the De Lameths, and the infamous part they had all played in the former insurrections—it is not altogether surprising.

37. It should be noticed that this reaction set in before the King’s final acceptance of the Constitution on September 13, 1791.  M. Louis Madelin (La Révolution, p. 187) says that from August 1 to October 1 it was the general opinion that the Revolution was over.

38. “ Doubtless there were French farmers who rejoiced at the spectacle of all the great properties of the kingdom being levelled by the nation ;  they did not, however, foresee that it would be their own turn next ;  that the principle of equality being once abroad, would infallibly level ALL property ”  (Arthur Young, The Example of France, p. 33).

39. Taine, La Révolution, iii. 136.

40. Ibid. v. 236.

41. See this petition in Buchez et Roux, x. 196, where the worst offenders are specified by the workmen in such terms as “ day-labourer now enriched with 50,000 livres of income,” or “ who arrived in Paris in sabots and now possess four fine houses.”

42. See, for example, the laws passed on June 14, 1791, suppressing “ coalitions of workmen ”—i.e. trades unions—in the following terms “ Article 1st.  The annihilation of all kinds of corporations of citizens belonging to the same state or profession being one of the fundamental bases of the French constitution, it is forbidden to re-establish them on any pretext or under any form whatsoever.”  The workmen were further forbidden to “ name presidents, keep registers, make resolutions, deliberate or draw up regulations on their pretended common interests,” or to agree on any fixed scale of wages.  These resolutions were passed almost without discussion and without a word of protest from Robespierre or any of the other so-called democrats of the Assembly (Buchez et Roux, x. 196) ;  in fact, they were enforced with still greater severity later on under the reign of Robespierre.  See the edicts passed by the Comité de Salut Public on the 22nd of Frimaire, An II., quoted by Aulard, Études et Leçons sur la Révolution Française, iv. 51.

43. Mémoires de Ferrières, iii. 204.

44. “ Discours sur la Situation politique de la Nation du 21 Octobre 1791,” Aulard’s Séances des Jacobins, iii. 208.

45. “ Leopold had no intention of entering upon hostilities, and found a loophole by which to escape from declaring war in the acceptance by Louis XVI. of the completed Constitution on 21st September 1791. He then solemnly withdrew his pretensions to interfere in the internal affairs of France ” (Revolutionary Europe, by H. Morse-Stephens, p. 103).

46. Prudhomme, Révolutions de Paris, ix. 570 ;  Journal d’un Étudiant, by Gaston Maugras, p. 166 ;  Madelin, p. 186 ;  The Journal of Mary Frampton, letter from James Frampton dated October 2, 1791 :  “ You cannot conceive how ridiculous it is to hear the amazing popularity of the King at present.”  Also letter in same volume from C.B. Wollaston on October 12, 1791.

47. Letter from M. Fougeret to M. Lecoy de la Marche, October 10, 1791, in Letters d’Aristocrates, by Pierre de Vaissiere, p. 413 ;  Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, i. 462.

48. Mémoires de Dumouriez, ii. 117.

49. Crimes de la Révolution, iv. 1.

50. Ibid. iv. 213.

51. Beaulieu, iii. 192.

52. Mémoires de Bouillé, i. 185.  See also Mirabeau’s note (Correspondance entre Mirabeau et le Comte de la Marck, ii. 68), in which he says of Desmoulins, “ this man is very accessible to money.”  Barbaroux declared that Desmoulins “ received indiscriminately from aristocrats and patriots alike ” for the opinions he expressed in his journal (Mémoires de Barbaroux, p. 9).

53. Mémoires de Mme. Roland, i. 333.

54. Mémoires de Lafayette, iii. 85.  On the venality of Danton and his payment by the Court contemporary evidence is overwhelming.  See, for example, Beaulieu, iii. 10 ;  Bertrand de Molleville, i. 354 ;  Mémoires de Brissot, iv. 193 ;  Correspondance entre Mirabeau et le Comte de la Marck, iii. 82 ;  also summing up by Taine, La Révolution, v. 317, and by Louis Blanc, Histoire de la Révolution, x. 409.

55. Danton, aware that the acquisition of this property had excited suspicions of his integrity, explained to the Commune that it was only an obscure farmhouse bought with the sum paid him in compensation for his post as solicitor to the King’s Council which was now abolished (Beaulieu, iii. 198).  But M. Lenôtre reveals that the “ farmhouse ” was “ almost a château ” in a park of approximately 27 acres (see Paris révolutionnaire, p. 260), and the Mémoires de Lafayette explain the transaction to which Danton referred in these words :  “ Danton had sold himself on condition that he should be paid 100,000 livres for his post of solicitor to the council which since its suppression was worth only 10,000 livres.  The King’s present was therefore of 90,000 livres. . . . Danton was ready to sell himself to all parties ”  (Mémoires de Lafayette, iii. 85).

56. “ Discours sur la Situation politique de la Nation du 21 Octobre 1791,” Aulard’s Séances des Jacobins, iii. 206.

57. Montjoie, Conjuration de d’Orléans, iii. 204 ;  Prudhomme, Révolutions de Paris, xiii. 526.  See also Deux Amis, viii. 93 ;  Mémoires de Barère, ii. 45.  The statements of Camille Desmoulins and St. Just will be given later in this book.

58. Beaulieu records that early in 1793, when the Brissotins began to find themselves falling under the power of Robespierre, General Wimpfen came upon Pétion and Buzot, who were engaged in conversation.  “Well,” he said to them, “ so this Republic that you wish to establish in the Constituent Assembly is now putting you in a great fix.”  “I,” replied Buzot, “ never wished for a Republic in France ;  its size and the character of its inhabitants are opposed to the establishment of such a form of government.”  “What do you want, then ?”  “ A change of dynasty.”  “But whom would you choose ? ”  “ A prince of the royal house of England.” (Essais de Beaulieu, v. 192.)

59. See the description given by Pétion in his discourse to the Jacobin Club on November 18, 1791, of the “ flattering reception ” given him by the “ Friends of the Revolution ” in England.  Several members of the Society wore the tricolour badge, a tricolour flag decorated the ceiling of the hall, and the band played the “ Ça ira ! ”

60. Précis de la Défense de Carra, p. 17.

61. This proposal is so discreditable to the Jacobins that it is suppressed in the report of their debates. The Journal des Débats records the incident in the following words :  “ M. Carra ascends the tribune where he delivers a discourse on the object of the war. . . . Certain propositions which do not seem in accord with the principles of the Constitution arouse the attention of M. Danton, and at his motion the orator is called to order in the name of the Constitution and of the Society.”  M. Aulard supplies the missing clue in his Séances des Jacobins, iii. 311.  Moreover Carra admitted it later at his trial.  See Précis de la Defense de Carra, p. 13.

62. Annales Patriotiques for January 9, 1792. This journal of Carra’s, one of the most violent of all the revolutionary publications, exerted an immense influence over the provinces of France. Wordsworth, in Paris at this date, thus described the important part played by Carra in the Revolution of 1792 :

63. Danton Émigré, by Dr. Robinet, p. 4.

64. Ibid. pp. 5. 24.

65. Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, i. 510, 516.  Talleyrand “ received for answer that England could not take any engagement whatever respecting the affairs of France.”

66. Ibid. p. 511.

67. Danton Émigré, p. 90.

68. Souvenirs d’Étienne Dumont, p. 302.  “ As for Talleyrand,” Mr. Burges writes from London to Lord Auckland on May 29, 1792, “ he is intimate with Paine, Horne Tooke, Lord Lansdowne, and a few more of that stamp, and generally scouted by every one else ” (Journal and Correspondence of Lord Auckland, ii. 410).

69. Pamphlet by Brissot, A tous les Républicains.

70. Discours de Jérôme Pétion sur l’accusation intentée contre Maximilien Robespierre, November 1792.

71. Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, i. 95.

72. On this point contemporaries are divided ;  Montjoie and Pagès both represent Robespierre as an Orléaniste, whilst Beaulieu (Essais, ii. 159) and the Marquis de Bouillé (Memoires, p. 100) assert that he merely pretended sympathy with the Orléanistes in order to further his own designs.  I have adopted the latter theory because it seems to me the most convincing and alone explains Robespierre’s conduct at certain crises of the Revolution. For it will be noticed that whenever he could deal a blow at the Orléanistes without injuring his own cause he never failed to do so.

73. Aulard’s Séances des Jacobins, iii. 12, Séance du 13 Juillet 1791.

74. Ibid. iii. 420, Séance du 2 Mars 1792.

75. Moniteur, xii. 583.

76. Crimes de la Révolution, by Prudhomme, iv. 21.

77. Ibid. iv. 2.

78. It should be noted that the date of this letter is uncertain ;  D’Allonville and Bertrand de Molleville state emphatically that it was written on December 3, 1790, before the King’s final acceptance of the Constitution, but the Correspondence of the Comte de Fersen tends to prove that the date was December 3, 1791, that is to say, nearly two months after his final acceptance, during which interval the Glaciere d’Avignon and other atrocities in the provinces had occurred. Beaulieu, who also takes this view, explains the King’s motives in writing it (Essais, iii. 133).

79. See the evidence of the King’s minister, Bigot de Sainte-Croix :  “ From the spring of 1791 onwards the King prevented the execution of a secret plan framed at Mantua for two months later attacking France whose armies were incomplete and whose frontiers were undefended ;  in the summer of the same year he hindered the effects of the Convention of Pilnitz ;  the following autumn be concerted with the Emperor to restrain beyond the Rhine the designs and hostile preparations formed there. Let them give us back our correspondence that it may be published ;  it will all testify to the efforts of the King to avert this war which was provoked and begun by those who to-day dare to impute it to him ” (Histoire de la Conspiration du 10 Août, p. 152).  See also Fantin Désodoards, op. cit. iv. 48.

80. For example, Buzot (Mémoires, pp. 32, 35. 43. 195) :  “ One must have the vices of the people of Paris to please them. . . The stupid people of France. . . . Souls of mud ! . . . What a people is that of Paris !  What frivolity, what inconstancy, how contemptible it is ! ”  Barbaroux (Mémoires, p. 84) :  “ The people do not deserve that one should attach oneself to them, for they are essentially ungrateful ;  the more one defends their rights the more they take advantage of one.”  Madame Roland (Mémoires, i. 300) :  “ Cowardice characterized by selfishness and corruption of a degraded people whom we hoped to be able to regenerate . . . but which was too brutalized by its vices.”

81. “ Our social institutions,” wrote Brissot, “ punish theft—a virtuous action commanded by Nature herself ” (Recherches philosophiques sur le Droit de Propriété, etc.).  As Brissot himself had been imprisoned for theft this point of view is not surprising.

82. “ Should men nourish themselves on their kind ?  A single word decides this question, and this word is dictated by Nature herself.  All beings have the right to nourish themselves in any manner that will satisfy their needs ” (Bibliothèque philosophique, by Brissot de Warville, vi. 313).

83. Histoire particulière des Évènements qui ont eu lieu en France pendant les Mois de Juin, Juillet, d’Août, et de Septembre 1792, by Maton de la Varenne ;  Mémoires pour servir d’Histoire de la Ville de Lyon pendant la Révolution, by l’Abbé Guillon de Montléon, i. 58, 59.

84. Deux Amis, vii. 235.

85. Mémoires de Mme. Roland, i. 238.

86. Ibid. p. 233.

87. Révolutions de Paris, by Prudhomme, xii. 485.

88. Lettres de Mme. Roland aux demoiselles Cannet, ii. 573.

89. Souvenirs de Sophie Grandchamp.

90. Mémoires de Mme. Roland, i. 236.

91. Journal d’un Étudiant pendant la Révolution, edited by M. Gaston Maugras, p. 203.

92. Mémoires de Dumouriez, ii. 152, 153 ;  Mémoires de Mme. Roland, i. 142.

93. Ibid. i. 83.

94. Mémoires de Lafayette, iii. 299 ;  Beaulieu, iv. 187.

95. Moniteur, xii. 183, 184 ; Deux Amis, vii. 156.

96. La Mission de Custine à Brunswick, by Albert Sorel ;  Revue Historique, i. 157.

97. Mémoires de Mallet du Pan, i. 259.

98. Deux Amis, vii. 166 ;  Mémoires tirés des Papiers d’un Homme d’État, i. 333.

99. Montjoie, Conjuration de d’Orléans, iii. 171.

100. Correspondance secrète, p. 600.

101. Mémoires de Mme. Campan, p. 328.  See also Correspondance secrète, p. 600, and the Journal d’un Étudiant, edited by M. Gaston Maugras, p. 248.

102. Note the hypocrisy of this pretext, since the men who had proposed the Oath of the Tennis Court were now regarded by the revolutionary leaders as their bitterest enemies—Mounier had been driven from the country, and Bailly, the object of their perpetual execrations, was to perish at their hands under circumstances of revolting brutality. The truth is, as Bigot de Sainte-Croix points out, that the 20th of June was chosen as the anniversary of the flight to Varennes in the hope of reviving the unpopularity which the Orléanistes had succeeded in arousing against the King on this day.

103. See Santerre’s admission at a Séance of the Jacobins on April 13, 1792 :  “ The men of this Faubourg (Saint-Antoine) would like better, on coming in from their work, to find their homes in order than to see their wives return from an assembly where they do not always gain a spirit of sweetness, and therefore they have regarded with disfavour these assemblies that are repeated three times in the week.”

104. Deux Amis de la Liberté, vii. 242, viii. 24.  See also Montjoie, Conjuration de d’Orléans, iii. 189 ;  Essais de Beaulieu, iii. 104.  “ Nothing was more usual than this kind of fraud,” writes the contemporary Senac de Meillan ;  “ the sections and the Faubourgs were made to speak ;  they were set in motion even without their knowledge. . . We saw one day the Faubourg Saint-Antoine arriving, to the number of eight to nine thousand men. Well, this Faubourg Saint-Antoine was composed of about fifty bandits hardly known in the district, who had collected on their route every one they could see in the shops or workshops, so as to form an imposing mass. These good people were on the Place Vendôme, very much bored, not knowing what they had come for, and waiting impatiently for the leaders to give them permission to retire.”

105. This petition is recorded in the journal of Mme. Jullien, Journal d’une Bourgeoise, p. 89 :  “ There is a petition signed by 30,000 idlers (badauds) which is to appear on Sunday at the National Assembly against the Jacobins.”  We must not forget that in revolutionary language the terms “ badauds,” “ brigands,” or “ canaille ” signify the law-abiding members of the people.  Thus Prudhomme, Révolutions de Paris, xii. 526 :  “ The horde of fanatics and counter-revolutionaries who, to the number of more than 60,000, have taken refuge . . . in the capital.”

106. Paris pendant la Révolution, by Adolphe Schmidt, p. 21.  This report of the Paris administration is quoted by Prudhomme, Révolulions de Paris, xii. 523, as an insulting “ libel.”

107. Mémoires de Hua, p. 119.  See Camille Desmoulins’ reference to this incident in his Fragment de l’Histoire secrète, etc., p. 5 :  “ Moreover I will establish against Brissot and Gensonné the existence of an Anglo-Prussian committee by means of a number of proofs a hundred times stronger than those by which they, Brissot and Gensonne, proved the existence of an Austrian committee.”

108. Madelin, p. 219.

109. Buchez et Roux, xv. 19-30.

110. Mémoires de Lafayette, iii. 332.

111. “ Je fis la fameuse lettre,” Mémoires de Mme. Roland, i. 241.

112. Mémoires de Dumouriez, ii. 274.

113. That the rising of the 20th of June had been planned long before the dismissal of the three ministers on the 12th and the King’s final refusal to sanction the two decrees on the 19th, and that these circumstances were therefore only the pretexts given to the people for marching on the Tuileries, is further evident from the fact that the plan of insurrection was known in London at least ten days before it took place. On June 13 a member of the Jacobin Club read aloud a letter he had received from London announcing a movement that was to take place between the 13th and the 20th, and in the Correspondance secrète for June 16 we find an entry to the same effect :  “ Letters from London announce a great movement in Paris for the 20th of this month. It has been noticed that the great events of the Revolution have always been foretold us by the English.”  The co-operation of the English revolutionaries is here clearly evident.

114. Crimes de la Révolution, by Prudhomme, iv. 43.  Montjoie asserts that Robespierre was also present at the meetings, but this seems improbable, since the movement was conducted by his enemies the Brissotins and Orléanistes.  Moreover, at the Jacobin Club he had strongly opposed the plan of insurrection. If he was present the fact is only to be explained by his natural timidity—he may have been afraid to stay away lest he should be accused of sympathy with the Court. But it seems unlikely that he took any active part in the proceedings.

115. Montjoie, Conjuration de d’Orléans, iii. 174 ;  Ferrières, iii. 105.

116. A play on the word pique, which signifies both spades at cards and pikes.

117. Montjoie, Conjuration de d’Orléans,iii 174 ;  Histoire particulière, etc., by Maton de la Varenne.

118. Ibid.

119. Roederer, Chronique des Cinquante Jours (edition de Lescure), p. 18.

120. Mortimer Ternaux, Histoire de la Terreur, i. 141.

121. Deux Amis, viii. 25.

122. Maton de la Varenne, op. cit.;  Ferrières, iii. 105 ;  Montjoie, Conjuration de d’Orléans, iii. 175.

123. Buchez et Roux, xv. 196.  Chabot denied the accusation, but even if he did not make this definite proposition it is certain that he was in Saint-Antoine during the night stirring up the people against the King.  See Montjoie, Conjuration de d’Orléans, iii. 175 ;  Roederer, p. 19 ;  Ferrières, iii. 106 ;  Prudhomme, Crimes, iv. 38.

124. Roederer, p. 22.

125. Buchez et Roux, xv. 117.

126. See statement of Santerre on these payments to working-men quoted in the Memoirs of the Comtesse de Bohm (edition de Lescure), p. 196.

127. On this point contemporaries are entirely disagreed. Napoleon, an eye-witness of the scene, put the crowd at only 6000 ;  Beaulieu says 8000, but Roederer says 20,000.  Mr. Croker believed this to be an intentional exaggeration in order “ to make the mob pass for the people ” and to excuse the terror of the Assembly.

128. These words in italics given by Maton de la Varenne are suppressed by the Moniteur and Buchez et Roux.

129. Even Roederer is obliged to admit that this was the idea of the leaders :  “ The lack of concerted action between the people assembled seems to leave room for only one opinion—that the boldest and most subtle plotters of violence hoped that amongst so many disorderly people a fanatical hand would be raised against the monarch for whom it had not been thought necessary to designate or even to seek out an assassin.” (Chronique des Cinquante Jours (edition de Lescure), p. 38).

130. It was at this moment that Napoleon Bonaparte, coming out of a restaurant near the Palais Royal with Bourrienne, made his memorable exclamation :  “ What imbeciles, how could they allow that rabble (canaille) to enter ?  They should have swept away four or five hundred of them with cannons and the rest would still be running ! ” (Mémoires de Bourrienne, i. 49).

131. Mortimer Ternaux, i. 184 ;  Buchez et Roux, xv. 118.

132. Buchez et Roux, xv. 118.

133. Boucher Réné, a municipal officer, in his evidence to the police says “ a gunner ”;  La Reynie, who declared Boucher Réné to be one of the officers to give the order, says “ men of the National Guard.”  Roederer and Mortimer Ternaux accept the latter statement.

134. Roederer, p. 46.

135. Déposition de La Reynie, Buchez et Roux, xv. 118.

136. Mémoires de Hua, p. 136.

137. Histoire particulière, etc., by Maton de la Varenne.  Canolles was guillotined for this action on May 23, 1794.

138. Ibid.

139. Mémoires de Hua.

140. According to Maton de la Varenne it was Santerre who thrust the cap of liberty on to the King’s head ;  according to Beaulieu it was Clement, but other contemporaries relate that the King put it on of his own accord.  This seems improbable, and is contradicted by the King’s statement to Bertrand de Molleville.

141. “ What saved Louis XVI. was his presence of mind in putting on the bonnet rouge and in drinking from a bottle offered him by a real Sans-Culotte ” (Crimes de la Révolution, by Prudhomme, iv. 43).

142. Mémoires de Ferrières, iii. 115.

143. Evidence of the deputies Brunck and Lejosne, Moniteur, xii. 719.

144. Evidence of the deputy Alos, ibid.  The grenadier, a tailor by profession named Lalanne, was guillotined later “ for having boasted that Capet had taken his hand and held it to his heart ” (Granier de Cassagnac, Causes de la Révolution, iii. 217).

145. Mémoires de Hua.  The Moniteur tones down this discourse.

146. Dernières années . . de Louis XVI, by François Hue, p. 239 ;  Fantin Désodoards, op. cit. ii. 300.

147. Mémoires de Mme. Campan, p. 331.

148. Vie de Marie Antoinette, by Montjoie, p. 323.

149. Ibid.

150. Vie de Marie Antoinette, by Montjoie, p. 323 ;  Maton de la Varenne, op. cit.

151. Ferrières, iii. 119 ;  Maton de la Varenne, op. cit.;  Conjuration de d’Orléans, by Montjoie, iii. 184.

152. Dernières années . . de Louis XVI, by François Hue, p. 244.

153. “ Nothing of all this could move the crowd.  Divided between the King and his sister it remained motionless.  One read in all eyes astonishment, stupidity, or apprehension ” (Montjoie, Conjuration de d’Orléans, iii. 181).
      “ In truth, and we are glad to say it, amongst all the people who introduced themselves to the apartments very few shared this atrocious attitude.  It appears, according to various reports, that the greater number only showed the desire to see the King and Royal Family ” (Rapport fait au Conseil du Département par MM. Garnier, Leveillard et Demautort, Commissaires, au Sujet des Événements du 20 Juin).
      “ The people, ashamed of finding themselves all at once in the presence of their King and in the midst of his apartments, seemed frightened by their own temerity, at the sight of the ancient majesty of the throne that fourteen centuries of respect had in some way rendered sacred ” (Ferrières, iii. 113).

154. Evidence of soldiers and commissioners, Revue retrospective, 2^ième, série, tome i. pp. 213, 254.

155. Crimes de la Révolution, by Prudhomme, iv. 43.

156. Déclarations de la Reynie et Fayel reçues par le Juge de Paix de la Section du Roi de Sicile.

157. Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, iii. 3.

158. Moniteur, xiii. 5.

159. Mémoires de Hua, p. 138 ;  Deux Amis, viii. 19 ;  Dumont, Souvenirs de Mirabeau :  “ The whole mass of France was weary of the excesses of the Jacobins, and the outrage of June the 20th had excited a general indignation.”  See also Taine, La Révolution, v. 259.

160. Aulard’s Séances des Jacobins, iv. 48.

161. Buchez et Roux, xv. 165, 237.

162. Fragment d’Histoire secrète de la Révolution, by Camille Desmoulins, p. 55.

163. Essais de Beaulieu, iii. 396.