CHAPTER 11.

FROM THE OPENING OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY TO THE DEATH OF LOUis.

THE members of the Legislative Assembly-in the formation of which not only was almost every man entitled to a vote, but was also eligible to election—were, probably, the most motley group that ever undertook to regulate the affairs of a large and powerful country. Not fifty of the whole number were possessed of twenty-five hundred francs (five hundred dollars) a year. They were composed chiefly of presumptuous and half educated young men, clerks in counting-houses, and attorneys from the provincial towns who had risen to notice during the absence of all persons of wealth, and recommended themselves to attention by the vehemence with which they proclaimed the principles of democracy. In many instances they had talent enough to be dangerous, without knowledge enough to guide or property enough to check their ambition. If a demon were to select a body of men qualified to consign a country to perdition, he could not choose more efficient colleagues.

The new Assembly opened its sittings on the 1st of October, 1791. Its members divided themselves into three parties; the Feuillants, or friends of the Constitution, who had for leaders Lameth, Barnave, Duport, Damas and Vaublanc; the Girondists or republicans, led by Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonne, Isnard, and Brissot; and the Jacobins, or ultra revolutionists, led by Chabot, Bazire and Merlin. The real influence of the latter party, however, was to be found in the Jacobin clubs throughout Paris, where Robespierre, Danton and others held absolute sway.

The first acts of the new Assembly were directed against the clergy and the emigrants. The clergy having been already despoiled of their possessions, were now required to take the oath to the Constitution, which curtailed their salaries to a mere pittance and ordered them to be moved from place to place, so that they could acquire no influence over their people; forbidding them, also, to exercise any religious rites in private. The emigrants, were condemned to death and their estates to confiscation, unless they returned to France before the first of January, 1792. The king refused to sign these acts, but as he had already openly disapproved of the emigration, he issued a proclamation recalling the absentees. this, as in almost all his acts, he gave dissatisfaction and offence to every party.

In

The Assembly were more successful in persuading the king, though much against his will, to declare war against Hungary and Bohemia. This step, which was taken on the 20th of April, 1792, was popular with all parties. The Royalists hoped that the German powers might prevail, and by overturning the revolutionary authority, reinstate the king; the Constitutionalists, seeing their own consequence on the wane, hoped to regain it through the influence of the army; and the Jacobins longed for the tumult and excitement of campaigns, from which they felt confident in some way of reaping substantial advantage. Thus commenced the greatest, the most bloody, and the most eventful war which has agitated mankind since the Fall of the Roman Empire. It rose from feeble beginnings, but it finally enveloped the world in its commotion.

The intelligence of the declaration of war was received with joy by all the people of France. It communicated a new impulse to the public mind, already so excited. Addresses to the Assembly came in from every municipality, congratulating them on having vindicated the national honor; arms were prepared, gifts provided, and the nation seemed impatient to receive its invaders. But such displays of patriotism, how strong soever as auxiliary to military discipline, are seldom able to supply its place. The first encounters with the enemy were all unsuccessful to the French arms, and it more than once appeared in the sequel that, had the allies acted with decision and pressed on to Paris before military experience had been added to the enthusiasm of the French, the war might have been terminated by a single campaign. These disasters to the armies produced the utmost consternation in Paris: each party accused the others of treachery, and general distrust and recrimination prevailed. The Assembly took the most energetic measures for ensuring their own authority and the public safety. They declared their sittings permanent, disbanded the guard of the king, and exiled the refractory clergy. To secure the capital from insult, they directed the formation of a camp of twenty thousand men near Paris, and sought to maintain the enthusiasm of the people by a series of revolutionary fêtes.

The evident peril of the king now aroused him to more than usual vigor; but his measures still lacked that judgment which is essential to efficient exertion. On pretexts comparatively frivolous, he estranged himself from the Girondists, who in many respects were well disposed toward him, and he dismissed the three ministers on whom he could best have relied. The Girondists, chagrined at these proceedings, and fearful of the increasing power of the Jacobins, planned a general insurrection. On the 20th of June, a tumultuous body ten thousand strong, under direction of the Girondists, made their way to the doors of the Assembly with a petition for the total destruction of the Executive power. The hall was next thrown open, and the mob, now increased to thirty thousand men, women and children, passed through in procession uttering furious cries and displaying seditious banners. They next proceeded to the palace, the outer gates of which were left open. They immediately broke into the garden, thronged the staircase and entered the royal apartments, where Louis stood surrounded by a few attendants. The foremost of the crowd, overawed by his presence, made an involuntary pause; but the mass behind pressed onward, and the king was soon jostled and in imminent danger, from which his attendants with great difficulty rescued him, not however until he had received numberless personal indignities from the mob. This outbreak at last terminated without bloodshed, but its occurrence showed the desperate condition of the capital.

The court had now no hope but in the approach of the allies, who, under the Duke of Brunswick, had just entered the territories of France. The allied army consisted of fifty thousand Prussians and sixty-five thousand Austrians and Hessians. The Duke issued a proclamation, in which he warned the Assembly that if they did not forthwith liberate the king and return to their allegiance, they should forfeit their heads, and if the slightest insult were again offered to the royal family an exemplary punishment should be inflicted by the total destruction of the city of Paris. The effect of this manifesto was, in every particular, unfortunate; for, from the distance of the invaders at the time of its promulgation, it roused the

people to resistance, instead of overawing them; and, being regarded as a disclosure of the ulterior designs of the king, it furnished a pretext to the Assembly and the populace for yet more violent proceedings against the whole royal family.

As it was evident that some new outrage was contemplated, the king made preparations to defend the palace. His chief reliance was on the Swiss guard, of whom he could assemble about eight hundred men. In addition to these, some detachments of the National Guard who were believed to be faithful occupied the court of the Tuileries, and some hundreds of Royalists, chiefly of noble families, were scattered through the palace. On the other hand, the insurgents, organized by Danton and Robespierre, were assembled in great force and well supplied with artillery. The first assault was nobly repelled by the Swiss; but, as they were unsupported by the National Guard and unable from the smallness of their numbers to follow up their advantage, they were eventually overthrown and massacred almost to a man. Thus in this last extremity, it was neither in his titled nobility nor his native soldiers that the French king found fidelity, but in the free-born mountaineers of Lucerne, unstained by the vices of a corrupt age and firm in the simplicity of rural virtue. These events took place on the 10th of August, 1792, and they were immediately followed by a decree of the Assembly suspending the king, dismissing the ministers, and directing the instant formation of a National Convention. On the 13th of August, the royal family were removed to the Temple and confined as state prisoners.

The victory over the throne on the 10th of August was followed by the submission to the ruling party of all the departments of France. But the intelligence had at first a different reception at the head-quarters of La Fayette's army, then stationed at Sedan. The officers and men appeared to share the consternation of their leader, and even renewed their oath of fidelity to the constitutional throne; but the period had not arrived when soldiers, accustomed to look only to their chief, were prepared at his command to defy the authority of the legislature. In fact, La Fayette soon found that he had prematurely compromitted himself and was forced to flee from the army, whence he intended to escape to America; but he was arrested near the frontier by the Austrians and conducted to the dungeons of Olmutz. He was offered his liberty on condition of making certain recantations of opinions maintained by him in the earlier stages of the Revolution concerning a modification of the royal prerogative and in favor of a constitutional throne: but he preferred enduring four years of rigorous confinement to receding in any particular from the principles he had embraced. The Assembly declared him a traitor and set a price on his head, and the first leader of the Revolution owed his life to imprisonment in an Austrian fortress.

Meanwhile, the principal powers of the French government fell into the hands of Danton, Marat and Robespierre, well designated "the Infernal Triumvirate ;" and their influence was speedily felt in the measures adopted by the municipality of Paris.

Their first demand on the Assembly was for the appointment of a Revolutionary Tribunal, which, by being invested with the power to pronounce sentence of death without appeal, would be able to take summary vengeance on all concerned in the defence of the palace on the 10th of August, on which occasion so many of "the people" were slain. The

Assembly strove to resist this sanguinary demand, but they were forced to submit.

On the 29th of August, the barriers of Paris were closed and remained shut for forty-eight hours, so that all escape from the city was impossible; and domiciliary visits through every quarter of the town supported by a large military force were then made by order of the Tribunal. Several thousands of all ranks were arrested, but the victims were selected chiefly from the nobles and dissident clergy. Danton now directed the operations of the tribunal and prepared lists of proscription which he distributed to his functionaries. Early in the morning of the 2nd of September a band of three hundred assassins, directed and paid by the magistrates, assembled around the doors of the Hotel de Ville, where they were plied with ardent spirits and furnished with final instructions.

The prison of the Abbaye was the first to be visited. Four-and-twenty priests, put under arrest for refusing to take the new oath, were at the time in custody at the Hotel de Ville. They were now placed in six coaches and conducted to the Abbaye amid the yells and execrations of the mob; and the moment they arrived, they were dragged out from the carriages into the inner court of the prison, and there butchered. The cries of these victims first announced to the prisoners within the fate that awaited themselves. A tribunal was convened in an adjoining dungeon, over which Maillard presided by torch-light. He had a drawn sabre before him, his robes were drenched in blood, and officers with drawn swords and blood-stained shirts surrounded his chair. Reding, one of the Swiss guards, was first summoned to appear before this tribunal; but, while he was passing through the court, the impatient populace assailed him with knives, and he fell dead before he reached his judges. Others were successively called for. A few minutes, and often a few seconds sufficed for the trial of each individual, when he was turned out to the vengeance of the multitude who thronged around the door with knives and sabres, panting for blood and loudly demanding a more rapid supply of victims. Immured in the upper wards of the building, the other prisoners witnessed with agony the prolonged sufferings of their comrades, and some had the presence of mind to observe in what manner the victims soonest met death, in order that, when their turn came, they might shorten their own sufferings by avoiding useless struggles.

After this butchery had proceeded for some time, the populace in the more remote part of the court of the prison complained that those only who were nearest the dungeon of the tribunal could cut down the prisoners, while they were deprived of the privilege of shedding aristocratic blood. It was therefore stipulated, that those in advance should strike the condemned with the backs of their sabres, so that the victims might be made to run the gauntlet through a long avenue of murderers before they were finally struck down. The women in the adjoining quarter of the town made a formal demand to the tribunal to be admitted as spectators of this scene of blood; accordingly, benches were arranged, under charge of sentinels, for their accommodation. As each prisoner was successively turned into the court, a yell of joy arose from the multitude; and when he fell, they danced like cannibals around his remains. In the midst of the massacre, Mademoiselle de Sombrieul, a beautiful girl of eighteen, threw herself on her father's neck when he was beset by the assassins, and declared they should not strike him but through her body. In

the door of each room. Writing materials were taken from them, and, soon after, the scissors, needles and bodkins of the princesses, with which they had whiled away many a tedious hour; and, such was the rigor of their exclusion from the world without, they were almost wholly ignorant of what was taking place in the city. The municipality next determined to separate the king and the dauphin from the queen and princesses: a most barbarous decree and one that brought tears into the eyes of the officers who enforced it.

The king appeared before the Convention to hear and plead to the charges on the 11th of December, when, after some debate, it was decided that he should have time to prepare his defence and choose his own counsel. He made choice of M. Tronchet and M. Target; the former of whom accepted and faithfully discharged his duty; the latter had the baseness to decline. The venerable Malesherbes afterward volunteered his services to defend the king, and united with Tronchet in applying to Deseze for his coöperation, which that celebrated advocate immediately accorded.

When the eloquent peroration of Deseze was read to the king, the evening before it was to be delivered to the Convention, Louis requested him to strike it out from his argument. "It is enough for me," said he, "to appear before such judges and demonstrate my innocence: I will not condescend to appeal to their feelings." On the same day, he composed his immortal Testament; the most perfect commentary on the principles of Christianity that ever came from the hand of a king. "I recommend to my son," said he in a portion of that touching memorial, "should he ever have the misfortune to become a king, to feel that his whole existence should be devoted to the good of his people; to bury in oblivion all hatred and resentment, especially for my misfortunes; to recollect that he cannot promote the happiness of his subjects but by reigning according to the laws; at the same time, he cannot carry his good intentions into execution without the requisite authority. I pardon all those who have injured me and I pray my son to recollect only their sufferings. I declare before God, and on the eve of appearing at his tribunal, that I am wholly innocent of the crimes laid to my charge."

The trial commenced on the 26th of December and was continued for twenty days. The king's counsel defended their client with consummate ability, but the case, like most cases that came before that bloody tribunal, was prejudged, the royal victim was in effect condemned before he was accused, and eloquence and argument, as well as every appeal to humanity and justice, were equally vain. The final vote was taken on the 15th of January, when Louis was unanimously pronounced guilty; an astounding decision to all parties, but evidently given under the expectation that it would not prove fatal to the king; for, when the remaining question was proposed as to the punishment to be inflicted, it was debated through a protracted and stormy session of no less than forty hours, and finally decided by a majority of only twenty-six out of seven hundred and twenty-one votes. The sentence was DEATH.

But for the defection of the Girondists, the king's life would have been saved. Forty-six of their party, including Vergniaud, voted against him. They were anxious to save the king, but fearful of irritating the Jacobins by voting according to their own wishes. Almost every one of these fortysix afterward perished on the same scaffold, to which they had condemned their sovereign.