CHAPTER XI. Anarchy and Military Despotism.-A. D. 1789-1815. ATROCIOUS OUTRAGES. FRANCE. REVOLUTIONARY CLUBS. FLIGHT OF THE PRINCES AND NOBLES.-SCARCITY OF FOOD.-DISPUTES OF THE MILITARY.-ATTACK ON THE PALACE OF VERSAILLES. MIRABEAU. -ATTEMPTED FLIGHT OF THE ROYAL FAMILY.-THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY. -REPEATED ATTACKS ON THE PALACE. DANTON.-SEPTEMBER MASSACRES.-THE PRINCESS OF LAMBALLE.-THE NATIONAL CONVENTION. -FRANCE DECLARED A REPUBLIC.-TRIAL OF THE KING.-HIS EXECUTION.—THE GIRONDISTS.- THE MOUNTAIN. — EXECUTION OF THE -- 66 - TERRORISTS. 99 _66 - STRUGGLES FOR SUPREMACY. WHEN the tidings of the capture of the Bastile reached the national assembly, many of the moderate among the THE MOB TRIUMPHANT. 141 members began to fear that the state of things was becoming too serious, and would gladly have adopted some remedial measures, but it was too late. They requested the king to recall the troops from Paris, and not to allow them to fire on the people; but the advice was hollow: already the court had discovered that no dependence could be placed on the soldiery. The king again summoned Necker to undertake the arrangement of the finances, and the people testified the most tumultuous joy on the occasion; but this act was equally vain: no one could, in the existing confusion, carry any measure for obtaining a revenue. Paris governed the country, and Paris was governed by the mob. The most awful excesses were committed in the capital, and repeated through the provinces; chateaux innumerable were burnt down; outrages of the most atrocious kind were perpetrated, in which neither sex nor age were spared, and every feeling of decency and humanity was utterly disregarded. It was the carnival of licentiousness, and Paris an earthly pandemonium, where the grossness of animal sensuality was added to fiendish malignity. Revolutionary clubs kept the popular excitement up to a pitch of feverish intensity in several parts of the city, and when any symptoms of abatement appeared, Camille Desmoulins, and others of the same character, were ever ready to add fresh fuel to the spreading conflagration. The national assembly was, in the meanwhile, discussing certain abstract propositions, founded upon Paine's pamphlet on "The Rights of Man," and completely subverting the ancient order of things. That many of the proposed changes were desirable, cannot be disputed; but selection had but little to do with the proceedings, which were almost exclusively of a destructive kind. To reconstruct the shattered fabric of the state seemed to be beyond their power. Various, yea, innumerable schemes were indeed devised, but rejected as speedily as proposed, or lost amid the mass of vague and impracticable speculations. The more moderate among the members wished to frame a constitution somewhat after the English model, with two legislative chambers, over whose decisions the king should have the right of veto; but this was considered too aristocratic, and soon dismissed. In fact, the national 142 SCARCITY OF FOOD. assembly, the boasted cradle of liberty, was itself by no means unfettered; the real power being absorbed by the various clubs, which maintained their influence by pandering to the unrestrained passions of the mob, and which were, in many instances, composed of the members of the national assembly itself. The situation of the poor king became every day more alarming. Many of the nobility had fled from the scenes of rapine and violence, the princes of the royal family had several of them followed their example, and even the queen, against whom much popular hatred existed, had packed up her jewels, and was with difficulty prevailed on to remain. To increase the dreadful perplexity, scarcity now began to be severely felt, and threatened to terminate in famine. Necker strove to effect loans and purchase corn; but the credit of the state was gone, and capitalists would not advance their money, with the more than probable prospect that it never would be repaid. Some few spasmodic efforts were made to meet the emergency; but they were more theatrical in their aspect, than effectual in their influence. The king contributed his plate, the members of the assembly took the gold buckles off their shoes, and gave them to the president for the service of the state; the citizens came in procession with their gifts; females presenting their rings and thimbles, and various articles of bijouterie; but such expedients removed neither the popular discontent, nor the actual scarcity on which it was based. Absurd reports were current that the aristocracy were concealing the grain with the fixed intention of starving the people; shops and warehouses were now sacked, and their contents appropriated without any payment, or at such a disproportionate price as the people chose to fix. When the government had succeeded in purchasing some temporary supply of grain, they were obliged to guard it by troops against the attacks of a famished populace. In order to make the wheat available as extensively as possible, rye and other cheap cereals were mixed with it and of necessity rendered it dark coloured. This gave rise to a new rumour, that the court was attempting to poison the people by selling poisoned flour. Such monstrous and absurd suspicions would however soon have died out, but for the unpardonable conduct of Desmoulins, BREAD RIOTS AT VERSAILLES. 143 Danton, Marat, and other political incendiaries, who, in their inflammatory harangues encouraged these scandals, and endeavoured to affix the odium of the pretended scheme upon the king, the nobility, and the royalists generally. The excitement resulting from the scarcity at last became so great, that a number of females of the lowest orders formed themselves into a procession and started for Versailles; when there, they forced themselves into the hall where the National Assembly was convened, shouting, "Bread, bread!" they even seated themselves among the members, and a fishwoman occupied the president's chair during his temporary absence. This strange assemblage had been joined by a number of male rioters armed with any thing that came to hand, and the whole preceded by one of the national guard beating a drum. After a scene of violence and confusion in the hall of the assembly of the most extreme kind, a number of the women forced themselves into the presence of the king, who in a few kind words assured them of his sympathy, and promised to return to Paris in a few days: they now returned to the hall, and mingled their screams and curses with the deliberations of the assembly. This absurd demonstration might however have passed off quietly, but for some trifling dispute between the king's body guard, a regiment he had recently summoned from Flanders, and the national guard of Versailles: exaggerated accounts of this dispute were carried to Paris, and the national guard there, under the command of Lafayette, determining to avenge the supposed insult offered to their body, notwithstanding all the efforts of Lafayette to prevent them, started for Versailles accompanied by the centre grenadiers, and reached the palace about midnight. At ten o'clock that night the king had signed the document prepared by the assembly, in which the rights of man and the constitution were so proudly asserted: carried back to the hall by the president, it was received with acclamations from the members, mingled with screams, execrations, and laughter from the women, when the roll of drums announced that another scene in this strange drama was about to open. About sixty thousand persons, partly national guards and partly the lowest rabble of Paris, are supposed to have come from the 144 FURY OF THE MULTITUDE. capital on that fearful night. Lafayette going to the king, persuaded him that the only means of quieting the tumult, was for the royal family to return to Paris on the following day. He then made such arrangements as seemed best suited to secure the peace of the palace, and retired to rest; but in a short time the shrieks and screams which arose, showed that the work of violence had begun, and it was found that the mob, resolving to wreak their vengeance on the queen, were forcing their way into the palace. Some of the rioters were about bursting into her bedchamber, and were only prevented by the faithful devotion of some of the body-guards. The royal family assembled in the king's apartments in the greatest terror and distress, Marie Antoinette exclaiming, "O God, save me and my children!" the few attendants at that part of the palace were enervated by fear, while the mob was thundering at the various entrances determined to gain admission. Lafayette, who had been aroused by the disturbance, now appeared, and prevailed on the king and queen to show themselves on the balcony, and assure the people that they would return with them to Paris. Accordingly, at noon on the 6th of October, the royal family left Versailles accompanied by the national assembly, a motley crowd of men and women of the lowest class, armed, hungry, and furious, and the national guard as democratic in their sympathies as the rest of the rabble. The heads of two of the body-guard who had been slain in the emeute of the previous night, were borne in front of this tumultuous procession; some passed on before the royal carriage, others, crowding around it, shouted, shrieked, cursed, blasphemed, and cried, "We shall want no more bread, for we have got the baker, the bakeress, and the baker's boy." The fishwomen crowded round the carriage, and directed sneers and scoffs at the queen, and sang the most obscene songs for her annoyance: thus did the king of France enter his capital, there to meet with still greater indignities, till death terminated his career of woe. the evening the procession entered the city, and henceforth the king and queen were in reality prisoners. In The national assembly now met together in Paris; but fear and disgust had driven away many of the more |