Chapter 18. Journées toward the Republic

The Left in the National Assembly following the fall of the Bastille was by no means republican, still less radical. It was composed largely of constitutionalists, who accepted the monarchy as an indispensable part of the new government, and its deliberations were guided by prudent lawyers who tilted toward fairly conservative views. Far more liberal—even radical—were the elected officials in the municipalities, whose constituencies were more open to public scrutiny and pressure than departmental officials or Assembly deputies.

The authentic radicals of this period could be found in the Cordeliers district, on the Left Bank of the Seine. Perhaps the most militant district in the capital and a major propaganda center of the Revolution, the Cordeliers played a strategic role in awakening public consciousness in favor of a republic. Led by the ebullient lawyer Georges Danton, who presided over the district’s assembly, as well as other fervent leaders of the Revolution who also lived and worked there, it became at once a center and a protective haven for radicals throughout the city. Jean-Paul Marat moved to the district for a time to seek refuge from the police, and it was here that the printer Antonio Momoro’s press published some of the most incendiary pamphlets of the period. Here, too, the famous Cafe Procope attracted some of the Revolution’s ablest journalists, intellectuals, lawyers, and artists, continuing a tradition that dated back to Moltere and Diderot. Finally, most of the radical publishers were located in the district: the Cordeliers was home to Desmoulins’s newspaper La France Libre and the older Revolutions de Paris, among others of the same fiery genre.

The Cordeliers district had led all other districts in the journees of the preceding years. In the summer of 1789 it issued fierce denunciations of the king’s gathering of troops in Paris, and in the journee of October 5 it petitioned Lafayette’s National Guards to follow the women to Versailles. This activity was due in no small measure to the head of the Cordeliers district, Danton himself. Gargantuan in build, richly endowed with oratorical gifts, Danton helped to establish perhaps the most vigorous example of a militant direct democracy, at least of active citizens. “Danton realized the political capital to be made out of appeals to local autonomy and denunciations of municipal despotism,” observes Norman Hampson in his biography of the revolutionary leader.

He was the inventor of what were to become the tactics of every radical group fighting for its place in the sun: the basis of all authority was the local meeting which claimed to reflect the direct democracy of the sovereign people, even if, in fact, it stood for no more than a militant minority. As far as possible, all power was to be located in such gatherings, and when concerted action on the Parisian scale was necessary, it should be taken by the spontaneous cooperation of the Districts (and later, of the Sections), communicating their resolutions to each other and electing ad hoc executive committees as necessary. All men elected to any higher body were to be delegates, not representatives, the mere agents of the Districts and subject to instant recall. Throughout the Revolution this was to be the program of the men at the bottom.[269]

The French were by no means unaware of the grassroots popular network created during the American Revolution—the great committee “engine,” as John Adams called it. Indeed, from the outset of that revolution, committees and assemblies had formed throughout France, comparable to the American Committees of Correspondence, Committees of Safety, and conventions, on which the districts and later the sections depended for their effectiveness.

The sixty electoral districts of Paris had essentially become permanent neighborhood assemblies of active citizens, many of which were gadflies for the less radical National Assembly, which had transformed itself into a Constituent Assembly to write a constitution, and later the Legislative Assembly that followed the constitution’s adoption. In June 1790, the reticent municipal authority, fearful of the districts’ radicalism, persuaded the National Assembly to diminish their influence by reducing them to forty-eight sections in the vain hope that the fewer their number, the more controllable they would be. Unlike the districts, whose origin stemmed from the election of the Third Estate, these new sections were the creation of the Assembly, and as such the Assembly sought to define and limit their powers as it saw fit. Participation in sectional assemblies, it stipulated, would remain legally open only to active citizens. (Each section ranged from seventeen hundred to eighteen hundred potential participants.) A section’s assembly meetings were to be circumscribed: it could meet only to elect officials or when fifty members requested a meeting. Perhaps naively, right-wing deputies probably congratulated themselves “on decimating certain of the 60 electoral districts which had begun to function as centers of popular radicalism,” observes William Doyle.[270]

But the various clubs and revolutionary societies, especially those in the Cordeliers district, campaigned vigorously against the change, and although they lost, the reorganization and name changes—the Cordeliers district, for example, was renamed the Theater-Français section—failed miserably to have their intended effect. The new sectional assemblies still claimed a wide latitude of political authority; indeed, in practice the distinction between active and passive citizens was honored less and less as time went by. Danton’s formidable political machine continued to influence not only the other sections of Paris but the nation as a whole. In fact, almost from the start, the new sections jealously upheld their own autonomy and developed a critical stance not only toward the National Assembly but toward the fairly conservative Paris Commune at the H6tel de Ville. As early as September and October 1790 many of the sections voted to censure the ministers for conniving with aristocrats, a proposal that Danton himself brought to the National Assembly. Although it was defeated, the vote was so close that all the ministers but one resigned.

Still another reason why the sections remained powerful and became increasingly radicalized was the growing influence that the new popular clubs and societies exercised on the people of Paris. One of the most important clubs that was to play a major role in the events of the Revolution was the Society of Friends of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, formed in the summer of 1790 and located in an old Franciscan monastery on Cordeliers street in the Théatre Français area of the Left Bank. Not to be confused with the old Cordeliers district, it generally became known as the Cordeliers Club and proved in time to be an action group rather than a debating society, dedicated to protesting the grievances of the poor and voicing some of the most radical goals in the Revolution. According to the founding Cordeliers charter, its “main object is to denounce before the tribunal of public opinion the abuses of the various authorities, and every sort of infringement of the rights of man.”[271] An eye was imprinted on the club’s public papers, symbolizing a “vigilant eye” always on the alert to detect the misdeeds of elected representatives and officials. The club famously conducted investigations into abuses, drew up petitions for redressing malfeasances, and played a leading role in mobilizing popular demonstrations.

The Club drew no distinctions between active and passive citizens, and its membership fee was kept very low (only two sous a month) so that the poor, as well as shopkeepers and artisans, could join it. Significantly, unlike many other clubs in Paris, the Cordeliers also opened its doors to women. During the winter of 1790 and 1791, in fact, fraternal societies that were in sympathy with the Cordeliers were formed throughout Paris, and by May 1791 the Cordeliers formed a confederation with other clubs that was linked by a central committee. As Mathiez observes in his history of the French Revolution:

Their ideal, borrowed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was that of direct government. They held that the constitution and even the laws should be subject to the ratification of the people, and they were not slow to express their distrust of the oligarchy of politicians which had replaced the oligarchy of nobles and priests.[272]

By the end of 1790, the Cordeliers in Paris numbered a thousand members, who constituted themselves into a highly democratic vanguard of the Revolution, making the Club a major propelling force in the drift toward the Left.

In contrast to the Cordeliers, the Jacobin Club was initially quite moderate, even rather elegant. Formed in the earliest days of the Revolution under the name of the Society for the Friends of the Constitution, its meeting rooms were located in the Jacobin monastery, hence the clerical name. Deputies of all political shades attended Jacobin meetings at one time or another. Although by no means a club of the Left in its early days, the Jacobins maintained a confrontational stance that reflected a wide spectrum of revolutionary public opinion, as Desmoulins grandiously observed:

Not only is it the grand inquisitor which strikes terror in the aristocrats; it is also the great accuser, redressing all abuses and coming to the aid of all citizens. It is, indeed, as though the club exercised the functions of a public prosecutor to the National Assembly. In its bosom are poured out the grievances of the oppressed, which come to it from every side before being taken before the august assembly.[273]

Indeed, after October 1791 the debates of the Jacobins were opened to the public, and very often the club’s galleries were filled to overflowing. More so than the Cordeliers, who remained largely Parisian, the Jacobin Club was replicated throughout the provinces until some four hundred clubs formed a network across France, with which the Parisian society maintained a close correspondence, sharing publications, ideas and strategic advice and spreading its political ideas.

If the societies exercised increasing influence on the sectional assemblies, the sectional assemblies, in turn, continually tried to extend their powers, despite attempts to restrict them. Thus, even before May 1790, Pari—who became president of the Cordeliers district after Danton abandoned his role in it for national office—denied that the Paris Commune’s police had legitimate authority to search for Marat, who was hiding in the district at the time. The district, in effect, claimed the sole right to arrest malefactors in its territory, a claim that openly flouted the authority of the Paris Commune itself.

In fact, by the summer of 1790, the mood in Paris and in France was anything but placid. After a year, the Constituent Assembly, it became clear, had failed to deal with the needs of the urban poor and the peasantry. The popular song “Ça ira”—to which radicals had added the line “Let’s hang the aristocrats from the lanterns”—created panic among the aristocrats of the city, with the result that carriages of nobles heading for the frontier could be seen daily in the streets of Paris. No one doubted that an outright royalist counterrevolution was being plotted to restore the king and the Church to their former status. Jacqueries continued to flare up in the countryside as peasants, who refused to pay feudal dues after the August 4 “defeudalization,” repeatedly invaded seigneurial forests and game parks and destroyed the hated chateaux that had dominated rural life for centuries.

Once again, enough tinder was accumulating so that the Revolution needed only a spark to ignite it—and that came, surely enough, from the king, his “loyal clergy,” and the pope.

THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES

On April 13,1791, the pope formally instructed the Gallican bishops not to take the oath for the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, an order that the radicals were only too eager to challenge. Anticlericalism, always popular in the political clubs and the theaters, now increased in intensity among the people, who burned the pope in effigy, invaded convents, and prevented the refractory priests from conducting mass. In the church of Saint-Sulpice, for example, whose curd was refractory, an invading crowd ordered the organist to play “Qj ira” which they sang menacingly together with the panicked congregation.

The king, never at peace with the Civil Constitution, patently regretted he had signed the document; and Paris, ever mistrustful of his behavior, grew still more suspicious of his intentions after he helped his aunts, who were also his close advisers, to journey to Rome in February 1791 to discuss the affairs of the French Church personally with the pope. Louis was accused of taking communion from a refractory priest, for which outraged Parisian pamphleteers called him a traitor to the nation. By now, Parisians were so incensed toward the monarchy that when Louis tried to leave the capital to spend Easter Week at Saint-Cloud, a hill overlooking the city, a crowd actually prevented the monarch’s carriage from moving. With good reason, they were convinced that he planned to escape abroad to organize a counterrevolution with the dmigrds and invade France at the head of a foreign army. Indeed, so numerous were antiroyalist and anticlerical riots in Paris that Lafayette sent the National Guards rushing around the city in a fruitless effort to suppress them.

The Constituent Assembly could do little to calm the situation. Exacerbating popular fears of a counterrevolution were serious economic dislocations that made Paris more restive than at any time since July 1789. Unemployment was rising, earnings were declining, and workers and journeymen were in a dangerously sullen mood. The Assembly’s abolition of guilds in March 1791 had freed working people, especially carpenters and blacksmiths, to organize for higher wages, which, with the support of the popular clubs, seemed to portend a wave of strikes for a minimum wage. But the Assembly, horrified by this prospect, promptly passed the notorious Le Chapelier law on June 14, which prohibited workers from forming any associations—what would later be called trade unions—on the excuse that any economic combinations were redolent of feudal corporations. The law, which was to remain in effect well into the next century, deprived workers of the right to strike. Ironically, Le Chapelier, who had proposed the bill, had been a leading radical and a founding member of the Jacobin Club, but by 1791 he decided that the course of the Revolution had to be slowed down because popular emotion threatened to render it uncontrollable.

To allay popular suspicions that the king was trying to elude the people’s surveillance {and possibly to protect him), hundreds of National Guardsmen were dispatched to stand guard around the Tuiieries. In fact, as the summer of 1791 approached, the king and his closest advisers had laid detailed plans for him to flee with the royal family to Montmédy, on the Luxembourg frontier. There, Louis hoped to gain the necessary military support from imigris and the Austrian emperor, Leopold, Marie Antoinette’s brother, to undo all the achievements of the Revolution. Finally, on the night of June 20, the king and queen, their two children, and an entourage consisting of the king’s sister, two seamstresses, and the children’s governess slipped out of the Tuiieries through an unguarded door and left Paris in a large, heavily laden carriage, accompanied by a cabriolet for the royal servants. Traveling incognito toward the frontier with imprudent dilatoriness, they arrived four hours late at Pont de Somme Vesle, where the escape plan called for the royal party to meet up with a cavalry escort. But these plans misfired completely. By the time the carriage arrived, the escort that was assigned to accompany them had withdrawn because it had aroused suspicion among the local peasants who, fearful that the troops were there to collect overdue rents for a local landlord, menacingly threatened them with pitchforks.

As the party continued unescorted to Sainte-Ménéhould, it could not remain unnoticed for long. The postmaster of the town, who recognized the king from his picture on the assignat, excitedly rushed to Varennes, the next town along the route, raising the alarm over the entire countryside. By the time the royal carriage reached Varennes, the entire town came out to intercept the escapees. Like the many blunders that marked his reign, Louis’s attempted flight had failed because of an arrogant disdain for his opponents—his carriage was slowed down to a leisurely pace once it left the environs of Paris—and the royal family was escorted back to Paris under guard. The people came out to witness his return in sullen silence. Louis had left behind a written statement abjuring the Revolution and his previous endorsements of its acts and condemning the Constitution, which outraged revolutionaries all over the country. The king’s position as head of state was now completely untenable. On June 24 the Cordeliers Club, backed by a crowd of thirty thousand, presented a petition to the Constituent Assembly demanding that it either depose the king or hold a referendum on his fate. Talk of republicanism, considered heinous two years earlier, now became open, and the symbols of royalty were desecrated throughout the capital.

To add to all the mishaps that plagued Louis’s flight, the Emperor Leopold of Austria issued an arrogant circular note from Padua calling upon the European powers “to vindicate the liberty and honor of the Most Christian King and his family, and to limit the dangerous extremes of the French Revolution.”[274] An Austrian invasion, with or without Louis at its head, seemed imminent, and French military forces, ranging from the local National Guards to the army, were mobilized on a war footing.

The Constituent Assembly now found itself in a hopeless dilemma. France without a king seemed unthinkable to many of its deputies, and a republic would require the writing of a new constitution to replace the one that had just been so painstakingly completed. Moreover, the deposal of the monarch would almost certainly, it seemed, invite invasion by foreign powers as well as vindicate republican demands for basic changes in the state. With the typical awkwardness of moderates in a searing revolutionary situation, the Assembly resolved to preserve the unpresentable monarchy. Two days after the flight, it issued a patently false statement that the king had been kidnapped by royalists and that his compromising statement had been coerced from him by sinister advisers. But no one believed the story. The Cordeliers militantly protested against the whitewash, as did other radical clubs throughout France, but Louis remained king. The Assembly, for its part, temporarily deprived him of his constitutional functions and took over the power of the executive for itself, issuing decrees without royal approval.

None of these actions served the Constituent Assembly well among the Parisian masses. Indeed, the firmly republican Cordeliers prepared another petition calling for a republic, and called upon the people of Paris to sign it by placing it upon the Altar of the Nation in the Champ de Mars—the site of the 1790 Fete de la Federation. On July 17 a crowd of fifty thousand gathered in the parade ground. Some sue thousand had signed it when two suspicious men were discovered hiding under the altar; the surly crowd decided they were spies and hanged them. Bailly, the mayor of Paris, used the lynching as a pretext to declare martial law and called out the National Guard, to which Lafayette responded with alacrity. The marquis, apparently eager to disperse the crowd, marched to the Champs de Mars with the mayor and his mainly bourgeois troops. When the Guard raised the red flag of martial law, the crowd greeted them with stones and a few shots. After they refused to disperse, Lafayette ordered his troops to fire several volleys point-blank into mostly unarmed people, and when the smoke cleared, fifty people were lying dead on the parade ground.

With the massacre of the Champs de Mars, the popularity of Lafayette and Bailly came to a definitive end. Lafayette and his circle of members, who favored retaining the monarchy, withdrew from the Jacobin Club, of which they had been members, rather than sign a petition demanding the overthrow of the king, and formed a new club that met at the former convent of the Feuillants. All the Jacobin deputies to the National Assembly departed with them. Maximilien Robespierre, who stayed behind, managed in effect to keep the club from dissolving completely by holding together a handful of wavering republicans. Indeed, all that remained of the Jacobins were its Left elements, which Robespierre and his supporters rebuilt, in time, into a powerful political machine.

The Constituent Assembly, in turn, used the Champ de Mars massacre to launch an attack not upon the royalists, who had supported the king’s flight, but the growing number of republicans in the capital, who were outraged by it. Using a law against so-called “tumults” that had been passed as early as October 1789, municipal authorities and police were unleashed on antiroyalist revolutionaries. The radical presses and newspapers that had supported republican views were closed; radical leaders were arrested and tried in the hundreds; and generally, every effort was made to intimidate known republicans. Thereafter, the Assembly passed a law—unanimously, except for Robespierre’s dissent—restricting freedom of the press for those who “deliberately provoke disobedience to the law” or “disparagement of the constituted powers and resistance to their acts.”[275] Danton was obliged to flee from the city and take refuge in England, while Marat, whose newspaper had raged against the royalists, hid in the cellar of the Cordeliers Club.[276] Desmoulins, Santerre, and other vocal Cordeliers were placed under proscription and went into hiding.

The new Constitution, which had yet to be completed, was made more moderate. It removed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy from the document, thereby allowing refractory clergy to support the Constitution and enabling the Constituent Assembly’s successor, the Legislative Assembly, to modify it, if it so chose. Still another change raised property qualifications for voting for Assembly deputies so high that only the fairly well-to-do could exercise the franchise. With these amendments, Louis agreed to sign the new Constitution and, despite his flight to Varennes, was officially restored to the throne.

THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY AND EUROPEAN WAR

The old National Constituent Assembly disbanded, having completed its labors, and a new Legislative Assembly convened on October 1, 1791. Since deputies to the former assembly were excluded from becoming deputies to the latter, the membership was entirely new and consisted largely of lawyers and the bourgeois elements of the period. The largest single political bloc in numerical terms was the royalist Feuillants. They expressly called for the loyalty of the king to the changed Constitution, reconciliation with the refractory clergy, and the return of the imigris. But the Feuillant bloc, despite its size numerically, was still a minority in the new Assembly—and a diminishing one whose uneasy members and supporters were trickling into foreign exile.

Far more influential than the Feuillants, on the whole, were the leftists, mainly lawyers, journalists, and merchants, who constituted a new type of radical. They were extremely ambitious and eager to mouth revolutionary slogans to gain popular support. These young people and their supporters were generally known as Brissotins; not until later would they acquire the more familiar name of Girondins. Led by Jacques-Pierre Brissot, a gifted orator and a prolific author and pamphleteer, the Brissotins dominated the Assembly with their skillful leadership. In contrast to the royalists’ views, their platform called for a war against the tmigrds, who were gathering in cities near the French frontier, and, if necessary, with European monarchies who protected them. This demand was basically tactical: a war against the enemies of the Revolution, the Brissotins emphasized, would force the king to work with the Legislative Assembly, heighten patriotic fervor, and rally the country around the Revolution. “Do you wish at one blow to destroy the aristocracy, the refractory priests, the malcontents?” cried Brissot. “Then destroy Coblenz [the center of émigré military activity]. The head of the nation will then be obliged to reign in accordance with the Constitution.”[277] A war, Brissot argued, would also spread the principles of the Revolution, fomenting civil conflicts against tyrants in other European countries.

The Jacobin deputies, for their part, were divided over the issue of war, although their divisions had little immediate impact. Their authority lay with their club, which was shifting to the Left, rather than in the Assembly. Indeed, the various clubs and popular societies were now developing into an extraparliamentary political sphere of considerable power in Paris, particularly in the forty-eight Parisian sections. Economic shortages and rising food prices during the spring of 1792 had given a new impetus to the growth of radical societies, which now began to parallel the sectional assemblies. As Goodwin observes;

Pétion, who replaced Bailly as mayor of Paris in November, Danton, as assistant deputy of the town clerk, and Robespierre, as public prosecutor of the department of Paris, did much to extend the power and influence of the municipality and to develop the activity of the political clubs. It is significant that the most vital issue of foreign policy at this time—war or peace with Europe— was fought out as much in the Jacobin club as in the Legislative Assembly, and that the most important issue of domestic politics—the fate of the monarchy— was decided by the Parisian sections.[278]

Moreover, the prospect of war was very popular in the provinces. Peasants still saw very little change in their situation. Although their noble landlords might reside in Savoy or Coblenz, their agents still remained in France and exploited the peasants as much as before. The redistribution of the Church lands had been neither thorough nor equitable, producing growing rural unrest and even armed peasant revolts.

The war fever in the countryside and among the Brissotins notwithstanding, however, the French army was in no way prepared for what might well become a major European conflict. Most of the army’s erstwhile officers had deserted to various imigre centers, and its regular troops were demoralized, undisciplined, and disorganized, lacking equipment, weapons, and ammunition. The risks opened by a war would be enormous: well-equipped foreign armies could decisively defeat the Revolution, and even if France were victorious, such a conflict could easily lead to a military dictatorship at home. Both Marat and Robespierre insightfully foresaw these dangers and spoke out strongly against the war fever generated by the Brissotins—but to no avail, as events soon revealed.

The queen and the tmigres, on the other hand, welcomed a war and the prospect of a foreign invasion. Indeed, Louis, not surprisingly, brought several pro-Brissotin ministers into the royal council, including the vain and ambitious but able General Charles-François Dumouriez. At length, Louis declared war against Austria on April 20, 1792, with the enthusiastic assent of the Assembly. Three months later, Prussia allied itself with Austria and declared war against revolutionary France.

Almost from the outset, the war went badly for the French, who, after advancing into Belgium, were obliged to retreat precipitously toward Lille, while still another force fell back on Valenciennes. For their part, the Brissotins were rapidly losing credibility in the capital, while the war had the effect of raising Robespierre’s star owing to his bitter criticisms of the king, the war, and the Brissotins.

Yet on one matter the Brissotins at least had been correct: the war revealed the hatred of the monarchy for the Revolution. Almost openly, the king and queen of France sided with the enemy, and rumors abounded among the people of machinations by the queen on behalf of Austria. With good reason, she was accused of providing Vienna with intelligence, and her alleged “Austrian Committee” in the Tuileries was popularly blamed for the defeat in Belgium. As it turned out, Marie Antoinette had actually disclosed the plan for the French military campaign to the enemy, which, after the behavior of the royal couple became known, could lead to nothing but the end of the monarchy.

THE JOURNEE OF AUGUST 10

In the early summer of 1792, faced with military defeats and fearing treachery in the Court and army, Paris was reaching a state of revolutionary fervor comparable only to its mood on July 14,1789. The polarization of the country between even constitutional monarchists and republicans was now acute. As French armies rolled back toward Longwy and Verdun, Lafayette frantically rushed from the front back to Paris to rally the Assembly in support of the king and quash the Jacobin Clubs immediately. The once-moderate marquis was apparently planning a military coup to restore order, perhaps to abet the king in another flight out of the country. The Assembly received Lafayette coolly, its suspicions reinforced by the fact that he was neglecting his troops in the face of a Prussian advance, and he despondently returned to the front Reports of pro-Austrian plots in the court and among refractory priests in the provinces filled Paris with alarm, pushing public sentiment increasingly in a republican direction.

On June 8, 1792, the Legislative Assembly passed a decree summoning twenty thousand fidiris, or provincial National Guards, to Paris for the annual Fite de la Federation on the third anniversary of Bastille Day. These fidiris were expected to free up the regular troops in the capital for service at the front. Around the same time, the sectional assemblies of the capital petitioned the Assembly to abandon the distinction between active and passive citizens at their meetings and allow them to meet every day—in permanent session. They also requisitioned a large number of pikes for general distribution to citizens, even though carrying weapons was still a privilege officially reserved to the National Guard.

As the month drew to an end, the sections carried out a demonstration against the king on June 20, that is, on the anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath. In view of the economic crisis that the war was creating (rising prices had already caused widespread food riots), some ten thousand Parisian sans-culottes, both women and men, illegally armed with pitchforks, muskets, and pikes, gathered in the eastern faubourgs, and then invaded the Tuileries with petitions against the king’s veto of Assembly decrees and his recent dismissal of several popular ministers. The crowd chopped down doors of the palace with hatchets and even dragged a cannon up a staircase. Behind a smashed door they found Louis, wearing a red sans-culotte bonnet. Although the monarch calmly refused their demands, the new mayor of Paris, Potion, persuaded the crowd to leave the palace after it became clear that Louis would stand firm on behalf of his royal prerogative.

Finally, on July 11 the Assembly tried to convey the full sense of danger that faced the country from its foreign and emigre opponents, proclaiming a national state of emergency. At the urging of the sections, which felt that the resources of the nation should be completely thrown into the war effort, the Assembly called the National Guards everywhere to arms. Within a few days, fifteen thousand Parisians had answered the call, and new battalions of volunteers were quickly formed. The Commune of Paris, in turn, decreed that all citizens who possessed pikes be drafted into the National Guard, thus opening its ranks to ever-lesser members of the social hierarchy. As ficUris, or National Guards from the provinces, began to arrive in the capital, Robespierre addressed them with the icy warning: “Citizens, have you hastened here for a mere ceremony, the renewal of the Federation of July 14?” The generals, including Lafayette, were deserting, he told them, and the Legislative Assembly “has been outraged and degraded, but [owing to its own inaction] has not avenged itself!” He then charged the fidiris with the sweeping—patently republican—task of saving the nation.[279] Within short order, petitions flowed into the Legislative Assembly, calling for the deposition of the king.

The celebrations of July 14 were observed without incident—and with no shouts of “ Vive le roif’ Most of the fidtris prudently remained on in the city after the celebration lest counterrevolution rear its head, and their very presence in Paris proved incendiary. The fedirts overwhelmingly supported the demands of the sections; indeed, on July 17, they established a central committee of their own at the Jacobin Club to back up the radicals and sans-culottes in an insurrection against the king. The Cordeliers, in turn, openly called for a National Convention, so similar to the American conventions decades earlier, that would unseat the king and write a strictly republican constitution for France.

Meanwhile, in the sectional assemblies, the distinction between active and passive citizens had essentially disappeared. The Theater-Fra^ais section (formerly the Cordeliers district) officially initiated the distinction by opening its doors to all the underprivileged in the neighborhood. This democratization of the Theater-Fran^ais assembly was quickly emulated by other sections and finally validated by the Legislative Assembly itself. On July 25 the Legislative Assembly permitted the sections to meet daily, whereupon they officially went into “permanent” session. Moreover, many sections opened their National Guard battalions to former passive citizens, radically transforming the Parisian National Guard from a middle-class force into a sam-culotte militia. The irresolute Assembly, which did little to intervene in these changes, was patently losing control of the capital.

Amid this steady flow of events, on July 28, Parisians awoke to a provocative manifesto from the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the enemy forces, in which he declared that his Austrian and Prussian armies would invade French soil to restore the king to his rightful place. Any National Guards who tried to impede the allied armies, the Duke warned, would be shot, and if the Tuileries were invaded again or the royal family harmed in any way, savage vengeance would be wrought upon Paris, reducing the city to rubble. Two days after the manifesto was published, it is worth noting, five hundred fider&s from Marseilles arrived in Paris, after stopping to put down a royalist revolt at Arles, and were quartered in the old Cordeliers district. Marching through the streets, they sang Rouget de Lisle’s stirring “Marseillaise,” the intoxicating hymn that revolutionary organizations throughout the world were to adopt well into the next century.

Brunswick’s declaration can be regarded as the turning point in the Revolution, the event that forced France to change from a constitutional monarchy into a republic. With fears of invasion running high and royalist plots abounding, the revolutionary Parisians had little doubt that the king intended to resist the Legislative Assembly and the sections, indeed to open the way for a foreign invasion that could establish his full control over the city. To head off this looming disaster, the sections and the fidiris were decided that they had to force the king to abdicate without delay.

Within the week, on August 9, delegates from the sectional assemblies arrived at the H6tel de Ville and disbanded the old conservative Commune, replacing it with a new revolutionary municipality, the Insurrectionary Commune. The mayor was confined to his house under guard and the brewer Santerre was placed in charge of the National Guard. In response to protests by moderates against this action, the delegates flatly replied, “When the people place themselves in a state of insurrection, they withdraw all power from other authorities and assume it themselves.”[280]

The insurrection had been thoroughly planned, and there is no reason to doubt that the Jacobin leaders, including Danton, had been complicitous in carrying it off. On August 10, the following day, the revolutionary Commune ordered its supporters to march on the Tuileries. To the sound of the tocsin, some twenty thousand armed fediris and sans-culottes attacked the palace, and the royal family, warned in advance, fled to the nearby Legislative Assembly, which nervously agreed to protect them. With their flight, most of the remaining National Guard battalions that had been accountable to royalist sections shifted their allegiance to the insurrection. The Tuileries was now left to defend itself with only nine hundred Swiss Guards and a few hundred courtiers. The crowd tried to fraternize with the Swiss, but following a chance shot by one of their men, others opened fire and a fruitless battle ensued.

Crying “treachery,” the Marseillais streamed into the palace under fire, cutting down everyone in sight. Of the Swiss Guards, who surrendered after their ammunition ran out, six hundred were massacred—while the insurrectionaries lost about four hundred. By the afternoon, they were in complete control of Paris. With the Assembly members fearful for their own lives, the king was surrendered and confined to a small prison known as the Temple.

This joumie of the fidMs and sans-culottes sealed the fate of the monarchy, and marked the definitive end of the so-called “bourgeois” Revolution. Like it or not, the king had been dethroned, and the Constitution of 1791, so recently completed, was abrogated. The sans-culottes had not only avenged the Champs de Mars massacre, but after playing a crucial role in jourrtees that unseated the ancien regime, they now moved to the center stage of the Revolution and pushed it ever farther to the Left.