means prevent crimes; and he was particularly pathetic on the sufferings of men subjected for a long period in solitude to its terrors. Robespierre was followed by other members in the same strain, who afterwards became as sanguinary. The assembly abolished the punishment of death, except in the case of an enemy to the country, which left the door open for all the horrors which followed. recommen led that if the officers were dismissed, they should, at least, retire on half-pay; but Robespierre treated this as a monstrous folly, thus increasing the enemies of the public, merely because they had found them unfaithful. He was firmly answered by Cazales, who belonged to the army. He denounced Robespierre as a black and cowardly calumniator, who was seeking to poison the minds of the people with the most dangerous suspicions. A perfect howl The progress of anarchy now grew every day more rapid. of fury assailed Cazales from the coté gauche, or jacobin Prudhomme boldly proposed the abolition of royalty, as the side of the assembly, and the cry was to send him to the greatest curse and plague which ever desolated mankind. Abbaye, After two days' debate, it was decided to put a Rousseau, he said, had rightly declared it a government new oath to the officers of the army, as had been recomagainst nature. Whilst these things were passing in the assem-mended by Dumouriez. But it was very evident that the bly, the municipality were busy without, removing the old clubs had obtained a perfect knowledge of the movements in names of streets, especially of royal ones, and naming them the palace, and on the frontiers for the flight of the royal after the heroes of the revolution. The Chaussée d'Antin family. was already converted into the Rue de Mirabeau, and now the Quai des Theatins became the Quai Voltaire, and the Rue Plâtrière, the Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau. On the anniversary of the funeral of Voltaire, the assembly voted that his remains should be removed to the Pantheon, and statues should be erected to him and Rousseau, as the real fathers of the revolution. The clubs every day more palpably, more undisguisedly, dictated to the assembly and denounced every remaining person and principle which stood betwixt them and general anarchy. Those, like La Fayette and Bailly, who had led on the early stages of the revolution, were now rapidly hurried towards that crisis in which they must flee, or be crushed under the fabric which they had raised. Danton, that hideous lawyer-and all the leaders of the ultrarevolutionists, Mirabeau, this Danton, Marat, and Robespierre, were hideously ugly-Danton denounced La Fayette and Bailly, in the Cordeliers, as traitors, for having ordered the national guards to fire on the people when the king wished to go to St. Cloud. Bailly immediately shut up the hall where they met; but they only removed to another, the Paris Tennis Court, and changed the name of the club to that of the Rights of Man. The jacobin club established a newspaper, their Journal des Debats, to report their proceedings, with the principal speeches at full length. This was an inducement for Robespierre to attend still more sedulously, as thus his sentiments were constantly diffused amongst the people; and there was a regular meeting of a central committee of all the clubs. The clubs were becoming the real government of the nation. Whatever was determined in them was immediately afterwards introduced by some of their members into the assembly. On the 8th of June the jacobin club discussed the propriety of dismissing all the officers in the army of Bouillé, because they were aristocrats, and could not be trusted. Roederer declared that nothing would secure the fidelity of the army, but wholly dis-aristocratising it; and Robespierre strongly supported this view. He insinuated the wisdom of suspecting almost everybody, and was, in truth, already venting that poison-breath of suspicion, which soon intensified itself into a deadliness unexampled in history since the days of Nero. As was the custom now, only two days after this discussion in the jacobin club, the same motion was made in the assembly, and Robespierre was the great champion of the measure. Some speakers The arrangements of the Austrian armies, the coalition of Prussia and Spain, the increasing assemblage of French emigrants on the Rhine, all were known and stated. A correspondent of the Moniteur stated that he had seen letters from the Tuileries, written to some of the German courts, in which the letter of the king to the foreign ambassadors was described as intended only to throw dust in the eyes of the public, till the king and his family could get away. That, had they succeeded in reaching St. Cloud, the next day they would have been at Compiègne, and the following one at Brussels, when Louis would have thrown off the mask; declared his acts for many months to have been solely the results of compulsion, and that they were, therefore, null and void. Montmorin, in the name of the king, wrote to the president of the assembly, protesting that this was a tissue of the most wicked falsehoods, but no one gave the smallest credit to the assertion. The assembly issued an order commanding the prince of Condé to return to France, and take the oath to obey and maintain the constitution, under penalty of being declared a All this time the traitor and rebel, with all his adherents. clubs and journals kept up the wildest clamour regarding the royal family. It was declared that all the coin in the kingdom almost had been packed off to maintain the armies about to invade France, and hence the great dearth of money. The assembly made a fresh issue of assignats, and ordered all the bells of the suppressed churches to be melted and coined into money. Freron, in his “Orateur du Peuple," exclaimed,. "O Parisians! open your eyes! See the preparations that your enemies are making! The only hostage that you have is the royal family, and they are going to escape from you. It will not be by open force, for they have tried that and failed, but it will be by means of a disguise which is unknown to you. They will be beyond the frontiers before you know that they have quitted their nest." The clubs now engaged with the utmost activity in preparing for the election of the new assembly. The idea which Robespierre had thrown out, of universal suffrage, had not been cast upon an ungenial soil. It was everywhere seized upon with avidity, and petitions were pouring into the assembly from all quarters to demand it. The idea, too, of Robespierre had taken equal root, that the new members should be wholly and solely of the people. They should not, as Brissot, in his journal "Le Patriote Francais," observed, be A.D. 1791.] PREPARATIONS FOR FLIGHT OF THE ROYAL FAMILY. men who were friends of the people, but wholly of, and belonging to, the people. None of them should have any claims whatever to aristocratic birth or connection. In fact, they were all to be not merely plebeians, but jacobins. Carra published a list in his "Annales Patriotiques" of proper men, who were jacobins, with a sprinkling of Girondists-a party now about to start into light, and to contend with the jacobins, whose party in the new assembly was about to obtain the name of the Montagne, the Mountain; both for reasons to be stated when they come into action. Amongst the Girondists figured M. Roland, the mayor of Lyons, and husband of madame Roland, a name about to assume a wonderful distinction in the revolution and the world. On the other hand, Marat employed himself in pointing out such "rogues and villains," according to his description, as were to be by all means precluded from becoming electors in Paris. These were different tradesmen, whom he painted in the blackest colours, and declared all to be paid spies of Bailly and La Fayette. Robespierre was appointed, with the assistance of Danton, to draw up for the jacobin club a report on the kind of men proper to be chosen. He reiterated the necessity of avoiding all men of genius, and such as had ever mixed with aristocrats, in which case, he contended, they would be found incurably corrupted. In fact, the lists of men recommended by the jacobins were not all of their own party, but men hitherto utterly unknown, but who speedily became known as the most extraordinary assemblage of monsters that the world had ever seen. The abbé Sieyes made a proposition in the jacobin club, although he had long before declared that he would go no more amongst them, for theirs were cavern politics. On the 19th of June he read a paper on the necessity of preserving personal freedom for all parties, and for quiet submission to the laws, and recommended, as a measure necessary to check the domineering of particular cliques, that there should be two houses of assembly instead of one. It might have been supposed that the worthy abbé had not only absented himself from the club, but that he had been asleep for the last twelve months. A more unwelcome proposition could not have been made to the jacobins. It was received with a tempest of noise and fury. Some one said that the abbé was a great man, and had rendered signal services to the revolution, and should be heard with respect; but Danton rose, and said that " amongst a people become truly great there ought to be none of these considerations for your pretended great men." He said, this was the priest Sieyes who defended tithes; who had resisted the conversion of the property of the church to the uses of the nation, and who had got a law passed in the assembly to fetter the press. He said, Sieyes had endeavoured to win him over from the jacobins, and that he only wanted an upper chamber to favour the restoration of the aristocrats. Such was the fury manifested against Sieyes, and such was the frightful language of Marat in his journal, who called on the faubourgs to rise and destroy all the incorrigible traitors to liberty and equality, that a certain number of the deputies of the assembly, who had signed his paper, declared that they had been deceived as to its real contents; and scarcely a man, except M. Gorguereau, dared to say a word on his behalf. The reign of terror was beginning. 543 The assertions of the journals, that the king was intending to escape to the army, received constant confirmations. The committee of research, the municipality, and La Fayette were perpetually warned that the royal family was on the eve of flight, and that a civil war would be the immediate consequence of his reaching the army on the frontiers. Fréron, in his "Orateur du Peuple," published a letter professedly written by the queen to the prince of Condé. The letter, which was a very vulgar and clumsy forgery, said, "Prince, pay no attention to the decree launched against you by the assembly of swine; we shall learn how to stir up the toads and frogs (the Parisians). This is the manner in which notre gros (the king) will set out as soon as our people mount guard at the Tuileries. We have resolved to have a coach made like a hackney-coach; the coachman is to be dressed like a hackney-coachman, and will drive us two leagues from Paris. The king will set out with his son; I shall follow with madame Elizabeth and my daughter, in another sort of hackney-coach. Monsieur and madame will set out in another direction. Our fair-complexioned man (La Fayette) and M. Bailly, who have assisted us, will get out of Paris on horseback, as if going for a short ride, and will then escape. As for ourselves, iì the people discover our departure, the cavalry, under pretence of pursuing us, will escort us on our road; for the cavalry are all for us, and we rely entirely upon them. M. Bailly has been giving them, for some time past, six livres a-day per man. We have also on our side the mercantile body, who have an understanding with us; they furnish us with money in specie. In the national assembly our people have succeeded in decreeing that there shall be nothing but paper-money employed in commerce, in order that we may be able to carry off all the gold and silver." It concluded by saying, "Everything is arranged for our setting out in a day or two. We only fear the troops of the carbuncled man (Orleans), formerly Gardes Françaises; we have not been able to gain them, or the republic of the faubourg St. Antoine. I send you two millions of livres in specie, which the Paris merchants have procured us." In this letter there was a mixture of real information, as the events showed, but so managed as to throw the most deadly suspicion on Bailly, La Fayette, and others, whom the jacobins wished to see the mob destroy. Fréron, who had probably fabricated the letter himself, had also procured a Flemish woman, who was to pretend to be the person intrusted with it. This woman he introduced to the committee of research, and to Camille Desmoulins, who rushed away to make Robespierre and Buzot acquainted with this alarming fact. These two worthies were at once for immolating Bailly and La Fayette; but Petion, on seeing the letter, instantly pronounced it a gross forgery. Still Fréron published it in his journal, and it produced a terrible sensation. It is remarkable how near the truth, however, the forger had come; for scarcely was the letter before the public, and whilst there was the utmost commotion regarding it, when Alexandre Beauharnais, the husband of Josephine, afterwards empress of the French, appeared before the startled assembly, and announced that the royal family was actually gone. This was about ten o'clock on the morning of the 21st of June. He stated that M. Bailly had come to inform them that the king and part of his family had been carried off in the night by the enemies of the public weal. M. Bailly had put the fact in this shape as most respectful to the king. The guns of the municipality were already firing to alarm the town, but the news had flown through it long before. At the first wild cry that the royal family had fled, the mob rushed from all quarters towards the Tuileries, burst in, and traversed every apartment like maniacs, flinging down and treating with savage rudeness everything that came in their way. Having ascertained that the escape was too real, they shrieked for the head of La Fayette. Nothing could be more imminent than the peril of both himself and Bailly, who had been just represented as deep in the plot for this very evasion. La Fayette, at the head of his national guards, had first galloped to the Hôtel de Ville, where he only arrived in time to snatch from the clutches of the infuriated mob the duke d'Aumont, the commander of the sixth division of the national guards. He was here joined by Bailly, which only increased the danger; and, as they proceeded towards the Tuileries, they were pursued by the raging mob hissing and hooting. Scarcely had the assembly recovered from the first shock of M. Beauharnais' announcement, when the mob arrived at the door of the assembly, bringing as prisoner M. Robeuf, an aide-de-camp of La Fayette, whom they had seized and grossly abused. Robeuf said he had left a brother officer in the hands of the rabble, who, he feared, had already murdered him. Rewbell, the friend of Robespierre, accused M. La Fayette and his guards of complicity with the royalist plot; but Barnave rose and zealously defended La Fayette as a stanch and steady friend of the revolution, and moved that the assembly should order all citizens to be armed, and to maintain peace, receiving no orders but from the assembly. This was unanimously voted. Several of the king's ministers were admitted, who all declared that they knew nothing whatever of the plan for carrying off the king. Charles de Lameth moved that the assembly should order the committee of research to use all diligence to discover the authors of the crime, and should also appoint a number of its members as an executive government, but D'Audré reminded them this could not be constitutionally done without the consent of the king, who was absent. Upon this, the assembly decreed, that, until some other arrangement should be made, the decrees of the assembly should be put into execution by the ministers without further need of sanction; and that, instead of heading decrees with "Louis, by the grace of God," &c., it should head them with "The national assembly decrees, commands, and orders," &c. In the midst of other difficulties, respecting the putting the great seal to decrees, and of legalising the acts of ministers, a letter from M. Montmorin, the minister of foreign affairs, announced that the people were besieging him in his house, so that he could not appear before the assembly. Presently after La Fayette came in full uniform, on which a cry was raised of "No uniforms here!" But this the president overruled by saying that M. La Fayette was summoned from immediate duty to report to the assembly. La Fayette desired to introduce his aide-de-camp, M. Gouvion, to show that he had been some time informed that preparations had been making for the flight of the royal family, and that, in consequence, he had used extraordinary precautions. Gouvion had, in fact, drawn his information from too sure a source. It was from a woman, his mistress, who belonged to the queen's wardrobe. "As," says madame Campan, "she had been placed with the queen at the time of her marriage, her majesty was accustomed to see her, and was pleased with her address and intelligence. Her situation was above that of a woman of her class; her salary and emoluments had been gradually increased, until they afforded her an income of about twelve thousand francs. She was handsome; she received in her apartments above the queen's, in the little rooms between the two floors, several deputies of the tiers état; and she had M. de Gouvion as her lover. We shall soon see how far she carried her ingratitude." In fact, she was a regular spy on the queen and the royal family; she had furnished herself with a double key to the queen's cabinet, and was thus able to discover every preparation made. The queen, one evening, had been packing her jewels, shut up alone with madame Campan, and, when she went out, she locked the door, and took the key with her; yet, by the depositions of this woman, shown to the queen on her return from Varennes, she had entered the cabinet after the queen left it, and had seen the diamonds wrapped in cotton-wool, lying ready for packing on the sofa. This was decisive, as a proof that she had spied every action, and given notice of it to Gouvion. Gouvion professed, in consequence of this information, to have been extraordinarily vigilant, and not to be able to account for the king escaping through a certain back-door, as it was alleged he had done, for he asserted that both himself and five other officers had been before the door all night. Gouvion stated that M. Sillery, the husband of madame Genlis, had also received warning of the intended flight, but this he denied. It was now resolved that a letter addressed to the queen, and found in her apartment, should be submitted to the committee of research, and that possession should be immediately taken of the money in the treasury. M. Laporte, minister of the civil list, now appeared, with a memoir of the king's, which he had left in the hands of a valet-de-chambre. It was, after some discussion, agreed to have it read, and the reading must have been a particularly bitter experiment on the feelings of the greater part of the assembly. Louis, in this document, no longer played the part of the acquiescent; but he detailed a catalogue of undeniable truths, enough to have maddened a man of strong feelings, and which had evidently sunk deep, even into a timid and submissive nature like that of the king. It stated that the king had been a real prisoner ever since the 6th of October, 1789, when they brought him from Versailles to Paris; that his own misfortunes had been hard to bcar; but when he saw that the assembly had destroyed royalty itself, had invaded the property of the church and of individuals, and had introduced universal anarchy, it became intolerable. The king complained of the miserable condition of the Tuileries, in which they had compelled him to live; of the dismissal of his gardes-du-corps, who had been so faithful to him; and of the massacre of two of them under his very eyes. Still more emphatically did he complain of A.D. 1791.] EXCITEMENT IN PARIS AFTER THE KING'S FLIGHT. the infamous language and savage behaviour towards the queen from the very commencement of the revolution; and, as this was exhibited against a woman who had shown 1 erself a faithful wife, and of a conduct quite heroic, it was clearly intended, through her, to wound the king. The king had, the paper again repeated, been made a prisoner in his own states and in his own house. Those who were placed as guards were, in fact, his keepers; and the commandant of the national guard, his especial keeper. He was surrounded not by those whom he could trust, but those whom he most distrusted. The memoir declared that the king had been most willing to go along with the assembly in all real reforms, but that he had soon found himself left without any freedom of action. "The assembly," he said, "has put the king out of the constitution, in refusing him the right of sanctioning the constitutional acts, and classing as constitutional acts whatever other acts they think proper, and in curtailing and limiting his veto. They have allowed him twenty-five million livres, which are entirely absorbed by the expenses of his household. They have left him the usufruct of some domains, with embarrassing forms, and have deprived him of the patrimony of his ancestors. Let the different points of the administration be examined, and it will be seen that the king is set aside in all of them. He has no share in the naking of laws, he can only humbly beg the assembly to Ocupy themselves about such or such a matter. As for the acninistration of justice and the appointment of the judges, hehas no share in it. There remained a last prerogative, the nost beautiful of all, that of pardoning and commuting pun hments-you have taken that, too, from the king!" 54b be your friend, when your holy religion shall be respected, when government shall be placed on a proper footing, and liberty established on a solid basis." The proclamation then concluded by prohibiting the ministers from signing any orders in his name, and ordered the keeper of the seals to deliver to him the great seal whenever he demanded it. After this plain outspeaking there could be no further misunderstanding betwixt the king and the assembly. It would have been more politic to have reserved it till the king was certainly past all peril; but there it was, a clear and full confession of the royal opinion of the revolution, and a detail of truths such as made the assembly, and especially the cote gauche, foam with rage. The foreign ambassadors sent to state their fears from the excitement of the people, and to submit to the assembly that some means of security might be adopted; but the assembly decreed that Paris was tranquil, and the ambassadors were in no danger, although the mob had been threatening the houses of the ambassadors of Austria, Prussia, and Sardinia. General Rochambeau, whom we saw, some time ago, commanding in America, and who held the greatest military post next to Bouillé, was summoned to the bar of the assembly and interrogated as to the sentiments of the officers of the army. He declared that they would all cheerfully swear fidelity and devotion to the assembly; and it was decreed that such an oath should be put to all the officers. Information was brought in that the municipality was sitting day and night to preserve order, and to execute the decrees of the assembly. A decree was next issued for the arrest of the king, and a counter-proclamation sent off in all directions; and, after ordering the whole of the national guards to be called out, and a liberal scale of payment fixed for the time they should be on service, the assembly began to feel more at ease. Th proclamation, which was addressed to the French nation went on to say that the society of jacobins had usurpe the real sovereignty of the people; that the clubs ruled nt only the king but the assembly; that, as for the monarci though declared to be the head of the army, he Whilst these transactions were taking place in the had new been able to make any appointments in it, or assembly, Paris was like a hive of bees in swarm. In every dispositios of it. It was the same in the civil administra- quarter there was a running and a buzzing beyond all tion-the determined everything; the king was a cypher. description. Danton armed the Faubourg St. Antoine The desposm of these clubs was a thousand times worse with pikes, against what enemy it was difficult to conceive, than the on that had been overthrown. Such a govern- for, instead of invasion or an insurrection, there had been ment it we impossible to perpetuate, and of that men of only the flight of a harmless king and his family. The any reflectin became every day more convinced. The jacobins and their creatures, the mob, were busy pulling clamour of e clubs, their journals, and their pamphlets, down everything like a royal statue or a royal name; a overawed thessembly, and established anarchy and terror. crown or a sceptre, or the mere name of king, or queen, or It then recapulated the proposal to carry off the king from prince over a shop, was actively obliterated. The king's Versailles and hut the queen up in a convent; the insults bust in the Place de Grève, which was lit up at night by to the king id queen at the fête of federation; the the ominous lanterne, was destroyed, and many a plaster harsh treatmen of the queen's aunts, because they simply cast of him besides. The walls were placarded with all wished to visit me from religious motives; the still more kinds of insults to the king and his family. Poor Louis shameful treatmat of the gentlemen who, from pure was described as a fat hog who had escaped from his stye, love to the monah, had, on the day of poniards, assembled and a moderate reward was promised to any one who at the Tuileries torevent any outrage to the royal family; should bring him back to it. Others were for first leading him the obstruction to he intended removal to St. Cloud; and to the frontiers, and then kicking him across them. On the the forcing of the Iter to the foreign ambassadors from the queen all the obscenity and filth of the language were cast. king. "After all tse sufferings, and seeing the impossi- She was a modern Messalina, a Lucretia Borgia, the Fury bility of hindering tlevil, it is natural that the king should of France. The Cordeliers-or, as it now styled itself, the endeavour to put himlf in safety. Frenchmen," it added, Society of the Rights of Man-declared that every member "and you whom the 'ng was wont to call the inhabitants should be armed with poniards, and swore, one and all, to exof the good city of Pa, place no confidence in the sugges-terminate tyrants. "Only one thing remains,” raved Marat tions of the factions. Return to your king; he will ever in his journal, "to save you from the precipice to which ligiously in all that he orders for the destruction of your mortal enemies! This is the moment for striking off the heads of the ministers and their subalterns; of La Fayette and all the villains of his staff; of Bailly and all his counterrevolution municipals, and of all the traitors of the national assembly. Make a beginning by getting possession of all their persons, if you are yet in time; seizing this moment for breaking up the national guards, who have betrayed liberty. Call forth all the patriots of the departments; call the Bretons to your succour; storm the arsenal; disarm the alguazils of the police and customs; prepare to defend your rights, to avenge liberty, and to exterminate your implacable suspicion around them, the jacobin clu was doing the very same thing. The moment Robesɣrre could escape from the assembly he hastened thithe and delivered a speech of the most diabolical tenden-all death and accusation to everybody but the rankestevolutionists. He congratulated the nation on the flight the king, as the greatest blessing that could have befall it. He considered that day as the consummation of the yolution. The forty millions of livres allowed to the roy individual were thus saved. He knew, and all France kr, these forty millions only amounted to twenty-five millis. But what alarmed him above everything, was the air unanimity amongst all |