LOUIS XVI.--THE GREAT REVOLUTION--FALL OF THE MONARCHY
Crowned vice was now succeeded by crowned folly. The grandson of Louis
XV., a well-meaning but weak and foolish youth, and his thoughtless,
pleasure-loving queen, were confronted by state problems that would have
taxed the genius of a Richelieu in the maturity of his powers.
Injustice, misery, oppression, discontent, were clamant and almost
universal; taxes had doubled since the death of Louis XIV.; there were
30,000 beggars in Paris alone. The penal code was of inhuman ferocity;
law was complicated, ruinous and partial and national credit so low that
loans could be obtained only against material pledges and at interest
five times as great as that paid by England. Wealthy bishops and
abbots[152] and clergy, noblesse and royal officials were wholly exempt
from the main incidents of taxation; for personal and land taxes, tithes
and forced labour, were exacted from the common people alone. No liberty
of worship, nor of thought: Protestants were condemned to the galleys by
hundreds; booksellers met the same fate. Authors and books were
arbitrarily sent by _lettres de cachet_ to the Bastille. Yet in spite of
all repression a generation of daring, witty, emancipated thinkers in
Paris were elaborating a weapon of scientific, rationalistic and liberal
doctrine that cut at the very roots of the old _régime_. And while
France was in travail of the palingenesis of the modern world, the
futile king was trifling with his locks and keys and colouring maps, the
queen playing at shepherdesses at Trianon or performing before
courtiers, officers and equerries the _rôles_ of Rosina in the _Barbier
de Seville_ and of Colette in the _Devin du Village_, the latter
composed by the democratic philosopher, whose _Contrat Social_ was to
prove the Gospel of the Revolution.[153] Jean Jacques Rousseau, the
solitary self-centred Swiss engraver and musician, has described for us
in words that will bear translation how an ineffaceable impression of
the sufferings of the people was burnt into his memory, and the germs of
an unquenchable hatred of their oppressors were sown in his breast.
Journeying on foot between Paris and Lyons he was one day diverted from
his path by the beauty of the landscape, and wandered about, seeking in
vain to discover his way. "At length," he writes, "weary and dying of
thirst and hunger I entered a peasant's house, not a very attractive
one, but the only one I could see. I imagined that here as in
Switzerland every inhabitant of easy means would be able to offer
hospitality. I entered and begged that I might have dinner by paying for
it. The peasant handed me some skim milk and coarse barley bread, saying
that was all he had. The milk seemed delicious and I ate the bread,
straw and all, but it was not very satisfying to one exhausted by
fatigue. The man scrutinised me and judged by my appetite the truth of
the story I had told. Suddenly, after saying that he perceived I was a
good, honest youth and not there to spy upon him he opened a trap door,
descended and returned speedily with some good wheaten bread, a ham
appetising but rather high, and a bottle of wine which rejoiced my heart
more than all the rest. He added a good thick omelette and I enjoyed a
dinner such as those alone who travel on foot can know. When it came to
paying, his anxiety and fears again seized him; he would have none of my
money and pushed it aside, exceedingly troubled, nor could I imagine
what he was afraid of. At last he uttered with a shudder the terrible
words '_commis, rats de cave_' ("assessors, cellar rats"). He made me
understand that he hid the wine because of the _aides_,[154] and the
bread because of the _tailles_[155] and that he would be a ruined man if
it were supposed that he was not dying of hunger. That man, although
fairly well-off, dared not eat the bread earned by the sweat of his
brow, and could only escape ruin by pretending to be as miserable as
those he saw around him. I issued forth from that house indignant as
well as affected, deploring the lot of that fair land where nature had
lavished all her gifts only to become the spoil of barbarous tax-farmers
(_publicans_)." The elder Mirabeau has told how he saw a bailiff cut off
the hand of a peasant woman who had clung to her kitchen utensils when
distraint was made on her poor possessions for dues exacted by the
tax-farmer. It is related in Madame Campan's _Memoirs_ that Louis XV.,
hunting one day in the forest of Senard, about fifteen miles south of
Paris, met a man on horseback carrying a coffin. "Whither are you
carrying that coffin?" asked the king. "To the village of ----." "Is it
for a man or a woman?" "For a man." "What did he die of?" "Hunger,"
bluntly returned the villager. The king spurred his horse and said no
more.
"But though the gods see clearly, they are slow
In marking when a man, despising them,
Turns from their worship to the scorn of fools."
Half a century had elapsed since that meal in the peasant's house and
the royal colloquy with the villager in the forest of Senard, when the
Nemesis that holds sleepless vigil over the affairs of men stirred her
pinions and, like a strong angel with glittering sword, prepared to
avenge the wrongs of a people whose rulers had outraged every law, human
and divine, by which human society is held together. King, nobles, and
prelates had a supreme and an awful choice. They might have led and
controlled the Revolution: they chose to oppose it, and were broken into
shivers as a potter's vessel.
After the memorable cannonade at Valmy, a knot of defeated German
officers gathered in rain and wind moodily around the circle where they
durst not kindle the usual camp-fire. In the morning the army had talked
of nothing but spitting and devouring the whole French nation: in the
evening everyone went about alone; nobody looked at his neighbour, or if
he did, it was but to curse and swear. "At last," says Goethe, "I was
called upon to speak, for I had been wont to enliven and amuse the troop
with short sayings. This time I said, 'From this day forth, and from
this place, a new era begins in the history of the world and you can all
say that you were present at its birth.'" This is not the place to write
the story of the French Revolution. Those who would read the tremendous
drama may be referred to the pages of Carlyle. As a formal history, that
work of transcendent genius may be open to criticism. Indeed to the
present writer the magnificent and solemn prosody seems to partake of
the nature of a Greek chorus--the comment of an idealised spectator,
assuming that the hearer has the drama unfolding before his eyes. Recent
researches have supplemented and modified our knowledge. It is no longer
possible to accept the more revolting representations of the misery[156]
of the French peasantry as true of the whole of France, for France
before the Revolution was an assemblage of many provinces of varying
social conditions, subjected to varying administrative laws. Nor can we
accept Carlyle's portraiture of Robespierre as history, after Louis
Blanc's great work. So far from Robespierre having been the bloodthirsty
protagonist of the later Terror, it was precisely his determination to
make an end of the more savage excesses of the extreme Terrorists and
to chastise their more furious pro-consuls, such as Carrier and Fouché,
that brought about his ruin. It was men like Collot d'Herbois, Billaud
Varenne and Barrère, the bloodiest of the Terrorists, who, to save their
own skins, united to cast the odium of the later excesses on
Robespierre, and to overthrow him. During the forty-five days that
preceded his withdrawal from the sittings of the Committee of Public
Safety, 577 persons were guillotined: during the forty-five days that
succeeded, 1285 went to their doom. Of the twelve decrees that have been
discovered signed by Robespierre during the four last decades, only one
had any relation to the system of terror. But whatever defects there be
in Carlyle, his readers will at least understand the significance of the
Revolution, and why it is that the terrible, but temporary excesses
which stained its progress have been so unduly magnified by reactionary
politicians, while the cruelties of the White Terror[157] are passed by.
Few of the buildings associated with the Revolution remain at Paris. The
Salle du Manège, the Feuillants and Jacobin clubs were swept away by
Napoleon's Rue de Rivoli. But at Versailles little is changed; the broad
Avenue de Paris, once filled with double uninterrupted files of
brilliant equipages, racing with furious speed from morning to evening
along the five leagues between Versailles and Paris, is now silent and
deserted. Here, outside the gates of the château were seen in 1775 that
vast "multitude in wide-spread wretchedness, with their sallow faces,
squalor and winged raggedness, presenting in legible, hieroglyphic
writing their petition of grievances, and for answer two were hanged on
a new gallows forty feet high." Here the traveller may see at the corner
of the Rue St. Martin in the Avenue de Paris, that Hôtel des Menus
Plaisirs, where the States-General sat, 5th May 1789, and where the
Commons took the bit in their mouths by declaring themselves the
National Assembly, whether the two privileged orders sat with them or
not, and decided to set about the task of regenerating France. Here
under the elm trees on the Paris road stood the Deputies in the
drizzling rain when they found the doors of the hall closed, by royal
order, against them, while giggling courtiers looked mockingly on. We
may trace their footsteps as they angrily paced to the Rue St. François;
we may stand in the very tennis-court whose walls echoed to the solemn
oath sworn by their 700 voices never to separate until they had given a
constitution to France. Hard by, in the Rue Satory, is the church of St.
Louis, where they met the next day on finding the court retained for a
tennis-party by the king's brother, the Count of Artois. We may return
to the Menus Plaisirs, where the king's messenger, de Brézé, ordering
them to disperse after the famous royal sitting, heard Mirabeau's
leonine voice bidding him go back to his master and tell him that they
were there by the people's will, and that nothing but the force of
bayonets should drive them forth.[158] We may enter the royal
apartments, the famous ante-room of the OEil de Boeuf with its oval
ox-eyed windows, the king's bed-chamber, and the council hall; we may
look on the foolish faces of the later Bourbons, of the princesses his
daughters whom Louis XV. dubbed Rag, Tatter, Snip, and Pig. In the
opera-house built for Mesdames Pompadour and Du Barry, we may recall
that mad scene of 1st October, when the officers of the bodyguard,
having invited their comrades of the Regiment of Flanders to a dinner on
the stage, were shaking the roof with cries of "_Vive le roi!_" while
the orchestra played the air, "_O Richard! O mon roi! l'univers
t'abandonne_," the king suddenly appeared in the royal box facing them,
leading the queen, who bore the Dauphin in her arms. Then was the air
repeated, and amid a scene of wild enthusiasm the royal family were
rapturously acclaimed with clapping of hands and deafening shouts of
"_Vive le roi! Vive la reine! Vive le dauphin!_" Ladies distributed
white cockades, the Bourbon colour, and the tricolor was trodden
underfoot. Intoxicated soldiers danced under the king's balcony, and
next morning it was discussed at a breakfast given at the hôtel of the
bodyguards whether they should march against the National Assembly. And
this within three months of the taking of the Bastille and when Paris
was in the grip of famine!
The news of the mad orgy goaded the people to fury, and on 5th October
an insurrectionary army of 10,000 women advanced on Versailles and
encamped on the vast open space in front of the gates. As we stand in
the Cour de Marbre, we may lift our eyes to that balcony of the first
floor where, on 6th October, Marie Antoinette stood bravely forth,
holding her two children by the hand and confronting the vociferating
people. At their cry, "No children!" she gently pushed the little
Dauphin and his sister back into the room, and with folded arms, for she
at least lacked not courage, gazed calmly at them in regal dignity, to
be answered by shouts of "_Vive la reine!_" It was the last time she
trod the palace of Versailles. The same day king, queen and children
went their way amid that strange procession to Paris, the women crying:
"We need not die of hunger now. Here are the baker, the baker's wife and
the baker's boy." The palace of the Tuileries was hastily prepared for
their reception and for the first time Louis XVI. entered its gates.
Camille Desmoulins has described in his Memoirs how on 11th July he was
lifted on a table in front of the Café Foy, in the garden of the Palais
Royal, and delivered that short but pregnant oration which preceded the
capture of the Bastille on the 14th, warning the people that a St.
Bartholomew of patriots was contemplated, and that the Swiss and German
troops in the Champ de Mars were ready for the butchery. As the crowd
rushed to the Hôtel de Ville, shouting "To arms!" they were charged by
the Prince de Lambesc at the head of a German regiment, and the first
blood of the Revolution in Paris was shed.
The Bastille, like the monarchy, was the victim of its past sins. That
grisly fortress, with the jaws of its cannon opening on the most
populous quarter of Paris, and its sinister memories of the Man in the
Iron Mask,[159] embodied in the popular mind all that was hateful in the
old _régime_, though it had long ceased to be more than occasionally
used as a state prison. If we would restore its aspect we must imagine
the houses at the ends of the Rue St. Antoine and the Boulevard Henri
IV. away and the huge mass erect on their site and on the lines marked
in white stone on the present Place de la Bastille. A great portal,
always open by day, yawned on the Rue St. Antoine and gave access to the
first quadrangle which was lined with shops: then came a second gate,
with entrances for carriages and for foot passengers, each with its
drawbridge. Beyond these a second quadrangle was entered, to the right
of which stood the Governor's house and an armoury. Another double
portal gave entrance across the old fosse once fed by the waters of the
Seine, to the prison fortress itself, with its eight tall blackened
towers and its crenelated ramparts.
[Illustration: MONTMARTRE FROM BUTTES CHAUMONT.]
The Bastille, first used in Richelieu's time as a permanent state
prison, was filled under Louis XIV. with Jansenists and Protestants, who
were thus separated from the prisoners of the common jails; and, later,
under Louis XV. by a whole population of obnoxious pamphleteers and
champions of philosophy. Books as well as their authors were
incarcerated, and released when considered no longer dangerous; the
tomes of famous _Encyclopédie_ spent some years there. From the opening
of the eighteenth century the horrible, dark and damp dungeons, half
underground and sometimes flooded, formerly inhabited by the lowest type
of criminals, were reserved as temporary cells for insubordinate
prisoners, and since the accession of Louis XVI. they were no more used.
The Bastille during the reigns of the three later Louis was the most
comfortable prison in Paris, and detention there rather than in the
other prisons was often sought for and granted as a favour; the
prisoners might furnish their rooms, have their own libraries and food.
In the middle of the seventeenth century certain rooms were furnished at
the king's expense for those who were without means. The rooms were
warmed, the prisoners well fed, and sums varying from three francs to
thirty-five francs per day, according to condition,[160] were allotted
for their maintenance. A considerable amount of personal liberty was
allowed to many and indemnities were in later years paid to those who
had been unjustly detained. But a prison where men are confined
indefinitely without trial and at a king's arbitrary pleasure is none
the less intolerable, however its bars be gilded. Prisoners were
sometimes forgotten, and letters are extant from Louvois and other
ministers, asking the governor to report how many years certain
prisoners had been detained, and if he remembered what they were charged
with. In Louis XIV.'s reign 2228 persons were incarcerated there; in
Louis XV.'s, 2567. From the accession of Louis XVI. to the destruction
of the prison the number had fallen to 289. Seven were found there when
the fortress was captured--four accused of forgery, two insane; one, the
Count of Solages, accused of a monstrous crime, was detained there to
spare the feelings of his family. The Bastille, some time before its
fall, was already under sentence of demolition, and various schemes for
its disposal were before the court. One project was to destroy seven of
the towers, leaving the eighth standing in a dilapidated state. On the
site of the seven a pedestal formed of chains and bolts from the
dungeons and gates was to bear a statue of Louis XVI. in the attitude of
a liberator, pointing with outstretched hand towards the remaining tower
in ruins. But Louis XVI. was always too late, and the Place de la
Bastille, with its column raised to those who fell in the Revolution of
July, 1830, now recalls the second and final triumph of the people over
the Bourbon kings. Some stones of the Bastille were, however, built into
the new Pont Louis Seize, subsequently called Pont de la Revolution and
now known as Pont de la Concorde: others were sold to speculators and
were retailed at prices so high that people complained that Bastille
stones were as dear as the best butcher's meat. Models of the Bastille,
dominoes, inkstands, boxes and toys of all kinds were made of the
material and had a ready sale all over France.
Far to the west and on the opposite side of the Seine is the immense
area of the Champ de Mars, where, on the anniversary of the fall of the
Bastille, was enacted the fairest scene of the Revolution. The whole
population of Paris, with their marvellous instinct of order and
co-operation, spontaneously set to work to dig the vast amphitheatre
which was to accommodate the 100,000 representatives of France, and
400,000 spectators, all united in an outburst of fraternal love and hope
to swear allegiance to the new Constitution before the altar of the
Fatherland. The king had not yet lost the affection of his people. As he
came to view the marvellous scene an improvised bodyguard of excavators,
bearing spades, escorted him about. When he was swearing the oath to the
Constitution, the queen, standing on a balcony of the _Ecole militaire_,
lifted up the dauphin as if to associate him in his father's pledge.
Suddenly the rain which had marred the great festival ceased, the sun
burst forth and flooded in a splendour of light, the altar, Bishop
Talleyrand, his four hundred clergy, and the king with upraised hand.
The solemn music of the _Te Deum_ mingled with the wild pæan of joy and
enthusiasm that burst from half a million throats.
The unconscionable folly, the feeble-minded vacillation and miserable
trickery by which this magnificent popularity was muddled away is one of
the saddest tragedies in the stories of kings. The people, with unerring
instinct, had fixed on the queen as one of the chief obstacles to what
might have been a peaceful revolution. Neither Marie Antoinette nor
Louis Capet comprehended the tremendous significance of the forces they
were playing with--the resolute and invincible determination of a people
of twenty-six millions to emancipate itself from the accumulated and
intolerable wrongs of centuries. The despatches and opinions of American
ambassadors during this period are of inestimable value. The democratic
Thomas Jefferson, reviewing in later years the course of events,
declared that had there been no queen there would have been no
revolution. Governor Morris, whose anti-revolutionary and conservative
leanings made him the friend and confidant of the royal family, writes
to Washington on January 1790: "If only the reigning prince were not the
small beer character he is, and even only tolerably watchful of events,
he would regain his authority," but "what would you have," he continues
scornfully, "from a creature who, in his situation, eats, drinks and
sleeps well, and laughs, and is as merry a grig as lives. He must float
along on the current of events and is absolutely a cypher." But the
court would not forego its crooked ways. "The queen is even more
imprudent," Morris writes in 1791, "and the whole court is given up to
petty intrigues worthy only of footmen and chambermaids." Moreover, in
its amazing ineptitude, the monarchy had already toyed with
republicanism by lending active military support to the revolutionists
in America, at a cost to the already over-burdened treasury of
1,200,000,000 livres.
The American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, was crowned at court with
laurel as the apostle of liberty, and in the very palace of Versailles
medallions of Franklin were sold, bearing the inscription: "_Eripui
coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis_" ("I have snatched the lightning from
heaven and the sceptre from tyrants"). The revolutionary song, _Ça ira,
ça ira_ ("That will go, that will go"), owes its origin to Franklin's
invariable response to inquiries as to the progress of the American
revolutionary movement. There was explosive material enough in France to
make playing with celestial fire perilous, and while the political
atmosphere was heavy with the threatening change, thousands of French
soldiers returned saturated with enthusiasm and sympathy for the
American revolution. Already before the Feast of the Federation the
queen had been in secret correspondence with the _émigrés_ at Turin and
at Coblenz who were conspiring to throttle the nascent liberty of
France. Plots had been hatched to carry off the royal family. Madame
Campan relates that the queen made her read a confidential letter from
the Empress Catherine of Russia, concluding with these words: "Kings
ought to proceed in their career undisturbed by the cries of the people,
as the moon pursues her course unimpeded by the howling of dogs."
Mirabeau was already in the pay of the monarchy; soon after the return
of the court to St. Cloud the queen had a secret interview with him in
the park, and boasted to Madame Campan how she had flattered the great
tribune.
As early as December 1790 the court had been in secret communication
with the foreigner. Louis' brother, the Count of Artois (afterwards
Charles X.), with the queen's and king's approval, had made a secret
treaty with the house of Hapsburg, the hereditary enemy of France, by
which the sovereigns of Austria, Prussia and Spain agreed to cross the
frontier at a given signal, and close on France with an army a hundred
thousand strong. It was an act of impious treachery, and the beginning
of the doom of the French monarchy. Yet if but some glimmer of
intelligence and courage had characterised the preparations for the
flight of the royal family to join the armed forces waiting to receive
them near the frontier, their lives at least had been saved.
The incidents of the four months' "secret" preparations to leave the
Tuileries as described by Madame Campan read like scenes in a comic
opera. The disguised purchases of elaborate wardrobes of underlinen and
gowns; the making of a dressing-case of "enormous size, fitted with many
and various articles from a warming-pan to a silver porringer"; the
packing of the diamonds; the building of the new _berline_, that huge,
lumbering Noah's ark which was to bear them swiftly away! The story of
the pretended flight of the Russian baroness and her family; the start
delayed by the queen turning into the Carrousel instead of into the Rue
de l'Echelle, where the king and her children were awaiting her in the
glass coach; the colossal folly of the whole business has been told by
Carlyle in one of the most dramatic chapters in history.
The Assembly declared on hearing of Louis' flight that the government of
the country was unaffected and that the executive power remained in the
hand of the ministers. After voting a levy of three hundred thousand
National Guards to meet the threatened invasion, they passed calmly to
the discussion of the new Penal Code.
The king returned to Paris through an immense and silent multitude.
"Whoever applauds the king," said placards in the street, "shall be
thrashed; whoever insults him, hung." The idea of a republic as a
practical issue of the situation was now for the first time put forward
by the extremists, but met with little sympathy, and a Republican
demonstration in the Champ de Mars was suppressed by the Assembly by
martial law at the cost of many lives. Owing to the aversion felt by
Marie Antoinette to Lafayette, who with affectionate loyalty more than
once had risked his popularity and life to serve the crown, the court
made the fatal mistake of opposing his election to the mayoralty of
Paris and paved the way for the triumph of Petion and of the Dantonists.
To the famous manifesto of Pilnitz by the Emperor of Austria and the
King of Prussia in August 1791, calling on the sovereigns of Europe to
support them in an armed intervention to restore the rights and
prerogatives of the French king, the Assembly replied that, while they
must regard as enemies those who tolerated hostile preparations against
France, they offered good neighbourship, the amity of a free and
puissant country to the nations of Europe. They desired no conquests and
would respect the laws and constitutions of others if they evinced the
same respect towards those of France: if the German princes favoured
military preparations directed against the French, the French would
carry among them, not fire and sword, but liberty. "_Let them ponder on
the consequences of an awakening of the nations._"
Meanwhile the Assembly renewed some laws of the _ancien régime_ against
_émigrés_, who were threatened with the confiscation of their property
without prejudice to the rights of their wives and children and lawful
creditors if they did not return within a definite time. The foreign
monarchies reasserted the lawfulness of their acts and war became
inevitable.
[Illustration: PLACE DE LA CONCORDE]
At the news of the first defeats the king added to his amazing tale of
follies by vetoing the formation of a camp near Paris and by turning a
deaf ear to the earnest entreaties of the brave, loyal and sagacious
Dumouriez and accepting his resignation. He sent a secret agent with
confidential instructions to the _émigrés_ and the coalesced monarchies,
and when Lafayette, after the first demonstration against the Tuileries,
hastened to Paris and strove to stir the ill-fated king to resolute
action he was coldly received, and with bitterness in his heart returned
to his army at the frontier. The ill-starred proclamation[161] of the
Duke of Brunswick completed the destruction of the monarchy. While the
French were smarting under defeat and stung by the knowledge that their
natural defender, the king, was leagued with their enemies, this foreign
commander warned a high-spirited and gallant nation that he was come to
restore Louis XVI. to his authority, and threatened to treat as
rebellious any town that opposed his march, to shoot all persons taken
with arms in their hands, and in the event of any insult being offered
to the royal family to take exemplary and memorable vengeance by
delivering up the city of Paris to military execution and complete
demolition. When the proclamation reached Paris at the end of July 1792,
it sounded the death knell of the king and the triumph of the
Republicans. Paris was now to become, in Goethe's phrase, the centre of
the "world whirlwind"--a storm centre launching forth thunderbolts of
terror. After the Assembly had twice refused to bring the king to trial,
the extremists were able to organise and direct an irresistible wave of
popular indignation towards the Tuileries, and on 10th August the palace
was stormed. While a band of brave and devoted Swiss guards was being
cut to pieces in hundreds, the feeble and futile king had fled to the
Assembly and was sitting safely with his wife and children in a box
behind the president's chair. Thorwaldsen's monument to the fallen
Swiss, carved in the granite rock at Lucerne, recalls that piteous scene
at the Tuileries when these poor Republican mercenaries, true to their
salt, stood faithful unto death in defence of an empty palace.
No room for compromise now. The printed trial of Charles I. was
everywhere sold and read. "This," people said, "was how the English
dealt with an impossible king and became a free nation." Old and new
were in death-grapple, and the lives of many victims, for the people
lost heavily,[162] had sealed the cause of the Revolution with a bloody
consecration. Unhappily, the city of Paris, like all great towns in
times of scarcity (and since 1780 scarcity had become almost permanent),
had been invaded by numbers of starving vagabonds--the dregs that always
rise to the surface in periods of political convulsion, ready for any
villainy. When news came of the capture of Verdun, of the indecent joy
of the courtiers, and that the road to Paris was open to the avenging
army of Prussians, the horrors of the Armagnac massacres were renewed
during four September days at the prisons of Paris, while the
revolutionary ministry and the Assembly averted their gaze and, to their
everlasting shame, abdicated their powers. The September massacres were
the application by a minority of desperate and savage revolutionists of
the _ultima ratio_ of kings to a desperate situation. The tragedy of
King Louis is the tragedy of a feeble prince called to rule in a
tremendous crisis where weakness and well-meaning folly are the fatalest
of crimes. How pathetic are the incidents of the penalty of wrong! The
dreadful heritage of the sins of the later French monarchy had fallen on
the head of one of the best-intentioned and least guilty, though most
foolish and feeblest of men.
On 21st September 1792 royalty was formally abolished, and on the 22nd,
when "the equinoctional sun marked the equality of day and night in the
heavens," civil equality was proclaimed by the representatives of
France.