_From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of Oct. 1789._
We have seen the military conditions under which the attempt at an armed
counter-revolution failed. There follows a short phase of less than
three months, whose character can be quickly described.
It was that moment of the Revolution in which ideas had the freest play,
in which least had been done to test their application, and most scope
remained for pure enthusiasm. That is why we find in the midst of that
short phase the spontaneous abandonment of the feudal rights by the
nobility. And that is why the violent uprisings all over France
continued. It is the period in which the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen, a document which may fittingly stand side by
side with the Declaration of Independence (for together they form the
noblest monuments of our modern origins), was promulgated. In the same
period were the elements of the future Constitution rapidly debated and
laid down, and notably that national policy of a _Single Chamber_ which
the modern French have imprudently abandoned. In that same period,
however, appeared, and towards the close of it, another form of
resistance on the part of the Crown and of those who advised the Crown.
The King hesitated to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and
similarly hesitated to promulgate the Decree of the 4th of August in
which the nobility had abandoned their feudal dues. It would be foolish
to exaggerate the military aspect of what followed. Louis did call in
troops, but only in numbers sufficient for personal defence, and we can
hardly believe that he intended anything more than to police the
surroundings of his throne. But the brigade (for it was no more, nor was
it of full strength) which he summoned was sufficient to kindle
suspicion; and the determinedly false position of the Queen (who all her
life was haunted by the idea that the regular soldiers, especially if
they were well dressed and held themselves rigidly, were a sort of
talisman) provoked an explosion. A feast was given in which the officers
of the Regiment of Flanders, which had just reached Versailles, were
entertained by the officers of the Guard. It was made the occasion for a
good deal of drunkenness and a violent Royalist manifestation, at which
the Queen was present, which she approved, and which some thought she
had designed.
The failure of the harvest to relieve the scarcity of bread in Paris,
the permanent state of alarm in which Paris had remained, and of
suspicion for the safety of the Parliament which it continually
entertained since the early part of the summer, needed no more to
provoke an outbreak. It is an error to imagine that that outbreak was
engineered or that such a movement could have been factitious. Great
masses of women (in whom the movement originated), and after them a
whole flood of the populace, marched upon Versailles.
There was no direct attack upon the palace, though the palace feared
such an attack at any moment. The troops present were sufficient to
prevent violence.
La Fayette followed in the night at the head of his new Parisian militia
force.
Too much reliance was placed upon the military character of this force;
the palace was invaded in the early morning, an attempt to assassinate
the Queen on the part of the mob failed, though two of the Guards were
killed. And after scenes whose violence and apparent anarchy only masked
the common determination of the populace, the royal family were
compelled to abandon Versailles and to take up their place in the
Tuileries; the Parliament followed them to Paris, and neither King nor
Parliament returned again to the suburban palace.
This recapture of the King by Paris is much more significant than a mere
impulse of the mob. The King in Paris, the unison of his person with the
capital city, had been the very sacrament of French life for century
upon century. It was precisely a hundred years since Paris had been
abandoned by Louis XIV for Versailles. The significance of that error
may be understood by the citizens of an aristocratic country if they
will imagine the abandonment of their countrysides by the squires, or,
again, the future historian of our modern industrial civilisation may
understand it when he describes how the wealthy manufacturers abandoned
the cities in which their wealth was made, to dwell outside and apart
from the living interests of their people.
With the return of the royal family to Paris, and with the presence of
the Assembly within the heart of the national life, one prime factor
appears, which is this: that while the National Assembly proceeds step
by step to what it imagines to be a complete attainment of democracy
(though how partial will soon be seen), the resistance of the Crown is
transformed into a resistance of the mere Court. The attack on the
Revolution becomes a personal thing. The King is still wholly the chief
of the Executive; he can give what commands he wills to the armed force;
he controls receipts and payments; he is for all active purposes the
Government. But he is no longer considering that prime function of his,
nor even using it to restore his old power. He acts henceforward as an
individual, and an individual in danger. The Queen, whose view of the
Revolution and its dangers had always been a purely personal one, is the
directing will in the court-group from this moment, October 1789,
onwards; and the chief preoccupation of that group for eighteen months
is personal safety. Surrounded by the pomp of the Tuileries and amid all
the external appearances of a power still greater than that of any other
monarch in Europe, Louis and his wife and their very few immediate and
devoted friends and followers thought of the palace as a prison, and
never considered their position save as one intolerable.