"

insurrection was obviously brewing. The Court fortified the Tuileries and gathered about them whatever Royalist force was available, including the Swiss Guard; and a desperate resistance was prepared for with the faint hope of the King being able to cut himself out and reach the frontier; but the 10th of August ended the matter. Those Constitutionalists who had any intention of supporting the Court found their hearts failing them, and even the "constitutional battalions of the National Guard were prepared to take the popular side. The King and royal family left the Tuileries for the Legislature, leaving no orders for the unlucky Swiss, who with mechanical military courage stood their ground. The insurrectionary sections attacked the Tuileries and carried it, though not without heavy loss-1200 killed, the Swiss being all slain except a few who were carried off to prison. On the 13th August, the King and his family were bestowed as prisoners in the Temple, and the first act of the Revolution had come to an end.

CHAPTER XII

THE FRENCH

REVOLUTION :

THE PROLETARIAN STAGE

THE

HE insurrection of the 10th August, which culminated in the final downfall of the monarchy and the imprisonment of the King and royal family in the Temple, was headed and organised by a new body definitely revolutionary, intended to be the expression of the power of the proletariat, to wit, the Commune of Paris, the moving spirit of which was Marat, who even had a seat of honour assigned to him in its hall. Already, before the King had been sent to the Temple, the Girondin Vergniaud, as president, had moved the suspension of the "hereditary representative" and the summoning of a national Conven

tion. Danton was made minister of
justice; and a new Court of Criminal
Justice was established for the trial of
political offences. The members of the
Convention were chosen by double elec-
tion, but the property qualification of
"active and passive citizens"
was done

away with.

While all this was going on, the movement of the reactionary armies on France was still afoot; and the furious flame of French national enthusiasm, which was afterwards used by the self-seeking conqueror Napoleon, was lighted by the necessity of the moment -not to be extinguished in days long after his. We mention this here because, in order to appreciate what follows, it must be remembered that an armed coalition of the absolutist countries was gathering together, threatening to drown the Revolution in the blood of the French people, and especially of the people of Paris; that one of its armies, commanded by the Duke of Brunswick, a famous general of Frederick the Great, was already within a few days' march of the city; that nothing

4

was between Paris and destruction but undisciplined levies and the rags of the neglected army formed under the old regime; while at the same time the famous royalist insurrection had broken out in La Vendée. Every republican in Paris, therefore, had good reason to feel that both his own life and the future of his country were in immediate danger at the hands of those who did not care what became of France and her people so long as the monarchy could be restored.

Danton now demanded a search for arms, which was carried out on 29th August; and the prisons were filled with prisoners suspected of royalist plotting, and many of them surely guilty of it.

Verdun fell on the 2nd September, and the Duke of Brunswick boasted that he would presently dine in Paris; and on the same night the irregular trials and slaughter of the prisoners in Paris, known as the September Massacres, took place.

The next day a circular was issued by the Committee of Public Safety, approving of the massacre, signed by Sergent,

Panis (Danton's friend), and Marat, with seven others.

The Girondins in the Assembly and elsewhere kept quiet for the time, though they afterwards used the event against the Jacobins.

Meanwhile the French army, under Dumouriez, had seized on the woodland hills of the Argonne, checked Brunswick, defeated him at Valmy, and Paris was saved.

The Convention now met on the 20th September-and the parties of the Girondins and the Mountain, or extreme revolutionists, were at once formed in it. It is noteworthy that while it declared as its foundation the sovereignty of the people and the abolition of royalty, it also decreed that landed and other property was sacred for ever. Apropos of which, it may here be mentioned that the bookseller Momoro, having hinted at something like agrarian law, and some faint shadow of Socialism, had to go into hiding to avoid hanging.

So far, therefore, we have got no further than the complete triumph of bourgeois republicanism. The possi