Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume I.Scott, Walter
History
Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume I.
Scott, Walter
France -- History -- 1789-1815; Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821
If we consider the cause of this wild scene, it seems natural enough
that the Queen, timid as a woman, anxious as a wife and a mother, might,
in order to propitiate the favour of men who were summoned expressly to
be the guard of the royal family, incautiously have recourse to imitate,
in a slight degree, and towards one regiment, the arts of conciliation,
which in a much grosser shape had been used by the popular party to
shake the fidelity of the whole army. But it is impossible to conceive
that the King, or ministers, could have hoped, by the transitory and
drunken flash of enthusiasm elicited from a few hundred men during a
carousal, to commence the counter-revolution, which they dared not
attempt when they had at their command thirty thousand troops, under an
experienced general.
But as no false step among the Royalists remained unimproved by their
adversaries, the military feast of Versailles was presented to the
people of Paris under a light very different from that in which it must
be viewed by posterity. The Jacobins were the first to sound the alarm
through all their clubs and societies, and the hundreds of hundreds of
popular orators whom they had at their command, excited the citizens by
descriptions of the most dreadful plots, fraught with massacres and
proscriptions. Every effort had already been used to heat the popular
mind against the King and Queen, whom, in allusion to the obnoxious
power granted to them by the law, they had of late learned to curse and
insult, under the names of Monsieur and Madame Veto. The King had
recently delayed yielding his sanction to the declarations of the Rights
of Man, until the constitution was complete. This had been severely
censured by the Assembly, who spoke of sending a deputation to extort
his consent to these declarations, before presenting him with the
practical results which they intended to bottom on them. A dreadful
scarcity, amounting nearly to a famine, rendered the populace even more
accessible than usual to desperate counsels. The feasts, amid which the
aristocrats were represented as devising their plots, seemed an insult
on the public misery. When the minds of the lower orders were thus
prejudiced, it was no difficult matter to produce an insurrection.
[Sidenote: INSURRECTION IN PARIS.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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