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.