Political clubs sprang up like mushrooms, chief among which were the Jacobins and the Cordelies, whose leaders, Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, advocated sedition and organized the revolution. The Assembly, in its burst of patriotism, extinguished feudal privileges, abolished serfdom, and equalized taxes. The estates of the clergy were confiscated, and upon this security notes were issued to meet the expenses of the government. Austria and Prussia took up arms in behalf of Louis, and invaded France (1791). This step doomed the monarch and the monarchy. The approach of the “foreigners” kindled to unrestrainable fury the wrath of the masses. The “Marseillaise” was heard for the first time on the streets of Paris; the palace of the Tuileries was sacked; the faithful Swiss guards were slain, and Louis sent to prison. The Jacobins were triumphant. They arrested all who spoke against their revolutionary projects; assassins were hired to go through the crowded prisons and murder the inmates. For four days during September the terrible carnival of blood raged. The Prussian army was checked at Valmy, and soon recrossed the frontier. Then the Austrians were defeated at Jemmapes, and Belgium was proclaimed a republic. The leaders of the French revolution were electrified, and the next Assembly established a republic in France. The king was arraigned and guillotined. As the bleeding head tumbled into the basket the furious crowds shouted “_Vive la Republique!_” Europe was horrified, and a league, with England as its moving spirit, was formed to avenge the death of Louis. The royalists held Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyons and Toulon. The Convention appointed a Committee of Safety, which knew neither mercy nor pity. Revolutionary tribunals were set up, and the work of slaughter began and raged with a ferocity beyond the power of imagination to conceive. To charge a person with being in sympathy with the aristocrats was his death warrant. Men saved themselves by denouncing their neighbors before their neighbors could denounce them. Intimate friends suspected each other, and members of the same family became mortal enemies. Marie Antoinette, her head silvered by the awful woe and desolation and horror, perished on the same scaffold where her husband had died. At Lyons, the guillotine was too slow, and the victims were mowed down with grape-shot; at Nantes, boat-loads were rowed out and sunk in the Loire. The people were made frantic by their thirst for blood. Marat rubbed his hands and chuckled with glee at the carnival of murder. He showed his admiring friends his reception room, papered with death warrants. But his turn speedily came. Charlotte Corday, a young girl from Normandy, gained access to him, and, while he was jotting down the names of fresh victims, stabbed him to death, and then walked proudly to the guillotine.