From these accumulated statements, we infer that about Paris, in the spring of 1791, especially after the 20th of June, there was much agitation in favor of the dethronement of Louis XVI, some for the change of the royal family, and a perceptible tendency in favor of a republic. After the acceptance of the Constitution by the king and by the Legislative Assembly, the constitutional question of the kingship is little discussed till in the summer of 1792. Then the Legislative Assembly was frightened over the defeat of the French army at Lille and at Tournay, the disastrous defeat of Biron’s army at Mons, and the probable advance of the Austrian army upon Paris. The king, following the advice of Montmorin and Malouet, had sent Mallet du Pan on a mission to the German courts to secure a manifesto of intimidation against the factious Frenchmen.[135] The _Austrian committee_ was denounced boldly in the journals and in the Assembly.[136] Incited by this array of reverses, royal intrigues, and threatened invasion, the Assembly passed three decrees for the protection of the country: May 27, the deportation of the non-juring priests; May 29, the dismissal of the king’s guard; June 8, the formation of a camp of 20,000 fédérés at Paris. The king opposed his veto to the first and last of these. The Girondin ministry was dismissed early in June.[137] The invasion of the Tuileries, June 20, was the result of these aggravations. The petition presented to the Legislative Assembly by the crowd on that day does not solicit the establishment of a republic, but urges that the king should fulfill his constitutional function of protecting liberty.[138] The king continued to be disturbed by the people. The manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick, July 27, greatly excited the Parisians, already much aroused. Then from the sections of Paris, from administrative bodies, and from communes, addresses were sent in asking for the suspension or the dethronement of the king.[139] The significant fact about this outcry for the removal of Louis is the silence about what is to supersede him. The _commune_ representing the forty-eight sections of Paris, through Pétion, presented at the bar of the Assembly, August 3, a petition most vehement in its denunciation of the faithless monarch and most startling in the picture presented of the country’s danger; but this _commune_, the most radical, perhaps, in France, invoked the Constitution in praying for his dethronement.[140]