France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Causes
Meanwhile two very important things had lent to the French, in spite of
the wretched insufficiency of their armed force, an intensity of feeling
which did something to supply that insufficiency. In the first place,
the third anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, the 14th of July, had
called to Paris deputations from all the provinces, many of them armed;
this gave the national feeling unity. In the second place, Brunswick had
issued from Coblentz, which was his base, upon the 25th of that same
month of July, a manifesto which was known in Paris three days later,
and which (though certain modern historians have questioned this)
undoubtedly set revolutionary opinion ablaze.
This manifesto demanded, in the name of the Allied Army, a complete
restoration of the old _régime_, professed to treat the French and their
new authorities as rebels subject to military execution, and contained a
clause of peculiar gravity, which excited an immediate and exasperated
response from Paris. The authorship of this clause lay with Marie
Antoinette, and it threatened, if there were any attack upon the palace,
to give the capital over to military execution and total subversion.
Two days later the Federals from Marseilles, a middle-class body of
excellent citizens, though merely amateurs at soldiering and small in
numbers, marched into the city. Their marching song has become famous
under the title of the “Marseillaise.” They had accomplished the
astonishing feat of traversing France, drawing cannon with them, at the
rate of eighteen miles a day, in the height of a torrid summer, for
close upon a month on end. There is no parallel to such an effort in the
history of war, nor did contemporary opinion exaggerate when it saw in
the battalion of Marseilles the centre of the coming fight.
The shock between the palace and the populace was joined in the morning
of the 10th of August. The palace was held by about six thousand men,[3]
of whom some twelve hundred were regulars of the Swiss Guard. The palace
(the Tuileries) was, or should have been, impregnable. The popular
attack, we may be certain, would have been beaten back had the
connection between the Tuileries and the Louvre on the south been
properly cut. The flooring had indeed been removed at this point for
some distance, but either the gap was not wide enough or the post was
insufficiently guarded; the populace and the Federals, badly beaten in
their main attack upon the long front of the palace, succeeded in
turning its flank where it joined on to the Louvre; they thus enfiladed
the suites of rooms and utterly put an end to the resistance of its
garrison.
Meanwhile the King and Queen, the Dauphin and his little sister, with
others of the royal household, had taken refuge during the fighting in
the hall of the Parliament.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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