To close a chapter dealing so largely with the destructive efforts of the middle-class assembly against the prerogatives of the King and of the two privileged orders, it may be noted that on the 19th of June, 1790, on the proposal of members of the nobility, all titles were abolished. Hereafter Mirabeau is Honore Riquetti, the _ci-devant_ Comte de Mirabeau; and Camille Desmoulins, prompt, picturesque and impertinent, logically applies the process to the King himself and rechristens Louis, _Mr. Capet l'aine_. {105} CHAPTER VIII THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES On the 14th of July 1790 was held the first great festival of the Revolution, the federation of the national guards at the Champ de Mars in Paris. Federation was the name that had been given all through France the previous year to district or departmental gatherings or reviews, at which the newly raised national guards had paraded and, with great ceremony, sworn patriotic oaths. This was now repeated on a grander and more centralized scale, to commemorate the fall of the Bastille twelve months before. On the military exercise ground just outside Paris, 14,000 national guards assembled. An altar was erected, at which Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun and deputy, officiated. La Fayette led the military procession. Louis was made to play an almost subordinate role. The national guards took an oath of fidelity to La Fayette, the Law, and Louis XVI; the gradation was intended and significant. {106} The festival was, in a sense, merely an echo of the policy which the assembly was pursuing in regard to the army. The army was a great factor in the situation; sooner or later, as in most revolutions, it was likely to prove the decisive one. From the first the pressure of the armed force on Paris had acted as a powerful irritant; and in reducing the power of the King nothing seemed more important than to detach the army from its allegiance. The mutiny and desertion of July 1789 gave the assembly a good starting point; in the spring of 1790 the troops were placed under oath to obey the law and the King, and not to act against the citizens. This, however, was not decisive, for on the northeastern frontier, far from Paris, among the fortresses of Alsace and Lorraine, a considerable part of the army was assembled. There French and foreign regiments were well mixed, esprit de corps was maintained, staunch loyalists were in command, and it was conceivable that the troops would respond to Louis' appeal if the King summoned them to his help.