At this juncture the court party began the disastrous policy which in the end was responsible for most of the terrible excesses of the French Revolution, by insisting that troops should be called to restrain the Assembly, and that Necker should be banished. Louis showed the same vacillating spirit now that he had displayed in yielding to the Assembly, and assented. The noble officers had lately shown themselves untrustworthy, and the men in the ranks refused to obey when called to fight against the people. The baser social elements of the whole country had long since swarmed to the capital. Their leaders now fanned the flame of popular discontent until at last resort was had to violence. On July twelfth the barriers of Paris were burned, and the regular troops were defeated by the mob in the Place Vendôme; on July fourteenth the Bastille, in itself a harmless anachronism, but considered by the masses to typify all the tyrannical shifts and inhuman oppressions known to despotism, was razed to the ground. As if to crown their baseness, the extreme conservatives among the nobles, the very men who had brought the King to such straits, now abandoned him and fled. Louis finally bowed to the storm, and came to reside among his people in Paris, as a sign of submission. Bailly, an excellent and judicious man, was made mayor of the city, and Lafayette, with his American laurels still unfaded, was made commander of a newly organized force, to be known as the National Guard. On July seventeenth the King accepted the red, white, and blue--the recognized colors of liberty--as national. The insignia of a dynasty were exchanged for the badge of a principle. A similar transformation took place throughout the land, and administration everywhere passed quietly into the hands of the popular representatives. The flying nobles found their châteaux hotter than Paris. Not only must the old feudal privileges go, but with them the old feudal grants, the charters of oppression in the muniment chests. These charters the peasants insisted must be destroyed. If they could not otherwise gain possession of them, they resorted to violence, and sometimes in the intoxication of the hour they exceeded the bounds of reason, abusing both the persons and the legitimate property of their enemies. Death or surrender was often the alternative. So it was that there was no refuge on their estates, not even a temporary one, for those who had so long possessed them. Many had already passed into foreign lands; the emigration increased, and continued in a steady stream. The moderate nobles, honest patriots to whom life in exile was not life at all, now clearly saw that their order must yield: in the night session of August fourth, sometimes called the "St. Bartholomew of privilege," they surrendered their privileges in a mass. Every vestige, not only of feudal, but also of chartered privilege, was to be swept away; even the King's