World history; World history -- Juvenile literature
In September of 1791, the first constitution of France was accepted,
and the members of the National Assembly went home. On the first of
October of 1791, the legislative assembly came together to continue
the work of the National Assembly. In this new gathering of popular
representatives there were many extremely revolutionary elements. The
boldest among these were known as the Jacobins, after the old Jacobin
cloister in which they held their political meetings. These young men
(most of them belonging to the professional classes) made very violent
speeches and when the newspapers carried these orations to Berlin and
Vienna, the King of Prussia and the Emperor decided that they must
do something to save their good brother and sister. They were very
busy just then dividing the kingdom of Poland, where rival political
factions had caused such a state of disorder that the country was at
the mercy of anybody who wanted to take a couple of provinces. But they
managed to send an army to invade France and deliver the king.
Then a terrible panic of fear swept throughout the land of France. All
the pent-up hatred of years of hunger and suffering came to a horrible
climax. The mob of Paris stormed the palace of the Tuileries. The
faithful Swiss bodyguards tried to defend their master, but Louis,
unable to make up his mind, gave order to “cease firing” just when the
crowd was retiring. The people, drunk with blood and noise and cheap
wine, murdered the Swiss to the last man, then invaded the palace, and
went after Louis who had escaped into the meeting hall of the Assembly,
where he was immediately suspended of his office, and from where he was
taken as a prisoner to the old castle of the Temple.
But the armies of Austria and Prussia continued their advance and the
panic changed into hysteria and turned men and women into wild beasts.
In the first week of September of the year 1792, the crowd broke into
the jails and murdered all the prisoners. The government did not
interfere. The Jacobins, headed by Danton, knew that this crisis meant
either the success or the failure of the revolution, and that only the
most brutal audacity could save them. The Legislative Assembly was
closed and on the 21st of September of the year 1792, a new National
Convention came together. It was a body composed almost entirely of
extreme revolutionists. The king was formally accused of high treason
and was brought before the Convention. He was found guilty and by a
vote of 361 to 360 (the extra vote being that of his cousin the Duke of
Orleans) he was condemned to death. On the 21st of January of the year
1793, he quietly and with much dignity suffered himself to be taken to
the scaffold. He had never understood what all the shooting and the
fuss had been about. And he had been too proud to ask questions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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