PART THREE

THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES

INTRODUCTION

After the failure of the flight of the royal family, it was evident to all men of foresight that the European governments, and in particular the government of the empire at the head of which were the brother and afterward the nephew of Marie Antoinette, would attempt to restrain the Revolution by force of arms. It was not equally apparent that matters would come to actual war, for many erroneously thought that the French would yield to the threat of foreign intervention. At the head of those who were guilty of this capital error was Marie Antoinette herself, who wrote to her brother in the autumn of that same year, 1791, suggesting that he should gather a large armed force upon the frontiers, and declaring that it should act as a menace and a police. She was thus principally responsible for what followed.

The winter passed with a false situation both within France and without. There was a desperate attempt to keep the king nominally in power, though all real authority had left him since his flight. This attempt was resisted by the mass of opinion, but was supported by nearly all the politicians, even the most radical. The foreign governments, meanwhile, grew more and more threatening, and Marie Antoinette kept up a secret correspondence with them. It became obvious as the spring of 1792 approached that if the foreign armies intervened, it would be not only to save the monarchy, but to crush the Revolution altogether. The queen betrayed French plans of war to the enemy. The emperor wrote a letter demanding certain things to be done in his name that concerned French domestic politics alone. The result was that the French Revolutionary parliament made war in April, 1792. Prussia joined Austria in the coming campaign.

Luckily for France, the foreign preparations were very slow; the French forces were in a deplorable state, and the success of the foreign invaders hardly doubtful. Meanwhile it became more and more publicly known that the court welcomed the war as a probable or perhaps certain deliverance of the royal family by foreign arms. The Palace of the Tuileries in Paris was thus a sort of fortress wherein the executive,--that is, the king and the queen at his side,--still wholly in command of the French armies in theory, and largely in command of them in practice, could direct operations adverse to the national welfare.

The instinct of all the democratic leaders was in favour of taking the Tuileries by storm, as a foreign stronghold might be taken; but for this they had no forces save the militia, the regular forces near Paris being in the hands of the king. The turning of the scale was due to the arrival in Paris of armed bands from the provinces, chief among which were the companies from Marseilles. These, with the aid of the Parisian militia and the incompetence of the court, managed to storm the Tuileries upon the tenth of August, 1792, and thus put an end to the French monarchy.