Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 2. Walton William

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      [Oh! the fine statue! Oh! the beautiful pedestal! The Virtues go afoot, and Vice rides on horseback.] This statue was overthrown on the 11th of August, 1792, and the Place Louis XV became the Place de la Revolution, a stone and plaster figure of Liberty seated, colored to imitate bronze, being set up on the pedestal. On the 26th of October, 1795, it was rebaptized Place de la Concorde; the Restoration restored its name of Louis XV, and the Revolution of 1830, its present name.

      A very great majority of the bishops having refused to take the oath to the new constitution civile du clergé, decreed by the Constituante Assemblée, which placed them under the control of the civil authorities, and being strengthened in this refusal by the authority of the Pope, the new Assemblée, by the law of May 24, 1792, directed that as a measure of public security all these priests non assermentés should be banished. The king refused to sanction this measure, and dismissed his Girondist ministers; he sent a secret agent to the foreign coalition menacing the frontiers: in the Assemblée, which allowed its sittings to be constantly interrupted and overawed by irruptions of so-called delegations of the citizens, of the sections, of the national guards, the suspicion and the open denunciation of the court constantly increased. The agitation and violence in the clubs, in the streets, in the journals, augmented from day to day; on the 20th of June an enormous mass of the populace overflowed the Assemblée chamber, broke into the Tuileries, shook their fists in the queen's face, and compelled the king to assume the red cap. A thin, pale young artillery officer, standing on the terrace by the river, watched this mob with indignation. "The wretches!" he exclaimed, "they ought to shoot down the first five hundred; the rest would take to their heels quickly enough." His name was Napoleon Bonaparte; he had been born in Corsica, in 1769, the year after that island had become French.

      Not daring to do otherwise, the king was compelled to recall the Girondins to power, and to declare war against the German emperor on the 20th of April; the first actions of this war were unfavorable; the Duke of Brunswick, the commander of the Prussian army, issued a proclamation on the 20th of July declaring that he was coming, in the name of the allied monarchs, to restore the authority of Louis XVI, and the infuriated Parisian mob replied by the attack on the Tuileries on the 10th of August. The king, with all his family, escaped to the Assemblée at seven o'clock in the morning; the Swiss guards, badly led and short of munitions, were massacred after a gallant and ineffective defence. The atrocious Marat was hailed as the victor of this evil day; the Assemblée, under the inspiration of Robespierre, began to incline toward more extreme measures. The populace demanded of it that the king should be dethroned and a national Convention convened, it granted the second but not the first; the king was removed from the Assemblée to the prison of the Temple, and the Commune, headed by Danton, minister of justice, and composed of those leaders who had been elected to the principal municipal offices, became the real power in the capital. Through its instigation most of those confined in the various prisons of Paris were massacred in the first week in September. The helpless Assemblée held its last sitting on the 21st of this month, and the president, remitting its authority to the new Convention Nationale, announced in phrases which the future was to make but sinister mockery: "The aim of all your efforts shall be to give the French people liberty, laws, and peace."

      The first step of the new legislators was to declare that "royalty was abolished in France," and to proclaim the Republic. The struggles to maintain the direction of affairs between the Girondins and the Montagnards increased in vehemence until the latter succeeded in acquiring the ascendency at the end of May, 1793. "Educated in the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they dreamed of the rude virtues of the best period of Rome and of Sparta for the France of the eighteenth century, and, even though society should perish in the experiment, they were determined to apply their theories." The question of bringing the king, or "Capet," as he was now termed, to trial was debated in the Convention as early as the 7th of November, 1792; on the 2d of December, the Conseil Général of the Commune of Paris sent a petition to the Convention inviting that body to expedite this affair, and asking that the debate should be on these two questions: "1. Is Louis worthy of death? 2. Would it be advantageous for the Republic that he should perish on the scaffold?" By the terms of the constitution, the person of the king was sacred, and the extreme penalty provided for him was deposition, but the spirit of the "Terror" was already in the air; the situation on the frontiers was extremely critical; it was with some vague idea of defying or of awing the coalition that Danton had exclaimed in the Assemblée: "Let us throw them, in defiance, the head of a king!" The execution of the monarch, on the morning of the 21st of January, 1793, had, on the contrary, the effect of uniting against France all the sovereigns of Europe.

      Around this execution have clustered the usual growth of legends and invention that supplement the great, trenchant facts of history with an embroidery to which history does not always condescend. The fine words which the king's confessor, the Abbé Edgeworth, are supposed to have addressed to him on the scaffold: "Son of Saint-Louis, ascend to heaven!" were invented on the day of the execution by a journalist named Charles His. The picturesque story of a secret midnight mass, celebrated every year on the anniversary of the execution, at the instigation and at the expense of the executioner Sanson, is equally devoid of foundation. It first appeared in the preface of a work published in 1830, under the title of Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la Revolution française, by Sanson, exécuteur des arrêts criminels. The preface was written by Balzac, the work itself by a certain Lhéritier, and Balzac reproduced the story with appropriate embellishments in his Une Messe en 1793, and later in the Episode sous la Terreur. One of the nuns who, in the first account, appeared as Mlle. de Charost here becomes the Mlle. de Langeais who figures so picturesquely and improbably in several of his romances. In the Biographie universelle, Michaud relates that Sanson, in his will, left directions to have a commemorative mass celebrated every year on the 21st of January; that he was so affected by the execution of the king that he fell ill immediately afterward, and died within six months, and that the provisions of the will were faithfully executed by his son and successor until his own death, in 1840. It appears, however, that the elder Sanson continued "to function" all through the Terror, did not die till 1806, and that any attempt to carry out the pretended provisions of his will would have been very dangerous to his son, and to any notary who might have drawn it up. Through the Terror, and even under the Directory, there are numerous records of sentences of deportation against priests who had celebrated requiem masses for the repose of the soul of Louis XVI. The famous Messe de Sanson appears to have been invented out of the whole cloth by Balzac.

      In the Convention, divided into factions, and rent by mutual suspicion and terror, efficient measures were, nevertheless, taken against the allied enemies on the frontier, and those in the bosom of the nation; a committee of general security was formed to look after the latter, with a revolutionary tribunal to judge them, and a committee of public safety, "a species of dictatorship with nine heads," took energetic measures for the national defence. To the cry of "Citoyens la Patrie est en danger!" the volunteers flocked to the enrolling offices in such numbers that it was thought necessary to issue a decree commanding the bakers and the postal employés to remain to exercise their functions. Everything was lacking in the way of equipment for the armies, the officers were suspected, and two or three of the generals went over to the enemy; but the nation, inspired with a double fury, against the foreign enemy and against its own citizens, put one million two hundred thousand men in the field, and the fourteen armies of the Republic, organized by the minister of war, Carnot, inaugurated that tremendous series of victories which carried the French name to its apotheosis of military splendor.

      The excesses of the Reign of Terror are explained by the historians as the result of the universal fright and suspicion. "Under the reign of Hébert and Danton," said Saint-Just, "every one was wild СКАЧАТЬ