第48章

In the towns and villages revolutionary municipalities were instituted, protected by the local National Guards.Those of neighbouring towns commenced to make mutual arrangements to defend themselves should need arise.Thus federations were formed, which were soon rolled into one; this sent 14,000National Guards to Paris, who assembled on the Champ-de-Mars on the 14th of July, 1790.There the king swore to maintain the Constitution decreed by the National Assembly.

Despite this vain oath it became more evident every day that no agreement was possible between the hereditary principles of the monarchy and those proclaimed by the Assembly.

Feeling himself completely powerless, the king thought only of flight.Arrested at Varennes and brought back a prisoner to Paris, he was shut up in the Tuileries.The Assembly, although still extremely royalist, suspended him from power, and decided to assume the sole charge of the government.

Never did sovereign find himself in a position so difficult as that of Louis at the time of his flight.The genius of a Richelieu would hardly have extricated him.The only element of defence on which he could have relied had from the beginning absolutely failed him.

During the whole duration of the Constituent Assembly the immense majority of Frenchmen and of the Assembly remained royalist, so that had the sovereign accepted a liberal monarchy he could perhaps have remained in power.It would seem that Louis had little to promise in order to come to an agreement with the Assembly.

Little, perhaps, but with his structure of mind that little was strictly impossible.All the shades of his forbears would have risen up in front of him had he consented to modify the mechanism of the monarchy inherited from so many ancestors.And even had he attempted to do so, the opposition of his family, the clergy, the nobles, and the Court could never have been surmounted.The ancient castes on which the monarchy rested, the nobility and the clergy, were then almost as powerful as the monarch himself.

Every time it seemed as though he might yield to the injunctions of the Assembly it was because he was constrained to do so by force, and to attempt to gain time.His appeals to alien Powers represented the resolution of a desperate man who had seen all his natural defences fail him.

He, and especially the queen, entertained the strangest illusions as to the possible assistance of Austria, for centuries the rival of France.If Austria indolently consented to come to his aid, it was only in the hope of receiving a great reward.Mercy gave him to understand that the payment expected consisted of Alsace, the Alps, and Navarre.

The leaders of the clubs, finding the Assembly too royalist, sent the people against it.A petition was signed, inviting the Assembly to convoke a new constituent power to proceed to the trial of Louis XVI.

Monarchical in spite of all, and finding that the Revolution was assuming a character far too demagogic, the Assembly resolved to defend itself against the actions of the people.A battalion of the National Guard, commanded by La Fayette, was sent to the Champ-de-Mars, where the crowd was assembled, to disperse it.

Fifty of those present were killed.

The Assembly did not long persist in its feeble resistance.

Extremely fearful of the people, it increased its arrogance towards the king, depriving him every day of some part of his prerogatives and authority.He was now scarcely more than a mere official obliged to execute the wishes of others.

The Assembly had imagined that it would be able to exercise the authority of which it had deprived the king, but such a task was infinitely above its resources.A power so divided is always weak.``I know nothing more terrible,'' said Mirabeau, ``than the sovereign authority of six hundred persons.''