The French Revolution Volume 2; The Democratic Republic, 1792-1795 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I PREPARATIONS FOR THE DETHRONEMENT OF LOUIS XVI I. Measures taken by the Legislative Assembly against the royal power.?II. Public opinion in France in July and August, 1792. ?III. The Federals.?IV. The Parisian journals and Republicanism.?V. Sectional agitation.?VI. The attitude of the Legislative Assembly. At the very time when the Legislative Assembly was declaring itself to be monarchical, it found itself drawn, by the necessity of the situation, by the fact of the war, and by the existence of the latent treason of the King, into measures of defence against the King, which had no other object than that of saving a threatened country; measures which, in reality, deprived the royal power of something of its prestige and authority, and thus prepared the way for the downfall of the throne. The Assembly felt itself forced to treat as an enemy, one who must before all else be disarmed, the King whom it had sworn to maintain; whom, in fact, it wished to maintain. We have seen that the Assembly disbanded the King's guard, and that the King sanctioned the decree. Having deprived the King of the means of defence against a popular insurrection, the Assembly had sought to create for itself a military force whose function should be to annul the projects of the King andthe Court. This camp of 20,000 men, whose establishment under the walls of Paris the Assembly had decreed on June 8th, was to be composed of volunteers chosen from all parts of France; of Federals who would at first stay in Paris, there to celebrate the festival of July i4th, and would then remain in the neighbourhood of the capital, so that they would enter it at need, in order to suppress the royalist conspirators. They would have constituted not only a kind of permanent federation, but a new body...