1. Political Events during the Life of the Legislative
Assembly.
BEFORE examining the mental characteristics of the Legislative
Assembly let us briefly sum up the considerable political events
which marked its short year's life. They naturally played an
important part in respect of its psychological manifestations.
Extremely monarchical, the Legislative Assembly had no
more idea than its predecessor of destroying the monarchy. The
king appeared to it to be slightly suspect, but it still hoped to
be able to retain him on the throne.
Unhappily for him, Louis was incessantly begging for
intervention from abroad. Shut up in the Tuileries, defended
only by his Swiss Guards, the timid sovereign was drifting among
contrary influences. He subsidised journals intended to modify
public opinion, but the obscure “penny-a-liners” who
edited them knew nothing of acting on the mind of the crowd.
Their only means of persuasion was to menace with the gallows all
the partisans of the Revolution, and to predict the invasion of
France by an army which would rescue the king.
Royalty no longer counted on anything but the
foreign Courts. The nobles were emigrating. Prussia, Austria,
and Russia were threatening France with a war of invasion. The
Court favoured their lead. To the coalition of the three kings
against France the Jacobin Club proposed to oppose a league of
peoples. The Girondists were then, with the Jacobins, at the
head of the revolutionary movement. They incited the masses to
arm themselves—600,000 volunteers were equipped. The Court
accepted a Girondist minister. Dominated by him, Louis XVI. was
obliged to propose to the Assembly a war against Austria. It was
immediately agreed to.
In declaring war the king was not sincere. The queen
revealed the French plans of campaign and the secret
deliberations of the Council to the Austrians.
The beginnings of the struggle were disastrous. Several
columns of troops, attacked by panic, disbanded. Stimulated by
the clubs, and persuaded—justly, for that matter—that the king
was conspiring with the enemies of France, the population of the
faubourgs rose in insurrection. Its leaders, the
Jacobins, and above all Danton, sent to the Tuileries on the 20th
of June a petition threatening the king with revocation. It then
invaded the Tuileries, heaping invectives on the sovereign.
Fatality impelled Louis toward his tragic destiny. While
the threats of the Jacobins against royalty had roused many of
the departments to indignation, it was learned that a Prussian
army had arrived on the frontiers of Lorraine.
The hope of the king and queen respecting the help to be
obtained from abroad was highly chimerical.
Marie-Antoinette suffered from an absolute illusion as to the
psychology of the Austrian and the French peoples. Seeing France
terrorised by a few energumens, she supposed that it would be
equally easy to terrify the Parisians, and by means of threats to
lead them back under the king's authority. Inspired by her,
Fersen undertook to publish the manifesto of the Duke of
Brunswick, threatening Paris with “total subversion if the
royal family were molested.”
The effect produced was diametrically opposite to that
intended. The manifesto aroused indignation against the monarch,
who was regarded as an accomplice, and increased his
unpopularity. From that day he was marked for the scaffold.
Carried away by Danton, the delegates of the sections
installed themselves at the Hôtel de Ville as an
insurrectionary Commune, which arrested the commandant of the
National Guard, who was devoted to the king, sounded the tocsin,
equipped the National Guard, and on the 10th of August hurled
them, with the populace, against the Tuileries. The regiments
called in by Louis disbanded themselves. Soon none were left to
defend him but his Swiss and a few gentlemen. Nearly all were
killed. Left alone, the king took refuge with the Assembly. The
crowds demanded his denouncement. The Legislative Assembly
decreed his suspension and left a future Assembly, the
Convention, to decide upon his fate.
