This general insurrection against royalty, and against the privileges of nobility and clergy, threw into affright the Right side of the National Assembly, where sat the most violent antagonists of the Revolution.
The Center of the Assembly, called by turns the Plain and the Swamp, had no settled convictions whatsoever. The Left was almost entirely composed of the deputies of the Third Estate, among whom, famous for their eloquence, were Sieyès, Duport, and Barnave. On this side also were some few scattering representatives of the nobility, such as the Duke of Orleans, the Marquis of Lafayette, the Lameths, and, most illustrious of all, the elder Mirabeau, a magnificent orator, but corrupt in his private life. At the extreme Left sat a deputy, then obscure and next to unknown, but destined soon to become the incarnation of the French Revolution. 'Twas Maximilien Robespierre, attorney at the bar of Arras.
In one single night, the night of the 4th of August, 1789, the old feudal edifice crumbled before the determined attitude of the nation. O, sons of Joel, let us glorify the memory of our obscure ancestors, who prepared the triumph of the Revolution.
The imperishable work of the National Assembly was the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This monumental document embraced territorial and administrative unity; social, civil, political and religious equality; and above all, the formal recognition of the sovereignty of the people as the source of all power and of all functions, which it delegated to its representatives by election. Nevertheless we must admit that the Constitution of 1789-1791 lacked much that it should have contained, and contained much which it would have been better without. Such, for instance, were its several breaches of the sovereignty of the people, like the distinction drawn between "active" and "passive" citizens, the two-degree election, and the requirement of a certain amount of direct taxation to qualify one for election as a representative. The Convention later corrected these injustices; but it must be noted that the Constitution of 1789-91 made no provision for the rights of women. Our Gallic fathers admitted women into their city councils, even when the deliberations turned on matters of war. Equality of civil and political rights for men and women should have figured at the very head of the Constitution. The question of marriage should there have been taken up and established as a matter of free unions, ruled by mutual tastes and agreements. Property should also have been reorganized, and declared collective in the state, the department, the district, or the commune, according to its nature, and no individual should have possessed more than a temporary title to the instrument of labor or the plot of ground which he needed for his support, and which should have been assigned to him gratuitously by the commune. The abolition of inheritance would have logically followed, and the suppression of interest on capital. A system of free, compulsory, and nonsectarian education should have been proclaimed, and also the right to assistance during youth, old age, illness or unemployment.
However that may be, and in spite of the regrettable omissions in the Constitution, honor to the labors of the legislators of '79. The clergy, the nobility, the monarchy, smitten in their prestige, in their property, in their privileges, and in their temporal authority, received their death blow. The National Assembly inaugurated the era of enfranchisement. It could, with good right, date its work the Year I of Liberty. But we must not forget that it was the revolutionary attitude of the populace of Paris at the attack on the Bastille, that ushered in our freedom.
But a fact often before made manifest, almost one century after another, was now once more to come into play. The royal power, forced to grant concessions, sought only how best to elude or annul them, employing to this end, each in its turn, perfidy, perjury, and violence!
Soon the hostility of the court showed itself in the open. Louis XVI refused to sanction the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the corner-stone and basis of the Constitution, and opposed his veto to the law attaching for sale the goods of the clergy. Thereupon, projects fatal to liberty began to rear their heads with unheard-of insolence. On October 1, 1789, the foreign troops were summoned to Versailles. The Body Guard bespoke to a banquet the newly arrived officers, together with those of the Montmorency Dragoons, the Swiss regiments, the Hundred-Swiss, the mounted Police, and the Mayor's Guard. Several monarchical captains, picked out from among the National Guard of Versailles, were also invited. The officers of the army, instead of wearing the national tricolored cockade, affectatiously displayed enormous cockades of white. The Court was tendering to the Army a sumptuous banquet, the expenses of which were paid by the King. The tables were spread in the Opera Hall of the palace, which was brilliantly lighted. The bands of the Flanders regiment and the Body Guard played during the repast royalist or topical airs, such as "Long Live Henry IV," or "O Richard, O My King, the World Is All Forsaking Thee." The wine, liberally distributed, rose to all heads. They drained their bumpers to the health of the royal family; one captain of the National Guard proposed the health of the Nation; he was drowned with hoots.
Soon the officers called in their soldiers, who were massed in all the alcoves. Then the King entered the hall in a hunting habit, accompanied by the Queen, who held the Dauphin by the hand. At the sight of Louis XVI, the officers were transported with enthusiasm. The German regimental band struck up the "March of the Uhlans," a foreign war song. The drunkenness rose to frenzy. Insults and bloody threats were hurled against the Revolution, against the Assembly. The cavalry trumpets sounded the charge. The officers whipped out their sabers to cries of "Long live the King!" The tricolored cockade was trampled under foot. Then these rebels, dragging after them their soldiers, as drunk as themselves, poured out into the courtyard of the palace, crying savage imprecations against the Representatives of the people. The National Assembly, intimidated, defenseless, surrounded by these saturnalia of military force and placing little reliance in the National Guard of Versailles, hardly dared show its fears. Unpardonable weakness!
But the people of Paris were watching in their clubs. The press sounded the alarm.
"That Saturday night," wrote Camille Desmoulins in his journal, Revolutions of France and Brabant, "Paris rises. It is a woman, who, seeing that her husband is not listened to in his district meeting, is first to run to Foy's Cafe, at the Palais Royal, and denounce the royalist orgy. Marat flies to Versailles, returns like the lightning, and cries to us, 'O ye dead,—awake!' Danton, on his part, thunders in the club of the Cordeliers; and the next day this patriotic district posts its manifesto demanding a march on Versailles. Everywhere the people arm; they seek out the white cockades and the black ones, the latter the Catholic rallying sign, and—just reprisals—trample them under foot. Everywhere the people gather, discussing the imminence of the danger. They hold councils in the gardens of the Palais Royal, in the St. Antoine suburb, at the ends of the bridges, on the quays. They say the hardihood of the nobility is growing visibly, that the boat laden with flour, which arrives morning and night from Corbeil, has not come at all for two days. Is the court, then, going to take Paris by famine? They say that despite the orders of the Assembly, the local councils are still functioning; that that of Toulouse is burning patriotic leaflets; that the council of Rouen has ordered the seizure of citizens acquitted by the Assembly; that the one of Paris has recorded itself, and is obstinately determined to make use of its Gothic formulas 'Louis, by the grace of God, King' and 'Such is our good pleasure.' And finally they say that conclaves are being held in the aristocrats' mansions, and that they are secretly enrolling gangs of ruffians for the court."