This was the first time that a nobleman had been hanged, and the mob, deeming him an infamous conspirator against the rights of the people, rejoiced in his execution. They witnessed with delight this indication that the reign of equality had really commenced; that the sword of retribution would hereafter fall as surely upon the head of the high-born as upon that of the low-born offender.
It was now nearly a year since the fall of the Bastille, and France, even in the midst of famine, and almost starvation, had passed from the reign of the most execrable despotism to the reign of constitutional liberty. Never before had so vast a revolution been effected so peaceably. The enslaved people had broken and thrown away their fetters, and were enfranchised. Instead of falling upon their past oppressors in indiscriminate massacre, they had spared them, wresting from them only the exclusive privileges of tyranny. The Assembly sought only constitutional liberty and peace with all the world. The decrees enacted by the Constituent Assembly were essentially the same with those adopted by republican America.
THE MARQUIS OF FAVRUS READING HIS DEATH-WARRANT.
Free principles had been infused into the government; lettres de cachet, the most infamous instruments of oppression the world has ever known, abolished; feudal impediments and oppressions of every kind removed; the right of suffrage established and made almost universal; the offices of honor and emolument in the state thrown open to merit, with but the slightest limitations; religious liberty proclaimed, the Protestant, the Jew, the negro, and the play-actor enfranchised; law made uniform, criminal jurisprudence reformed, monasteries, those haunts of indolence and vice, abolished, and the military force of the country intrusted to the citizens of the country. Such a transformation from the slavery, corruption, and horror of the old régime was translation from the dungeon to the blaze of day. All this was done almost without violence. The court here and there shot down a few hundred, some chateaux were burned, and there were a few acts of mob violence; but that a nation of twenty millions of people should have been able to accomplish so vast a change so bloodlessly must ever be a marvel.
But the armies of aristocratic opposition were gathering to crush this liberty, which threatened to spread to other states. Despotic Europe combined, and with all her accumulated armies fell upon the people of France. The recently emancipated people fought to protect themselves from new chains with all the blind fury and ferocity of despair. Then ensued scenes of blood and woes which appalled the world.[254]
The French people, unconscious of the terrific storm which was gathering, prepared for a great national jubilee. It was to be held on the 14th of July, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. All France was to be represented at the festival. The Field of Mars, a vast parade-ground in Paris, a mile in length and half a mile in width, extending from the military school to the banks of the Seine, was the selected theatre for this national festivity. The centre was made smooth as a floor, and the removed earth was placed on the sides so as to create slopes in the form of an amphitheatre capable of accommodating nearly half a million of spectators. But so immense was the work to be performed, that at length apprehensions were felt that the field could not be in readiness in season for the appointed fête. No sooner was this idea suggested than all Paris, in a flame of enthusiasm, volunteered to aid in the toil.
A more extraordinary scene of enthusiasm earth has never witnessed. All heads and hearts were electrified. Men, women, and children, of all ages and ranks, spread over the field and shared in the toil. The Carthusian monk and the skeptical philosopher, the hooded nun and the brawny fish-woman, merchants, lawyers, students, scholars, gray-haired patriots, and impetuous boys, matrons and maidens, delicate ladies and the rugged daughters of toil, blended harmoniously together in immense groups, ever varied, incessantly moving, yet guided by engineers with almost military order and precision. Moving tents and portable restaurants, decorated with tricolored ribbons, added to the gayety of the spectacle. Trumpets sounded the charge against banks of earth, and willing hands wielded energetically all the potent enginery of wheel-barrows, hoes, and spades. Bands of music animated and enlivened the scene, blended with shouts of joy and songs of fraternal sympathy. Three hundred thousand persons were thus seen at once laboring upon this spacious arena to rear an altar for the great sacrament of French liberty. It was a work of love. The long twilight allowed them to labor until the clock struck nine. Then the groups separated. Each individual repaired to the station of his section, and marched in procession, accompanied by triumphal music and with the illumination of torches, to his home. Even the Marquis of Ferrières, inveterate Royalist as he was, can not withhold his tribute of admiration in view of this astonishing drama. "The mind felt sinking," says he, "under the weight of a delicious intoxication at the sight of a whole people who had descended again to the sweet sentiments of a primitive fraternity."
