[133] "Before the Revolution the number of noble families in France did not exceed 17,500. Reckoning five individuals to a family there might have been about 90,000 nobles. The disasters of the Revolution must have reduced them to less than 40,000."--L'Europe après le Congrès d'Aix la Chapelle, by Abbé de Pradt, note at the end of chap. ix.
THE TUMULT IN PARIS.
Marshal Broglie.—Gatherings at the Palais Royal.—Disaffection of the Soldiers.—Imprisonment and Rescue.—Fraternization.—Petition to the Assembly.—Wishes of the Patriots.—Movement of the Troops.—Speech of Mirabeau.—New Menaces.—Declaration of Rights.—Dismissal of Necker.—Commotion in Paris.—Camille Desmoulins.—The French Guards join the People.—Terror in Paris.—Character of the King.
Notwithstanding the National Assembly was thus organized, rumors filled the air that the junction was but transient, and that the court was making preparation for some deed of violence. The citizens of Paris were in a great ferment, all business was at a stand, the poorer classes had no employment, and their families were actually perishing from hunger. Troops were continually parading the streets, and an army of fifty thousand men, now placed under the command of the veteran Marshal Broglie, encircled the city of Versailles. The spacious garden of the Palais Royal in Paris, surrounded by the most brilliant shops in Europe, was the general rendezvous of the populace anxiously watching the progress of events. The people in their misery had nothing to do but to meet together to hear the news from Versailles. Often ten thousand men were assembled in the garden, where impassioned orators harangued them upon their rights and upon their wrongs. The Duke of Orleans, with his boundless wealth, encouraged every insurrectionary movement. He was willing so far to renounce aristocratic privileges as to adopt a constitution like that of England, if he, as the head of the popular party, could be placed upon the throne, from which he hoped to eject his cousin Louis XVI.
It soon became evident that there was a Tiers Etat in the army as well as in the state. The French Guards, consisting of three thousand six hundred picked men, in the highest state of discipline and equipment, were stationed at Paris. They began to echo the murmurs of the populace. The declaration of the king had informed them that no reform whatever was to be tolerated in the army; that the common soldier was to be forever excluded from all promotion. The privates and subalterns were doomed to endure all the toil of the army and its most imminent perils, but were to share none of its honors or emoluments. The troops were governed by young nobles, generally the most dissolute and ignorant men, who merely exhibited themselves upon the field on parade days, and who never condescended even to show themselves in the barracks.
The discontent of the soldiers reached the ears of their officers. Apprehensive that by association with the people the troops might become allied to them by a common sympathy, the officers commanded the guards no longer to go into the streets, and consigned them to imprisonment in their barracks. This of course increased their exasperation, and, being left to themselves and with nothing to do, they held meetings very much like those which they had attended in the Palais Royal, and talked over their grievances and the state of the monarchy.[134] Patriotic enthusiasm rapidly gained strength among them, and they took an oath that they would not fire upon the people. The colonel of the regiment arrested eleven of the most prominent in this movement and sent them to the prison of the Abbaye, where they were to await a court-martial and such punishment as might be their doom. This was the 30th of June.[135] On the evening of that day, as a vast and agitated multitude was assembled at the Palais Royal, listening to the speakers who there, notwithstanding reiterated municipal prohibitions, gave intelligence of all that was passing at Versailles, tidings came of the arrest of the soldiers. A young man, M. Lourtalot, editor of a Parisian paper, mounted a chair and said,
"These are the brave soldiers who have refused to shed the blood of their fellow-citizens. Let us go and deliver them. To the rescue!"
There was an instantaneous cry, rising from a thousand voices in the garden and reverberating through the streets, "To the Abbaye!" The throng poured out of the gate, and, seizing axes and crowbars as they rushed along, every moment increasing in numbers, soon arrived at the prison, six thousand strong. There was no force there which could for a moment resist them. The doors were speedily battered down, the soldiers liberated and conducted in triumph to the Palais Royal. Here they were provided with food and lodging, and placed under the protection of a citizens' guard.