STORMING THE BASTILLE.
The Assembly petitions the King.—Resolves of the Assembly.—Narrative of M. Dumont.—Scenes in Paris.—The People organize for Self-defense.—The new Cockade.—The Abbé Lefebvre d'Ormesson.—Treachery of the Mayor, Flesselles.—Character of De Launey, Governor of the Bastille.—Sacking the Invalides.—The Bastille Assailed.—Assassination of De Launey and of Flesselles.
It will be remembered that in the election of deputies to the States-General Paris had been divided into sixty sections, each of which chose two electors. These hundred and twenty electors, composed of the most wealthy and influential citizens of Paris, immediately met and passed the night deliberating respecting the anarchy into which the city was so suddenly plunged. There were two foes whom the city had now equally to dread—the court and the mob; the princes, bishops, and nobles of the realm, with the armies and the resources of the kingdom, on the one hand, and the starving multitude, infuriated by misery and brutalized by ages of misrule, on the other. These were the two foes against which the Revolution ever had to struggle. The mob triumphed in the Reign of Terror. Napoleon rescued the Revolution from their bloody hands. The princes, with the aid of all the despotisms of Europe, triumphed at Waterloo, and the Revolution was crushed for a time.
Early on Monday morning, July 12th, the electors sent a deputation to the National Assembly at Versailles soliciting the establishment of a citizens' guard for the preservation of order. They gave a true and of course a terrible description of the tumult prevailing in the city.[152]
The Assembly immediately sent a committee of twenty-four members to the king, entreating him to withdraw the foreign troops from the capital. But the queen and the court had now obtained such an ascendency over the feeble-minded king that he was constrained to send a reply that he should make no change whatever in his measures, and that the Assembly could accomplish no useful purpose by interfering with matters in the metropolis.
This was the day on which it was supposed armed bands were to march to disperse the Assembly. It was publicly stated at Versailles that a parliament composed of the nobles was to be suddenly organized at Versailles, that all the deputies of the Third Estate were to be tried for treason, that those members of the clergy and of the nobility who had declared in their favor were to be consigned to perpetual imprisonment, and that those who had been particularly active in the cause of popular liberty were to be sent to the scaffold.[153]
In preparation for this event, the day before (Sunday, 12th), the new ministry, bitterly hostile to the popular cause, had taken their seats in the king's cabinet; Necker, a fugitive, was hastening into the Netherlands; fifty thousand troops under Marshal Broglie, the most determined advocate of aristocratic privilege, crowded the environs of Paris and Versailles; and the troops on the 12th had been ordered to those movements which were preliminary to the great event.[154]