The first was the National Assembly at Versailles, originally consisting of twelve hundred deputies, but now dwindled down by emigration and other absence to about eight hundred.
The second was the municipal government of Paris, consisting of three hundred representatives from the different sections or wards of the city, and which held its sessions at the Hôtel de Ville. As Paris considered itself France, the municipality of Paris began to arrogate supreme power.
The third was the colossal assembly of the Parisian populace, an enormous, tumultuous, excitable mass, every day gathered in the garden of the Palais Royal. This assembly, daily becoming more arrogant, often consisted of from ten to twelve thousand. It was continually in session. Here was the rendezvous for all of the lower orders, men and women. Impassioned orators, of great powers of popular eloquence, but ignorant and often utterly unprincipled, mounted tables and chairs, and passionately urged all their crude ideas.
Reflecting men soon began to look upon this assembly with alarm. Its loud murmurs were echoed through the nation, boding only evil; but emancipated France could not commence its career by prohibiting liberty of speech. La Fayette anxiously looked in upon this portentous gathering, and listened to the falsehood, the exaggerations, and the folly with which its speakers deluded the populace, but he could not interfere. Indeed, it soon became perilous for any one in that assembly to plead the cause of law and order. He was at once accused as an aristocrat, and was in peril of the doom of Berthier and Foulon.
And now suddenly there uprose another power which overshadowed all the rest—the power of a free press. Newspapers and pamphlets deluged the land. They were read universally; for the public mind was so roused that those who could not read themselves eagerly listened to the reading from others, at the corners of the streets, in shops and hovels.[205]
France was now doomed to blood and woe. It is easy to say that if the populace had been virtuous and enlightened all would have gone well; or if the nobles and the higher clergy would have united with the true patriots freedom might have been saved. But the populace were not virtuous and enlightened, and the nobles were so inexorably hostile to all popular rights that they were resolute to whelm France in ruin rather than relinquish their privileges. France, as France then was, could have been saved by no earthly wisdom. The Royalists openly declared that the only chance of restoring the old system of government was to have recourse to civil war, and they were eager to invoke so frightful a remedy.
One of the most popular of the journals was "The Friend of the People," by Marat. This journal already declared that the National Assembly was full of aristocrats, and that it must be dissolved to make way for a better.[206] "We have wrested power," wrote Marat, "from the nobles but to place it in the hands of the moneyed class. What have we gained? The people are still poor and starving. We need another revolution." "Yes," echoed the mob of Paris, "we need another revolution."
The roar from the Palais Royal fell ominously upon the ears of the Assembly at Versailles, and of the municipality at the Hôtel de Ville. And now all the starving trades and employments began to congregate by themselves for discussion and combined action. First came the servants, destitute of place, of shelter, of bread, whose masters had fled from insurgent Paris into the country or had emigrated. The court-yard of the Louvre was their rendezvous. The soldiers debated at the Oratoire, the hair-dressers in the Elysian Fields, and the tailors at the Colonnade.[207] These bodies soon became, as it were, committees of the great central congress of the populace ever gathered at the Palais Royal.
The noblest men in the National Assembly were already beginning to despond. Firmly, however, they proceeded in the endeavor to reconstruct society upon the basis of justice and liberty. The measure to which their attention was now chiefly devoted was to adopt a Constitution, which was to be prefaced by a Bill of Rights. La Fayette was active in this movement, and was unquestionably assisted by Thomas Jefferson, then American minister at Paris.
This celebrated declaration of rights, adopted on the 18th of August, 1789, was a simple enunciation of those principles which are founded in nature and truth and which are engraven on all hearts. They were axioms upon which every intelligent legislator must proceed in forming a just code of laws. It declares that all mankind are born free and equal; that the objects to be gained by human governments are liberty, the security of property, and protection from oppression; that sovereignty resides in the nation and emanates from the people; that law is the expression of the will of the people; that the expenses of government should be assessed upon the governed in proportion to their property; that all the adult male inhabitants are entitled to vote; that freedom consists in the liberty to do any thing which does not injure another, and should have no limits but its interference with the rights of others.[208]