Under the guillotine fell during this month the head of the queen’s friend, the Princess de Lamballe, who was followed in crowds by the king’s faithful adherents, sealing their loyalty and their love with their death.
This loyalty and love for the royal family was during this month branded as an unpardonable crime, for the National Convention, which on the 21st of September had taken the place of the Constituent Assembly, on the 25th declared France to be a republic, and the royalists became thereby criminals, who had sinned in the respect and love which they owed to the “republic one and indivisible.”
The new republic of France celebrated her saturnalia in the following months, and unfurled her blood-stained standard over the nation. She was not satisfied with having brought to the guillotine more than ten thousand aristocrats and royalists, to terrify the faithful adherents and servants of the throne. She required, moreover, the death of those for whose sake so many thousands had perished—the death of the king and of the queen.
On the 5th of December began the trial of Louis Capet, ex-King of France, now accused by the Convention. The pages of history have illustrated this stupendous and tragical event in all its shapes and colors. Each party has preyed upon it, the poets have sung it, and made it the central point of tragedy and romance: but none have painted it in so telling, in so terse, masterly traits, none have so fully comprehended and expressed the already stupendous event, as Lieutenant Napoleon Bonaparte, the future Emperor of France.
He happened to be in Paris during these days of terror. He had, with all the energies of his soul, given himself up to the new state of things, and he belonged to the most upright and zealous faction of the republicans. He acknowledged himself won over to their ideas, he participated in their celebrations, he was the friend of many of the most influential and conspicuous members of the Convention, and he was rarely absent from their meetings; but in the presence of the awful catastrophe of the king’s accusation and execution his proud and daring soul shrank back, and, full of misgivings, shuddered within itself. The young, enthusiastic republican, to his own great horror, found in the depths of his soul a holy respect and awe in the presence of this royalty which he so often in words had despised, and the fall of the king, this enemy of the republic, moved his heart as a calamity which had fallen upon him and upon all France. He himself gave to one of his friends in Ajaccio a very correct description of these days. After narrating the events of the first days of the trial of the king, he continues:
“The day after I heard that the advocate Target had refused to undertake the king’s defence, to which he was privileged by virtue of his office. This is what may be called, in the strictest sense of the word, to erase one’s name from history. What grounds had he for such a low cunning? ‘His life I will not save, and mine I dare not risk!’ Malherbes, Tronchet, Deseze, loyal and devoted subjects, to imitate them in their zeal would be impossible for me; but were I a prince I would have them sit at my right hand—united together in the most strenuous efforts to defend the successor of St. Louis. If they survive this deed of sublime faithfulness, never can I pass by them without uncovering my head.
“Business detained me unavoidably in Versailles. Only on the 16th of January did I return to Paris, and consequently I had lost three or four scenes of this tragedy of ambition. But on the 18th of January I went to the National Convention. Ah, my friend, it is true, and the most infuriated republicans avow it also, a prince is but an ordinary man! His head will as surely fall as that of another man, but whosoever decrees his death trembles at his own madness, and were he not urged by secret motives, his vote would die on his lips ere it was uttered. I gazed with much curiosity at the fearless mortals who were about deciding the fate of their king. I watched their looks. I searched into their hearts. The exceeding weightiness of the occasion had exalted them, intoxicated them, but within themselves they were full of fear in the presence of the grandeur of their victim.
“Had they dared retreat, the prince had been saved. To his misfortune, they had argued within themselves, ‘If his head falls not to-day, then we must soon give ours to the executioner’s stroke.’
“This was the prominent thought which controlled their vote. No pen can adequately portray the feelings of the spectators in the galleries. Silent, horrified, breathless, they gazed now on the accused, now on the defenders, now on the judges.
“The vote of Orleans sounded forth—‘Death!’ An electric shock could not have produced deeper impression. The whole assembly, seized with an involuntary terror, rose. The hall was filled with the murmurs of conflicting emotions.