At noon Paris began to flow back from Versailles to the capital once more, but now Louis and his family were in the midst of the throng. In a great lumbering coach, surrounded by the populace, Louis and his wife and children were proceeding from the palace of Versailles to that of the Tuileries; an epoch of French history was coming to a close. The Austrian princess, looking out and seeing a man of the people riding on the step of her coach, declared contemptuously that this was the first occasion on which an individual not wearing knee breeches, an individual sans culotte, had occupied so honourable a position. The cry of sans culotte was taken up, and approved on the spot as the symbol of worthy citizenship. But the cant phrase that belongs most closely to the event of the 6th of October, was that whereby the Parisians declared triumphantly that they had now brought into their midst le boulanger, la boulangère, et le petit mitron,—the baker, the baker's wife and the little cook boy.
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CHAPTER VII
THE ASSEMBLY DEMOLISHES PRIVILEGE
In the preceding chapter, stress has been laid on the economic causes that had led to the rooting up of the Bourbons from Versailles; in this one the political significance of the event must be accentuated. In the history of the Revolution it is always so; the political and the economic factors are constantly fusing the one in the other.
In a sense, what had happened was that the poor people, the democracy, let us say, of Paris, had now got the King in the city and under their influence; not only the King, but also the assembly,—for it had followed Louis and was installed in a building adjacent to the Tuileries. And the assembly became quickly conscious of the fact that Paris was now unduly weighing on the representation of France, and under the lead of Mirabeau attempted to assert itself. This was the first feeble step towards the assumption of power that culminated three years later in the appointment of {90} the Committee of Public Safety. The assembly assumed a middle position between the King on the one hand and the mob on the other. It voted the change of Louis' title from King of France, by the grace of God, to King of the French, by virtue of the Constitution; it repressed disorder by proclaiming martial law; but in the continuation of its constitutional debates it asserted unequivocally its middle-class composition. A handful of democrats, Robespierre, Grégoire, and less than a dozen others, pleaded the rights of the many, but the assembly declined to listen to them and confirmed, by a nearly unanimous vote, the recommendations of its committees for drawing up the declaration of rights and constitution. The greater part of French citizens were thereby declared to have only passive, not active rights, and were excluded from the franchise. The qualification for voting was placed at the paying of taxes equal to 3 days' labour, and for being a deputy paying in taxes one marc of silver, about 54 francs.
The outcry against this legislation was so loud, and so widespread, as to show what genuine political aspirations were to be found in the mass of the Parisian population. The greater part of that population was excluded {91} from voting. For to say nothing of the fact that about 120,000 inhabitants were classed as paupers, it so happened that the capitation tax had been remitted for a term of years, leaving only the well-to-do shopkeeper, some part of the professional, and the capitalist class on the voters' list. Workmen of the faubourg St. Antoine signed a petition to be allowed to pay taxes so as to obtain a vote. Robespierre, a narrow, prudish, jealous, puritanical but able lawyer from Arras, with journalists like Desmoulins and Loustallot, inveighed against what they described as iniquitous class legislation that would have excluded from the councils of the French nation Jean Jacques Rousseau and even that pauvre sans culotte Jesus Christ. But the assembly was obdurate, and, in fact, remained middle class in its point of view all through the Revolution except when irresistible pressure was brought to bear against it.
The journalists, however, tended far more rapidly towards democracy than the deputies. Journalism had sprung from the events of July. The pamphlets of Camille Desmoulins had, by a natural metamorphosis, become journals after that date. Their popularity did not, however, attain that of Loustallot's {92} Révolutions de Paris, of which one number is said to have reached a circulation of 200,000. Marat's Ami du peuple, first published in September, soon became the most formidable organ of opinion, and remained so until the rise of Hébert and his atrocious Père Duchesne, at a later period. These papers and their editors played a great part, and will often be noticed, but for the present all that need be said is that their rise at this period is one of the symptoms of the tremendous change that had come over the city of Paris.
Paris before 1789 was, in a sense, mediaeval, provincial. Although the largest city of France, its capital, the centre of thought and art, the resort of many French and foreign visitors, the city was still in a way a local centre, and isolated, unrelated with the rest of France. The Court did not reside there, the administration, especially of justice, was in large measure decentralized, and Paris was the abode of the Parisian almost in the same narrow sense that the province was the abode of the provincial. But now all this was rapidly changing. The arrival of the Court and of the National Assembly suddenly made of Paris the heart of France. The fever of revolution made that heart beat faster, and a rapid {93} current of the best life blood of the nation began circulating from the provinces to Paris and from Paris back again to the provinces, bringing energy and a broadening of sympathy with it. And if a glance is taken at Europe during the same period, during the twenty-five years that follow the outbreak of the French Revolution, the same process may be seen at work, but on a larger scale. The old stagnation, the feudal congestion of Germany and Italy, the immobility of the population, is broken through, the old barriers are shaken down; great centralized states send official, economic, and national action sweeping back and forth; great armies tramp through the whole breadth of Europe; roads are built in all directions to facilitate their movements, people begin to know one another, to mix, to form larger conceptions of humanity.