Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1847. Excerpt: ... liberty, to fire upon the multitude--sometimes to menace and coerce the King, as in the rising of the 20th June 1792, when the mob of the Fauxbourgs, under the lead of the brewer Santerre, broke into the Tuileries and demanded of the King to give his sanction to Decrees, upon which he had already exercised his constitutional prerogative of the veto, placing the bonnet rouge upon his head and loading him with every circumstance of personal indignity and insult. These commotions were but the prelude to the armed insurrection and organized attack upon the Tuileries of the 10th of August 1792, which expelled the King from the Palace, consigned hirn to the prison of the Temple, and led first to the abolition of Royalty and then to the public execution of the dethroned monarch. The brief interval which ensued, before these final results of the insurrection were consummated, was marked by one of the most shocking and revolting scenes to be found in the records of human crime--the massacres of September--when three hundred hired assassins, for three successive days and nights, were employed in emptying the prisons of Paris, (which had been filled to repletion with victims of proscription from every class of society, ) by the most summary process of butchery and extermination. The fomentors of popular commotion soon began to quarrel among themselves as to whose benefit the victory should enure. Among them were men of the most opposite characters, habits and dispositions--on the one hand, Brissot, Condorcet, Vergniaud, Isnard, Gensonne, Louvet, the eloquent and cultivated leaders of the Girondists--on the other, Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Collot D'Herbois, Billaud Varennes, the noisy and ferocious Demagogues who ruled in the Jacobin Club and controlled the movement...