358 Chapter XV
but in 1789. There was not yet in any literal sense any conspiracy of aristocrats in
the summer of 1789, but there was much in the recent past that gave a certain
credibility to the idea: the action of the parlement in the preceding September, the
threats of the Notables in December, the vacillation and hesitancy of a government
that had at times clearly favored the Third Estate, the speeches and pamphlets of
noblemen, the delaying action of the nobility in the Estates General, the King’s
locking out the Third Estate on June 20, his ambiguous proposals, and now his
unaccustomed summoning of regiments of the regular army to Paris. On July 11,
by dismissing Necker, the King gave further evidence that he planned to use force
to disband the Assembly. It was known that Joseph II had dissolved the Estates of
Brabant three weeks before.
In Paris people of all kinds, from bankers to shopkeepers and young café orators
like Camille Desmoulins, combined in the agitation that led to the fall of the Bas-
tille. There were a few cases of popular lynch- law, and heads were cut from corpses
and impaled on pikes, but since governments themselves commonly exposed the
heads of defunct malefactors to public view, it is not wholly germane to harp on
atrocities of this kind. The bourgeoisie of Paris, acting through the “electors” elected
in the preceding March, took over the government of the city, and organized a na-
tional guard to preserve life and property. The king proved unwilling or unable to
use his army to put down this disturbance. He came to Paris, recognized the Pari-
sian revolution, and accepted the existence of the National Assembly at Versailles.
Agrarian insurrection raged throughout the country. Peasants refused taxes,
tithes, and manorial payments. They invaded chateaux and burned the legal papers
on which their obligations rested. What they intended was no less than a social
revolution, in that they meant by their own action to destroy the manorial or “feu-
dal” system and the forms of property and income that this system represented. In
places they were seized for a while by the panic called the Great Fear, believing
that their fields and villages were about to be assaulted by brigands in the pay of
aristocrats.
Although Louis XVI, under these pressures, recognized the National Assembly
and seemed to accept the Revolution, his brother, the Count of Artois, along with
the Prince of Condé and others, left the country during the latter part of July. Thus
began the emigration. It was known that these émigrés would seek foreign aid, and
it was already rumored that the British were about to land in support of the aristo-
crats, and that the King of Sardinia had the same intention. These rumors were
wholly groundless, but they were by no means wholly absurd in a world where
revolutions in Holland, Geneva, and Poland had been suppressed by foreign inter-
vention. Such thoughts inflamed the idea of an aristocratic conspiracy, and the
belief in such a conspiracy already produced anticipations of what would one day
be the Terror. Barnave, commenting on the street murders, had already let fall the
dreadful query, Ce sang était- il donc si pur? There was talk of committees of investi-
gation and of special courts to try crimes against the state. The great lawyer Target,
the small lawyer Robespierre, the Protestant lawyer Barnave, the nobleman Gouy
d’Arsy, all agreed that drastic measures were justified in what amounted to civil
war; and a month before the Declaration of Rights, it was said that civil liberties
could be suspended in time of dire public emergency.