Revolutionizing of the Revolution 405
prominent members of the bourgeoisie, from whom some of the first Jacobins had
been recruited. The Revolution of 1792 rose from deeper depths in the popula-
tion. With it, classes hitherto not heard from in European politics, except epi-
sodically on days of riot or insurrection, made their influence felt as a continuing
source of power. They were not the “dregs,” as they seemed to some more highly
placed. They were the small people in plain occupations, the menu peuple, the
butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker together with those Jacobins who
would work with them.
Men of this kind attacked the Tuileries Palace on August 10, with cries of
“Down with the fat- head!” (le gros cochon), by which they meant Louis XVI. The
palace was defended only by the Swiss Guard and a few gentlemen in waiting. The
king and queen fled to the Legislative Assembly, which gave them refuge in the
stenographer’s box and continued in session, listening to irrelevant speeches, wait-
ing with inert dignity to see how events would turn out. After several hours the
king ordered his defenders to cease fire. No one knows how many were killed, since
there never was any official inquiry. There were some six hundred casualties among
the defenders, mostly killed, some massacred after the end of the fighting. The at-
tackers had over three hundred killed and wounded, among whom there were men
from forty- two of the forty- eight Paris sections and from nineteen of the eighty-
three departments. The fédérés from Marseilles alone lost twenty- four killed. Parts
of the palace caught fire, and Marie- Antoinette’s books were thrown out the win-
dow, but there was little actual pillage; a few thieves were put to death on the spot,
and patriotic prowlers who came upon jewelry or other valuables ceremoniously
deposited them at the bar of the Assembly. It was a purely political riot.
Delegates from the sections, who had formed an association of their own some
days before to prepare the insurrection, now took over from the municipal authori-
ties as the government of the city. Thus originated the revolutionary Commune of
Paris, which became a rival power to the Convention, while remaining highly re-
sponsive to the radicalism welling up from the sections.
The Commune imprisoned Louis XVI and his family in the Temple, a grim
building dating back to the medieval Templars. Lafayette tried to lead his army to
Paris to interfere, but his men would not follow him. To the radicals he was now
clearly a “traitor.” He gave himself up to the Austrians, who shut him up in a Sile-
sian castle as a prisoner of war and dangerous revolutionary.
The Legislative Assembly meekly accepted the accomplished fact. It declared
the king dethroned, set up a provisional executive council, and authorized elections
for a convention. While thus preparing for its own liquidation, it meanwhile en-
acted a number of significant measures, in which the nature of this “second” revo-
lution was made more manifest. The Revolution was reaching the point where its
most zealous supporters were to be found in the lesser ranks of society. It was
necessary to make a popular appeal, to get the bulk of the country to accept the
new order in Paris and to recruit strength for the war. Universal suffrage was one
such step. It was now also, after August 10, that “feudalism” was at last “abolished.”
In 1789 the abolition of the most important seigneurial dues had been made sub-
ject to compensation. The compensation was now done away with, and the peasant
landowner was now fully free from the manorial lord. The significance of this de-