The Issues and the Adversaries 381
ing the six- pound crown, and bearing the orb and scepter. Goldpieces were thrown
to the multitude, and red and white wine flowed from certain fountains.
That night Prince Esterhazy gave a ball. Young Metternich opened the dance
with the Princess of Mecklenburg, the future Queen Louise of Prussia. Nineteen
years old, he had been designated for the coronation as Master of Ceremonies of
the Catholic Westphalian Imperial Princely Bench. At this ball Esterhazy spent
ten thousand guilders on the illuminations alone. A few years later Gouverneur
Morris was told in Vienna that Esterhazy had spent eighty thousand English
pounds in six weeks at Frankfurt in 1792, so that, although the wealthiest subject
in Europe, his estate was in the hands of its creditors. The American Morris took
this as a sign of the “feudal system” in its decline.^7
The Prussian troops continued to pass through the city, and the Emperor and
his advisors, Maury, the French émigrés, and various others moved on to Mainz,
there to take counsel with the King of Prussia on their joint policies toward France.
They considered a manifesto to the city of Paris, of which more will be said.
In Paris the proceedings of July 14 showed “the honors inverted.” Since 1790
the anniversary of the Bastille had been the day of the fédération, on which patri-
otic delegations from various communities met together regionally, and also at a
national level in Paris, to “federate” with each other, that is to pledge themselves to
each other and to the new constitution in support of the new order in France.
Organized by the political clubs which had sprung up everywhere, these exchanges
of delegates were a means by which men who had had no chance for political ex-
perience before 1789 acquired a sense of political awareness and participation, felt
themselves to constitute a “nation” by the use of their own free will, or to act col-
lectively, as they saw it, as a free and sovereign people. The federation of 1792 was
the first since the beginning of the war. The war had gone badly, the Prussians were
approaching, the king was distrusted, and the émigrés announced with loud men-
aces their imminent return. The Assembly had passed a decree of national emer-
gency, la patrie en danger. Bells clanged in Paris as in Frankfurt, but they were bells
of alarm, the tocsin.
The men who converged on Paris to celebrate July 14 were therefore very differ-
ent from those who converged upon Frankfurt for the same day. They were the
patriots and superpatriots sent in from the provinces, or rather by the authorities
of the new “departments” into which the provinces had been reorganized. By half-
dozens or by hundreds they dribbled into the capital, where they joined with one
another and with the Parisians in a great surge of national and revolutionary feel-
ing, to defend the Revolution against all who might threaten it—the foreign pow-
ers, the émigrés, the aristocrats, the French king and queen—against all who might
be suspected of treachery, or who merely by moderation might open the way to the
enemy. Some of the congregating provincials arrived too late for the actual day.
Among these were several hundred from Marseilles, who on July 14 were some-
where in central France on a twenty- seven- day walk from Marseilles to Paris. As
they trudged through the countryside they chanted Rouget de Lisle’s new war
7 Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, 2 vols. (New York, 1888), II, 248.