382 Chapter XVI
song, since known as the Marseillaise. Its refrain leaped from town to town: Aux
armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons!
The observance in Paris took place at the Champ de Mars, the open area now
graced by the Eiffel Tower, then lying on the outskirts of the city. The Ecole Mili-
taire was there then, as today; from one of its balconies Marie Antoinette and the
court looked down upon the proceedings. Sixty or a hundred thousand people
filled the space, some in the uniforms of the National Guard and keeping casual
military formations, others in the ordinary clothing of the various social classes of
Paris, individuals, families, children in holiday mood to see a bit of pageantry and
public festivity. Along the edge of the crowd was a series of tents, one for each of
the eighty- three departments, each with its name in a tricolor decoration. Near the
Seine, about where the Eiffel Tower now stands, was a temporary structure put up
for the occasion, some twenty feet high, with a curved flight of steps and adorned
with classical urns, and at the top an oblong block on which a copy of the constitu-
tion rested. This was the Altar of the Country, l ’autel de la patrie. Near it stood a
“genealogical tree,” a sapling already felled and placed here for the day, with a pile
of kindling at its base. From its branches hung escutcheons, coats of arms, and
coronets of various descriptions, the apparatus of “counts and barons, but not of
kings,” as one Paris newspaper reported, “blue ribbons, gold chains, ermine man-
tles, parchment titles and all the baubles of the former nobility.”^8
The much buffeted Louis XVI still occupied his shaken throne, and he led the
procession, consisting of his own guard, and of members of the Assembly and vari-
ous civic magistrates, from the Ecole Militaire the length of the Champ de Mars,
through the crowds and through the massed pikes and bayonets of the citizens in
arms, to the Altar of the Country at the other end. Here he mounted the steps and
renewed his oath to the constitution, which he was of course known to have repu-
diated at the time of the flight to Varennes. The genealogical tree was then ignited.
The emblems of aristocracy went up in smoke. The French people thus published
their counter- threat to the French émigrés, and their defiance to Europe.
In Paris as in Frankfurt there were a good many foreigners on July 14, though
except for occasional appearances at the Jacobin club, or at the bar of the Assem-
bly, they played no public role. Some were individual travelers, sympathizers with
the Revolution, such as James Watt, Jr., son of the inventor of the steam engine,
who was there partly out of curiosity and partly as a salesman for his father’s in-
dustrial products. Others were political exiles, émigrés of an opposite character to
those who attended Prince Esterhazy’s ball—refugees from the counterrevolution
at Geneva, Belgian “democrats” who had fled from the Austrian restoration of
1790, and, above all, the Dutch refugees from the Orange restoration of 1787, of
whom thousands had come to France and an unknown number were in Paris.
Each of these groups hoped to advance its own cause by the war. As the Count of
Artois hoped to re- enter France in the wake of the Prussians and Austrians, so
these émigrés in Paris hoped that with French victories they might return to re-
8 Révolutions de Paris, Nos. 157 and 158, pp. 81–82, 97–106. Details on July 14 at Paris are taken
from this journal, and from A. Mathiez, Le Dix- Aout (Paris, 1931) and La Révolution et les étrangers
(Paris, 1918).