Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty

Meanwhile, some hundred unknown individuals, who gathered at the Hôtel-de-Ville, and surreptitiously made their way into one of the halls, had formed an insurrectionary Commune....

For the majority of women, still beautiful, who mingle in public affairs, love is the principal thing; politics but the accessory, the pretext. They imagine they are attaching t...

At eight o'clock in the morning Mademoiselle Pauline de Tourzel arrived at the Feuillants. "I cannot say enough," she writes in her _Souvenirs de Quarante {332} Ans_, "about the...

After having voluntarily exposed herself to all the anguish of the invasion of the OEil-de-Boeuf, the courageous Princess was with the Queen in the Council Hall, when the crowd,...

In spite of the advice of Dumouriez, Louis XVI. would not make use of his right to form another guard. He preferred to put himself in the hands of the National Guard, who were h...

How will terminate the career of that brilliant King of Sweden, who had received from Versailles and from Paris, from the court and from the city, such an enthusiastic reception...

The danger constantly increased. At four in the morning of one of the last days of July, warning was given at the palace that the faubourgs were threatening, and would doubtless...

It was only a later illusion of the generous but imprudent man who had already dreamed many {231} dreams. He thought the popular tiger could be muzzled by persuasion. He was goi...

So the little Philipon wanted to take the chief place in the fruiterer's shop, just as, later on, she desired it on the political stage or the Ministry of the Interior. This ene...

The fête of the Federation, which was to be celebrated July 14, was awaited with anxiety. The federates came into Paris full of the most revolutionary projects. Anxiety and angu...

Read the Memoirs of Louvet, Buzot, Barbaroux, Pétion, and Madame Roland, and you will see to what extremes of bitterness the language of deceived ambition can go. They are parox...

This was one of the King's illusions. While he was parleying with the two municipal officers the armed citizens had passed in review before the Assembly. They had just left the...

On her return to the Tuileries after the disastrous journey to Varennes, the Queen wrote to {16} Fersen, June 27, 1791: "Be at ease about us; we are living," and Fersen replied:...

Thus commenced that gigantic war which France was to wage against all Europe, and which ended, {130} twenty-three years later, in the disaster of Waterloo. How many battles, wha...

The royal family has just entered the session chamber. It will find there not an asylum, but the vestibule of the prison and the scaffold. The man who had taken the Dauphin from...

Work away, then, insurgents! This unknown young man, this "straight-haired Corsican," hidden in the crowd, will be the master of you all! He will crush the Revolution, he will m...

At first Roland sent this letter to the King, with a promise that it should always remain a secret between them. But, incited by the vanity of his wife, who was incessantly urgi...

At the Carmelites, one hundred and eighty priests, crowded into the church and convent, were awaiting their fate with pious resignation. Two days before, Manuel had said to them...

It is a sad thing to say, but even their community in suffering did not disarm Madame Roland's hate for Marie Antoinette. It was in prison, on the eve of ascending the scaffold...

And yet there were still souls that gave way to compassion. From the upper stories of houses near the Temple enclosure there were eyes looking down into the garden when the pris...

Including both revolutionists and reactionists in the same accusation, Lafayette makes this reflection: {180} "What a remarkable conformity of language exists, gentlemen, betwee...

André Chénier was at this time writing weekly letters for the _Journal de Paris_, in which he eloquently supported the principles of order and liberty. As M. de Lamartine has sa...

I. PARIS AT THE BEGINNING OF 1792 . . . . . . . . . 1 II. COUNT DE FERSON'S LAST JOURNEY TO PARIS . . . . 14 III. THE DEATH OF THE EMPEROR LEOPOLD . . . . . . . . 23 IV. THE DEA...

As has been very well said by M. Frédéric Masson {98} in an excellent book, as novel as it is interesting, _Le Département des affaires étrangères sous la Revolution_, Dumouriez...

Dumouriez, portrait of, by Madame Roland, 94; Minister of Foreign Affairs, 95; "a miserable intriguer," 95; his career, 96; Masson's description of him, 98; plays a double part,...