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place, upon the one means to remedy our evils; suspend the executive power as was done last year; thereby you will cut the root of all our evils. We know that the constitution does not speak of deposition; but in order to declare that the King has forfeited the throne it is necessary to try him, and in order to try him it is necessary that the King should be temporarily suspended. Convoke the primary assemblies, in order to put yourselves in a position to learn, in an indirect manner, the desire of the majority of the people for the national convocation upon the so-called constitutional articles relative to the executive power.

Legislators, there is not an hour nor a second to lose, the evil is at its height, avert from your fatherland a universal shock, make use of all the power which is entrusted to you and save it yourselves. Would you fear to call down upon your heads a terrible responsibility, or indeed (what we cannot believe) would you wish to give to the nation a proof of impotency? There would remain to it no more than one resource, that of displaying all its strength and sweeping away its tyrants. We have all, both you and we, sworn a hundred times to live free and to die in defending our rights. Well, we have come to renew that oath which makes despots tremble when it is pronounced by men who know how to feel strongly. We shall either emerge from this conflict free or else the tomb of liberty shall be ours.

C. Address of the Paris Sections. August 3, 1792. Archives Parlementaires, XLVII, 425-427.

Legislators, it is when the fatherland is in danger that all its children ought to press around it; and never has so great a peril threatened the fatherland. The commune of Paris sends us to you; we come to bring into the sanctuary of the laws the opinion of an immense city. Filled with respect for the representatives of the nation, full of confidence in their courageous patriotism, it has not despaired of the public safety; but it believes that to cure the ills of France it is necessary to attack them in their source and not to lose a moment. It is with grief that it denounces to you, through our agency, the head of the executive power. Without doubt, the people have the right to be indignant with him; but the lan

guage of anger does not befit brave men. Compelled by Louis XVI to accuse him before you and before all France, we shall accuse him without bitterness as without pusillanimous deference. It is no longer time to listen to that protracted indulgence which befits generous peoples, but which encourages kings to perjury; and the most respectable passions must be silent when the saving of the State is in question.

We shall not retrace for you the entire conduct of Louis XVI since the first days of the Revolution, his sanguinary projects against the city of Paris, his predilection for nobles and priests, the aversion which he exhibited to the body of the people, the National Constituent Assembly outraged by court valets, invested by men of arms, wandering in the midst of a royal city and finding an asylum only in a tennis court. We shall not retrace for you the oaths so many times violated, the protestations renewed incessantly and incessantly contradicted by actions, up to the moment at which a perfidious flight came to open the eyes of the citizens most blinded by the fanaticism of slavery. We shall leave at one side everything which is covered by the pardon of the people; but pardon is not oblivion. It would be in vain, moreover, should we be able to forget these delinquencies; they will soil the pages of history and posterity will remember them.

However, legislators, it is our duty to remind you in rapid terms of the favors conferred by the nation upon Louis XVI and of the ingratitude of that prince. How many reasons there were for depriving him of the throne at the moment in which the people reconquered the sovereignty! The memory of an imperious and devouring dynasty, in which scarcely one king is reckoned against twenty tyrants, the hereditary despotism increasing from reign to reign with the misery of the people, the public finances entirely ruined by Louis XVI and his two predecessors, infamous treaties ruining the national honor, the eternal enemies of France becoming its allies and its masters: these are what constituted the rights of Louis XVI to the constitutional sceptre. The nation, faithful to its character, has preferred to be generous rather than prudent: the despot of an enslaved land has become the king of a free people after having attempted to flee from France, in order to reign at Coblentz, he has been replaced upon the throne,

perhaps contrary to the wish of the nation which ought to have been consulted.

Favors without number have followed that great favor. We have seen in the last days of the Constituent Assembly the rights of the people enfeebled in order to strengthen the royal authority, the first public functionary become an hereditary representative, a military establishment created for the splendor of his throne, and his legal authority supported by a civil list which has no other limits than those which he has wished to prescribe for it.

And we have speedily seen the favors of the nation turned against it. The power delegated to Louis XVI for the maintenance of liberty arms itself in order to overthrow it. Let us cast a glance over the interior of the Empire. Perverse ministers are removed by the irresistible force of public contempt; they are the ones for whom Louis XVI mourns. Their successors notify the nation and the king of the danger which surrounds the fatherland; they are dismissed by Louis XVI for having shown themselves citizens. The royal inviolability and the perpetual change of the ministry each day elude the responsibility of the agents of the executive power. A con spiring guard is dissolved in appearance; but it still exists: it is still paid by Louis XVI; it sows trouble and promotes civil war. Turbulent priests, abusing their power over timid consciences, arm children against their fathers; and from the land of liberty they send forth new soldiers under the banners of servitude. These enemies of the people are protected by the appeal to the people, and Louis XVI maintains for them the right to conspire. Coalesced department directories dare to constitute themselves arbiters between the National Assembly and the King. They form a species of dispersed High Chamber in the midst of the Empire; some even usurp the legislative authority; and in consequence of a profound ignorance, while declaiming against the republicans, they seem to wish to organize France into a federative republic. It is in the name of the King that they inflame intestinal divisions; and the King does not disavow with indignation two hundred stupid and guilty administrators repudiated from one end of France to the other by the immense majority of the administrations! Abroad, armed enemies threaten our territory. Two des

pots publish against the French nation a manifesto as insolent as absurd. French parricides, led by the brothers, kinsmen and connections of the King, prepare to rend the bosom of their fatherland. Already the enemy upon our frontiers places executioners in opposition to our warriors. And it is to avenge Louis XVI that the national sovereignty is impudently outraged; it is to avenge Louis XVI that the execrable House of Austria adds a new chapter to the history of its cruelties; it is to avenge Louis XVI that the tyrants have renewed the wish of Caligula, and that they would wish to destroy at a single blow all the citizens of France!

The flattering promises of a minister have caused the declaration of war, and we have commenced it with armies incomplete and destitute of everything.

Belgium calls upon us in vain; perverse orders have restrained the ardor of our soldiers; our first steps into those fair countries have been marked by conflagration; and the incendiary is still in the midst of the camp of the French! All the decrees which the National Assembly have rendered for the purpose of re-enforcing our troops are annulled by the refusal of the sanction or by perfidious delays. And the enemy advances with rapid steps, while patricians command the armies of equality, while our generals leave their posts in the face of the enemy, permit the armed force to deliberate, come to present to the legislators their opinions which cannot be legally expressed, and calumniate a free people whom it is their duty to defend.

The head of the executive power is the first link in the counter revolutionary chain. He seems to participate in the conspiracies of Pilnitz, which he has made known so lately. His name contends each day against that of the nation; his name is a signal of discord between the people and their magistrates, between the soldiers and the generals. He has separated his interests from those of the nation. Let us separate them as he has done. Far from putting himself by a formal act in opposition to the enemies within and without, his conduct is a formal and perpetual act of disobedience to the Constitution. As long as we shall have such a king, liberty cannot strengthen itself; and we are determined to remain free. By a stretch of indulgence we might have desired authority to

ask you for the suspension of Louis XVI as long as the danger of the fatherland shall continue; but the Constitution precludes that. Louis XVI invokes the Constitution incessantly; we invoke it in our turn and ask for his deposition.

That great measure once taken, since it is very doubtful whether the nation can have confidence in the present dynasty, we ask that ministers, jointly and severally responsible, selected by the National Assembly, but outside of its own body, according to the constitutional law, selected by the open vote of free men, may exercise provisionally the executive power while waiting for the will of the people, our sovereign and yours, to be legally pronounced in a National Convention, as soon as the security of the State may permit it. Meanwhile let our enemies, whoever they may be, all range themselves beyond our frontiers; let dastards and perjurers abandon the soil of liberty; let 300,000 slaves advance; they will find before them 10 millions of free men, as ready for death as for victory, fighting for equality, for the paternal roof, for their wives, their children and their aged ones. Let each of us be soldiers in turn; and if it is necessary to have the honor of dying for the fatherland, before yielding the last breath, let each of us make his memory illustrious by the death of a slave or a tyrant.

23. The Duke of Brunswick's Manifesto.

July 25, 1792. Archives Parlementaires, XLVII, 372-373.

This document sealed the fate of the old monarchy. Known at Paris on July 28, when the agitation for the suspension of the King had already attained great strength, it gave the final impulse to that movement. Its authorship has been much discussed and it is now clear that the document was substantially the work of Emigrés.

REFERENCES. Gardiner, French Revolution, 114-115; Mathews, French Revolution, 198-199; Stephens, French Revolution, II. 105 106: Lavisse and Rambaud, Histoire Generale, VIII, 139-140; Sorel, L'Europe et la Revolution Francaise, II, 503-515.

Their Majesties, the Emperor and the King of Prussia, having committed to me the command of the united armies which they have caused to assemble on the frontiers of