formed themselves under the name of Constitutional Clubs, to rouse the
same spirit which they had roused in France; and the French envoy,
Chauvelin, protested warmly against a proclamation which denounced this
correspondence as seditious.

[Sidenote: The Coalition attacks France.]

Such a course could only knit men of all parties together in a common
resentment; and the effect of these revolutionary efforts on the friends
of the Revolution was seen in a declaration which they wrested from Fox,
that at such a moment even the discussion of parliamentary reform was
inexpedient. A far worse result was the new strength they gave to its
foes. Burke was still working hard in writings whose extravagance of
style was forgotten in their intensity of feeling to spread alarm
throughout Europe. He had from the first encouraged the emigrant princes
to take arms, and sent his son to join them at Coblentz. "Be alarmists,"
he wrote to them; "diffuse terror!" But the royalist terror which he
sowed would have been of little moment had it not roused a revolutionary
terror in France itself. At the threat of war against the Emperor the
two German Courts had drawn together, and reluctantly abandoning all
hope of peace with France, gathered eighty thousand men under the Duke
of Brunswick, and advanced slowly in August 1792 on the Meuse. France,
though she had forced on the struggle, was really almost defenceless;
her forces in Belgium broke at the first shock of arms into shameful
rout; and the panic, as it spread from the soldiery to the nation at
large, took violent and horrible forms. At the first news of Brunswick's
advance the mob of Paris broke into the Tuileries on the 10th of August;
and at its demand Lewis, who had taken refuge in the Assembly, was
suspended from his office and imprisoned in the Temple. In the following
September, while General Dumouriez by boldness and adroit negotiations
was arresting the progress of the Allies in the defiles of the Argonne,
bodies of paid murderers butchered the royalist prisoners who crowded
the gaols of Paris, with a view of influencing the elections to a new
Convention which met to proclaim the abolition of royalty. The retreat
of the Prussian army, whose numbers had been reduced by disease till an
advance on Paris became impossible, and a brilliant victory won by
Dumouriez at Jemappes which laid the Netherlands at his feet, turned the
panic of the French into a wild self-confidence. In Novemb