ut
which you paid for with torrents of blood Courage broke your chains;
reason has made ours fall off."

But alas! reason was soon to lose control. The lower classes had wakened
to a sense of their power, they began to use it savagely. Hatred of the
haughty aristocracy, long smoldering, burst everywhere into flame. Mobs
of country peasants plundered isolated chateaux and slew their inmates.
Meanwhile the National Assembly had been abolishing all titles of
nobility; the vast estates of the clergy were confiscated. The
aristocrats began fleeing from France, and the possessions of all who
fled were declared forfeited to the new government.

Imagine the tumult that this upheaval caused to the rest of Europe. News
travelled slowly in those days; but these "_emigres_," these banished
nobles, were palpable evidences of what had occurred. The common folk
everywhere, especially along the French borders in Germany, Switzerland,
and Italy, celebrated the French triumph as their own. Liberty was at
hand! For them, too, it would come presently! Murmurings of revolt grew
loud. The monarchs of Europe, terrified, took up the cause of the
_Emigres_ as their own. France was threatened with invasion. King Louis
threw in his lot with his royal friends and attempted flight from Paris.
He was caught and brought back a prisoner. A foreign army marched
against France.

This invasion was met and repelled in the Battle of Valmy (1792), not an
extensive or bloody contest in itself, but one of incalculable
importance in human history, because like Bunker Hill it showed that a
new force had arisen to upset all the military calculations of the past.
Raw troops could now be found to meet on equal terms with veterans.
Liberty, hitherto an impalpable idea, a mere phantom in the brains of a
few philosophers, proved able to call up armies at a word, able
physically to hold its own against embattled despotism. Even the German
Goethe wrote of Valmy, "In this place and on this day a new era of the
world begins."[13]

France however had already gone mad with its success. Even before Valmy
wholesale murder had begun in Paris. The prisons were broken open and a
thousand "aristocrats" hideously butchered without trial. The day after
Valmy, the land was proclaimed a republic. King Louis was put on trial
for his life, and in January, 1793, was executed.[14] Frenchmen began
fighting among themselves. The reign of "terror" began as that of kings
was abolished.