ad
of guards, jailers have been imposed on me. I have been rendered
responsible for a government that has been torn from my grasp. Though
charged to preserve the dignity of France in relation to foreign powers,
I have been deprived of the right of declaring peace or war. Your
constitution is a perpetual contradiction between the titles with which
it invests me, and the functions it denies me. I am only the responsible
chief of anarchy, and the seditious power of the clubs wrests from you
the power you have wrested from me. Frenchmen, was this the result you
looked for from your regeneration? Your attachment to your king was wont
to be reckoned amongst your virtues; this attachment is now changed into
hatred, and homage into insult. From M. Necker down to the lowest of the
rabble, every one has been king except the king himself. Threats have
been held out of depriving the king even of this empty title, and of
shutting up the queen in a convent. In the nights of October, when it
was proposed to the Assembly to go and protect the king by its presence,
they declared it was beneath their dignity to do so. The king's aunts
have been arrested, when from religious motives they wished to journey
to Rome. My conscience has been equally outraged; even my religious
principles have been constrained: when after my illness I wished to go
to St. Cloud, to complete my convalescence, it was feared that I was
going to this residence to perform my pious duties with priests who had
not taken the oaths; my horses were unharnessed, and I was compelled by
force to return to the Tuileries. M. de La Fayette himself could not
ensure obedience to the law, or the respect due to the king. I have been
forced to send away the very priests of my chapels, and even the adviser
of my conscience. In such a situation, all that is left me is to appeal
to the justice and affection of my people, to take refuge from the
attacks of the factions and the oppression of the Assembly and the
clubs, in a town of my kingdom, and to resolve there, in perfect
freedom, on the modifications the constitution requires; of the
restoration of our holy religion; of the strengthening of the royal
power, and the consolidation of true liberty."

The Assembly, who had several times interrupted the reading of this
manifesto by bursts of laughter or murmurs of indignation, proceeded
with disdain to the order of the day, and received the oaths of the
generals employed at Paris. Numero