the king exercised his
right of _veto_ the mob rose in fury; and though they then did no more
than threaten, on the advance of the emigrant army on the 10th of
August, 1792, a more terrible rising took place. The Tuilleries was
sacked, the guards slaughtered, the unresisting king and his family
deposed and imprisoned in the tower of the Temple. In terror lest the
nobles in the prisons should unite with the emigrants, they were
massacred by wholesale; while, with a vigour born of the excitement, the
emigrant armies were repulsed and beaten. The monarchy came to an end;
and France became a Republic, in which the National Convention, which
followed the Legislative Assembly, was supreme. The more moderate
members of this were called Girondins from the Gironde, the estuary of
the Garonne, from the neighbourhood of which many of them came. They
were able men, scholars and philosophers, full of schemes for reviving
classical times, but wishing to stop short of the plans of the
Jacobins, of whom the chief was Robespierre, a lawyer from Artois,
filled with fanatical notions of the rights of man. He, with a party of
other violent republicans, called the Mountain, of whom Danton and Marat
were most noted, set to work to destroy all that interfered with their
plans of general equality. The guillotine, a recently invented machine
for beheading, was set in all the chief market-places, and hundreds were
put to death on the charge of "conspiring against the nation." Louis
XVI. was executed early in 1793; and it was enough to have any sort of
birthright to be thought dangerous and put to death.

5. The Reign of Terror.--Horror at the bloodshed perpetrated by the
Mountain led a young girl, named Charlotte Corday, to assassinate Marat,
whom she supposed to be the chief cause of the cruelties that were
taking place; but his death only added to the dread of reaction. A
Committee of Public Safety was appointed by the Convention, and
endeavoured to sweep away every being who either seemed adverse to
equality, or who might inherit any claim to rank. The queen was put to
death nine months after her husband; and the Girondins, who had begun to
try to stem the tide of slaughter, soon fell under the denunciation of
the more violent. To be accused of "conspiring against the State" was
instantly fatal, and no one's life was safe. Danton was denounced by
Robespierre, and perished; and for three whole years the Reign of Terror
lasted. The emigrants