hundred; the rest would take to
their heels quickly enough." His name was Napoleon Bonaparte; he had
been born in Corsica, in 1769, the year after that island had become
French.

Not daring to do otherwise, the king was compelled to recall the
Girondins to power, and to declare war against the German emperor on the
20th of April; the first actions of this war were unfavorable; the Duke
of Brunswick, the commander of the Prussian army, issued a proclamation
on the 20th of July declaring that he was coming, in the name of the
allied monarchs, to restore the authority of Louis XVI, and the
infuriated Parisian mob replied by the attack on the Tuileries on the
10th of August. The king, with all his family, escaped to the Assemblee
at seven o'clock in the morning; the Swiss guards, badly led and short
of munitions, were massacred after a gallant and ineffective defence.
The atrocious Marat was hailed as the victor of this evil day; the
Assemblee, under the inspiration of Robespierre, began to incline toward
more extreme measures. The populace demanded of it that the king should
be dethroned and a national Convention convened, it granted the second
but not the first; the king was removed from the Assemblee to the prison
of the Temple, and the Commune, headed by Danton, minister of justice,
and composed of those leaders who had been elected to the principal
municipal offices, became the real power in the capital. Through its
instigation most of those confined in the various prisons of Paris were
massacred in the first week in September. The helpless Assemblee held
its last sitting on the 21st of this month, and the president,
remitting its authority to the new Convention Nationale, announced in
phrases which the future was to make but sinister mockery: "The aim of
all your efforts shall be to give the French people liberty, laws, and
peace."

The first step of the new legislators was to declare that "royalty was
abolished in France," and to proclaim the Republic. The struggles to
maintain the direction of affairs between the Girondins and the
Montagnards increased in vehemence until the latter succeeded in
acquiring the ascendency at the end of May, 1793. "Educated in the ideas
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they dreamed of the rude virtues of the best
period of Rome and of Sparta for the France of the eighteenth century,
and, even though society should perish in the experiment, they were
determined to apply their theories." The q