V.

The Growth of Radicalism in The Government

On July 17, 1791, the Republicans of Paris massed in the Champ de Mars and demanded that the king be deposed. On the orders of Lafayette, who was affiliated politically with the Feuillants, a group of moderate monarchists, the National Guard opened fire on the demonstrators and dispersed them. The bloodshed immeasurably widened the split between the republican and bourgeois sections of the population. After suspending Louis for a brief period, the moderate majority of the Constituent Assembly, fearful of the growing disorder, reinstated the king in the hope of stemming the mounting radicalism and preventing foreign intervention. Louis took the oath to support the revised constitution on September 14. Two weeks later, with the election of the new legislature authorized by the constitution, the Constituent Assembly was dissolved. Meanwhile, on August 27, Leopold II and Frederick William II, king of Prussia, had issued a joint declaration regarding France, which contained a thinly veiled threat of armed intervention against the Revolution.

The Legislative Assembly, which began its sessions on October 1, 1791, was composed of 750 members, all of whom were inexperienced, since the members of the Constituent Assembly had voted themselves ineligible for election to the new body. The new legislature was divided into widely divergent factions, the most moderate of which was that of the Feuillants, who supported a constitutional monarchy as defined under the Constitution of 1791. In the centre was the majority caucus, known as the Plain, which was without well-defined political opinions and consequently without initiative. The Plain, however, uniformly opposed the Republican factors that sat on the left, composed mainly of the Girondins, who advocated transformation of the constitutional monarchy into a federal republic similar to the Montagnards, consisting of Jacobins and Cordeliers, who favoured establishment of a highly centralized, indivisible republic. Before these differences caused a serious split between the Girondins and the Montagnards, the Republican caucus in the assembly secured passage of several important bills, including stringent measures against members of the clergy who refused to swear allegiance. Louis exercised his veto against these bills, however, creating a Cabinet crisis that brought the Girondins to power. Despite the opposition of leading Montagnards, the Girondin ministry, headed by Jean Marie Roland de la Platière, adopted a belligerent attitude towards Frederick William II and Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, who had succeeded his father, Leopold II, on March 1, 1792. The two sovereigns openly supported the activities of the émigrés and sustained the opposition of feudal landlords in Alsace to the Revolutionary legislation. The desire for war spread rapidly among the monarchists, who hoped for defeat of the Revolutionary government and the restoration of the Old Regime, and among the Girondins, who wanted a final triumph over reaction at home and abroad. On April 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly declared war on the Austrian part of the Holy Roman Empire, beginning the protracted conflict known as the French Revolutionary Wars.