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Chapter Fifteen...
Terror unleashed.
Please, find a comfortable place to rest in the gardens near the Café Corazza, for the next part of my tale may be difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to believe.
The Church now abolished, all convents and monasteries were suppressed. My sister and I were therefore obliged to leave our convent school. I moved into the home of an old family friend in Caen, a city on the Normandy coast. There, I followed the course of the Revolution with feverish interest, devouring whatever political pamphlets and news from Paris came my way.
In April of 1792, Austria and Prussia declared war on France. I was glad. The moderate Girondins, with whom I sided, hoped a war would put an end to the Jacobin revolt and enable a constitutional monarchy to return to France.
It did not. The Jacobins had other plans.
In August the Jacobins proclaimed Georges Danton Minister of Justice, making him the dictator of Paris. At his side were Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre. All three had the support of Jean-Paul Marat who, through his paper, Ami du Peuple (Friend of the People), painted ‘Louis and Antoinette’ as enemies of the people.
To strike a final blow to the French Monarchy, Danton and his Jacobin friends encouraged the people to attack the Tuileries Palace where the king and his family lived under house arrest. The royal family escaped out the back of the Palace with just enough time to spare for the King Louis XVI to give his last orders to the royal guards: He forbade them from drawing arms on the rioting civilians.
The siege was awful! In only two hours the rabble succeeded in killing and mutilating the king’s defenseless guards, whose severed heads and bloody remains were tossed everywhere.
Paris became an abbatoir, a slaughterhouse.
As the mob plundered the Palace the royal family fled to the National Convention, housed in the equestrian facility of the Tuileries. There, they ran right into the hands of the radical Jacobins, who immediately arrested the king and queen, accused them of collaborating with the Austrian and Prussian armies, and sent them to the Temple fortress, yet another wretched medieval prison.
Chapter Sixteen...
The massacres of September 1792.
Images:
George Danton. From Adolphe Thiers, Histoire de la Révolution française (10 tomes). Paris: Furne et Cie Libraires-Éditeurs, 1865 (13th edition, collection of Y.- A. Durelle-Marc). Digital image courtesy of le Centre d’Histoire du Droit de l’Universite Rennes 1.
Prieur & Berthault. Siege et prise du Chateau des Tuileries, 10 Aoút 1792 (Siege and Taking of the Chateau des Tuileries, 10 August 1792), 1804. Reproduction of original engraving [LC-USZC2-1498], courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
Saturday, July 30, 2011 at 1:45PM Tweet 
Feisty foodie/lit-chickie/globe trotting wannabee Frenchie, Andi Fisher, offers her point of view in her fun and informative blog, Misadventures with Andi:
