Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/362

 35o THE EUROPEAN CONVULSION so much so that the Assembly compelled the king to declare war upon Austria at the very moment when Leopold died. France France at the same time became possessed with declares War, the theory of Louis xiv., that she had a right to her 1792, ' Natural ! boundaries — those which would give her a geographically complete territory, girdled on two sides by the sea, on the south by the sea and the Pyrenees, and on the east by the Alps and the River Rhine. This involved the appropria- tion of some German territory, and of the Austrian Netherlands or Belgium, which in character and language were French rather than Austrian. Thus France had two distinct motives for war, one aggressive, the other patriotically defiant of foreign inter- ference in French affairs. To this was presently added a third, that of liberating the 'peoples' of Europe from 'slavery' to monarchs, for which subjection to the * liberty '-loving French Republic was to be substituted. Patriots crowded to the armies which hastened to the frontiers. Louis really hoped for the restoration of his own September dignities by the foreign intervention which he was Massacres. defying. The Jacobins captured the Paris govern- ment or 'Commune' and the persons of the whole royal family, while the Legislative Assembly showed that it had no real control. The prisons were already crowded with 'suspects,' persons who were supposed to be connected with the emigres and plotters for an aristocratic restoration : an immense number more were suddenly seized and massacred (September 1792), largely owing to panic over the advance of the Prussian and Austrian forces on the frontier, an advance which was checked almost at the same moment. Also at the same moment the Legislative Assembly was dissolved and replaced by a new Nadonal Convention, dominated by extremists. In the course of the next four months the revolution was completed. The first act of the Convention was to declare the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a The Head of re P UDUC - In all directions the armies of the a King, republic were successful, in Savoy, on the Rhine, Jan. 1793. and - m Belgium. The Convention proclaimed that all the territories occupied by French troops were liberated from