Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/720

654 sovereigns while a constitution was being prepared by the Assembly.

Such was what was called the "Joyous Entry " of October 6th. The palace at Versailles, thus stripped of royalty and left bespattered with blood, was never again to be occupied as the residence of a king of France.

The Flight of the King (June 20, 1791).—For two years following the Joyous Entry there was a comparative lull in the storm of the Revolution. The king was kept a sort of prisoner in the Tuileries. The National Assembly were making sweeping reforms both in Church and State, and busying themselves in framing a new constitution. The emigrant nobles watched the course of events from beyond the frontiers, not daring to make a move for fear the excitable Parisian mob, upon any hostile step taken by them, would massacre the entire royal family.

Could the king only escape from the hands of his captors and make his way to the borders of France, then he could place himself at the head of the emigrant nobles, and, with foreign aid, overturn the National Assembly and crush the revolutionists. The flight was resolved upon and carefully planned. Under cover of night the entire royal family, in disguise, escaped from the Tuileries, and by post conveyance fled towards the frontier. When just another hour would have placed the fugitives in safety among friends, the Bourbon features of the king betrayed him, and the entire party was arrested and carried back to Paris.

The attempted flight of the royal family was a fatal blow to the Monarchy. Many affected to regard it as equivalent to an act of abdication on the part of the king. The people now began to talk of a republic.

The Clubs: Jacobins and Cordeliers.—In order to render intelligible the further course of the Revolution we must here speak of two clubs, or organizations, which came into prominence about this time, and which were destined to become more powerful than the Assembly itself, and to be the chief instruments in inaugurating the Reign of Terror. These were the societies of the