Page:Lectures on the French Revolution of John Acton.djvu/93

Rh ambitious lawyers, the profligate noblemen, and unfrocked priests who were ruining the country.

In adopting these measures the king did not regard himself as the originator of violence. There had been disturbances in Paris, and at Versailles the archbishop of Paris had been assaulted, and compelled to promise that he would go over to the Assembly. The leader on the other side, Champion de Cicé, archbishop of Bordeaux, came to him, and entreated him not to yield to faction, not to keep a promise extorted by threats. He replied that he had given his word and meant to keep it.

Forty years later Charles X. declared that his brother had mounted the scaffold because, at this juncture, he would not mount his horse. In truth Lewis believed that the deputies, cut off from Paris by visible battalions, would be overawed, that the army of waverers would be accessible to influence, to promises, remonstrances, and rewards, that it would be safer to coerce the Assembly by intimidation than to dissolve it. He had refused to listen to Talleyrand; he still rejected the stronger part of his scheme. By judicious management he hoped that the Assembly might be brought to undo its own usurping and unwarranted work, and that he would be able to recover the position he had taken up on June 23, the last day on which his policy had been that of a free agent.

Necker knew no more than everybody else of the warlike array. On July 7 thirty regiments were concentrated; more were within a few days' march, and the marshal, surrounded by an eager and hurried staff, surveyed his maps of suburban Paris at his headquarters at Versailles.

The peril grew day by day, and it was time for the Assembly to act. They were defenceless, but they relied on the people of Paris and on the demoralisation of the army. Their friends had the command of money, and large sums were spent in preparing the citizens for an armed conflict. For the capitalists were on their side, looking to them to prevent the national bankruptcy which the Court and the nobles were bringing on. And