n intermittent despotism, for factions
blindly impelled on by enthusiasm, credulity, misery, and fear.[1233]
Like a tame elephant suddenly become wild again, the mob throws off it
ordinary driver, and the new guides who it tolerates perched on its neck
are there simply for show. In future it will move along as it pleases,
freed from control, and abandoned to its own feelings, instincts, and
appetites.--Apparently, there was no desire to do more than anticipate
its aberrations. The King has forbidden all violence; the commanders
order the troops not to fire;[1234] but the excited and wild animal
takes all precautions for insults; in future, it intends to be its own
conductor, and, to begin, it treads its guides under foot.--On the 12th
of July, near noon,[1235] on the news of the dismissal of Necker, a cry
of rage arises in the Palais-Royal; Camille Desmoulins, mounted on
a table, announces that the Court meditates "a St. Bartholomew of
patriots." The crowd embrace him, adopt the green cockade which he has
proposed, and oblige the dancing-saloons and theaters to close in sign
of mourning: they hurry off to the residence of Curtius, and take the
busts of the Duke of Orleans and of Necker and carry them about in
triumph.--Meanwhile, the dragoons of the Prince de Lambesc, drawn up on
the Place Louis-Quinze, find a barricade of chairs at the entrance
of the Tuileries, and are greeted with a shower of stones and
bottles.[1236] Elsewhere, on the Boulevard, before the Hotel
Montmorency, some of the French Guards, escaped from their barracks,
fired on a loyal detachment of the "Royal Allemand."--The alarm bell is
sounding on all sides, the shops where arms are sold are pillaged,
and the Hotel-de-Ville is invaded; fifteen or sixteen well-disposed
electors, who meet there, order the districts to be assembled and
armed.--The new sovereign, the people in arms and in the street, has
declared himself.

The dregs of society at once come to the surface. During the night
between the 12th and 13th of July,[1237] "all the barriers, from the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine to the Faubourg Saint-Honore, besides those of
the Faubourgs Saint-Marcel and Saint-Jacques, are forced and set on
fire." There is no longer an octroi; the city is without a revenue just
at the moment when it is obliged to make the heaviest expenditures; but
this is of no consequence to the mob, which, above all things, wants
to have cheap wine. "Ruffians, armed with pikes and sti