oung men (most of them
belonging to the professional classes) made very violent speeches and
when the newspapers carried these orations to Berlin and Vienna, the
King of Prussia and the Emperor decided that they must do something
to save their good brother and sister. They were very busy just then
dividing the kingdom of Poland, where rival political factions had
caused such a state of disorder that the country was at the mercy of
anybody who wanted to take a couple of provinces. But they managed to
send an army to invade France and deliver the king.

Then a terrible panic of fear swept throughout the land of France. All
the pent-up hatred of years of hunger and suffering came to a horrible
climax. The mob of Paris stormed the palace of the Tuilleries. The
faithful Swiss bodyguards tried to defend their master, but Louis,
unable to make up his mind, gave order to "cease firing" just when the
crowd was retiring. The people, drunk with blood and noise and cheap
wine, murdered the Swiss to the last man, then invaded the palace, and
went after Louis who had escaped into the meeting hall of the Assembly,
where he was immediately suspended of his office, and from where he was
taken as a prisoner to the old castle of the Temple.

But the armies of Austria and Prussia continued their advance and the
panic changed into hysteria and turned men and women into wild beasts.
In the first week of September of the year 1792, the crowd broke
into the jails and murdered all the prisoners. The government did not
interfere. The Jacobins, headed by Danton, knew that this crisis meant
either the success or the failure of the revolution, and that only
the most brutal audacity could save them. The Legislative Assembly was
closed and on the 21st of September of the year 1792, a new National
Convention came together. It was a body composed almost entirely of
extreme revolutionists. The king was formally accused of high treason
and was brought before the Convention. He was found guilty and by a
vote of 361 to 360 (the extra vote being that of his cousin the Duke of
Orleans) he was condemned to death. On the 21st of January of the year
1793, he quietly and with much dignity suffered himself to be taken to
the scaffold. He had never understood what all the shooting and the fuss
had been about. And he had been too proud to ask questions.

Then the Jacobins turned against the more moderate element in the
convention, the Girondists, called after the