The day France stopped being a kingdom
On 21 September 1792, at its first public sitting, the newly elected National Convention voted unanimously that royalty was abolished in France. Louis XVI, a prisoner since the fall of the Tuileries six weeks earlier, was now to the revolutionaries simply Louis Capet. The day before, a French army had stopped the Prussians at Valmy; from the next day, 22 September, the Republic counted its years, starting with Year I.
At Valmy the day before: Charles-François Dumouriez, commander of the Army of the North, who fought alongside Kellermann; and the Duke of Brunswick, whose Prussians broke off the attack and turned back.
The storming of the TuileriesEvent: Storming of the Tuileries. The day Paris overthrew its king on 10 August 1792 had brought down Louis XVIFigure: Louis XVI. The king who called a meeting and lost a monarchy in all but name. That same day the Legislative Assembly suspended the king and called a new assembly, a National Convention, to decide how France would be governed. On 13 August the royal family was taken to the Temple, an old fortress-tower in the Marais, as prisoners of the Paris Commune.
The six weeks that followed were among the most frightening of the Revolution. A Prussian-led army under the Duke of Brunswick had crossed the frontier: Longwy surrendered on 23 August and Verdun on 2 September, leaving the road to Paris open. In the first days of September, crowds broke into the city’s prisons and killed well over a thousand inmates, most of them common criminals, in what became known as the September massacres. It was in this atmosphere that France voted. For the first time nearly every adult man had the right to take part, though turnout was low, and in Paris the electors voted aloud, in public.
On 20 September, near the village of Valmy in Champagne, the French armies of Kellermann and Dumouriez met Brunswick’s Prussians. There was hardly any hand-to-hand fighting: the day was an artillery duel in rain and mud. When the Prussian infantry advanced toward the French line on the ridge by Valmy’s windmill, it met steady fire and a shout of “Vive la Nation!”, and Brunswick called the attack off. Losses were light on both sides. But the invasion had stalled, and by the end of October the Prussians had left French soil.
“From this place, and from this day, begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can say that you were there.”
The deputies who had reached Paris, about half of the 749 elected, had met for the first time on the afternoon of the 20th, inside the Tuileries, to check their mandates and elect Jérôme Pétion as their president. On the 21st they took over the Manège, the old riding school beside the Tuileries gardens where the earlier assemblies had sat, and the Legislative Assembly came to an end.
On the motion of DantonFigure: Georges Danton. The orator who called for audacity, then for mercy, the deputies first declared that there could be no constitution but one the people accepted. Then Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, an actor and playwright elected for Paris, moved that royalty be abolished at once. Henri Grégoire, the constitutional bishop of Blois, backed him in words that were quoted for a century:
“Kings are in the moral order what monsters are in the physical order. Courts are the workshop of crime, the hearth of corruption and the den of tyrants. The history of kings is the martyrology of nations.”
A few voices asked for a proper debate first; they were brushed aside. The decree, voted unanimously amid cheering, ran to a single line: “The National Convention unanimously decrees that royalty is abolished in France.”
The decree did not use the word “republic”. That came the next day, 22 September, when the Convention ruled that its acts would from then on be dated “Year I of the French Republic”. On 25 September it declared the Republic “one and indivisible”, an answer to the charge, thrown across the hall, that the GirondinsGroup: Girondins. The deputies who took France to war and lost Paris to the Mountain wanted to break France up into a federation of provinces.
A year later the Republic made its own calendar. Adopted in October 1793, it counted from 22 September 1792: the day after the abolition and, by a coincidence the Convention welcomed, the autumn equinox. That day became 1 Vendémiaire, Year I. France kept the calendar until the end of 1805.
No one had voted for a republic in 1789, and few spoke of one before the flight to VarennesEvent: Flight to Varennes. The king's escape that ended fifty kilometres from safety in 1791. It was not proclaimed in one solemn act: it arrived almost sideways, out of a war, an insurrection and a one-line decree. Its first question was what to do with the former king. The Girondins hesitated; the Montagnards of the Jacobin ClubGroup: Jacobin Club. The Paris club at the heart of the radical Revolution wanted him tried and punished. The quarrel ran through the autumn and ended with the trial that opened in December and the scaffold of 21 January 1793Event: Execution of Louis XVI. The morning the Republic beheaded its king. The First Republic lasted until 1804, when NapoleonFigure: Napoleon Bonaparte. The officer the Revolution made, and the ruler who ended it became emperor.
