The day Paris overthrew its king
The armed rising of 10 August 1792, when the revolutionary sections of Paris and fédérés from the provinces stormed the Tuileries Palace. The royal family had already taken refuge in the Legislative Assembly, and most of the Swiss Guards defending the palace were killed. The Assembly suspended Louis XVI and called a National Convention, which abolished the monarchy six weeks later.
Also on the day: the Marquis de Mandat, commander of the National Guard, killed at the Hôtel de Ville; the brewer Antoine Joseph Santerre, who took his command; and the mayor, Jérôme Pétion, who had brought the sections' petition against the king to the Assembly a week before.
In April 1792 France declared war on Austria, which Prussia soon joined. The first campaigns went badly, and in Paris defeat was blamed on treason at court. In June Louis XVI vetoed two decrees of the Legislative Assembly — one against the priests who refused the oath to the constitution, one setting up a camp of 20,000 fédérés, National Guards from the provinces, near Paris — and dismissed his Girondin ministers. On 20 June a crowd invaded the Tuileries; the king put on a red cap and drank to the nation, but kept his vetoes. On 11 July the Assembly declared the country in danger.
The fédérés came to Paris anyway, for the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, and many stayed. Those from Brest arrived in late July; on 30 July some 500 men from Marseille marched in singing a new war song written for the Army of the Rhine, which Paris soon named after them: the Marseillaise. At the start of August a declaration by the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Austro-Prussian army, dated 25 July, became known in the capital. It threatened Paris with military punishment and total destruction if the royal family came to the slightest harm. Meant to protect the king, it seemed to prove that he and the enemy were on the same side.
Paris gives itself a new Commune
On 3 August the mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, brought the Assembly a petition from 47 of the city's 48 sections, its districts with their own assemblies, demanding that the king be deposed. The Assembly hesitated, and on 8 August it refused to put on trial General Lafayette, who had denounced the JacobinsGroup: Jacobin Club. The Paris club at the heart of the radical Revolution. Some sections set a deadline: if the Assembly had not acted by the night of 9 August, the tocsin would ring.
Around midnight the bells began to ring the alarm. Commissioners chosen by the sections gathered at the Hôtel de Ville and, in the course of the night, pushed aside the lawful city council: this was the insurrectionary Commune. Early in the morning the Marquis de Mandat, who commanded the National Guard and had organised the palace's defence, was summoned to the Hôtel de Ville; he was arrested there and killed soon after. The brewer Antoine Joseph Santerre, a leader of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, took his command. From the working districts, columns of armed citizens, with the fédérés of Marseille and Brest, set off towards the Tuileries.
The Tuileries was defended by about 900 Swiss Guards, some battalions of the National Guard and a few hundred noblemen who had come to protect the king. In the morning Louis reviewed his defenders in the courtyards and the garden. There were some cheers, but many National Guards, the gunners above all, answered with cries of “Long live the nation!”, and some went over to the insurgents.
Pierre Louis Roederer, the chief law officer of the Paris department, saw that the palace could not be held and urged the king to place himself under the protection of the Assembly.
“Sire, Your Majesty has not five minutes to lose; there is no safety for you except in the National Assembly.”
Louis agreed. With the queen, their two children, his sister Madame Élisabeth and the governess Madame de Tourzel, he crossed the garden under escort to the Manège, the former riding school where the Assembly sat. The family was put in the reporters' box behind the president's chair, a cramped room where they stayed for the rest of the day while the deputies debated and the fighting at the palace could be heard.
Loyal to a king who was no longer there
The king had left without giving his defenders clear orders. When the insurgents poured into the courtyards, some tried to fraternise with the Swiss; then shots were fired, by whom is still disputed, and a Swiss volley cleared the courtyard, leaving many dead. The attackers came back in greater numbers and with cannon. From the Assembly the king sent a written order telling the Swiss to lay down their arms and withdraw to their barracks.
The order left them defenceless. Swiss who tried to retreat across the garden were cut down; others were killed in the palace, on its stairs and in the streets nearby. Of the roughly 900 Swiss at the palace, about 600 died in the fighting or the killing that followed, and some of those taken prisoner died in the September massacres. The attackers lost several hundred killed and wounded. The palace was ransacked. A young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, watched from a shop on the Carrousel; years later, on Saint Helena, he said that none of his battlefields had given him such an impression of heaped dead as the Swiss that day. In Lucerne they are commemorated by a dying lion, pierced by a broken spear and lying over a shield with the lilies of France, carved to a design by Bertel Thorvaldsen and dedicated in 1821.
That same day, with the king listening from his box, the Assembly voted that the head of the executive power was provisionally suspended. It also called for a National Convention, to be elected by almost all adult men, to decide the country's future institutions. A provisional Executive Council of six ministers took over the government; that night the deputies chose Georges Danton, the tribune of the Cordeliers, as Minister of Justice. Real power in Paris, however, now lay largely with the insurrectionary Commune.
The royal family spent three nights in the cells of the old Feuillants convent beside the Assembly. On 13 August the Commune had them taken as prisoners to the Temple, the medieval fortress of the Knights Templar in the Marais. On 21 September the newly elected Convention met and abolished the monarchy. Four months later, on 21 January 1793, Louis was guillotined.
