Status Updates From The Road from Versailles: L...

Amid transports of enthusiasm, and with only seven dissenting votes, war was declared. With a few brief pauses, it would last for twenty-three years.

By the summer of 1791, the attempt to end the Revolution by reviving the idea of an ‘English-style’ monarchy was probably doomed before it began. Yet one ingredient for its success was always needed over and above the support of the Assembly: the acquiescence of the king and queen themselves.

It was a grim irony - the only military offensive against the Parisian people during the entire Revolution had been the work not of the king’s soldiers, but of the revolutionaries themselves.

... La Fayette acted. On his own initiative, he dictated an order claiming that the king had been abducted by enemies of the Revolution, and commanded all good citizens to rescue him.

This sudden radicalization of politics was in large part the work of the Jacobin club, to which most of the left-wing deputies in the assembly belonged.

On the night of 4 August, however, the debate was taken over by a group of radicals. Led by a young left-wing noble, the duc d’Aiguillon, they demanded not just the reform of feudalism but its outright abolition.

...has gone down to posterity as the ‘Ministry of the Hundred Hours.” Yet these hundred hours spanned the outbreak of the French Revolution. To this day, its aims and motive remain shrouded in mystery.

...the third estate decided that it alone spoke for the vast majority of the French people, and on 17 June formally declared itself the National Assembly. By this act alone, it gave birth to representative democracy in Europe.

...he was probably still loyal to the traditional conception of an absolute monarchy tempered by the parlements. But he was no friend of the abuse of royal power; he had seen all too well in Russia where that could lead.