In the midst of this the Court, recovering from the first blow of the taking of the Bastille, began to plot counterrevolution, and devised a scheme for getting the King away from Versailles to Rouen or elsewhere, and putting him at 140 the head of a reactionary army and an opposition reactionary Assembly. A banquet given by the Court to a regiment supposed to be loyal, practically exposed this plot, and amidst all the terror and irritation which it gave rise to, a popular rising headed by the famous march of the women on Versailles came to the aid of the Assembly, and forced the King to go to Paris and take up his abode at the Tuileries. In this affair the mere Sansculotte element became very obvious. It was stirred up by the artificial famine caused by the financial and stock-jobbing operations of the Court, and of private persons, the popular middle-class minister, Necker, having been the immediate cause of it by his issue of small paper money. It was opposed by the bourgeois soldiery, the National Guard, headed by Lafayette, who was the embodiment of the Constitutional Revolution. This was followed by a further flight of the noblesse and higher bourgeoisie from France, which flight, as it were, gave a token of the complete victory of Constitutionalism over the Court party.
For some time the King, or rather the 141 Queen and Court carried on a struggle against the victorious middle classes, apparently unconscious of its extreme hopelessness; while the bourgeois government for its part was quite prepared to put down any popular movement, all the more as it now had a formidable army in the shape of the National Guard. But by this time there had arisen a kind of People’s Parliament. outside the Assembly, the famous Jacobins Club and the Cordelier Club to wit, and the sky was darkening over for triumphant Constitutionalism.
That triumph was celebrated by the great feast of the Champ de Mars, 13th July 1790, when the King in the presence of delegates from all France swore to the Constitution. But Royalist plots went on all the same, and settled down at last into a fixed conclusion of the flight of the