King to the north-eastern frontier, where were the remains of what regular army could be depended on, with the threatening Austrian troops at their back. As a trial the King attempted at Easter to get as far as St. Cloud, announcing his determination as a matter of course; but 142 he was stopped by a mixed crowd not wholly Sansculotte, though Lafayette did his best to help royalty turned quasi-constitutional, in the pinch. At last on the 20th June, the King and the royal family made the great attempt, in which they would most probably have succeeded, if they had not hampered themselves with all kinds of absurd appliances of wealth and luxury, and if they had had any idea of the kind of stake they were playing for. As it was in spite of, or perhaps partly because of, their having arranged for various detachments of troops to meet them on the way as escorts, they were stopped at the little town of Varennes and brought back again to Paris. It was a token of the progress of ideas, that by this time the King’s presence in Paris was looked at from a twofold point of view. By the pure constitutionalists as the necessary coping stone to the Constitution, without which it could not stand; but by the revolutionists as a hostage held by the French people in the face of hostile reactionary Europe. Also now the word Republic was first put forward, and at 143 last it became clear that there were two parties amongst those who were making the Constitution,— the constitutional Royalists and the Republicans.
The latter were supported by the people, who flooded the Assembly with petitions for the deposition of the King; the Assembly decided against it on the ground of the legal fiction familiar to the anti-Royalist party in our Parliamentary wars, that the King had been carried off by evil and traitorous councillors. But the split between the parties was emphasised by bloodshed. A Jacobin petition lay for signature on the altar of the Country in the Champ de Mars, and great crowds were about it signing and looking on. In the evening Lafayette marched on the Champ de Mars with a body of National Guards, proclaimed martial law by the hoisting of the red flag, according to the recently made enactment, and finally fired on the people, killing many of them.