But let us not anticipate. The Girondins are still to have a glimmer of joy. The Republic is about to be proclaimed.
[1] The bloody _knife_ of tyranny is lifted against us.
"One of the astonishing things in the French Revolution," says one of the most eminent writers of the democratic school, Edgar Quinet, "is the unexpectedness with which the great changes occur. The most important events, the destruction of the monarchy and the advent of the Republic, came about without any previous warning." The most ardent republicans were royalists, not merely under the old régime, but after 1789, and even up to August 10, 1792. Marat wrote, in No. 374 of the _Ami du Peuple_, February 17, 1791: "I have often been represented as a mortal enemy of royalty, but I claim that the King has no better friend than myself." And he added: "As to Louis XVI. personally, I know very well that his defects are chargeable solely to his education, and that by nature he is an excellent sort of man, whom one would have cited as a worthy citizen if he had not had the misfortune to be born on the throne; but, such as he is, he is at all events the King we want. We ought to thank Heaven for having given him to us. We ought to pray that he may be spared to us." Marat praying, { 385} Marat thanking Heaven! and for whom? For the King. Does not that prove what deep root royalty had taken in France? April 20, 1792, the same Marat bitterly reproached Condorcet with "shamelessly calumniating the Jacobin Club, and perfidiously accusing it of wishing to destroy the monarchy" (_L' Ami du Peuple_, No. 434). June 13, he attacked those who violated the oath taken at the time of the Federation, and said: "To defend the Constitution is the same thing as to be faithful to the nation, the law, and the King" (_L' Ami du Peuple_, No. 448).
During the entire continuance of the Legislative Assembly, when Robespierre, having left the tribune, was pretending to educate the people by means of his journal, what he defended to the utmost was the royal Constitution. Madame Roland relates that after the flight to Varennes, when the prospect of a republic loomed up, possibly for the first time, at a secret meeting, Robespierre, grinning as usual, and biting his nails, asked ironically what a republic might be. In June, 1792, the entire Jacobin Club was royalist still. It proposed to drop Billaud-Varennes, because Billaud-Varennes had dared to put the monarchical principle in question. On the 7th of July following, two months and a half, that is, before the opening of the Convention, at the time of the famous Lamourette Kiss, all the members of the Assembly swore to execrate the Republic forever. Three weeks after September 2, Danton alleged the paucity and the weakness of the republicans, compared with the royalists, as { 386} motives for the massacres. Pétion has said: "When the insurrection of August 10 was undertaken, there were but five men in France who desired a republic."