secretly appealing for help from Austria and Prussia. The neighbouring kingdoms were watching the developments in France with concern. They feared that the rise of common people might bring to an end the rule of monarchs and so they sent their troops to France to contain the revolution. Meanwhile the National Assembly declared war against Austria and Prussia.
On hearing this, people from various parts of France united to fight the foreign forces. A group of people from the place of Marseilles proceeded to Paris by singing the Marseillaise song. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen has a preamble and articles. The first article contains the statement: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The purpose of “political association,” as the Declaration states, should be the preservation of these rights, detailed as liberty, security to property, and resistance to oppression.
It also declares that both sovereignty and law should come from the “general will.” It protects the freedom of speech and of religion and insists on equal treatment before the law. It also asserts that taxes should be paid by all citizens in accordance with their means. The Declaration served as the preamble to the Constitution of . The Age of Revolutions Girondins and Jacobins Lafayette’s constitutional monarchy dominated the political scene for two years.
An attempt by the king to flee Paris in June to join counter-revolutionary armies congregating across the border was thwarted by the local militia. Yet food shortages, price rises and unemployment drove the artisans and traders as well as the labourers to the point of despair. Repression could not stop rising popular upsurge. The moderates who ran the government fell out among themselves.
Within the Jacobin Club a group called the Girondins, also known as the Brissotins (after one of their leaders, Brissot), were less radical than Robespierre and Danton. Though there were differences of opinion among themselves, all of them excepting Robespierre, believed that a war against the foreign powers would help. Robespierre,