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CHAPTER XXIII: French

War had commenced on the part of Austria and Prussia, and the French at first met with some severe checks; but on the advance of the Prussians, the duke of Brunswick published a violent manifesto against the French nation, which did much injury to the cause it advocated. A decree was issued for suspending the king from all his functions, as well as for the immediate convocation of a national convention. He and his family were closely confined in the tower of the Temple; and the commune of Paris, at that time under the control of Danton, Robespierre, and Marat, began its tyrannical reign. Under a pretence that the royalists who were confined in the different prisons were domestic enemies of France, the forms of justice were dispensed with, and they were inhumanly butchered. Royalty was next formally abolished; and it was resolved ere long to bring the king to the scaffold. Meantime two powerful parties appeared in the assembly; the Girondists, or Brissotines, led by Brissot, who were sincere republicans; and the Jacobins, or mountain party, so called from the upper seats which they occupied, acting under Robespierre and his friends, whose sole objects were anarchy and bloodshed.