The supreme moment of the Revolution was, perhaps, the Fête of the Fédération, celebrated on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, on the Champ-de-Mars, by the Parisians and the delegates sent by the army and the departments. The citizens, fearing that the great amphitheatre destined for this celebration would not be prepared in time, armed themselves with spades and picks, and thronged to the location to aid the workmen in this patriotic labor. The king presided; the queen, seated in a gallery of the École Militaire, took the dauphin in her arms and presented him to the people at the moment when his father was taking the oath to employ all the power delegated to him by the constitutional law of the State to maintain the constitution decreed by the Assemblée and accepted by him. The Te Deum was chanted before the immense "altar of the country" erected in the midst of the Champ-de-Mars, and the sun, suddenly breaking through the rain-clouds, illuminated the scene as if the heavens approved. In the evening, and for three days following, the populace danced on the Place de la Bastille.
It was in this year, 1790, that the municipalité or commune of Paris was organized by the law of the 7th of May, which decreed that it should be administered by a maire, or mayor, sixteen administrateurs, thirty-two members of the council, ninety-six notables, a procureur of the commune, and two substitutes. The city was divided into forty-eight sections, which were to be as nearly equal as possible, relative to the number of citizens. The ninety-six notables, the maire, and the forty-eight members of the corps municipal constituted the conseil général of the commune. The municipality had a treasurer, a secrétaire greffier with two assistants, a keeper of the archives, and a librarian.
A very important part in the administration of the State, which became more and more an irregular administration in which the powers of the authorized government were tempered or set aside by popular clamor and bloodshed, was taken by the various clubs. That which was composed of the moderates, who wished to maintain the Constitution of 1791, having for leaders Lafayette and Bailly, took its name from the convent of the Feuillants in which it was lodged, and had separated from the formidable club of the Jacobins. The building of the latter was destroyed by the mob on the 28th of March, 1791, but the sittings were not finally suspended until November 11, 1794. The Feuillants ceased to exist after the 10th of August, 1792. The Jacobins, also named from the convent in which it held its sittings, had been the club Breton, and had left Versailles at the same period as the government. At first under the influence of moderate men, it gradually came under the sway of Robespierre. Danton presided over that of the Cordeliers, established in the ancient refectory and school of the former convent of that order; there was another turbulent association known as the Amis de la Vérité [friends of the truth]; a ladies' club which published a journal; and even two royalists' clubs, one closed by the police in May, 1790, and the other by a decree of the municipalité in January, 1791.
The Constituante Assemblée held its last sitting on the 30th of September, 1791, having finished its labors on the constitution, and seen it accepted by the king,—apparently restored to a position of security after the unsuccessful attempt of the royal family to escape on the night of the 20th of June. The maire of the city, Bailly, addressed his resignation to the officers of the municipality, and Lafayette resigned the command of the Parisian national guard, "the Revolution being terminated, and the reign of law established," according to a decree of the municipalité of the 1st of October. The Assemblée Legislative, which was to carry on this peaceable government, and to which no members of the Constituante were eligible, held its first sitting on this date. But the new constitution satisfied no one, republicans or monarchists, and the former were divided into numerous factions with very different views,—the Girondins, so named from the eloquent members from the Gironde, who directed the new Assemblée, and who wished to overthrow the royal authority without going to extremes; the extreme republicans, called Montagnards because they occupied the high seats on the left in the Assemblée, and the Feuillants, or constitutional royalists, who sat on the right.
On the 21st of September, 1791, the Assemblée had decreed that every criminal condemned to death should be beheaded, and to facilitate the execution of this law a Doctor Louis drew up a mémoire which he presented to this body on the 20th of the following March, in which he described an instrument of his own construction, and which, after preliminary trials on animals and dead bodies, was finally adopted. Its name was derived from a Doctor Guillotin who, on the 1st of September, 1789, demanded that the sufferings of those condemned to death should be abridged by their execution with a species of machine that had been formerly in use. "With my machine," he said, "I will strike off your head in a twinkling, and without your suffering the slightest pain." This phrase, which provoked the Assemblée to much laughter, was repeated throughout Paris, and when a German mechanic, Schmidt, had constructed on the plans of Doctor Louis an apparatus, it was immediately called the machine à Guillotin, and presently, the guillotine. It was inaugurated on the 25th of April, 1792, in the Place de Grève, upon the person of a highway robber named Jacques Pelletier. "The novelty of the execution increased greatly the number of those whom a barbarous pity brought to view these sorrowful spectacles. This machine was preferred with reason to the other methods of execution; it did not soil the hand of a man with the blood of his fellow-creature."
The new instrument was put to such frequent use in the numerous political executions that it soon acquired a great notoriety, the prisoners jested concerning it, it was called the national razor, the mill of silence, and there were some persons who wore in their ears small representations of it. "In several of the hôtels of Paris, those aristocrats who could not succeed in emigrating killed time with a little guillotine in mahogany which was brought on the table after dessert; there were passed under its axe, successively, little figures or dolls whose heads, made to resemble those of our best magistrates, allowed to escape, as they fell, a reddish liquor resembling blood, from the body, which was a flask. All the guests, especially the ladies, hastened to dip their handkerchiefs in this blood, which proved to be a very agreeable essence of ambergris."
The site of the present Place de la Concorde, in which the guillotine was afterward set up, was embellished with a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XV, by Bouchardon, sculptor in ordinary to his Majesty, inaugurated on the 17th of April, 1763, and, Bouchardon having died, the design was completed by Pigalle, who placed on the marble pedestal four bronze figures typifying Strength, Prudence, Justice, and Love of Country,—supposed to represent the typical qualities of the monarch. Consequently, the Parisians soon had the pleasure of reading on the pedestal the following unofficial couplet:
[Oh! the fine statue! Oh! the beautiful pedestal! The Virtues go afoot, and Vice rides on horseback.] This statue was overthrown on the 11th of August, 1792, and the Place Louis XV became the Place de la Revolution, a stone and plaster figure of Liberty seated, colored to imitate bronze, being set up on the pedestal. On the 26th of October, 1795, it was rebaptized Place de la Concorde; the Restoration restored its name of Louis XV, and the Revolution of 1830, its present name.
A very great majority of the bishops having refused to take the oath to the new constitution civile du clergé, decreed by the Constituante Assemblée, which placed them under the control of the civil authorities, and being strengthened in this refusal by the authority of the Pope, the new Assemblée, by the law of May 24, 1792, directed that as a measure of public security all these priests non assermentés should be banished. The king refused to sanction this measure, and dismissed his Girondist ministers; he sent a secret agent to the foreign coalition menacing the frontiers: in the Assemblée, which allowed its sittings to be constantly interrupted and overawed by irruptions of so-called delegations of the citizens, of the sections, of the national guards, the suspicion and the open denunciation of the court constantly increased. The agitation and violence in the clubs, in the streets, in the journals, augmented from day to day; on the 20th of June an enormous mass of the populace overflowed the Assemblée chamber, broke into the Tuileries, shook their fists in the queen's face, and compelled the king to assume the red cap. A thin, pale young artillery officer, standing on the terrace by the river, watched this mob with indignation. "The wretches!" he exclaimed, "they ought to shoot down the first five hundred;