The revolutionary gears finally went into motion. The alarm was beaten, the tocsin was sounded and on the peaceful night of 9-10 August the people of the faubourgs, grabbing their rifles, hitching their cannons, prepared to deliver combat at dawn.

These men weren’t animated by narrow and immediate interests. The workers, the proletarians who were entering combat alongside the boldest section of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, didn’t formulate any economic demands. Even when they had fought against the hoarders and monopolists who had increased the price of sugar and other goods, the workers of Paris said: ‘It’s not bonbons we’re demanding. We don’t want to leave the Revolution in the hands of a new selfish and oppressive caste.’

It was above all else full political freedom, full democracy that they demanded. This would certainly provide guarantees for their interests, their wages, and their very existence.

While on 14 July and 5 and 6 October it was against royal despotism that the united workers and bourgeoisie fought, on that 10 August they fought both against royalty and against that portion of the bourgeoisie that had rallied to it. In bringing down the king they would at the same time take their revenge on the bourgeois moderantistes who had, on the Champ de Mars in July 1791, fired on the people in order to defend royalty.

And the red flag, which was the flag of martial law, the bloody symbol of bourgeois repression, was taken over by the revolutionaries of 10 August. It was more than a symbol of vengeance. It wasn’t the banner of reprisals: it was the splendid flag of a new power conscious of its right, and this is why since then, whenever the proletariat was to affirm its strength and its hopes, it would be the red flag it would unfurl. In Lyon under Louis-Philippe the workers, ground down by hunger, unfurled the black flag, the flag of poverty and despair. But after February 1848, when the proletarians wanted to illustrate the new revolution through a symbol of their own, they asked the provisional government to adopt the red flag.

On the night of 9 August, around midnight, the sound of the tocsin, the beating of the drums, alerted the legislators scattered around Paris that a great movement was being prepared. They hastily went to the Assembly, and at midnight the session was opened. It was a session of expectation. The Assembly was resolved to keep an eye on events, but not to intervene directly in the fight between the people and the king.

Around dawn, at the moment when from all the faubourgs, from Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel, the federals and workers formed in columns and marched on the Tuileries, the assembly of sections substituted itself for the legal Commune and organised itself into a revolutionary commune. This was a daring and perhaps decisive move, for through it the fighting people had behind it the support of an organised public force. And the revolutionary Commune spread doubt and confusion in the ranks of the enemy.

In this way it preserved the freedom of popular action. And it also clearly showed from the beginning of this great day what its true character was. This was not a summoning of the king. It was rather a question of a change in power, and the people installed itself as sovereign at the Hôtel de Ville in order to drive from the Tuileries the sovereignty of treason.

How would the legislative assembly receive this new power, the revolutionary expression of the people’s will? It was informed of the events in the Hôtel de Ville around seven AM by a complaining deputation from the former municipality. But what was to be done? Several deputies proposed repealing the new power as illegal. But the fight around the chateau had already begun, and the proposal failed. The new power acted and it decisively backed the people’s efforts.

The resistance of the Tuileries was immediately disorganised. The court had lost every legal point of support; the National Guard no longer gave the Swiss Guards or the gentlemen the least assistance. The king became fully aware of this at about six o’clock when he briefly left the castle to review the positions at the Carrousel and the Tuileries. The artillerymen of the National Guard received him either with a gloomy silence or with shouts of ‘Long Live the Nation!’

Louis XVI had the stinging, fatal sensation that he was alone against the people. He returned to the chateau in a state of despair. Little by little the attackers were arriving and beginning, though at first half-heartedly, to invest the chateau via the Carrousel and the Tuileries. Would the king and queen, half abandoned, be able to support the risk of a siege? The disquiet was great at the Assembly. What would happen if, in the fury of the assault, the king and queen were massacred? Wouldn’t France, which on 20 June had already been moved to support the threatened king, rise up against those who would have killed him, against those as well who, through their inaction, would have been accomplices in the murder? Several deputies requested that the Assembly call for the king to come to it. But doing this meant not only protecting the king’s life; it also in a way covered his power with national protection. It also perhaps meant turning the revolutionary forces against the Assembly itself, now appearing to be in solidarity with the king.

The Assembly understood this and didn’t surrender itself. A proposal that was less clear and which exposed the Assembly less was formulated. It wouldn’t call for the king to come, but it would let him know that it was assembled and that if he wished he could go to it. But this too meant tying the Assembly’s responsibility to that of the king. It hesitated again, despite the visible emotion of Cambon, who shouted that the Assembly’s inaction would be at least as dangerous as action, and that it was necessary to ‘save the glory of the people,’ that is, preserve the king’s life. Since the Assembly continued to hesitate and remained immobile, stagnant in the storm, the king decided to leave the Tuileries and go to the Assembly.

Via the central alley of the garden, and then via the alley of the Tuileries already scattered with dead leaves after an arid and hot summer, the royal family arrived with difficulty, passing through a half-uncertain half-hostile crowd in order to reach the door of the Assembly. Louis XVI was never again to return to the home of kings.

Was it a king who was coming to the Assembly, one of the powers of the constitution come to join with the other? Or was it an outlaw seeking asylum at the altar of the law, which his treason had vainly attempted to overthrow? For the Assembly it was a king, or at least the shadow of the king, and twenty-four deputies, those closest to the door, advanced ahead of him in the growing tumult and confusion.

When the king had entered and, in accordance with protocol, taken his place alongside the president, he said to the Assembly: ‘I have come here today to avoid a great crime and I will always feel myself and my family to be safe amidst the representatives of the nation.’ Royalty’s ghost thus continued to live.

After the departure of the royal family the crowd investing Tuileries had grown. The federals, the people of the faubourgs with bayonets, pikes, and cannons arrived, swelling the crowd. Was it impossible to avoid a bloody collision? The Assembly hastily addressed a proclamation to the people, but who would see to its taking hold? The former municipality had been dissolved and was powerless. Thuriot openly proposed to the Assembly that it recognise the new municipality, the revolutionary Commune: ‘I request that all the commissioners who will be going to the city be authorised to confer with all those in whose hands resides, either legally or illegally, any form of authority and who have at least apparent public confidence.’

The Assembly adopted Thuriot’s motion and it was thus through the Commune that the first sliver of the republican revolution entered the still-monarchical constitution of 1791.

A few minutes later the Assembly decided to allow the revolutionary Commune the at least provisional choice of a new commander for the National Guard. In the meanwhile, in a Tuileries devoid of the king, it seemed the watchword of disarming was given. From the windows the Swiss shouted words of friendship to the people. The door opening onto the grand staircase opened and the people of the faubourgs and the federals joyously rushed through them. But suddenly, from every step of the staircase a terrible fusillade answered the confident Revolution. Was this an abominable trap and trickery? Or was it that in the anarchy of a small army suddenly abandoned by its king and issued contradictory orders there was an awful misunderstanding?

A horrible cry of pain, death, and anger rose from the people as they were pushed back. They aimed their cannons at the walls, their rifles at the windows from which the Swiss’ muskets crackled. The buildings built against the palace walls were set on fire and there could be heard the sound of the cannon, deep, wrathful, and gloomy; the piercing and irritated noise of the fusillade, the crackling of the flames lightened by the breaking day; a clamour, a tumult of destruction and combat filled the courtyard of the Carrousel and echoed in the Assembly. At around nine o’clock a cry of panic was heard at the door of the meeting hall: ‘The Swiss have arrived. The room has been forced.’

The frightened Assembly believed that royalty’s mercenary soldiers were going to lay hands on them; that treasonous royalty, after having vanquished the people, was going to strike the people’s representatives and that there was nothing left for it but to die and in this way leave to new generations the heroic memory of an immortal protest in support of liberty.

At the first cannon shots all the citizens in the tribunes rose: ‘Long Live the National Assembly! Long Live the Nation! Long Live Liberty and Equality!’ The Assembly immediately decided that all the deputies would remain in their places and await their fate, to save the Fatherland or die for it.

‘Here come the Swiss,’ the citizens on the tribunes shouted again, who were both sublime in their courage and confused by the uncertain rumours. ‘We won’t abandon you; we’ll die with you!’

The patriots’ fears didn’t last long. The Swiss who’d been shouted about had already been vanquished. They retreated from the chateau forced by the people via the Tuileries gardens; they fell under the balls, the pikes, and the bayonets of the victors.

During this drama, what was the king’s state of mind? This is an impenetrable mystery. Did he briefly hope that the castle would defend itself and that the Revolution would be defeated? He watched the Assembly’s session from the stenographer’s box. The cries that announced the arrival of the Swiss doubtless echoed joyously in his heart. It’s also possible that when he heard the cannons, heard the crackling of the fusillade, he regretted not having remained among his soldiers to inspire them with his presence. Choudieu, who observed him closely, affirmed that as long as the combat continued his face remained impassive, and that he only showed emotion when the defeat of his final defenders became known to him. Too late he ordered the Swiss to cease fire. The victorious people invaded the Tuileries, dug around it from the cellar to the roof, and men covered with powder or with bloody faces entered the assembly bearing papers, gold coins, or the queen’s jewels and shouted: ‘Long Live the Nation!’

This was the victory of the Revolution and the fatherland. It was also the victory of the revolutionary Commune. It was the latter that, by substituting itself for the legal commune, burned the bridges behind the advancing revolution. It had to win or perish.

On the morning of August 10, and with the chateau hardly forced, the Commune presented itself to the Assembly, not to request the legal confirmation of a power it owed the Revolution itself, but on the contrary to dictate laws. In its name Huguenin, accompanied by Léonard Bourdon, Truchon, Berieux, Vigaud, and Cellier, said the following:

‘It is the new magistrates of the people who present themselves at your bar. The new dangers to the Fatherland provoked our election; the circumstances counselled it and our patriotism will render us worthy of it. The people, finally having had enough, for the past four years the playthings of the perfidies and intrigues of the Court, felt that it was time to stop the Empire at the brink of the abyss. Legislators: all that is left is to back up the people: we come here in its name to work out with you measures for public safety.

‘This day is the triumph of civic virtues. The people who have sent us to you charged us with declaring to you that it again invests you with its confidence. But at the same time it has charged us with declaring to you that it only recognises the French people, your sovereign and ours, gathered in primary assemblies as fit to judge the extraordinary measures which necessity and resistance to oppression have led it.’

The Assembly didn’t protest against the victorious Commune that claimed to treat it as an equal and that invested it again in the name of the people, but only so that it convoke the people itself.

It was this revolutionary Commune that the Assembly charged with transmitting to the people decrees inviting them to calm. On that same day, it rendered the decisive decrees without debate.

With the first it invited the French people to form a National Convention, deciding that the method and time of its convocation would be decided the next day. At the same time it declared the head of the executive power provisionally suspended from his functions.

With the second it declared that the ministers in place did not have its confidence and it decided that ministers would be provisionally named by the National Assembly and by individual election. They could not be taken from within that body.

Finally, with a third group of decrees it decided that the decrees already rendered that hadn’t been sanctioned, and that the decrees to be rendered which couldn’t be because of the suspension of the king, would nevertheless bear the name of laws and would be in force throughout the kingdom. It was, in summary, the end of the monarchy.

This Convention, without it having yet been clearly announced, meant the arrival of the republic. It was above all the arrival of democracy. No more cens, no more privileges, no more harmful and bourgeois distinctions between active and passive citizens. Upon the report of Jean Debry, deputy from the Aisne, in the name of the Committee of Twelve, the Assembly voted without debate at the session of 10 August that all citizens aged 25 were electors. On 12 August the Convention again expanded the popular base, lowering the age of the electorate from 25 to 21. So universal suffrage was founded.

On 11 August Louis XVI had been taken with his family to the Luxembourg palace and from there, a few days later, to the Temple. He was nothing but a prisoner.