[4] The Legislative Assembly passed decrees sentencing any priest denounced by twenty citizens to immediate deportation (27 May), dissolving the King's Constitutional Guard, incorrectly alleging that it was manned by aristocrats[5] (29 May), and establishing in the vicinity of Paris a camp of 20,000 fédérés (8 June).

[7] The King's veto of the Legislative Assembly's decrees was published on 19 June, one day before the third anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath, which had inaugurated the Revolution.

Appearing before the crowd, the King put on the bonnet rouge of liberty and drank to the health of the nation, but refused to ratify decrees or to recall the ministers.

The republican mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve, was suspended by the Directory of the Seine département for having neglected to protect the Tuileries Palace on 20 June.

Vergniaud recalled the royal veto, the disorders it had caused in the provinces, and the deliberate inaction of the generals who had opened the way to invasion; and he implied it to the Assembly that Louis XVI came within the scope of this article of the Constitution.

[13] Evading the royal veto on an armed camp, the Assembly had invited National Guards from the provinces, on their way to the front, to come to Paris, ostensibly for 14 July celebrations.

[14] The fédérés set up a central committee and a secret directory that included some of the Parisian leaders and to assure direct contact with the sections.

Vaugeois of Blois, Debesse of The Drome, Guillaume of Caen, and Simon of Strasbourg were names nearly unknown to history: but they were the creators of a movement that shook France[citation needed].

They met at Maurice Duplay's house in the Rue Saint-Honoré, where Robespierre had his lodgings, in a room occupied by their fifth member, Antoine, the mayor of Metz.

On the 27th Pétion, who had been reinstated as Paris mayor by the Assembly on 13 July, permitted a "correspondence office" to be set up in the Hôtel de Ville.

[16] On 1 August came news of a manifesto signed by the Duke of Brunswick, threatening as it did summary justice on the people of Paris if Louis and his family were harmed: "they will wreak an exemplary and forever memorable vengeance, by giving up the city of Paris to a military execution, and total destruction, and the rebels guilty of assassinations, to the execution that they have merited.

From midnight until three o'clock the next morning the old and new, the legal and the insurrectional communes, sat in adjoining rooms at the Town Hall (Hôtel de Ville).

The Insurrectional Commune informed the municipal body, in a formally worded resolution, that they had decided upon its suspension; but they would retain the mayor (Pétion), the prosecutor (Manuel), the deputy-prosecutor (Danton), and the administrators in their executive functions.

He rejected the last-minute advice, not only of Vergniaud and Guadet, now alarmed by a turn of affairs they brought about and also of his loyal old minister Malesherbes, to abdicate the throne.

A plan of defense, drawn up by a professional soldier, had been adopted by the Paris department on 25 June: for it was their official duty to safeguard the Executive Power.

Pétion professed that he had to come to defend the royal family; but at about 2 a.m., hearing himself threatened by a group of royalist gunners, he obeyed summons to the Parliament-house, reported that all precautions had been taken to keep the peace, and retired to the Mairie, where he was confined on the orders of the Insurrectional Commune.

His second act, when a series of bulletins from Blondel, the secretary of the department, made it clear that an attack was imminent, was to persuade Louis to abandon the defense of the palace and to put himself under the protection of the assembly.

But François Chabot reminded him that the assembly could not deliberate in the presence of the King, and Louis retired with his family and ministers into the reporter's box behind the president.

At many places that had been ordered guarded, no resistance was put up at all, like at the Arcade Saint-Jean, the passages of the bridges, alongside the quays, and in the court of the Louvre.

Then the Swiss attacked, stepped over the corpses, seized the cannon, recovered possession of the royal entrance, crossed the Place du Carrousel, and even carried off the guns drawn up there.

Louis, hearing from the manége the sound of firing, wrote on a scrap of paper: "The King orders the Swiss to lay down their arms at once, and to retire to their barracks."

The main body of Swiss Guards fell back through the palace and retreated under fire through the Tuileries Garden at the rear of the building.

[33] Some sought sanctuary in the Parliament House: about sixty were surrounded, taken as prisoners to the Hôtel de Ville, and put to death by the crowd there, beneath the statue of Louis XIV.

[34] The victims of the massacre also included some of the male courtiers and members of the palace staff, although being less conspicuous than the red-coated Swiss Guards others were able to escape.

Eighty-three of these were fédérés, and two hundred and eighty-five members of these were the National Guard: common citizens from every branch of the trading and working classes of Paris, including hair-dressers, harness-makers, carpenters, joiners, house-painters, tailors, hatters, boot-makers, locksmiths, laundry-men, and domestic servants.

Events since 1789 had brought difference and divisions: many had followed the refractory priests; of those who remained loyal to the revolution some criticized 10 August while others stood by, fearing the day's aftermath.

[40] Among the Swiss Guards who survived the insurrection, up to 350 later enlisted in the Revolutionary Army of the First French Republic, while others joined the counter-revolutionaries in the War in the Vendée.

The Assembly appointed a provisional Executive Council and put Gaspard Monge and Pierre Henri Hélène Marie Lebrun-Tondu on it, along with several former Girondin ministers.

"Passive" citizens were admitted to meetings, justices of the peace and police officers dismissed and the assemblée générale of the Section became, in some cases, a "people's court", while a new comité de surveillance hunted down counter-revolutionaries.

The Commune silenced the opposition press, closed the toll gates, and seized a number of refractory priests and aristocratic notables.