History
For a detailed description of the proceedings of the Legislative Assembly and related events, see The Legislative Assembly and the fall of the French monarchy.
The 27 August 1791 Declaration of Pillnitz already threatened France with attack by its neighbors. With both King Louis XVI and the majority of the legislature favoring war, albeit for different reasons, this led in April 1792 to the first of the French Revolutionary Wars.
In the early days of the Legislative Assembly, the king vetoed many of their radical measures:
- Legislation against the émigrés, passed 9 November 1791 but vetoed by Louis.
- Enforcement of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy: on 29 November 1791 the Assembly decreed that every non-juring clergyman must take the civic oath within eight days, on pain of losing his pension and, if any troubles broke out, of being deported. Louis vetoed this decree as a matter of conscience.
A sparsely populated session of the Legislative Assembly, almost all of them Jacobins, suspended Louis from office and voted that a convention should be summoned to give France a new constitution. At this point, the government of France descended into chaos. The new, anti-monarchical government had no root in law and little hold on public opinion. It could not lean on the Assembly, a mere shrunken remnant, whose days were numbered. It remained dependent on the power which had set it up, the revolutionary Commune of Paris. The Commune could therefore extort what concessions it pleased. It got the custody of the king and his family, who were imprisoned in the Temple. Having obtained an indefinite power of arrest, it soon filled the prisons of Paris. With the invasion of France on 19 August 1792 under the leadership of the Duke of Brunswick, a prison bloodbath ensued, a prelude to the Reign of Terror.
The ensuing elections to the Convention were by almost universal suffrage, but indifference or intimidation reduced the voters to a small number. Many who had sat in the National Constituent Assembly and many more who had sat in the Legislative Assembly were returned. The Convention met on 20 September 1792 and became the new de facto government of France.
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