The privileges of the nobility and clergy were abolished, and the church property was seized.  The king’s brothers and many of the nobles fled in affright across the frontier, and tried to induce other sovereigns to take up the cause of royalty in France and restore the former order of things.  The emperor of Austria (brother of the French queen) and the king of Prussia entered into a treaty to that effect, at Pilnitz, in 1791.

When this treaty became known, war at once followed.  Robespierre and other self-constituted leaders in Paris held sway for a while, and the most frightful massacres of nobles and priests ensued.  The weak and unfortunate king, who had accepted constitution after constitution, was now deposed and a republic was established.  Affairs had assumed the nature of anarchy and blood, and Lafayette and other moderate men disappeared from the arena.  The king was tried on charge of inviting foreigners to invade France, was found guilty and was beheaded in January, 1793.  His queen soon shared a like fate.  The English troops sent to Flanders were called to fight the French, for the rulers of France had declared war against Great Britain, Spain and Holland in February.

Thomas Jefferson who entered Washington’s cabinet in 1789, had just returned from France, where he had witnessed the uprising of the people against their oppressors.  Regarding the movement as kindred to the late uprising of his own countrymen against Great Britain, it enlisted his warmest sympathies, and he expected to find the bosoms of the people of the United States glowing with feelings like his own.  He was sadly disappointed.  Washington was wisely conservative.  His wisdom saw that the cruelty of the anarchists of Paris was not patriotism, but the worst sort of despotism.  The society of New York, in which some of the leaven of Toryism yet lingered, chilled Jefferson.  He became suspicious of all around him, for he regarded the indifference of the people to the struggles of the French, their old allies, as an evil omen.  Though the Tories of New York were cool toward the French republic from far different motives than Washington, yet the same cause was attributed to both.

Jefferson had scarcely taken his seat as Secretary of State in Washington’s first cabinet before he declared that some of his colleagues held decidedly monarchical views; and the belief became fixed in his mind that there was a party in the United States continually at work, secretly and sometimes openly, for the overthrow of American republicanism.  The idea became a monomania with Jefferson from which he never recovered till his death, more than thirty years afterward.  Jefferson soon rallied under his standard a large party of sympathizers with the French revolutionists.  Regarding Hamilton as the head and front of the monarchical party, he professed to believe that the financial plans of that statesman were designed to enslave the people, and that the rights and liberties of the States and of individuals