So it came to pass that, as the Revolution took its shape, a vast combination among the antique species came semi-automatically into existence, pledged to envelop and strangle the rising type of man, a combination, however, which only attained to maturity in 1793, after the execution of the King.  Leopold II, Emperor of Germany, had hitherto been the chief restraining influence, both at Pilnitz and at Paris, through his correspondence with his sister, Marie Antoinette; but Leopold died on March 1, 1792, and was succeeded by Francis II, a fervid reactionist and an obedient son of the Church.  Then caste fused throughout Germany, and Prussia and Austria prepared for war.  Rouerie had returned to Brittany and only awaited the first decisive foreign success to stab the Revolution in the back.  England also was ripening, and the instinct of caste, incarnated in George III, found its expression through Edmund Burke.  In 1790 Burke published his “Reflections,” and on May 6, 1791, in a passionate outbreak in the House of Commons, he renounced his friendship with Fox as a traitor to his order and his God.  Men of Burke’s temperament appreciated intuitively that there could be no peace between the rising civilization and the old, one of the two must destroy the other, and very few of them conceived it to be possible that the enfranchised French peasantry and the small bourgeoisie could endure the shock of all that, in their eyes, was intelligent, sacred, and martial in the world.

Indeed, aristocracy had, perhaps, some justification for arrogance, since the revolt in France fell to its lowest depth of impotence between the meeting at Pilnitz in August, 1791, and the reorganization of the Committee of Public Safety in July, 1793.  Until August, 1792, the executive authority remained with the King, but the court of Louis was the focus of resistance to the Revolution, and even though a quasi-prisoner the King was still strong.  Monarchy had a firm hold on liberal nobles like Mirabeau and Lafayette, on adventurers like Dumouriez, and even on lawyers like Danton who shrank from excessive cruelty.  Had the pure Royalists been capable of enough intellectual flexibility to keep faith upon any reasonable basis of compromise, even as late as 1792, the Revolution might have been benign.  In June, 1792, Lafayette, who commanded the army of the North, came to Paris and not only ventured to lecture the Assembly on its duty, but offered to take Louis to his army, who would protect him against the Jacobins.  The court laughed at Lafayette as a Don Quixote, and betrayed his plans to the enemy.  “I had rather perish,” said the Queen, “than be saved by M. de Lafayette and his constitutional friends.”  And in this she only expressed the conviction which the caste to which she belonged held of their duty.  Cazales protested to the Assembly, “Though the King perish, let us save the kingdom.”  The Archduchess Christina wrote to her sister, Marie Antoinette, “What though he be slain, if we shall triumph,” and Conde, in December, 1790, swore that he would march on Lyons, “come what might to the King.”