France was permeated with archaic thought which disorganized the emerging society until it seemingly had no cohesion.  To the French emigrant on the Rhine that society appeared like a vile phantom which had but to be exorcised to vanish.  And the exorcism to which he had recourse was threats of vengeance, threats which before had terrified, because they had behind them a force which made them good.  Torture had been an integral part of the old law.  The peasant expected it were he insubordinate.  Death alone was held to be too little to inspire respect for caste.  Some frightful spectacle was usually provided to magnify authority.  Thus Bouille broke on the wheel, while the men were yet alive, every bone in the bodies of his soldiers when they disobeyed him; and for scratching Louis XV, with a knife, Damiens, after indescribable agonies, was torn asunder by horses in Paris, before an immense multitude.  The French emigrants believed that they had only to threaten with a similar fate men like Kellermann and Hoche to make them flee without a blow.  What chiefly concerned the nobles, therefore, was not to evolve a masterly campaign, but to propound the fundamental principles of monarchy, and to denounce an awful retribution on insurgents.

By the middle of July, 1792, the Prussians were ready to march, and emperors, kings, and generals were meditating manifestoes.  Louis sent the journalist Mallet du Pan to the Duke of Brunswick, the commander-in-chief, to assist him in his task.  On July 24, and on August 4, 1792, the King of Prussia laid down the law of caste as emphatically as had the Parliament of Paris some twenty years before.  On July 25, the Duke of Brunswick pronounced the doom of the conquered.  I come, said the King of Prussia, to prevent the incurable evils which will result to France, to Europe and to all mankind from the spread of the spirit of insubordination, and to this end I shall establish the monarchical power upon a stable basis.  For, he continued in the later proclamation, “the supreme authority in France being never ceasing and indivisible, the King could neither be deprived nor voluntarily divest himself of any of the prerogatives of royalty, because he is obliged to transmit them entire with his own crown to his successors.”

The Duke of Brunswick’s proclamation contained some clauses written expressly for him by Mallet du Pan, and by Limon the Royalist.

If the Palace of the Tuileries be forced, if the least violence be offered to their Majesties, if they are not immediately set at liberty, then will the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Germany inflict “on those who shall deserve it the most exemplary and ever-memorable avenging punishments.”

These proclamations reached Paris on July 28, and simultaneously the notorious Fersen wrote the Queen of France, “You have the manifesto, and you should be content.”  The court actually believed that, having insulted and betrayed Lafayette and all that body of conservative opinion which might have steadied the social equilibrium, they could rely on the fidelity of regiments filled with men against whom the emigrants and their allies, the Prussians, had just denounced an agonizing death, such as Bouille’s soldiers had undergone, together with the destruction of their homes.