[Illustration:  The Palace of Versailles]

As soon as the king was thrown into prison and the people of France took charge of their government, a panic arose throughout the courts of Europe.  Other kings, alarmed over the fate of the king of France, began to fear for themselves.  They, too, had taxed and oppressed their subjects.  They felt that this revolt of the French people must be put down, and the king of France set back upon his throne, otherwise the same kind of revolt might take place in their countries as well.  Accordingly, the king of Prussia, the king of England, and the emperor of Austria all made war on the new French Republic.  They proposed to overwhelm the French by force of arms and compel them to put back their king upon his throne.

Of course, if the soldiers in the armies of these kings had known what the object of this war was, they would have had very little sympathy with it, but for years they had been trained to obey their officers, who in turn obeyed their generals, who in turn obeyed the orders of the kings.  The common soldiers were like sheep, in that they did not think for themselves, but followed their leaders.  They were not allowed to know the truth concerning this attack on France.  They did not know the French language, and had no way of finding out the real situation, for there were no public schools in these countries, and very few people knew how to read the newspapers.  The newspapers, moreover, were controlled by the governments, and were allowed to print only what favored the cause of the kings.

The French, however, knew the meaning of the war.  A young French poet from Strasbourg on the Rhine wrote a wonderful war song which was first sung in Paris by the men of Marseilles, and thus has come to be called “La Marseillaise.”  It is the cry of a crushed and oppressed people against foreign tyrants who would again enslave them.  It fired the French army with a wonderful enthusiasm, and untrained as they were, they beat back the invaders at the hard-fought field of Valmy and saved the French Republic.

[Illustration:  The Reign of Terror]

The period known as “the reign of terror” now began in earnest.  A faction of the extreme republican party got control of the government, and kept it by terrorizing the more peaceable citizens.  The brutal wrongs which nobles had put upon the lower classes for so many hundred years were brutally avenged.  The king was executed, as were most of the nobles who had not fled from the country.  For three or four years, the gutters of the principal French cities ran blood.  Then the better sense of the nation came to the front and the people settled down.  A fairly good government was organized, and the executions ceased.  Still the kings of Europe would not recognize the new republic.  There was war against France for the next twenty years on the part of England, and generally two or three other countries as well.