into money, promissory notes, or assignats, were issued.  But, as coin was scarce, these were not worth nearly their professed value, and the general distress was thus much increased.  The other oath the great body of the clergy utterly refused, and they were therefore driven out of their benefices, and became objects of great suspicion to the democrats.  All the old boundaries and other distinctions between the provinces were destroyed, and France was divided into departments, each of which was to elect deputies, in whose assembly all power was to be vested, except that the king retained a right of veto, i.e., of refusing his sanction to any measure.  He swore on the 13th of August, 1791, to observe this new constitution.

4.  The Republic.—­The Constituent Assembly now dissolved itself, and a fresh Assembly, called the Legislative, took its place.  For a time things went on more peacefully.  Distrust was, however, deeply sown.  The king was closely watched as an enemy; and those of the nobles who had emigrated began to form armies, aided by the Germans, on the frontier for his rescue.  This enraged the people, who expected that their newly won liberties would be overthrown.  The first time the king exercised his right of veto the mob rose in fury; and though they then did no more than threaten, on the advance of the emigrant army on the 10th of August, 1792, a more terrible rising took place.  The Tuilleries was sacked, the guards slaughtered, the unresisting king and his family deposed and imprisoned in the tower of the Temple.  In terror lest the nobles in the prisons should unite with the emigrants, they were massacred by wholesale; while, with a vigour born of the excitement, the emigrant armies were repulsed and beaten.  The monarchy came to an end; and France became a Republic, in which the National Convention, which followed the Legislative Assembly, was supreme.  The more moderate members of this were called Girondins from the Gironde, the estuary of the Garonne, from the neighbourhood of which many of them came.  They were able men, scholars and philosophers, full of schemes for reviving classical times, but wishing to stop short of the plans of the Jacobins, of whom the chief was Robespierre, a lawyer from Artois, filled with fanatical notions of the rights of man.  He, with a party of other violent republicans, called the Mountain, of whom Danton and Marat were most noted, set to work to destroy all that interfered with their plans of general equality.  The guillotine, a recently invented machine for beheading, was set in all the chief market-places, and hundreds were put to death on the charge of “conspiring against the nation.”  Louis XVI. was executed early in 1793; and it was enough to have any sort of birthright to be thought dangerous and put to death.