Louis xvi french revolution biography sample

In June , they attempted to escape, which was considered proof of Louis' treasonable dealings with foreign powers. He was forced to accept a new constitution, thereby establishing a constitutional monarchy. Nonetheless, against a background of military defeat by Austria and Prussia, the revolutionary leadership was becoming increasingly radicalised.

In September , the new National Convention abolished the monarchy and declared France a republic. Louis was found guilty of treason and executed at the guillotine on 21 January Marie Antoinette was executed nine months later. Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. Edited by Alfred d'Arneth and Jules Flammermont.

Paris, Beales, Derek. Joseph II. Cambridge, U. Girault de Coursac, Pierette. Hardman, John. London, New Haven , Jordan , David P. Berkeley and Los Angeles , Lewis-Beck, M. Hildreth, and A. Analyzes voting in Louis XVI's trial. Murphy, Orville T. Albany, N. Price, Munro. Preserving the Monarchy: The Comte de Vergennes, — New York , Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. F rance's King Louis XVI started life in the majesty of the French royal court and ended it with a horrible death among the jeering crowds of Paris.

History has often portrayed Louis XVI as simple-minded and cowardly. But some historians con tend that Louis XVI was a dynamic, dedicated leader who tried to act in the interests of the French people during very turbu lent times, and was an unfortunate victim of circumstances. Their ancestors had ruled France since Louis-Auguste's father was the son of King.

Louis XV. Louis-Auguste had three brothers and two sisters who lived beyond infancy.

Louis xvi french revolution biography sample

When the ten-year-old heir to the throne got ill and died of a respiratory disease in the spring of , the family was devastated. Louis-Auguste, next in line to become king, was a fair-skinned, rather awkward boy with blue eyes and heavy eyebrows. He was encouraged by his tutors to be reserved and restrained, because those were considered good traits for a future king.

All his life, Louis-Auguste enjoyed riding and hunting, and worked for hours making keys and locks and drawing maps. He does not seem to have been overly proud, despite his royal upbringing. In his biography, Louis and Antoinette, Vincent Cronin called Louis-Auguste "that rare creature, a prince with a poor opinion of himself. Louis-Auguste's parents died of respiratory disease in the mids.

On April 27, , after his grandfather's death from smallpox, nineteen-year-old Louis-Auguste became the King of France. He was henceforth known as Louis XVI. The Holy Roman Empire dissolved in The slim, blue-eyed, blonde Marie-Antoinette, a bride at sixteen, was mostly interested in fashion, the theater, and court gossip. The French people distrusted her devotion to her native land, Austria, and blamed France's financial problems on her free-spending ways.

The couple had three children. They were Marie-Therese, born in ; Louis-Joseph, a much-loved oldest son who was born in and died in ; and Louis-Charles, who was born in A French king was called an absolute monarch, but his powers were really rather limited. He directed and paid for adventures in foreign lands and declared war if necessary to preserve the country.

He made decisions together with a State Council. His ability to impose taxes was limited by the group of thirteen courts known as the parlements pronounced PARL-mahns. The parlements were made up of nobles, who opposed any of Louis's efforts to take away their tax-free status. As a result, the tax burden fell on the people who were least able to pay.

Heavy taxes on the common people had caused widespread misery. Gradually the peasants the common people became angry with the ruling class, the cause of their unhappiness. Between and , Louis XVI had several finance directors who tried to manage the treasury of France. Each in his turn proposed various financial reforms, but finally concluded that France's privileged classes must be taxed in order to prevent the country from going bankrupt.

The privileged classes included members of the royal court, the nobles, members of parlements, and Roman Catholic clergymen. Louis XVI repeatedly bowed to pressure from those people and rejected any talk of taxing them. After the king rejected his proposals, each finance minister was forced to resign. During this period of revolving finance directors, Louis XVI approved limited reform measures.

For example, he approved the taxing of rich people for road repairs, rather than forcing the common people to repair them for free in their spare time. The reforms led to a brief period of popularity for Louis. But the common people continued to simmer with resentment. They lived lives of grinding poverty, and they resented being forced to send their sons to serve in the military.

Chaos erupted in France in Bad weather had ruined the harvest and people were starving. The peasants were forced to pay higher and higher taxes and make large payments to the Roman Catholic Church. Punishment for crimes was very harsh. For example, if a man were caught killing a gamebird to feed his starving family, he was executed. In some people who were interested in solving France's financial crisis pressured Louis XVI to call a meeting of the Estates General to discuss the country's problems.

France had three social classes, known as estates. A meeting of all three classes had not taken place for years. The king at first refused to call such a meeting, but public pressure forced him to do so. He ordered the meeting for May The man who was then finance director, Brienne pronounced bree-EN , publicly asked all Frenchmen to send him suggestions on how best to conduct the Estates General meeting.

This kind of free speech had never been allowed in France before. Instead of offering useful suggestions, though, people took the opportunity to insult Brienne and the royal family. The king was angry about this and dismissed Brienne in August But it was too late to stop France's peasants from expressing their displeasure with their lives.

It was a huge, magnificent structure where the French royal family lived in great luxury, surrounded by ten thousand relatives, nobleman, and an enormous staff of servants. There the Third Estate commoners formed itself into a National Assembly. In June the National Assembly vowed to stay together until it produced a new constitution and saw it firmly established in France.

But Louis XVI resisted the assembly's demands for political independence, equal rights, and freedom for all French citizens. On June 23 he threatened to dismiss the Assembly at once if it did not take back its claims to national power. The assembly then rose up and declared that the king no longer could dismiss them, because they now held the power in France.

They vowed to leave "only at the point of a bayonet. But Louis's troops refused to attack their countrymen. A few days later the king, fearing bloodshed, backed down and ordered all three estates to work together to draw up a new constitution. On July 11, , Louis XVI dismissed finance minister Jacques Neckar, who had urged him to make many reforms that would help the peasants.

By that time, the king had surrounded Paris and the Palace of Versailles with 25, Swiss and German mercenaries pronounced MER-sa-naireez; soldiers for hire to protect him in case of an uprising. The uprising began early on July 14, , when Parisian peasants armed themselves with pitchforks and shovels to defend against a rumored assault on them by French and foreign soldiers.

Soon realizing that these weapons were inadequate, the revolutionaries set out to find guns of their own. They seized 30, muskets from an old military hospital, but they still needed gunpowder. The Bastille was Paris's ancient prison, a gray stone structure with nine-foot-thick walls and high gun towers that stood as a symbol of France's oppressive government.

For centuries, people had been sent to serve time in the prison, whether or not they were convicted of any crimes. On July 14, an angry crowd forced its way into the Bastille, demanding gunpowder. Arguments between the people and Bastille officials continued throughout the day, and tensions mounted. Finally, in the afternoon, soldiers inside the Bastille fired their cannons and hundreds of peasants were killed or wounded.

The crowd went wild. Hungry for revenge, they rampaged through the Bastille, destroying whatever they could find and killing some of the soldiers. The building was torn apart, stone by stone. Today, French people throughout the world commemorate the July 14 anniversary of the storming of the Bastille as Bastille Day, a celebration of French independence.

After this explosion of violence, many nobles and members of the royal family escaped from France. But the king was trapped at the Palace of Versailles and could not escape. The document declared that "men are born and remain free and equal in rights. The assembly declared that King Louis must share his power with them and with the Parlements.

No longer could he dictate laws and have them put in place unchallenged. Now laws could be made only through agreement with the other branches of government. Likewise, laws could not be enacted by the assembly without the king's approval. Louis XVI claimed that he shared the assembly's belief in a republican form of government, but few people were convinced of his sincerity.

A republic is a government with a chief of state who is not a monarch. Supreme power rests in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote. On October 15, , a group of rowdy citizens from Paris broke into the Palace of Versailles to bring their complaints directly to the king. They were particularly angry about the widespread lack of food.

They demanded that Louis XVI return to Paris, where he could keep himself informed about their plight and show his dedication to changing the situation. The Assembly moved there with him. After the king's move to Paris, his subjects' hostility abated. The fall harvest turned out to be better than expected, and people felt empowered by what they had accomplished in demolishing the Bastille and bringing their king back to Paris.

For a while they calmed down and peace descended on France. The National Assembly prepared a constitution that called for power to be divided between the king and the Assembly. It contained a system of checks and balances, like that of the U. Constitution, to make sure one department of government did not exercise too much power over the others.

The assembly introduced other measures such as freedom of speech and open trade. It also demanded that members of the clergy take oaths of loyalty to the Revolution. During the years to , the Assembly made adjustments to the new constitution. They felt like prisoners. They hated the gloomy Tuileries Palace, where commoners often pressed up against the windows to observe the royal family's activities.

Marie-Antoinette urged Louis to go to her native Austria and bring back an army to destroy the revolutionaries and take back his monarchy. In , the king and queen tried to flee the country but were caught and forced to return to Paris. With his capture, the king's hopes of reestablishing his authority were dashed. The members of the National Assembly publicly forgave the king for his attempt at escape.

They had worked hard at coming up with a constitution, and that document said that they had to share power with the king. Some assembly members feared that without a king at their head, commoners might get out of hand and destroy the entire social system of France. On September 14, , the king signed the new constitution, and swore his allegiance to it.

It appeared that the revolution was over and France could look forward to a bright future. But worse times were in store. France's alliance with its traditional enemy Austria had pulled the country into the disastrous Seven Years' War , in which it was defeated by the British and the Prussians , both in Europe and in North America. Louis XVI's shyness and, among other factors, the young age and inexperience of the newlyweds who were near total strangers to each other: they had met only two days before their wedding meant that the fifteen-year-old bridegroom failed to consummate the union with his fourteen-year-old bride.

His fear of being manipulated by her for Austrian purposes caused him to behave coldly towards her in public. Letters sent between the Empress and the Ambassador express a desire for Marie Antoinette to exercise authority in the French court and to encourage Louis XVI to dedicate more attention to his role as prince. To their disappointment, however, the princess did not seem overly interested in "serious affairs".

The couple's failure to produce any children for several years placed a strain upon their marriage, [ 17 ] exacerbated by the publication of obscene pamphlets libelles mocking their infertility. One such pamphlet questioned, "Can the King do it? Can't the King do it? The reasons for the couple's initial failure to have children were debated at that time, and they have continued to be debated since.

One suggestion is that Louis XVI suffered from a physiological dysfunction, [ 19 ] most often thought to be phimosis , a suggestion first made in late by the royal doctors. Louis XVI's doctors were not in favour of the surgery — the operation was delicate and traumatic, and capable of doing "as much harm as good" to an adult male. The argument for phimosis and a resulting operation is mostly seen to originate from Stefan Zweig 's biography of Marie Antoinette.

Most modern historians agree that Louis XVI had no surgery [ 22 ] [ 23 ] [ 24 ] — for instance, as late as , the Prussian envoy, Baron Goltz, reported that Louis XVI had definitely declined the operation. This would not have been possible if he had undergone a circumcision; at the very least, he would have been unable to ride to the hunt for a few weeks afterwards.

The couple's sexual problems are now attributed to other factors. Antonia Fraser 's biography of Marie Antoinette discusses Joseph II's letter on the matter to one of his brothers after he visited Versailles in In the letter, Joseph describes in astonishingly frank detail Louis XVI's inadequate performance in the marriage bed and Marie Antoinette's lack of interest in conjugal activity.

Joseph described the couple as "complete fumblers"; however, with his advice, Louis XVI began to apply himself more effectively to his marital duties, and in the third week of March Marie Antoinette became pregnant. Eventually, the royal couple became the parents of four children. According to Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan , Marie Antoinette's lady-in-waiting, the queen also suffered two miscarriages.

The first one, in , a few months after the birth of her first child, is mentioned in a letter to her daughter, written in July by Empress Maria Theresa. Madame Campan states that Louis XVI spent an entire morning consoling his wife at her bedside, and swore to secrecy everyone who knew of the occurrence. Marie Antoinette suffered a second miscarriage on the night of 2—3 November Of these, only Armand, Ernestine and Zoe actually lived with the royal family: Jean Amilcar, along with the elder siblings of Zoe and Armand who were also formally foster children of the royal couple, simply lived on the queen's expense until her imprisonment, which proved fatal for at least Amilcar, as he was evicted from the boarding school when the fee was no longer paid, and reportedly starved to death on the street.

When Louis XVI acceded to the throne in , he was nineteen years old. He had an enormous responsibility, as the government was deeply in debt, and resentment of despotic monarchy was on the rise. His predecessor, his grandfather Louis XV , had been widely hated by the time of his death. The public remembered him as an irresponsible man who spent his time womanizing rather than administrating.

As king, Louis XVI focused primarily on religious freedom and foreign policy. Although raised as the Dauphin since , he lacked firmness and decisiveness. His desire to be loved by his people is evident in the prefaces of many of his edicts that would often explain the nature and good intention of his actions as benefiting the people, such as reinstating the parlements.

When questioned about his decision, he said, "It may be considered politically unwise, but it seems to me to be the general wish and I want to be loved. Granting non-Roman Catholics — Huguenots and Lutherans , as well as Jews — civil and legal status in France and the legal right to practice their faiths, this edict effectively nullified the Edict of Fontainebleau that had been law for years.

The Edict of Versailles did not legally proclaim freedom of religion in France — this took two more years, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of — however, it was an important step in eliminating religious tensions and it officially ended religious persecution within his realm. So, in , Turgot was dismissed and Malesherbes resigned, to be replaced by Jacques Necker.

Necker supported the American Revolution , and he carried out a policy of taking out large international loans instead of raising taxes. He attempted to gain public favor in by publishing the first ever accounting of the French Crown's expenses and accounts, the Compte-rendu au Roi. This misleading publication led the people of France to believe the kingdom ran a modest surplus.

Again this failed, so Louis convoked the Assembly of Notables in to discuss a revolutionary new fiscal reform proposed by Calonne. When the nobles were informed of the true extent of the debt, they were shocked and rejected the plan. Upon the refusal of the members of the Parlement , Louis XVI tried to use his absolute power to subjugate them by every means: enforcing in many occasions the registration of his reforms via Lit de justice 6 August , 19 November , and 8 May , exiling all Parlement magistrates to Troyes as a punishment on 15 August , prohibiting six members from attending parliamentary sessions on 19 November, arresting two very important members of the Parlement , who opposed his reforms, on 6 May , and even dissolving and depriving of all power the "Parlement", replacing it with a plenary court, on 8 May The failure of these measures and displays of royal power is attributable to three decisive factors.

First, the majority of the population stood in favor of the Parlement against the King, and thus continuously rebelled against him. Second, the royal treasury was financially destitute to a crippling degree, leaving it incapable of sustaining its own imposed reforms. Third, although the King enjoyed as much absolute power as his predecessors, he lacked the personal authority crucial for absolutism to function properly.

Now unpopular with both the commoners and the aristocracy, Louis XVI was therefore only very briefly able to impose his decisions and reforms, for periods ranging from 2 to 4 months, before having to revoke them. As authority dissipated from him and reforms were clearly becoming unavoidable, there were increasingly loud calls for him to convoke the Estates General , which had not met since at the beginning of the reign of Louis XIII.

As a last-ditch attempt to get new monetary reforms approved, Louis XVI convoked the Estates General on 8 August , setting the date of their opening on 1 May With the convocation of the Estates General, as in many other instances during his reign, Louis XVI placed his reputation and public image in the hands of those who were perhaps not as sensitive to the desires of the French population as he was.

Because it had been so long since the Estates General had been convened, there was some debate as to which procedures should be followed. Ultimately, the Parlement of Paris agreed that "all traditional observances should be carefully maintained to avoid the impression that the Estates General could make things up as it went along. For example, the First and Second Estates the clergy and nobility respectively proceeded into the assembly wearing their finest garments, while the Third Estate was required to wear plain, oppressively somber black, an act of alienation that Louis XVI would likely have not condoned.

He seemed to regard the deputies of the Estates General with respect: in a wave of self-important patriotism, members of the Estates refused to remove their hats in the King's presence, so Louis removed his to them. This convocation was one of the events that transformed the general economic and political malaise of the country into the French Revolution.

Within three short months, the majority of the King's executive authority had been transferred to the elected representatives of the Nation. The performance of Castor et Pollux in when he was visited by his brother-in-law, Joseph II, involved more than people. Britain's victories had seen them capture most of France's colonial territories. While some were returned to France at the Treaty of Paris , almost all of New France was ceded to the British, or to France's Spanish allies to compensate them for losses to the British.

This had led to a strategy amongst the French leadership of seeking to rebuild the French military in order to fight a war of revenge against Britain, in which it was hoped the lost colonies could be recovered. France still maintained a strong influence in the West Indies , and in India maintained five trading posts , leaving opportunities for disputes and power-play with Great Britain.

In the spring of , Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes , the Minister for Foreign Affairs, saw an opportunity to humiliate France's long-standing enemy, Great Britain , and to recover territory lost during the Seven Years' War , by supporting the American Revolution. In the same year Louis was persuaded by Pierre Beaumarchais to send supplies, ammunition, and guns to the rebels secretly.

Early in he signed a formal Treaty of Alliance , and later that year France went to war with Britain. In deciding in favor of war, despite France's large financial problems, the King was materially influenced by alarmist reports after the Battle of Saratoga , which suggested that Britain was preparing to make huge concessions to the Thirteen Colonies and then, allied with them, to strike at French and Spanish possessions in the West Indies.

After , Great Britain switched its focus to the West Indies , as defending the sugar islands was considered more important than trying to recover the Thirteen Colonies. France and Spain planned to invade the British Isles themselves with the Armada of , but the operation never went ahead. France's initial military assistance to the American rebels was a disappointment, with defeats at Rhode Island and Savannah.

The French expeditionary force arrived in North America in July The appearance of French fleets in the Caribbean was followed by the capture of a number of the sugar islands, including Tobago and Grenada. Great Britain recognized the independence of the Thirteen Colonies as the United States of America, and the French war ministry rebuilt its army.

However, the British defeated the main French fleet in at the Battle of the Saintes and successfully defended Jamaica and Gibraltar. France gained little from the Treaty of Paris that ended the war, except the colonies of Tobago and Senegal. Louis XVI was wholly disappointed in his aims of recovering Canada, India, and other islands in the West Indies from Britain, as they were too well defended and the Royal Navy made any attempted invasion of mainland Britain impossible.

The war cost 1, million livres , financed by new loans at high interest with no new taxes. Necker concealed the crisis from the public by explaining only that ordinary revenues exceeded ordinary expenses, and not mentioning the loans. After he was forced from office in , new taxes were levied. This intervention in America was not possible without France adopting a neutral position in European affairs to avoid being drawn into a continental war which would be simply a repetition of the French policy mistakes in the Seven Years' War.

Vergennes and Maurepas refused to support the Austrian position, but the intervention of Marie Antoinette in favor of Austria obliged France to adopt a position more favorable to Austria, which in the Treaty of Teschen was able to get in compensation the Innviertel , a territory whose population numbered around , persons. However, this intervention was a disaster for the image of the Queen, who was named " l'Autrichienne " a pun in French meaning "Austrian", but the "chienne" suffix can mean "bitch" on account of it.

As a consequence, the Marquis de Bussy-Castelnau moved his troops to the Isle de France now Mauritius and later contributed to the French effort in India in France also intervened in Cochinchina following Pierre Pigneau de Behaine 's intervention to obtain military aid. Louis XVI also encouraged major voyages of exploration. There is a lack of scholarship on the subject of Louis XVI's time as a constitutional monarch, though it was a significant length of time.

The reason as to why many biographers have not elaborated extensively on this time in the king's life is due to the uncertainty surrounding his actions during this period, as Louis XVI's declaration that was left behind in the Tuileries stated that he regarded his actions during his constitutional reign as provisional; he reflected that his "palace was a prison".

This time period was exemplary in its demonstration of an institution's deliberation while in their last standing moments. Louis XVI's time in his previous palace came to an end on 5 October , when an angry mob of Parisian working men and women was incited by revolutionaries and marched on the Palace of Versailles , where the royal family lived.

After the situation had been defused by Lafayette , head of the National Guard , the king and his family were brought by the crowd to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, the reasoning being that the King would be more accountable to the people if he lived among them in Paris. The Revolution's principles of popular sovereignty, though central to democratic principles of later eras, marked a decisive break from the centuries-old principle of divine right that was at the heart of the French monarchy.

As a result, the Revolution was opposed by many of the rural people of France and by all the governments of France's neighbors. Still, within the city of Paris and amongst the philosophers of the time, many of which were members of the National Assembly, the monarchy had next to no support. As the Revolution became more radical and the masses more uncontrollable, several of the Revolution's leading figures began to doubt its benefits.

Beginning in , Armand Marc, comte de Montmorin , Minister of Foreign Affairs, started to organize covert resistance to the revolutionary forces. Thus, the funds of the Liste Civile , voted annually by the National Assembly, were partially assigned to secret expenses in order to preserve the monarchy. Arnault Laporte , who was in charge of the civil list, collaborated with both Montmorin and Mirabeau.

After the sudden death of Mirabeau, Maximilien Radix de Sainte-Foix , a noted financier, took his place. In effect, he headed a secret council of advisers to Louis XVI, which tried to preserve the monarchy; these schemes proved unsuccessful, and were exposed later when the armoire de fer was discovered. Mirabeau's death on 7 April, and Louis XVI's indecision, fatally weakened negotiations between the Crown and moderate politicians.

The Third Estate leaders also had no desire in turning back or remaining moderate after their hard efforts to change the politics of the time, and so the plans for a constitutional monarchy did not last long. On one hand, Louis was nowhere near as reactionary as his brothers, the Count of Provence [ citation needed ] and the Count of Artois , and he repeatedly sent messages to them requesting a halt to their attempts to launch counter-coups.

On the other hand, Louis was alienated from the new democratic government both by its negative reaction to the traditional role of the monarch and in its treatment of him and his family. He was particularly irked by being kept essentially as a prisoner in the Tuileries, and by the refusal of the new regime to allow him to have confessors and priests of his choice rather than ' constitutional priests ' pledged to the state and not the Roman Catholic Church.

The voyage was planned by the Swedish nobleman, and often assumed secret lover of Queen Marie Antoinette, Axel von Fersen. While the National Assembly worked painstakingly towards a constitution , Louis and Marie-Antoinette were involved in plans of their own. Louis had appointed Louis Auguste Le Tonnelier de Breteuil to act as plenipotentiary, dealing with other foreign heads of state in an attempt to bring about a counter-revolution.

Louis himself held reservations against depending on foreign assistance. Like his mother and father, he thought that the Austrians were treacherous and the Prussians were overly ambitious. This degree of planning reveals Louis's political determination, but it was for this determined plot that he was eventually convicted of high treason. The National Assembly was quick to decide to publish the theory that the King had been kidnapped, thus avoiding any challenge to the Constitution, which was then nearing completion, while at the same time ordering that the carriage be placed under arrest.

It was a deliberately deceptive choice, since Louis XVI had left a manifesto in plain view, assuming and justifying the escape. La Fayette decided to censor the text. Letters were sent throughout the country to stop the royal carriage. Louis's indecision, many delays, and misunderstanding of France were responsible for the failure of the escape.

Within 24 hours, the royal family was arrested at Varennes-en-Argonne shortly after Jean-Baptiste Drouet , who recognised the king from his profile on a 50 livres assignat [ 54 ] paper money , had given the alert. Viewed suspiciously as traitors, they were placed under tight house arrest upon their return to the Tuileries. At the individual level, the failure of the escape plans was due to a series of misadventures, delays, misinterpretations, and poor judgments.

Furthermore, he totally misunderstood the political situation. He thought only a small number of radicals in Paris were promoting a revolution that the people as a whole rejected. He thought, mistakenly, that he was beloved by his subjects. The realization that the King had repudiated the Revolution was a shock for people who until then had seen him as a good king who governed as a manifestation of God's will.

Many suspected the King of collaborating with the Austrians, due to Marie Antoinette's family ties and the fact that the monarchs had clearly been heading for the Austrian border. War now seemed imminent, and the King seemed to have been politically involved with France's traditional enemies, who were still widely hated despite recent cooperation.

The other monarchies of Europe looked with concern upon the developments in France, and considered whether they should intervene, either in support of Louis or to take advantage of the chaos in France. Initially, he had looked on the Revolution with equanimity. However, he became more and more disturbed as it became more and more radical.

Despite this, he still hoped to avoid war. Although Leopold saw the Pillnitz Declaration as an easy way to appear concerned about the developments in France without committing any soldiers or finances to change them, the revolutionary leaders in Paris viewed it fearfully as a dangerous foreign attempt to undermine France's sovereignty.

Dumouriez prepared an immediate invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, where he expected the local population to rise against Austrian rule. However, the Revolution had thoroughly disorganised the army, and the forces raised were insufficient for the invasion. While the revolutionary government frantically raised fresh troops and reorganised its armies, a Prussian-Austrian army under Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick assembled at Koblenz on the Rhine.

In July, the invasion began , with Brunswick's army easily taking the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun. Contrary to its intended purpose of strengthening Louis XVI's position against the revolutionaries, the Brunswick Manifesto greatly undermined his already highly tenuous position. It was taken by many to be the final proof of collusion between the King and foreign powers in a conspiracy against his own country.

The anger of the populace boiled over on 10 August when an armed mob — with the backing of a new municipal government of Paris that came to be known as the Insurrectional Paris Commune — marched upon and invaded the Tuileries Palace.