the front, stormed the Tuileries and massacred the king's Swiss guard. Louis and his family took refuge in the nearby hall of the Legislative Assembly, which promptly suspended the king and placed him in confinement. Simultaneously, the insurrectionists deposed the governing council of Paris, which was replaced by a new provisional executive council. The Montagnards, under the leadership of the lawyer Georges Jacques Danton, dominated the new Parisian government. They swiftly achieved control of the Legislative Assembly. The assembly shortly approved elections, by universal male suffrage, for a new constitutional convention. Between September 2 and 7, more than 1000 Royalists and suspected traitors who had been rounded up in various parts of France, were tried summarily and executed. These “September massacres” were induced by popular fear of the advancing allied armies and of rumored plots to overthrow the revolutionary government. On September 20 a French army, commanded by General Charles Francois Dumouriez, checked the Prussian advance on Paris at Valmy. On the day after the victory at Valmy, the newly elected National Convention convened in Paris. In its first official moves that day, the convention proclaimed establishment of the First Republic and abolished the monarchy. Agreement among the principal convention factions, the Girondists and the Montagnards, extended little beyond common approval of these initial measures. No effective opposition developed, however, to the decree sponsored by the Girondists and promulgated on November 19, which promised the help of France to all oppressed peoples of Europe. Encouraging reports arrived almost weekly from the armies, which had assumed the offensive after the battle at Valmy and had successively captured Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, Nice, Savoie, the Austrian Netherlands, and other areas. In the meantime, however, strife steadily intensified in the convention, with the Plain...
