The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c7.8

c7.8

It was unexpectedly and virtually through friends and well-wishers of the king and the queen that royalty was abolished in France. The National Assembly’s Bolshevistic short cuts with the feudal privileges and hereditary nobility had made the country too hot for the aristocratic classes. The French nobles thereupon sought refuge in the Germanistic territories. The public opinion and military support of the continent were successfully canvassed by them against the revolutionists on behalf of the old royalist regime. Eventually the Austrian emperor and the Prussian king in coalition with this “emigrant” nobility invaded France to “re-establish the liberty and honour of the most Christian king and his family and place a check upon the dangerous excesses of the French revolution, the fatal example of which it behooves every government to repress”. It was this foreign invasion that led the National Assembly to declare the country in danger; and it was against this *tyrannie* of foreigners, and not against Louis XVI, that the famous *La Marseillaise* was composed.