CHAPTER V.PARIS.
I .-- Pressure of the Assembly on the King.
His veto rendered void or eluded .-- His ministers insulted and driven away .-- The usurpations of his Girondist ministry .-- He removes them .-- Riots being prepared.
Previous to this the tree was so shaken as to be already tottering at its base .-- Reduced as the King's prerogative is, the Jacobins still continue to contest it, depriving him of even its shadow.

At the opening session they refuse to him the titles of Sire and Majesty; to them he is not, in the sense of the constitution, a hereditary representative of the French people, but "a high functionary," that is to say, a mere employee, fortunate enough to sit in an equally good chair alongside of the president of the Assembly, whom they style "president of the nation."[2501] The Assembly, in their eyes, is sole sovereign, "while the other powers," says Condorcet, "can act legitimately only when specially authorized by a positive law;[2502] the Assembly may do anything that is not formally prohibited to it by the law," 'in other words, interpret the constitution, then change it, take it to pieces, and do away with it.

Consequently, in defiance of the constitution, it takes upon itself the initiation of war, and, on rare occasions, on the King using his veto, it sets this aside, or allows it to be set aside.[2503] In vain he rejects, as he has a legal right to do, the decrees which sanction the persecution of unsworn ecclesiastics, which confiscate the property of the emigres, and which establish a camp around Paris.

At the suggestion of the Jacobin deputies,[2504] the unsworn ecclesiastics are interned, expelled, or imprisoned by the municipalities and Directories; the estates and mansions of the emigres and of their relatives are abandoned without resistance to the jacqueries; the camp around Paris is replaced by the summoning of the Federates to Paris.

In short, the monarch's sanction is eluded or dispensed with .-- As to his ministers, "they are merely clerks of the Legislative Body decked with a royal leash."[2505] In full session they are maltreated, reviled, grossly insulted, not merely as lackeys of bad character, but as known criminals.