when a child: "Look my master, behold this great kingdom! It is all for you, it belongs to you, you are its master!"-- Undoubtedly, to swallow and digest such gross irony people must be half-fools or half-brutes; but it is exactly their capacity for self-deception which makes them different from the sensible or passive crowd and casts them into a band whose ascendancy is irresistible.

Convinced that a street mob is entitled to absolute rule and that the nation expresses its sovereignty through its gatherings, they alone assemble the street mobs, they alone, by virtue of their conceit and lack of judgment, believe themselves kings.
Such is the new power which, in the early months of the year 1792, starts up alongside of the legal powers.

It is not foreseen by the Constitution; nevertheless it exists and declares itself; it is visible and its recruits can be counted.[2525] On the 29th of April, with the Assembly consenting, and contrary to the law, three battalions from the suburb of St.Antoine, about 1500 men,[2526] march in three columns into the hall, one of which is composed of fusiliers and the other two of pikemen, "their pikes being from eight to ten feet long," of formidable aspect and of all sorts, "pikes with laurel leaves, pikes with clover leaves, pikes a carlet, pikes with turn-spits, pikes with hearts, pikes with serpents tongues, pikes with forks, pikes with daggers, pikes with three prongs, pikes with battle-axes, pikes with claws, pikes with sickles, lance-pikes covered with iron prongs." On the other side of the Seine three battalions from the suburb of St.Marcel are composed and armed in the same fashion.

This constitutes a kernel of 3,000 more in other quarters of Paris.

Add to these in each of the sixty battalions of the National guard the gunners, almost all of them blacksmiths, locksmiths and horse-shoers, also the majority of the gendarmes, old soldiers discharged for insubordination and naturally inclined to rioting, in all an army of about 9,000 men, not counting the usual accompaniment of vagabonds and mere bandits; ignorant and eager, but men who do their work, well armed, formed into companies, ready to march and ready to strike.