An advance guard of the mob, women, children, and men, armed with cutters, cudgels, and pikes, spread over the abandoned Carrousel, and, towards eight o'clock, the advance column, led by Westerman, appears in front of the palace.
VII .-- August 10.
The King's forces .-- Resistance abandoned .-- The King in the National Assembly .-- Conflict at the palace and discharge of the Swiss Guard .-- The palace evacuated by the King's order.
-- The massacres .-- The enslaved Assembly and its decrees.
If the King had wanted to fight, he might still have defended himself, saved himself, and even been victorious.[2676]--In the Tuileries, 950 of the Swiss Guard and 200 gentlemen stood ready to die for him to the last man.

Around the Tuileries, two or three thousand National Guard, the elite of the Parisian population, had just cheered him as he passed.[2677] "Hurrah for the King! Hurrah for Louis XVI.! He is our King and we want no other; we want him only! Down with the rioters! Down with the Jacobins! We will defend him unto death! Let him put himself at our head! Hurrah for the Nation, the Law, the Constitution, and the King, which are all one! If the gunners were silent, and seemed ill-disposed,[2678] it was simply necessary to disarm them suddenly, and hand over their pieces to loyal men.

Four thousand rifles and eleven pieces of artillery, protected by the walls of the courts and by the thick masonry of the palace, were certainly sufficient against the nine or ten thousand Jacobins in Paris, most of them pikemen, badly led by improvised or rebellious battalion officers,[2679] and, still worse, commanded by their new general, Santerre, who, always cautious, kept himself aloof in the Hotel-de-ville, out of harm's way.

The only staunch men in the Carrousel were the eight hundred men from Brest and Marseilles; the rest consisted of a rabble like that of July 14, October 5, and June 20;[2680] the palace, says Napoleon Bonaparte, was attacked by the vilest canaille, professional rioters, Maillard's band, and the bands of Lazowski, Fournier, and Theroigne, by all the assassins, indeed of the previous night and day, and of the following day, which species of combatants, as was proved by the event, would have scattered at the first discharge of a cannon .-- But, with the governing as with the governed, all notion of the State was lost, the former through humanity become a duty, and the latter through insubordination erected into a right.

At the close of the eighteenth century, in the upper as well as in the middle class, there was a horror of blood;[2681] refined social ways, coupled with an idyllic imagination, had softened the militant disposition.