ABSTRACT
It took the Americans over seven years to create their republic: it would take the French over seventy years before a republican system of government was able to sustain itself for more than a few bloodstained years. The fundamental reason, from a political standpoint, for the protracted birth of the first French Republic, finally announced in September 1792, was the resistance of the monarchy and its sympathisers abroad, as well as in the outlying French provinces of the west and the south-east, not just to the idea of a republic, but to the moderate solution of a constitutional monarchy. Louis XVI and his Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette, encompassed their own downfall by elevating their political ideology (as ‘totalitarian’ as anything dreamed up by Rousseau), their caste and monarchical calling above that of ‘their’ people. This is to oversimplify, as subsequent modifications to this important point will suggest, but this would be the reluctant conclusion drawn by the new breed of national politicians by the summer of 1792, the great majority of whom were monarchists at heart, republicans only by default.
