ABSTRACT
The Declaration of Pillnitz, although published with an inflammatory and unauthorised commentary by the emigres, did not arouse in Paris the uproar one might have expected. The belief that the declaration of war would be the signal for a rising against the Habsburg Emperor, and indeed all the princes of the Holy Roman Empire, was repeated constantly during the winter of 1791-1792, in the press, in pamphlets, in the Jacobin Club and in the Legislative Assembly. When all these arguments for war were put together, they created in the Legislative Assembly an atmosphere which was always highly charged and which could border on mass hysteria on grand occasions. The result was a unique political assembly with a style of doing business all of its own. It was quite unlike other such apparently similar legislatures as the American Congress or the British Parliament.
