generating rapidly while the lot of the common people was becoming harder and harder. They were taxed heavily and freely, while the practice of cor by means of which the peasant and the labourer were forced to give one whole day's free work to their overlords extended to making them work on the roads.
Although the people were restive and grumbling, revolt in terms of blood and fire was still far off. But on the thro King Loui to dissolve the the army adamant in its refusal to assist him in the enforcement of his wishes on that august body, brought in the foreign regiments, mercenaries, of whose "loyalty" he was assured. In this he was acting on the suggestion of the Queen and the Comte d'Artois and never was a king more ill-advised, The Assembly demanded the immediate withdrawal of the foreign regiments; King Louis refused—and Paris was up in arms, The revolt had begun and Madame La Guillotine was in power Fettered Opinion the city of Paris brooded the ous castle of Saint Antoine, t of the bastilles of Paris, within whose sullen, thick walls many a man and woman had di for ever, for it was used prison and not a fortress fi an early period, Prisoners were divided into two main cla " those detained under sdmonitory correction, and who were to no trial or judgment and whose term of imprisonment depended on the whim of the king; and those who lay under presumption or proof of guilt; the latter were techni-ally brought to trial—but the interval between arrest and trial was extremely flexible and a prisoner could easily reach eme old age before he was brought before the tribunal But the most notorious use of the Bastille was the detention of those outspoken men, mostly writers, whi criticized or attacked those in power—among them Voltaire—and it wi this which made the Bastille so much an emblem of all that the Citizens hated and feared. This was why the astill's rapture and demolition as-parently untoward imleaders of the revolution realized that in the eyes of the masses, it personified the years of torture and oppression they had suffered and so, mobilizing all the forces at their command, they attacked the Bastille After a by the tually fell to the Paris—that motley arm armed men who, amid fearful scenes of carnage, faced the cannons and bullets of the soldiers within the and, bound together with the for freedom and equality, vanquished them
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.