" The declaration was hardly more than pompous bluster, for
the armies of the German allies were not as yet ready for war, but its
solemn expression of an intention on the part of foreign despots to
interfere in the internal affairs of France aroused the most bitter
feeling among Frenchmen who were patriotic as well as revolutionary.
[Sidenote: French Politics Under the Limited Monarchy Favorable to
Foreign War]
The prospect of war with the blustering monarchs of Austria and Prussia
was quite welcome to several important factions in France. Marie
Antoinette and her court clique gradually came to the conclusion that
their reactionary cause would be abetted by war. If the allies won,
absolutism would be restored in France by force of arms. If the French
won, it would redound to the prestige of the royal family and enable
them by constitutional means to recover their authority. Then, too, the
constitutionalists, the bourgeois party which was led by Lafayette and
which loyally supported the settlement of 1791, worked for war.
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