Chapter 1074: Chapter 349: Storming the Bastille! (Part 2)

They couldn’t squeeze out a single coin.

The Third Estate directly kicked out the nobles and part of the clergy and set up the National Assembly on their own to issue a new constitution.

We of the Third Estate are France; you nobles are redundant. Either you join us, or we’ll expel you from France.

You think Louis XVI could swallow that?

So, under his orders, several foreign armies were converging on Paris, preparing to crush this rabble at home.

Yes, bringing in foreign troops to suppress the people of your own capital— even Cixi wouldn’t have gone that far.

At this very moment, Prussia’s army was already pressing on the border.

Only through the constant explanations of the people around him did David half understand, half not, what the situation was—the storm was about to break.

Rumors of impending rebellion and uprising were everywhere, and all along the road were beggar peasants and furious sans-culottes.

They were loudly denouncing the king, raging against the nobles, the crowds pooling together in the streets like a powder keg that could blow at any second.

All it lacked was a single match.

Even in David’s own heart, a fire started to burn.

This was something that didn’t exist in Night City, something you couldn’t find in any book.

Everyone hated the corporations, but faced with that overwhelming disparity in force, no one dared stand up and speak.

They were afraid—afraid of resisting.

Why?

Because the Americans had never staged a revolution, didn’t have that kind of inertia in their thinking. Plus, the gap in power here was nothing compared to the one in his era. Any spark was crushed by the corporations before it could even flare up, and people could only launch suicide charges against them as isolated individuals.

By now the crowd on the roadside had grown thicker and thicker; some sort of news seemed to be passing between them, and that news was stirring the masses.

David vaguely caught wind of something.

That minister who’d actually been doing things—Necker—had been dismissed by Louis XVI.

This string of moves provoked panic and fury among the people.

In his field of vision, an invisible flame was lit.

A young man—a young man named Camille Desmoulins—climbed up onto a table. In front of the crowd, he drew a pistol and motioned for everyone to look his way.

The young man’s eyes were full of rage. The way he looked differed in each person’s eyes, because by design he would look very much like Mewtwo’s user himself.

"Citizens of France! Not a moment can be lost! Necker’s dismissal is a signal—our king is summoning foreign troops, he wants to slaughter us!

He wants to reenact in Paris the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of patriots!

Tonight those Swiss Soldiers and German Soldiers will enter the city to kill us!

We have only one way to live, and that is to take up arms, to defend our lives from the nobles! To defend our country!"

He shouted until his voice was hoarse, his face scarlet, his words reaching every ear, quickly winning more and more people over.

They even decided to use green as a cockade to recognize friend from foe—if you had cloth, you used cloth; if you didn’t, you plucked a leaf and stuck it on your head.

There were too many people; they filled the streets.

So many that David was stunned—he had never seen so many people choose to resist with one heart.

They hoisted statues of Necker and the Duke of Orléans, marched from Rue Saint-Martin to Rue Saint-Denis, then rushed to Rue Saint-Honoré. Along the way they smashed the tax walls to rubble, tore down all the watchtowers, stripped and beat the armed Soldiers and tax collectors.

The crowd grew still larger, to the point of frightening the man who had been leading David all this time.

He hurriedly grabbed David’s hand.

"Quick, it’s no longer safe here—let’s get to the barracks."

David really wanted to ask why—why not follow the crowd?

But the choice belonged to Mewtwo, not him, and he could only be dragged along, dodging the surging human tide.

Yet somehow, in some dim way, David seemed to know where those people were going and what they were doing.

Mounted patrols in the streets tried to break up the marchers, but the furious crowd drove them back with stones snatched up from the ground.

The young man who looked so much like David roared at the cavalry from within the crowd:

"Go back and tell your masters that here and now we bear the will of the people! We will never leave! If they’ve got the guts, let them come at us with bayonets!"

At last, the procession reached Place Louis XV.

And there, the Prince de Lambesc from Germany had already been waiting with the German royal guards.

Why have foreigners suppress their own people?

Because they wouldn’t hesitate to kill.

The prince gazed coldly at the demonstrators without a trace of pity. His guards spurred their horses and charged into the crowd, sabers swinging, hurling people to the ground and leaving behind a street littered with corpses and fugitives.

The chase ran all the way to the Tuileries gardens. The guards killed anyone they saw, whether in the march or not; French blood flowed through the streets of Paris, staining this land that had always belonged to them.

The demonstrators seemed to have been driven back.

But one sentence began to spread among them.

"Take up arms! Arm yourselves! We must fight! If we retreat, the cause we fight for will fail!"

In these circumstances, David finally reached the barracks.

But it was anything but quiet here.

The Soldiers were in the middle of a quarrel—arguing with the noble officers, arguing with other Soldiers.

Some thought they shouldn’t get involved in this affair; others cursed the shirkers as cowards.

They were all mixed up together, on the verge of coming to blows.

"Sorry, recruit. Looks like we won’t be able to give you a welcoming ceremony after all."