On August 10, 1792, a mob of Parisian insurrectionists and defected National Guard units stormed the Tuileries Palace, where King Louis XVI had taken refuge. Around 600 of the king's Swiss Guard were killed in the fighting or massacred afterward. Louis and his family had already fled to the Legislative Assembly, but the attack effectively ended the monarchy and set the stage for the Republic and, eventually, the king's execution.
By the summer of 1792, Paris was a tinderbox. War with Austria was going badly, bread was scarce, and revolutionaries increasingly viewed Louis XVI as a traitor secretly hoping for foreign invasion to restore his absolute power. In the early hours of August 10, tens of thousands of national guardsmen from the provinces (the fédérés) and armed Parisian sans-culottes converged on the Tuileries Palace.
Louis, warned in advance, walked with his family to the nearby Legislative Assembly for protection, leaving his loyal Swiss Guard—about 900 men—to hold the palace largely without orders. When the crowd breached the gates, a chaotic firefight erupted. The Swiss Guard, following the king's belated command to cease fire, were cut down as they tried to surrender or flee; some were chased through the streets and butchered, others castrated and mutilated by the mob in the frenzy. Roughly 600 guardsmen died, along with hundreds of attackers.
The massacre effectively finished the monarchy as a functioning institution—the Assembly suspended Louis's powers that same day. Within weeks France would abolish the monarchy outright and declare itself a Republic. The Lion Monument in Lucerne, Switzerland, commemorates the slaughtered Swiss Guards with the inscription 'Helvetiorum Fidei ac Virtuti'—to the loyalty and bravery of the Swiss.
Key people: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette