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Lyon resisted a two-month siege, capitulating on October 9, 1793, and reprisals afterward cost the lives of 1,900 rebels. 14 About 300 rebels were executed in Bordeaux and Marseille. In the three-day battle of Wattigenies, a little south of Lille, on October 15–17, the French defeated the main Austrian army. Marie-Antoinette, after a farcical trial, was beheaded on October 16, 1793, to the glee of many Parisians, and the next day the Vendeans were defeated at Cholet, east of Nantes; they subsequently resorted to scattered guerrilla warfare.

Itinerant vendors and tinkers found it advisable to openly display their wares and tools to avoid police inquiries and made sure they were always able to show where they got their merchandise. Farm migrants and journeymen on the move needed to obtain papers from their local authorities to prove they were not vagrants and to avoid the charge of gens sans aveu, or people for whom no respectable person would vouch. Incarceration was always a definite prospect if identity papers were missing. The step from migrant to vagrant or vagabond in the eyes of the police and the general public was quick and easy; it often led to the next step, which everyone feared—brigandage.

In the preamble, known as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (see Appendix 1), the delegates formulated the revolutionary ideals later summarized as liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity). While the Constituent Assembly deliberated, the food-deprived population of Paris (a hotbed of anger and of rumors of royalist conspiracies) clamored for bread and lower prices. Reports of a bountiful banquet at Versailles given by the royal guards in which the tricolor of the revolution was said to have been trampled underfoot propelled the political ferment in Paris into a frenzy.