Early in September, the Parisian mob made its presence known once more. During the first week of September, in what became known as the September Massacres, the Paris Commune brutally killed or murdered around 1,200 persons who were imprisoned throughout the city. Some of these individuals were aristocrats or clergymen, but the vast majority were merely regular criminals.

The mob had presumed that all of the captives were counter-revolutionaries. The news of this atrocity, as well as the slaughter of Swiss guards and the incarceration of the royal family, travelled quickly around Europe, instilling further enmity toward the revolutionary government.

The Paris Commune therefore forced the Legislative Assembly to call for the election of a new assembly to establish a democratic constitution via universal male suffrage.

The French army, full with patriotic recruits prepared to die for the revolution, had stopped the Prussian onslaught the day before in the Battle of Valmy in eastern France. Victory on the battlefield had affirmed the domestic victory of democratic forces. The Convention's first step was to declare France a republic, that is, a nation controlled by an elected assembly rather than a king. The second revolution was the effort of more extreme Jacobins than the Girondists, as well as the sansculottes of Paris.

This group's name means "without breeches" and is derived from the long pants that they wore as working people instead of aristocratic knee breeches. The sans-culottes worked as shopkeepers, artisans, wage earners, and, in certain circumstances, industrial workers.

Several concerns had caused the Mountain and its sans-culottes supporters to dominate the Convention and the revolution by the spring of 1793. In December 1792, Louis XVI was tried as a mere "Citizen Capet," the royal family's original medieval name. The Girondists attempted to save his life, but the Mountain foiled their efforts.

Louis was found guilty by an overwhelming majority of plotting against the liberty of the people and the security of the state. He was beheaded on January 21, 1793, after being sentenced to death by a lesser majority.

The Convention declared war on the United Kingdom and Holland the next month, then on Spain a month later.

Soon after, the Prussians resumed their onslaught, driving the French from Belgium.

The sans-culottes, for the most part, knew what they wanted.

Parisian merchants and artists sought immediate relief from food shortages and rising costs by instituting price restrictions. Because of their financial difficulties, they were impatient to have their requests satisfied.

They felt that everyone had a right to sustenance and detested most types of social injustice. This mindset made them vehemently opposed to the aristocracy and the original leaders of the 1789 revolution from the Third Estate, whom they saw as only seeking to share political power, social status, and economic security with the aristocracy.

The sans-culottes' disdain for inequality did not lead them to seek the abolition of property. Rather, they urged for a community of small property owners to participate.

In politics, they were anti-monarchical, staunchly republican, and even distrustful of representative government. They felt that the people should have as much say in government decisions as possible.

The sans-culottes had gained political experience at meetings of the Paris sections in Paris, where they wielded the most power. The previous summer's Paris Commune served as their primary political vehicle, and crowd action served as their primary means of action.

The Jacobins' Policies The sansculottes' ideals were not entirely consistent with those of the Jacobins, who advocated representative governance. Jacobin hostility to the nobility and inherited privilege did not extend to a broad distrust of riches.

Essentially, the Jacobins advocated for an unrestrained economy.

In direct answer to Burke and in support of revolutionary values, Thomas Paine, the hero of the American Revolution, wrote The Rights of Man (1791–1792). "From what we now observe, nothing of reform in the political arena should be regarded as unlikely," Paine asserted. It is a time of changes, and everything can be sought."

5 Paine's book sold more copies in England at the time, but Burke's work had a greater long-term impact and was extensively distributed on the continent, where it became a guidebook for European conservatives.

By the commencement of war with Austria in April 1792, the other European monarchies, like Burke, realized the dangers of both revolutionary France's beliefs and aggression.