News of Necker's dismissal reaches Paris in the afternoon of Sunday, July 12.

The Parisians generally presume that the dismissal marks the start of a coup by conservative elements.

Liberal Parisians are further enraged by the fear that a concentration of Royal troops—brought in from frontier garrisons to Versailles, Sèvres, the Champ de Mars, and Saint-Denis—will attempt to shut down the National Constituent Assembly, which is meeting in Versailles.

Crowds gather throughout Paris, including more than ten thousand at the Palais-Royal.

The angry Parisian crowd, inflamed by a speech from journalist Camille Desmoulins, demonstrates against the King's decision to dismiss Minister Necker.

Desmoulins was born at Guise, Aisne, in Picardy.

His father, Jean Benoît Nicolas Desmoulins, is a rural lawyer and lieutenant-general of the bailliage of Guise.

Through the efforts of a friend, he had obtained a scholarship for the fourteen-year-old Camille to enter the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris.

Desmoulins had proved an exceptional student even among such notable contemporaries as Maximilien Robespierre and Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron.

He had excelled in the study of Classical literature and politics, and gained a particular affinity for Cicero, Tacitus and Livy.

He had pursued law, and succeeded in gaining acceptance as an advocate of the parlement of Paris in 1785; however, his serious stammer and ferocious temper had proved severe obstacles to success in this arena.

Thus stymied, he had turned towards writing as an alternative outlet for his talents; his interest in public affairs had led him to a career as a political journalist.

In March 1789, Jean Benoît Nicolas Desmoulins had been nominated as deputy to the Estates-General from the bailliage of Guise; however, due to illness, he had failed to take his seat.

Camille Desmoulins, himself limited to the role of spectator at the procession of the Estates-General on May 5, 1789, had written a response to the event: Ode aux Etats Generaux.

The Comte de Mirabeau, a powerful political figure within the Estates-General who has positioned himself as a bridge between the aristocracy and the emerging reformist movement, had briefly enlisted Desmoulins to write for his newspaper at this time, strengthening Desmoulins' reputation as a journalist.

Owing to his difficulties in establishing a career as a lawyer, Desmoulins' position in Paris is a precarious one, and he often lives in poverty.

However, he had been greatly inspired and enthused by the current of political reform that surrounded the summoning of the Estates-General.

In letters to his father at the time, he had rhapsodized over the procession of deputies entering the Palace of Versailles, and criticized the events surrounding the closing of the Salle des Menus Plaisirs to the deputies who had declared themselves the National Assembly—events that led to the famous swearing of the Tennis Court Oath.

On July 12, spurred by the news of the politically unsettling dismissal of Necker, Desmoulins leaps onto a table outside the Cafe du Foy (one of many cafés in the garden of the Palais Royal frequented in large part by political dissidents) and delivers an impassioned call to arms.

Shedding his customary stammer in the excitement, he urges the volatile crowd to "take up arms and adopt cockades by which we may know each other", calling Necker's dismissal the tocsin of the St. Bartholomew of the patriots, a reference to the St. Batholomew's Day Massacre.

The stationing of a large number of troops in Paris, many foreign, has led Desmoulins and other political radicals to believe that a massacre of dissidents in the city is indeed imminent.

This is an idea that his audience also finds plausible and threatening, and they are quick to embrace Desmoulins and take up arms in riots that spread throughout Paris rapidly.

The "cockades" worn by the crowd were initially green, a color associated with liberty, and made at first from the leaves of the trees that line the Palais Royal.

However, the color green is also associated with the Comte d'Artois, the reactionary and conservative brother of the King, and the cockades therefore are quickly replaced by others in the traditional colors of Paris: red and blue.

The forces semi-organized under this banner had attacked the Hôtel des Invalides to gain arms and, on 14 July, embark upon the Storming of the Bastille.

The term Muscadin, meaning "wearing musk perfume" has come to these refer mobs of young men, relatively well-off and dressed in a dandyish manner, who are the street fighters of the Thermidorian Reaction in Paris in the French Revolution.

After the coup against Robespierre and the Jacobins of 9 Thermidor Year II, or 27 July 1794, they had taken on the remaining Jacobins and sans-culottes, and have largely succeeded in intimidating them over the next year or two.

In prints, they are often seen carrying large wooden clubs, which they like to call "constitutions".

Supposedly organized by the politician and journalist Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron, they will eventually number two thousand to three thousand.

They in fact seem to have mostly consisted of the lower middle-classes, and are quietly encouraged by the shaky new government, who have good reason to fear Jacobin mobs, and wider unrest as the hard winter of 1794-5 has seen increasing hunger among the Parisian working-class.

The Muscadin are considered to be part of the First White Terror in response to the preceding Reign of Terror of the Jacobins.

The "jeunesse dorée" come to have a considerable influence on the National Convention, and after the Jacobin revolt of 12 Germinal, Year III (April 1, 1795), are held to have forced the arrest of the three main "ring-leaders" remaining from the Jacobin regime: Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois, Bertrand Barère, and Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, who are all transported to French Guiana.

The law of 18 Germinal, Year III (April 7, 1795) defines five units of measure.

This system continues the tradition of having separate base units for geometrically related dimensions:

    The mètre for length
    The are (100 m2) for area [of land]
    The stère (1 m3) for volume of stacked[40] firewood
    The litre (1 dm3) for volumes of liquid
    The gramme for mass.

The hectare, equal to a hundred ares, is the area of a square 100 metres on a side (about 2.47 acres), and is still in use.

The early metric system included only a few prefixes from milli (one thousandth) to myria (ten thousand), and they were based on powers of 10 unlike later prefixes added in the SI, which are based on powers of 1,000.

Originally the kilogram was called the "grave"; the "gram" being an alternative name for a thousandth of a grave.

However, the word "grave", being a synonym for the title "count" has aristocratic connotations and is renamed the kilogram.