Arrangement dating from the early period of the French revolution, c.1790: the song had not yet acquired the capacity for bloodthirstiness that it was to gain during the Terror, such that it was subsequently banned under the Consulate. In the later 1790s a version was coined in England, "The (Down)fall of Paris", which became ubiquitous in army bands, especially those occupying Paris after Waterloo.

Perhaps the choice of subject indicated republican sympathies in Taylor; he emigrated to America in 1792. He had been a member of the old order in England; musically educated by Samuel Arnold, he had commenced his career as a boy chorister in the Chapel Royal, in which position he had sung at the funeral of Handel (and accidentally dropped his hat into the grave).