All through June and into July, Paris and Versailles rumbled like awakening volcanoes. Nobles were in terror, abandoned by the king, who did nothing. Soldiers in Paris joined the mobs in drinking and rioting, and let prisoners out of jail. There were 30,000 troops at Versailles to protect the king, but he was afraid to order them into action.
Inspired by the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence, Lafayette had worked since January on “the First European Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” He showed his drafts to Jefferson, but it was mostly his own work. On July 10, 1789, he introduced it to the Assembly as a preamble to a constitution. It said that “all men are created free and equal” and abolished social classes. All men also were “born with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, the right to work, the right to hold and express opinions and religious beliefs, and the right to defend their persons, their lives, and their honor.” People possessed “natural rights,” which were those that did not interfere with the rights of others. Other articles established a constitutional monarchy with three branches and called for “clear, precise and uniform laws for all citizens.” The legislature must approve all spending.43
Jefferson liked it. Morris was cynical. “Our American example has done them good,” he groused, “but like all novelties, liberty runs away with their discretion, if they have any. They want an American Constitution…without reflecting that they have not American citizens to support that Constitution.” He doubted that democracy stood a chance in France, “unless the whole people are changed.”44
The Declaration provided the “irritation” that Washington had warned about. Paris exploded, as street-corner ranters used it to whip crowds into a frenzy. The people were equal to the king and nobility, so they had the right to tear the latter two down. On July 12 a combination of food riots, anarchist uprisings, and looting consumed the city. Troops at the Tuileries Palace fired on the crowd. Other troops defied orders to shoot. The Third Estate of Paris, led by Bailly, formed a government and a Bourgeois Guard to restore order. It did not.
On the evening of the thirteenth, rumors spread that the queen had demanded that the king send troops to arrest the National Assembly, which voted to stay in session through the night. On the evening of July 14, 1789, the members learned that the Paris mob had taken the Bastille, the prison fortress on the city wall. The rioters had been looting arsenals all day, acquiring arms but no powder, which was stored in the Bastille. After the guards there killed 175 protesters, troops who had joined them dragged up a cannon and blew the doors in, freeing all seven prisoners. The mob spread out, killing, hanging, and beheading many.
Louis XVI. He was a waddling argument against the divine right of kings, but in a bow to tradition Lafayette wanted him to become the first head of a French constitutional monarchy. (SKILLMAN LIBRARY, LAFAYETTE COLLEGE)
All of Versailles was horrified. The king visited the Assembly on July 15 and bowed to its authority. He asked for help in restoring order. “And here, again,” Jefferson remembered, “was lost another precious occasion of sparing to France the crimes and cruelties through which she has since passed…. The king was now become a passive machine in the hands of the National Assembly, and had he been left to himself, he would have willingly acquiesced in whatever they should devise as best for the nation…. But he had a queen of absolute sway over his weak mind and timid virtue.” He was correct. Marie-Antoinette was plotting to reverse everything that had happened.45
Marie-Antoinette, Louis’queen. She represented everything that was worst about the wretched excesses of Versailles. “The queen weeps, but sins on,” Jefferson said. If she had trusted Lafayette, she might have saved her and Louis’ lives. (SKILLMAN LIBRARY, LAFAYETTE COLLEGE)
Assuming that Louis’ capitulation meant that the French Revolution was over, Lafayette led a delegation of the Assembly to Paris. What they found there was appalling. Bailly asked him to take command of the Bourgeois Guard, so he donned his maréchal’s uniform, commandeered a big white horse, and reined in the militiamen roaming the streets. He renamed them the National Guard of Paris and assigned officers for each district. He sent convoys to escort food into the city, and ordered the Bastille demolished. He attacked lynch mobs, and by the end of the month the city began to calm down. When Morris asked him if the troops would always obey him, he replied that they might not do guard duty in the rain, but they would follow him into action. Morris predicted that Lafayette would have “an opportunity of making the experiment.” He thought Lafayette was trading wholly on his popularity. “If the sea runs high, he will be unable to hold the helm.” There were two kinds of ambition, “the one born of pride, the other of vanity, and his partakes most of the latter.”46
On July 17 Lafayette summoned the king, who arrived with members of the Assembly. Lafayette met him at the city gates and conducted him to the Hôtel de Ville, where Bailly presented Louis with the key to the city and a red and blue cockade, symbol of the Revolution. The king confirmed the city’s status as self-governing and Lafayette’s as commander of the National Guard. Nobles began to flee the country that night. Morris told Washington that Lafayette “had his sovereign during the late procession to Paris completely within his power. He had marched him where he pleased, measured the degree of applause he should receive as he pleased, and if he pleased could have detained him prisoner.”47
The center of Paris was calm, but everywhere else the city was overrun with savagery. Lafayette had seen nothing like it in America. He had naively thought that achieving liberty would be simple, but now he had the duty of taming the chaos. He learned how to be a labor negotiator, arbitrator, militia commander, and domestic diplomat. In the process he filled the vacuum left by the royal government, and by the fall he was known as père nourricier (father-provider) of the city. Between them, he and Bailly established the credibility of the revolutionary government, whose main instrument was the National Guard. A new “patriotism” emerged in France. Instead of king or country, it was love for a political ideal embodied in the people, but its hero was Lafayette.48
Four factions emerged during the disorder. The royalists wanted to restore the absolute monarchy under Louis. The Orléanists were populists who wanted to replace Louis with his cousin the duc d’Orléans, who had renamed himself Philippe Égalité (equality). Lafayette’s club favored a constitutional monarchy with Louis on the throne. The Jacobin Club (named for an old monastery that served as its headquarters), led by lawyer and agitator Maximilien Robespierre, wanted to overthrow the monarchy and establish a dictatorship of the “common will.”
Lafayette threatened to resign early in August if he did not get enough support for his efforts to restore order. The Paris government made him military dictator of the city, provided money for the troops, and offered him a hefty salary and expense allowance. Citing Washington’s example, he declined the latter two. Enlisting trustworthy officers, he made the Guard a force of 50,000 men, outfitted in uniforms of red, white, and blue that he designed. He seized weapons, banned street demonstrations, and arrested rabble-rousers. Like his adoptive father, he promised to return to private life once his work was done.49
The Assembly, which Lafayette seldom attended, adopted the Declaration of Rights on August 26, 1789, but it was no longer the document he had drafted. His definition of individual responsibility and provisions for universal suffrage, abolition of slavery, equality between the sexes, and free trade were gone. There were new provisions granting absolute freedom of speech and the press, and a universal right to resist “oppression,” which each citizen could define for himself. It was a recipe for anarchy.
Violence continued to erupt. The Declaration’s grant of unfettered freedom of speech and the press made things worse, because new demagogues and thousands of pamphlets and broadsides flooded Paris. They accused the royal family of living in luxury while the people starved, and demanded that the king move into the city. Lafayette a
nd his Guard grew increasingly busy as September advanced. France seemed to be going insane, and even Jefferson was worried. Civil war was “much talked of and expected,” he said.50
Mob rule was the greater danger, as the resistance from the king was not strong enough to force the moderates to band together and fight back. On the first of October a regiment of royal troops summoned by the queen entered the gates of Versailles, and the next day the king rejected the Declaration of Rights. Orators were soon working the Paris mobs. On October 5, thousands of women, finding the bakeries empty, marched on the Hôtel de Ville. It was before opening time, but somebody rang the emergency bell, which drew mobs armed with pikes. They broke into the place and looted it, then set off for Versailles to raid the palace bakery. Guardsmen joined them, to protect them from the royal troops. The horde expanded into many thousands, armed with a variety of weapons and even three cannons. When Lafayette reached the city hall, six Guard companies demanded that he lead them to Versailles. He agreed, on condition that they stood by their oaths to protect the royal family. He marched them to the head of the mob and reached Versailles at about midnight.
The Guard commander was greeted by a message from the frightened king, who “regarded his approach with pleasure” and had just accepted the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Lafayette led a weird torchlight procession through Versailles, then went to the palace, where he presented the crowd’s demands for bread and for the king and government to move to Paris. By three in the morning, everyone was exhausted, so he went to the Noailles mansion and collapsed in sleep. He had asked that his Guard take over from the royal troops, but Marie-Antoinette objected. She did not trust him.
Lafayette was awakened before dawn by news that the mob had crashed the palace gate, overwhelmed the soldiers, and beheaded two of them. Grabbing a horse and waving his sword, he charged into the crowd, his guardsmen behind. The throng scattered, surrounding the palace. By ten o’clock he had talked the king into going to Paris and harangued the crowd from a balcony. The people called for the queen’s head, so he took her out and kissed her hand. Madame de Staël, from inside, heard shouts of “Vive La Fayette!”
The mob set off for Paris, trailed by wagons carrying the royal flour. Behind them rode the royal family, surrounded by guardsmen. It took until the seventh to make the trip, which ended with a procession through hooting crowds. When the royal family reached the Hôtel de Ville, Bailly greeted them and thanked them for giving bread to the people. It ended with the king and family waving to cheering masses from the front steps. According to William Short, the American chargé, Lafayette was called “the guardian angel of the day.”51
The “October Days” of 1789 were another triumph for Lafayette, but he failed to follow through. The royal family was confined to the Tuileries, while mobs roamed the streets to prevent their escape. The Assembly moved to Paris and voted to impose martial law. The Guard put down riots, brought food into the city, and arrested those whose hobby was beheading people. The country called Lafayette its “protector,” but when the Assembly offered him its presidency, he declined because he was too busy putting down trouble.
Lafayette coasted along on his popularity, but he acted with no real authority. His ally Mirabeau observed, “The multitude is totally ignorant of the dictatorship which La Fayette exercises so maladroitly…and if it knew the sort of ministry without responsibility he wished to arrogate to himself, his public credit would be ruined.” Louis offered Lafayette the marshal’s baton, the constable’s sword, even the position of lieutenant general of the kingdom, but he turned them down. Other generals thought he should accept these offers. If he feared for his popularity, he should take command of all National Guards in the country, disband or reform the army, and establish the constitutional monarchy. He stayed with the Paris Guard, making a point of refusing greater power, because that is what Washington had done, as he saw it.52
THE SCENE OF THE ONE ACTION WAS IN HEAVEN, THE OTHER IN HELL
The fall of the Bastille and the king’s capitulation made the world think that France had completed a peaceful revolution. The news reached America early in the fall. Hamilton congratulated his friend Lafayette, although he feared “much for the final success of the attempts, for the fate of those I esteem who are engaged in it.” He felt a “foreboding of ill” over what would happen, especially to Lafayette.53
Washington, since April 30, 1789, president of the United States, complained that he had not heard from his young friend in some time. There had been “a long interval of silence between two persons whose habits of correspondence have been so uninterruptedly kept up as ours,” he told Lafayette, “but the new and arduous scenes in which we have both been lately engaged will afford a mutual excuse.” He was mystified by the news from France. “The revolution, which has taken place with you, is of such magnitude and of so momentous a nature that we hardly yet dare form a conjecture about it. We however trust, and fervently pray that its consequences may prove happy.”54
Privately, Washington told Morris that the revolution going on in France was “of too great a magnitude to be effected in so short a space, and with the loss of so little blood.” On the other hand, he told a friend in January 1790, he would “sincerely rejoice to see that the American Revolution has been productive of happy consequences on both sides of the Atlantic.” The “agency of the Marquis de la Fayette” was “in a high degree honourable to his character.”55
Washington was ambivalent, because while he hoped for the best, he dreaded the consequences for his adopted son. He had reason to worry, because with the king a prisoner of the Assembly, the country’s fate rested in the hands of its members. The royalists had fled the country, leaving three factions—the remaining nobles, the liberals, and the enragés (madmen). In January 1790, the lunatics took over the asylum. Lafayette was too often absent keeping the peace to organize resistance to them. Shouting the moderates into silence, the radical Jacobins abandoned the attempt to write a constitution and grabbed power through a supreme governing council, a Jacobin caucus that lorded it over the Assembly. They revoked the last of the king’s authority and abolished the Catholic Church. Disagreement with them was declared treasonous. They extended their political control over the country by dividing it into districts, cantons, and communes, each run by a prosecutor. They were in total control by spring.
Once they had power, the radicals appropriated the lands of the king, church, and émigrés (nobles who had left the country) and issued 400 million livres in bonds, secured by the seized properties, which went up for sale. Their hatred for the old order was so intense that it inspired prolonged savagery all over France. Mobs looted unguarded mansions in the cities, while peasants did the same to country homes. The army started to fall apart, as commoner soldiers slaughtered officers. The establishment of a civil-service church touched off the mass butchery that only religion can inspire. Many of Lafayette’s in-laws fled the country, but Adrienne stood by him, and her mother stood by her.56
“How often, my beloved general, have I wanted your wise advices and friendly support!” Lafayette cried to his adoptive father. Adrienne also wrote to Washington. “Monsieur, in the midst of the agitations of our revolution,” she told him, “I have never ceased to share in Monsieur de La Fayette’s happiness at having followed in your footsteps, in having found in your example and your lessons a means of serving his country.”57
They had grounds for optimism early in 1790, because Lafayette retained his popularity. In a process called “Caesarism,” strongmen took over in many provinces, but there was only one national figure—Lafayette. He was so popular that 1790 was for many months called the “Year of Lafayette.” It appeared that he had persuaded the king to go along with the revolution, and he escorted the monarch into the Assembly in February to say so. But the queen and king were both plotting against him, and he did not know it.
Hoping to restore a liberal faction to counter the radicals, in the spring Lafayette formed a partnership
with Mirabeau, and they organized the Club of 1789. “Your great qualities need my force,” Mirabeau told him, “and my force needs your great qualities.” He warned him that nobody can be popular all the time. Lafayette had strong principles, but not much practical political sense. Still, he had to be reckoned with. As long as the National Guard of Paris was behind him, he was invincible. This could not have been more different from the Washington of the Newburgh Addresses.58
The revolution was “getting on as well as it can with a nation that has swalled [sic] up liberty all at once,” Lafayette told Washington in March, “and is still liable to mistake licentiousness for freedom—The Assembly have more hatred to the ancient system than experience on the proper organization of a new and constitutional governement—The ministers are lameting [sic] the loss of power, and affraïd to use that which they have.” Because everything had been “destroïed and not much new building is yet above ground, there is much room for critics and calomnies.”
If Lafayette had one political talent, it was for the symbolic gesture. “Give me leave, my dear general,” he said, “to present you with a picture of the Bastille just as it looked a few days after I ordered its demolition, with the main kea [key] of that fortress of despotism.” He presented it as a tribute which he owed “as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide de camp to my general, as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.” The key symbolized people fighting for liberty. He knew Washington would think of it that way, and when it arrived, the general gave it a place of honor in his parlor at Mount Vernon. It is still there.59
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