The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  Clamour overwhelmed the capital, fanned by a mad and evil journalist, Marat. It was rumoured that the King was about to seize Paris by force, that he was going to dismiss the Assembly; but it was the news of the banquet itself which enraged the women, for there had been a bread famine for months. On 5 October an armed rabble 5,000 strong—mainly women, and some of them well-to-do bourgeoises—set out from Paris to march the ten miles to Versailles; as they marched through the pouring rain they shouted, ‘Bread! Bread!’ or screamed what they would do to Marie Antoinette—‘We’ll cut off her head … rip her heart out … fry her liver … make her guts into ribbons.’ The popular story that Marie Antoinette, when told of the bread famine, had cruelly said, ‘Let them eat cake!’ shows how deeply she was hated by the people.

  At Versailles a delegation was allowed in to see the King. Its spokesman, a seventeen-year-old female art student, Louison Chabry, said simply, ‘Bread, Sire’ and then fainted. When she revived Louis kissed her on both cheeks and promised to do something about the famine. But the mob outside remained, throughout the wet night, despite the fact that the palace was patrolled by Lafayette and his National Guard. Early next morning, in Lafayette’s absence, the crowd managed to break in through an unlocked door, killing and then decapitating two of the Bodyguard. Marie Antoinette barely had time to reach the King’s apartments. Luckily Lafayette arrived and calmed the crowd by promising that Louis would speak to them. The King appeared on the balcony, but was too overwrought to say anything. With remarkable bravery the Queen took his place. The crowd, waving their axes and the heads of guardsmen on pikes, howled in derision, but when Lafayette kissed her hand they began to shout, ‘Vive la Reine!’

  They also yelled, ‘To Paris! To Paris!’ The minister for the royal household, M de Saint Priest, advised the King to flee to Rouen and raise an army to restore law and order, but Necker told him that such a step would be tantamount to abdication. Accordingly, Louis appeared on the balcony again and said, ‘Mes enfants, you want me to come with you to Paris. I consent, but only on condition that I shall never be parted from my wife and children.’ He also demanded safe conduct for his Bodyguard. Shortly after midday an extraordinary procession set out for the capital, headed by a gloating, uproarious mob, and including the miserable men of the Flanders Regiment and of the Bodyguard who had all been disarmed and now wore the Revolutionary cockade in their hats. The same day the royal family was installed in the Tuileries, which they found dirty and dilapidated, and with only a few sticks of old-fashioned furniture; the Dauphin was frightened by its gloom.

  The Assembly was unwise enough to follow the King to Paris, where it found itself at the mercy of the mob. It decided to change Louis’s title—from being ‘by the grace of God King of France and Navarre’, he became ‘by the grace of God and the constitutional law of the state, King of the French’. Daily, crowds flocked to the Tuileries to see their Parisian King and Queen.

  Mirabeau, leader of what were now the moderates in the Assembly, submitted a secret memorandum to Louis urging him to flee to Normandy and from there offer the country a workable democratic constitution. (Louis had made his only clever move during the entire Revolution, by offering to pay Mirabeau’s debts in return for his advice.) But Marie Antoinette did not trust Mirabeau, whose pock-marked face—like a diseased lion—and reputation for vice and atheism obscured his very real patriotism and political genius. In any case, the King was determined not to start a civil war. He had read Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion and it had impressed him deeply—he was convinced that so long as he did not oppose the revolution by force of arms in the way Charles I had done, everything would turn out right. Ironically, he gave it as his opinion that, ‘The Frenchman is incapable of regicide.’ Such beliefs suited his lethargic nature—he had always hated having to make decisions. And to anyone so politically naive as Louis XVI the situation seemed far from hopeless; he remained extremely popular, and medals and statues of him were still being inscribed ‘Restorer of Liberty’. In February 1790, addressing the Assembly, he declared himself to be King of the Revolution.

  Indeed, life at the Tuileries, which had been refurnished, was not so very different from what it had been at Versailles. Count Fersen, visiting Marie Antoinette in February 1792, was staggered by the splendour of her apartments. Though Louis was no longer able to hunt, he went riding in the Bois, unescorted and plainly dressed as befitted a citizen King, where he was sometimes cheered by workmen. His new position as a constitutional monarch was curiously modern. Men like the Comte de Narbonne and the Vicomte de Noailles really believed that the new constitution would work—even Louis himself thought so at times.

  The King co-operated with the Assembly throughout 1790. On 14 July, the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, there was a great ceremony in the Champs de Mars, which some saw as a revolutionary coronation, a ‘dispelling of Gothick mists’. Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, said Mass (for the last time). Louis made a most successful speech to the huge crowd and then took the Civic Oath: ‘I, the King of the French, do swear and declare that I will use all the powers delegated to me by the constitutional law of the state, to maintain the constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by me.’ Marie Antoinette, watching from a balcony of the Ecole Militaire, lifted up the six-year-old Dauphin to present him to the crowd, who cheered them emotionally. Most people thought that the revolution was over.

  Unfortunately, the government, having abolished the traditional taxes, had to look for money elsewhere. On Talleyrand’s advice it seized all church property; henceforward the state would pay the clergy’s stipends. The government insisted that bishops and parish priests must be appointed by the state through the local authorities, and they were now required to swear an oath of obedience to the nation; the vast majority of French churchmen refused to take such an oath, which implicitly denied Papal supremacy, so ‘Down went the old Church of France with all its pomp and wealth’. As a man of rigid religious principles, the King was horrified by the government’s action. He still possessed the veto and refused to accept edicts against non-juring clergy. It was the veto which eventually destroyed him.

  The break with Rome did not come until the Pope denounced the oath in April 1791. By then France was hopelessly divided. The lesser nobility, many of whom had been mildly liberal, turned against the Revolution when titles and the traditional law of inheritance were abolished in June 1790. They followed the grands seigneurs into exile, and among them were a large number of army officers and naval men. Many of these émigrés waited in the Rhineland towns just over the frontier, hoping for civil war or armed intervention by the great powers. Marie Antoinette was no longer ‘Madame Déficit’ but ‘Madame Veto’. Frantically she begged her brothers (the Emperors Joseph II, Leopold II and Francis II, who succeeded each other in turn) to invade France and save her. To Artois she wrote despairingly that Louis could not see his danger. At home, the constitutionalists were steadily losing ground to the extremist republicans of the political clubs. In September 1790 even Necker had resigned and fled to Switzerland. The streets rang with that gayest, catchiest and most sinister of all revolutionary songs, Ça Ira. Curiously, it had been composed by Couperin.

  Hitherto the King had roundly cursed anyone who spoke to him of flight or of conspiring against the Revolution. But by the autumn of 1790 he had had to realize that in Paris he was a mere prisoner and, after being threatened on a number of occasions, almost at the mercy of the mob. In November he therefore commissioned M de Breteuil to negotiate secretly with foreign courts for help ‘to re-establish my lawful authority and my people’s happiness’. Shortly afterwards, the Assembly bullied him into signing an edict dismissing priests who would not take the oath. Mesdames Tantes, the Princesses Adelaide and Victoire, were sent to take refuge with old Cardinal de Bernis at the French embassy in Rome. Mirabeau, Louis’s one really able adviser, died in March 1791, lamenting that he had unwittingly helped to pull down the monarchy. Par
is became more and more suspicious of the King, especially after the flight of his aunts. Jacobin extremists attacked him in the Assembly and in the gutter press. They were not without provocation. Nearly 400 pugnacious noblemen haunted the Tuileries, swaggering and boastful and known as the Chevaliers du Poignard—Knights of the Dagger. Their loose talk gave rise to rumours of conspiracy. One day, when they met at the Palace, they were arrested by a detachment of the National Guard—though only after a pitched battle—and dragged off to prison. Louis was so upset that he took to his bed. His Revolutionary subjects’ worst suspicions were confirmed. At Easter 1791, when the royal family tried to visit Saint-Cloud, they were prevented by a howling mob who seized their horses’ bridles. Louis commented, ‘They want to murder me like Henri IV.’ He realized that he had to get out of Paris at all costs.

  The flight to Varennes was one of the worst-organized escape attempts in history. On the night of 20 June 1791 the King disguised in a brown wig, Marie Antoinette swathed in a voluminous black cloak, and the Dauphin dressed as a girl, together with Madame Royale and Louis’s sister Mme Elisabeth, climbed into a small carriage driven by Count Fersen. As soon as they were outside Paris they exchanged it for an enormous green and yellow coach which made disguise superfluous—it even had the royal arms on the door. Most unfortunately, one of the detachments of loyal Hussars who were supposed to meet them en route, failed to make contact. At Varennes the Dragoons were waiting for them on the wrong side of the river. When they arrived there at midnight, the royal family were met by some Hussars, but too few of them. Suddenly the entire party was surrounded by a large and excited detachment of National Guardsmen. Louis, with his almost superstitious dread of shedding French blood, ordered the Hussars not to resist.

  The coach and its dejected occupants were driven back to the capital, a melancholy and terrifying journey which took nearly four days, during which they were frequently stoned. When they reached Paris they drove to the Tuileries through silent crowds—placards warned, ‘Whoever cheers the King will be flogged: Whoever boos him will be hanged.’ Soldiers reversed arms as though at a funeral parade. The National Assembly suspended Louis until a committee of investigation reported diplomatically that he had been kidnapped and was therefore innocent. But as Gouverneur Morris, a good friend to the monarchy, reported to President Washington, ‘It would not be surprising if such a dolt as this were to lose his throne.’ Even though the Assembly resisted an outcry for his deposition from Jacobins like Danton and Robespierre, the King was doomed. He had lost his last asset, his popularity.

  Even now, however, his situation seemed far from desperate. In July a great anti-monarchist demonstration in the Champs de Mars was broken up by the National Guard, who opened fire and killed over sixty demonstrators; many Jacobin extremists went into hiding, Danton actually fleeing across the Channel. On 3 September 1791 the Constituent Assembly completed its work and introduced a definitive Constitution. The King retained his functions, but had to swear yet another oath, pledging his loyalty to all the provisions of the new Constitution. He did so publicly before the Assembly, with considerable aplomb; while he was taking the oath the Deputies rudely sat down, whereupon Louis sat down himself and continued. In private he was miserably dejected and wept, groaning, ‘It’s all over.’ Marie Antoinette was furious with him. Reading his speech, which had been carefully prepared for him by the Assembly, she cried angrily, ‘That’s hardly the speech of a King deeply resentful of his ill treatment!’ Louis simply shrugged his shoulders. But Paris was en fête—for a second time people thought that the Revolution was over. Poor simple Marie de Lamballe came home to her beloved Queen.

  The Constituent Assembly had naively forbidden the reelection of any of its members. As a result, the new Legislative Assembly was far more to the left, though a minority were still convinced supporters of Louis XVI. At once egalitarian debates began as to whether he should still be addressed as Sire and Majesty. Emperor Leopold II and King Frederick William of Prussia had issued a declaration, in August, that it was in the interests of every European sovereign that the King of France should recover all his powers. In November 1791, at the Assembly’s prompting, Louis issued a declaration to the effect that France was ready to fight in defence of its new constitution and laws; he also asked his fellow sovereigns to withdraw their troops from the French borders. In addition, he issued an open letter to his brother Artois, who was busy organizing an émigré army, inviting him to come home. On 20 April 1792 the King went to the Legislative Assembly and asked it to declare war on the new Emperor, Francis II.

  Quite rightly, many people suspected Louis of playing a double game. Both he and the Queen believed that a war would be their salvation—6,000 out of 9,000 army officers had left the country and it was reasonable to assume that an undisciplined rabble would be speedily defeated. In fact, his open letter to his brother was a calculated lie—for many months he had been sending money to the émigrés, and to Artois in particular. He had already vetoed laws against them (to confiscate their property and make them liable to the death penalty if ever they returned to France), despite the Assembly’s remonstrances. Ironically, he was now behaving exactly like his bête noire, Charles I, negotiating with both sides.

  To begin with, the war went badly for France. A French attack in the Low Countries failed disastrously, largely because the men did not trust their officers. At home the new paper currency of assignats collapsed, resulting in savage inflation and food riots. In the panic, the Assembly began to lose control—on 20 June it was invaded by a savage mob who ordered the deputies to force Louis to sign an edict deporting priests who would not take the oath, and which he had been resisting for over a month.

  At the same time, an enraged rabble stormed its way into the Tuileries to force the King to sign the edict. They made him don the red cap of Liberty—they tried to put one on Marie Antoinette but she promptly placed it on the Dauphin. Threatened with a bayonet, the King invited a soldier to feel his heart ‘to see if I’m afraid’. He cheerfully drank from a bottle offered to him, and then appeared on the balcony, wearing his cap; but he none the less remained firm in his refusal to sign the edict. A young gunner officer who was watching outside asked a friend, ‘Why on earth did they let in that scum? If a few hundred had been mown down by cannon, the others would still be running.’ The officer’s name was Captain Bonaparte. Nevertheless, the King’s coolness and amiability impressed the mob, who withdrew, and aroused a certain admiration in most spectators. Moderate men were indignant and Lafayette prepared a counter-attack on the political clubs who had arranged the demonstration, but his plans were deliberately betrayed to the Mayor of Paris on the orders of Marie Antoinette, whose personal dislikes always overruled her judgement. By now the royal palace of the Tuileries had an atmosphere ‘like that of a wrecked ship in a storm’.

  On 26 July the Duke of Brunswick, the general commanding the Prussian army, issued a proclamation which threatened that, if the Royal Family were harmed, Paris would be sacked and its inhabitants placed before firing squads; the Duke also announced that he was going to restore Louis XVI to his rightful powers. The French went almost mad with rage. Even moderates began to accuse the King of conspiring with the enemy—with justification Marie Antoinette was suspected of being an Austrian spy who was sending information to her brother the Emperor. The Assembly was inundated with letters and petitions demanding Louis’s deposition.

  The Paris Commune, which was now controlled by extremists, carefully organized a final assault on the Tuileries, arming the mob from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and reinforcing it with like-minded National Guardsmen. In the early hours of 10 August they took up their position on the Place du Carrousel, in front of the palace, to the sound of ceaseless drum rolls and accompanied by twelve cannon. The Tuileries were defended by 900 red-coated Swiss Guards, 2,500 National Guardsmen, and 200 noblemen (including gallant old Malesherbes, well over seventy, who had brought his court sword). Unfortunately there was no one to l
ead them, as the National Guard officer commanding the palace had been lured away and murdered. Louis, as heedless of reality as ever, took a morning stroll in the garden, driving the mob outside the railings into a frenzy. The gates collapsed and the rabble swept in. But the King had already left, just in time, although the Queen wanted him to stay and die—he hoped to defuse the situation by taking refuge at the Manège (the royal riding school) where the Assembly were sitting. Unfortunately he forgot to tell the Swiss to withdraw. They and the armed gentlemen fired steadily into the mob until the courtyard was heaped with dead and dying sans-culottes. The mob had been all but beaten off when a message arrived from Louis ordering the Swiss to lay down their arms; they obeyed, whereupon they were hacked and clubbed to death, their severed heads being thrown into the air to be caught on pike points—over 800 died. Years afterwards Napoleon, who was not exactly a stranger to bloodshed, said that he had never seen such carnage. A few Swiss got away through the gardens, while many of the nobles—including Malesherbes—escaped through secret passages.

  After a miserably uncomfortable confinement in the minute writers’ gallery at the Manège, the royal family were temporarily imprisoned in the former monastery of the Feuillants nearby. Louis had been quickly suspended from his functions by the Assembly, whose members were terrified by the mob outside howling ‘Down with the tyrant!’ Finally, the royal family were sent to the grim Tower of the Temple, a thirteenth-century building which until recently had been the headquarters of the Knights of Malta (it had been built by the Knights Templar). The prisoners’ quarters were on two floors, dungeonlike rooms which they found in a filthy, verminous condition and almost without furniture. Louis’s only comment was to remove a pornographic picture hanging on the wall, muttering, ‘I can’t allow such things to be seen by my daughter.’ Soon, however, the rooms were swept out and furnished, humbly but adequately. A single servant, Cléry, the King’s valet, waited on them. The Queen, Mme Elisabeth, the Dauphin and Madame Royale slept on the lower floor, Louis on the floor above. They met at breakfast, in the King’s room which served as a sitting-room, and spent the day together. In the morning Louis, Marie Antoinette and Mme Elisabeth gave lessons to the children—Latin, history, geography and arithmetic—and at one o’clock went for a walk in the grounds before lunching at two. The King slept afterwards and then there was reading aloud. Mme Elisabeth mended their clothes. The food and wine seem to have been excellent and the archivist’s fine library was available—after saying goodnight to his family at nine, Louis always read till midnight. The most unpleasant feature were the guards, two of whom were always in the sitting-room in case of any attempt at escape or to communicate with the outside world.