The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  Outside, the terrified Assembly had dissolved itself and had been succeeded by the Convention, who proclaimed a republic and set about concocting yet another constitution. The Revolution was fighting for its life. Brunswick, having taken Longwy and Verdun, marched on Paris. On 20 November he was halted at Valmy by devastating fire from the French artillery (which was commanded by pre-1789 officers); to the amazement of all Europe, Brunswick withdrew and then began a general retreat. Goethe, who was a spectator at the ‘Cannonade of Valmy’, prophesied that a new era of history had begun. Meanwhile, in Paris the extremists, determined to cow any opposition, had instigated the dreadful ‘September Massacres’, butchering more than 1,200 prisoners in the Paris jails. Although the royal family had no means of knowing what was happening, they were sometimes stoned and screamed at during their walks. One day a mob paraded outside, waving a pike bearing a beautiful blonde head which the Queen suddenly realized was that of her faithful friend, Marie de Lamballe; the sans-culottes tried to storm the Temple but were stopped by an official; a deputation was allowed in, one of them holding a piece of bleeding flesh which he claimed was the heart of Mme de Lamballe—Marie Antoinette fainted. The guards were increasingly insolent, addressing Louis as ‘Capet’. One took particular pleasure in blowing tobacco smoke into the King’s face. Some drew cartoons on the walls, of their prisoners hanging from gibbets—inscribed ‘Louis taking an air bath’ or ‘Marie Antoinette dances’. But others were impressed by the King’s dignity and simplicity—one remarked, ‘A man who loves his children like that cannot have done all the evil that they say.’

  The extremists demanded that ‘Citizen Capet’ be tried. Probably a majority of the Convention was against it. But on 20 November François Gamain, the locksmith who had once been a pampered favourite of the King’s, showed the authorities a secret iron safe which he had built for him at the Tuileries; it was opened and found to contain hundreds of documents which revealed that Louis had been subsidizing émigrés and begging foreign powers to invade France and save him. On 11 December he was summoned before the Convention to be accused of treason. His appearance was not helped by his being unshaven (his razors had been confiscated), yet although stripped of the trappings of royalty, his dignity was overwhelming—even Marat observed, ‘If he were not a King I would have said that he was a great man.’ Everyone present was haunted by the recollection of Charles I’s trial. Louis denied all charges and was allowed to choose counsel to defend him. The seventy-two-year-old Malesherbes came to the Temple and requested the honour. The King, in tears, embraced him but warned him that he was risking his neck. ‘Yours is a far greater sacrifice, because you are putting your own life in danger when you cannot even save mine.’ Louis had no doubt as to the verdict and made his will. During his trial he was not allowed to see his family—for Louis an almost unbearable hardship.

  The Jacobins, whipped up by Marat, bullied the Convention into deciding both guilt and sentence by a public vote. The Girondins, republicans but not murderers, tried to save the King by vainly demanding a referendum—it was refused, as the extremists knew that the country would acquit him. Tom Paine, the English revolutionary, proposed that the King be exiled to America. But fanatics howled for Louis’s head, referring to him as ‘that fat pig who cost us so much’ or ‘the snoring rhinoceros’. Yet even the most savage Jacobin was shocked by the behaviour of Orléans—now known as Citizen Philippe Egalité—who voted for his cousin’s death (probably, like many others, he did so to save his own life). However, although a large majority found Louis guilty of conspiring against the state, a much smaller majority voted for execution—a single vote less, and he would have been saved. Malesherbes brought the verdict to Louis, falling at his feet. After comforting Malesherbes, the King told his valet to fetch a volume of history containing an account of the execution of Charles I. What hurt the simple creature most was that Orléans had voted for his death. The order for Capet’s execution was issued on 19 January. Even the ferocious Carnot, the architect of the republic’s victories, wept when he signed the death-warrant.

  On Sunday 20 January 1793 a deputation called at the Temple to inform the King that he was to be executed within twenty-four hours. They refused his request for the sentence to be deferred for three days so that he could prepare his soul, but agreed to send him a non-juring priest. After a last evening with his family, he said goodbye. Marie Antoinette wanted to spend the night with him but he refused, promising to see everyone in the morning. They all insisted, ‘You promise!’ ‘Yes, I promise.’ The priest, the Franco-Irish Abbé Edgeworth, had supper with Louis who ate an excellent meal and then slept soundly.

  Drums and trumpets sounded continuously throughout Paris from five am. The King’s first words on waking were to ask Cléry to draw the curtains. ‘I need daylight—yesterday’s business tired me.’ After having his hair dressed so that his neck would be ready for the guillotine, Louis heard Mass and communicated. Making what possessions remained to him into small parcels, and asking Cléry to give his wedding-ring to Marie Antoinette, he told the valet, ‘Tell the Queen, and my dear sister and my beloved children that I beg their pardon for not having allowed them to come upstairs—I wanted to spare them the pain of a cruel parting.’ At eight-thirty am Louis, wearing a black cocked hat and a brown overcoat, and the Abbé Edgeworth were driven in the Mayor of Paris’s carriage to the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde). The square was packed with 20,000 troops, though the streets were deserted. On the way, the King read the Psalms from Edgeworth’s breviary. When they arrived drums rolled, and as he climbed the steps of the scaffold the King shouted to the drummers, ‘Keep quiet!’—they ceased. He loosened his shirt, taking off his cravat with an almost unnatural calm. He demurred a little when the executioners wanted to tie his hands, but then agreed. As he was about to lie on the board beneath the knife he cried, ‘Frenchmen, I die innocent!’ The drums began to roll. His last words were, ‘May my blood strengthen the happiness of the Fr …’ As the knife fell, the Abbé Edgeworth prayed aloud, ‘Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven.’

  However weak and indecisive Louis XVI may have been, no more honourable or decent man ever sat upon a throne. He could have escaped his fate many times over, if he had not been so determined to avoid shedding his people’s blood. Ernest Renan saw his killing as self-murder, ‘the suicide of France’.

  ‘The Child in the Temple’

  LOUIS XVII (1793–1795)

  _____________

  ‘Always alone—my mother stays in the other tower’

  There is no episode in French history more painful than the ‘reign’ of Louis XVII. These two years, the last of his short life, were years of utter misery; the boy who had been born to the highest position in the world was systematically brutalized and degraded, and then deliberately neglected until he died. None the less, for a moment at least he knew that he was King of France when, after his father’s execution, his mother knelt before him in homage.

  Louis XVII—Louis-Charles—was born at Versailles on Holy Saturday 1785, and at once created Duc de Normandie. Marie Antoinette first learnt his sex when the child was shown to her wearing the cordon bleu of the Saint-Esprit—the traditional way of informing a Queen that she had given birth to a Son of France. In contrast to his brother, the Dauphin Louis-Joseph, he began life as a healthy, lively boy, soon very talkative, with striking, somewhat girlish good looks, set off by his long fair hair, but marred (according to contemporaries) by excessively thick lips—though these are not apparent in the many beautiful portraits of him. Hézecques tells us that he was a noticeably sweet-natured child. He was only four when he succeeded his brother as Dauphin, too young to realize his new importance. In a letter, written in that sad summer of 1789, Marie Antoinette says that though healthy he is much too nervous—‘the slightest unusual noise has an extraordinary effect on him.’ He had to have as much fresh air as possible; fortunately he loved flowers and gardening. The Queen herself read him Perraul
t’s fairy tales and La Fontaine’s fables. She noticed with concern that her son was bad at his lessons, owing to lack of application rather than stupidity. However, she was satisfied that he had the best governess possible in Yolande de Polignac.

  Louis-Charles could remember little of the early days of the Revolution. He was obviously upset by the dreadful leave-taking of Versailles in October 1789; when the harridans screamed threats at the Queen on the way to Paris, he put his head out of the coach window and begged ‘Forgive Mummy’ (Grace pour Maman). Although his first sight of the Tuileries, dusty and unfurnished, frightened him, he became happy enough there, and enjoyed playing in the palace gardens wearing the red, white and blue uniform of the National Guard. In July 1790 1,500 Bretons marched up to Paris to swear loyalty to the King. After Louis XVI had embraced their leader, the entire contingent was taken to see the Dauphin who was picking flowers on the terrace of the Tuileries. ‘The pretty boy gave a flower as long as they lasted to every Breton’, says an English eye-witness, ‘and then gathered lilac leaves, and for fear they should not last, tore them in two, and gave half a leaf apiece to the rest.’

  Probably his first lasting moment of fear was the flight to Varennes; having fallen asleep after leaving the Tuileries, he said later that he woke up on the way out of Paris, terrified and convinced that ‘someone was coming to murder him’. Such a timid, sensitive child was horribly scared by the hostile demonstrations—the shouting and the stoning—and by his parents’ dejection on the miserable drive back.

  Louis-Charles’s last year at the Tuileries must have been a time of constant terror, not only when the mob stormed into the palace on 20 June 1791, and made him wear the red cap of Liberty, but each day and every day. Though his mother and father did their best to conceal their own fear from him, he must have sensed the savage hostility of the mob outside the railings. According to Mme de Tourzel, one of his governesses, the Prince Royal (as he was called by the new Constitution) was obviously aware of his parents’ alarm, however much they tried to hide it. After the mob’s invasion of the Tuileries in June 1792, the royal family dared not set foot outside the palace, and Louis-Charles was even banished from his beloved gardens; when his mother attempted to take him for a walk there, there was nearly a riot by the red-capped sans-culottes, who screamed threats and insults at them through the railings and howled Ça Ira. During the flight from the palace to the Manège his parents kept the full horror of their situation from him, and mercifully he dozed throughout much of the ordeal in the minute writers’ box.

  The months in the Temple with his father and mother were probably happy enough for Louis-Charles. Admittedly, the contrast between palatial luxury and the Tower’s rough furniture—some of which can still be seen at the Musée Carnavalet—must have come as a shock, but at least his parents were able to spend more time with him. They were invariably soothing and reassuring, despite the guards’ provocation. The King and Queen did not even show emotion when the commissioners came to tell them that the monarchy had been abolished, though the boy realized that secretly they were very distressed, and he learnt to fear the constant visits by committees from the Convention. Cléry, that heroic valet, was deeply impressed by the child’s sweet nature and attempts to comfort his parents. Naturally quick and intelligent, he learnt to live with the insolent guards, to recognize which of them was biddable or at any rate not a nuisance; on one occasion he reported to his father, as a good sign, that a guard was reading Tacitus.

  When Louis XVI knew that he had been condemned to death, he told the Dauphin never to forget his Catholic faith and never to take vengeance upon regicides, raising the boy’s hand into the air to give more solemnity to the oath. Louis-Charles tried, unsuccessfully, to run out of the Temple, with a touching little plan of begging the soldiers to save his father. While the cannon roared to celebrate the execution and the royal prisoners were all in tears, Marie Antoinette (it is said) knelt solemnly before her son and acknowledged him as King. Almost certainly the majority of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen joined with her in spirit. Only extremists wanted the First Republic—everyone else was heartily sick of the bloodshed and anarchy, the soaring inflation, the revolutionary wars at home and abroad.

  The prisoners were guarded with the utmost vigilance. One plan to escape—in which Louis was to have been hidden in a laundry-basket—was betrayed; another was foiled by sheer accident. For a time General Dumouriez who commanded the republican armies in the Low Countries, intended to march on Paris and enthrone Louis XVII, but he was defeated by the Austrians at Neerwinden in the spring, and deserted. In March 1793 the royalists rose in the Vendée where, led by the Marquis de Rochejacquelein, the pious peasants—the dreaded Chouans, so called from their hooting like owls when signalling—waged a bestial little war on the Godless government. Other risings were to follow—at Caen, Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles. The French would soon be at each other’s throats, White (royalist) against Blue (democrat). The newly-formed Committee of Public Safety (the ten extremists who terrorized the Convention and formed the country’s real government) regarded Louis as the greatest internal danger—he was the focal point of every counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Even the crazy Hébert, whose extremism had degenerated into mania, had to admit that, ‘For royalists and moderates the King never dies—he is in the Temple.’ It was also obvious that his mother and aunt had every intention of escaping and of taking him with them. The last straw came in June 1793 when it was discovered, just in time, that the Franco-Irish General Dillon had been plotting a coup d’état to dismiss the Convention at the point of the bayonet and proclaim Louis XVII.

  Accordingly on the night of 3 July 1793 six commissioners—mostly Paris tradesmen—suddenly arrived at the Temple and burst in on the Queen who was quietly sewing by the side of her sleeping son. They announced brusquely that ‘Capet’s son is to be separated from his mother and family’. For an hour Marie Antoinette clutched Louis, who was weeping hysterically, imploring and beseeching the men to have mercy, but her prayers were in vain. At last she dressed the sobbing child, telling him to go with the men but never to forget how much she loved him. As they dragged him away, the King of France and Navarre screamed piteously.

  In place of his mother Louis XVII now had a ‘tutor’, a Member of the Paris Commune, Antoine Simon. This successor to the grand seigneur Governors of the Bourbon child monarchs was a failed cobbler of nearly sixty, from the Paris back streets, who was living off the savings of his charwoman wife. Illiterate—he could neither read nor write—dirty, foul-mouthed and evil-tempered, Simon had been chosen deliberately as being best qualified ‘to turn an aristocrat into a democrat’. Though it has sometimes been questioned, there is no reason to doubt the traditional assessment of Simon. The child cried for two days and two nights, refusing to eat and begging to be taken back to his mother; eventually he grew too frightened to weep. The old cobbler quickly taught the boy, who was only eight and naturally trusting, to sing popular revolutionary songs like the Marseillaise and the Carmagnole, and to swear, and made him wear the red bonnet of a sans-culotte. Meanwhile his distraught mother, who could hear him crying in the room below, stayed at her window for hours on end in the hope of catching a glimpse of him when he went to play in the garden. Later, she said, ‘Nothing can hurt me any more.’

  Simon was frequently drunk, and made Louis drink till he was tipsy too, although wine nauseated the boy. From her own room his horrified sister heard her brother’s shrill treble echoing the old man’s hoarse voice in bawdy catches. The cobbler made the King of France fetch and carry for him, cursing and shouting at him, and beating him especially when drunk. Hébert seems to have instructed Simon to degrade the boy physically—the old man taught him to masturbate, damaging one of his testicles in the process. Probably he was also instructed to bring prostitutes into his room, who, it was hoped—although he was too small to have intercourse with them—might infect him with the pox (this instruction does not seem to have been carried out). Every effort
was made to terrify Louis, Simon bellowing that he would send him to the guillotine. Such treatment soon had an appalling effect on the sensitive little boy. Only a few weeks after being dragged from his mother, referring to his relatives in the room above him, he was heard to yell, ‘Foutre, haven’t those damned whores been guillotined yet?’

  By the summer of 1793 the Austrians and Prussians were beginning to capture French frontier towns, while the English occupied Toulon and the Spaniards invaded Roussillon. Within France, royalist risings were going from strength to strength—even the Protestant mountaineers of the Cévennes rose for the lily banner of the Kings who had treated them so ill. Only the most savage measures sustained the tottering Republic, the guillotine crashing down monotonously. Robespierre and Carnot saved their Revolution in an orgy of French blood. Scapegoats were needed, the most sensational possible, and the Austrian bitch was the obvious candidate. The Committee of Public Safety wished to humiliate her as well as to destroy her.