When the King Took Flight
Page 5
Grim and sullen, the family had moved into their assigned residence in the Tuileries palace, at the western end of the great Louvre complex in the heart of the capital. For weeks thereafter they refused even to leave the buildings or to stroll in the adjacent gar- dens.26 A few days after the event the king wrote to his cousin the king of Spain an extremely significant letter-discovered by historians only in the twentieth century. In it he openly and self-consciously repudiated virtually the entire Revolution and protested "all those acts contrary to royal authority that have been extorted from me by intimidation" since the attack on the Bastille. Whatever temptations he might once have felt to cooperate with a reform movement, he now fully embraced a traditional image of authoritarian kingship: "I owe it to myself, I owe it to my children, I owe it to my entire family to ensure that royal authority, confirmed in my dynastic line through the test of time, shall not be diminished in any respect." And he solemnly declared that his conservative declaration on June 23 was the only policy to which he would subscribe.27 Both he and the queen had now come to believe that a small group of Parisian radicals, the Jacobins, had seized control of the state and that the great mass of the population outside the capital fully backed the king and only awaited the opportunity to show him their love and obedience. But for the time being, insofar as the king had a policy, it was a "politique du pire": to wait patiently and allow the evil to work its course until the Revolutionaries destroyed themselves through their unworkable schemes of democracy and social equality. "He had persuaded himself," wrote Saint-Priest, "that the Assembly would be discredited through its own errors. The king's weakness led him to take hold of this idea, thus relieving him of the need for a permanent day-to-day opposition, too difficult for his character to sustain."28
We now know that the king's oath and his various appearances before the National Assembly-when he seemingly supported their actions-had been largely choreographed by the patriot leadership and notably by the marquis de Lafayette, the young hero of the American Revolution and the single most influential revolutionary leader in 1790. To be sure, a steadfast consistency was never Louis' forte, and he may have wavered at times in his assessment of the situation. In the spring of 1790 the family had finally begun venturing out of the Tuileries palace into the gardens and even by carriage into the city. In June they were allowed to drive to the queen's chateau of Saint-Cloud just to the west of Paris, and the time spent in the country seems to have raised their spirits. The king was also greatly affected by his enthusiastic popular reception during the Festival of Federation and the weeklong celebration that accompanied it. He rode out daily to review troops and national guard units and their rousing cheers of "Long live the king," pronounced with such fervor and sincerity, helped fill his need to be loved and appreciated by his people.29 For a time both he and the queen seem also to have come under the spell of the great orator and Revolutionary leader Count Mirabeau, who had now sold himself as secret adviser to the monarchy, and who held out the vision of a compromise that would return the king to power as a greatly strengthened constitutional monarch.30
But Mirabeau died suddenly in April 1791, and long before that the queen, if not the king, had entirely lost confidence in him." As the months passed, moreover, and as the situation became ever more complex and uncertain, Louis increasingly fell back on his wife for advice and guidance. And it is doubtful whether Marie ever seriously considered a compromise with the evil that was Revolution. Throughout most of the period she had complained in letters to her brothers in Vienna and to her Austrian confidant MercyArgenteuil that she considered herself and her family the captives of a "rebellious mob"-or of unruly "vassals," as she sometimes said, using the medieval phrase. She was beside herself with fury at the audacity of such people, at their pretensions to equality with the nobility and even the royalty. "These monsters," she wrote to Mercy in June 1790, "are becoming more insolent by the day. I am in utter despair." The words monsters and monstrous recurred con tinually in her descriptions of the Revolutionaries. When the Spanish ambassador spoke to her in January 1791, he felt that he "stood in the presence of a woman at the extreme limits of her endurance." "Louis," she had told him, trembling with emotion, "will fail in his obligations to himself, to his subjects, and to all of Europe, if he does not cast out the evil that besets us, no matter what the price."32 Under the influence of his queen and in his own fumbling and selfdeceptive manner, Louis was increasingly playing a double game, a game that would be not only exceptionally dangerous for the king but catastrophic for the Revolution and for France.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
Louis XVI Taking His Oath to the Constitution at the Champ de Mars, July 14, tygo. The king appears at the top of the steps (far right), facing Lafayette and surrounded by the president of the National Assembly, Mayor Bailly, and the queen holding the dauphin. Among the deputies (seated below at right) are Barnave (pointing), Alexandre Lameth and Duport (to Barnave's right), and Robespierre sitting next to Petion (eleventh and twelfth to Barnave's right).
The Decision to Flee
We will probably never know for certain how and when Louis made the momentous decision to take flight from Paris. The night he actually escaped from the palace he left behind on his desk a declaration written in his own hand containing a whole litany of grievances, justifying his decision to flee the capital and to cease cooperating with the Revolutionary leaders. He complained bitterly of all the royal powers that had been stripped from the throne by the National Assembly: direct control over the army, over diplomacy, over provincial administrators; the right to issue pardons; and indeed the power to reject outright any law of which he disapproved. He was angry with the Assembly's drastic reduction of his personal revenues, reductions that greatly reduced his lifestyle and diminished, he felt, the prestige of the monarchy. He was also rankled by slights to his honor, as when he had been forced to sit next to the president of the Assembly during the Federation ceremonies and had been separated from his family. And then there was the Assembly's sweeping reorganization of the French Catholic church and the subsequent requirement that clergymen take an oath of allegiance to the constitution, measures that he felt he had been compelled to accept. The latter decrees, in particular, tore at the conscience of the pious and orthodox monarch-especially after they were formally condemned by the pope in the spring of 1791.33
For a Bourbon king, heir to an absolute monarchy tightly linked to Catholic orthodoxy and a millennium-long tradition of rule, these were no doubt all good reasons. Whether they were the real reasons pushing the king to flight is not certain. In fact many of the laws that Louis opposed had been decreed more than a year before the escape plan began to take shape. Since at least July 1789, and on numerous occasions thereafter, courtiers and ministers and eventually the queen herself had encouraged Louis to retire to a safe distance from the dangerous crowds of the capital and to surround himself with loyal troops. But Louis had always declined such schemes. During the October Days, he had rejected Saint-Priest's carefully organized evacuation to Rambouillet, some twenty miles to the west of Versailles. So, too, in the spring of 1790, while he and his family were in Saint-Cloud, he had refused proposals of escape to Compiegne or elsewhere 34 In part, it was the old problem of making up his mind. Yet he also seems to have worried about the consequences of flight for the other members of his family. His youngest brother, the count of Artois, had gone into exile shortly after the fall of the Bastille, and his two elderly aunts, the daughters of Louis XV, had managed to leave on a "pilgrimage" to Rome in early 1'791. But his sister, Elizabeth, and his brother the count of Provence-the future Louis XVIII-remained in Paris. In any case, two dramatic and violent events in early 1791, both directly affecting the king and his family in the Tuileries palace, seem to have been critical in steeling Louis' resolution to attempt an escape.
The complex and often confusing events of February 28 were sparked by a popular attack on the great royal prison of Vi
ncennes, to the east of the capital, rumored to have become a new Bastille where patriots were secretly imprisoned. When General Lafayette led a large contingent of national guardsmen to halt the riot, new rumors spread that the king had now been left unprotected and that his life was in danger. With threats of violence rising rapidly, some three hundred fanatical young nobles living in Paris, many of them members of the now disbanded royal bodyguard or of the conservative Monarchy Club, rushed to the Tuileries to protect their king. Once inside they began baiting and insulting the patriot guards whom they found in the palace. Fearing a bloody confrontation, the king stepped in and asked his "defenders" to lay down their arms and leave peacefully. But as soon as they had complied, many were roughed up and arrested by the angry guardsmen. The king was outraged by what he felt was the betrayal of a mutual agreement and an affront to his honor. "My faithful servants," as he would write on the eve of his flight, "had been violently dragged from the palace," and he himself had been forced to "drain his cup to the last dregs."35
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
Brawl in the Tuileries palace, February 28, /79/. In this patriot depiction, Louis XVI is shown speaking with Lafayette (background left) and approving the order to the national guard to disarm the counterrevolutionary nobles who had come to protect the king. In reality, Louis was deeply angered by the manner in which his defenders were treated.
Even more threatening to the king and his family were the events of April 18, 1791. It had all begun with the royal family's plan to return to the chateau of Saint-Cloud to celebrate the Easter festivities. Huge crowds formed outside the eastern gates of the Tuileries to prevent his departure, crowds that soon received support from many of the national guardsmen who were supposed to help clear the way. The people rightly assumed that the king was leaving to avoid Easter services with the pro-Revolutionary "constitutional" clergy, and they refused to disband, and the guard refused to obey, despite the pleas of Lafayette himself. In the process, several of the king's servants and courtiers were seized and threatened with hanging, and for the first time the king heard himself directly mocked and even threatened with being deposed. Once again Louis was beside himself with frustration and anger. "It is amazing," he was reported to remark, "that after having given freedom to the nation, I myself am deprived of all freedom." In the end, the family was forced to descend from the coach and walk back into the palace, thus "compelled to return to their prison." Several close observers felt that the events of April 18, in particular, were crucial in convincing the king of the imminent danger to his family and of the necessity of flight. He would allude directly to the incident when he explained his departure to the grocer Sauce in Varennes and later to the National Assembly.36
But the two violent events at the palace of that late winter and early spring had another effect. After February 28, the national guard was given orders to forbid the entry of nobles into the Tuileries, whatever their traditional honorific titles, unless they had specific personal or administrative reasons for consulting the king. April 18 saw the imposition of even tighter restrictions, banishing most of the king's closest noble confidants, as well as the family's retinue of bishops and other clergymen, all of whom had refused the oath of allegiance. Although Louis and Marie had never been as tightly linked to court ceremonial as their predecessors, the trials of the Revolution had pushed them closer than ever before to the support and company of their aristocratic followers. And now, sud denly, the palace seemed a very empty place. Where once the "great" of the kingdom, men and women, had surrounded the two monarchs and basked in their presence, now there were only the Revolutionary guards and the teams of simple servants scurrying about their duties. To the royal couple, the dismantling of the court in the spring of 1791 seemed an especially cruel and unnecessary blow, conceived primarily, as they believed, to humiliate and isolate them, "denying His Majesty the gentle consolation of being surrounded by those who were devoted to him." "Not content with holding the monarch captive," wrote the noble deputy Irland de Bazoges, "they now want to banish from his presence those very individuals whose continuing devotion might bring him some comfort." Indeed, in the declaration left at the time of his departure, Louis would complain specifically of being stripped of "almost all his principal palace dignitaries."37
Whether these violent events pushed the king to a final decision to flee or merely reinforced a previous determination, by the middle of April I791 there seems to have been no turning back. "It is now all the more evident to the king," wrote Axel von Fersen on April 18, "that it is time to act and to act with all due haste."38
Planning for Flight
The plan used by the royal couple in June 1791 had been conceived some nine months earlier by the bishop of Pamiers and the baron de Breteuil, the king's conservative ex-minister now living in exile in Switzerland. The proposal was different from earlier versions in that the goal was not just to move the king to a safe distance away from Paris-to Rambouillet or Rouen, for example-but to ensure his escape all the way to a frontier, where he could receive support or at least the threat of support from foreign troops. The basic assumption was that once he had distanced himself from the capital, from the Paris Jacobins, and from the radicals of the National Assembly, the king would find a massive popular following. Surrounded by his loyal soldiers and backed by the foreign deterrent so the idea went-other Frenchmen from around the country would rally to his support. In this new position of strength the monarch would be able to renegotiate the entire constitution and bring the Revolution to an end 39
By late October 1790 the king had agreed to consider such a scheme, at least as a contingency plan, and the conspirators set about devising detailed arrangements. From the beginning, the marquis de Bouille-general of the army of northeastern France, headquartered in Metz-was given full charge of preparing the king's reception at the frontier. The actual escape from Paris and the overland journey were to be planned by the queen and, above all, by von Fersen. The long relationship between Marie and her Swedish companion now acquired a new dimension, and the plot that the two organized would be as sophisticated and deceptive as anything spawned during the entire Revolution.
Night after night, through the winter and spring of 1791-even before the king had definitively accepted the idea-Fersen and Marie met secretly in the palace to assemble a plan for what was surely the single most daunting element of the entire undertaking: the escape from the Tuileries and from the great, teeming, and suspicious capital itself. Although Louis was also consulted on key decisions and undoubtedly maintained a kind of veto power, on this as on so many other issues he now increasingly delegated his authority to the queen. In the process, and in the midst of such extraordinary circumstances, Fersen became a kind of de facto prime minister for the royal household. Several evenings a week, he arrived at the palace, disguised in a commoner's dress with a frock coat and the round-brimmed hat worn by some elements of the popular classes. His account of his relationship to the royal family was probably not exaggerated: "Without me," he wrote to the baron Taube, his closest friend in Sweden, "their escape would be impossible. I alone have their confidence. There is no one else whose discretion they can count on to carry out such plans.""
From the beginning it was clear to Fersen that the success of the project would depend on foreign support. The king's personal bud get was limited, and he would need substantial amounts of money to pay mercenary troops and to maintain his family's requisite lifestyle until the situation could be "normalized." The plan also called for Austrian troops to be massed at the border "in large enough numbers to serve as a rallying point for all those well-intentioned parties, dissatisfied with events, who will come to join us."41 But the long negotiations with foreign regimes, pursued primarily by the queen, proved enormously frustrating. Many of the neighboring monarchs, though sympathetic to the plight of the royal family, were wary of committing themselves unless the other great powers agreed as well. The queen was particu
larly disappointed by the caution of her own brother Leopold, who had become emperor of Austria after Joseph's death in 1790. It was only in early June 1791 that Leopold directly promised full support of money and troops. But even then the emperor specified that assistance could be provided only after the king had escaped and was in a position to act independently. Such a position added another powerful incentive for flight, but it made advance planning all the more difficult."
As for the course of the escape, both Bouille and Fersen had originally urged the royal family to travel in separate groups and in small, unpretentious vehicles in order to make a rapid dash for the border. This would be the strategy followed by "Monsieur," the king's brother, who escaped without a hitch to Brussels, disguised as an English gentleman, on the same night that the royal couple left.43 But the king and queen adamantly refused to journey apart, or without their two children and the king's sister, Elizabeth. Making matters more complicated, the queen insisted on taking along two of the children's nurses. Soon they also added the marquis d'Agoult, a family confidant, to act as "guide" and spokesman if difficulties arose, as well as three other nobles, disguised as coachmen, to serve as bodyguards. With a total of eleven individuals, the party had now grown too large for a single coach.44