At that very moment, the general was a good hour and a half away. He had been told the disastrous news at a little after four that morning by his youngest son, who caught up with him as he and his officers had almost reached Stenay after abandoning their long wait outside Dun. It had taken another forty-five minutes to get the bulk of his royal German cavalry, three or four hundred strong, into the saddle and riding back toward Varennes. As they approached the town they encountered hundreds of peasants and guardsmen in full mobilization, marching in all directions with drums and flags, and on several occasions they were forced to draw their sabers and charge, threatening a fight before the crowds gave way. When they finally arrived on the hill above Varennes, it was nine or half past. And they went no further.
Bouille would later argue that the bridge had been dismantled and that they were unable to ford the river. But the commander of the Varennes cavalry had waded the river on horseback a few hours earlier, and the road actually crossed to the right bank of the Aire only a couple of miles farther south. More likely, the general had been informed that the king was now two hours away and that he was surrounded by several thousand armed guardsmen. Menaced from all sides by the local population, concerned about the condition of the horses after their long ride south, and perhaps nursing doubts about the reliability of his own cavalry-who would in fact go over to the patriots a few hours later-the general now turned and retreated to Stenay. He had a quick cup of coffee in his inn, gathered together his two sons and about twenty officers, and rode into exile in Austrian Belgium, a few miles away.38 Two days later the baron Klinglin, one of the officers who had worked most closely with Bouille over the previous months, wrote a letter to his sister. He lamented the failure of "our sublime conspiracy." "How difficult it is to overcome fate! What a strange destiny that the leaders of an insignificant little town like Varennes should have halted the king. Oh my dear friend, how sweet it would have been to have died, if only we could have saved the king!"39
By the time Bouille had begun his retreat the royal cortege was just entering Clermont. Those in the king's party would never forget the terrifying journey back to Paris. Compared with the race to Varennes on June 21, the return was ponderously tedious, dragging on for four long days. The hottest weather of the summer had now settled in, and the pace of the carriages was usually too slow to raise even a hint of a breeze. The enormous crowds of people tramping along outside raised great clouds of dust that only intensified the misery. Valory, who sat atop the berline with his hands tied, recalled the ordeal: "We were cooked by the sun and choked by the dust.""
When they first drove out of Varennes, they had been accompanied by some six thousand national guardsmen, marching in double columns with some semblance of order, led by the Parisian guardsman and messenger Bayon. But as they made their way west, countrypeople converged from every direction: men, women, and children, often whole villages arriving en masse, in carts or on foot, carrying every conceivable weapon. Observers were staggered by the numbers of people, spilling off the road into the surrounding fields and following like a great swarm: this "countless multitude," as the bodyguard Moustier remembered, "of every age and of both sexes, armed with muskets, sabers, pitchforks, pikes, axes, or sickles." The deputy Petion, who accompanied the family on the last half of their journey, said much the same: in addition to the guardsmen, there were "old men and women and children, some carrying sickles or long spits, others with clubs, swords or antique guns."" Many came simply to gawk at the king and the queen, whom they had never seen, never hoped to see. Others, members of their town or village militias, rushed to the defense of both the nation and the king-for at first there were rumors that the monarch had been kidnapped. Often it was their first chance to put to use their company flags and colorful new uniforms, previously worn only in parades around the town square. At times the crowds were in a celebratory mood, especially when the royal cortege crossed the communities touched by the previous night's panic. People exalted at their victory sang and danced and drank to the health of the nation and the king. Mayors gave splendid speeches, patterned on the rhetoric they had read in accounts of National Assembly debates. The faithful Madame de Tourzel was shocked by the many harangues the king had to endure from local dignitaries, anxious to lecture him on his thoughtlessness in abandoning his people, in causing them such a fright-even if he had only been heeding the advice of treacherous councilors. Town officials, she felt, "had only one thought in mind: to glory in their own triumph and to humiliate the royal family. It was a joy for them to overwhelm the unfortunate monarchs with bitter invectives."42
Yet there was also a strong element of fear. General Bouille and his four hundred cavalrymen, galloping down the road to Varennes, had caused an enormous fright among the countrypeople, a fright that quickly spread from village to village and was magnified by the movement of other troops in the region. Soon reports began spreading of thousands of soldiers, perhaps the whole Austrian army, led by the villain general, arriving to punish the people of Lorraine and Champagne for capturing the king."3 Among the crowds following the cortege, swept by ever-changing rumors, the festive mood could be rapidly transformed into anger and a desire for revenge. Usually the outrage was directed not toward the monarch-cries of "Long live the king!" could be heard throughout the journey-but toward those presumed to have influenced or kidnapped him. However, the crowds had few qualms about targeting the queen. There were the inevitable coarse references to Marie's sex life, and snide remarks about the dauphin's "real father." When Marie offered a piece of chicken to a guardsman who had been particularly kind and obliging, a great roar rose up that it was poison, that the young man should not touch it. But hatreds were focused above all on the three bodyguards, seated prominently above on the driver's seat, still dressed in their rich yellow livery coats, symbolic of all that was hateful under the Old Regime. Assumed by many to have been the instigators of the flight, they were continually threatened verbally and pelted with rocks or dung. On several occasions groups tried to approach the berline and attack them physically, before being pushed away by the national guardsmen."
Sauce himself accompanied the coaches as far as Clermont, before turning back to see to the defense of his town against a possible attack by Bouille. The cortege then moved along the main post road to Sainte-Menehould, where the mayor gave another formal speech and Drouet and Guillaume-who had returned home during the night-ostentatiously joined in the march. West of the town a local noble, the count Dampierre, who had witnessed the mayor's address in Sainte-Menehould, attempted to approach the berline on horseback and speak to the family. When the guards pushed him back, he shouted "Long live the king!," fired his musket in the air, and rode off toward his chateau. The count was already widely hated by the local population, and groups of people followed him, shot him off his horse, and killed him in the fields. It is unclear whether the king himself saw the massacre, but the bodyguards watched in horror from atop the carriage."
By the time the procession reached Chalons-sur-Marne at the end of the day, the royal family had been almost forty hours without sleep. "It is almost impossible," as one witness put it, "to describe their state of exhaustion."46 But here they would know a few hours of respite from the tension and fatigue. They were feted by the mayor and the departmental leaders, who arrived to meet them at the gates of the city, and they were given accommodations in the palace of the former intendant. It was the very building where the young Marie-Antoinette had once spent the night on her trip to France from Austria, some twenty-one years earlier. Authorities here were clearly more sympathetic to the plight of the monarch. That night a small group of individuals even offered to help him escape, though Louis refused to consider leaving without his family, and the plan came to nothing. The next morning the king and queen attended Corpus Christi mass, but before the service was completed they were hustled away by another company of national guards just arrived from Reims. New stories were coming in that Varennes and Sainte-Menehould had be
en sacked and burned by marauding armies, and the guardsmen insisted on moving the king rapidly back toward Paris.47
They set out once again in late morning, advancing painfully slowly with their great escort, now estimated at 15,000 to 30,000 people, following the Marne Valley rather than the shorter route through Montmirail that they had used for their flight. They stopped briefly for dinner in Epernay, but a riot broke out in the streets, and Madame de Tourzel was nearly pulled away into the crowds before they were rushed onto the road once again."8 Then toward half past seven in the evening, as the route skirted the river in the open countryside, the cortege suddenly came to a halt, and the crowds hushed and pulled aside from the road ahead. Three deputies sent by the National Assembly in Paris had arrived and were approaching on foot, preceded by the Assembly's sergeant at arms. The representatives had learned that the king had been stopped in Varennes some twenty hours earlier, and they had immediately dispatched three of their members, carefully chosen to represent the diverse political groupings in the Assembly. Antoine Barnave led the way, a moderate Jacobin and gifted orator, only twenty-nine years old and looking even younger. He was followed by Jerome Petion, somewhat older, a fervent democrat and close associate of Maximilien Robespierre and the radical Jacobins; and by Marie-Charles de Latour-Maubourg, a monarchist and a friend of Lafayette. After the long hours of fear and uncertainty, the women in the carriage were overcome with emotion at the appearance of these men, men they had once so despised, but who now seemed to promise their safety. Madame Elizabeth took the deputies' hands and begged them to protect the three bodyguards, who had only recently been threatened with lynching. After a few words of comfort, Barnave formally read the decree of the Assembly, commissioning them to ensure the king's safe return to Paris. He then climbed atop the berline and, sharply illuminated by the setting sun, read out the decree a second time for the benefit of the crowd. It was another extraordinary moment in the Revolution, clearly marking the transfer of sovereignty from the king to the nation.49
The deputies had been accompanied by the military officer Mathieu Dumas, a moderate patriot and veteran of the War of the American Revolution, and Dumas now took charge of the national guard contingents, reestablishing some semblance of order in the immense procession. Barnave and Petion squeezed their way into the larger coach with the two children moved to the laps of the women, and the much taller Maubourg found a place with the nurses in the cabriolet. They spent that night in the small town of Dormans, getting to bed well after midnight. The next day, as they passed through the town of Chateau-Thierry, Dumas managed a maneuver at the bridge that cut them off from most of their amorphous popular escort, and they were able to proceed rapidly to Meaux, where they passed the night of June 24 in the bishop's residence. But more masses of people, guardsmen and spectators, converged on the town during the night, and the final drive to the capital through the summer heat was as slow and encumbered as before. "I have never experienced," wrote Petion, "a longer and more exhausting day." 51
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
The Royal Family Approaches Paris. The king's berline and the smaller diligence holding the nurses pass below the customs gate of Le Roule just north of the entrance to the Champs-Elysees. The hill of Montmartre, exaggerated in height, is visible in the background.
As the procession passed through the Paris suburbs, the mood grew decidedly more aggressive. There were several concerted attacks on the berline, probably aimed at the bodyguards. Barnave and Petion began to fear for the safety of the passengers and shouted for protection from the guardsmen, some of whom had now arrived from Paris. Two officers were badly wounded, and Dumas was nearly pushed from his horse before they finally arrived at the city walls, where General Lafayette met them with a large contingent of cavalry." The cortege was then directed around the perimeter of the city, again avoiding the working-class neighborhoods and entering from the northwest via the Champs-Elysees. The whole of Paris had kept abreast of the king's progress, and tens of thousands of men, women, and children pressed to watch the slow advance down the avenue, with hundreds more clinging to trees and rooftops. The occupants of the carriage appeared exhausted, dirty, ruffled. There were a few cheers for the deputies, and for Drouet and Guillaume and the guardsmen from Varennes who had made the long trek, and who were positioned prominently at the front of the march. But for the most part the crowd remained silent, refusing to remove their hats and their bonnets, in an obvious expression of disrespect for the monarch. As a similar sign of disapprobation, several companies of the national guardsmen lining the street held their muskets upside down, barrels pointed at the ground. In Paris, unlike in the provinces, the traditional salute of "Long live the king!" was not to be heard.51 For Louis, always so sensitive to the acclamations of the crowds, it could only have been a moment of great sadness.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
The Royal Family Returns to the Tuileries. The berline crosses the Place de Louis XV (today Place de la Concorde) and is about to enter the Tuileries gardens. Almost all the spectators have left on their hats and bonnets, an obvious snub to the king. Note the women confronting a man (right) who has taken off his hat.
At the end of the avenue they crossed the great square-known today as the Place de la Concorde-and entered the Tuileries gardens, coming to a halt near the entrance to the palace. Discipline almost broke down now, as people in the crowds rushed toward the coach and attempted to seize the bodyguards. Only with great difficulty were Dumas and Petion and several other officers able to carry the three battered and bleeding men to safety. In the meantime the royal family had quickly descended and walked untouched into the Tuileries, the palace they had hoped to escape forever just five days earlier.53
Postmortems
"What a strange destiny!" the baron Klinglin had exclaimed. Only fifteen more miles, one or two hours' drive to Dun through the dead of night, and the royal family could have been in the protective care of General Bouille and his force of several hundred cavalry. From the very moment of the king's capture, participants in and witnesses of the flight to Varennes began asking themselves what had gone wrong, how they had failed, who was ultimately at fault. Even the patriots, for whom the flight's failure was a great victory, reflected at length on the strange workings of fate that had halted the king of France so close to his escape. Indeed, generations of historians have followed in their minds the divergent universes of "contrafactual history," meditating on how different everything might have been if Louis had succeeded in reaching Montmedy. What would have happened if the servingwoman in the palace had not become suspicious, compelling the royal family to postpone their departure; if Lafayette had not come by the Tuileries for a late-night chat; if the duke de Choiseul had waited one more hour in the meadow near Somme-Vesle; if Drouet had remained in his fields a few minutes longer before returning to his post; if the drivers from Clermont had been convinced or bribed or coerced to continue beyond Varennes without a change of horses? The string of "ifs" is almost endless. For indeed, the "event" of Varennes-like almost any event in history-is constructed of a nearly infinite series of subevents, any one of which might have changed the outcome of that day.
Yet if one steps back from this sequence of circumstances, from the minutiae of individual actions and reactions, one might argue that two major factors shaped the experience of Varennes. The first was the personality and behavior of the central figure of the whole adventure, Louis XVI himself. The king's chronic indecision and unreliability had profoundly affected the origins and course of the entire Revolution. In the case at hand, an early and steadfast decision for flight would almost certainly have increased the chances of success. Even after April 1791, when Louis seems finally to have opted for escape, the act itself was postponed time after time, even though all the plans were in place by early May, if not before. Every day that the flight was delayed made it more likely that the complex conspiracy would be
found out-as it was in fact found out by the queen's servingwoman sometime in early June. Every day that the flight was delayed made it more likely that French soldiers-under the ever-greater influence of the patriotic clubs-would refuse to obey their aristocratic commanders, would act aggressively to halt any action whose goals they rejected. During the months before the departure, General Bouille had grown progressively more pessimistic about the reliability of his troops and the feasibility of the whole plan .51 In the end, his decision to rely on foreign-born, Germanspeaking cavalry enormously raised the suspicions of the villagers and townspeople who would observe their movements. But even then the flight might have succeeded, if only the king had not tempted fate by riding in his carriage with the window shades down and by stepping outside and openly presenting himself to all by standers. Such actions were, of course, closely related to the king's failure to comprehend the real meaning and wide appeal of the Revolution, to his assumption that the Revolutionary changes he detested had been provoked by a few radicals in the National Assembly and their demagogic control of the Parisian "rabble."
But in this sense a second fundamental cause of the failure of Varennes was precisely the sweeping transformation in French attitudes and psychology engendered by the Revolution. A new sense of self-confidence, of self-reliance, of identity with the nation as a whole and not merely with the local community-the transformation that we observed in the small town of Varennes-had penetrated much of the French population. It was developments such as these that help explain the extraordinary initiatives taken by smalltown officials in Sainte-Menehould and Varennes to halt the king. Although the individual actions of Drouet and Sauce should not be underestimated, those actions would scarcely have been possible without the support of the town councils and indeed of the whole citizenry. The readiness of support had been further activated by the unusual and unexplained movements of mercenary cavalrymen in the days before the escape and by the population's pervasive suspicion of the aristocratic officers who led those troops. Nearinsurrectional conditions already existed in both Sainte-Menehould and Clermont before the arrival of the king's caravan. MercyArgenteuil had not been mistaken when he warned the royal couple that now, in the context of the new Revolutionary mentality, "Every village could be an insurmountable barrier to your passage."
When the King Took Flight Page 9