When the King Took Flight

by Timothy Tackett

  Indeed, from one point of view, the real question is not why the flight failed, but how it came so close to succeeding. The family's spectacular achievements in exiting from the Tuileries palace undetected, escaping from the great wary and suspicious city of Paris, and traveling along the main post roads to within a few dozen miles of the Austrian border all underline the organizational talents of General Bouille and, above all, of Axel von Fersen. Working together, they came close to pulling off what would certainly have ranked among the greatest escapes of all time.

  CHAPTER 4

  Our Good City of Paris

  THE CITY to which Louis and his family returned on June 25, and in which they were to find themselves virtually imprisoned, was a universe unto itself, dramatically different from any other town or region in the kingdom. With some 700,000 souls, Paris was the second-largest city in all of Christendom and one of the ten largest in the world. If one had climbed a tower of Notre Dame, the great cathedral on an island in the Seine at the heart of the metropolis, one might have gained some sense of the extraordinary diversity of this teeming, vibrant, complex world., From this vantage point an observer could easily make out many of Paris' architectural monuments, which eighteenth-century tourists already flocked to visit: the great Gothic hall of justice, just to the west, where the Parlement of Paris formerly met; the splendid Renaissance city hall across the river to the north; the Baroque dome of the French Academy farther west along the river; and, just opposite it, the massive Right Bank structure of the Louvre and its western extension of the Tuileries.

  Besides the turrets and towers of these civil constructions, one could count no less than two hundred spires and belfries erected over the centuries by the Catholic church, many of them now confiscated by the Revolution, along with much of the clergy's property and revenues. To the west in general, and in pockets at several other points in the city, a visitor could also discern neighborhoods that were markedly whiter, with newer structures interspersed among greenery. These were the town houses and gardens of what was perhaps the greatest concentration of aristocratic families in all of Europe. Although the Revolution had swept away the distinct legal and political privileges formerly enjoyed by these families, they-unlike the clergy-retained most of their enormous wealth and much of their cultural influence.

  Alongside these imposing monuments of wealth and power, much of the city would have appeared darker and rather tawdry, a jumble of smaller, multistory structures, some leaning precariously forward or holding one another up. Particular clusters of workingclass abodes could be seen in the eastern suburbs: notably in the Saint-Antoine district, jutting eastward like a spur into the countryside from the square where the now-demolished Bastille had stood; and in the Saint-Marcel neighborhood, clustered along the smaller Bievre River winding into the Seine from the southeast. Fersen had carefully avoided districts such as these when he drove the royal family out of the city in the early morning of June 21. But similar dwellings were visible in almost every part of the city, often directly abutting the palaces and churches. Here were the homes of the great mass of Parisian commoners, describing themselves until recently as the "Third Estate."

  Many of the individuals in question, perhaps ioo,ooo scattered across the city, lived comfortable and stable lives in families of government workers and professional men, merchants and shop owners, or master craftsmen. A substantial proportion of this group had been born in the city, and virtually all the men and most of the women were literate. This critical mass of the "middle class," more numerous here than in the rest of the kingdom put together, was already providing the core of local Revolutionary leadership. But the bulk of the Parisian population lived more uncertain lives. There were journeymen and shop workers, laundrywomen and street hawkers, lackeys and day laborers and prostitutes (some 40,000 by one estimate): the precariously employed, the unem ployed, the down-and-out. A great many were immigrants, arriving with a motley mixture of costumes and accents from many different regions of the kingdom and even from other countries: some with trades and talents immediately fitting into the workaday world; others illiterate and unskilled, floating on the margins, unstable and miserable. It was the juxtaposition of large numbers of both great and small, rich and impoverished, highly educated and illiterateand of most everything in between-that gave the city its very particular character. Indeed, Sebastien Mercier, that inveterate observer of Paris in the late eighteenth century, aptly described the city as "a melting pot of the human race."'

  Although the king liked to imagine that the unrest in Paris since 1789 was the work of a small minority of Jacobins and rabblerous- ers, there is ample evidence of the Revolution's impact on all levels of Parisian society. Foreign tourists passing through the city in 1790 and 1791 invariably commented on the outward signs of this transformation: the political discussions taking place in the streets, even among strangers; the tricolor patriot badges, or cockades, worn by virtually all men and women; the Revolutionary newspapers and brochures sold and distributed everywhere; and the patriotic songs intoned during intermission at the popular theaters and the Opera.' This politicization of Parisian daily life was part of a Revolutionary process not unlike that which had affected the peasants and townsmen of Varennes over the previous two years. Almost everywhere, the National Assembly's onslaught against Old Regime institutions in the name of popular sovereignty and equality had encouraged men and women to question authority and injustice more generally. But in Paris the corrosive logic of democracy and equality had rapidly pushed some segments of the population toward near-millenarian expectations for a radical transformation of the world.

  This exceptional radicalization was linked, first, to the city's eighteenth-century experience as a veritable cultural battleground. The political struggles of the French Parlements against the fiscal and religious policies of the monarchy, the dissident movement of Jansenism against the Catholic establishment, and the intellectual struggles of Enlightened philosophers against clericalism and obscurantism in any form had all been more intense in Paris than anywhere else in France or in Europe. Indeed, the city was the recognized capital of the Enlightenment, drawing intellectuals from throughout the Atlantic world to its salons and cafes and editorial houses. These complex and often contradictory movements affected many elements of the unusually literate, highly educated Parisian population, helping to create an atmosphere of critical and independent thought.

  But the radicalization of Paris was also tied to more recent developments. By early 1791 Paris had been saturated with dozens of daily newspapers and numerous other sporadic publications. Such papers articulated almost every position on the political spectrum. In many sections of the city the tone and content of debate were increasingly influenced by a group of exceptionally talented radical writers-like Camille Desmoulin, Jean-Paul Marat, Nicolas de Bonneville, and Louise Keralio and her husband, Francois Robert-who advocated ever more expansive democratic and egalitarian principles.' Throughout most of France newspapers, radical or otherwise, had little direct effect on the great majority of men and women, who had only minimal access to the printed word. In Paris, however, not only was functional literacy exceptionally high, but there were other means by which even the illiterate had access to the latest political commentary. Those who frequented any of the seven-hundred-odd cafes in the city might hear papers and brochures read aloud and commented on nightly by one of the selfappointed "head orators" who held sway in such establishments.' Others were informed-or misinformed-of the affairs of the day by the hundreds of pamphlet and newspaper hawkers roaming the streets. They continually shouted out the "headlines," or gave their own sensationalist interpretations of those headlines, the better to sell their copies. William Short, the protege of Thomas Jefferson and the American representative in Paris, was amazed at the extraordinary influence of the popular newspapers: "These journals," he wrote to Jefferson, "are hawked about the streets, cried in every quarter of Paris and sold cheap or given to the people who devour them w
ith astonishing avidity." Mercier was appalled by the potential influence of the paper sellers, many of them actually illiterate: "Simple legislative proposals are transformed into formal decrees, and whole neighborhoods are outraged by events that never took place. Misled a thousand times previously by the false announcements of these peddlers, the common people continue nevertheless to believe them."6

  Finally, Parisian radicalism had been influenced since the beginning of the Revolution by an exceptional proliferation of political associations. We have already seen the influence of the local patriotic club in Varennes and in the surrounding towns. In Paris, at the moment of the king's flight, there were no less than fifty such societies.' A few of these groups-like the majority of clubs in the prov inces-were relatively elitist, with elevated dues limiting the membership to the middle or upper classes. Such was the case of the celebrated Jacobin Club, which met on the Right Bank not far from the National Assembly and the Tuileries palace, and which was the mother society for a whole network of "Friends of the Constitution" throughout the kingdom. Yet many of the Parisian clubs had been created specifically to attract the more humble elements of society, those "passive citizens" whom the National Assembly had excluded from voting and officeholding by means of property qualifications.

  No Parisian group was more active in recruiting the lower classes into political participation than the Society of Friends of the Rights of Man, best known to history as the Cordeliers Club. Meeting on the Left Bank, near the Latin Quarter and in the heart of the publishing district, its members consisted of a group of radical intellectuals-men like Desmoulins, Marat, Robert, and Georges Danton-and a substantial contingent of local merchants and artisans, both men and women. From the beginning the Cordeliers pursued a dual agenda: on the one hand, to promote the expansion of democracy and equality and to defend the rights of the common people; and on the other, to root out the plots and conspiracies that most members believed were threatening the Revolution.' But this club was only the oldest and best-known of thirty-odd "fraternal societies," popular democratic associations that had emerged in Paris in 1790 and 1791. Some of these had grown up around individuals with aspirations to leadership in particular neighborhoods of the city. Others-like the Fraternal Society of the Indigenthad been promoted by the Cordeliers themselves in early 1791, with the specific intention of mobilizing the masses in support of their brand of egalitarian politics. All the fraternal societies sought to obtain the right to vote and to hold office for all men, not just for those with property. Several also permitted participation by women, some of whom were urging an increasing role for female patriots more generally. By the spring of 1791 Francois Robert and the Cordeliers were attempting to coordinate the activities of all such societies around a "Central Committee." The Friends of the Rights of Man were thus well on the way to creating a Paris-based network of political clubs closely paralleling the national network of the Jacobins.'

  A second set of urban associations had developed around the forty-eight "sections" of Paris. Created in the spring of 1790 to replace the older "districts," the sections had been designed as electoral units for the periodic selection of officeholders. But by early 1791 they were meeting almost continuously, assuming control over an array of neighborhood affairs, and frequently voicing opinions on the political issues of the day. Although membership was limited to "active" male citizens, the leadership cultivated close ties with the local communities, lending them a certain grassroots character. Indeed, many of the sections with large working-class constituencies adopted egalitarian and democratic positions not unlike those of the Cordeliers Club and the fraternal societies. Their power and influence grew even greater after they began communicating with one another and holding joint meetings to coordinate policies. By the spring of 1791 both the sections and the fraternal societies were becoming organs of influence increasingly independent from the National Assembly and the regular Paris municipal government.10

  In the months preceding the king's flight, a series of developments had left the neighborhoods of Paris ever more nervous and suspicious. A great wave of strikes and other collective actions by workers kept the city in near-constant turmoil throughout the winter and spring. Working men and women were disturbed, in part, by the rapidly rising prices, triggered by the great quantities of paper money being printed by the government. Yet the unrest could also be linked to the Revolutionary process itself, as journeymen workers applied the same egalitarian logic to the labor system that others had used against the political and social systems. Many of these workers had been encouraged in their struggles in March 1791, when the National Assembly formally abolished the guild system, an institution that had given so much authority to the master craftsmen. Only a few days before the king's flight, however, the Assem bly passed a decree far less favorable to the workers, the famous Le Chapelier law, which outlawed worker associations and collective bargaining."

  Lower class and middle class alike were also unsettled by continuing rumors of counterrevolutionary plots. Fears had been aroused by the blustering pronouncements of emigrant nobles, threatening to invade from across the Rhine, and by the very real and well-publicized conspiracies hatched during the first two years of the Revolution. Such tensions were exacerbated by the large numbers of aristocrats living in the city, many of them with their own reactionary clubs and publishing houses, closely attached to the conservative minority in the Assembly itself. The creation of a Monarchy Club at the end of 1790, with a membership drawn largely from the nobility and clergy, seemed tangible evidence of a conspiracy to reinstate all the abuses of the Old Regime. Perhaps even more disturbing was the religious schism set in motion by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the requirement of an ecclesiastical oath. Some 34 percent of the parish clergy in the capital and its suburbs had rejected the oath. For the Parisians, as for the people of Varennes, the "refractory" clergy became a visible symbol of the counterrevolutionary forces lurking in their midst. The fear of conspiracy hatched by refractories or aristocrats was a primary cause of numerous riots in Paris throughout the winter and spring."

  The responsibility for reining in and controlling this tense and turbulent city had fallen to two key figures in municipal politics, both chosen from the National Assembly itself in July 1789: the mayor, Jean-Sylvain Bailly; and the commander of the national guard, the marquis de Lafayette. Renowned astronomer, member of the prestigious French Academy, and onetime friend of Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin, Bailly had made his political reputation as the exceptionally able first president of the National Assembly. The much younger marquis-only thirty-three at the time of Varennes-was well known not only for his exploits in the American Revolution but also for his involvement in a variety of liberal causes in France on the eve of the Revolution. In 1791 Bailly and Lafayette had at their disposal over 50,000 national guardsmen. Some io,ooo of these forces-most of them former military menwere on permanent duty, paid and living in barracks. The remainder were volunteer citizen soldiers, serving only by rotation or in moments of emergency. Because the volunteers were required to provide their own uniforms and to have enough free time for a smattering of drills, the majority came from the middle class." Although the total force seemed imposing, and was vastly greater than anything existing under the Old Regime, it was not without its problems. The same suspicion of authority that had beset the regular army was having its effect on the national guard. The refusal of some contingents of the guard to allow the royal family to leave the Tuileries on April 18-despite Lafayette's formal order-was revealing in this respect. But in the aftermath of the April 18 incident, the general had been given a free hand to reform the corps, and stronger discipline had been imposed with the dismissal of the insubordinate guardsmen.'

  Throughout the first half of 1'791, the guard had been continually active, intervening almost daily in a variety of worker protests, market brawls, and insurrections against clergymen or nobles rumored to be plotting counterrevolution and civil war. Both Parisian obser
vers and foreign visitors were obsessed by the incessant turmoil, the ever-present threat and reality of social violence besetting the city, violence of which February 28 and April 18 were only the most dramatic instances. "Tumults happen daily," wrote the British secret agent William Miles: Lafayette and his subordinates were "kept trotting about like so many penny-postmen." The English ambassador, the earl George Granville Gower, reported on "the absolute anarchy under which this country labours." William Short felt that the endless disturbances cast "a gloom and anxiety on the society of Paris that renders its residence painful in the extreme." The elderly Parisian Guittard de Floriban had much the same feeling: "Can't we ever be happy," he pleaded, "to simply live together in peace with one another? All this violence leaves me overwhelmed and depressed."15 On the eve of Varennes Paris was already in danger of exploding from one day to the next.

  Louis the Faithless

  For months rumors of plots to kidnap the king had been circulating in Paris. One of the deputies had reported such a threat as early as January, and similar reports were published in newspapers in February and throughout the spring. Although the details of the conspiracies were generally quite vague, the assumption was usually that someone else-a foreign power, the "aristocrats," perhaps even the queen-would forcibly abduct the monarch against his will.)6 On the eve of the flight, the radical journalist Stanislas Freron reported rumors circulating through the city that Marie-Antoinette and the king's sister, Elizabeth, had actually attempted such an escape. Marat published a vaguer rendition of the story, colored by his standard prophecies of doom. Following accusations by one of the queen's servants, Lafayette and his lieutenants had increased the guard on the royal palace. Yet there had been so many rumors in the city over the previous months, none of which had materialized, that no one took the new denunciation very seriously."