After the long hours of uncertainty and fear, this colorful evening festival marked a release of tension and seemed to reinforce a new sense of unity and self-confidence. Mobilized in part, no doubt, by the fraternal societies and the more radical sections, the common people present were also armed with a rough sort of political message. Some carried banners with the words "Live free or die." Others added new verses to "(;a ira," sending both the aristocrats and the king to the devil. Although in general their allegiance was directed toward the National Assembly, they also made it clear that they did not intend to be subservient to the Assembly's decisions if those decisions were not to their liking. "Long live the good deputies!" some of them called out, "but let the others watch out!"39 And though their mood was generally joyous, the people were also well armed with an incredible assortment of weapons, from sickles to pitchforks, from clubs to pikes. Many of the pikes were covered with bright red "liberty caps"-now the hat of choice among the patriotic workingpeople. But underneath the caps were razor-sharp spikes and hooks, originally conceived for slicing up cavalry horses but more recently used to carry the severed heads of the victims of popular violence. Some of the pikes had almost certainly been seized illegally from the municipal armories during the last two days."0 It was the first time such weapons had been seen in the Assembly since the harrowing October Days of 1789. In a symbolic sense, then, this extraordinary nighttime procession marked a major moment in the emergence of the sans-culottes as a self-conscious, well-organized political force. It was a force that the National Assembly and the whole of France would soon have to reckon with.
A King Is Not Inevitable
For well over a thousand years the Parisians had always had a king. When one died, so the theory went, another one, his closest male heir, immediately assumed the royal powers-"The king is dead; long live the king!"-even if the monarch in question was only a child and his powers were exercised by a regent. But now, for a great many Parisians, the myth of the kingship had been shattered. Once Louis had been brought back from Varennes, led through the streets of Paris, and reinstalled in the Tuileries, the great question in everyone's mind was what should become of the monarch and the monarchy. The bookseller Nicolas Ruault sized up the situation in a letter to his brother: "We have to decide what we will do with this king, who is now a king in name alone. The question is delicate and awkward in the extreme."41 Everyone in Paris began mulling over the situation and proposing solutions. Louis should be maintained as king, but only as a figurehead; he should be deprived of all power until the constitution was completed and then offered the throne, to take it or to leave it; he should be exiled from Paris or from the country; he should be imprisoned and tried for treason; he should be deposed, and his power should pass to the little dauphin, who would be carefully educated in the ideals of the Revolution. But from the very first day of the king's flight, and in the midst of the confusion, some Parisians went even further. They asked themselves if the monarchy itself was truly inevitable, if it was not time for the French to live independently in a republic without a king.
To be sure, this was not the first time the word republic had been mentioned in Paris. Almost a year earlier Louis Lavicomterie, a future member of the Convention, had published an essay called "Of People and Kings," which openly advocated a government without a monarch. Louise Keralio, the novelist and historian turned radical publisher, quickly picked up the idea in her newspaper the Mercure nationale, an idea that her husband, Francois Robert, further elaborated in a small booklet at the end of the year. By the spring of 1791 the concept of republicanism had become almost fashionable in certain radical intellectual circles. Yet there was always something speculative and academic about such discussions. The principal preoccupation of the radicals continued to be the expansion of voting rights to all men, regardless of income. And the idea of a French government without a king had virtually no popular support. The young duke de Chartres-the future Louis-Philippe, "king of the French" in 1830-described the reactions of a patriotic audience to a performance of Voltaire's Brutus. When an actor pronounced the line "Oh, to be free and without a king," only a few people applauded, while the great majority began shouting, "Long live the king!" followed by the "triple refrain" of "Long live the nation, the law, and the king!"42
Yet the flight to Varennes brought a dramatic change in attitude for many Parisians. Within hours after the news had broken a popular onslaught against symbols of royalty began throughout the city. Anything smacking of kings or kingship was removed, pulled down, covered over, or defaced. Establishments with names suggesting royalty in any form-like the Queen's Hotel or the Crowned Ox Restaurant-found their signs removed and destroyed. Coats of arms of the Bourbon family on public buildings or notary offices were blacked out with a mixture of soot and oil. Soldiers and guardsmen were urged to remove the royal fleur-de-lis insignia from their uniforms; busts of kings were pulled over, and larger royal statues, too massive to be moved, were covered in black cloth; even streets like Rue du Roi de Siam (the King of Siam) were renamed with a more patriotic designation."3 Marie-Jeanne Roland was amazed and delighted by the extraordinary rapidity with which the new idea seemed to take hold in the popular quarters of the city. "The masses have a healthy and correct understanding," she wrote on June 22. "The word `republic' is now being uttered almost everywhere.""
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
Parisians Covering Symbols of Royalty. In the days after the king's flight, people cover in black the word royal on the lottery office and the crown on the Golden Crown inn, and remove fleur-de-lis shields from a notary's office.
In addition to the spontaneous attacks by common people on the symbols of monarchy, a significant number of Parisian intellectuals, political figures, and radical newspaper editors openly declared for a republic. Within days, several of the most advanced journalists had come out in support of the idea. Brissot was particularly emphatic as he inveighed against Louis XVI, who "has destroyed his crown with his own hands. One can never convert a despot to the cause of liberty." The writer and founder of the populist Society of the Friends of Truth, Nicolas de Bonneville, began militating for a republic. With his friends, the celebrated mathematician and philosopher the marquis de Condorcet and the Anglo-American liberal Thomas Paine, he launched a newspaper dedicated to the republican ideal. "It is only with the event of June 21," as the abbe Sieyes wrote to Paine, "that we have suddenly seen the emergence of a republican party."as
From the beginning, the most effective and dynamic leadership for such a party came from the Cordeliers Club, whose membership included many of the journalists who would most vigorously adopt the new position. On the very day of the king's flight, the club resolved to call into question the whole idea of a constitutional monarchy as it had been elaborated by the National Assembly over the two previous years. The members seem to have adopted a twopronged strategy. On the one hand, they urged the deputies to redraft the constitution as a republic. But on the other hand, aware that the majority of French citizens might well oppose such a measure until they were properly informed and educated, the members supported a national referendum to elicit a general debate on the issue. "Legislators," they wrote, in a formal petition addressed to the Assembly, "you can no longer hope to inspire the people with the least degree of confidence in a state functionary who is called a `king.' On the basis of this fact, we beg you, in the name of the fa therland, either immediately to declare that France shall no longer be a monarchy, but a republic; or, at the very least, to wait until all the departments and all the primary assemblies have announced their will on this critical question."46 Thereafter the club became a whirlwind of activity and energy, promoting and explaining its idea. Members had posters printed and affixed them to walls at street corners throughout the city. They urged all the Parisian fraternal societies with which they were so closely linked to coordinate their efforts and to debate and adopt the same position. In addition, they organized a c
itywide march of adherents to present their petition to the National Assembly."
The demonstration of June 24 was another signal event in the development of popular radicalism and the politicization of the sans-culottes. In some respects, it might be viewed as the first modern political demonstration in French history-anticipating in its form and its spirit the great Parisian political marches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Coordinated through the network of popular societies and sections, people from all over Paris set off on foot toward the designated rallying point at the Place Vendome. The organizers built on the success of the previous day's Corpus Christi parade through the Assembly. In this sense, there was another fascinating link between the religious processions of the Old Regime and the new form of mass democratic culture. Men, women, and children-most of them from working-class families, according to witnesses-paraded through the streets, linking arms and walking seven or eight abreast, and occasionally singing or shouting slogans. Many wore armbands or badges on their coats with the eye that symbolized their club and its mission to search for conspirators. Guittard de Floriban, the elderly bourgeois property owner who lived not far from the Cordeliers, looked on as thousands marched by. At first he was frightened, fearing violence and a riot. But then he noted that the participants were calm and well organized. Unlike the previous night at the Assembly, no one carried arms, not even sticks or canes. He followed them as they crossed the river on the Pont-Neuf, heading toward the Place des Victoires, where they converged with thousands arriving from eastern Paris. In the Place Vendome, just north of the Assembly hall, they were met by Lafayette, who clearly had been tipped off about the demonstration and had gathered a large contingent of national guardsmen with cannons and muskets in readiness. But the crowd remained peaceful, announcing only that they wished to present to the Assembly a petition signed by 30,000 people. After a nervous faceoff, seven delegates from the crowd were allowed to deliver their statement.48
The demonstrators could only have been disappointed when the Assembly postponed reading the petition until the following day. When it was introduced, according to one member of the Cordeliers, it was read by a mere secretary "in such a manner that it could be heard by no one" and then sent to a committee to be promptly forgotten. Over the next three weeks the Cordeliers and the other fraternal societies in Paris continued their campaign. By one count, seventeen petitions were drawn up between June 21 and July 17, each of them rejected out of hand or ignored by the Assembly. Throughout this period both the Cordeliers and the fraternal societies continued to hold nightly debates on the king and the fate he deserved. Marie-Jeanne Roland, who went out each evening to watch and participate-for many such meetings invited the involvement of women-was stunned by the quasi-millenarian transformation she witnessed. The common people of Paris, who only a few years earlier would "stupidly sing amen" no matter what they were told by the authorities, were now becoming enlightened and were ready to support "our just cause" and demand "the reign of justice." "We are advancing ten years in a single day."49
The republican campaign by the popular societies was significantly affected, moreover, by two other developments. In the first place, it coincided with a series of worker demonstrations that contemporaries perceived as better organized and more intense than anything they had previously witnessed. By the first week in July, national guardsmen were being sent out almost daily to suppress labor protests and attempted strikes-by journeymen hatmakers, ma sons, and street workers, for example-strikes now rendered illegal by the National Assembly's recent Le Chapelier law. At almost the same time the city government, backed by the Assembly, had begun dismantling a system of public works, initiated in 1789 as a dole for the unemployed and now deemed too expensive. These actions generated enormous anxiety and anger, and in late June and early July workers organized several protest marches, many of them again converging on the Place Vendome. Although these labor movements were not necessarily related to the political events, they helped to intensify the atmosphere of crisis and to energize the sans-culotte movement."
In the second place, the Cordeliers and the fraternal societies, along with several of the more radical sections of Paris, came increasingly to focus their anger on the National Assembly itself. Disenchanted that the Assembly took so little notice of their petitions, they were also increasingly suspicious of the deputies' treatment of the king and queen after their return, allowing them to remain in the palace with their servants and advisers, almost as though nothing had happened. And they were beside themselves with anger and frustration when word began to leak out by the second week in July that the deputies were moving toward exonerating the king." Already prone to paranoid perspectives, the men and women of the Cordeliers and the fraternal societies began to sense a plot being hatched in the Assembly. Rumors spread that the deputies had "sold out to the court," that they had doctored or fabricated the king's private testimony-notably Louis' statement that he had never intended to leave the country. There were even stories that the majority of the deputies were planning the assassination of the small group of Assembly radicals, like Petion and Robespierre, who were sympathetic to the Cordeliers' position. In the midst of the crisis, the Assembly had postponed the election of a new legislature, and now there were accusations that the representatives were using the situation to perpetuate themselves in power, like the members of the Long Parliament in seventeenth-century England.52
On July 12 the Cordeliers and their allies drew up yet another petition. Once again it was rejected by the Assembly, after the president, Charles de Lameth, had read only a few lines and had announced it "contrary to the constitution." Furious at this snub, which resembled only too closely the upper-class condescension they had known under the Old Regime-and Lameth himself was a former count-the Cordeliers resolved to bypass the Assembly and to appeal their case directly to the French people. They drew up an "Address to the Nation" to be published and circulated throughout the country, an address soon supported by most of the neighborhood fraternal societies. Until now the radicals had taken great care to act within the law, carefully obeying the Assembly's decrees on petitions and duly notifying the municipal government before each street demonstration. But the new address could be seen as a veritable call for insurrection, prefiguring the convocation of the National Convention in the summer of 1792. The petitioners summoned each of the eighty-three French departments, the administrative units of the new regime, to send a delegate to Paris, there to constitute a new "executive authority" that would replace the king-and presumably the National Assembly as well-"until the nation can decide the fate of the ex-king and determine the new mode of government." They also denounced the deputies for refusing to allow new elections to take place: "this arbitrary and abusive prolongation of their term in office." The departments should immediately and unilaterally convoke new elections, replacing the current deputies, who had "lost the confidence of the nation." Finally, the local administrators were urged to organize these elections through universal male suffrage, ignoring the National Assembly's laws placing tax qualifications on the right to vote.53
During the same period many of the radical newspapers-whose messages were soon being read aloud in cafes and shouted in the streets throughout the city-began pushing even more directly for insurrection. Brissot thundered against the Assembly and its position on the king: "an infamy, an absurdity, an atrocity." Freron and Bonneville predicted and urged an impending revolt. One article, probably written by the Cordeliers' Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, was even more blunt. The author reminded the deputies of the fate of the governor of the Bastille in 1789, who had been decapitated by the insurrectionary crowds when he acted against public opinion. "There are moments," he wrote, "when insurrection is the holiest of duties.""
Bastille Day z79z
The second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille fell in the very midst of the crisis. Although there had been some talk of canceling the event after June 21, Paris officials decided in the end to fo
llow through with their original scheme. The Cordeliers and the nascent sans-culottes did not speak for all the complex population of the city. Indeed, large numbers of Parisians, including most of the deputies in the Assembly, were appalled by the recurrent street demonstrations of workers and political radicals. Few had been happy with Louis' flight, and most had felt considerable anger toward the king. But the continuing violence or threat of violence from the crowds, and the Cordeliers' scarcely veiled appeals for insurrection against the Assembly, had frightened them and made them all the more wary of radical changes to the constitution. Now the town fathers hoped that a reprise of the Federation Festival of 1790 might somehow resurrect the magic and the unity of the previous year and provide the means for respectable citizens to counter the demonstrations of the republicans. It would be a ringing response to the "fanatics who want to destroy the monarchy, to the treacherous rogues who can only shout for a republic," as one moderate journalist put it. In any case, the great stadium on the Champ de Mars at the western end of the city was refurbished to hold even more people than the year before, and the central "Altar to the Fatherland" was remodeled for the occasion.SS
When the King Took Flight Page 12