In any case, by December 1791 the king appears to have again reversed course. In a letter to his "foreign minister" in exile, the baron de Breteuil, he recommended the creation of "a Congress of the principal powers of Europe, supported by armed forces." This would be the best means, he believed, of "reestablishing a more desirable situation and ensuring that the evils which beset us do not spread to the other states of Europe." Now, apparently, he had quite set aside his moral scruples against war. He seemed to be pushing for direct intervention by the great powers to alter the constitution he had sworn to 19
SUCH WAS THE SITUATION at the beginning of I792. In another time and another place, Louis XVI might have finished out his reign in peace. He might even have been judged by posterity as a betterthan-average monarch. He undoubtedly desired the best for his people. Prodded by a fiscal crisis of unprecedented proportions, and in his own uncertain and inconsistent manner, he had attempted sweeping reforms in his government. "Never has a king done so much for a nation," he had proclaimed in all sincerity before the National Assembly on June 23, 1789. But by the time he gave this speech his vision of reforms and that of the patriots to whom he spoke had already sharply diverged. Indeed, it was only through wishful thinking on the part of the patriots and deception on the part of the monarch that the myth of the "citizen king" had survived so long. Now, with the pressure of events and under the influence of his queen, Louis had fallen back on the values he had been taught since childhood, values that included his own God-given right to rule and the hierarchical and fundamentally unequal nature of society. It was a vision that set him on a collision course with the men and women of the Revolution.
The Terror and Beyond
The months and years that followed in the French Revolution would not be kind to France or to many of the individuals encountered in this story. The constitution, which the men of 1789 had struggled more than two years to perfect, and which they hoped would "serve as a model for all nations of the world," would survive only eleven months.20 The new Legislative Assembly, created by that constitution, was deeply torn from the beginning by bitter struggles between Jacobins and Feuillants. Even more than the first group of deputies, the "Legislators" were haunted by suspicions of betrayal on the part of the king, especially after Louis used his veto powers to block decrees against emigre nobles and refractory clergymen. Rumors continued to circulate that a secret "Austrian Committee," organized around the queen, was undermining the new regime from within-rumors that were in fact not far from wrong.21 Such fears were reinforced by the joint agreement signed in August 1791 in the German castle of Pillnitz. Here the queen's brother Leopold-reacting perhaps in part to Louis' urgent pleahad urged all European powers to use armed force to "restore" the French monarchy. Fearful of conspiracies hatched by foreign powers in secret alliance with the French court, and spurred by the rhetoric of Jacques Brissot and others, who pushed for a great crusade to spread the ideals of the Revolution throughout Europe, the deputies declared war on Austria in April 1792. Soon they found themselves involved in a conflict with Prussia as well. The Legislative Assembly thus launched the nation into the very war that their predecessors had so hoped to avoid.
Initially the war went badly for the French. By the summer of 1792, the invasion everyone feared at the time of Varennes had become a reality. The Prussian and Austrian armies broke through France's barrier fortresses, capturing Verdun and Varennes itself and beginning a slow, methodical march toward Paris. Faced with the approach of the German armies and convinced more than ever of the king's treachery, the Parisians rose up in August of that year in a veritable second revolution. Following ideas first promoted by republicans in July 1791 and urged on by many of the same men and women who had participated in that movement, Parisians and national guardsmen from the provinces led a general insurrection against the monarchy. On August io Louis and his family were forced to evacuate the Tuileries palace, which was stormed by the insurgents in a bloody confrontation that left close to a thousand people dead in the heart of the city. This second revolution brought a new surge of democracy, with virtually all French men, regardless of wealth, now granted the right to vote and hold office. Six weeks later a hastily assembled National Convention officially deposed the king, and on September 21, 1792, it created the first French Republic.
Fortunately for the new republic, the French armies managed to pull themselves together. Building on the nationalist fervor and selfconfidence revealed at the time of the king's flight, they halted the Prussians at the battle of Valmy, only a few miles from SainteMenehould, where Drouet had first recognized the king. Eventually those same armies would advance beyond the French frontiers to invade and "liberate" whole areas of western Europe. But during the following years, the nation would be gripped by periods of obsessive suspicion, fratricidal infighting, and near anarchy. With civil wars and peasant uprisings breaking out over large areas of the country, with most of Europe arrayed in battle against the French, with sans-culottes radicals pushing for better economic conditions and revenge against their enemies, the republican government instituted a repression vastly greater than that of 1791. Before the storm had ended some eighteen thousand men and women of every social group would be judicially executed, and many tens of thousands more would be killed in civil wars and unofficial reprisals.
Of all the executions, none would be more dramatic and consequential than that of Louis XVI himself. In the last weeks of 1792, after several months of imprisonment, the king was placed on trial before the Convention. Throughout the proceedings he and his lawyers insisted that the constitution of 1791 guaranteed him immu nity from prosecution and that before the constitution was signed there had been no formal laws regulating his actions. He continued to dismiss the flight to Varennes as a mere "trip." And he eloquently rejected any suggestion that he was responsible for the shedding of French blood. "The multiple proofs that I have given at all times of my love for the people" should be clear to all. "My conscience reproaches me for nothing." But shortly before the trial began, the revolutionaries had uncovered a secret safe, hidden behind the woodwork of the Tuileries palace, containing a cache of the king's private papers. Many of the documents were written in Louis' own hand, and they provided massive evidence of the king's past deception and deceit, his efforts to oppose and obstruct the Revolution, and his collusion with certain counterrevolutionaries." Most of the formal accusations against the king were directly based on these documents. The single longest article of the indictment concerned Louis' attempted flight, his expenditure of public funds to carry out this plan, and his denunciation of the constitution in the statement he left behind on his desk.23 After prolonged debate, the Convention voted almost unanimously that the king was guilty of "conspiracy against liberty and the security of the state." Soon thereafter, and by a far closer margin, he was sentenced to death. On January 21, 1793, before tens of thousands of Parisians solemnly attending in the Place de la Revolution-the future Place de la ConcordeLouis XVI went bravely to the guillotine. He protested his innocence to the last.
By 1795 only two of the six passengers in the berline who had fled from Paris on that midsummer's night in 1791 would still be alive. Marie-Antoinette, whose treasonous activities had been even more flagrant than those of her husband (she had even smuggled out the French war plans to the Austrians), followed Louis to the scaffold in October of the same year. The king's sister, Elizabeth, guilty of little beyond her Bourbon name and her loyalty to her brother, was decapitated in May 1794. A little over a year later, the young dauphin, whom the royalists insisted on calling Louis XVII, succumbed to sickness in prison. His older sister might have fallen to a similar fate, but in one of the great ironies of the whole episode, she was liberated in 1796 in a prisoner exchange for jeanBaptiste Drouet. The man who had played a central role in halting the king's flight-and who, as a member of the Convention, had voted for Louis' death-had been captured by the Austrians two years earlier while on mission with the French army. After his
return to Paris and an amazing series of adventures, in and out of France, in and out of prison and politics, Drouet married and assumed a new identity in another provincial town. He died there peacefully in 1824.24
But in general, the principal patriot figures in our story did not fare well. Neither of the two deputies who accompanied the royal family back to Paris survived the Revolution. After the failure of the Feuillant party and his retirement to his home province, Barnave was arrested and executed for "royalism" in late 1793. Petion, who had served for a time as mayor of Paris, eventually broke with his friend Robespierre, fled the Convention, and committed suicide while in hiding in southern France. The philosopher and academician Jean-Sylvain Bailly withdrew from politics in late 1791. But he, too, was arrested and sentenced to death for his part in the shootings of July 17, executed at the very Champ de Mars where the event had taken place. Rabaut Saint-Etienne and Condorcet, Brissot and Marie-Jeanne Roland, Danton and Robespierre were also led to the guillotine, along with many of the leaders of the major Revolutionary factions. General Lafayette survived, but only after languishing for five years in an Austrian prison, where he shared captivity with his friend Latour-Maubourg and his onetime political rival Alexandre Lameth. Monsieur Sauce, the Varennes grocer who had arrested the king and welcomed him to his upstairs apartment, also lived on through the Revolution. But his life was marred by unhappiness. Execrated by the royalists as an archvillain, he was also suspected by the Revolutionaries for monarchist sympathies. After fleeing for his life and losing his first wife during the Prussian invasion, he moved away from his hometown, dying in obscurity in 1825.25
For the most part, the royalist conspirators of 1791 did far better than their patriot opponents. After their release from prison through the general amnesty of September, Choiseul, Goguelat, Damas, and the three bodyguards soon joined General Bouille and his sons in exile. All but the elder Bouille survived both the Revolution and the Napoleonic period, to reenter France after 1814, honored as heroes by the conservative Restoration government. Axel von Fersen also survived the Revolution. With singular audacity, he had slipped into Paris in February 1792 from his exile in Brussels, visiting the queen one last time at the Tuileries palace. Eighteen months later, crushed by the news of Marie's execution, he returned to Sweden. "If only I had been able to die at her side!" he wrote to his sister in despair. He never married and continued to refer to the queen with great feeling even as he rose to a position of eminence in the Swedish court.26 He was massacred during a popular uprising in Stockholm on June 20, 18io. It was nineteen years to the day since he had launched the great escape that came so close to changing the destiny of France.
Conclusion:
The Power of an Event
DID THEY DESERVE THEIR FATE, these men and women, celebrated or humble, commoner or king, almost all of whom had begun the year 1789 with such firm hopes for a better future? For more than two hundred years historians have struggled with the problem of violence and terror in the French Revolution. Was there something in the nature of the social situation in France or even in the ideas and political culture on the eve of the Revolution that made the slide into violence inevitable? Was there a necessary link between the inception of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror, between the National Assembly and the Committee of Public Safety, between the Bastille and the guillotine?
The story of the king's flight cautions us against making such simple linear connections. It serves to remind us of the contingent, unpredictable character of the Revolution-and perhaps of every major historical movement. What might have happened in the history of France, in the history of Europe, if events had taken only a slightly different course, and Louis and his family had reached Montmedy and subsequently taken refuge across the border with the Austrian army? In fact, during those two days in June when everyone believed that Louis was gone for good and that war was imminent, there had been an extraordinary surge of unity in the Assembly, in Paris, and throughout the nation. Might that harmony have been sustained if the king had not returned and war had broken out? Might the French have moved immediately toward a republic-as even moderates like Lafayette and Dupont de Nemours were suggesting on June 21? Might the Terror have been avoided or at least greatly attenuated? And what of that other parallel universe-less likely, to be sure-in which Louis resisted the influence of the queen and never fled Paris at all; in which he adapted himself to the role of citizen king that most of the French so ardently desired? Might France have then evolved peacefully toward genuine democracy-following more closely the path of events in the United States? The solution to this string of "what-ifs" is, of course, imponderable and impossible to resolve. Yet such reflections underscore the potential impact on the Revolution and on history of certain critical events.
The liberal regime initiated by the French in 1789, so close in many respects to the American system just under construction across the Atlantic, was not necessarily doomed to failure. There can be no doubt that on the eve of the king's flight the leaders of the National Assembly confronted an array of extremely difficult problems and sources of instability. Some of these problems were clearly of their own making. The deputies' decision to reform the Catholic church and to compel much of the clergy to swear a loyalty oath had brought deep unhappiness to whole segments of the French clerical and lay population. Other difficulties seemed to arise out of the nature of the Revolutionary process itself. No development was more typical in France after 1789 than a progressive questioning of authority, a questioning that quickly penetrated many levels of society. In the army, in the national guard, in the guilds, in the presence of the tax collector, within the civic culture of the cities, almost everywhere men and women began refusing to follow the rules established by either old regime or new, often with extremely disruptive results. At the same time, the very act of transforming society had aroused opposition among those whose vested interests and social positions had come under attack. By the spring of 1791, intransigent nobles and aristocratic bishops living in self imposed exile across the Rhine were already threatening to reimpose the old Regime through violence and the force of arms.
Yet the leaders of the Assembly were well aware of these problems. Although they would never have considered reestablishing the rights of nobles or rescinding the church reforms, they had made a great effort to promote toleration, establishing provisions for those who chose not to accept the religious reforms, and attempting to handle disputes with nobles and refractories in an orderly fashion through the regular court system. The Assembly also set out as rapidly as possible to establish a whole new set of administrative and judicial structures. By June of 1791 most of these structures were already in place and functioning, and it could be argued that they substantially reduced-though by no means eliminated political and social unrest in the provinces and restrained the decline in civil obedience. Moreover, the Assembly could continue to draw on deep reserves of support for the new regime from common men and women, not only in Paris but in communities large and small throughout the nation. The reaction of the citizens of Varennes to the crisis of June was a case in point.
In the spring of 1791 the deputies had been hopeful that with the completion of the constitution and the installation of a permanent new regime, the Revolutionary period would come to an end. And it is not impossible that the constitutional monarchy might have worked and eventually returned some measure of stability to the nation; it is not impossible that the period of state-sponsored violence and terror might have been avoided, if only the monarch himself, the central personage in the new system, had given his wholehearted support. At the beginning of June the majority of the French did think this was possible. The majority-especially outside Paris-continued to believe that their "citizen king" endorsed the Revolution. They continued to imagine Louis as a central father figure around whom the sovereign nation might rally.
But in opting to flee from Paris at a critical moment, when the constitution was almost complete, and in repudiating h
is solemn oath to uphold the Revolution, the king greatly contributed to the destabilization of the state and the society. In the short term, his action exerted a deeply traumatic effect on the whole population. A great wave of emotion swept across the country, emotions that ranged from crippling anxiety to outbursts of violence to chainreaction panics over imagined invasions. Rapidly thereafter patriots took hold of themselves and organized as best they could for the war that they all assumed to be inevitable. But the king's flight also initiated a sweeping reconceptualization of the political nation. Within days after the news had been received, everyone realized that the king had not been kidnapped, that he had fled of his own volition. For a great many people the shock was brutal. They had imagined the monarch as a good father, and now they experienced a profound sense of desertion and betrayal. In language that was often exceptionally harsh and angry, Louis was denounced as a liar, a coward, a traitor, a despot. The reaction was particularly strong in Paris, where the Cordeliers Club and the network of fraternal societies quickly launched a popular movement to depose the king and abolish the monarchy. The succession of petitions, marches, and street demonstrations constituted a signal moment in the history of popular Parisian radicalism and the emergence of the sans-culottes as a political force. But in many other areas of the country as well, during that three-week period of uncertainty when the National Assembly chose not to make a public judgment, a minority of people-far more than historians have realized-reflected seriously on the possibility of ousting the present king, even on the possibility of creating a republic.
When the King Took Flight Page 23