The Marquis

by Laura Auricchio

  As the opening of the Estates-General approached, political posturing abounded and conspiracy theories flourished. Suspicion, fear, and anger, already widely shared, had been stoked by the recent violence, and in the days before the convocation, Ferrières predicted that the Estates-General would be stormy. “The animosity between the orders is tremendous,” he wrote to his wife. On May 15, as the meetings devolved into chaos, he added an ominous postscript: “The orders are neither in accord within themselves, nor in accord with each other.” The nobility divided into factions that would form, mutate, and then dissolve as quickly as they arose, and fingers were pointed in all directions, blaming one group or another for each new setback. Lafayette and his allies in the Society of Thirty were at odds with Ferrières and other supporters of an absolute monarchy, and divisions even ran through the princes of the blood. Rumors held that the Réveillon riots had been instigated by the Duc d’Orléans as part of a plot to bring down the king, and Marie Antoinette carried on feuds with everyone from the reform-minded Duchesse d’Orléans to the Mesdames de France, the king’s staunchly traditionalist aunts.

  Such was the precarious state of affairs on Monday, May 4, 1789, when the deputies to the Estates-General gathered at seven in the morning at the Church of Notre-Dame in Versailles, located just north of the palace, to await the arrival of the king and queen. As the Marquis de Ferrières described the ceremony, three hours passed before the sound of drum, fife, and trumpet announced the approach of the members of the royal family, who were accompanied by the king’s ministers, the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and a vast retinue of courtiers. Brilliantly dressed—the women were “covered in diamonds,” according to Ferrières—the royal family and courtiers briefly took their seats on banquettes draped with velvet cloth embroidered with fleurs-de-lis while the king gazed upon the spectacle from a throne placed before the choir screen.

  Notre-Dame was only a staging ground for the main event: a High Mass was celebrated at the Cathedral of Saint-Louis, located some three-quarters of a mile away, just south of the palace. There, divine blessings would be solicited for the Estates-General. Two by two, the elected deputies made their way from one church to the next in a grand procession through streets hung with rich tapestries, each man carrying a long wax taper to be lit at the cathedral. Royal guards lined the route, and spectators looked on from windows and balconies—or, in the case of Gouverneur Morris, from the street, where he glimpsed what he could “thro a double row of tapestry.” Swept up in the pomp and ceremony of the sunny day, Ferrières found his “soul plunged into sweet drunkenness” as his eyes took in the “image of joy, happiness, and satisfaction.” Morris saw less but perceived more: observing the progress of the king and queen through the parade, he noted that “the former is repeatedly saluted as he passes along with the Vive le Roi, but the latter meets not a single Acclamation … [and] looks … with Contempt on the Scene in which she acts a Part.” Later in the day Morris learned that Louis, too, was displeased. Not only had the king’s “Consort received no Mark of public Satisfaction,” but his cousin Orléans had chosen to “walk as Representative and not as Prince of the Blood.”

  The Duc d’Orléans was a modern man who understood that public opinion would play a dominant role in the nation’s reinvention, but Louis XVI believed that affairs of state could move forward simply by following the traditions of the past. When the Estates-General convened on May 5, they met in yet another enormous hall at the Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs. Large enough to accommodate several times the number of participants as the room constructed for the Assembly of Notables, the cavernous space was flanked by side aisles, and loges above the main floor provided additional room for spectators. Delegates were instructed to dress in the costumes specified by the king (although one commoner drew applause when he entered in farmer’s garb), and seating arrangements reinforced the hierarchical divisions. The king presided from his golden throne, which had been placed atop a dais surrounded by velvet draperies at the far end of the room, as the queen, ministers, and princes of the blood fanned out around him. Deputies of the clergy and nobility occupied benches arranged in rows perpendicular to the throne, while representatives of the Third Estate sat far from the center of power, facing the king from the opposite end of the hall, the two landed estates strategically placed between them and the monarch. The visual messages were neither mistaken nor forgotten. Jules Michelet, the great nineteenth-century historian, wrote that Louis XVI had resurrected “the odious details of a gothic ceremonial, those oppositions of classes, those signs of social distinctions and hatred which it should rather have buried in oblivion. Blazonry, figures, and symbols, after Voltaire, after Figaro! It was [too] late.”

  Procession of the Estates-General through the streets of Versailles, May 4, 1789. (illustration credit 12.3)

  Ceremonial costumes worn by members of the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate at the Estates-General. (illustration credit 12.4)

  The real work of the Estates-General began on May 6, when the deputies reassembled with each estate in its own meeting room. Asked to verify that its membership had been constituted properly, the Third Estate refused, declaring itself unwilling to set a precedent for voting by order and insisting that all decisions be taken up by the Estates-General as a whole. The clergy and nobility, however, proceeded as they were instructed despite some scattered dissension in their ranks. In the weeks that followed, the Third Estate repeatedly tried and failed to persuade the other orders to join them in constituting a unified entity. On June 12, the Third Estate boldly proclaimed itself to be an independent legislative body—operating on a principle of one man, one vote—and adopted the name of the National Assembly. Members of the other orders were welcome. Some clergymen joined the National Assembly, and nobles, too, began to cross over. As early as May 6 one of the noblemen, Mathieu-Jean-Félicité, Comte de Montmorency-Laval, who had attended the Collège du Plessis a few years after Lafayette had departed, argued that the representatives’ verification of powers be done jointly, rather than by estate.

  As Jefferson had predicted, Lafayette was betwixt and between. On the one hand, his noble constituents had instructed him to vote by estate, and his own inclinations reinforced the idea that an empowered and conscientious nobility was the surest protection against an overreaching monarchy and was, therefore, the nation’s best guarantor of liberty. On the other hand, he was keenly aware that his reform-minded colleagues were drifting to the side of the commoners, and he wondered whether this might represent a better and more humane path forward. For a time, Lafayette considered resolving the issue by relinquishing his seat among the nobility and putting himself forward as a candidate representing the Third Estate. But just as he had at the beginning of the Assembly of Notables, he temporized, mired in the conflicting demands of his own belief system.

  While the deputies debated in the halls of Versailles, the citizens of Paris were losing patience. The collective voice of the city clamored for a unified National Assembly that might at last begin to address the pressing problems of hunger and inflation. Traveling through France, the English agronomist Arthur Young reported in June that more than a dozen new pamphlets appeared every day in the shops that lined the arcades of the Palais-Royal, with “nineteen twentieths of these productions … in favour of liberty, and commonly violent against the clergy and nobility.” The people, Young noted, were thronging in such large numbers to the boutiques and coffeehouses on the Orléans property that “one can scarcely squeeze from the door to the counter.… They are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening … to certain orators, who from chairs and tables harangue each his little audience. The eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the present government, cannot be easily imagined.”

  On the morning of Saturday, June 20, the deputies of the Third Estate arrived at Versailles expecting t
o welcome the reform-minded clergy into their midst. Instead, all three of the estates found their meeting places locked—the doors barred by armed guards—and signs announcing that a royal session would be held on Monday. Undeterred by the show of force and concerned that the previously unplanned royal session augured ill, the Third Estate and much of the clergy went in search of a new meeting place. Finding an unlocked door leading to an indoor tennis court on the Rue Saint-François, they entered. In an action that would soon be immortalized by the preeminent French painter of the day, Jacques-Louis David, the deputies courageously raised their right arms and pledged not to disband until France had a new constitution. The men who swore the “Oath of the Tennis Court,” as it became known, proclaimed the unassailable validity of the National Assembly by insisting that “nothing can prevent it from continuing its deliberations, in whatever locale it may be forced to establish itself; … wherever its members are gathered, there is the National Assembly.” As the days passed, more clergy joined the commoners, and on June 25, forty-eight nobles declared themselves members of the National Assembly. Lafayette was still not among them. In due course, Louis XVI realized that he had lost the battle. He ordered the clergy and nobility to join the Third Estate in the assembly on June 27.

  With the wrangling over process now complete, the National Assembly could turn to the project that Lafayette and many others believed would be the final task of the French Revolution: forging a new constitution. A June letter presumably written to the royalist Madame de Simiane explained Lafayette’s goals: “At nineteen, I dedicated myself to the liberty of mankind and the destruction of despotism, as much as a weak individual like myself possibly could. I set out for the New World thwarted by all and helped by no one.… I had the pleasure of seeing that revolution completed, and thinking already of revolution in France, I said in a discourse to Congress, printed everywhere except in the [state-sponsored] Gazette de France: ‘May this revolution serve as a lesson to the oppressors and an example to the oppressed.’ ” Now he believed that the joyous moment was at hand when he would produce a document that would help France rid itself of oppression in a peaceful and orderly fashion:

  I have tried everything short of civil war, which I could have accomplished except that I feared its horrors. A year ago I developed a plan whose simplest points seemed like extravagances, and which six months from now will be executed in its entirety, yes in its entirety, without changing a single word. I have also created a declaration of rights which M. Jefferson found so good that he had it sent to General Washington; and this declaration, or something like it, will be the catechism of France.

  Unfortunately, circumstances were not conducive to the sort of level-headed deliberation that might right the nation’s course. Tens of thousands of royal troops and foreign forces—mostly Swiss and German mercenaries—had been amassing on the outskirts of both Paris and Versailles since May. By early July, some 25,000 soldiers were encamped in a ring around the capital, awaiting orders from their commanding officer, Marshal Victor-François de Broglie, brother of the man at whose table Lafayette had been converted to the American cause. This enormous show of force was widely understood to be the brainchild of the Comte d’Artois and Marie Antoinette. Their absolutist faction still faced opposition from Necker and other moderates in the king’s council, but it was steadily gaining strength. Gouverneur Morris’s diary entry for June 30 records a conversation with Jefferson, who informed him that “very serious Events are apprehended. That perhaps the King will be prompted to attempt a Resumption of his authority.” Widespread rumors held that the National Assembly would be dismantled, the nascent constitution thwarted, and any dissenters slaughtered.

  Within the Paris city limits, the authorities were fast losing control. On July 1, Morris wrote to John Jay, a fellow New Yorker who shared his belief in a strong central government, that “the Soldiery in this City … declare they will not act against the People … and parade about the Streets drunk, huzzaing for the Tiers.” According to Morris, on June 30 a group of soldiers who had been imprisoned for mutiny were freed by a “Mob”—four thousand strong—with help from military guards. Morris added that when “a Party of Dragoons, ordered on Duty to disperse the Riot, thought it better to drink with the Rioters,” jubilation ensued. The prisoners were then “paraded in Triumph to the palais Royal, which is now the Liberty Pole of this City.” Versailles, too, saw the streets filled with angry crowds. Summing up the state of affairs in his letter to Jay, Morris concluded that “the Sword has slipped out of the Monarch’s Hands without his perceiving a Tittle of the Matter.”

  The National Assembly could do little more than look on with dismay. On July 8, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau— a member of the Society of Thirty who, sharing Lafayette’s hope for a constitutional monarchy, had written some of that group’s more persuasive pamphlets—proposed that the assembly send a deputation to the king bearing a “very humble address” asking for troops to be withdrawn. Born into the Provençal nobility, Mirabeau had been “déclassé”—stripped of the privileges of his order—following a series of scandals. Now a member of the National Assembly, elected by the Third Estate of Aix-en-Provence, he was fast becoming one of the most passionate orators of the French Revolution. The military presence, argued Mirabeau, was causing, not quelling, alarm in the streets of Paris, and jeopardizing “the liberty and honor of the National Assembly.” The written appeal that Mirabeau presented for the assembly’s consideration the next day elaborated further, declaring for his majesty’s edification that “the danger, Sire, threatens the tasks that are our primary duty, and that can have full success, real permanence, only insofar as the people regard them as entirely free.” The Archives parlementaires—the published record of France’s legislative proceedings—reported that Mirabeau’s July 9 address “caused the greatest stir in the Assembly, which rose in unison in a sign of support.” But the king soon put an end to their enthusiasm, for as Morris wrote in his diary, Louis XVI contemptuously suggested to the deputies that if they felt unsafe at Versailles they could be relocated to a more remote town, such as Soissons or Noyon, in the rural reaches of Picardy.

  Lafayette, who seconded Mirabeau’s proposal on July 8, grew steadily more wary. Writing to Jefferson, he reported that the king and his council “are very angry with me. If they take me up you must claim me as an American citizen.” Rarely did Lafayette invoke the divine, but he closed this letter with the phrase “God bless you,” as though these might be his parting words. He had reason to fear trouble from factions other than the king’s party as well. Members of the Orléans circle had been making “advances” to Lafayette, seeking an alliance he deemed suspect. In a letter written on July 11, Lafayette explained:

  They tell me that the head of M. le duc d’Orléans and mine have been marked; that sinister plots have been set in motion against me, as the only one capable of commanding an army; that M. le duc d’Orléans and I should coordinate our efforts; that he should be the captain of my guard, and I of his.

  Lafayette reported that he had rebuffed these offers in no uncertain terms, responding “coldly” that “M. le duc d’Orléans is, in my view, nothing more than an individual wealthier than myself, whose fate is of no greater interest than that of other members of the minority.” Vowing to keep an eye on Orléans, he even dared to imagine a time when he might denounce Artois and Orléans as equally “factious”—inclined to sedition—one prince of the blood being prone to aristocratic scheming, the other employing “more popular means.” As far as Lafayette was concerned, neither man had the best wishes of the nation at heart.

  On July 9, despite the inauspicious conditions, the thirty-man committee charged with determining a process for writing a new French constitution reported on its work. Lafayette was not a member of the committee, but the report was read into the record by one of his allies, Jean-Joseph Mounier, a lawyer from Grenoble who had devoted many years of study to the English system of government and who, upon
reaching Paris in 1789, had been introduced into the salon of Madame de Tessé by Lafayette. Mounier announced that the constitution of France would begin—just as Lafayette hoped—with a preamble articulating the universal rights shared by all of mankind. Mounier’s logic was clear: “The goal of all societies being the general good,” any valid principle of governance “must be founded on the rights of man.” Anxious to act before the window of opportunity slammed shut, Mounier enjoined his listeners to “seize the favorable moment.” But before enumerating the committee’s proposals, he added a heartfelt plea for a lasting success: “May all the provinces, through the organ of their representatives, finally contract among themselves and with the throne an eternal alliance!”

  Lafayette knew he had to act quickly if he wished to be the one to provide France with its declaration of rights. His letter to Jefferson of July 10 included a draft of the document along with a request for Jefferson “to consider it again and make your observations.” Lafayette impressed his urgency upon Jefferson: “I beg you to answer as soon as you get up, and wish to hear from you about eight or nine at least.”

  On July 11, Lafayette presented his “Declaration of the Rights of Man” to the National Assembly. Although he had been eager to solicit Jefferson’s advice, Lafayette did not necessarily follow it. Annotations to a copy of the text found among Jefferson’s papers suggest that the American was uncomfortable with Lafayette’s proposal to include property and honor among man’s fundamental rights. In other passages, Lafayette’s final copy jettisons ideas inspired by Jefferson found in earlier versions, among them the assertion that “no man may be disturbed … for his religion.” Facing a fractious and frightened assembly, Lafayette was in all likelihood more concerned with winning the support of the clergy than with acting immediately on the matter of religious freedom.