It may not have fulfilled all of Jefferson’s expectations, but Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man was sufficiently radical to raise red flags among some of the assembly’s more outspoken deputies. And it was not only what Lafayette said but what he failed to say that attracted attention. In a striking departure from Mounier’s oration, the word “monarchy” was pointedly absent from Lafayette’s text. In earlier drafts, Lafayette had made the customary references to the king and his ministers, but in the version he presented on July 11, he asserted that “the principle of all sovereignty resides in the nation” and left the specifics open to debate.
As soon as Lafayette’s speech concluded, the Comte de Lally-Tolendal, a supporter of absolute monarchy, took the floor to issue a series of dire warnings couched in words of support. Lally-Tolendal duly noted the speaker’s unique history, applauding Lafayette’s declaration of “sacred” principles. It was appropriate, he declared, that Lafayette should “be the first to present them to you; he speaks of liberty as he has defended it.” Certainly, Lally-Tolendal maintained, this seminal text should be debated in the bureaus. But under no circumstances should such a potentially explosive document—filled as it was with a free-floating array of abstract principles—be circulated to the public at this preliminary stage. “Allow me, Messieurs, to insist more than ever on the danger” that might be produced by “such a declaration isolated from the rest of the constitution,” he urged. Publicizing this document would arm the ministry, which would accuse the assembly of wreaking havoc. France, he insisted, was not like America: “There is an enormous difference between a new-born nation announcing itself to the universe, a colonial people breaking ties with a distant government, and an antique, immense nation, one of the greatest in the world.” An American solution—he called it “primitive equality”—would not work in France, Lally-Tolendal asserted, where people must be bound “to the monarchical government” and where the rights of “man, citizen, subject, king” must be articulated. The danger of announcing natural rights would be “incalculable.” Loud and lengthy applause greeted the termination of Lally-Tolendal’s speech. The deputies decided unanimously that Lafayette’s declaration would be sent to the bureaus to be refined in tandem with the articles of constitution and would not be shared with a wider audience until the constitution could be published alongside it.
If Lally-Tolendal and his fellow deputies believed they could stop any dissemination of Lafayette’s declaration beyond the walls of the Menus Plaisirs, they were mistaken. A new information age was dawning in Paris, as the public’s craving for political news was met by an ever-growing cast of publishers, authors, editors, and artists capitalizing on the government’s gradual relaxation of censorship laws over the course of the preceding year. The Journal de Paris, whose editors traveled in the same circles as the Society of Thirty, was particularly friendly to Lafayette in these days. The paper routinely reprinted Lafayette’s speeches and letters alongside a selection of flattering responses. On July 13, the Journal reported Lafayette’s presentation of his Declaration of the Rights of Man along with a highly partial view of its reception: despite Lally-Tolendal’s mixed reaction, the paper published only the absolutist’s most generous statement about the declaration: “Its author speaks of liberty as he defended it.”
A steady stream of exquisitely varnished reports reached American readers, who avidly devoured news of their favorite Frenchman. Nearly every ship that sailed for the United States carried updates from Paris and Versailles. French and English newspapers, private letters, and diplomatic missives shared cargo space with cases of textiles, wines, and other goods destined for the American market. Word traveled slowly: the crossing to New York or Boston could take more than three months, and another few weeks were generally required for information to reach America’s southern and western regions. Sometimes newspapers copied articles word for word from their European or American sources; sometimes they added their own embellishments.
On September 30, Bostonians read the Journal de Paris story of July 13 embroidered with local ornament, as the Massachusetts Centinel related that “M. Lally was so delighted with the speech that he exclaimed—‘The gallant Marquis speaks of liberty with the same spirit that he fought for it on the plains of America.’ ” Tellingly, the article’s title was also changed in translation. The Journal de Paris had reported its news under the headline “National Assembly,” but the Boston article was titled simply “Marquis de La Fayette.” More than an analysis of France’s growing concern for human rights, it was a celebration of Lafayette and a reflection that America wished to claim him as its own. Overstating Lafayette’s role in the French Revolution, the Centinel went so far as to assert that “to the Marquis de La Fayette may the present emancipation of the citizens of the Commonwealth of France be more justly attributed than to any other of their patriotic characters.” But no exaggeration was involved in the paper’s description of Lafayette’s indebtedness to American precedents: “He has been taught the relative Rights of the Ruler and the Ruled, in the continual correspondence he has kept up with his adopted father, General Washington—the hero and statesman.” The author closed the article with a poetic reverie:
Who with th’ enlighten’d Patriots met,
On Schuylkill’s banks in close Divan,
And wing’d that arrow sure as fate,
Which ascertain’d the Sacred Rights of Man.
It was not simply happenstance that Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man was reported both widely and favorably in France and abroad. Thanks to an aide on a swift horse, Lafayette’s words had flown to Paris nearly as quickly as they were spoken. Within hours of Lafayette’s July 11 speech, a secretary could be heard reading Lafayette’s text aloud in a large chamber of the Hôtel de Ville, an enormous French Renaissance edifice located across from the vast Place de Grève (now Place de l’Hôtel de Ville) on the Right Bank of the Seine, about a mile east of the Palais-Royal. The audience was the city’s Assembly of Electors, a group of some 180 men who, having been elected to choose Paris’s representatives to the Estates-General, were now serving as the municipality’s ad hoc government. That night, printed copies of Lafayette’s speech were turned out in quantity, and by the morning of July 12, broadsides proclaiming his enumeration of every French citizen’s inalienable rights were available for purchase throughout Paris. But in such tumultuous times, the news of the morning was not always the news of the afternoon, and Lafayette’s declaration did not hold the attention of the city for long.
CHAPTER 13
A STORYBOOK HERO
The Declaration of the Rights of Man had been published less than twenty-four hours earlier, but all anyone was talking about on the afternoon of July 12 was Louis XVI’s banishment of Jacques Necker, the director-general of finance, who was the only member of the government whom the people still generally admired. In short order, most of the remaining ministers submitted their resignations or were forced out in a purge orchestrated by the Comte d’Artois and his circle, to be replaced by men loyal to the absolutist cause. Necker had been dining at home on Saturday, July 11, when he’d received a visit from the Comte de la Luzerne, minister of the navy, bearing a letter from the king ordering his immediate exile. Necker calmly finished his meal, and without uttering a word about his plans, he then ushered his wife into a carriage and proceeded to his château at Saint-Ouen, just north of Paris. Less than a day later, the Neckers were safely on the road to Brussels, leaving the king—now stripped of all moderating influences—to attempt a reversal of all the reforms that his coterie of reactionary advisers assured him had already gone too far.
In Paris, word of Necker’s dismissal ignited fears that the emboldened forces of absolutism might seek to quell the growing unrest in Paris by attempting an all-out military offensive against the city. From every corner of the capital, angry citizens made their way to the gardens of the Palais-Royal, where orators clambered atop fences, tables, and chairs to declaim t
he government shake-up and warn of impending danger. “Aux armes!” they shouted to the frenzied crowds jostling for space among the trees. According to Gouverneur Morris’s diary, roving bands were soon “breaking open the Armorers’s Shops” and scouring the streets for weapons and ammunition to be used in defense of the city.
Others set out on missions of a more symbolic variety. The multitudes who gathered at the Palais-Royal had been ruled by a monarchy that was second to none when it came to deploying visual spectacle for political ends; from a fountain erected in the garden of Versailles in the seventeenth century portraying the Roman goddess Latona in the process of transforming disrespectful peasants into frogs, to the costumes prescribed for the Assembly of Notables, the people of France received constant visual reminders of royal authority. Now, as ordinary men and women struggled to wrest control of their destinies from the government, they armed themselves not only with guns and stones but also with symbols. By order of the populace at large, the theaters of Paris would be dark that night. Mourning was to be observed in honor of the exiled Necker, just as it had been in memory of the six-year-old dauphin, who’d died from tuberculosis in June. This time, though, in lieu of a royal proclamation, the news would be delivered by masses of citizens roaming the city, closing places of entertainment as they passed.
Philippe Curtius, an enterprising Swiss anatomist who had adapted his wax-modeling skills for commercial purposes, was at his waxworks gallery on the Boulevard du Temple when hundreds of men and women arrived at the door on the afternoon of July 12. The uncanny likenesses on display in his galleries—one of which was among the many popular attractions at the Palais-Royal—were always up-to-date, as Curtius constantly changed the heads of his figures in accordance with the interests of his public. Curtius, best remembered today as Madame Tussaud’s mentor, had both fueled and capitalized on the cults of personality that sustained the political leaders of the day. On this date, the crowd was particularly interested in two of these heads; they demanded that Curtius hand over the busts of Necker and Orléans. Soon, the wax heads were wending their way through the streets in triumph, borne aloft by long poles carried above the crowd. Had anyone wanted to take it, a wax bust of Lafayette was also available at Curtius’s shop. But the Palais-Royal crowd, partial to Orléans, was not interested in glorifying the marquis.
Scores of eyewitnesses documented the remarkable events of July 1789, and no account is more revealing than the diary of Gouverneur Morris. Morris—who was a deputy to the Continental Congress, an advocate for Washington’s army throughout the American Revolution, a signer of the Articles of Confederation, and an author of the Constitution—had participated in every stage of the American experiment in liberty and was particularly attuned to the implications of each action and reaction of the French situation. On the evening of July 12, he found himself in the midst of the melee as he made his usual Sunday rounds. He had visited the Club Valois in the Palais-Royal, his home away from home, and called on the Comtesse de Flahaut—a mistress whose favors he famously shared with Talleyrand and whose husband supported the faction of Artois and the queen. He had left her apartments and was on his way to see Jefferson when his carriage approached a remarkable scene on the Place Louis XV (known today as the Place de la Concorde). Behind him was “a body of Cavalry with their Sabres drawn”; before him a hundred people were “picking up stones” from the piles of building materials being used to construct the bridge now known as the Pont de la Concorde. Showers of rock rained down upon the mounted soldiers, who responded with pistols. The confrontation between citizens and cavalry continued into the adjacent garden of the Tuileries Palace, where members of the Gardes Françaises, armed with bayonets, joined forces with the people to face off against a detachment of the Royal Allemand—a mounted regiment of the royal army with a name that referenced its German origins. As Morris understood at once, there was no going back. “These poor Fellows,” he wrote, “have passed the Rubicon with a witness.”
By the next morning, the attention of Paris had shifted to the Hôtel de Ville. Inside that stately edifice, every room, corridor, stairway, and courtyard was filled to overflowing with panicked men and women clamoring for arms; the city was in danger, and the people demanded protection. Thrust into the center of a crisis with few resources at their disposal, the electors were desperate to strengthen their tenuous hold on the city, using whatever means they could. Since late June, they had considered seeking permission from the National Assembly and the king to reestablish a citizens’ militia that might ensure the city’s safety. The request had never been acted upon. Now, engulfed in chaos around eight in the morning on July 13, the electors tried to calm the crowd by announcing that a citizens’ militia had been authorized and urging the assembled multitudes to return to their home districts to report for duty.
With some semblance of calm restored, the flags of the city were carried into the meeting hall and, according to the published proceedings of the electors, mounted “as trophies” on the fireplace, where they fluttered over a marble bust of Lafayette. Carved by Houdon, and received as a gift from the state of Virginia to the city of Paris, the bust had decorated the mantelpiece since 1784, standing as a reminder of France’s role in winning American independence. But now, paired with the city flag, the sculpted face seemed to promise liberation closer to home. The minutes of the day’s meeting report that the fortuitous pairing of flag and bust gave the electors ideas. “As if by a sudden inspiration,” several electors expressed a shared sentiment that command of the militia must be given to Lafayette. Only he, they agreed, could protect Paris from Versailles and save the city from itself. By naming Lafayette to command the militia, the electors had chosen, as Condorcet eloquently put it, “a storybook hero who, thanks to the éclat of his adventures, his youth, his bearing, and his renown, could enchant … the imagination and rally all of the popular interests to his side.” Any other choice, he added, would have faced “strong opposition” and resulted in “great harm.” Only Lafayette—the renowned friend of Washington—had sufficient credibility to reassure the city.
Charles Marville, Hôtel de Ville, 1871. In 1789, the electors of Paris and Lafayette established their headquarters in the Paris Hôtel de Ville, seen here in a photograph taken shortly after the building had been burned during the Paris Commune. Most of the city’s records from the 1789 revolution were destroyed in the fire, but the façade was left virtually intact. (illustration credit 13.1)
For the time being, the marble bust was the closest the militia would come to seeing Lafayette at its helm. Another man, the Marquis de La Salle, was placed in command while Lafayette was still some five leagues away, at Versailles, where the National Assembly was trying to persuade the king to remove his menacing troops. Angered by the insubordination of the assembly, Louis spurned the deputation sent to him on July 13. “I have already made known to you my intentions regarding the measures that the disorders of Paris have forced me to take,” he declared. “It is for me alone to judge their necessity.” On July 14, two more groups of deputies again entreated the king. To the second, Louis responded tersely and abruptly ended the discussion by stating, “I have nothing to add.”
While Louis XVI held his ground in the palace and debates raged at the Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs, rumors of invasion and massacre swept Paris. At two o’clock in the morning on July 14, several of the Paris electors were holed up in the Hôtel de Ville, trying desperately to cobble together a provisional government that might succeed in controlling the terrified city, when, according to a record of the proceedings, a motley group “wearing on their faces every sign of fright and alarm” burst through the doors “crying that all had been lost, the City taken, and the Rue de Saint-Antoine inundated with 15,000 soldiers who might seize the Hôtel de Ville at any moment.” Their story was unfounded. But by six o’clock, the entire populace seemed ready for an imminent siege. Outside city hall, on the Place de Grève, the electors perceived “a countless multitude of people o
f every age and walk of life” bearing “arms of every variety.” Anticipating violence and starvation, crowds rushed to secure provisions from Les Halles, the city’s main marketplace, as strong gusts of wind blowing from the west hastened their steps. According to the electors’ notes, the roads were packed with “carts of flour, wheat, wine, and other comestibles, cannons, guns, ammunition” being pushed, pulled, or otherwise cajoled in the direction of the Hôtel de Ville.
Around seven o’clock, news of troop movements once again reached the electors. This time, they took action, instructing all citizens of Paris who possessed weapons of any sort to report to the militia’s ad hoc leadership, which was dispersed across the city’s sixty districts. The electors further ordered all members of the militia to proclaim their allegiance to Paris by wearing the colors of the city in the form of red and blue cockades and to begin constructing defenses by ripping paving stones from the streets, digging trenches, and erecting barricades. Meanwhile, the electors sent formal deputations to two military strongholds: the Hôtel des Invalides—named for its role as a government-sponsored home for aged and disabled veterans—and the Bastille. At these sites, the city’s representatives hoped to acquire not only armaments but also solemn pledges that the king’s soldiers would not fire upon the citizens. Those sent to the Invalides returned with cannons. Those sent to the Bastille met with less success.
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