The Marquis

by Laura Auricchio

  This is clearly a dirty picture, but more important, it is a pointed political critique. The title’s reference to the “constitution,” for instance, is a play on words of a type that abounded in the satirical verse of the era. The term plainly refers to the recent swearing of oaths led by Lafayette at the Festival of Federation, but the first syllable—con—is French slang for “idiot” or “jerk” and can also mean “twat” or “cunt.” Pornographic pamphlets abounded with the latter usage, as writers of ribald doggerel made hay of the facile pun, often italicizing, capitalizing, or separating “con” from the rest of a word to emphasize the point with an orthographic elbow to the ribs. Just as Lafayette upstaged Louis XVI on that rainy July afternoon, so too does he supposedly usurp the king’s prerogative in the graphic imaginings of My Constitution by claiming for himself the queen’s con; and the visual puns don’t end there, as Lafayette’s gesture subtly mimics the vogue for oath taking that swept the nation. Extending his right arm, he repeats the very motion made by tens of thousands of fédérés on the Champ de Mars, who were, in turn, echoing the elected deputies who swore the Oath of the Tennis Court in 1789. But the oath in My Constitution differs in one crucial respect from the others: the representatives to the Estates General and the fédérés were committing themselves to the public good and affirming their readiness to lay down their lives for the national interest. Lafayette, in contrast, is shown taking an oath of a far more private, and far less noble, variety, declaring himself willing to sacrifice the public good in the interest of his own illicit pleasure.

  My Constitution. Pornographic print depicting Lafayette and Marie Antoinette, c. 1790. (illustration credit 16.1)

  Were this image anomalous, it would be a mere footnote to history. But My Constitution is typical of a whole host of prints and pamphlets that cast Lafayette and the queen in comically erotic vignettes. Another of the type, sometimes given the title L’âge d’or, depicts a lover’s reunion with an astonishing twist. In the center of the image, a mounted officer of the National Guard dressed in full uniform—the conventional visual shorthand for Lafayette—holds a pair of roses in his right outstretched hand. At the right, a standing woman is poised to greet his arrival, raising her left hand as though ready to receive the flowers. Yet these details are mere window dressing to be noticed only after the viewer has recovered from the startling sight of the officer’s mount, for this gallant soldier is riding an enormous penis that stands erect on two equine legs, a ring of pubic hair fulfilling the function of a saddle and a feathery white tail protruding from the rear portion of its testicles. An arc of liquid spraying from the top of its head suggests that our hero may be overly excited by the amorous encounter.

  Pornographic print depicting Lafayette greeting Marie Antoinette, c. 1790. (illustration credit 16.2)

  The Austrian/Ostrich Hen. Caricature of Marie Antoinette, c. 1791. (illustration credit 16.3)

  More than just a crude joke at Lafayette’s expense, the bipedal penis adapts yet another play on words and images to identify the standing woman as Marie Antoinette. With its long neck, feathery tail, and rounded torso perched on two slender legs, the creature bears a striking resemblance to an ostrich, known in French as an autruche, which in turn sounds quite a bit like Autriche—Austria—the queen’s native land, and the nation with whom she was rumored to be plotting a military alliance that would restore France to absolute monarchy. The pun is spelled out in another caricature from the same period that identifies a female bird with a vaguely human face as both “la poule d’autruche” (the ostrich hen) and “la poule d’autryche” (the Austrian hen).

  Who commissioned these prints? One can’t be certain—most of the era’s pornographic caricatures were produced either anonymously or under false names—but in the case of L’âge d’or, all signs point in the direction of Orléans. One variant on this print was skillfully executed in the labor-intensive medium of hand-colored etching, making it expensive both to produce and to purchase and suggesting an upscale patron and audience; Orléans and his friends fit the bill. But the most important Orléans fingerprint, if one can call it that, is the two-legged penis.

  Pictures and sculptures of phalluses with legs (as well as phalluses with tails, phalluses with wings, and even phalluses with their own phalluses) were enjoying something of a heyday among the reform-minded French and British elite. Such images had been much reproduced as part of the ongoing interest in the findings from Herculaneum and Pompeii—the ancient Roman cities near Naples that, having been buried in volcanic ash in A.D. 79, had attracted widespread attention since the middle of the eighteenth century, when excavations began to uncover streets, buildings, and objects that had endured surprisingly intact.

  Easily identified by his oversized and always erect penis, Priapus was the god of fertility and, by extension, served as a protector of gardens. In 1791, a herm—or bust on a pillar—of Priapus would play a key role in the frontispiece for the Orléanist satire The Patriotic Brothel, in which a pair of women interact with the carved deity in an outdoor setting. The woman at the left, identified in the text as Marie Antoinette, rubs the signature stone phallus between her breasts, while the democrat Théroigne de Méricourt (an unlikely companion for the queen), seen on the right, fondles the statue’s testicles from below. The women, the pamphlet reports, are intoning a hymn to Priapus as they “adorn with garlands the vigorous member of this god, heaven and earth’s premier fucker of sirens.”

  Tintinnabulum (bell) believed to invoke the Roman god Priapus in order to ward off evil. (illustration credit 16.4)

  Frontispiece to The Patriotic Brothel, a pornographic Orléanist pamphlet, 1791. (illustration credit 16.5)

  Likening Lafayette, the protector of Paris, to Priapus, the protector of gardens, was not just a dirty joke—although it was surely that. It was also a sly critique of Lafayette’s provincial origins and clumsy bearing. As anyone schooled in the classics that dominated eighteenth-century French learning would have known, Priapus was renowned for a rough manner attributed, in part, to his rustic beginnings. In one antique epigram, Priapus, lamenting his own coarseness, explains that he was carved neither from fine stone nor by a master sculptor: “Neither Phidias nor Scopas nor Praxiteles produced me, but some bailiff hacked a log and told me ‘thou shalt be Priapus.’ ” In another he seeks the readers’ indulgence in excusing his rude behavior (which generally consisted of threatening to rape anyone—man, woman, or child—who attempted to steal from his garden). “Forgive a hick unable to compete with learned types,” he implores. From an Orléanist perspective, Lafayette, too, was something of a hick, but unlike Priapus, he was foolhardy enough to try to compete with his social superiors. According to the logic of the old regime, Lafayette had risen to heights that no child of the Auvergne should have been able to attain.

  In 1790 and 1791, Priapus was just one of the classical characters pressed into service as stand-ins for Lafayette. The most common of these was probably the mythical beast known as a centaur. Half man, half horse, the centaur took Lafayette’s uncommon attachment to his white steed to its logical conclusion by fusing the two into a single monstrous creature. A print entitled Le sans tort spells out this conceit through a play on words and images. Le sans tort translates literally as “the blameless one”—a reference to Lafayette’s tendency to shake off any culpability for acts of violence committed under his watch. But when read aloud, the phrase sounds like “Le centaur.” Underscoring the double entendre, the picture features the body and legs of a galloping white horse whose neck morphs into Lafayette’s torso and head. A shadowy homunculus identified in the caption as “chagrin” rides atop the hybrid steed, its arms wrapped around the neck/torso as if holding on for dear life, while the horse charges full speed ahead, dragging behind it a liberty cap, which has been tied with a neat bow to its trimly cropped tail.

  Le sans tort. Caricature likening Lafayette to a centaur, c. 1791. (illustration credit 16.6)

  Signs in the background
commemorate episodes that the supporters of Louis XVI saw as Lafayette’s greatest failures. Impaled heads preside over the center of the image like a gory totem pole. Beneath the heads, a round medallion reminds viewers of the promise that Lafayette had been unable to keep on the night of October 5, 1789: “Sleep peacefully. I’ll take care of everything.” At the right, a notice affixed to a wooden post recalls the 1790 execution of the Marquis de Favras—the only man to be put to death for counterrevolutionary activities before 1792. A third road sign, attached to the base of the pikes, simply references the day of February 28, 1791. This was the so-called Day of Daggers, when Lafayette and the National Guard subdued, disarmed, and arrested some four hundred noblemen who had gathered in the Tuileries armed with weapons of all variety—pistols, poignards, sabers, hunting knives—in order, it was believed, to facilitate the king’s escape. From the perspective of the aristocrats who opposed the revolution, Lafayette was very much like the ancient centaurs who were said to have battled the ancestors of the Greeks in a primordial struggle between civilization and barbarism. Centaurs were formidable opponents: powerful, lawless, and driven by nature’s coarsest instincts. But the forces of order ultimately prevailed. And surely, hoped supporters of absolute monarchy, they would do so again.

  Lafayette was well aware that his image had been tarnished. Since the onset of revolution he had kept up avidly with the burgeoning production of pamphlets and prints, purchasing multiple copies of each regardless of whether its treatment of him was good, bad, or indifferent. During this same period, Lafayette appears to have grown steadily more anxious about what the future might hold. He kept a locksmith busy for much of 1791 changing the locks on nearly every door, box, drawer, and cabinet in the Rue de Bourbon town house. Perhaps he sensed that matters were fated to go from bad to worse.

  CHAPTER 17

  DOWNFALLS

  Cannon fire jolted Paris to attention at nine-thirty on the morning of June 21, 1791. Soon, warning bells were ringing from every church and cries of alarm filled the streets. The king had vanished. Despite the heavy guard that surrounded the Tuileries Palace at all times, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, their children, and a handful of others had somehow disappeared overnight. No one knew where or why the royals had gone. It was equally unclear whether they had fled or been abducted. These questions went unanswered throughout the morning and early afternoon as rumors swirled through Paris and fingers were pointed in many directions—especially at Lafayette, the man who was supposed to protect the Tuileries.

  In the chamber of the National Assembly, stunned silence gave way to cacophony. Alexandre de Beauharnais was presiding over the assembly and struggling to control the mounting confusion when Jean-Louis Romeuf, one of Lafayette’s aides-de-camp, made his way to the bar. Romeuf had not planned to visit the assembly, but he was glad enough to be there. Glad enough to be alive. He was one of several couriers dispatched by Lafayette early that morning to “warn all good citizens that the king has just been carried off by enemies of the public good, and to order them to attempt to block this departure by all available means, and to bring him back if possible,” according to the published proceedings of the assembly. But Romeuf had barely made it out of the Hôtel de Ville when a group of workmen forced him from his horse. As they saw it, Lafayette was to blame for allowing, if not abetting, the king’s departure; not having Lafayette on hand, they seemed happy to take out their fury on his messenger. While blows and kicks rained down upon Romeuf, a second group of Parisians, in a less bellicose frame of mind, pulled him from the fray and conducted him to the assembly. Plucking Lafayette’s orders from Romeuf’s hand, Beauharnais read them aloud.

  Soon, Lafayette himself was in the chamber, having made his own escape from an angry crowd gathered on the Place de Grève. Speaking from the tribune, he proclaimed that “an attack” on the king had been carried out by “enemies of the public good” who hoped to strike a blow at “French liberty.” It was wishful thinking. Had the king been a victim, the nation would have faced a discrete enemy, a malignant force that could be identified and excised without harm to the body politic.

  Unfortunately, the arrival of Arnaud II de La Porte, intendant of the King’s Civil List, made it clear that Lafayette’s optimism was sorely misplaced. De La Porte came to the assembly bearing a document entitled “Declaration of the King, Addressed to All the French, upon his Departure from Paris.” Once the king’s text was read into the record, there could be no mistake: Louis XVI had not fallen prey to an anti-revolutionary conspiracy; he had been chief among the plotters. The king explained that he could no longer stand idly by to “see all my powers unrecognized, prerogatives violated, personal safety endangered everywhere, crimes going unpunished, and complete anarchy established above the law.” The new constitution, he complained, left the monarch with nothing more than “the appearance of authority,” without sufficient power “to cure a single one of the ills that afflict the realm.” And he was just getting started.

  The royal declaration was so long that it filled ten columns of print in the Archives parlementaires, its criticisms running the gamut from philosophical misgivings about the premises of the new order to grievances stemming from a sense of personal pique. The former are more substantial, but the latter are more telling, as the king’s grumblings about creature comforts and interior decoration reveal just how severely he underestimated the gravity of his situation. Recounting the ordeal of the royal family’s arrival at the Tuileries on October 6, 1789, Louis wrote, “Nothing had been prepared to receive the King.” Moreover, even after he had settled in, “the disposition of the apartments” did not “afford the comforts to which His Majesty had been accustomed in the other royal properties, and which every individual of means is able to enjoy.” Vexing, too, was his treatment during the Festival of Federation. At first, the assembly had placed him at the helm of the festivities “by special decree,” but they had subsequently “named another”—Lafayette—to the same post. Making matters worse, the seating arrangements were substandard: despite the king’s request, the royal family had been directed to a box separate from his own, “a thing hitherto unprecedented.” Louis was equally galled by the budgetary limits imposed on his household expenses; these restrictions, he complained, dared to presume “that services rendered to the person of the king are not also rendered to the State.” He concluded with a plea to the people: “Come back to your king; he will always be your father, your best friend.” The man seemed not to understand that the time for sentiment had passed.

  The royal missive heaped such scorn on the various reforms that had accumulated since the Assembly of Notables convened in 1787 that it managed to alienate nearly all but the monarchy’s most ardent supporters. The Révolutions de Paris termed it “a satire of the Revolution.” Even the royalist Marquis de Ferrières had had enough. He summed up the situation in a letter to his wife, writing, “The Declaration written in the hand of the king completes his downfall.” By denouncing “all the Assembly’s decrees,” explained Ferrières, Louis had “declared himself … an enemy of the Constitution.” One of the several papers that claimed the title L’ami du roi (“The Friend of the King”) went so far as to remove the reference to the monarch from its masthead: on June 22, the paper was sold as L’ami des français (“The Friend of the French”).

  Given the carelessness of the monarchs’ preparations for escape, it seems incredible that the royal scheme was not discovered. According to Madame Campan, plans had been in the works at least since March, when Marie Antoinette began sending Campan on shopping sprees. Buying just a few items from each boutique to elude detection, Campan assembled complete wardrobes for the queen and her children, shipping all purchases to Brussels to await the royal family’s arrival. Marie Antoinette had also decided that she could not live in exile without her custom-made nécessaire de voyage—an ebony box, some eight inches deep and twenty-two inches long, trimmed with copper and gilt silver, and designed to contain everything that might be
desired on a journey, from a complete tea service to a compass to a makeup brush—and so an order was placed with the ébéniste Jean-Pierre Charpenat for an exact duplicate to be made and shipped to the Netherlands.

  While Madame Campan was working her way through the shops of Paris, General de Bouillé was amassing twelve battalions and twenty-three squadrons, composed primarily of foreign troops, on the French side of the Belgian border. Bouillé, who pointedly did not share his plans with his cousin Lafayette, stationed most of his men in and around the fortress at Montmédy, the king’s intended destination, and dispatched others along the route the monarchs were to travel, in order to guarantee safe passage. As the historian Timothy Tackett has observed, if the suspicions of local citizens had not been aroused by the sudden influx of German-speaking soldiers, Bouillé’s order for eighteen thousand rations of bread must surely have signaled that something was afoot. Yet Bouillé reported that, “happily,” all of his arrangements generated “no suspicion among the people of the surrounding towns and countryside.”