The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  By the end of the month it had at least been decided that a concerted effort must be made by the Commons to persuade the parish priests among the clergy to come to join them. There were good grounds for hope that many of these priests would respond with enthusiasm. It was certainly well known that they were quite out of sympathy with the more conservative of the prelates and that there had been bitter exchanges during debates in the clergy’s hall. An abbé who had spoken slightingly of the Third Estate had been roughly told by a priest to hold his tongue; another priest had forcefully reminded the bishops, ‘In this place, my lords, we are all equal’; a third told the reactionary Abbé Maury, ‘The village priests may not have the talents of Academicians but they have at least the sound common sense of villagers!’

  Encouraged by these disputes among the clergy, a large delegation from the Third Estate, led by the enormously fat Gui Jean Baptiste Target, a deputy from Dauphiné, proceeded to the hall where the clergy were assembled. ‘The gentlemen of the Commons,’ announced Target, ‘invite the gentlemen of the clergy, in the name of the God of Peace and for the national interest, to meet them in their hall to consult upon the means of bringing about the concord which is so vital at this moment for the public welfare.’ A number of the clergy greeted these words with cheers and would have accepted the invitation immediately had not the more conservative amongst them insisted on discussing it first. The deputation thereupon returned to the Commons who decided to remain in session until the clergy’s answer arrived. Hours passed and the answer did not come. The invitation was repeated; the clergy replied that they needed further time to consider it; the Commons said they were prepared to wait all day and all night if necessary.

  Alarmed by the overtures being made to the priests and by the growing unrest in Paris and Versailles which was exacerbated by food shortages, the bishops turned to the King and asked him to intervene. Consequently, on 4 June, Necker proposed that each order should examine the credentials of its own members but allow the others to raise objections when the results were announced. If no decision could be reached, the King was to act as arbitrator.

  On the day that this proposal was announced, however, the Dauphin died at the age of eight. Overwhelmed with grief the King shut himself up in his rooms at Versailles then withdrew for a week to Marly. While he was away, the Parisian deputies, whose elections had been delayed, began to settle themselves into the rooms reserved for them at Versailles and to harden the Commons’ determination ‘to appear formidable in the eyes of their enemies’. Among the Parisian deputies was the Abbé Sieyès who proposed that the clergy and nobility should now be asked to join the Commons, that those who did not should be considered to have forfeited their rights as representatives – in other words, that the Third Estate should constitute itself the representative body of the nation as a whole without the King’s consent.

  A roll on which the names of clergy and nobles willing to join the Commons was accordingly opened on 12 June. Over the next few days not a single noble put down his name; as an order they merely promised to consider the Third Estate’s request ‘with their most studied attention’. But on 13 June three curés from Poitou appeared at the entrance to the Commons’ hall. They agreed, they said, to having their names put down on the roll. Their words were greeted with an outburst of clapping and cheering as deputies rushed towards them, embracing them with tears in their eyes. The next day another six priests, and two days later a further ten, followed their example.

  Encouraged by this break in the privileged orders’ ranks, Sieyès now proposed that, as the Third Estate represented ninety-six per cent of the nation, they should immediately start the work the country was waiting to see performed. As a first step the name of Estates General should be officially abandoned and the Third should confer upon itself a title that implied its unique authority.

  The debate that ensued was stormy, and at the centre of the storm was a vehemently gesticulating figure with bloodshot eyes and a massive neck, the Comte de Mirabeau.

  Honoré Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau was then forty years old. His great-grandfather, whose ancestors had been rich merchants of Marseilles, had been created a marquis after acting as a suitably indulgent host to King Louis XIV; his outspoken grandfather had been so badly wounded at Cassano in 1705 that, obliged thereafter to wear an arm in a sling and his head supported by a silver stock, he was wont to say that it was a battle in which he had lost his life; his father had also served as a soldier for a time, but had resigned his commission early to become a farmer and the author of various radical books, which brought upon him the disfavour of the Government who required him to remain upon his farm to the south of Fontainebleau.

  Honoré, his eldest surviving son, was born here in 1749 with two teeth in his mouth and an inexhaustible energy which was to be the despair of his family and household. At the age of three he contracted smallpox which left his face deeply pitted for life and thus increased his ugliness and contributed to the dislike his difficult father felt for him. After attending a military school in Paris he received a commission in the cavalry regiment which his grandfather had once commanded, but, like his father, he did not remain in the army long. Unattractive as his appearance was, his vivacity, charm, adventurous high spirits and entertaining conversation made him attractive to women for whom he himself had a voracious sexual appetite, making love to anyone who would have him and committing incest, so it was said, with his sister. A young lady to whom his colonel was attached fell in love with him and this led to a scandal which ended with his being imprisoned on the Île of Ré. In the hope that he might settle down and restore the family fortunes, he was, upon his release, married to the plain and extremely rich daughter of the Marquis de Marignane from whom he soon parted and, deep in debt, was incarcerated in prison once again. Removed from the Château d’If to a less rigorous confinement near Pontarlier, he made use of his relative freedom to visit the town where he was introduced into the house of a local nobleman whose pretty if rather vapid and ill-educated wife, Marie-Thérèse de Monnier, or Sophie, as he called her, fell helplessly in love with him. He fled to Switzerland where Sophie joined him; from Switzerland they travelled together to Holland where he made a precarious living by journalism and where he heard that he had been sentenced to death for rapt et vol at Pontarlier and beheaded in effigy; and from Holland he was brought back to France by the police and imprisoned yet again at Vincennes.

  At Vincennes he occupied his time in writing passionate letters to Sophie and the obscene Erotica biblion as well as political works of a less self-indulgent nature, including his celebrated attack on prison abuses, Lettres de cachet, which was published after his release from Vincennes in 1782 and translated into English in 1787. This treatise, which led to the closure of the prison of Vincennes, added some lustre to his literary reputation, but he was otherwise regarded with as widespread misgiving as ever. He grew tired of Sophie, who consoled herself with a young army officer and then committed suicide, while he began an affair with Madame de Nehra, the daughter of a Dutch statesman, whom he was to desert in turn for Madame Lejay. At the same time he became involved in no less than three scandalous law suits, after which he had to leave France again, first for Holland, then for England.

  ‘He had a tall, square, heavy figure,’ wrote someone who met him at a dinner party at about this time. ‘The abnormally large size of his head [in which the eyes were unnaturally protuberant] was exaggerated by a mass of curled and powdered hair. He wore evening dress with enormous buttons of coloured stone, and the buttons of his shoes were equally large. His whole costume was remarkable for an extravagant fashionableness which went well beyond the bounds of good taste…He had a reserved expression, but his eyes were full of fire. Trying to be polite, he bowed too low, and his first words were pretentious and rather vulgar compliments.’

  ‘His vanity was certainly excessive,’ added another observer, the fastidious and percipient law reformer, Sir Samuel Romilly, who translated one of
Mirabeau’s political theses into English, ‘and, like many of his countrymen who were active in the calamitous Revolution which afterwards took place, not sufficiently scrupulous about the means by which [the reform of society] was to be accomplished.’ Yet, for all his manifest faults, Mirabeau, ‘in his public conduct as well as in his writings, was desirous of doing good…His ambition was of the noblest kind and he proposed to himself the noblest ends.’

  Certainly, if he was rude and provocative, argumentative, overbearing and vain, immoral and unscrupulous both with regard to women and to money, Mirabeau was une force de la nature who could not be disregarded. ‘I am a mad dog,’ he said himself, ‘from whose bites despotism and privilege will die.’ Charming when he chose to be, a gifted conversationalist, possessed of a rare gift for mastering complex issues, and combining a powerful intelligence with a deep knowledge of the ways of the world, Mirabeau was bound to be one of the most dominant figures in the Third Estate to which, having been rejected by his own order, he was elected as deputy for Aix. He was also one of the most distrusted. The Comtesse de La Tour du Pin described in her memoirs the effect he had upon the other deputies when he first appeared amongst them:

  He entered the Chamber alone and took his place near the middle of the rows of backless benches which stretched one behind the other. There arose a very low but widespread murmur – a susurro–and the deputies already seated in front of him moved one bench forward, while those behind him moved back a little. He thus remained isolated in the middle of a very obvious space. Smiling contemptuously, he sat down.

  During the debate on the Third Estate’s new title he aroused further distrust by his apparent desire to stem the tide of feeling that was pushing the Commons towards appropriation of complete sovereignty to itself. He proposed that the Third Estate should rename themselves ‘Representatives of the French People’, and was immediately asked whether he would have translated ‘people’ as populus, meaning the whole nation including the privileged orders, or – what was, in fact, his intention – as plebs, meaning the Commons alone. Made aware of the ambiguity in Mirabeau’s title, the Third Estate then turned to the consideration of other names, and tempers rose as some deputies made suggestions that others considered inappropriate or misleading. Voices grew higher and more angry, while outside the hall a summer storm raged, the wind howling at the windows. Bailly was urged to bring the session to a close, but he remained in his place, cool and imperturbable, until the tempest subsided and the most violent of the protesters left the hall. He then proposed that the rest of the deputies should also withdraw to meet again in calmer mood the following morning.

  It was in such an atmosphere of confusion and uproar that so many of the debates were conducted. Often a hundred or so deputies were on their feet at the same time; and usually there was an impatient throng of them pushing against each other by the iron steps that led up to the rostrum. According to Arthur Young, who occasionally joined the noisy spectators in the public galleries, ‘Monsieur Bailly was absolutely without power to keep order’. There were still no rules of procedure and when it was suggested that lessons might be learned from the House of Commons in London, the proposal was rejected contemptuously as yet another example of that intolerable anglomania which the Comtesse de La Tour du Pin said had become so extreme at Court that people took to affecting English accents. So the debates remained uncontrolled: tedious speeches, prepared beforehand, were read out at length irrespective of whether or not they were relevant to the issues in dispute, petitioners arrived at the doors insisting that their grievances be immediately considered and from the galleries there came an almost continuous roar of approval or disapprobation and the occasional piece of rotten fruit.

  When the debate on the Commons’ new title was resumed on 17 June, however, the atmosphere in the hall was less uproarious than usual. And when a deputy from Berry, prompted it seems by Sieyès, proposed the simple and explicit name ‘National Assembly’, it was approved by 491 votes to 89. On learning that this title had been assumed by the Third Estate, those of the clergy who wished to join them pressed harder than ever for union. A vote was taken on the issue, and as the result was announced, a priest threw open one of the windows of the hall and shouted to the crowds waiting expectantly outside, ‘Won! Won!’ Soon the bishops and the priests who had voted in favour of the motion came out of the hall to be surrounded by a wildly cheering throng who bore them away triumphantly, many of them in tears, shouting, ‘Long live the good bishops! Long live the priests!’

  The next day, when the members of the self-styled National Assembly met to continue their deliberations, they found the door of their hall locked against them. Pressed by the Queen and by his family to make a stand against the revolutionary behaviour of the Third Estate, the King had decided to hold a meeting of all three orders, a séance royale, presided over by himself, and to announce that the actions of the Commons were illegal. In the meantime they and the clergy must be prevented from meeting.

  But, undeterred by the locked doors of their hall, and at the suggestion of Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin, one of the Paris deputies, most of the members of the National Assembly hurried off to an indoor tennis-court nearby. It was a large building with bare walls and a blue ceiling picked out with golden fleurs-de-lis. There were no seats other than a bench which was used as a desk, and an armchair which was offered to Bailly who refused it. Outside a huge crowd of people, who had followed the deputies from their locked hall, shouted ‘Vive l’Assemblée!’ by way of encouragement. Some of them demanded admittance, but two deputies were posted at the door to prevent them. The Commons’ deliberations, they were told, must be continued without interruption or distraction. Soon the tennis-court keeper arrived to take over the duties of doorkeeper, and the two deputies returned inside the building. Here Jean-Joseph Mounier, a handsome young barrister from Grenoble whose weak voice had obliged him to give up his practice, silenced talk of withdrawing to Paris to seek the protection of the people by declaring that they must all take an oath ‘never to separate’ until an acceptable constitution was established ‘on solid foundations’. With only a single exception the delegates came forward, their arms raised in dramatic salute, to take the oath before the tall figure of Jean-Sylvain Bailly who stood on a table made from a door wrenched off its hinges. They then took it in turns to sign a document on which the words of the oath had been inscribed. The one dissentient deputy, Martin d’Auch, insisted on signing his name with the word ‘opposant’ next to it. Cries of protest were raised against him, and Bailly tried to persuade him that, while he was perfectly entitled to refuse to sign the declaration, he could not register his opposition to it. But d’Auch refused to give way and was eventually allowed to register his dissent ‘out of respect for the liberty which all members of the Assembly enjoyed’.

  The Court was now thoroughly alarmed, and the King, for the moment rejecting the idea of forceful coercion though still convinced that the acts of the Third Estate must be declared null and void, was ready to make some concessions at the séance royale. But this meeting, announced for 22 June, had to be postponed to allow time for the removal of the public galleries in which demonstrations by unruly spectators might have taken place. The Third Estate were able to take advantage of the delay by welcoming the majority of the clergy into their new meeting-place, the Church of Saint Louis, whose doors had been opened for them by the parish priest when the Comte d’Artois thought he would deny them a place of meeting by booking the tennis-court for a game. Two nobles from Dauphiné also joined them and were greeted with enthusiastic applause. These were soon followed by a group of nobles from Guyenne.

  Three days after the oaths had been taken in the tennis-court, on 23 June, the Commons walked down the Rue des Chantiers for the séance royale. They found the door of the hall locked against them. Bailly knocked for a long time in vain. At length it was opened. He was told that they had arrived too early, and the door was shut again in his face. It was now pouring with ra
in and the deputies were about to go away when Bailly knocked yet again. At last they were admitted and hurried into the hall. One of them, who had noticed the ranks of soldiers on guard duty outside, recalled how oppressive was the atmosphere, how bedraggled and dispirited his colleagues looked.

  The King arrived to a fanfare of trumpets and the rolling of drums, escorted by cavalry and a company of Household Guards. He ‘affected to smile,’ wrote one observer, ‘but it was with an ill grace. The ironical gaiety of the Comte d’Artois seemed much more natural. He had the air of one riding in triumph and leading the King bound as his captive.’ The King was welcomed with cheers by the people outside the hall and by most of the nobility and clergy as he entered it. The Commons, though, were silent.

  Barentin stood up, after a short introductory speech by the King, to define the rules by which the three orders’ future sessions should be governed. Then the concessions which the monarchy was prepared to make were enumerated: there were to be various fiscal reforms; consideration was to be given to the abolition of the hated lettres de cachet–letters signed by the King, countersigned by a minister and stamped with the royal seal, by which men could be subjected to imprisonment without trial or the opportunity of defence; steps were to be taken towards the establishment of a free press; there were to be no taxes ‘without the consent of the nation’s representatives’. Yet, despite this apparent abandonment of Bourbon absolutism, there were so many reservations in the royal declaration that it was clear that the ancien règime was not to be dismantled. And, as though to emphasize this, the wording of the King’s speech had been more threatening than conciliatory. Still grieving for the loss of his son, he ‘had appeared sad and gloomy’, and had sounded flat and unconvincing, yet he made it clear all the same that the separateness of the orders and the existing social hierarchy were to be maintained, that any reforms which were to come would be granted by himself and not won by demand. ‘If you abandon me in this great enterprise,’ he concluded, ‘then I will work alone for the welfare of my peoples – I will consider myself alone their true representative…None of your plans or proceedings can become law without my express approval…I command you to disperse at once and to proceed tomorrow morning to the separate rooms set aside for your orders so that you may resume your deliberations.’