The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  As the King’s intendants abandoned their offices and central authority collapsed, provincial towns established their own committees which agreed to respect the decrees of the National Assembly only when they coincided with the wishes of the local population. Attempts were made to put down the disturbances by raising companies of militia, but as most of those enrolled were in sympathy with the demonstrators, the disorders continued with angry crowds marching upon town halls crying for bread at prices they could afford, surrounding the homes of rich merchants and rentiers and, in some cases, pillaging them.

  In the capital a deputy lamented that there was ‘no more army and no more police’, and Bailly admitted that ‘everybody knew how to command but nobody knew how to obey’. The lieutenant de maire of Saint Denis on the northern outskirts of Paris was chased through the streets by an angry crowd for contemptuously refusing to reduce the price of bread. Chased to the top of the church steeple, he was stabbed to death and decapitated. One of the Ministers in Breteuil’s reactionary government, Foullon de Doué, who was believed to have been speculating in the grain trade and plotting a counter-revolution, met an even more horrible fate. Accused of having said that the people should be made to eat hay if they were hungry, a collar of nettles was placed around his neck, a bunch of thistles was thrust into his hand and a fistful of hay was stuffed between his lips. He was then hanged on a nearby lampost. His son-in-law, Bertier de Sauvigny, the Intendant of Paris and the Île de France, was accused of similar abuses and murdered as well. His heart was torn out of his body and brandished at the windows of the Hôtel de Ville. Then his head was cut off and paraded with that of his father-in-law on a pikestaff through the streets and down the arcades of the Palais Royal, the one head being pushed against the other to cries of ‘Kiss papa! Kiss papa!’ Here Gouverneur Morris saw the ‘populace carrying about the mangled fragments with a savage joy’. ‘Gracious God,’ Morris thought. “What a people!’

  There were strong protests against these murders, but they had their apologists, too. ‘Is this blood then so pure,’ asked Barnave defiantly in the National Assembly, ‘that one should so regret to spill it.’ Others cried that more heads would have to roll before justice for the people could be secured.

  While the debates in the Assembly continued urgently but inconclusively, the wildest rumours, intensified by newspaper reports, were passed from mouth to mouth: the aristocrats were conspiring to suppress the National Assembly; the Queen had inspired a plot to blow it up; huge armies of hired brigands were on the march; foreign powers were preparing to invade the country to restore the King’s lost power; nobles were emigrating to enlist the help of mercenaries; the British fleet had been sighted off Brest; Polish troops had landed at Dunkirk; Spaniards were about to disembark at Bordeaux; Austrian soldiers had been seen on the march at Lyons.

  Stories such as these, spreading through the country districts, led to waves of panic which were to become known as the Great Fear. As castles, manor houses, abbeys and tax and salt monopoly offices were invaded and sometimes set on fire, villagers fled in terror from their houses at reports of assassins paid to wreak revenge, and sought refuge in forests and church belfries. Fear led to further violence. Protesting that they were acting in the name of the King against aristocrats who were conspiring to thwart his wishes, the peasants grew ever more violent in their demonstrations against manorial dues, disregarding all authority. ‘There no longer exists either executive power, laws, magistrates or police,’ the Venetian Ambassador reported. ‘A horrible anarchy prevails.’

  To the National Assembly the problem of restoring order seemed insuperable until the delegates from Brittany hit upon a clever tactical move by which certain of the liberal nobles were to offer to renounce some of those feudal privileges against which the peasants were so violently protesting. It was hoped that other nobles would then be persuaded to follow their example in a rising flood of emotional renunciations. These renunciations were to be provoked by the Duc d’Aiguillon, the greatest landowner in France, who was believed to have an annual income of 100,000 livres from his feudal rights alone. The debate was planned for the evening of Tuesday, 4 August.

  It almost failed in its purpose: the Vicomte de Noailles, a young man who had fought in America with his brother-in-law, Lafayette, and who evidently had a mind to steal the thunder of those who were in the Breton plot, leapt to his feet before the Duc d’Aiguillon. His proposals for a programme of aristocratic self-denial were naturally not too well received, coming as they did from one who did not personally have much to lose. After the Duc d’Aiguillon’s speech, however, the mood the Bretons had been hoping for was created. One after the other, noblemen and prelates alike, stood up voluntarily to renounce rights and privileges in an atmosphere that became almost hysterical. Spurred on by the excited self-immolation of the earlier renunciants, spokesmen for parlements and privileged towns jumped up to offer further sacrifices in a stream of oblation so rapid that the Assembly’s clerks could not keep up with it and the Marquis de Lally-Tollendal, by now an exasperated conservative, passed a message to the President: ‘Suspend the session. They have all gone quite mad.’

  But the session, which Mirabeau and Sieyés had both declined to attend, continued enthusiastically apace in what one witness described as ‘a contagion of sentimental feeling’ until two o’clock in the morning, deputies weeping and embracing one another, cheering each other’s selflessness or giving away, so one observer caustically commented, that which they did not own. ‘What a nation! What glory!’ declared Duquesnoy, a deputy from Bar-le-Duc, ‘What an honour to be French!’

  With daylight however, came doubt and apprehension. There was talk of having to consult constituents for the endorsement of what one noble deputy termed the ‘annihilation of a whole property system’. There was a feeling that perhaps Mirabeau was right when he complained that it was just like Frenchmen to spend weeks squabbling over syllables and then within a single night to ‘overthrow the entire traditional order of the monarchy’. So, although the Assembly’s decree proudly announced that it had destroyed ‘in its entirety the feudal system’, the debates of the next few days severely modified the sacrifices which had been promised and ensured that, while ecclesiastical tithes were abolished, the most burdensome of the feudal dues were made subject to redemption, and, until they were redeemed, the peasants were bound by them, as they had been before.

  Nor were the peasants much comforted by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen which, affirming that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights’, was adopted by the National Assembly later on that month. For, encouraged by disagreements within the Assembly, the King withheld his consent both to the Declaration and to the ratification of the decrees in which the sacrifices of the privileged orders had been formulated and published. ‘I will never consent to the spoliation of my clergy or my nobility,’ he assured the Archbishop of Arles. ‘And I will not sanction decrees which seek to despoil them.’ So, faced by the passive resistance of the King, the ‘patriots’ decided that force would have to be used again. The Revolution required another dramatic journée.

  The form that the journée was to take was indicated in a conversation between Dussaulx, a member of the Paris Commune, and Augeard, an official of the Queen’s Household, as they walked past the Tuileries one day.

  ‘When the King is living there,’ Dussaulx said pointing at the old, neglected palace, ‘this business can be settled. It was a great mistake not to keep him in Paris when he came here on 17 July. The King’s place of residence should be in the capital.’

  Augeard objected that the King could not be told where he must live. But Dussaulx maintained, ‘He can be forced when the good of the country is at stake. We will have to come to that.’

  On 29 September the Flanders Regiment arrived at Versailles. It was customary, when a new regiment came into garrison there, for a banquet to be given in its honour by the Gardes du Corps. The King saw no reason to interfere with
this tradition. So the usual banquet was held on I October in the Opera House where the boxes were filled with spectators from the Court. It turned out to be just the provocation for which the ‘patriots’ and the newspapers that supported them were waiting: several of the guests got drunk; there were rowdy demonstrations of loyalty to the throne; insults were showered upon the National Assembly; soldiers tore off their red and blue cockades. At the appearance of the King and Queen, who walked around the table, the band struck up one of Grétry’s popular royalist airs, while the ladies of the Court, who had for several weeks been provocatively wearing lilies pinned to their dresses, distributed cockades of pure white in honour of the Bourbon dynasty.

  In Paris, where the bread queues had been growing ever longer, accounts of this ‘orgy’, suitably embellished with reports that the national cockade had been trampled disdainfully underfoot, were soon spread far and wide. Camille Desmoulins renewed the call for the King to be brought to Paris away from the corrupting influence of the Court. Other popular orators leaped upon the tables shouting for a march upon Versailles, many of them combining that call with demands for a reduction in the price of bread.

  Bread was the people’s staple diet. Most workers, who consumed about three pounds a day, spent half their wages on it, as opposed to about fifteen per cent on vegetables, oil and wine, five per cent on fuel and one per cent on lighting. Skilled workers such as locksmiths and carpenters earned about fifty sous a day in 1789, masons about forty, labourers no more than twenty to thirty, so when the price of bread, normally about eight sous for a four-pound loaf rose above ten or twelve sous they had to face the prospect of hunger, and disturbances became commonplace. In August that year the price of bread was not unduly high at twelve sous for a large loaf, but a prolonged drought had resulted in millers being unable to grind corn, so there was an acute shortage and a consequent increase in outbreaks of violence: fighting erupted in bread queues where women were pushed aside by men, bakers were threatened with hanging and guards had to be posted in their shops. At Versailles a furious crowd attempted to murder a baker who started to sell bread at eighteen sous to those who could afford it, and stale loaves at a rather less exorbitant price to those who could not. In several other places women seized cartloads of grain, and on the morning of 5 October huge crowds of women gathered in the central markets and in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine shouting for bread, forcing the bell-ringer of the Sainte-Marguerite church to ring the tocsin and calling upon the citizens to take up arms to force the Government to help them. They were mostly poissardes, fishwives, working women, prostitutes and market stall-holders, but among them were several quite smartly dressed bourgeoises who appeared as angry as the rest. Together they marched towards the Place de Grève.

  They arrived there at about half-past nine and stormed up the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. The guards were disarmed and their weapons handed to men who had now joined the demonstration and were encouraging the women in their demands. As some of them burst through the door leading to the bell tower to sound the tocsin, others invaded the main building, searching for arms and powder, tearing up documents and ledgers for good measure. Persuaded that their best hope was to petition the King, they then set off for Versailles under the not entirely willing leadership of that self-proclaimed hero of the taking of the Bastille, Stanislas Maillard, who evidently considered it undignified to command such motley female troops.

  Further recruits were collected on the way, not all of them willing ones. A nurse, Jeanne Martin, the wife of a porter, claimed afterwards that she was forced to march by a group of about forty women who thrust a stick in her hand, threatening to beat her with it unless she accompanied them. She protested that she had not yet had any breakfast and had not a sou with her; but they shouted, ‘Come on, march, march! You won’t need anything.’ Another woman, Marie-Catherine-Victoire Sacleux, proprietor of a cleaning and dyeing shop which she had closed for the day ‘because of the public clamour’, made the excuse that she was urgently wanted at home and that, in any case, she was wearing the wrong kind of shoes, but she, too, was forced to go with the others and made to help drag along a cannon which had been brought from the Place de Grève.

  Compelling or inviting numerous others to accompany them, the women who had invaded the Hôtel de Ville had soon mustered a force over 6,000 strong. Among them were several men-some of hem dressed as women–agents provocateurs in the pay of the Duc d’Orléans as well as other agitators intent upon ensuring that their female companions did not just demand bread but the acceptance of the Assembly’s decrees, the King’s return to Paris and the punishment of all who had insulted the national cockade. Tramping through the rain, some with muskets, others with pikes and swords, bludgeons, crowbars, pitchforks and scythes, they passed through Sèvres where they pillaged the shops, and at five o’clock in the afternoon were in sight of Versailles.

  The King had been out hunting again. On his return he went immediately to a council of Ministers most of whom, with the notable exception of Necker, advised flight, though they did not know yet just what the women wanted. Louis was, as usual, hesitant. ‘A fugitive King,’ he murmured doubtfully, repeating the words several times. Eventually he adjourned the Council and went to consult the Queen who had spent the early afternoon in the gardens of the Trianon, which she was never to see again. She too urged him to escape while there was still time, but he could not bring himself to do so. And when, at half past five, the women stormed through the doors of the National Assembly, the King was still at Versailles. Two hours later the hall of the Assembly ‘remained full of women and men armed with scythes, sticks and pikes’, so Étienne Dumont, a friend of Mirabeau, reported. ‘The President was wasting his strength trying to keep order…Mirabeau raised his powerful voice and called for the withdrawal from the Chamber of all strangers. It needed all his popularity to achieve this. Gradually the crowd withdrew’. About ‘a hundred women and a number of young people’ remained in the gallery, however, and these shouted or kept silence at the orders of a ‘harridan who addressed the deputies with coarse familiarity: “Who’s that talking down there? Make the chatterbox shut up. That’s not the point. The point is, we want bread. Tell them to put our little mother Mirabeau up to speak. We want to hear him.” Then everyone shouted for “our little mother Mirabeau” (a form of affectionate expression employed by people of this class). But Mirabeau was not the man to waste his energy on occasions such as this. His popularity as he said himself, was not that of a demagogue.’

  The president, Jean Joseph Mounier, had gone to consult the King leaving his chair to the Bishop of Langres who was quite incapable of controlling the rabble. ‘Order! Order!’ the bishop called as the women clambered on to the platform. ‘We don’t give a fuck for order,’ they shouted back at him. ‘We want bread.’ Several of them pushed their faces at him, demanding to be kissed. He obliged them with a sigh. Others threatened to play boule with the head of ‘that damned Abbé Maury’. A few, who had gone into assommoirs were now quite drunk, some of them vomiting over the benches. One of the prettiest sat down on the knee of her ‘little mother Mirabeau’ who seemed very happy to hold her.

  Eventually the King agreed to see a deputation of women in the Salle de Conseil if Mounier would take them there.

  M. Mounier appeared with twenty of these women at the palace gates all of which were closed and guarded [recorded the Marquis de Paroy in a letter to his wife]. I found myself by chance inside one of the gates and, recognizing the President of the Assembly, who was being crushed by the crowd, I told the officer of the guard who he was. M. Mounier told the officer the object of his mission. They let him in with six women, and I accompanied them to the King’s apartment where they were introduced. I noticed that two of them were quite well dressed and not at all of the class of person to which the others belonged, though they affected their language. They had come, they said, to ask for bread from the King.

  The King walked into the room, looking rather nervous, t
o ask the women what they wanted. ‘Sire,’ replied one, a pretty girl who sold flowers at the Palais Royal, ‘we want bread.’

  ‘You know my heart,’ the King told her. ‘I will order all the bread in Versailles to be collected and given to you.’ At these words the girl fainted. Revived by smelling salts, she asked to be allowed to kiss the King’s hands. ‘She deserves better than that,’ His Majesty said and took her into his arms. Thrilled by their generous reception, the women whom Mounier had chosen as representatives came out again into the courtyard to find that the others who had marched with them were far from disposed to share their pleasure at the King’s generosity. The deputation had been duped, they were told; even if the King meant what he said, the Queen and the aristocrats at Court would soon see that he broke his promise. A few women began to chant again, as they had done on the march, ‘Bread! Bread! Meat at six sous the pound! No more talking…We’ll cut the Queen’s pretty throat! We’ll tear her skin to bits for ribbons!’ The six representatives were forced to go back and obtain a written declaration. Pacified by this, some of the women then returned to Paris with Stanislas Maillard.