The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  As the divisions deepened, the laity, too, took sides, friends and families quarrelling bitterly, peasants in many areas enthusiastically supporting the priests who refused the oath, condemning those who had taken it, and thereby giving popular support to the forces of counter-revolution. The Assembly endeavoured to pacify the unrest by giving pensions to priests opposed to the Civil Constitution and by allowing them to continue in their parishes until they were replaced. But the breach was not healed and remained a source of angry dispute until Napoleon’s Concordat with the Papacy in 1801.

  Before the Civil Constitution of the Clergy caused such upheaval in France, attempts to raise the provinces against the Assembly in Paris had met with little success as Mounier and Lally-Tollendal had discovered. In some areas enthusiasm for the Revolution was not marked and there were occasional outbreaks of violence against it; but most people welcomed it, and in many districts towns and villages had come together in fraternal friendship, forming themselves into fédérations in commemoration and celebration of the country’s rebirth. In February 1790, in one typical, moving ceremony at Pontivy, delegates from Anjou and Brittany joined hands to swear that they were ‘neither Angevins nor Bretons, but citizens of one and the same community’. On the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille thousands of National Guardsmen and soldiers from all over France converged upon Paris for a splendid Fête de la Fédération. The celebrations centred upon the Champ de Mars, a large open space between the École Militaire and the Seine. It had been planned to dig out the earth from the centre and to pile it up around the sides to create a vast amphitheatre capable of containing tens of thousands of spectators. But, although twelve thousand workmen were employed on this ambitious undertaking, it was realized as the day of the festival approached that it would never be ready in time. So, ‘in an instant the whole population was transformed into labourers’. Priests and prostitutes, watchmakers and watermen, sempstresses, shopkeepers and soldiers, men and women of every age and class, marched to the site to the sound of drums and under banners of different colours emblazoned with patriotic emblems. Lafayette came to lend a hand. So did several ladies who, fainting after their unaccustomed exertions, were cheerfully pushed away in wheelbarrows by sturdy fishwives.

  Rich people, poor people, well-dressed people, people in rags, old men, boys, comedians, clerks, actors, scholars, nuns, Carthusians grown old in solitude…exhibited to the astonished eye a scene full of life and bustle [recorded the Marquis de Ferrières]. There were songs and shouts of joy, the sound of drums and military instruments, the voices of labourers calling to each other…As the clock struck nine the groups separated, each citizen returned to his family and friends. They all marched off to the sound of drums, preceded by torches, singing from time to time the famous Ça ira [which had become a kind of theme song of the Revolution]…Meanwhile the fédérés were arriving from every part of the country. They were lodged in private houses where they were happily supplied with beds and sheets, wood and food, everything, in fact, that would help to make their stay in Paris agreeable.

  At length the great day came…The fédérés set out from the site of the Bastille under the eighty-three banners of the departments of France…They were greeted on their way with the acclamations of an immense concourse of people who filled the streets, the quays and the windows of the houses on either side. A heavy rain was falling but it neither upset nor slackened the march. Dripping with sweat and rain, the fédérés danced farandoles, shouting ‘Long live our brothers, the Parisians!’ Wine, ham, fruit, sausages were let down from the windows for them, and they were loaded with blessings. The National Assembly joined the procession at the Place Louis XV…The rain continued to fall. No one seemed to notice it…M. de Lafayette, mounted on a superb horse, and surrounded by his aides-de-camp, gave orders and received the homage of the people and the fédérés…A man whom nobody knew, pushed through the crowd and advanced, holding a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other. ‘General,’ he said. ‘You are hot. Have a glass.’ Raising his bottle he filled a large glass and handed it to M. de Lafayette. The General took the glass, eyed the stranger for a moment and drank off the wine at a draught. The people applauded while M. de Lafayette, with a complacent smile, cast a benevolent and confiding look upon them…

  Meanwhile more than three hundred thousand people, assembled since six in the morning, were sitting on turf seats in the Champ de Mars, drenched, bedraggled, sheltering under umbrellas; then, when the rain stopped, they adjusted their dresses as they waited, laughing and chatting, for the fédérés and the National Assembly to arrive.

  At last the procession entered the Champ de Mars. The deputies took up their positions and the fédérés assembled under their respective banners while Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, the Bishop of Autun, attended by 300 priests in white surplices with tricolour scarves, prepared to say Mass at an altar in the middle of the amphitheatre. After Mass, the Bishop blessed the oriflamme and the eighty-three banners of the fédérés; then he led the singing of the Te Deum to the accompaniment of an orchestra of 1,200 musicians.

  The staff of the Parisian National Guard, with Lafayette at their head, followed by representatives of the army, the navy and the fédérés, marched up to the altar to swear to be faithful to the nation, the law and the King. Cannon thundered, banners were waved, sabres glistened and the hundreds of musicians played their instruments more loudly than ever as the President of the National Assembly repeated the same oath and the deputies and spectators, answered with shouts of ‘I swear it!’

  The King then stood up and declared in the sudden silence, ‘I, King of the French, swear to employ the power delegated to me in maintaining the constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by me.’ The Queen then, too, stood up; and, lifting the Dauphin in her arms, said, ‘Here is my son! He and I both join in those sentiments.’

  Vociferous cheers greeted these remarks. Thousands of voices shouted, ‘Vive le Roi! Vive la Reine! Vive M. le Dauphin!’ The rain had stopped; the sun had come out.

  The festivities continued the next day and the day after that. There were celebrations and parades in the Champ de Mars; there were reviews of the army and the National Guard; there were firework displays and banquets. A ball was held in the Halle au Blé, another on the site of the Bastille. Crowds of fédérés converged upon the Palais Royal, many of them equipped with a useful pamphlet entitled Lists of Emoluments for the ladies of the Palais Royal, and for the other regions of Paris, comprising names and addresses, which an enterprising publisher had brought out to help simple young men from the provinces in their dealings with such women as Madame Duperon and her four lady friends at 33, Palais Royal, who charged twenty-five livres, or with the less exotic Victorine who charged only six. In the Champs Elysées, beneath trees festooned with coloured lights, crowds of young people danced and sang, while sailors clambered up the masts greased with soap in attempts to win the prizes offered to those who could bring down the tricolour flags flying from their summits. ‘You should have heard the bursts of laughter which greeted those who were forced to relinquish the attempt, and the encouragement given to those who, more lucky or more adroit, appeared likely to reach the top,’ wrote one observer of this ‘charming and brilliant festival’. ‘A sentimental joy was diffused over every face and beamed in every eye. It reminded me of the happy pleasures of the Elysian fields of the ancients. The white dresses of the crowds of women strolling under the trees in those beautiful alleys served to heighten the illusion.’

  The preparations for the festival and the festival itself had, indeed, provided a convincing display of national unity and given grounds for hope that the bitterness of the past would soon be forgotten.

  In the spring and summer of 1791, however, this national unity was undermined by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. People came out into the streets in support of recalcitrant priests wearing royalist cockades, there were riots in several towns and violent disturbances in
many villages from which curés who refused to take the oath were evicted.

  The King had signed the Civil Constitution, on the advice of a majority of his Ministers, with evident reluctance. Soon afterwards he received a long-delayed letter from the Pope expressly declaring that if he lent his approval to it he would be leading his nation into schism. This was followed by another letter suspending all priests who accepted the Civil Constitution and firmly condemning the election of clergy by the people. The King thereupon replaced his confessor who had taken the oath by one who had not, and consulted a distinguished theologian, the Bishop of Clermont, as to whether he could now take communion from his parish priest who had also taken the forbidden oath.

  Up till now the Paris which the King overlooked from his first-floor windows above the Seine had remained quite calm. The upheavals of the summer of 1789 had not been repeated. While outbreaks of violence and sporadic riots were troubling several provinces – particularly in the south where many regiments were so close to mutiny that Mirabeau thought it would be a good idea to disband the whole army and ‘enlist another on revolutionary principles’–the life of the capital had continued largely undisturbed. The cafés were crowded, the theatres played to full houses, the salons were as well attended as ever and rich aristocrats continued to walk the streets and patronize the fashionable shops. ‘We have had several delightful tea parties the last few days,’ one of these aristocrats wrote. ‘We are all amusing ourselves.’ To some the Revolution had become a kind of joke. Women wore Constitution jewellery and Liberty caps decorated with ribbons the colour of that vivid red known as Foullon’s blood; men took pinches of snuff from boxes elegantly enamelled with the tricolour. ‘Feudal’ became a popular word of playful denigration to be used of coffee-grinders that failed to work or watches that refused to keep time. There was a strange light-heartedness in the air. When Madame de Simiane was hit by an apple thrown from the upper gallery of the Théâtre Français, she sent it to her brother-in-law, Lafayette, with the comment, ‘Here, my dear General, is the first fruit of the Revolution that has so far come into my hands.’

  In this atmosphere the King had begun to suppose that he might yet recover his lost authority. At the beginning of 1790 he had made a speech to the Assembly in which he had promised to educate his son in the new principles of constitutional monarchy, of freedom with justice, and had associated himself with those plans which the Assembly were carrying out ‘for the benefit of France’. He had been loudly cheered and escorted back to the Tuileries as a hero. More recently, and more than once, he had been vociferously cheered again as he had been during the celebrations of the Fête de la Fédération. ‘I am still King of the French,’ he said with some satisfaction.

  When he had first arrived at the Tuileries he had seemed listless and despairing. Although it was not suggested to him that he must forego the pleasure of hunting, he had sulkily indicated that he had lost his zest for it. Followed everywhere by six National Guardsmen who were ordered by the Assembly never to lose track of him, he had grown fat and discontented. But as the months passed his spirits revived. The Queen, too, became less unpopular. She was still the victim of libels, accused of plotting to starve the poor, of sending money to Austria, of continuing to indulge a voracious sexual appetite with both men and women. Yet deputations of citizens came to wish her well, while she herself attempted to prove herself worthy of their regard by visiting hospitals and workshops.

  Encouraged by the respect which the monarchy still commanded and by a growing feeling in the Assembly, except on the Left, that the Revolution had gone far enough and it was time to conciliate the King, the counter-revolutionaries now urged him to strike back, to turn to the army and to prepare for civil war. This was the advice of the Comte d’Artois given from the safety of exile in Savoy; this was the advice, too, of their sister Elisabeth. The King, however, could not face the prospect of civil war, clinging to his hope that there were now sufficient deputies in favour of compromise with the Court to ensure a return to the quiet pleasures of Versailles. This hope was shattered by the Pope’s firm stand against the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and by the King’s decision that, in loyalty to his faith and conscience, he must accept the view of Bishop Bonal that he could not receive Holy Communion from a ‘Constitutionnel’ priest.

  The Pope’s unequivocal pronouncement against the Civil Constitution, made public in a brief, led to serious disturbances in Paris where the people’s anti-clericalism was fostered both by political clubs and by the theatres which, when not presenting plays celebrating civic virtue, put on others that displayed the horrors of the Inquisition, the tribulations and hypocrisy of monastic and convent life, and the greed and dissipation of real and fictional leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. Outside the theatres and in the gardens of the Palais Royal effigies of the Pope were set alight on bonfires, a severed head was tossed through the windows of the Papal Nuncio’s carriage, convents were broken into and nuns assaulted and revolutionary slogans were scrawled on church doors. A mob broke into the Church of St Sulpice, calling out for the head of the curé who had protested against the Civil Constitution and forcing the organist to play the tune of ‘Ça ira’, the words of which they sang with frightening intensity. The King was called upon to dismiss his new confessor and condemned in pamphlets as a traitor for having flouted the laws of the nation by receiving Communion from a priest whose allegiance was to the Pope rather than to the state.

  In fact, the King had not yet committed this breach of the Civil Constitution, but he had made up his mind to do so, and at Easter he and his family prepared to leave the Tuileries for Holy Communion at Saint-Cloud. The gates of the palace, however, were shut against them by a shouting crowd that had intimidated the National Guardsmen on duty in the courtyard. Lafayette arrived on the scene. So did Bailly. But neither of them could persuade the mob to let the carriage pass. Nor could the King who put his head out of the window to ask for that freedom for himself which, he told them, he had given to the nation. His words were met by insults and by a rattling of fists on the carriage doors. For nearly two hours the uproar continued while the Queen, pale yet composed, comforted the weeping Dauphin and the King waited vainly for the crowds to disperse. Then he told the coachman to return to the palace.

  In the Tuileries he was advised once again, as he had so often been in the past, to escape from Paris: once he had got away to the army on the frontier he would be able to persuade his brother-in-law, the Austrian Emperor, to take part in an armed congress if not actually to order an invasion of France; he would then be in a position to act as negotiator and the Assembly would be obliged to have him back on his own terms. He would also be free to worship as his conscience urged him to do. Slowly convinced by suggestions and propositions such as these, and by the Queen’s strong endorsement of them, the King came to the conclusion that he must make a dash for the frontier. After all, both the King of Spain and the Austrian Emperor had stressed that they could not help him until he and his family were in a place of safety. Once they were, the foreign powers would at least be given the opportunity of proving that they were not using the French royal family’s present confinement merely as an excuse for doing nothing as the Queen suspected. The time chosen for the dangerous attempt was the night of 19 June 1791.

  Escape from the Tuileries was not to be easy. For weeks past it had been expected that an attempt would be made. When a rumour got about that the Comte de Provence had already gone abroad to join the Comte d’Artois, a mob surrounded the Luxembourg, demanding that he show himself if he were there, and forced him to drive about the streets in a carriage accompanied by market-women who cheekily kissed him and fondled him. His two maiden aunts, Adélaïde and Victoire, daughters of Louis XV, had succeeded in escaping across the frontier with passports for Rome. They had been held for a time in Burgundy before being allowed to proceed, and crowds had besieged the Tuileries calling for their recall and insisting that a deputation be admitted to the palace to ensu
re that they had not taken the Dauphin with them. Since then the palace had been patrolled by hundreds of National Guardsmen in addition to those who closely watched the movements of the King and Queen. Sentinels stood at each garden gate and at intervals along the river terrace; 600 sectionnaires watched all the approaches. Several of the palace servants were paid informers, and no one could enter or leave the apartments which had been allocated to the royal family without the production of a stamped pass. As well as being difficult, escape would be expensive; and Louis had little money of his own readily available, while the Queen could not sell her jewels without arousing suspicion. But fortunately there was a man in Paris with both the means and the inclination to help them, a man of courage and resource. This was Hans Axel, Count von Fersen.

  Fersen, a tall, amusing, strikingly handsome man of thirty-six, was the son of the distinguished Swedish soldier and politician, Frederik Axel von Fersen. After a rigorous education in Sweden, Germany and Italy, he had entered the French military service and had served as aide-de-camp to General Rochambeau in America, being promoted colonel propriétaire of the Royal-Suédois regiment in 1785. Since then he had been appointed King Gustavus III’s special representative at the French Court. He had grown fond of the King and was devoted to the Queen, ‘an angel’, as he described her in a letter to his sister, a woman both brave and sensitive. He was, he added, doing all he could to console her in her misfortune. Needless to say, it was rumoured that they had become lovers. Perhaps they had. Certainly Fersen was very attractive to women and much attracted by them: he already had one devoted lover in Paris, Eleonora Sullivan, a voluptuous Italian woman, once a circus acrobat and courtesan, now the wife of an Anglo-American millionaire and the mistress of a Scottish one.