Early on the morning of the appointed day about 8,000 people, National Guardsmen, shopkeepers, artisans, market porters, working women and their children, began their march. Armed with muskets, pikes, pitchforks and scythes, sharp pieces of iron fastened to the end of stout bludgeons, they swarmed towards the Assembly. When information reached the Manège that there were as many as 8,000 of them, one of the deputies stood up to exclaim, ‘Eight thousand! And we are only seven hundred and forty-five. We must adjourn immediately.’
As cries of ‘Order! Order!’ echoed round the hall, and a deputy of the Right leaped up to remind the Assembly that while there might well be 8,000 citizens on the march in Paris there were a further 24,000,000 Frenchmen to be considered elsewhere, a group of leading demonstrators bearing a petition burst through the doors. The deputies rose to their feet in indignation as the President put on his hat and required them to wait outside. To the deputies’ apparent surprise, the petitioners then withdrew; whereupon the mollified Assembly consented to admit them again and to allow the thousands of demonstrators to march peacefully through the hall.
In they came, therefore, led by men carrying huge tables upon which had been pinned the Declaration of Rights and around which danced women and children singing the Ça ira. To cheers from the public galleries, they marched across the floor waving flags, shouting slogans, displaying banners inscribed with such watchwords as ‘The Constitution or death,’ brandishing ragged trousers to cries of ‘Vivent les sans-culottes!’ and a calf’s heart fixed to a pike with the inscription, ‘The heart of an aristocrat’. For three hours the demonstration continued, while the deputies both of Right and Left sat in subdued and anxious silence. As the last of the citizens marched out of the hall, Santerre presented the deputies with a flag, then went off to the Tuileries where a vast crowd had assembled in the courtyards, shouting ‘Sanction the decrees! Down with the veto! Down with the priests!’ ‘Rappel des ministres patriots! Tremblez tyrans! Voici les sans-culottes!’
It was now about four o’clock in the afternoon. There were large numbers of troops on duty but they made no move to disperse the demonstrators who, finding the Porte Royale, a side entrance to the palace, unlocked, pushed it open, mounted the stairs, dragging up a cannon with them and hacking down doors with hatchets. They discovered the King in an anteroom whose door they smashed down with their pikes.
For some time past he had been in a state of utter despondency.
For ten days together [recorded the Queen’s maid, Madame Campan] he did not utter a word even to his family, except at a game of backgammon which he played with Madame Elisabeth after dinner when he merely pronounced the words which are necessary to play that game. The Queen roused him from this state, so ruinous in a crisis, by throwing herself at his feet, and sometimes by employing images calculated to terrify him, at others expressions of her affection for him. She also urged him to remember what he owed to his family, and went so far as to say that if they must perish at least let them do so with honour and not wait to be strangled to death on the floor of their own apartment.
When the demonstrators rushed in upon him, however, he had recovered from his morose and silent depression and showed himself to the armed intruders with remarkable composure. ‘Here I am,’ he said, standing still in front of them. Madame Elisabeth was with him, her arms thrown round his shoulders as though pleading for protection. But the Queen, for whom his sister was at first mistaken, had been taken away with the children to the Council Room by a courtier who barricaded them in with furniture.
The King was persuaded to move to another, larger room to listen while a petition, which Legendre had brought with him, was read in his presence. He was asked to stand on a bench; several other benches and a table were set before him, while guards and attendants hurried into the room to stand on either side of him. The demonstrators crowded in front of him, shouting in unison with the people in the courts below, ‘No aristocrats! No veto! No priests!’
With his booming voice Legendre quietened them by reading the petition, each sentence of which was punctuated by shouts of agreement from his companions and by cries of ‘Long live the Nation! Vive la Nation!’
‘Yes, vive la Nation!’ said the King when Legendre had finished. ‘The nation has no better friend than me.’
‘Prove it then!’ someone shouted, proferring a red cap on the end of a pike. ‘Put this on.’
The King seemed embarrassed rather than intimidated. He took the cap which had recently been introduced by the Girondins as an emblem of revolutionary fervour, and tried to put it on, but it was too small and fell off. A man picked it up, stretched it over his knee, and handed it back to the King who managed to get it over the back of his head. Another man now thrust a bottle of wine at him, asking him to toast his visitors.
‘People of Paris,’ the King said, obediently taking the bottle and putting the neck to his lips, though someone warned him it might be poisoned. ‘I drink to your health and to that of the French nation.’
He would not, however, withdraw his veto of the Assembly’s decrees, and he was still standing firm in his refusal when a delegation of deputies arrived, followed some time later by the Mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, who made the improbable excuse that he had only just heard of the royal family’s plight. Finding that the King’s friendly but determined manner had earned the respect of many people in the room, Pétion advised the demonstrators to leave ‘for fear lest enemies of the nation’ might question their ‘respectable intentions’. So the crowd slowly filed out of the room; and when they had all gone the King fell down into a chair looking exhausted, the red cap still on his head until, suddenly becoming aware of it, he snatched it off and threw it on to the floor.
His behaviour that day brought about an immediate reaction in favour of the monarchy. Numerous resolutions came in from the provinces, denouncing the insult to the royal family, and in Paris a petition protesting against the demonstration at the Tuileries was signed by over 20,000 people. Pétion was suspended for a time from his functions. So was Louis Manuel, the former tutor of a banker’s son who was now a leading member of the Paris Commune. Hundreds of young men from the western sections volunteered for guard duty at the Tuileries, while royalist members of the National Guard attacked anyone suspected of republican tendencies whom they came upon walking in the Tuileries gardens. And when Lafayette made a speech condemning the events of 20 June in the Assembly he was loudly applauded, and not only by the Feuillants.
But the reaction was short-lived. The court did not take proper advantage of it, the Queen, in particular, being wary of accepting help from those whom she considered untrustworthy or dislikeable. ‘She was more intent upon appearing to advantage in the midst of the peril,’ Lafayette later remarked with some bitterness, ‘than in averting it. As for my relations with the King, he always gave me his esteem, but never his confidence.’ ‘Better to perish,’ the Queen herself said, ‘than to be saved by M. de Lafayette.’ Agreeing in their turn to anathematize Lafayette as a ‘scoundrel, a traitor, an enemy of the nation’, the Left temporarily buried their differences in face of the common enemy. By 13 July Pétion had been restored as Mayor; Manuel was also back in office, and the Legislative Assembly, as concerned by the threats of the Austrians as by the activities of the sans-culottes, declared ‘La patrie en danger’. A state of emergency was proclaimed, and all Frenchmen capable of bearing arms were called up for national service. The King was forced to agree to the establishment of a military camp at Soissons and to the fédérés being allowed to pass through Paris in order to attend the now customary celebrations on 14 July.
In the provinces, local authorities which had been authorizing the disarming of suspects ever since the military disasters had seemed to presage an Austrian invasion, extended their campaign against refractory priests, disregarding the royal veto by ordering arrests, and in some places appearing to condone murders. In Paris also the Revolution was evidently approaching a crisis as the war news wor
sened. In several streets and squares platforms draped with tricolours were erected to serve as places of recruitment for men answering the call to arms. And, as the alarm guns thundered from the Pont Neuf and the Arsenal, municipal officials, wearing tricolour sashes over their shoulders and escorted by troops of cavalry, marched from street to street and square to square to spread abroad the Assembly’s proclamation, ‘La patrie en danger’.
The celebration of 14 July that year was a sadly different affair from that of 1790. In the Champ de Mars eighty-three tents had been erected representing the eighty-three departments of France, and beside each was a poplar from which fluttered a tricolour. In the centre of the circle described by these tents was a large marquee in which the Assembly and the King were to gather; another large marquee had been put up for the administrative bodies of Paris. The area resembled a military encampment rather than the scene of a festival. On one side was a memorial to those many French soldiers who had died in the recent fighting; on the other, a tall tree, called the Tree of Feudalism, was bedecked with titles of nobility, escutcheons, armorial bearings, crowns, blue ribbons, cardinals’ caps, St Peter’s Keys and other symbols of aristocracy, royalty and the papacy, to which the King was to be asked to set fire.
The King, with his sister, wife and children, stood on a balcony to watch the parade of soldiers and fédérés pass by. He looked quite calm but his wife seemed almost in tears and had, so one observer thought, already been weeping. As the royal family waited, a huge crowd of people pushed their way into the Champ de Mars beneath them, shouting ‘Pétion for ever!’ They were followed by columns of fédérés marching along casually, arm in arm; by a group of men bearing a model of the Bastille; by the operators of a printing press which was put down from time to time so that sheets of patriotic songs could be produced and distributed to the bystanders; by the National Guard and regiments of the line; and finally by the members of the Assembly.
When the procession had passed beneath him, the King went forward as required to the ‘altar of the nation’–a truncated column placed at the top of the tiers of seats which had been constructed for the first festival – where he was expected to swear an oath of loyalty. Although surrounded by troops he had difficulty in making his way through the dense crowds of people; and the Queen, watching his progress with the aid of a glass, was frightened that he would be crushed to death or assassinated. She had had a thickly padded undergarment made for him which she hoped would resist the first thrust of a dagger, but she had not expected these suffocating crowds of people. She saw him stumble on a step by the altar and screamed as the confusion around him increased.
He took the oath, and was then escorted to the Tree of Feudalism which he was required to burn down. He protested at this indignity, and ordered the soldiers of his escort to take him away to the École Militaire. They marched off shouting ‘Vive le Roi!’ A few voices in the crowds took up the cry and an occasional murmur of sympathy could be heard, but most spectators watched him in silence. To Madame de Staël he looked like a martyr. To others, he was a strangely pitiable figure who seemed, contrasted with the appearance of the people around him, to belong to another age, with his clothes ‘embroidered in the ancient Court fashion’ and his carefully dressed and powdered hair. He disappeared from view and was thereafter rarely glimpsed by the people until the day of his death.
As the King resumed his sad life at the Tuileries, the news from the front grew more alarming and demands for more decisive measures to meet the crisis became insistent. The Commune had already decreed that all citizens who possessed pikes should be enlisted as National Guardsmen, and soon the Assembly felt obliged to permit their general distribution. Gradually the distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens was being lost, the National Guard becoming less a bourgeois body than a force of the sans-culottes.
Towards the end of the month it became known in Paris that a manifesto, drafted by Count Fersen helped by an émigré, the Marquis de Limon, and signed at Coblentz by the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the enemy army, had threatened Paris with ‘total destruction’ if the royal family were not respected and protected, or if the Tuileries were again invaded. The manifesto had also declared that any National Guard who resisted the Austro-Prussian advance would be treated as an irregular, shot out of hand and have his home demolished. It was the provocation for which the King’s enemies had been waiting. The fédérés, who had refused to leave Paris for Soissons after 14 July until some decisive action had been taken, and who had been entertained while they remained by various of the city sections, marched about the city shouting, ‘Citizens to arms!’ A contingent of five hundred of them from Marseilles, who had put down a royalist insurrection in Aries, sang as they marched through the streets the stirring words of a song which had been written at Strasbourg for the Army of the Rhine by Rouget de Lisle, an officer of engineers. These fédérés from Marseilles-patriotic heroes, in the opinion of some citizens, to others, like the French Guards officer, General Thiébault, ‘an infernal gang of assassins’–‘sing this song with the greatest fervour’, reported the Chronique de Paris, ‘and the passage where, waving their hats and brandishing their swords, they all sing together “Aux armes, citoyens” is truly thrilling…They often sing at the Palais Royal – sometimes in the theatre between two plays.’
The Assembly, hesitant and still for the most part innately conservative, was losing control of Paris to these fédérés and to the radical city sections, nearly all of which had now admitted ‘passive’ citizens to their committees and had enrolled volunteers for the defence of Paris. The section known as Bon Conseil which had enrolled 300 men – two thirds of them artisans and most of the rest, apart from two surgeons’ apprentices and two architects, shopkeepers and clerks – voted at a crowded meeting no longer to recognize the King and to march on the Assembly and thence on the Tuileries on Sunday, 5 August. The section Quinze-Vingts also voted for an armed march on the Assembly and the Tuileries on the 5th and asked all the other sections of Paris to come with them. By no means averse to such a march but anxious not to be found on the wrong side on Monday morning, Pétion persuaded the Quinze-Vingts to delay it until the 10th so as to give the Assembly time to dethrone the King themselves.
The Quince-Vingts and the other sections agreed to wait; but on 6 August a vast crowd of fédérés and sectionnaires gathered in the Champ de Mars to demand the King’s abdication. And since the Assembly still took no action, the sections, organized by the Jacobins, decided to act independently in accordance with their previous threats.
On the night of 9 August their delegates arrived at the Hôtel de Ville, announced that the Commune was summarily disbanded and replaced it with an Insurrectionary Commune of their own in which there were twice as many artisans as lawyers. Protests were answered with the claim, ‘When the people place themselves in a state of insurrection, they withdraw all power from other authorities and assume it themselves.’ The royalist commander of the National Guard, Mandat de Grancy, was arrested, executed and replaced by Antoine Santerre, while plans were laid to keep Pétion a prisoner in his own room in case he should take it upon himself to interfere. Early the next day, a day of almost tropical heat, the march of some 20,000 armed people on the Tuileries began.
The main defenders of the palace were 900 Swiss Guards whose ammunition was severely limited. They were supported by about 2,000 National Guardsmen but these were suspected to be in sympathy with the marching citizens rather than the King to whom it was suggested that, if he went out to show himself to the National Guard, they might feel more inclined to protect him. He took the advice and went down into the courts. He had refused to put on the padded waistcoat which he had worn on 14 July, maintaining that, while such protection was acceptable against the dagger of an assassin, there was ‘something cowardly’ in wearing it when reviewing men who might be required to fight in his defence. As he appeared, untidily dressed in a purple suit, a sword at his side, his hair powdered on one
side only, there were some shouts of ‘Vive le Roi!’ but these were not so loud as cries of ‘Down with the veto!’ ‘I can see him now as he passed along our front,’ a National Guardsman wrote. ‘He was silent and careworn and, with his swaying walk, he seemed to say to us, “All is lost.”’ An officer by his side advised him not to proceed with the review of the men drawn up in the courts and gardens, but to go over instead towards the battalion posted on the Pont Tournant. He agreed to do so, but while walking past the terrace of the Feuillants, which was crowded with people shouting insults and abuse, he was mortified to see this battalion followed by another move off with the evident intention of joining the demonstrators in the Place du Carrousel. Already several of the gunners had turned their cannon round to face towards the palace and had had to be disarmed; and, confronted by this further desertion, the King seemed to lose the last vestiges of hope. Mme Campan was watching him from a window of the palace. She saw ‘some of the gunners quit their posts, go up to the King and thrust their fists in his face. He went as pale as a corpse…The Queen later told me that the King had shown no energy, that this sort of review had done more harm than good.’
The Days of the French Revolution Page 15