The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  From inside the palace the shouts from the direction of the Place du Carrousel could now be heard quite clearly. The marching citizens, who were accompanied by about 400 Marseillaise and smaller numbers of fédérés from other provincial cities, were far from being ‘la dernière plèbe’ of Hippolyte Taine’s description. From the casualty lists it appears that they came from nearly all the sections of Paris and, while there were few professional men – a surgeon, an architect and a drawing-master are mentioned – many of them seem to have been shopkeepers, small traders, manufacturers and master craftsmen. Far less than half were wage-earners. There were musicians, journeymen cabinet-makers and journeymen goldsmiths, domestic servants, clerks, jewellers, water-carriers, master glaziers and master locksmiths, gauze-workers and carters.

  As they marched towards the Tuileries, Lucille Desmoulins anxiously waited for news in her lodging-house. She had spent an almost sleepless night listening apprehensively to the sound of the tocsin, her beloved husband’s head resting for a time on her shoulder.

  We got up [she recorded, remembering every detail of the events of that day]. We had breakfast. Camille went off assuring me that he would not expose himself. Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock passed without our hearing a word. We picked up some of yesterday’s papers, sat on the sofa in the drawing-room and tried to read…I thought I heard the sound of cannon-fire…Jeanette, Camille’s cook, was bleating like a goat. We heard shouting and weeping in the street. We thought Paris would be running with blood…People were crying, ‘To arms!’

  At the approach of the marching citizens, the King sent an urgent message to the Assembly asking them to send a delegation to the Tuileries for his protection. This request elicited no response but, soon after it had been sent, Pierre Roederer, the procureur général syndic of the Department of Paris, a body strongly opposed to the Jacobins, arrived at the palace in the hope, shared by the Girondins, that bloodshed might be averted and the Legislative Assembly afforded some chance of regaining control of the situation if the royal family were persuaded to throw themselves upon the protection of the deputies. Roederer was shown up to the room where the King and Queen and several Ministers were anxiously discussing their predicament. Roederer told them that the National Guard at the gates were talking cheerfully to the people who had already begun to pour into the courtyard and he urged the royal family to hurry over to the Assembly.

  The Queen strongly opposed such a move. It would be disgraceful, she said, to seek the protection of men who had behaved so badly towards them; she would rather be nailed to the walls of the palace. ‘Madame,’ Roederer answered her, ‘you endanger the lives of your husband and children. Think of the responsibility which you take upon yourself.’ The argument grew more and more vehement as the King turned indecisively first to his wife, then to the others who urged him to leave. At last he made up his mind to go. ‘Marchons,’ he said, raising his hand as though to silence the disputants.

  He then walked round the circle formed by the members of the Court [Roederer recorded]. I did not notice that he spoke to anyone in particular; I just heard him say, ‘I am going to the National Assembly.’ Two files of guards arrived and we walked out of the Palace through one apartment after another. When we were going through the Oeil-de-boeuf the King removed the head-dress of the National Guardsman who was marching on his right, and put his own hat, which had a white feather in it, on the man’s head in its place. The man looked surprised, then, after a moment’s hesitation, took the hat off his head and put it under his arm.

  When we reached the colonnade at the bottom of the great staircase the King asked, ‘What is going to happen to all the people we have left behind?’ ‘Sire,’ I replied. ‘The demonstrators from the faubourgs will soon be here…Our numbers are not sufficient. There is no one with the authority to resist even the crowds in the Place du Carrousel.’

  When we were under the tree opposite the cafe on the terrace of the Feuillants, we walked through the leaves which had fallen in the night and had been swept up by the gardener into heaps. We sank up to our knees in them. ‘What a lot of leaves!’ said the King. ‘They have begun to fall very early this year.’ Manuel had written in a newspaper that the King would not last beyond the fall of the leaves. One of my colleagues told me that the Dauphin amused himself by kicking up the leaves on to the legs of the person in front of him.

  As they crossed the garden numerous gentlemen of the court ran out after them, followed by palace servants. Roederer tried to prevent them, begging them to realize that their presence would not only annoy the Assembly but would excite the rage of the populace; that they might even cause the King and Queen to be murdered. Only a few paid heed to him; the rest came on, getting as close as they could to the Swiss bodyguard, increasing the press and confusion of people now surging around the royal family. So dense did the throng become, indeed, that a soldier had to pick the Dauphin up and carry him over his head, and at the sight of what she took to be the child’s kidnapping the Queen, who could not reach him, shrieked in terror.

  When they arrived at the gate which opened on to the passage leading up to the Assembly, a National Guardsman came up to the King and said to him in a strong Provençal accent, ‘Don’t be afraid, Sir. We are all decent people but we just don’t want to be betrayed any more. Be a good citizen, Sir, and get rid of those Holy Joes you keep in the Palace. Don’t forget. It’s high time to do as I say.’ The King, so Roederer commented, replied good-naturedly.

  The doors of the Assembly were opened and the royal family walked inside. ‘I come,’ the King said to them, ‘to prevent a great crime, and I think, gentlemen, that I cannot be safer than in your midst.’ Vergniaud replied that he could rely on the protection of the National Assembly who had sworn to die in defence of the properly constituted authorities. The King then sat down beside the President; but, following the objections of François Chabot, a former friar who was one of the leaders of the Cordeliers Club, that his presence there would affect the freedom of debate, he and his family–‘their heads lowered like whipped dogs’, according to a deputy from the Aude – were removed to the shorthand-writers’ box, a small room scarcely ten feet square beneath the gallery and separated from the main hall of the Manège by an iron railing. This railing was removed so that they could more easily take shelter in the midst of the Assembly, should it be necessary for them to do so, the King himself pulling out several bars. They had not been in the box long when the sound of musketry and cannon fire could be heard from the direction of the palace and a few stray balls flew through the open windows of the hall. ‘I assure you,’ shouted the King, ‘that I have ordered the Swiss to be forbidden to fire.’ The sounds of firing grew louder, however, and a delegation of twenty deputies was sent to try to stop the fighting. No sooner had they left on their vain mission than a band of armed citizens began battering on the doors of the hall, demanding admittance. ‘We are stormed!’ shouted one deputy as others rushed to hold the door; and the President, making the gesture which custom required of him on such occasions, put on his hat.

  The door was soon forced and a crowd of sans-culottes stormed into the hall, demanding that the deputies ‘swear in the nation’s name to maintain liberty and equality’ with all their power or to die at their posts.

  No one answered at first [reported one deputy, Michel Azéma, to friends in Carcassonne]. Then all the deputies…shouted…unanimously and simultaneously, ‘I do swear!’…The roll was called at once, and on the rostrum each in turn pronounced the…charming oath…indicated by the sans-culottes…Meanwhile, fierce fighting was going on at the Tuileries.

  Here the fédérés from Marseilles and Finistère, at the head of the long column of demonstrators, had advanced towards the palace steps, calling out friendly greetings.

  Every effort was made to persuade the Swiss to leave their position and join us [reported Pierre-François Desbouillons, a clerk from Brest who commanded the Finistère fédérés]. No one intended to do anything other tha
n disarm them. But they steadfastly refused to give way to our urgent pleas to come over to our side. One of them decided to come over by himself to talk to the National Guard and was descending the steps when men who were no doubt paid to start the conflict tried to stab him. He rejoined his comrades at once. Everyone was still conferring. A musket shot had been fired but this had not yet started the fighting. The Swiss commanders persisted in saying they could not leave their posts without an order from the King. ‘Then you all want to die,’ someone said to them. ‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘we shall all certainly die rather than abandon our posts without orders from me King.’

  The area around the bottom of the steps was now filled with citizens, most of whom were armed only with sabres. In the milling about one of the Swiss commanders was slightly cut; and this immediately resulted in the citizens being fired on.

  Crying out, ‘Trahison! Trahison!’ the citizens and fédérés fled in confusion while the Swiss came down the steps in good order, discharging their muskets, then running towards the cannon which had been negligently left in the courtyard and opening fire with shot. At this moment the King’s order not to fire reached them. They immediately abandoned the guns and marched off in the direction of the terrace of the Feuillants. Other companies of the Swiss were still in the palace, however. The King’s order did not reach them; and they were still there when the Marseillais, together with some Breton fédérés, rallied and renewed the attack, repeating their shouts of ‘Trahison! Trahison! Mort aux traîtres!’ Wild with fury, they dashed across the courtyard under heavy fire, reached the steps and, followed by crowds of sans-culottes, streamed into the palace. The Swiss, having almost exhausted their ammunition, surrendered, throwing down their arms, but they were shown no mercy. The mob poured into the palace, cutting down everyone they found, ushers, pages, doorkeepers, cooks, maidservants as well as soldiers, and the Dauphin’s sub-governor. They threw the bodies out of the windows, impaled heads on pikes, looted the rooms, smashed furniture and windows, pocketed jewellery and ornaments and scattered papers over the floors. Fugitives who tried to escape were struck down as they ran across the garden and hacked down under the trees and beside the fountains. Some clambered up the monuments but were prodded down with pikes and bayonets by the assailants who, forbearing to fire for fear lest they injure the marble, stabbed them as they fell at their feet. One witness saw ‘some very young boys playing with human heads’; another heard ‘an honest artisan’ remark, ‘Ah, Monsieur. Providence has been very good to me. I killed three of the Swiss with my own hands.’

  I ran from place to place [recorded one of the royal servants], and finding the apartments and staircases already strewed with dead bodies, I took the resolution of jumping from one of the windows in the Queen’s room on to the terrace…I got to my feet and ran away to the Dauphin’s garden gate where some Marseillais, who had just butchered several of the Swiss, were stripping them. One of them came up to me with a bloody sword in his hand, saying, ‘Hello, citizen! Without arms! Here take this and help us to kill.’ But luckily another Marseillais seized it and, being dressed in a plain coat, I managed to make my escape. Some of the Swiss who were pursued took refuge in an adjoining stable. I concealed myself in the same place. They were soon cut to pieces close to me. On hearing their cries the master of the house ran up and [he took me back to his house with him]…Presently a body of armed men came in to see if any of the Swiss were hiding there. After a fruitless search these men, their hands red with blood, stopped and calmly related to each other accounts of the murders which they had committed. I remained in the house until four o’clock in the afternoon, having before my eyes a view of all the horrors that were being perpetrated. Some of the men were still continuing the slaughter; others were cutting off the heads of those already slain; while the women, lost to all sense of shame, were committing the most indecent mutilations on the dead bodies from which they tore pieces of flesh and carried them off in triumph. Towards evening I took the road to Versailles and crossed the Pont Louis Seize which was covered with the naked carcasses of men already in a state of putrefaction from the intense heat of the weather.

  Over 500 of the Swiss guards had been slaughtered in the grounds of the palace or on its steps, and a further sixty who were escorted under guard to the Insurrectionary Commune at the Hôtel de Ville were massacred when they got there. Of the besiegers about ninety fédérés and almost 300 citizens from the sections, three of them women, had also been killed.

  At the Manège the King and the royal family were still in the shorthand-writers’ box listening to the agitated debate of those few deputies who had been courageous enough to be present that day. At nightfall they were all escorted to a convent where they were given beds. In the morning they were taken back to the box where all that day and the next they listened to the continuing debates of the Assembly which, ‘under the orders of the galleries’, as one contemporary put it, ‘feeling the eyes of the Insurrectionary Committee always upon them’, voted for the suspension of the King from his functions, the establishment of a provisional council of six Ministers, the imposition of all the decrees upon which the royal veto had been imposed, the summoning of a National Convention which was to be elected on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, and the imprisonment of the King. The deputies at first decided that he should be held in the Luxembourg, the house from which the Comte de Provence had fled in June the year before, but it was later decreed, at the insistence of the Insurrectionary Commune, that he should be confined in the Temple which had formerly been occupied by the Comte d’Artois and which could be more securely guarded.

  The atmosphere in Paris was now suddenly transformed as ambassadors were withdrawn by their governments, the salons closed their doors, and aristocrats, who, though stripped of their titles, had previously been left in peace provided they were not suspected of being counter-revolutionaries, thought it as well to leave their houses and go into hiding. Some tried to escape from Paris but found the gates shut and carriage-horses commandeered by the Insurrectionary Commune for the army. Several were arrested and, with their families and various conservative deputies, were thrown into prison where they waited apprehensively for the next stage in the Revolution’s development. And in prison they heard with alarm that, while five of the six Ministers appointed to the provincial government were Girondins, the Ministry of Justice had gone to an ugly, sensual lawyer of commanding personality who was more powerful than any of them, Georges Jacques Danton.

  6

  THE DAYS OF THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES AND THE EXECUTION OF THE KING

  2–7 September 1792 and 21 January 1793

  ‘The people of Paris administer their own justice and I am their prisoner’

  PÉTION

  Like most of the other leading revolutionaries, Danton came from a respectable middle-class provincial family. His father, who died when he was three, was a lawyer; one of his uncles a canon at Troyes. He was born near Troyes, at the little town of Arcis-sur-Aube, on 28 October 1759, and from his earliest years his character seems to have been as carefree and lively as the sparkling wines of the district. His grandfather was a farmer and it was in the country where most of his days were spent and where the accidents, which marred his features for life, took place. His scarred and twisted lip, so it was said, was the result of his being gored by an angry bull when he was sucking the teat of a cow; his squashed nose was also the consequence of an encounter with a bull; the scars on his cheeks and eyelids were caused by the hooves of a herd of pigs. The skin around them was badly disfigured by smallpox.

  Quite undeterred by these misfortunes and deformities, the young Danton continued to enjoy life, to make friends easily, to do well at his school at Troyes where his oratorian masters provided the lazy but clever boy with a wider and more liberal education than he could have expected at many another establishment. This enabled him to read and enjoy the English books which, as well as the classics of the Enlightenment, including scores of volumes of Vol
taire and Rousseau, were to fill the shelves of his sitting-room in Paris.

  He arrived in Paris when he was twenty-one to enter a lawyer’s office and, having obtained a legal degree from the University of Rheims and borrowed a good deal of money from, among others, the father of the girl he intended to marry – the daughter of a prosperous restaurateur – he bought the remunerative office of avocat aux Conseils du Roi. Thus, at the age of twenty-seven, he established himself in a far more promising position than so many of his impecunious contemporaries who, coming up from the provinces to swell the ranks of an overcrowded profession and finding success in it difficult to achieve without money, took to ill-paid journalism and other literary pursuits while idly hoping for, or actively working for, the overthrow of an order that so circumscribed their talents and ambition.

  Danton, who at this time chose to call himself d’Anton, did not share their disgruntlement, though he joined in their discussions at the Café Procope. He seems to have worked conscientiously, earning over 20,000 livres a year according to a friend, and taking on any cases that came his way without too scrupulous a regard for the justice of his clients’ claims. While preparations were being made for the election of the Estates General in 1789, for example, d’Anton was busy defending a landowner who had arbitrarily enclosed an area of common land adjoining his estate. With a satisfactory income, and helped by the generous dowry of his attractive wife, he moved into a comfortable and well-furnished apartment in the Rue des Cordeliers. Here the d’Antons and their two sons were living contentedly when the Estates General met.