by Ruth Scurr
CONTRARY TO ROBESPIERRE’S vision, many in Paris in 1791 were going about their everyday lives with little regard to the Revolution. The number of marriages and baptisms had risen significantly since the previous year and the mortality rate was falling. Judging by the small ads posted in the daily Chronique de Paris, the people still had plenty of mundane concerns. One Mme Gentil of the rue de Richelieu offered a handsome reward for her lost greyhound. There were elegant apartments to rent with facilities for stabling horses or parking carriages, as well as plenty of more modest accommodations. Opticians, hairdressers, pharmacists, dentists specializing in teeth whitening, and chiropodists all promoted their skills. An Italian singer just arrived in the city offered home tuition. Exchange visits between French and English children were still being advertised. Oysters, oranges, and other luxury comestibles continued to be imported. In the theaters and opera houses, the Revolution was being culturally assimilated. Jean-Baptiste Pujoulx wrote a play about the death of Mirabeau (La mort de Mirabeau) and Luigi Cherubini’s instrumental music for it was performed in the Théâtre Feydeau for the first time in May.
There were, however, ways in which Paris had not recovered from 1789. The rearrangement of the city’s sixty districts into forty-eight new sections had not destroyed local loyalties, and in poorer sections like Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel popular militancy did not disappear with the fall of the Bastille. Even though day-to-day policing was probably as effective in 1791 as it had been before the Revolution, tension between patriots and aristocrats, together with anticlerical feelings exacerbated by the disputes over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, led to many incidents of violence.24 In April, for example, rampaging patriotic women in the rue Saint-Antoine broke into local convents and dragged the nuns into the street for public whippings. Of course, the scurrilous press was delighted by this, exaggerated what had happened, and inspired repetitions of the incident in other parts of the city. There was also widespread fear of brigands, or troublemakers, recently arrived in the capital. Such “enemies of the people” could easily conceal themselves among Paris’s transient population: six out of ten people in the city at the time had been born elsewhere. The growing fear of malicious outsiders led to demands for a new census, and the municipal police department ordered a survey of the city’s logeurs, or people letting furnished rooms, who might be harboring suspicious newcomers.25
In this context, the National Guard became all the more important. People throughout France had imitated the Parisians and formed local battalions of national guards, but the relationship of these citizen militias to the Revolution was increasingly vexed. In theory, the National Guard was designed both to protect the Revolution and to maintain public order. In practice these two objectives sometimes conflicted. Soon after the fall of the Bastille in 1789, Robespierre had been horrified by the move to exclude nontaxpaying citizens (citoyens passifs) from the National Guard, and he never ceased to oppose it. In his newspaper, on 5 December 1790, Marat—who had heard but still could not spell Robespierre’s name—had written, “Robertspiere, Robertspierre alone in vain raised his voice against the perfidious decree regarding superior conscripts, but his voice was muffled.”26 Afterward, Robespierre composed a speech on the topic, read it to the Jacobins at Versailles, then published and circulated it through the network of affiliated clubs across France. In February of the following year, he wrote sarcastically to the newly wed Camille Desmoulins, reminding him to advertise the published speech in his newspaper:
May I remind Monsieur Camille Desmoulins that neither the beautiful eyes nor the beautiful attributes of charming Lucile [Camille’s wife] are reasons for not announcing my work on the National Guard…. There is not at this time anything more urgent or important than the organization of the National Guard.27
Camille did as he was told and a notice about Robespierre’s recent work appeared in Révolutions de France et de Brabant a week later, on 21 February. Even so, it was not until the end of April that the assembly got around to discussing the subject again.
Robespierre argued that the institution of the National Guard was an unprecedented revolutionary act, resulting from a kind of patriotism previously unknown among free peoples. The assembly was busy formulating constitutional laws intended to protect the people’s liberty, but only force—force deployed in the name of the people—could ultimately guarantee that liberty:
The National Guard cannot be other than the whole nation armed to defend, when necessary, its rights; all citizens of an age to bear arms must be admitted without distinction.28
This idea was straight out of Rousseau, and when he spoke in the assembly, Robespierre mentioned the philosopher by name:
The free cantons of Switzerland offer us examples in this area, even though their militias have a more extensive purpose than our National Guard, since they [the Swiss] do not have any other troops to direct against external enemies. All the inhabitants are soldiers, but only when it is necessary for them to be, if I may paraphrase J. J. Rousseau.29
The French still had a professional army and Robespierre was particularly insistent that it must be kept separate from the National Guard. He argued that the king, as nominal head of the professional army, must not be allowed to nominate the heads or officers of the National Guard, that officers in the professional army must not hold posts in the National Guard, and that the king and his ministers must not be allowed to deploy or discipline the National Guard either. Robespierre was mindful of recent problems inside the army. During the summer of 1790, at Béthune (near Arras) and Metz, there had been a series of conflicts between rank-and-file soldiers sympathetic to the Revolution and aristocratic officers intent on maintaining old-style discipline. In Nancy things had gone completely out of control when a cousin of General Lafayette’s, the Marquis de Bouillé, used severe military discipline to suppress a rebellion in the Châteauvieux regiment.
The rebellious soldiers had the support and encouragement of their local Jacobin Club. But this did not save them from the draconian measures of General Bouillé’s military tribunal: one soldier was broken on the wheel, twenty were hanged, and forty-one were sentenced to the galleys for life—all of which astonished enlightened citizens, who thought such barbarism had been banished from France along with the old regime. Even more astonishing, though, was the assembly’s decision to praise Bouillé for this pitiless repression. At first, only Robespierre, Pétion, and a handful of other radical deputies protested. Robespierre was shouted down at the tribune. Outside the assembly, however, he had the support of the Jacobins, and soon there were public demonstrations of solidarity with the heroes of the Châteauvieux regiment. To show their sympathy with those forty-one soldiers now toiling their lives away in the galleys, some patriots took to wearing the bonnet rouge, the cap of the galley slaves.30 Robespierre himself disdained this fashion and was extremely irritated when, at the Jacobins one evening, someone leaned over and dumped a bonnet on top of his meticulously maintained wig.31 Nevertheless, events in Nancy had made an impression on him, and he was adamant that there must be no confusion in the future between the National Guard and what remained of the old regime army. He wanted to see the former organized along rigorously democratic lines, free of the authoritarian hierarchy that had caused such suffering at Nancy. Throughout his speech in April, he kept referring to “the people” until someone interrupted, demanding to know what he meant exactly. “I myself protest against all manner of speaking that uses the word people in a limited sense,” he said:
It is the people that are good, patient, and generous. The people ask for nothing but peace, justice, and the right to live. The interest, the will of the people, is that of humanity: it is the general interest. The interest of that which is not the people, of that which separates itself from the people, is mere ambition and pride.32
This was all very well in theory, but in practice the National Guard’s dual responsibilities—to protect the Revolution, and to maintain public order—were bound to co
me into conflict, sooner or later, with particular sectors of this much-invoked people. Robespierre, following Rousseau, could define the people and their National Guard as one and indivisible, but theirs was not a definition that would hold up in a public brawl, still less a Revolution.
AS EASTER 1791 approached, the king and queen, eager for a rest and change of atmosphere, hoped to be permitted to leave Paris for Saint-Cloud. In this suburb west of Paris, Marie Antoinette owned a splendid château, surrounded by twelve hectares of gardens and terraces overlooking the Seine. It was here that she had held her secret audience with Mirabeau, the occasion on which his ugliness overwhelmed her. Now Mirabeau was dead, the king was wracked by terrible headaches, and Marie Antoinette longed more than ever to escape the confines of the Tuileries palace, where privacy was impossible and she scarcely dared open a window for fear of the abuse that would greet her. Back in December 1790, the king had finally given in and signed the proposed Civil Constitution of the Clergy despite the pope’s disapproval, but now his conscience was troubling him. At Saint-Cloud it might be possible to celebrate Easter in the old way, without political interference. However, for the last few weeks Marat had again been spreading panic, this time telling his readers that a hostile foreign army was massing at the Austrian border. “It is all up with liberty, it is all up with the country,” he warned, “if we suffer the royal family to quit the Tuileries.”33 It was true that during the nine months that had passed since a battalion of Austrian troops asked permission to cross into France, foreign troops had been gathering at the border.34 It was also true that it would be much more difficult for the Parisians to influence the course of the Revolution if the king abandoned the capital. So when the royal party tried to set off on 18 April, it was stopped by the mob. The next day, Louis XVI strode purposefully across the Tuileries gardens to the Manège and addressed the Assembly:
Gentlemen, you are informed of the opposition expressed yesterday to my departure for Saint-Cloud. I was unwilling to overcome it by force, because I feared to occasion acts of severity against a misguided multitude, but it is of importance to the nation to prove that I am free. Nothing is so essential to the authority of the sanction I have given to your decrees. Governed by this powerful motive, I persist in my plan of going to Saint-Cloud, and the National Assembly must perceive the necessity of it.35
This was a strong and dignified speech, but to no avail. Over at the Hôtel de Ville, the municipality of Paris, urged on by Danton with the Cordelier Club behind him, decreed that the king was not to go to Saint-Cloud. The assembly decided not to interfere, there was nothing General Lafayette could do to help, so the king, who had behaved well and wisely, had no choice but to walk back despondently across the garden and break the news to his disappointed wife.
Marie Antoinette had been planning an escape for many months. Mirabeau had fully shared her belief that removing the king from Paris was the only way to restore royal authority over the Revolution. All sorts of schemes had been auditioned—getting him out was, obviously, a difficult project—but now even the famously indecisive king was determined to try. He was equally determined, however, not to leave France, not to flee as so many nobles had done and abandon what he still thought of as a kingdom entrusted to him by God. This narrowed his list of possible destinations down to one: he must try to reach the loyal troops under the command of General Bouillé, who were encamped at Montmédy, near the Austrian border, about 170 miles away. Bouillé was highly regarded by Louis for his successful 1778 campaign against the English in the West Indies during the American Revolutionary War, and, much more recently, for suppressing the controversial rebellion in Nancy, with cavalry that remained under his control even as insubordination spread through the rank and file. Bouillé could not reach the king in Paris, but if the king could get to Bouillé, they could together start to assemble forces for reasserting royal authority, with or without reinforcements from abroad.
The most direct route from Paris to Montmédy ran through Reims. For this reason, the king rejected it, convinced he would still be widely recognized in the place of his coronation fifteen years ago. Unfortunately, the alternative road was not only longer but also less remote, passing through many small towns, where the royal fugitives might easily arouse suspicion. Nevertheless, that was the road chosen, and the departure date was set for 20 June. The decision to travel in an unusually shaped, extra-large custom-made coach capacious enough for at least eight people did nothing to lower the risk of attracting attention. Since this striking vehicle could hardly pull up outside the Tuileries, on the night of 20 June it was parked discreetly near the city wall, while a more ordinary coach waited close to the palace on the corner of the rue de l’Echelle, the royal party’s first point of assembly. Shortly after ten, the king’s two children, heavy with sleep and dressed in disguises, were carried out and left in the coach with their governess. The princess asked her young brother what he thought they were going to do that evening. “Act in a play, I suppose,” he replied, “since we have all got these odd dresses.”36 An hour later, their aunt, Mme Elisabeth, joined them, stepping on the dauphin, who had fallen asleep on the floor as she entered the carriage: “He had the courage not to cry out,” his sister loyally recalled. Then the king and queen arrived, separately, Marie Antoinette shaken because her face had been caught for a few fleeting seconds in the lights of General Lafayette’s carriage, sweeping past unexpectedly at that late hour.
The royal family were conveyed successfully to their special traveling coach and set off for the border accompanied by three guards in flamboyant yellow livery. If they were stopped and questioned, the plan was to pass themselves off as the family and traveling companions of a Russian woman, the Baroness de Korff, played by the governess. Marie Antoinette would assume the now-vacant role of governess, the king’s sister would pose as a friend named Rosalie, and Louis XVI—most improbably of all—would take the part of a valet. The dauphin had been quite right to guess that amateur dramatics were in store. As the sun rose behind the carriage window blinds, the occupants settled into their journey, practiced their parts, and began on a picnic breakfast that lifted their spirits. It was pretty funny to think of the shock on Lafayette’s long face when he learned of the empty beds in the Tuileries that morning. The king, always keen on lists and maps, was suddenly in his element, providing a running commentary on the group’s progress for the benefit of his children. By the afternoon he was relaxed enough to get out and engage people in pleasant conversation about the weather and crops as the horses were changed at relay stops. As far as the town of Varennes, fresh horses were ordered in the ordinary way by sending a courier ahead. But at Varennes arrangements had been made for a special relay of horses to be protected by a small detachment of Bouillé’s troops. These troops drew suspicious comment from nervous locals—many of them newly signed-up members of the National Guard—even before the peculiarly shaped coach arrived in the middle of the night and squeezed through the narrow arch in the town wall. In the twenty-four hours since the escape from the Tuileries had commenced, the royal family had got to within twenty miles of their final destination.
At Varennes everything went wrong. The special relay of fresh horses was nowhere to be seen. As the coach drove into the town, the travelers peeped through the blinds and saw groups of National Guardsmen milling around, some carrying muskets. The yellow livery worn by the three guards accompanying the suspicious coach shone beneath the lamps and moonlight; to make matters worse, the livery resembled that of the Prince de Condé, leader of the émigré nobles in exile, and people stopped to stare. It was exactly like the beginning of a play. None of the party could sustain their assumed identity for long—the king’s papers were made out for Frankfort, but Varennes was not on the road to Frankfort—and besides he had been recognized at one of the post houses earlier in the day. At first, there was general excitement—it was quite something to have Louis XVI paying the town an unexpected nocturnal visit—and there was even talk a
mong the townspeople of escorting the coach to Bouillé at Montmédy in the morning. However, Lafayette’s orders from Paris arrived by 5:00 a.m. on 22 June, along with a decree from the assembly that the royals must return. And so they set out again, slowly retracing their path, accompanied by the National Guard and an angry, jeering crowd throwing dung at the liveried guards, who were prominently seated on top of the carriage like three bright badges of shame.
Robespierre was not in Paris on 20 June. He was in Versailles for the day, visiting his friends in the local Jacobin Club, tactfully explaining his decision to give up the post of judge on the Versailles tribunal, a position he had held since 1790 but never devoted any time to. Tact was required because Robespierre had recently been appointed public prosecutor in Paris and so had a good job to look forward to once the assembly’s business was finished and the new constitution went into effect. However, he remained anxious not to alienate his friends in Versailles. Just as he had cultivated every available source of support when standing for election in Arras, so Robespierre continued in 1791 to value each and every expression of interest in himself and his career, no matter how lowly or improbable. He definitely did not want the Jacobins at Versailles to think badly of him, especially when he was doing so well among the Paris Jacobins, so he went in person to apologize and explain. By happy coincidence, his visit fell on the day of the second anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath, and he joined the local Jacobin Club in its celebrations, amid cries of “Vive Robespierre! Vive the nation! Vive the Friends of the Constitution [Jacobins]!” “No one ever deserved flattery as much as Robespierre,” commented a Versailles newspaper approvingly.37
The next morning he woke to a city in tumult. Rumors of the royal flight filled the air and Robespierre had to fight his way to work through crowds of people all heading toward the Manège to find out what had happened in the Tuileries. He pushed his way through and was in his seat by nine. There was stunned silence in the assembly. Hoping to save the constitutional monarchy, Bailly, mayor of Paris, was maintaining that Louis XVI had been kidnapped against his will and that there was no reason for the assembly to distrust the king or his ministers. On his desk in the Tuileries, however, the king had left behind—in his own handwriting—a list of his complaints against the assembly and the constitution it was drafting. These ranged from regrets over the formal powers (such as direct control of the army) that he had been forced to relinquish, to more personal slights (especially the Assembly’s reduction of his personal revenues). This detailed account of his reasons for fleeing Paris was tantamount to a confession of guilt. There was uproar in the assembly, and Robespierre, urging his fellow deputies to “tell all good citizens to be vigilant for traitors,” could not make himself heard at greater length in the chaos. At lunchtime he went home with Pétion, his fellow radical deputy, to discuss the response these unforeseen developments required. The journalist Jacques Brissot was there at lunch, too, along with a newcomer, Manon Roland, both destined for political eminence over the coming year.