Dancing to the Precipice

by Caroline Moorehead

  Paris itself, like a metaphor for the ills consuming the country, had never smelt so rank or so sinister, a putrefying ‘miasma’ seeping out from graves, basements and underground prisons, a silent fermentation that threatened to engulf the entire city. The houses, warned Mercier, were now ‘leaning over abysses’. In the gardens of the Palais-Royal, the stench of urine and faeces was overwhelming; along the Avenue de Saint-Cloud at Versailles dead cats lay in stagnant water, while livestock, wandering into the great gallery, left behind trails of dung. Paris, observed a visitor, the world centre of the arts, fashion and good taste, had become the ‘centre of stench’. No amount of ‘odiferous balls’, of lemons studded with cloves, of sachets of rue, mint and rosemary, could drive it away.

  The Assembly of Notables, with its 144 nobles and clerics, had not proved biddable. After many false starts it had convened, only to refuse to endorse Calonne’s proposed land tax, prompting Lafayette to remark that the Notables might perhaps better be called Not-Ables. So futile was the whole exercise perceived to be, with its grandiose flights of rhetoric, that in one satirical cartoon, a monkey was shown addressing a group of chickens: ‘My dear creatures,’ it was saying, ‘I have assembled you here to deliberate on the sauce in which you will be served.’ Calonne was dismissed, and Loménie de Brienne, the Archbishop of Toulouse–whom the King had turned down as Archbishop of Paris on the grounds, so it was said, that he thought that the primate of the French Church should at least believe in God–was appointed Principal Minister. Brienne was an excellent administrator, keen to implement a number of sensible and liberal policies, intended to stabilise the state; but again the Notables rejected them. This time, however, it was they who fell, and the Assembly was disbanded.

  Brienne now tried to get at least some of the measures through the Paris parliament, promising economies in government as well as at court (the cravat holders and wolf hunters of the royal household were to go), but the parliamentarians, sensing loss of power, fanned the flames of dissent, gaining support from the people and from the provincial parliaments. Discontent with the King, spear-headed by the nobility, who argued that they were protecting France from ministerial despotism, was spreading throughout the country. On 7 August 1788, with serious crop failures caused by hailstorms, a run on banks and the collapse of government stocks, the King agreed to convoke the Estates General. It was Brienne’s turn to be forced from office, despite support from the powerful clerics on whom he had showered patronage. Necker was recalled as Director General of Finances, and he announced that all reforms were to be postponed until the Estates General met.

  There had been no Estates General for more than 170 years. This archaic body, first convened by Philip III in 1302 to give counsel at times of crisis, had not actually met since 1614. The crucial question was how it was going to be composed. The First Estate, the clergy, representing the 10,000 members of the Catholic Church, combined with the Second, the nobility, speaking for 400,000 nobles, both of which enjoyed numerous privileges and rights, hoped to vote together. This way they could block any proposed reforms put forward by the Third Estate, who represented France’s 25 million people. However, the First Estate included large numbers of parish priests, far closer to their parishioners than to the aristocratic bishops and cardinals; and the Second, many liberal nobles, reared on the Enlightenment and genuinely hoping for reform. With these liberals were Frédéric and his father, the de Lameth brothers, the Duc de Lauzun, Lafayette and the wild, unruly Comte de Mirabeau, the writer and polemicist, men who had recently founded a Society of Thirty to promote reform.

  Among these aristocratic liberals, meeting in the salons of Mme Necker, in the Palais-Royal or in Mme de Genlis’s pavilion to talk about the rights of man, the abolition of privileges or the sale of Church property, was Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, recently made Bishop of Autun, a man better known for his scheming and amorality than for his piety, but clever, witty, full of irony and charm. Like Archbishop Dillon, Talleyrand saw no difficulty in having mistresses and was already the father of a son; he was a fine-looking man, with a genial if slightly sly expression, and a full head of hair, curled back in the fashion of the day. He was also lame, with a severely deformed right foot. True philosophers, declared Talleyrand, should ‘adore God, serve Kings, love mankind’. He would play an important part in Lucie and Frédéric’s lives.

  These liberals, among them not only Frédéric but also his father and his brothers-in-law, wished to double the representation of the Third Estate from 300 to 600, thus making them equal to the first two Estates combined and weakening the entrenched autocracy of Church and nobility. When, two days after Christmas 1788, the Royal Council met to consider their proposal, Necker voted in favour, and the King reluctantly agreed.

  Much of the population of France, by 1789, could not read, or only barely. This did not prevent an outpouring of pamphlets, allegorical compositions and political caricatures from flooding the capital. Libelle literature, purporting to use precise descriptions, dialogue and phrases from letters to create the illusion of an accurate picture of the scandalous and licentious life at court, as seen by an invisible fly on the wall, was being circulated all round Paris. To this were now added tracts, journals, almanacs, pamphlets and posters, all reflecting the growing state of turmoil and uncertainty. Every day, observed the Parisian journalist and author Nicolas Ruault, it was ‘raining pamphlets and brochures’. Along with the caricatures came scurrilous songs and plays, drawing on an ancient vein of satire against the clergy. In Charles IX, a popular play by Marie-Joseph Chénier, the King was depicted as a devious and amoral halfwit, surrounded by cardinals and bishops plotting to exterminate good citizens.

  In January 1789, a radical priest called the Abbé Sieyès, whose essays would mirror the coming revolutionary ferment, produced a pamphlet attacking what he described as the parasitic nobility and clergy. What, asked Sieyès, is the Third Estate? ‘Everything. What has it represented in the political order until now? Nothing. What is it asking for? To become something.’ ‘Qu’est-ce-que le Tiers Etat?’ (‘What is the Third Estate?’) became the most famous essay of the day. Everyone knew what the First and Second Estates were. The question, now, was just what, exactly, the Third Estate might become.

  Early in 1789 began one of the most ambitious exercises in political consultation ever undertaken. A hundred thousand copies of a leaflet, explaining in detail the composition and the purpose of the Estates General, were printed and distributed. It was addressed neither to women, nor to servants, nor to actors, but even so its scope was vast, and people were encouraged to speak out through cahiers de doléances, books of grievances. All through the late winter and early spring they did so, loudly, coherently and very firmly, demanding a radical review of all forms of taxation and an end to seigneurial and ecclesiastical dues.

  The winter was bitterly cold. The Seine froze almost all the way to Le Havre. In the Channel, fish died and oysters were brought up from the depths in Brittany frozen solid. In Paris’s fashionable streets glided sleighs in the shape of dragons and sirens, their passengers enveloped in fur-lined velvet cloaks trimmed with gold braid, their coachmen decked out as moujiks with long false beards. The spring brought floods. The price of both bread and firewood almost doubled in six months. Twenty-five thousand silk workers were out of work in Lyon, and 10,000 textile workers in Rouen. Necker used what very little money he could still raise to buy grain abroad in order to prevent famine, but there were attacks on bakeries in Brittany and riots in the Midi, the Dauphiné, Provence and the Languedoc. On the streets of Paris, thousands of beggars clamoured for food and some were put to work, for 20 sous a day, digging the hills of Montmartre. Everyone was waiting to see what the harvest of 1789 would bring.

  Candidates for nominations to the Estates General put themselves forward. To Lucie’s immense relief–for she had a presentiment, she wrote later, that disaster was looming–Frédéric, who stood for the Second Estate for both Nemours and Gr
enoble, failed to get himself elected. Archbishop Dillon, perceived as too venal and too partisan, also failed to win a place among the First Estate. But Lucie’s father-in-law, M. de la Tour du Pin, was elected to represent Saintonge, and the de Lameth brothers, Talleyrand, Lafayette, Mirabeau and Condorcet all secured places.

  At the court, and among the Parisian nobility, the spring arrived with its customary round of social diversions. Lucie, who remarked later that never had Paris seemed less anxious or more intent on pleasure, was constantly either at the theatre or at balls. ‘Many upright and honourable people’, she wrote, continued to believe that France, albeit reformed but with its monarchy, landed aristocracy and powerful Church basically unchanged, was about to enter on a ‘Golden Age’. She herself was no longer as certain. On 27 April, she accompanied Pulchérie de Valance to the races at Vincennes to watch the Duc d’Orléans’s horses, with their English jockeys, run against those of the Comte d’Artois. They travelled under the Duc d’Orléans’s livery, since M. de Valance was First Equerry to the Duke. On their way back into Paris in the afternoon, they were stopped by a menacing crowd but, once the people recognised the Duke’s livery, there were cheers of ‘Long live d’Orléans’, for d’Orléans, unlike most of the rest of the royal family, remained popular with Parisians for his outspoken, reforming opinions.

  Only later did Lucie hear that there had been an attack on the wallpaper factory of a man called Réveillon, sparked off by a false rumour that he had been planning to reduce his workers’ wages. Riots spread across the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and Réveillon’s factory was burnt to the ground, along with his entire stock of printing blocks, machines and warehouses. The Gardes were called out to confront the rioters and by nightfall had killed some 50 people. The incident, Lucie noted later, was all the more unfortunate because Réveillon was in fact a generous employer, who, earlier in his life, had saved one of his workmen from debtors’ prison and his family from starvation.

  Once the elections to the Estates General were over, and 1,196 men selected to represent constituencies from all over France, Lucie, Frédéric and the Princesse d’Hénin moved to Versailles for the opening ceremony. To absorb the delegates, their families and servants, the town had become a vast hotel, people crammed into every room and attic. The Princesse d’Hénin still had an apartment on an upper floor, above the Galerie des Princes, which overlooked the Orangery and the gardens to the south. The governor of Versailles, the Prince de Poix, offered them his house at the Ménagerie at the far end of one arm of the canal, opposite the Trianon, almost half a mile from the palace itself. Here, next to the elephant and the rhinoceros, looking out across the park, the water and the rides, Lucie and the Princesse installed themselves in great comfort, with footmen, a cook, horses and Lucie’s English groom. Versailles was extremely lively. There was still, remembered Lucie later, no real concern about events, only a sense that the Estates General would give birth to a new, better, more egalitarian and more prosperous France. ‘Amid all these pleasures,’ she wrote, ‘we were laughing and dancing our way to the precipice.’ And, she added, while such blindness was pardonable among the young, it was ‘inexplicable in men of the world, in Ministers and above all, in the King’.

  Frédéric was so annoyed at having failed to be elected to the Estates General that he decided to rejoin his regiment and refused to wait for the opening session on 5 May. But Lucie watched it all. The day before, a magnificent day of early summer, with bright sunshine and sparkling light following a night of heavy rain, the royal family, the court and the 800 delegates who had already reached Versailles, had attended a solemn Mass in the Church of Notre Dame. The procession of the Holy Sacrament to the church had been a brilliant display of scarlet, purple and gold for the two upper Estates, of black and white for the Third. In front were mounted falconers in medieval dress holding hooded birds, and heralds on white horses, in purple velvet embroidered with fleurs de lys, blowing trumpets. Of the royal princes, only the Duc d’Orléans walked apart, preferring to march with the Third Estate. The King was loudly cheered; but the Queen was not. Lucie, standing with the Princesse de Poix at the windows of the royal stables, thought she looked sad and cross.

  On the morning of 5 May, 3,000 people crammed themselves into the Salle des Menus Plaisirs, the former storeroom for scenery and props, redecorated with white and gold Doric columns and hung with magnificent Gobelin tapestries. Behind the King’s throne on its golden dais hung purple velvet hangings, picked out in gold fleurs de lys. The three Estates were seated separately. The King and the Princes of Royal Blood wore robes of the Order of the Holy Ghost, the King’s, noted Lucie, more ‘thickly encrusted with diamonds and more richly embroidered’. She decided that he looked very undignified, standing awkwardly and walking ‘with a waddle’. All Louis’s movements, she wrote later, ‘were abrupt and lacking in grace’; and, since he refused to wear glasses, he screwed up his eyes in order to see. The Queen, sitting on a platform just below his purple and gold throne, wore white satin and a cloak of purple velvet. From the way she used her fan, she seemed to Lucie very agitated. She appeared to be scouring the faces of the seated ranks of the Third Estate, among whom she knew she had many enemies, as if she were searching for something. Gouverneur Morris, also studying the Queen’s face during the King’s speech, observed that she looked as if she were crying. Her eldest son, the 7-year-old Dauphin, was very ill, in the last stages of tuberculosis.

  There was an awkward moment when Mirabeau, the renegade philosopher count, already emerging as the most inventive and brilliant orator of the revolution, and one of a handful of nobles who had secured a place to represent not the Second, but the Third Estate, that of the people, arrived to take his place. When he moved towards the middle of one of a row of benches, those close to him moved away; throughout the hall could be heard a low, hostile hiss from the nobles who regarded him as a traitor. As he took his place among the lawyers and shopkeepers, Lucie thought his smile looked ‘contemptuous’. She found Necker’s two-hour opening speech about tax and administrative reforms extremely boring. Seated on a wide, backless bench reserved for those ladies of the court not actually in attendance on the Queen that day, she felt obliged to ‘maintain an impeccable attitude’ throughout interminable sentences that to her 19-year-old ears had little of meaning or interest.

  There was also a moment of comedy, when the Third Estate, unaware of the age-old ritual of the doffing of hats by the King and the nobility, began doffing their own, unleashing a round of further doffing and more replacing of hats, until the King put an end to the confusion by firmly replacing his ‘Henri IV’, a great white plumed beaver hat with an enormous diamond. After many speeches, some of them inaudible to much of the vast audience, the King left the hall, urging the delegates to avoid ‘dangerous innovations’. ‘Here drops,’ noted Gouverneur Morris, ‘the curtain on the first great Act of this drama.’

  From the first, the meetings of the Estates General were extremely noisy, with the delegates all eager to speak at once, and rancourous. Germaine de Staël, sitting near Lucie, remarked that the tone was also a curious mixture of frivolity and pedantry. Most of the Third Estate were men who had in some way been touched by the Enlightenment, and they had come to Versailles envisaging not rebellion but reform and believing that a king, even if not this king, was central to the idea of a state. Among the Second Estate were 4 princes, 16 dukes and 83 marquises; many were also soldiers, and most were very rich. No one had liked Necker’s speech, neither the people, who felt that he regarded them as little other than provincial administrators, nor the nobles, who were against the proposed new taxes. Weeks passed in deadlock, all progress halted by disagreement over how they should even meet or vote.

  As the proceedings dragged on, early on the morning of 4 June, the Dauphin, Louis-Joseph, died. According to custom, he lay in state at Meudon, where deputies from all three of the Estates came to sprinkle holy water on the small corpse. Later his heart, in an urn, was taken to th
e Benedictine convent of Val-de-Grâce, while his coffin, covered in a silver cloth, with the crown, sword and orders of the Dauphin of France laid on top, made its way to the crypt of Saint-Denis. When members of the Third Estate insisted on a meeting with the King three days later, Louis, sombre and uncommunicative, commented: ‘So there are no fathers among the Third Estate?’ Marie Antoinette had lost two of her children in two years. Two were left, Marie-Thérèse, who was 11, and 4-year-old Louis-Charles, who now became Dauphin.

  On 10 June, still locked in disagreement, the Third Estate invited the nobility and the clergy to meet them in a general session. This was refused. On the 17th, they issued a unilateral declaration that they were henceforth to be known as the National Assembly. Necker, hoping to isolate the extremists, urged the King to consider a package of reforms, to be debated at a plenary session. A misunderstanding developed. When, on 20 June, the Third Estate arrived at the Menus Plaisirs, they found the doors locked and barred: the King, assuming that nothing more would happen before the plenary session, had simply suspended the proceedings. Suspecting a royal coup, the Third Estate repaired to the nearby Jeu de Paume, Louis XIV’s tennis court, from where they issued the famous Tennis Court Oath: they would not leave, they declared, until a new constitution was agreed.

  Three days later the King agreed to endorse most of Necker’s reforms. He promised to abolish the hated lettres de cachet and to give greater freedom both to the press and to individuals; and he accepted that he would govern, in the future, with an elected assembly. However, he refused to break up the separate Estates, which effectively meant that the clergy and the nobility, voting together, could continue to block motions put forward by the people. When the moment came to disperse, the Third Estate refused to leave the building. ‘We are here by the power of the people,’ declared Mirabeau, ‘and will leave only at the point of a bayonet.’