Dancing to the Precipice

by Caroline Moorehead

  However, the England of the 1790s was no longer the revolutionary England of the 17th century, but a thriving, conservative land, and stories of heads on pikes and the assault on Versailles had troubled even those who strongly opposed absolute monarchy. Burke’s view–that reform based on abstract philosophical principles was doomed to failure, and that only slow modifications, produced over time, lasted–found willing listeners in London. To make a tabula rasa of the past, Burke warned, was to ‘insult nature’. Though he attacked the profligate spending of the nobility, and maintained that the existing order needed to be reformed, his views were somewhat tempered by his great admiration for the French court and particularly for Marie Antoinette, whom he described as ‘glittering like the morning star, full of life, splendour and joy’. As for the nobility, they were ‘men of high spirit and a delicate sense of honour…well bred, humane and hospitable’.

  In France, Reflections sold well, particularly to the royalists and those who still believed it possible to combine reform and monarchy. For Frédéric and his father, as for Mme de Staël, Burke’s words struck a chord. The Jacobins preferred to buy Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man with its attacks on despotism and tyranny and its celebration of God-given ‘rights’.

  After the mutiny at Nancy, M. de la Tour du Pin appeared discouraged and depressed. He was, wrote Lucie, increasingly ‘powerless before the intrigues of the Assembly’. It was becoming clear to him, as it was to the Marquis de Bouillé, that discipline in the army was collapsing and that civil war threatened. After the plans he had drawn up for the reform of the army were rejected, he had written to offer his resignation to the King. It was refused, but in the Assembly there were cries of ‘Sack the ministers’ from deputies who wanted the appointment of diplomats and ministers to be put in the hands of the people rather than the King. Later, M. de Bouillé wrote that it had been exceptionally fortunate to have had such an excellent and virtuous man in so essential a post at that time; he urged M. de la Tour du Pin to make whatever concessions were needed in order to remain at his post ‘for you may find yourself one day in the position to render the King a great service’.

  But Frédéric’s father’s position was becoming untenable. On 10 November, Danton accused him in the Assembly of being an enemy of the revolution, a despot and an incompetent; he called for him to be tried. Clamours for his dismissal followed; the ministers, the deputies shouted, were all ‘clowns who do nothing but move their lips’. M. de la Tour du Pin again tendered his resignation; this time it was accepted. Writing to the King, he said that every day he had seen his honour compromised and been forced to witness ‘every kind of sickening event’. Later, among the King’s papers, was found a draft of a letter Louis had written to his Minister for War. M. de la Tour du Pin had been, it said, a good and devoted servant to him, and he would never forget it.

  Frédéric himself had spent some months working on a plan for the reorganisation of the army: the King now proposed to him that he take his father’s place at the ministry. Frédéric, fearing a political backlash, refused. But he did agree to go instead to Holland as Minister Plenipotentiary in the autumn, after the Constitution had been accepted. Since they were obliged to move out of the Hôtel de Choiseul, Lucie, Frédéric, Humbert, Marguerite and M. de la Tour du Pin accepted the Princesse d’Hénin’s offer of her house in the rue de Varennes, taking with them Cécile and her children. Augustin was away with his regiment. For the first time, Lucie began to understand the precariousness of their financial position. With her father-in-law’s salary gone, and their seigneurial dues vanished, there would be only Frédéric’s wages to support a considerable number of people.

  Cécile was fascinated by the deliberations in the Assembly and spent most of her days in a box at the edge of the Chamber lent to her by one of the King’s equerries. Lucie occasionally accompanied her, but preferred her piano and Italian lessons. In the afternoons, she rode in the Bois de Boulogne with her cousin Dominic Sheldon, on a lively thoroughbred whose ‘step and manner I enjoyed tremendously’. Since game was no longer protected as a royal privilege there was little to be seen in forests once teeming with deer, wild boar, pheasants, partridges and rabbits. The King had given up his hunt, and most of the birds and animals had been slaughtered. It was characteristic of the strange sense of calm that pervaded Paris, 18 months after the fall of the Bastille, that a young woman on a fine horse, evidently a member of the nobility, could ride in safety in the company of only her cousin or a single groom, often staying out until dusk.

  But even Lucie could not be oblivious to the violence that now marked most Parisian days. One afternoon, in the spring of 1791, returning home in the early evening accompanied only by her English groom, Lucie was stopped at the end of the rue de Varennes by the Garde Nationale. She turned back and tried to enter the street by one of the other roads leading to it. All were blocked. Eventually, in the rue de l’Université, she was allowed in. As she rode past the Hôtel de Castries, she saw that the house had been ransacked, its furniture dragged out into the courtyard, its mirrors shattered, the windows and doors wrenched off their hinges. A riot, it turned out, had been orchestrated by Charles and Alexandre de Lameth, after Charles had been slightly injured in a duel with the Duc de Castries that morning. Lucie knew the duke and his family well, having been a visitor to the house all her life. Lafayette had been warned in advance of the attack, she wrote later, and had delayed sending the Gardes to the house, through ‘laziness’, and she hoped that it had not been through some more sinister motive.

  From her windows in the rue de Varennes, Cécile had watched the de Lameths’ Italian secretary urging the rioters on. Since the fall of the Bastille, the three de Lameth brothers had taken very different political paths. Augustin, Cécile’s husband, remained a liberal monarchist, like Frédéric and his father, while Charles and Alexandre were emerging as powerful voices among the Jacobins, trying to become, Lucie contemptuously noted, ‘the idols of the people’. Neither Cécile nor Augustin any longer spoke to his brothers, and Lucie herself cut them dead if she met them in the street.

  On the eve of Epiphany, Talleyrand had written to his former mistress, Mme de Flahaut: ‘Poor Kings! I think that their celebrations and their reigns will soon be a thing of the past. Mirabeau himself fears that we are moving too fast, with too large steps, towards a republic.’ For some time now, Mirabeau, who, for all his booming oratorical skills, had a shrewd sense of the workings of government, had been fighting in the Assembly to preserve for the King at least some of his powers, hoping to find ways to reconcile the revolution with the monarchy, in order to safeguard liberty. ‘The people,’ he warned, ‘have been promised more than can be promised; they have been given hopes that will be impossible to realise…’. When, at the end of February, the Assembly debated whether to set up a committee to determine the right of anyone to enter or leave France, Mirabeau, seeing in this the beginnings of a police state, fought hard against it, saying that it was not constitutional. Among the Jacobins, he was loudly criticised for betraying the revolution, but his standing was such that he survived: his flourishes of rhetoric and passion charmed his audiences.

  Then, one morning, he was struck down with severe pains to his stomach. He struggled on, making speeches, while day by day his great voice shrank to a gravelly whisper. On 2 April, he asked to be shaved; then declared that he was dying. ‘When one has come to that,’ he observed, ‘all one can do is be perfumed, crowned with flowers, enveloped in music and wait comfortably for the sleep from which one will never awaken.’ He was 42.

  The idea of transforming Soufflot’s stark neo-classical Church of Sainte Geneviève into a Pantheon for patriots and heroes, stripped of all religion, a place to celebrate life and not death, well predated the revolution. As Paris mourned the turbulent, philandering Mirabeau–his sexual appetites and colossal debts obligingly forgotten–plans were made to give him the most magnificent funeral. On 4 April, at six o’clock in the evening, a lead urn containing
Mirabeau’s heart, where his passion and candour were said to reside, was borne through the streets of the capital by eight black horses covered in black velvet studded with silver stars, followed by a procession of Guardsmen, their rifles reversed and their drums muffled, and a band with piccolo, flutes, oboes, clarinets, French horns, bassoons and trumpets. Virtually the entire Assembly as well as most of the Jacobins followed behind. It was later said that 300,000 Parisians had turned out, in the fading dusk, to watch their dead hero carried past by the light of flaming torches. ‘It seemed,’ wrote Nicolas Ruault, to his brother, ‘that we were travelling with him to the world of the dead.’

  The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ were being used regularly in the Assembly–the patriots sitting to the left of the President, the monarchists to the right–where debates, as the spring of 1791 wore on, were increasingly divisive and acrimonious. Out of power, but anxiously aware of the anger which seemed to consume Paris, Frédéric and his father listened, talked and felt powerless. They were sometimes joined by Arthur, still a member of the Assembly.

  The lifting of censorship meant that pamphleteers and editors on all sides could join in the discussions, so that the speeches of the men who were coming to dominate the Assembly and the Jacobins–Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Desmoulins–were printed in the newspapers. The Jacobins, taking some of their rituals and symbols from the Freemasons, had won followers in provincial towns and regarded themselves as guardians of revolutionary purity. But there were many other clubs, where men came to discuss politics and the new order. Paris was alive with orators, spinning webs of revolutionary fervour.

  The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen had generously promised freedom and equality to all Frenchmen. But on the subject of slaves and women it had been silent. Among the debates raging in the Assembly were calls for the abolition of France’s highly lucrative slave trade and the granting of rights to the men, women and children working the sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton plantations of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue. Just before the revolution, Brissot de Warville, spurred on by the new anti-slavery movements among English and American Quakers and liberals, had founded a Société des Amis des Noirs, with the goal of bringing to an end the ‘horrible traffic in negroes’. Among its early members were three dukes, two princes, seven marquises, eight counts, one archbishop and any number of merchants, magistrates and financiers. For Condorcet, long an outspoken abolitionist, slavery was a crime far worse than theft.

  But the Antilles were extremely important to France. The small colony of Saint-Domingue alone, with its 30,000 whites and 465,000 blacks, produced greater riches in sugar and coffee than any other colony in the world. And in the Assembly were many delegates–Lafayette and Talleyrand, both absentee owners of plantations, among them–who opposed abolition on the grounds that the slaves were necessary for the prosperity of France, and that in any case humane slavery was a better condition for black people than freedom in their own heathen African countries. As Montesquieu had written, it was hard to comprehend how God, in all his wisdom, could have put a soul, let alone a good soul, into a totally black body.

  One of these anti-abolitionists was Arthur who, having come from the Antilles with a mission to safeguard the economy of the colonies, spoke passionately in the Assembly against over-hasty abolition. To counter the arguments of the Société des Amis des Noirs, Dillon and a number of plantation owners set up their own club, the Massiac, pointing out that there was no one among the abolitionists who had actually ever been to the Antilles or understood how colonialism worked. The Massiac established branches in the French ports, to keep a close eye on the comings and goings of ‘négrophiles’. But as the tide of liberty swept on, Arthur and his friends were overruled. After many fierce debates and reports of growing revolutionary ferment in the islands, the Assembly voted to grant full legal rights to blacks, whether in the colonies or in France; but only, for the moment, to those born to free parents.

  Arthur, having argued that France would end up losing its colonies and its trade to the English by pandering to egalitarian chimeras and been defeated, resigned from the Assembly. He was now without a job and, as always, without money, though his fortunes took a turn for the better when compensation was at last paid for the confiscated Dillon regiment which had been formally incorporated into the French army as the 87th regiment of the line. Lucie, visiting her father frequently, was conscious of the many years she had been without him. She had become extremely fond of him, as had Frédéric, though their views on many issues–such as slavery–were markedly different.

  Women, however, fared rather less well than slaves in the Assembly. In 1789, France’s for the most part illiterate female population had listened to the discourse of rights and wondered what it might achieve for them. It was women who had, after all, led the march on Versailles. Freed at last to reimagine a world made on their own terms, they began to suggest that they should have a say in their choice of husband, and even over how they wished to live. Like Frédéric’s mother, any adulterous woman could be put away by her husband in a convent for two years, and forced to remain there indefinitely if he did not want her back. In Paris, groups of women now opened their own clubs, went to meet friends and talk in cafés, and sat in the public gallery of the Salle du Manège, where they heckled the delegates.

  They soon found a champion, in the shape of the 42-year-old daughter of a butcher and widow of a banker called Olympe de Gouges, who came up with her own Declaration of the Rights of Women. It was time, said de Gouges, that Frenchwomen were made aware of their ‘deplorable fate’. Contrary to the opinion of dozens of tendentious philosophers, she declared, there was no proper evidence to prove that women, supposedly frail creatures with poor powers of reasoning, were actually inferior to men. They should be entitled to vote, to take government jobs, to have parity with men over money and, ‘especially’, they should resist the ‘oppression’ under which they currently lived. And they also needed their own, female, national assembly. A devoted monarchist, de Gouges dedicated her Declaration to Marie Antoinette, which may have done neither her nor the Queen any good.

  Another champion for women was a novelist and journalist called Louise de Kéralio, who achieved rather more when she proposed in an article in the Mercure Nationale, of which she was editor-in-chief, that the polite form of ‘vous’ should be put in quarantine, and the more familiar ‘tu’ used instead, suggesting that this would lead to more ‘fraternity’ and consequently to ‘more equality’. Not long afterwards, tutoiement became obligatory, the polite form effectively vanishing for some years, along with Monsieur and Madame, who became Citoyen and Citoyenne. But neither de Gouges nor de Kéralio made much progress against 18th-century men’s fears that women would cease to be women if given rights. It would not be long before the Committee of Public Safety disbanded the successful women’s clubs, after so-called ‘Jacobines’ were spotted in the markets wearing red trousers and red bonnets. As the committee pointed out, man, born strong, robust, full of energy, courage and boldness, destined to play a part in commerce, navigation, wars and ‘everything that demands force, intelligence, capability’, was alone suited to ‘great mental concentration’.

  Lucie, growing up in a world in which clever and articulate women wielded considerable subtle influence, would see herself, not freed, but silenced, relegated to a life of domestic obscurity, forbidden all political activity. The day of the true salon hostess, with her deft and delicate sense of power, was, for the time being, over. The role of the citoyenne was to be the virtuous Roman matron of David’s republican paintings, not a politician.

  After a winter of incessant rain, spring had arrived early, bringing blossom to the Tuileries gardens, where pear, apricot and peach all flowered in March. By May 1791, there were peas, asparagus and strawberries in the markets. Frédéric’s job as Minister to Holland had been confirmed and in the rue de Varennes, where Lucie was packing cases to send ahead to The Hague, the lilac smelt v
ery sweetly. The city was quiet enough for a visiting soldier called Desbassayns to spend a peaceful day at Versailles, where he visited the very dilapidated Ménagerie, to find the rhinoceros sharing its cage with a dog, and a strange, pale, stripy animal which he identified as a cross between a zebra and a donkey. The novelty on the streets of Paris was a horseless carriage, propelled by two men pedalling, while a third sat in front to steer.

  When Voltaire became the third person to be interred in the Panthéon–the first had been Descartes, the second Mirabeau–his coffin removed from the abbey in which he had been buried, Lucie and Frédéric went to watch what she called the ‘unseemly splendour’ of the procession. An immense chariot, drawn by four white horses, its wheels cast in bronze, carried the porphyry sarcophagus on which an effigy of Voltaire reclined, asleep; in front of it walked 20 young girls in white robes strewing flowers from golden baskets to the martial beat of military bands. In the midst of such turmoil and uncertainty, it was a curiously innocent scene.

  Mirabeau’s vision of a modified monarchy, with ministers accountable to a legislative body, might perhaps have worked; but by the late spring of 1791 too many forces were stacked against it. Its chief architect, Mirabeau, was dead; the King’s chronic indecisiveness was getting worse; and Marie Antoinette was in fact behaving precisely as her enemies suspected, encouraging schemes for counter-revolution. Hostility towards the woman they now called ‘l’Autrichienne’ was turning more vicious all the time; in the Tuileries gardens, when Marie Antoinette went walking, her clothes were sometimes ripped by jeering passers-by. Mesdames Tantes, Adélaïde and Victoire, the King’s elderly aunts, had signified their distaste for the way the revolution was going by leaving for Rome (having taken the precaution of ordering four ‘grand tabliers de taffetas vert d’Italie’ to take with them, the current fashion being to wear little aprons in bright colours), though their departure was delayed by angry crowds.