Dancing to the Precipice

by Caroline Moorehead

  In the second week of April, 50,000 Austrian troops were moved to the Belgian frontier. On the 20th, Louis XVI, believing that a successful war might also restore him to his proper place, went to the Assembly and proposed that France should begin hostilities, though much of his family and his court were by now in exile and on the opposing side. War–which would last, on and off, for almost 23 years–was declared. In the garrison at Strasbourg, a young army engineer called Rouget de Lisle came up with a catchy, rousing song that would remain famous long after the revolutionary music of Gossec and Grétry was forgotten. Soon, men all over France were marching to war to the Marseillaise, with its heady appeal to valour and patriotism and its images of the tainted blood of tyrants.

  For the French, the war did not start well. Despite the presence of able and seasoned military veterans in all three major theatres of war–Lafayette, Rochambeau and Luckner–the army was disorganised and still plagued by memories of the troubles at Nancy in which Frédéric had played a role. Many soldiers remained suspicious of their aristocratic officers. One of the first to fall foul of his men was Théobald Dillon, Arthur’s first cousin, who had served with him in the American war. Théobald had been commanding a force sent to attack the Austrians at Tournai. Retreating after encountering unexpectedly heavy opposition, he had been mistaken for a spy, lynched and hanged from a lamp-post in Lille, before his leg was hacked off and paraded around the town. Other officers, learning of his fate, hastened to resign and crossed the border to join the Army of the Princes.

  France itself, like its army, was in a troubled and volatile mood. As the value of the paper money, the assignats, kept falling, and news of grain shortages in the south and the southwest was reported, so there were increasing attacks on the barges and wagons carrying food. A ‘famine plot’ was talked about, apparently planned by scheming ‘counter-revolutionary forces’. Uprisings in the French West Indies, where tens of thousands of slaves in Saint-Domingue, under the free, highly intelligent Toussaint L’Ouverture, had destroyed a large number of plantations and made coffee and sugar, two commodities which had become staples in French life, prohibitively expensive. Into this mood of paranoia about food and anger towards those responsible for the shortages was emerging a new band of revolutionaries, the sans-culottes, artisans, shopkeepers and functionaries of the more militant Paris sections, who saw in the silk stockings and breeches of the old court everything they most deplored. The enemy was perceived to be not just the émigré army and the Austrians, gathering against France, but the ‘false patriots’ and fifth columnists at home. ‘To your pikes, good sans-culottes,’ urged Jacques-René Hébert, whose acerbic Père Duchesne was becoming the most popular of the revolutionary papers, ‘sharpen them up to exterminate aristocrats.’ The true patriot now was a man who wore, along with his tricolour cockade and red bonnet, pantaloons, suspenders, clogs and a short jacket, the carmagnole. Writing to Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, the last American diplomat left in Paris, remarked: ‘On the whole, Sir, we stand on a vast Volcano, we feel it tremble and we hear it roar…’

  At the end of May, as Frédéric kept a close and anxious eye on events in France from The Hague, and Lucie nursed her increasingly sick sister-in-law Cécile, the King in Paris was forced to agree to the disbanding of his own personal guard. Using his veto in the Assembly, he refused, however, to accept a decree to deport all ‘refractory’ priests. It was a stormy, wet summer. The Paris crowd was not in a mood to tolerate royal vetoes. On 20 June, a mob forced its way into the Tuileries, brandishing a gibbet with a doll dangling on a rope labelled ‘Marie Antoinette à la lanterne’, dragged a cannon up the staircase and battered down the doors to the royal apartments. The King was cornered, forced to place a red bonnet on his head and to swear allegiance to the Constitution.

  Events were moving very fast. The insults against Louis and Marie Antoinette had become such that they no longer dared to walk in the gardens. While 20,000 Guardsmen were converging on Paris for the 14 July celebrations, singing the Marseillaise and reducing the city to new levels of lawlessness, the Duke of Brunswick, commander-in-chief of the combined Austrian and Prussian forces, issued a memorandum promising an ‘exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance’ against anyone who harmed the French royal family.

  In the Assembly, where Robespierre called for unity and emergency powers, ‘la patrie’, the nation, was proclaimed to be ‘in danger’. An ‘insurrectionary commune’, made up of people from the more militant sections, and including Robespierre and Danton, was set up. The travelling soldier Desbassayns remarked that though the markets were full of peas there were very few apricots, and noted: ‘We have reached a moment of crisis.’

  All through the night of 9 August, the tocsin rang continuously. On the morning of the 10th, the royal family was taken for safety to the Assembly, where they were forced into a caged space usually reserved for reporters. A crowd, swollen by many Gardes armed with pistols, sabres, scythes, swords, pikes and knives, surrounded the Tuileries, which was lightly guarded by 900 Swiss soldiers together with a number of mounted gendarmes and about 300 aristocrats. The Swiss fired; the crowd retaliated. In the hours that followed, those defending the palace were stabbed, stoned, clubbed, bludgeoned to death. People poured into the Tuileries, killing everyone they caught, dragging them out of hiding places in the chapel, the attics or the cellars, looting and drinking as they went. The naked bodies of Swiss Guards, stripped of their distinctive red, blue and gold uniforms, were mutilated. When an English visitor to Paris, Mr Twiss, ventured out at three o’clock, he found the bridges, gardens and quays surrounding the Tuileries covered with bodies, dead, dying or drunk; sans-culottes and poissardes running about covered in blood; and bodies being loaded on to carts to be taken for burial in common lime pits. Looters, rummaging in the wardrobes of Marie Antoinette and her servants, emerged decked in feathers and pink petticoats. Marie Grosholz, later famous as Madame Tussaud, described seeing the gravel stained red, with flies buzzing around clotted pools of blood. Some of the women wore ears and noses pinned to their caps.

  The violence abated; but the monarchy had fallen. That night, the royal family slept in the Convent of the Feuillants. On the 13th, they were taken to the medieval tower of the old monastery of the Templars in the Marais. They were now prisoners. In L’Ami du Peuple, Marat spoke of 10 August as a ‘glorious day’. There would be, he added, no ‘false pity’ for tyrants. The Princesse de Lamballe and the children’s governess were separated from the royal family and taken to the prison of La Force. Inside the Temple, life resumed some kind of normal course. The King read in the excellent library of the Knights of Malta; Mme Eloffe was allowed to deliver clean linen; there were prayers, lessons, needlework. The meals remained relatively luxurious, soups, entrées, roasts and desserts, served on silver. What would happen to the royal family had not been decided.

  But the sudden outbreaks of frenzied violence were not over. Santerre, a brewer known for his revolutionary fervour, was made head of the Gardes. The events of 10 August were quickly recast by those now in power as a royal plot, courageously foiled. The newly formed Insurrectionary Commune called for the establishment of a military tribunal to try those accused of plotting against the republic. It had powers to arrest, question and punish, with no right of appeal. The task of tracking down the guilty was put into the hands of a new Comité de Surveillance; ‘domiciliary visits’ began, late at night or at dawn, to search for fugitives and incriminating documents. A revolutionary police state had effectively come into being. The Terror had begun.

  Over a thousand people, many of them ‘refractory’ priests, bishops, almoners and vicars, hiding in seminaries and churches, along with aristocrats and their servants, were rounded up; editors and printers deemed ‘counter-revolutionary’ were seized and their publications closed down. Among those sought were former ministers. Frédéric’s father, M. de la Tour du Pin, managed to make his way to Boulogne and crossed the Channel to Dover. Mme d’Hénin’s lover Lal
ly-Tollendal was caught in the net and sent to the prison of L’Abbaye, from where he wrote to a friend asking for clean shirts and a few bottles of wine.

  The war was still going well for L’Armée des Princes and its allies, who had crossed the French border on 14 August, scored a victory at Longwy and were advancing on Verdun. Goethe, attached to the Prussian army, found time to pin down the noise made by the cannons. They sounded, he wrote, like ‘the humming of tops, the gurgling of water, and the whistling of birds’.

  In the Assembly, Danton rose to describe fifth columnists, traitors to the patrie, lying low in Paris waiting to exact revenge should the royal family be threatened. The Orateur du Peuple printed a rousing article about the enemies at home. ‘The prisons,’ it said, ‘are full of conspirators…’ Marat spelt it out. ‘Good citizens’, he declared, on posters that went up on walls all over Paris, should go to the prisons, seize the priests and conspirators held there and ‘run a sword through them’. The city was sealed, its gates barricaded shut; drums were beaten; the tocsin was rung.

  Among the first to be dragged from their cells were 24 priests, hacked to death in the gardens of the prison of L’Abbaye. Over a hundred others were slaughtered in the Convent of the Carmelites, following a brief parody of a trial. Bishops were shot as they prayed. Vicars, abbots, parish priests, canons, almoners, seminarians, men known for their piety and learning, were murdered. The massacres, which had started on 2 September, continued into the 3rd. Nothing was done to stop the violence. The prisons of Bicêtre, La Force and La Salpêtrière housed not only the newly arrested clergy and nobility, but beggars, prostitutes, old women and the insane; they, too, were hauled out and killed, the youngest being a vagrant boy of 12. By the time the killing had played itself out, 1,400 people were dead, most of them hacked and battered to pieces. One of these was M. de Montmorin, Frédéric’s former employer at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Another was the Princesse de Lamballe, the blue-eyed, fair-haired friend of Marie Antoinette who, refusing to denounce the monarchy, had her head chopped off; it was impaled on a pike and borne off to the Temple, to be danced about under Marie Antoinette’s windows, before being carried to the Palais-Royal to be shown to her lover, the Duc d’Orléans. Lally-Tollendal miraculously survived by escaping through a window.

  Though the Duke of Brunswick was continuing to advance, the fortunes of the émigré army and its allies were in fact turning. The magnificent squadrons of mounted cavalry, noted by the Comte d’Espinchal in his diary of the campaign as being ‘almost entirely composed of the cream of the French nobility’ and filled with ‘indescribable enthusiasm and zeal’, were being routed. The initial force of 30,000 men, eroded to little more than 10,000 by incessant heavy rain and inadequate supplies, was halted at Valmy on 20 September. On the 30th, the Prussians sounded the retreat. It soon looked more like a stampede. Dragging carts piled high with sick or wounded men, the émigré force fell back through torrential rain and deep mud, losing men to marauding bands of French attackers, or abandoning them to die of dysentery in the ditches. The magnificent horses described by d’Espinchal were soaked and bedraggled. Returning to Koblenz, the Army of the Princes fell apart; its members began to disperse, carrying the French diaspora still further afield.

  Lucie’s father Arthur, to the fury of the Archbishop his uncle, who accused him of treachery, had remained in France. Many aristocratic families were now divided, their members at war with each other, the royalists outside France, plotting to bring down the revolution, the liberals inside the country, still hoping to be able to save a reformed constitutional monarchy. Promoted to lieutenant-general, Arthur had initially hoped to be sent to Martinique as colonial governor, to join his wife. But in the spring of 1792, shortly before the declaration of war, Arthur had been drafted to serve in the army. He was on the border with Flanders when he heard of the massacres in Paris. Always rash and outspoken, at heart a convinced monarchist, Arthur immediately declared that he would indeed renew his oath of allegiance: but it would be an oath to the King as well as to the Constitution, and he asked that his men do the same. His position, as a former aristocrat, with three Dillon relations serving on the other side with the Army of the Princes, was made more precarious when his friend Lafayette, judging that civil war was looming, deserted and crossed the lines to the Austrians. Arthur could, like Lafayette, have remained abroad in safety. Lucie begged him to join them in The Hague; but her father insisted on returning to Paris.

  For a while, Arthur, who was an excellent and brave soldier, was protected by Dumouriez, who had been promoted to supreme control of the French armed forces. He was sent to command the Army of the Ardennes, at one point holding out against 80,000 Prussians with only 10,000 men. At Verdun, however, he made a fatal mistake. Hoping to confuse the enemy with a series of phoney letters that he was confident would be intercepted, he was himself accused of treachery and recalled to Paris to defend himself before the Assembly. There, Arthur managed to persuade the deputies of his innocence, and was even able to secure compensation for the widow of his murdered cousin, Théobald, despite Marat’s accusation that Théobald was nothing but a royalist intriguer. But Arthur’s manner was brusque, and he had never been diplomatic. He was relieved of his command. Offered lowly alternative positions, he refused to take them, announcing that he would remain in Paris and keep requesting military reinstatement until offered a worthy command. As a friend observed, Arthur had defended himself ‘with zeal, too much zeal’.

  For the revolutionary French forces, victory followed victory. In Paris, every revolutionary triumph was greeted with jubilation, the heroic deeds of the victors celebrated on posters, in paintings and on the stage. ‘We cannot be calm until Europe, all Europe,’ declared Jacques-Pierre Brissot, emerging as one of the leaders of the revolution, ‘is in flames.’ Battalions of volunteers, some as young as 14, had responded when invasion threatened. All over France every man with two pairs of shoes gave up one for the defenders of the frontiers; women made bandages and scraped the walls of cellars to extract saltpetre for explosives. By the end of October, General Custine, M. de la Tour du Pin’s whiskery, red-faced friend, had occupied the Rhineland; in the south, Savoy and Nice fell to the French. The 6th November saw the winning Battle of Jemappes, after which Dumouriez and his men marched on Brussels, mercilessly requisitioning all they set eyes on as they went, and demanding vast indemnities, thereby setting a pattern for French conquest for the next 20 years.

  In Brussels, the thousand or so émigrés, settled in lodgings and hotels around the Grand Place, had believed themselves safe. But one evening, just as Lucie was preparing to leave for a reception at court in The Hague–at which she was a frequent and popular guest, despite Frédéric’s dismissal as ambassador–the Austrian Minister, the Prince de Starhemberg, arrived, looking ‘distraught’. ‘Everything is lost,’ he told her. ‘The French have defeated us completely. They are occupying Brussels.’

  For the Dutch, and for the French émigrés who filled their cities, Dumouriez’s advance was indeed disastrous. A friend arriving at The Hague from Brussels described to Lucie the flight from the city of the thousand or so émigrés who had taken refuge there. He told her of scenes of chaos, as frantic people, piling their belongings on to every waggon, dray and carriage they could get their hands on, fled the city. For many it had been their second, or even third, sudden flight. The wisest and those ‘most plentifully provided with funds’, made their way to England. Somewhat sternly, with the self-righteousness of youth mixed with her own tendency to take a firm moral line, Lucie noted how appallingly some of the richer émigrés behaved towards those without money. ‘Many of them,’ she observed, ‘presented a sorry spectacle of the most shocking heartlessness towards their companions of misfortune.’ Vowing that she herself would certainly never help them should they fall on hard times themselves, ‘I hastened,’ she wrote later, ‘to offer my services to the most heavily stricken and paid very little attention to the richer.’ Lucie herself
had just miscarried again, at around five months into her pregnancy. She was not very well, but she did not complain.

  The French émigrés, perched precariously in towns and villages over the borders in Switzerland, Italy, the German States, Belgium and the Austrian Netherlands, were indeed in an increasingly impossible position. In their absence, ever more punishing edicts had been issued against them: one by one, their rights had been curtailed, their relations threatened, their lives menaced, their houses and lands marked for sequestration and sale as biens nationaux, national properties. Already dispossessed of their feudal dues, desperate not to lose everything they owned, but fearing imprisonment and execution if they returned home, they were also running out of what little money they had taken with them into an exile that all assumed would only be brief. Their hosts in the border towns were, for their part, growing increasingly impatient with guests who seemed incapable of understanding that the ancien régime was over, and who continued to gossip, gamble and hold salons, while borrowing vast sums of money. In several places, these unwanted exiles were now being ordered to move on, and parties of desolate French counts and marquises, sinking ever deeper into debt and penury, could be encountered trailing along the roads of Europe, spending their nights in their carriages and selling their last pieces of jewellery. Outside villages could now be seen signs: ‘émigrés not wanted here’. ‘Our fate,’ noted one mournful count, briefly finding refuge in Spa, ‘is to be ceaselessly victims of events.’

  Lucie and Frédéric, who had been sent to The Hague on official business, were in a somewhat different category, and Frédéric, since his dismissal by Dumouriez, had spent a considerable amount of time back in France. When, in the late autumn of 1792, fresh penalties against émigrés were voted through the Assembly, banishing them from France in perpetuity and arranging for the immediate sale of their properties, Frédéric decided that it would be sensible for Lucie to return, to try to ensure that the house in the rue du Bac would not be seized. From Paris, he wrote to tell her that too much was at stake for her to delay any longer. Frédéric’s father had also decided to leave London and come back to Paris, saying that he refused to do anything that would jeopardise the remaining inheritance of his children. The full meaning of the dispossession of the Church and the nobility was at last clear to Lucie. Up until this moment, she wrote, ‘I was still no campaigner, but as delicate, as much a fine lady and as spoiled as it was possible to be…I still thought that I had accepted the greatest sacrifice that anyone could require of me when I agreed to do without the services of my elegant maid and my footman-hairdresser.’