by Susie Kelly
Upstairs a few reconstructed cells show how prisoners lived while awaiting trial. Members of the riff-raff element slept upon piles of straw on the floor. The middle classes who were able to afford a little comfort could have a bed, and wealthy aristos had the luxury of chairs and writing desks too. What happened to the “liberty, equality and fraternity” which was the slogan of the Revolution?
Once prisoners had been condemned they had little time to fret. They went to their death the following day after emptying their pockets and having a final haircut in that last chance saloon, the tiny and sparse Salle de la Dernière Toilette. From there they passed through a small doorway leading out to the street where the tumbrels waited. The doorway is still there. I thought I might have caught, from the corner of my eye, a transparent figure passing through it.
The twenty-one Girondist deputies became victims of the same Revolution that they had been instrumental in unleashing. They are pictured having a jolly party in their chapel on the eve of their execution. Elegant and relaxed, they sit at, or stand around a long table whose white cloth is covered with dishes, plates and glasses. Numerous empty bottles are in evidence; perhaps these contributed to the high spirits with which the men went singing to the scaffold next morning. Only one of them wasn’t enjoying the party. He had already stabbed himself to death, and his body lies in a barrow. He didn’t succeed in cheating the guillotine simply by killing himself, though. Next day his dead head was chopped off.
When Marie-Antoinette arrived at the Conciergerie she was lodged in the semi-subterranean former Council Chamber. It is no longer visible today. In its place stands a plain and rather chilly-looking commemorative chapel built on the orders of her brother-in-law, Louis XVIII. There is a reconstruction, though, of the tiny room in which she spent the last 76 wretched days of her life. The figure of a woman dressed in black is seated at a desk, her back to viewers. To one side is a narrow, uncomfortable-looking bed. Behind the Queen, Prisoner No. 280, Widow Capet, or whatever other name her gaolers chose to use, is a folding screen. This could not have offered her any privacy whatsoever, as it only reaches to the chin of the guard permanently stationed behind it to watch over her. The contrast between this room and the opulence of Versailles couldn’t have been stronger. Yet there was one similarity – in both places she was under constant observation, like an animal in a zoo.
According to Madame Campan’s Memoirs of Marie-Antoinette:
‘The Queen was lodged in a room called the council chamber, which was considered as the most unwholesome apartment in the Conciergerie on account of its dampness and the bad smells by which it was continually affected. Under pretence of giving her a person to wait upon her they placed near her a spy, – a man of a horrible countenance and hollow, sepulchral voice. This wretch, whose name was Barassin, was a robber and murderer by profession. Such was the chosen attendant on the Queen of France! A few days before her trial this wretch was removed and a gendarme placed in her chamber, who watched over her night and day, and from whom she was not separated, even when in bed, but by a ragged curtain. In this melancholy abode Marie Antoinette had no other dress than an old black gown, stockings with holes, which she was forced to mend every day; and she was entirely destitute of shoes.’
Madame Campan does not mention the young serving girl, Rosalie Lamorlière, who was the nearest thing that Marie Antoinette had to a maid. The girl later related the events she witnessed during the Queen’s stay in the Conciergerie. She described her gentleness, her attempts to keep herself decent as her clothes fell to pieces, her occasional despair and the admiration and pity her plight awoke in her gaolers. However, anybody openly sympathetic to her risked the most severe punishment, thus any small kindnesses had to be most discreet. The few small treasures she still owned were confiscated after a bungled rescue attempt. Stefan Zweig relates how she found temporary escape from the loneliness and hopelessness of her situation by avidly reading true adventure stories.
There was no question that Marie Antoinette would be condemned to death at her trial, but she decided to defend herself anyway. Her ordeal had transformed a vivacious young queen into a prematurely aged, exhausted and ailing woman. The only assets she retained were dignity and courage. She responded to the indictments cautiously but with spirit. When outrageous charges of incest with her young son were read out she treated them with contempt. Even those women who had come to see her humbled were so shocked by this disgusting charge that they became sympathetic to her.
It was 4.00 in the morning when, after a trial lasting two days she was summoned before the tribunal, pronounced guilty and sentenced to die. She spent some time writing a farewell letter to her sister-in-law who was still in the grim Temple prison. She wrote that she hoped to die with the same courage as her husband, and she would do so with a clear conscience, devout in her Catholic faith. She refused the ministrations of a priest who had taken the oath of allegiance to the Constitution. Her greatest sadness was in leaving her children.
The letter was never delivered to Madame Elizabeth, who would lose her head the following year. (At her execution, the King’s sister was seated beside the guillotine, to benefit from a close-up view of the machine in action as it decapitated all her companions first.) Marie-Antoinette’s letter was handed to the public prosecutor and only reappeared twenty-one years later when it arrived in the hands of Louis XVIII.
The new Republic had almost finished with Marie Antoinette. Just a few more hours of her life remained, and her enemies would make them as humiliating and painful as they possibly could.
Apart from the prison guards Rosalie was the only person who witnessed the Queen’s preparation for her execution. On the morning of October 16th 1793, the girl encouraged Marie Antoinette to eat a few spoonfuls of soup. A guard stood in the cell watching as she changed her undergarments, stained from haemorrhages she had suffered. She dressed herself carefully, in white, with her best shoes and stockings. How poignant is that – a woman taking pains to look her best on her way to the guillotine? A white-haired old lady two weeks before her 38th birthday. It had been four years almost to the day since the family were driven out of Versailles.
Looking at the mocked-up cell did nothing for me. I could not relate it in any way to the above events. It felt as if Marie Antoinette had deliberately refused to let any part of her spirit exist in this bleak place.
After a brief visit to the rest of the building, I went off to find Terry. He was happily standing by the bridge in the sunshine, chatting to a blonde French lady.
“Shall we go for lunch now?” he asked, hopefully. Like a baby bird, he needs feeding at short and regular intervals.
“Not just yet. In a while. We’ll walk a little first.”
“Where to?”
“You’ll see,” I said, setting off at a brisk pace because I was quite hungry too.
“So, what did you think of the Conciergerie?”
“Hm. The architecture of the two great halls is magnificent, but I couldn’t feel any atmosphere in there. It seemed too sanitised.”
“What, no rusting chains or messages scratched on the walls?”
“No, nothing at all like that. It’s as if every trace of anything unpleasant has been whitewashed out, and all the history sucked away. I’d like to have seen it as it was during the Revolution.”
We followed the route the tumbrels had taken when they left the Conciergerie, crossing the Pont au Change to the north bank of the river and picking up the Rue Saint Honoré.
“Why are we walking here? I’m hungry.”
“So am I, but we are walking here,” I explained, “because this is the route on which Marie-Antoinette was taken to her execution.”
“I hope she went in style.”
“She certainly did, but not in the style that you are thinking, nor to which she was once accustomed.”
Unlike Louis who had travelled in a carriage accompanied by a priest, the hated Austrian woman was led from the prison by the executioner, ho
lding her by a cord binding her hands behind her back. She was helped onto the back of a crude cart pulled by a draught horse.
Like that of her late husband, her journey was designed to give as many spectators as possible a chance to enjoy the spectacle, which lasted for two hours. All along the roads people lined up, laughing and shouting at her. They revelled in her humiliation – albeit she had never personally done them any harm. Throughout this degrading ordeal she maintained an air of complete indifference. With her back straight and her chin up, the only sign of her inner torment was the way her cheeks alternately flushed and paled.
I looked up at the elegant buildings, visualising coarse, jeering ghouls leaning from the windows to watch the miserable procession on its way to the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution. Amongst the spectators, I wondered whether there were any who had felt sympathy for the woman on the cart?
Marie-Antoinette en route to the guillotine by Jacques-Louis David
Eye-witnesses told that the Queen went to her death with royal dignity and great courage. Even that most spiteful man, Hébert, wrote: ‘The whore, for the rest, was bold and impudent to the very end’.
In contrast, her old bête noire Madame du Barry, who followed her to the guillotine a couple of months later, made a hysterical exhibition of herself on the scaffold, running around screaming and begging for mercy.
After Marie-Antoinette’s death her body was tossed onto a cart with her severed head placed between her legs. Her remains were put into the meanest coffin and buried in a common trench beside her dead husband and other victims of The Terror.
We arrived at the Place de la Concorde where the guillotine had once practised its grisly trade. It felt as if we were standing beside the Tower of Babel. Foreign tongues filled the air, tourists clicked their cameras, backing and bumping into each other as they manoeuvred for the best angle. Amongst the polyglottal chatter there were French voices too. As we listened to and watched smiling, sophisticated Parisians talking on their mobile phones, laughing and strolling in the sunshine, I couldn’t help wondering what their ancestors had been doing at the time of the Revolution.
Despite the heat of the sun, chilly little fingers ran over my flesh as I reflected on the horrors that had taken place in this elegant square. There had been a time when the smell of blood was so powerful that cattle refused to walk there. In particular I thought how terribly lonely Marie-Antoinette must have felt as she climbed the scaffold’s steps amongst a sea of hostile faces waiting excitedly to watch her have her head cut off. And it seemed extraordinary that this barbaric event took place not in the Middle Ages, but only eight years before the birth of the 19th century. And in a country that has produced some of the world’s greatest writers, artists and philosophers.
“I’m hungry,” repeated Terry, unmoved by events of the past. “Let’s go and eat.”
Because it was such a glorious a day we forwent our planned lunchtime treat of a meal in a restaurant. Instead we picnicked in the garden of the Tuileries, tossing crumbs to fat and expectant pigeons. I noticed that the spaces between the straps of my ugly-sandaled feet were sunburned to Dayglo-pink, and so were my shoulders.
I had forgotten the precise address of the next stage of our safari, so we wandered along to a small tourist office in the Elysian Fields. The man there was polite but baffled, and said he’d never heard of the place I mentioned. However after burrowing into a drawer he consulted some papers, then sketched a map. Following his directions we unexpectedly found ourselves at the gates of the Elysée Palace, eyeball to eyeball with a policeman who stared back unblinkingly. There was no sign of any activity within the building. Presumably M. Chirac was either inside busily running the country in his oleaginous way, or on one of his frequent overseas jaunts.
The map drawn by the man at the tourist office led us around in circles. We asked several pedestrians and a policeman for directions, and were surprised by two things: firstly their courtesy. Where were the rude Parisians we hear so much about? Without exception, from the railway staff to the Batobus staff, the people in the Tourist Office, the shopkeepers, the flics and the pedestrians we spoke to, they were all charming, polite and as helpful as they could possibly be. The second surprising factor was that none of them could easily remember, or even appeared to know where to find the place we were looking for. A vague idea was the best that most of them could summon up. By putting all the little clues together, we eventually arrived at the dark and leafy little Square Louis XVI at the junction of Boulevard Haussmann and Rue d’Anjou.
At the beginning of the 18th century the cemetery here welcomed about 160 new residents each year. In May 1770 there was a rush for places by the 133 people who had died at the giant firework display for the nuptial celebrations of Louis and Marie-Antoinette. But this was as nothing in comparison with the demand for space during The Terror. It was to this cemetery, only 150 by 60 feet, that the tumbrels delivered the heads and bodies, in separate baskets, of the recently-executed for burial in a large communal pit.
During the final seven weeks of the madness, the guillotine despatched an average of 46 people each day. [Francois Guizot: A Popular History of France.] Quite a logistical challenge to find somewhere to put them. The 900 massacred Swiss Guard who had needlessly died at the Tuileries were buried here. Men and women, rich and poor, young and old, educated and illiterate, famous and infamous. There had been no discrimination. Many of even the most conscientious and vociferous Revolutionaries would end up mingled with their victims in a companionable and democratic tangle in the melancholy square where we were standing.
Beneath our feet had lain the unidentifiable remains of more than 2,000 victims, including Louis and Marie-Antoinette. However, a vigilant Royalist resident in a nearby street had kept his head and noted the place where the King and Queen were buried. Once the Terror was over he marked the spot by planting some willow and cypress trees. What little remained of the royal bodies was exhumed in 1815 and buried in the Royal necropolis at St Denis.
Still, it’s hard to believe that with so many corpses crammed into such a relatively small area, and the heads arriving independently of the bodies, there could not have been some room for error. Also, if Louis’ body was smothered in lime very little of him would have been left. Marie Antoinette’s remains were supposedly identified by a piece of garter. It’s unlikely that she alone of all the female victims was wearing a garter. With no DNA testing at that time, who knows whether the disinterred remains were indeed royal or just some unfortunate commoner who had shared their fate? If you visit the chapel in the square, and read the information sheets there, it says very clearly ‘The King and Queen’s bodies (or at least the presumed bodies, at least for the King’s) were excavated’.
The chapel, built in the style of a Roman temple with a pinch of Greek influence lies at the far end of a lawned area divided by a path. A series of mini-temples containing the tombs of the Swiss Guard flank the outer edges of the grass. I tried not to think of what and who lay beneath us as we walked through the profusion of white roses bordering the path leading to the steps of the chapel.
Inside, statues of Louis and Marie-Antoinette on their way to their heavenly repose live in niches in the walls. The interior is brightly illuminated by rays of light from a series of small circular windows in the domed ceilings above. It is solemn without being mournful. I thought that if she were alive Marie Antoinette might have been quite content sitting here reading or writing, while her children and pet dogs played on the lawn.
A reproduction of Louis’ Will is on display. In this poignant document he commends his soul to his God, pardons those who have done him harm and begs forgiveness of anyone whom he has unwittingly harmed. He commends his children to the loving care of their mother and aunt, advises his son not to seek revenge for his death, and bequeaths what few tiny possessions remain to him to his valet Clery. The following paragraph intrigued me:
‘I beg my wife to forgive all the pain which she suffered
for me, and the sorrows which I may have caused her in the course of our union; and she may feel sure that I hold nothing against her, if she has anything with which to reproach herself.’
Now, with what could he have felt she might reproach herself?
Chopping off heads, confiscating, denouncing, looting, terrorising were not the only sports practised during the French Revolution. The guillotine was by no means the worst form of execution. Slower and more painful methods included burning, beating, shooting, stabbing, and trampling with horses. In Nantes, enemies of the Republic, or people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, were condemned to death by the horrifying ‘noyade’ – sealed into the holds of old barges that were then sunk. In the ‘Republican marriage’ version of this naked men and women, often clergy and nuns, were chained together and thrown into the water to drown. The guillotine had been conceived as a quicker and more humane death – but of course, it was a matter of taste.
Under the new regime, it wasn’t only the aristocracy who had to be eliminated. There was no place for clergy unless they renounced their religion and embraced the new Revolutionary creed. Christianity had to go. First it was replaced by the Cult of Reason, which was followed by the Cult of the Supreme Being. The French Revolution was no longer about a shortage of bread or the depravity of the aristos. It had become a war of ideologies between the most powerful men of the time.
With the outlawing of Christianity, out too went the Gregorian calendar based on the birth of Christ. The Revolutionary calendar came into existence in 1792, on the 22nd September to be precise, the autumnal equinox, and the birthdate of the Republic following the abolition of the monarchy.
This new calendar retained the twelve-month format but each month was divided into units of 10 days known as décades. The months were given rather beautiful and appropriate new names, by a French poet called Fabre d’Eglantine: