Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (8 page)

On Monday, October 5, the king was hunting in the woods near Versailles. He had shot more than eighty animals when he was told that a large group of workingwomen had left Paris that morning to demand grain and flour from their sovereign—as well as concessions to democracy. The king ordered his granaries to be opened, but the crowd would not be pacified. As night fell, they were demanding the bodies of the sovereigns. At four o’clock in the morning, the palace apartments were invaded. By midday the king and queen were being taken to the capital, surrounded by the chanting mob, the heads of their guards planted on sticks and waved around them. At the palace, the only sound to be heard was the closing of doors and shutters. Locked up and deserted, the ghost court at Versailles stood in its ornamental gardens and wooded parks, a hated relic of a monarchy that was breathing its last.

“Kings who become prisoners are not far from death,” the queen told Madame Campan.
¹
At the dilapidated Tuileries Palace in Paris, the king paced the rooms, and the queen tried to give her children the impression of normality. They decorated their apartments with furniture and ornaments from Versailles, and drapes were strewn over the damp patches on the walls and the rotting wood of the door frames. In Versailles,
the royals had been as distant from the populace as ornaments in a museum. At the Tuileries, dirty, toothless faces pressed up against the windows, and their carriage was pelted with mud whenever they drove out.

Alexandre and his fellow deputies proposed that the king cede military command to the National Assembly, and drafted other changes that attempted to install equality into French life, including the abolition of a hereditary monarchy. The National Assembly confiscated the Church lands, which constituted nearly ten percent of France. Plum positions in the Church, government, and military were opened up to the population rather than being reserved for the aristocracy. Alexandre was made one of the secretaries of the assembly. The venal, womanizing soldier and minor aristocrat considered too insignificant to follow the hunt was now a man of leadership, one of the rulers of revolutionary France.

On October 29, 1790, Marie-Josèphe, Euphémie, and Hortense disembarked from
La Sensible
at Toulon after a difficult crossing and found that France had changed entirely. Every village and town was festooned with banners and garlands, and the trees in the squares wore red caps of liberty. Even the language was different: People were increasingly calling each other
tu
instead of
vous,
though by 1792 the accepted form of address was
citoyen
and
citoyenne.

The walls and houses of Paris were covered in the same red caps, ribbons, and slogans. At Fontainebleau, the hunting shelters and fine horses stood untouched. The workshops of the perfumiers were quiet, the Sèvres factory made porcelain that nobody bought, and embroiderers, saddle makers, and hairdressers sat glumly unemployed, while lemonade makers and pâtissiers scrabbled for the few aristocratic customers who still dared spend.

Marie-Josèphe took up lodgings at 953 rue Saint-Dominique, just off the fashionable Boulevard Saint-Germain. She lived with Désirée Hosten, a fellow Creole with a thirteen-year-old daughter who loved to play with Hortense. Euphémie was also with them, as well as Hortense’s faithful governess Marie de Lannoy, and Marie-Josèphe’s new dog, Fortuné, an ill-tempered, cross-faced, but loyal pug.

Madame Hosten was truly a woman of revolutionary sympathies.
Marie-Josèphe learned from her the new way to survive: how to dress, behave, and speak like a person from the working classes (or an aristocratic notion of such a person). Marie-Josèphe—who hated strict regimes of dress and etiquette and had never been able to speak in a properly affected manner—was in her element. In a reaction against Versailles, the women of the 1790s were no longer beribboned ornaments wearing corsets so pointed that they could not sit down in a carriage. They stuffed their jewelry under their beds and gave the hoops from their dresses to their children as toys. The decorative woman hiding behind a lacy fan was a hated symbol of the parasitic aristocratic hierarchy. Finally, Marie-Josèphe could cut up the flouncy, boned gowns she loathed.

The young
citoyenne
Beauharnais now wore simple gowns striped in red and blue, plain bonnets, and jewelry made of iron and steel. Her hair curled unpowdered around her face—the new orthodoxy was that flour should be feeding the poor, not adorning the coiffures of the upper classes.
²
She still kept a little rouge on her cheeks, but the simple style was much more suited to her careless elegance. She was in fashion and—in certain lights—beautiful. She was the ideal revolutionary woman: plainly dressed, practical, and very informal. Except she lacked the zeal for the dismantling of royal and aristocratic privilege. She thought the treatment of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was more horrifying than gratifying. But she kept her views quiet, and everyone believed her a friend of the Revolution. All she had to do was appear hopeful for the future.

Not long after she arrived home, Marie-Josèphe received the news that her father had died at fifty-five. She had been to visit her home just in time. He died with terrible debts, so there would be no money for her, although her family was able to stay on the plantation.

A new Parisian salon society sprang up to replace the court. The city was alive with cabals, discussions, and meetings, and as the wife of Alexandre, she had a new cachet and could enter any salon she desired. It was a time when anything seemed possible and the people imagined a new country, free of aristocratic privilege and royal oppression, emerging phoenix-like from the ashes of the Revolution. “The nation was seized with hopes for boundless happiness,” wrote Madame de Staël,
and “one has never seen both so much life and so much intellect.”
³
Her salon was vital in directing government policy; there Marie-Josèphe encountered men who were shaping her country and who would also transform her life, including the ruthless former priest Abbé Sieyès and the limping bishop-turned-republican Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, who had tried to seduce Madame de Staël to further his ambitions. The thirty-six-year-old aristocrat was the most skilled and devious politician Marie-Josèphe would ever meet.

Newly dressed in her plain striped gowns, Marie-Josèphe was all the more popular for never having been presented at court. She was congratulated, admired, invited to balls, operas, country picnics, and receptions; in short, she was in demand, and to keep up her new status, she spent money as if there were no tomorrow.

But underneath all the sparkling conversation, the cheering, and the caps of liberty, the truth was that France was bankrupt. Unrest continued to surge; the crowds were prowling and angry, unwilling to wait much longer for the bread they had been promised.

A
T TEN-THIRTY P.M.
on Monday, June 20, the two surviving children of the king and queen were carried out of the Tuileries, half asleep and disguised in heavy woolen dresses, and bundled into a coach with their governess. The young princess asked her brother what he thought they were doing. “I suppose to act a play,” he replied, “since we have got these odd costumes.”
⁴
The king and queen, the king’s sister Elisabeth, and their escorts joined them, all disguised as servants in shawls and pulled-down hats. Louis’s crown and robes were stuffed into the baggage under the seats. The king had finally agreed to flee Paris and head to the border, where royalist troops and foreign armies would protect him and allow him to demand concessions.

The plan was that the royals would pretend to be the servants of a noblewoman, the Baroness de Korff, played by the children’s governess. The king would act the part of a valet. At the city walls, the party transferred to a large custom-made coach guarded by three men in bright yellow livery.

At eleven on the following night, the ill-disguised set of servants arrived at the small town of Varennes-en-Argonne, where they searched
desperately for fresh horses. The huge coach and the yellow-clad guards made them conspicuous. They were recognized and captured only twenty-five miles from the fortified royalist town of Montmédy, where they had hoped to be safe.

When the news came through of the royal flight, Alexandre was on his second day as president of the assembly. He dispatched riders to retrieve the royal party and announced that the assembly should sit continuously until the runaways were caught.

O
N
J
UNE
25, the royal family were dragged back through Paris in front of crowds of spectators. Madame Campan attended the queen on her return to the Tuileries and found that her hair had turned entirely white.

Alexandre de Beauharnais was the hero of the hour. The flight of the king was a turning point. The moderates who had espoused the idea of a constitutional monarchy—or a king with limited powers rather than an elected form of governance—felt terribly betrayed. Those on the left were confirmed in their notion that the king and queen were dangerous traitors who had intended to reach Austria and then wage war on France. The members of the powerful pro-Revolution Jacobin club—who hoped for equality, along with their working-class supporters, the
sans-culottes
—were infuriated. Marie Antoinette was cast as a corrupt plotter, a woman who would betray the country without compunction.

In September 1791 the constitution, so long in formation, was signed by the king. Louis had only the right of veto, and the country would be governed by a legislative assembly, elected by those deemed proper citizens—which meant about three quarters of the adult male population of France. “There is nothing to be done with this assembly, it is a gathering of scoundrels, madmen, and fools,” wrote Marie Antoinette.
⁵
But she had to give the impression of contentment with the new order. “The Revolution is ended!” the people cried. Fireworks and bonfires lit up the sky. A hot-air balloon floated over the Champ de Mars, billowing ribbons of red, white, and blue. The Champs-Élysées was strewn with illuminations from the Tuileries, and everybody was encouraged to celebrate.

The crowds might have cheered the fireworks, but they were still angry. The salon aristocrats of Marie-Josèphe’s circle lived in a gilded
bubble. The twenty theaters of Paris were full every night and the balls and receptions continued. They all genuinely believed that once the king’s power and spending were reduced, the people’s fury would be assuaged and life would return to normal. They expected to retain their privileges and see a large chunk of the money and luxury that once were the preserve of Versailles.

On June 20, 1792, the anniversary of the flight to Varennes, the guards let a mob into the Tuileries gardens. They stormed into the king’s apartments with pikes and hatchets and threw a red cap on his head. For two hours, they danced and sang and forced him to drink the health of the country, while the queen clutched her children in terror. By the evening, order was restored, though all the doors had been broken, the furniture smashed, and the drapes torn down. The king and queen were like animals in a zoo, on display with no means of escape.

Later in the summer of 1792, the jubilation had dispelled, and the borrowed money had run out. With the king and queen imprisoned, the people needed someone to blame for their poverty. They turned their attention to the aristocrats. The parading crowds shouted, “We will hang all the aristocrats.” Members of the Versailles court were arrested and imprisoned. Alexandre left Paris to serve in the army at Blois. Marie-Josèphe and her friends became very afraid and redoubled their efforts to appear ordinary and citizen-like.

The government hoped that the imprisonment of the royal family might pacify the people. On August 9, the National Guard was sent to the Tuileries to take the king and his family to prison. They butchered the courtiers and five hundred Swiss Guards, along with hundreds from their own side who were mistaken for their enemies in the confusion. The gravel was left stained with blood and strewn with limbs. “What a lot of leaves!” was the king’s only comment as he left. The royal family was taken to the Tower of the Temple near the Bastille. “We shall never return,” said the Princesse de Lamballe, the fluffy blonde so hated by the populace.

Still the people were not mollified. Within a month, angry Jacobin and
sans-culottes
mobs had set upon the prisons and killed many of the remaining courtiers, as well as hundreds of ordinary farmers, maids, shopkeepers, and children in what became known as the “September
Massacres.” Marie-Josèphe hid with her children in their house, thankful that she had never attended court. She was near enough to the prisons to hear the screams as sixteen hundred men, women, and children were tried by ad hoc tribunals and either released or hacked to death. Crowds came to stare at the shiny new piece of killing equipment set up in front of the city hall. An afternoon with “Madame la Guillotine” became a popular entertainment as people gathered to watch, clutching “programmes” of those to be killed.

They were hungry for blood. The queen’s darling, the Princesse de Lamballe, was put in front of a hastily assembled trial. When she refused to proclaim her hatred of the royal family, she was thrown to the crowds, raped, and killed. Her breasts were sliced off and the jubilant mob propped her head on a pike, her innards on another, and paraded her through Paris. They even took her head to a hairdresser to have her trademark golden locks arranged. They then ushered it to the Tower so the queen could give her lips one last kiss. However, the horrific sight of the princesse’s head on a pike popping up at the windows was too much for even the hardened guards, and they hurried to close the shutters so the queen would not see. The mob paraded the head around throughout the afternoon and later abandoned it, after which it was retrieved by a kindly citizen who asked to give the last remains of the princesse a proper burial.