Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (19 page)

Tension between court and Assembly intensified once more in the autumn of 1789, principally because the king loathed and hesitated to assent to the August edicts. As economic distress, food prices, and political uncertainty mounted, a critical turning point was reached. To aggravate matters further, the arrival at Versailles, from Douai, in late September, of the 1,050 men of the prestigious Flanders regiment fed fresh rumors that the “parti aristocratique” planned a
contre-révolution
using the military. Reports circulated, notably in Gorsas’s paper on 3
October,
⁹³
recounting scenes of royal troops cheering, stamping, and yelling “Vive le roi!” at Versailles, and trampling tricolor cockades underfoot. This instantly inflamed opinion around the Palais-Royal. On 5 October, groups of demonstrators, gathering first in Paris’s public gardens and squares and then before the city hall, and eventually constituting a crowd of some thirty thousand mostly female citizens, led by the market women of Les Halles carrying homemade pikes and other makeshift weapons, set off in a long and angry procession to Versailles. This mass of hungry women chiefly demanded bread, but some also backed the aspirations of Louis-Philippe, the flamboyant Duc d’Orléans (1747–93), a prince descended from the younger brother, Monsieur, of Louis XIV and a great enthusiast for British constitutional monarchy and Freemasonry (as well as horse-racing and other pastimes), and one of the richest men in France. Louis-Philippe hoped to head the liberal monarchist Revolution.

On reaching Versailles many hours later, toward evening, the unruly mob bivouacked around the palace gates for the night. Lafayette had followed the crowds with a force of the National Guard. On reaching the palace, Lafayette conferred at length with the king, who had ordered his guards on no account to fire on the women or anyone else. Lafayette assured the monarch that he had been unable to prevent the crowds marching on Versailles but would now firmly take charge of the situation and ensure the royal family’s and the palace’s safety. Despite these assurances, early the next day, crowds assailed the palace guards, killing several, including a brother of Villette, and then invaded the entire palace, causing pandemonium though only slight damage. The extraordinarily unpopular queen, Marie Antoinette, was lucky to escape by a secret passage to the king’s apartments unscathed. The crowds also swamped the Assembly’s meeting hall.
⁹⁴

Order was belatedly restored by the National Guard. Later on 6 October, the royal family was escorted to Paris by Lafayette and his men, a seven-hour procession accompanied by an immense and growing crowd amounting perhaps to sixty thousand. Welcoming the dazed, utterly traumatized royal family in the capital, Bailly delivered a rousing speech, setting the municipality’s seal on a momentous day that marked the end of the French court at Versailles and the virtual end of traditional monarchy in France. Whether or not Louis himself had really contemplated a military coup, some of those close to him assuredly had, and their intrigues continued. But the events of 5 and 6 October effectively ended all direct royal resistance to the Assembly’s proceedings,
forcing the king to accept the temporary royal veto and the end of privilege. Louis and Marie Antoinette, installed in the Louvre, were now virtual “hostages,” living the next tumultuous months in an isolation not far removed from custody. The king gave up his favorite activity, hunting, and both king and queen became semirecluses largely confined to the Tuileries where the rituals and ceremonies of Versailles were reconstituted but on a much-diminished scale.

Whether or not Louis personally had been playing a double game earlier, now that he was stripped of nearly all his authority, he certainly did so from 6 October 1789 onward, in public acquiescing in his role as the servant of the people and the Revolution, while secretly writing to fellow monarchs, as he did to the Spanish king on 12 October, assuring him that he rejected entirely the destruction of “royal authority” in which he had been forced to acquiesce against his will.
⁹⁵
No one failed to discern the momentousness of what had occurred. In a panic, a fresh wave of courtiers and grandees departed, as did a considerable number of rightist deputies defecting from the Assembly and as also did the celebrated court portraitist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), who fled with her daughter by carriage to Italy, where she stayed until 1792 before venturing farther.
⁹⁶
To an appalled Gibbon, observing developments from Lausanne, the situation looked catastrophic:

their king brought a captive to Paris after his palace had been stained with the blood of his guards; the nobles in exile, the clergy plundered in a way which strikes at the root of all property; the capital an independent republic; the union of the provinces dissolved; the flames of discord kindled by the worst of men (in that light I consider Mirabeau); and the honestest of the Assembly, a set of wild visionaries (like our Dr Price) who gravely debate, and dream about the establishment of pure and perfect democracy of five-and-twenty millions, the virtues of the golden age, and the primitive rights and equality of mankind, which would lead, in fair reasoning, to an equal partition of lands and money.
⁹⁷

He was right on two counts: the situation had changed dramatically, and it was the “set of wild visionaries” allied to Price who had brought it about, even if elements of the Paris populace now acted as their watch-dogs.
⁹⁸
The march on Versailles, this second “access of revolution,” commented the
Chronique de Paris
two days afterward, would doubtless “hasten the work of the Assembly” by undoing the “intrigues of the majority of deputies” (supporting Crown, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical
authority). It would enable “the 150 or so deputies” who, according to the
Chronique
, regularly supported the philosophique leadership, the “généreuse minorité” (often helped by the Fayettiste faction and Orléanistes) to “feel more secure.”
⁹⁹
The court’s transfer from Versailles to the capital, moreover, was immediately followed by the National Assembly’s, the latter taking up new quarters in the Tuileries close to the royal family. Thus, Paris consolidated its grip on the Revolution while intensifying economic distress continued to afflict and exasperate the poor. “These
philosophes
who are not even able to read,” sneered the Venetian envoy, deriding Paris’s artisans for their growing plight, as well as their mouthing democratic slogans, “have not yet learnt that philosophy has always been poor.”
¹⁰⁰

Brissot and Condorcet, their position within the joint assembly of Paris sections (now reduced to forty-eight) much enhanced, were asked to compose two crucial municipal addresses, the first welcoming the National Assembly to Paris, the second assuring France’s provinces and municipalities that Louis had freely chosen to transfer to the capital. Brissot personally spoke on behalf of the Paris delegation in the Assembly, and afterward both addresses were printed and distributed around the country. The king and Assembly, Brissot and Condorcet assured their countrymen, would be treated with fitting deference and kept perfectly secure, but about the popular insurrection that produced this result Brissot and Condorcet said as little as possible. They and the Paris Commune chose not to explicitly condone it but stressed rather the responsible conduct of the National Guard and city authorities in restoring order and organizing the transfer from Versailles.
¹⁰¹

Nevertheless, no one could be in any doubt as to what had actually happened. Even if it was partly true, as Lafayette’s supporters claimed, that the insurgent women had been stirred up by Orléanist agents, nothing could conceal the fact that the urban lower orders had now categorically joined the insurgent rural peasantry as a major force in the Revolution—and not just the men but, even more strikingly, the womenfolk. Not only did the revolutionary popular press as such begin to emerge as a distinct impulse within the Revolution during the autumn of 1789, but, unsurprisingly, so did a new kind of big-city
presse populaire
that appealed directly to the market women and laundresses, the illiterate female presence teeming around the capital’s central markets, as well as the poor Paris suburbs or faubourgs of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel. Reflecting the volatile and angry but also hesitant, unaware, and uncertain character of the revolutionary popular voice—
constantly pulled as it was in divergent directions—the popular press directed at women emerged in late 1789, dividing into rival streams respectively backing the Orléaniste and Lafayette factions, competing for what later became the liberal monarchist center ground, though until early 1791 the Fayettistes in the poor faubourgs remained broadly allied to the democrats belonging to the organizations of the Cercle Social and Amis de la Vérité.
¹⁰²
Gradually, through 1790 and especially 1791, the
presse populaire
directed at lower-class women came to reflect the basic three-way split dividing the Revolution as a whole, becoming more and more internally divided. Largely defecting from the liberal monarchist centrist factions that attracted most popular female support in October 1789, urban plebeian womanhood, like every other section of the population, fragmented into three competing tendencies supporting the three main rival ideological blocs.
¹⁰³
The populist journalists more and more intensely contested the political orientation of the now seemingly crucial typical illiterate market woman. Her being pulled relentlessly in three contradictory directions did not prevent her being metamorphosed into the legendary “Mother Duchesne” figure—the presiding motherly market lady selling old hats, swearing continually and tolerating no nonsense, who iconically represented lower-class female rectitude.

One series of Mother Duchesne gazettes, designed to be read aloud to groups of illiterate women gathering to discuss political affairs in the streets, appeared in late 1790, edited by the Abbé Buée. This Mother Duchesne portrayed the “wise,” upright, and savvy market woman as someone who conforms finally to the views of the clergy, always prioritizing religion and faith above revolutionary ideals and refusing to defer to their “foolish” menfolk who were more vigorously supporting the Revolution. This tendency was then countered by a Left radical series of Mother Duchesne gazettes, the
Lettres bougrement patriotiques de la Mère Duchêne
, which summoned women to fight alongside their men for revolutionary ideals, doing so as equals, vigorously and independently, and always thinking for themselves.
¹⁰⁴
The radical appeal to illiterate women was then in turn countered by a third series of Mother Duchesne newssheets opposing both the radicals and the center, insisting that the veritable woman of the people, the genuinely upright and admirable ordinary woman, invariably accepts her husband’s views and adopts a strictly subordinate role, women being subordinate to men in everything concerning public affairs and politics. The latter, strongly Rousseauiste impulse, powerfully affirming gender inequality, was the
tendency that aligned with the Montagne and, from late 1791, energetically supported Marat and Robespierre in their war against the democratic republican radicals who directed the early stages of the Revolution and had chiefly benefited from the women’s march of 5 October 1789.
¹⁰⁵

The move of both court and Assembly to Paris was bound to result in increasing popular intimidation of that part (the majority) of the Assembly comprising liberal aristocrats, clergy, conservative lawyers, pragmatists, and monarchiens. They had striven, albeit thus far ineffectually, to withstand the universalist, egalitarian constitutional proposals of Sieyès, Mirabeau, and the steering group. At this point, Mounier, Lally-Tollendal, and the archbishop of Paris, feeling they had irretrievably lost their fight for a conservative outcome, withdrew from the Assembly altogether.
¹⁰⁶
Resigning from the Comité de Constitution, Bergasse too retired; one of the relatively few monarchiens to survive the Terror, he later reemerged as an ultraconservative.
¹⁰⁷
Lally-Tollendal departed for Switzerland, where he produced a political memoir justifying his efforts to rescue Crown and aristocracy that was witheringly reviewed in the
Chronique de Paris
the following March.
¹⁰⁸
“Mounier who was looked on as the chief of the discontented,” reported the secretary of the United States embassy, William Short, to Jefferson, now back in America, “and who, it was supposed, meant to excite a fermentation in Dauphiné, has lost his influence there.”
¹⁰⁹
Before long, he too left for Switzerland, where he also resumed the struggle by writing.

In his
Considérations sur les gouvernements et principalement sur celui qui convient à la France
(Paris, 1789), Mounier renewed his call to the Assembly to discard principles emanating from antimonarchical philosophes who disagreed with the “wise Montesquieu.” Settling in Geneva, he commenced his new life by putting on a public lecture course on natural right, where he scathingly attacked the Revolution and rejected Sieyès’s and Mirabeau’s principle of popular sovereignty. All the fashionable ladies and gentlemen of Geneva reportedly attended. The antiaristocratic philosophes may have been justified in attacking popular préjugés, but their obsession with ignorance and error had led them to overstep bounds they ought to have respected. Prioritizing ideas over experience, they erred deplorably, introducing “d’erreurs méprisables” and emulating Plato in creating republics that could never exist outside their heads. The great danger was that their philosophy would usher in “la tyrannie démocratique.” Every properly organized society must be led by men of rank. Mixed monarchy on the British model was
the answer, an upper chamber composed of peers and political bishops providing genuine social hierarchy balanced by real monarchical authority.
¹¹⁰
Britain, objected his opponents, was less perfect than he maintained. But English pride in their constitution and belief in its superiority, Mounier retorted, even if blinding them to its defects, was admirable, for it ensured that the sensible British followed experience and received notions, rejecting la philosophie.
¹¹¹
Mounier’s defense of rank and aristocracy was enthusiastically received at Geneva, resounding also in Berne and all the “aristocratic cantons of Switzerland.”
¹¹²
Geneva remained a crucial ideological battleground, pitting the views of the democratic revolutionary leadership in France, Belgium, and Switzerland against the moderate Anglophile Enlightenment and the many French aristocratic émigrés who sought refuge in its environs. This intensifying ideological warfare also fed into the bitter contest, raging since 1782, between “aristocrats” and “democrats” vying for control of the Genevan republic itself. In Geneva, commented the
Chronique de Paris
, you see fought out in miniature most of the great debates presently engaging the forces of liberty.
¹¹³