The Days of the French Revolution (14 page)

The return journey to Paris was a dreadful ordeal. At Sainte-Ménéhould, the berlin, escorted now by a vast crowd of curious onlookers and by National Guards, some in uniform, others not, was halted while the mayor made a speech of admonition and rebuke. Later, an old quixotic nobleman, who rode up with the cross of St Louis on his breast to make the King an elaborate salute, was shot in the back as he rode away. The crowds increased, shouting insults and threats, spitting at the windows. Then near Pont à Binson, two members of the Assembly, Antoine Barnave and Jérôme Pétion, who had been sent out to meet the carriage, climbed into it, obliging the Queen to take the Dauphin on her knee. Pétion, soon to be Mayor of Paris, a good looking, though fat and vain and tiresomely garrulous man, afterwards gave a detailed account of the last stages of the journey. He described how anxious the Queen and Madame Elisabeth were to assure him that the King had had no intention of leaving the country, and how the King, whose linen was now very
dirty, on several occasions offered him something to drink and poured it out for him, trying to make conversation. He began to talk about the English, their industry and keen commercial sense; but he uttered a few sentences only, then became embarrassed and blushed. Often ‘the difficulty he found in expressing himself made him shy’.

We stayed for twelve whole hours in the carriage [Pétion continued] without once getting out. What surprised me particularly was that neither the Queen nor Madame Elisabeth nor Madame de Tourzel showed any sign of wanting to get out. The Dauphin made water two or three times. The King himself unbuttoned his breeches and made him pee into a big silver cup. Once Barnave held the cup. It has been said that the coach contained an English convenience. Perhaps it did; but I saw no sign of one.

As the hours passed, Pétion began to flatter himself that Madame Elisabeth was physically attracted by him. Their eyes ‘met now and then with a kind of understanding’. He stretched out his arm and she placed hers over it. ‘Our arms were interlaced,’ he said, ‘and mine touched her armpit. I felt a hurried movement of her heart and a warmth passing through her clothes…I noticed a certain abandon in her attitude…and I believe that if we had been alone she would have fallen into my arms and given herself up to the promptings of nature.’

Once a fight broke out among the people surrounding the carriage, and men carrying bayonets could be seen staring angrily at the Queen through the windows. ‘Soon they started swearing at her. “Look at the bitch,” they shouted. “It’s no good her showing us her child. Everyone knows it isn’t his.” The Dauphin, frightened by the noise and the clank of arms, started to scream. The Queen soothed him, the tears pouring down her cheeks. Barnave and I spoke to the men, one of whom replied, “Don’t worry. No harm will be done. We can promise you that. But the post of honour belongs to us.” It turned out that the fight had been caused by a quarrel over precedence.’

So the journey continued in the insufferable heat. Clouds of dust rose from the wheels of the carriage and the clopping hooves of the
horses, until at last, after five exhausting days of fruitless travelling, the royal family arrived back in Paris where the streets were lined with National Guards, their arms reversed as though for a funeral procession. The crowds were immense. Every window and roof in the Champs Elysées was filled with faces. People clambered on to gates and into the trees. But there was a strange silence broken only by shouts of ‘
Vive la Nation!
’ Hundreds of official notices had been pasted to the walls of Paris reading: ‘Whoever applauds the King shall be flogged. Whoever insults him shall be hanged.’ The carriage stopped outside the Tuileries. The doors opened. The King climbed out. Still there was silence. But, so Pétion said, ‘the Queen’s appearance was greeted with violent expressions of disapproval, though the children were received with good humour and even with endearments.’ They walked up the steps into the palace where a deputy approached the King and reprimanded him, like a schoolmaster speaking to a naughty pupil. ‘Well, that was a fine way to behave! That comes of having such bad advisers. Now see what a mess you’ve got yourself into.’ Then, as the man suddenly and unexpectedly burst into tears, the Marquis de Lafayette, having inspected the guards and ensured that there was no chance of further escape, came up to the King and asked formally for orders. ‘I seem,’ the King replied petulantly, ‘to be more at your orders than you are at mine.’

20 June and 10 August 1792

Before dying at the age of forty-two on 2 April 1791 in his house in the Chaussée d’Antin, the Comte de Mirabeau said sadly to Talleyrand, ‘I carry away with me the last shreds of the monarchy.’ After the flight of the royal family to Varennes and their enforced return to Paris, the French monarchy was, indeed, doomed. There were many deputies like Barnave who had been able to put his ideas to the Queen during their journey together back to the Tuileries, who still hoped that some sort of compromise with the Court was possible, who still believed that, although the Constituent Assembly had ordered Ministers to execute decrees without troubling to obtain the King’s signature, the monarchy should still have a place in the new Constitution which would soon at long last be ready for his approval. But the
monarchiens
, while still quite numerous in the Assembly, were losing ground outside it. Sieyès continued to assert his belief in the monarchy; so did Bailly. But these heroes of the Revolution’s early days, like several others, were now derided for their caution: the firebrands of 1789 were, in the words of Antoine de Rivarol, now coming forward as firemen. At the same time, ever sharper distinctions were being made between those who considered that the Revolution had gone far enough, who were content to observe that the prestige of the two once privileged orders was being usurped by the bourgeoisie, and those who were demanding the trial and punishment of the King, ‘liberty for all’, and further advances in the ‘emancipation of the people’. The differences between these new revolutionaries and their more moderate bourgeois opponents were highlighted by numerous disturbances during the late winter and spring of 1791. One of the earliest and most serious of these took place at the end of February when over a thousand workers from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, encouraged by members of the Cordeliers Club, marched upon the Château de Vincennes which was being converted into a prison for the reception, so it was alleged, of political prisoners. Accompanied by a battalion of the National Guard under the unwilling command of the brewer, Antoine Santerre – who had been forced to lead them as Lafayette had been compelled to lead the National Guard to Versailles seventeen months before – the
ouvriers
carried with them crowbars and
pickaxes, which had been used in the demolition of the Bastille, and vigorously set about the demolition of the château. Their work was interrupted by Lafayette who arrived on the scene with a large force of troops and who loudly and sternly rebuked Santerre in front of the assembled company. More than sixty prisoners were taken and were carried off to the Conciergerie as the rest of the
ouvriers
hooted and jeered at their captors.

As the weeks passed the rift between the workers, many of whom were now unemployed, and the more well-to-do citizens was deepened both by the Cordeliers, who sought to enlist the
ouvriers
’ support for the advancement of revolutionary democracy, and by the readers and writers of such reactionary news-sheets and gossip-sheets as
Le Babillard
which constantly blamed the workers and unemployed for all the ills of France.

Citizens of every sort [
Le Babillard
declared in its issue of 6 July] are beginning to lose all patience with the workers. The National Guard, merchants, manufacturers,
les bourgeois, les artisans
alike all cry out against these people who are in the pay of sedition-mongers…One hears everywhere that they ought to be swept out of the way by a blast of cannon fire.

Less than a fortnight after the publication of this issue of
Le Babillard
, there was a violent clash between the opposing parties which became known as a massacre. It occurred on Sunday, 17 July.

On the afternoon of that day a huge crowd of people assembled on the Champ de Mars. They had come to sign a republican petition drawn up by the leaders of the Cordeliers Club, a popular club in the Rue Dauphine with a subscription of only two
sous
a month, whose members had sworn to protect the people against abuses of authority. The petition was laid out on an altar which had been erected for the recent celebration of the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. As the signatories filed past, many writing their names with evident difficulty, some unable to write at all, two men, one a hairdresser, the other an
invalide
with a wooden leg, were discovered under the
steps leading up to the platform. It was later supposed that they had hidden there to peep up the women’s skirts, but at the time the cry went up that they intended to set fire to the altar of liberty, that they were spies for counter-revolutionaries. They were dragged out and hanged on the spot.

At the Hôtel de Ville, where reports were received of a potentially dangerous riot, it was decided that the time had come for a show of forceful authority. Martial law was declared; the National Guard were called out and, led by Bailly and Lafayette, marched off to the Champ de Mars behind a red flag. They were greeted by jeers, boos, catcalls, and, finally, by a volley of stones. Lafayette ordered a few shots to be fired in the air in retaliation. The crowd scattered for a few minutes but then drew together again to renew their shouting and stone-throwing. Lafayette called upon them to disperse, and when they showed no sign of being willing to do so, he gave the command, ‘Fire!’ In the ensuing volleys about fifty of the demonstrators were killed.

Order had been rapidly restored, but the split in the revolutionaries’ ranks was now wider than ever. Lafayette lost his popularity with the citizens of Paris overnight, and Bailly’s political career was ruined. Having been succeeded as Mayor of Paris by Jerome Petion, who was more acceptable to the
sons-culottes
, Bailly retired to write his memoirs in the provinces whence he was eventually to be dragged back to the capital for execution.

For the moment, however, the conservative revolutionaries had the upper hand and were determined to keep it. From the Hôtel de Ville and from the Assembly came a stream of orders authorizing the arrest of extremists including Camille Desmoulins and Santerre, both of whom went into hiding; newspapers that supported the
sons-culottes
were suppressed; martial law was kept in force. And the left-wing Jacobin Club, which had previously wielded such influence, almost disintegrated, most of its members seceding to form the more moderate Feuillant Club in protest against a petition to dethrone the King.

The members of the Feuillant Club were by far the largest of the political groups that made up the new Legislative Assembly which,
elected on a restrictive middle-class franchise, met on I October 1791, soon after the long-awaited Constitution had at last been promulgated and been accepted and signed by the King. In this Assembly, from which all members of the Constituent Assembly were excluded, the clergy and nobility no longer had separate representation. A few nobles and clergy who held liberal views had been elected, but nearly all the deputies were middle class, many of them lawyers, as had been the case in the Third Estate in 1789. Yet, although the great majority of the Legislative Assembly held moderate opinions and were in favour of some sort of accommodation with the monarchy, the most gifted and rhetorically most powerful deputies were those who sat on their left, several of whom came from the Gironde and were therefore collectively to be known as Girondists. Prominent amongst these men, who were inclined to worship Rousseau and the Romans rather than God, were two lawyers from Bordeaux, Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud and Marguerite Élie Guadet. Closely associated with them was a lawyer from Normandy, Françgois Buzot, and the unashamedly ambitious, impulsive, imaginative and rather affected editor of the
Patriote français
, Jacques Pierre Brissot.

Vergniaud, the son of a merchant, was a quiet, withdrawn and scholarly man of thirty-eight who sat for much of the time in what appeared to be abstracted reverie, but when he did rise to speak, his oratory was so compelling that he was elected the Assembly’s President. Guadet, three years younger than Vergniaud, dark, thin, intense, with gleaming eyes and a sharp, sarcastic tongue, was an almost equally gifted orator. But overshadowing them both was Brissot.

Brissot, the son of an inn-keeper and the husband of a woman who had been a governess in the household of the Duc d’Orléans, was born at Chartres in 1754. His father, anxious that the boy should get on in the world, had ensured that he was given a good education which enabled him to enter a lawyer’s office in Paris where, with that customary desire of the
bourgeois
to appear to be more highly born than he was, he called himself Brissot de Warville. Abandoning the law for letters, he became a prolific writer of books, treatises and pamphlets as well as newspaper articles, contributing to the
Mercure
and the
Courrier de l’Europe
before becoming editor of the
Patriote français
. The views he expressed had frequently landed him in trouble with the Government, and for a time he had been incarcerated in the Bastille, the keys of which were presented to him after its capture by the
Vainqueurs
. He had spent some time in exile in London and, as an agent of an anti-slavery society, had visited Philadelphia whence he had returned with his Quaker-like appearance and manner much intensified. Since he had spent more time abroad than most of his colleagues, he was considered to have an expert knowledge of foreign affairs, a reputation which led to him being appointed to the diplomatic committee of the Legislative Assembly. He soon became the acknowledged leader of this committee and consequently one of the principal arbiters of the foreign policy of France. His fervent advocacy of war as a means of saving the Revolution had a profound influence on the events which were now to unfold.

Although the Feuillants were opposed to war, there was wide support for it not only among other members of the Legislative Assembly but also in the country at large. Both in the provinces, where the flight of the King to Varennes had led to renewed disturbances such as those which had characterized the Great Fear, and in Paris, where members of the Assembly had been booed and insulted after granting an amnesty for political prisoners, there was a growing feeling that the fissures in society were becoming so deep that all the ground that had been gained would be lost unless a violent assault were made upon the enemies of the Revolution beyond the nation’s frontiers.

To millions of peasants it seemed that the only real beneficiaries of the upheavals of 1789 were the middle classes. Several peasants had acquired sizeable parcels of land which had been thrown on to the market by the nationalization of the property of the Church, while many nobles, who had been compensated by the Assembly for the loss of their offices, had been enabled to extend their estates, but it was the wealthy bourgeoisie who had acquired by far the largest holdings. In fact, the expropriation of ecclesiastical property had tended to reinforce the class distinctions as reflected in land ownership rather than to break them down. At the same time the flight of
many landowners abroad had done nothing to alleviate the peasants’ economic plight, since the
émigré
still made his demands upon them through his agents. ‘We thought,’ ran one of the numerous complaints addressed to the Assembly from country districts, ‘that, after the decrees suppressing the feudal regime had been passed, we should be as free in our property as in our persons. Two years’ experience has shown us that we are still slaves. We have no seigneur any more: he is at Coblenz. But he has left us his
fermiers
who badger and persecute us just as they did before the Revolution…Unless you come to our help we are ruined!’

In several parts of the country unrest was still fostered by popular support for priests who, having refused to take the oath required by the Assembly, were being driven from their parishes. There were renewed riots as armed crowds forced open churches whose doors had been shut against recalcitrant
curés
. Prompted by the Left, the Assembly passed a decree depriving non-juring priests of the pensions that had been granted them and expelling them from all places where disturbances had occurred.

To this decree the King applied the veto which the new Constitution had granted him and of which he had not yet been deprived. He also exercised his right of veto when the Assembly, harangued again by the Girondins, passed another decree sentencing to a traitor’s death and confiscating the property of all
émigrés
who had not returned to France by the end of the year.

Confronted by these vetoes the Girondins, believing that there would be large-scale desertions from the enemy ranks, called more loudly than ever for war against those who sheltered and armed the
émigrés
and who supported priests owing allegiance to the Pope rather than to the nation. Brissot, determined to force the King to give way to the Girondins’ demands and to declare himself openly on the side of the militant Revolution, declared that France urgently needed war ‘to purge her of the vices of despotism’. ‘Do you wish at one blow to destroy the aristocracy, the refractory priests, the malcontents?’ Brissot asked. ‘Then destroy Coblenz [where an
émigré
army was being formed]. The head of the nation will then be obliged to reign in accordance with the Constitution.’

The cry was taken up by all Brissot’s vociferous supporters, most
of whom, as one of their colleagues admitted, were inclined to be intoxicated by their own words once they heard themselves applauded, frequently being carried away ‘far beyond the limits of their own feelings, and, as they left the Assembly, blushing for what they had said’. Maximin Isnard, a wealthy ship-owner who had been elected to the Legislative Assembly for the department of the Var, told his fellow-deputies that caution was ‘merely weakness. The bravest are the best and an excess of firmness is the safeguard of success. We must amputate the gangrened limb to save the rest of the body.’ Outside the Assembly a female voice advocated violence in even stronger terms: ‘Peace will set us back…We can be regenerated through blood alone’. This was the voice of Madame Roland.