The Days of the French Revolution (16 page)

The disastrous beginning of the war had led to the most violent demonstrations in the capital: rumours of counter-revolution were rife, the King and Queen were accused of conspiring with the enemy and an ‘Austrian Committee’ at the Tuileries was supposed to be betraying military intelligence to Vienna. The Legislative Assembly, concerned by these rumours and disturbances and by repeated reports from the provinces that recalcitrant priests were stirring up
trouble amongst their parishioners, passed a series of decrees directed against the forces of counter-revolution: refractory priests denounced by twenty citizens were to be deported to Guiana; priests responsible for fomenting disturbances were to be deported on the denunciation of a single citizen; the King’s 6,000-strong Household Guard, which had been authorized by the Constitution, was dismissed; and 20,000 National Guardsmen from the provinces were summoned to a camp just outside Paris.

The King accepted the decree disbanding the Household Guard, but he vetoed both those concerning recalcitrant priests and that authorizing the formation of the
fédérés
camp near Paris. And in protest against these vetoes, Jean Roland, urged on by his wife who had become the guiding force of the ministry, publicly condemned the King’s action, reading out the sharply worded condemnation in His Majesty’s presence and reminding him that he would have to choose between the Revolution and its opponents. The King, already exasperated by the rudeness of Roland who insisted on appearing at Court with laces in his shoes instead of the prescribed buckles, responded by dismissing most of his Ministers and replacing them with more amenable Feuillants.

Feelings in Paris now rose higher than ever and divisions between and within the political parties grew more and more deep. On the Right there were those who considered that royal authority should be restored even if this meant the defeat of the French army; yet there were also those who, like the Marquis de Ferrières, could ‘never condone the introduction of a foreign army in France’ and who were seized ‘by a feeling of horror for those who could contemplate such a crime’. On the Left the arguments and quarrels between factions were quite as bitter: Girondins angrily accusing those members of the Jacobin Club who had condemned the war of being agents of counter-revolution; Jacobins with even greater vehemence accusing Girondins of being in the pay of the Court; Marat bringing down fire and brimstone on both their houses and urging soldiers to massacre their officers.

While Jacobins, Girondins and Feuillants squabbled fiercely with each other and among themselves, and journalists, supporting one faction or another or condemning them all, became ever more in
temperate, popular leaders of the
sans-culottes
decided upon independent action. They urged the assemblies of the forty-eight
sections
into which Paris had now been divided for administrative purposes to admit ‘passive’ citizens – that is to say those who did not have votes – as well as ‘active’ ones – those who paid a minimum of three days’ wages in direct taxation – into their meetings, to distribute pikes to citizens who did not have the right to carry firearms (a privilege still reserved to the National Guard) and to join together in another demonstration against the Court.

The day chosen for this demonstration was 20 June 1792, the third anniversary of the Tennis-Court Oath when, as part of the celebrations, a tree symbolizing Liberty was to be planted in the Tuileries gardens. It had originally been planned that the tree should be carried by an unarmed deputation, but the leaders of the
sans-culottes
and the radical
sections
were determined that the peaceful celebrations must be transformed into a violent popular uprising. They met to discuss means of making it so. Among them were Antoine Santerre, the brewer; Louis Legendre, one of the founders of the Cordeliers Club, an ill-educated butcher who had an enormously powerful voice and was extremely proud of his ‘explosions of feeling’; Claude Lazowski, a factory inspector; and Rossignol, a jeweller’s assistant. They decided that as many people as could be assembled in the eastern
faubourgs
of the city, women as well as men, should march upon the Hôtel de Ville and then to the Assembly with petitions against the royal veto and the dismissal of Roland and his colleagues. They should then make their way to the Tuileries. There should be no difficulty in collecting a good crowd, they thought, as the citizens of Paris had economic as well as political grievances: inflation was soaring and the price of certain foods had increased so enormously that there had been riots in several
sections
. Grocers’ shops had been invaded by angry women demanding sugar at twenty-five
sous
a pound, instead of the three
livres
they were being asked to pay.

Early on the morning of the appointed day about 8,000 people, National Guardsmen, shopkeepers, artisans, market porters, working women and their children, began their march. Armed with muskets, pikes, pitchforks and scythes, sharp pieces of iron fastened
to the end of stout bludgeons, they swarmed towards the Assembly. When information reached the Manège that there were as many as 8,000 of them, one of the deputies stood up to exclaim, ‘Eight thousand! And we are only seven hundred and forty-five. We must adjourn immediately.’

As cries of ‘Order! Order!’ echoed round the hall, and a deputy of the Right leaped up to remind the Assembly that while there might well be 8,000 citizens on the march in Paris there were a further 24,000,000 Frenchmen to be considered elsewhere, a group of leading demonstrators bearing a petition burst through the doors. The deputies rose to their feet in indignation as the President put on his hat and required them to wait outside. To the deputies’ apparent surprise, the petitioners then withdrew; whereupon the mollified Assembly consented to admit them again and to allow the thousands of demonstrators to march peacefully through the hall.

In they came, therefore, led by men carrying huge tables upon which had been pinned the Declaration of Rights and around which danced women and children singing the
Ça ira
. To cheers from the public galleries, they marched across the floor waving flags, shouting slogans, displaying banners inscribed with such watchwords as ‘The Constitution or death,’ brandishing ragged trousers to cries of ‘
Vivent les sans-culottes!
’ and a calf’s heart fixed to a pike with the inscription, ‘The heart of an aristocrat’. For three hours the demonstration continued, while the deputies both of Right and Left sat in subdued and anxious silence. As the last of the citizens marched out of the hall, Santerre presented the deputies with a flag, then went off to the Tuileries where a vast crowd had assembled in the courtyards, shouting ‘Sanction the decrees! Down with the veto! Down with the priests!’ ‘
Rappel des ministres patriots! Tremblez tyrans! Voici les sans-culottes!
’

It was now about four o’clock in the afternoon. There were large numbers of troops on duty but they made no move to disperse the demonstrators who, finding the Porte Royale, a side entrance to the palace, unlocked, pushed it open, mounted the stairs, dragging up a cannon with them and hacking down doors with hatchets. They discovered the King in an anteroom whose door they smashed down with their pikes.

For some time past he had been in a state of utter despondency.

For ten days together [recorded the Queen’s maid, Madame Campan] he did not utter a word even to his family, except at a game of backgammon which he played with Madame Elisabeth after dinner when he merely pronounced the words which are necessary to play that game. The Queen roused him from this state, so ruinous in a crisis, by throwing herself at his feet, and sometimes by employing images calculated to terrify him, at others expressions of her affection for him. She also urged him to remember what he owed to his family, and went so far as to say that if they must perish at least let them do so with honour and not wait to be strangled to death on the floor of their own apartment.

When the demonstrators rushed in upon him, however, he had recovered from his morose and silent depression and showed himself to the armed intruders with remarkable composure. ‘Here I am,’ he said, standing still in front of them. Madame Elisabeth was with him, her arms thrown round his shoulders as though pleading for protection. But the Queen, for whom his sister was at first mistaken, had been taken away with the children to the Council Room by a courtier who barricaded them in with furniture.

The King was persuaded to move to another, larger room to listen while a petition, which Legendre had brought with him, was read in his presence. He was asked to stand on a bench; several other benches and a table were set before him, while guards and attendants hurried into the room to stand on either side of him. The demonstrators crowded in front of him, shouting in unison with the people in the courts below, ‘No aristocrats! No veto! No priests!’

With his booming voice Legendre quietened them by reading the petition, each sentence of which was punctuated by shouts of agreement from his companions and by cries of ‘
Long live the Nation! Vive la Nation!
’

‘Yes,
vive la Nation!
’ said the King when Legendre had finished. ‘The nation has no better friend than me.’

‘Prove it then!’ someone shouted, proferring a red cap on the end of a pike. ‘Put this on.’

The King seemed embarrassed rather than intimidated. He took the cap which had recently been introduced by the Girondins as an
emblem of revolutionary fervour, and tried to put it on, but it was too small and fell off. A man picked it up, stretched it over his knee, and handed it back to the King who managed to get it over the back of his head. Another man now thrust a bottle of wine at him, asking him to toast his visitors.

‘People of Paris,’ the King said, obediently taking the bottle and putting the neck to his lips, though someone warned him it might be poisoned. ‘I drink to your health and to that of the French nation.’

He would not, however, withdraw his veto of the Assembly’s decrees, and he was still standing firm in his refusal when a delegation of deputies arrived, followed some time later by the Mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, who made the improbable excuse that he had only just heard of the royal family’s plight. Finding that the King’s friendly but determined manner had earned the respect of many people in the room, Pétion advised the demonstrators to leave ‘for fear lest enemies of the nation’ might question their ‘respectable intentions’. So the crowd slowly filed out of the room; and when they had all gone the King fell down into a chair looking exhausted, the red cap still on his head until, suddenly becoming aware of it, he snatched it off and threw it on to the floor.

His behaviour that day brought about an immediate reaction in favour of the monarchy. Numerous resolutions came in from the provinces, denouncing the insult to the royal family, and in Paris a petition protesting against the demonstration at the Tuileries was signed by over 20,000 people. Pétion was suspended for a time from his functions. So was Louis Manuel, the former tutor of a banker’s son who was now a leading member of the Paris Commune. Hundreds of young men from the western
sections
volunteered for guard duty at the Tuileries, while royalist members of the National Guard attacked anyone suspected of republican tendencies whom they came upon walking in the Tuileries gardens. And when Lafayette made a speech condemning the events of 20 June in the Assembly he was loudly applauded, and not only by the Feuillants.

But the reaction was short-lived. The court did not take proper advantage of it, the Queen, in particular, being wary of accepting help from those whom she considered untrustworthy or dislikeable.
‘She was more intent upon appearing to advantage in the midst of the peril,’ Lafayette later remarked with some bitterness, ‘than in averting it. As for my relations with the King, he always gave me his esteem, but never his confidence.’ ‘Better to perish,’ the Queen herself said, ‘than to be saved by M. de Lafayette.’ Agreeing in their turn to anathematize Lafayette as a ‘scoundrel, a traitor, an enemy of the nation’, the Left temporarily buried their differences in face of the common enemy. By 13 July Pétion had been restored as Mayor; Manuel was also back in office, and the Legislative Assembly, as concerned by the threats of the Austrians as by the activities of the
sans-culottes
, declared ‘
La patrie en danger
’. A state of emergency was proclaimed, and all Frenchmen capable of bearing arms were called up for national service. The King was forced to agree to the establishment of a military camp at Soissons and to the
fédérés
being allowed to pass through Paris in order to attend the now customary celebrations on 14 July.

In the provinces, local authorities which had been authorizing the disarming of suspects ever since the military disasters had seemed to presage an Austrian invasion, extended their campaign against refractory priests, disregarding the royal veto by ordering arrests, and in some places appearing to condone murders. In Paris also the Revolution was evidently approaching a crisis as the war news worsened. In several streets and squares platforms draped with tricolours were erected to serve as places of recruitment for men answering the call to arms. And, as the alarm guns thundered from the Pont Neuf and the Arsenal, municipal officials, wearing tricolour sashes over their shoulders and escorted by troops of cavalry, marched from street to street and square to square to spread abroad the Assembly’s proclamation, ‘
La patrie en danger
’.

The celebration of 14 July that year was a sadly different affair from that of 1790. In the Champ de Mars eighty-three tents had been erected representing the eighty-three departments of France, and beside each was a poplar from which fluttered a tricolour. In the centre of the circle described by these tents was a large marquee in which the Assembly and the King were to gather; another large marquee had been put up for the administrative bodies of Paris. The area resembled a military encampment rather than the scene of a
festival. On one side was a memorial to those many French soldiers who had died in the recent fighting; on the other, a tall tree, called the Tree of Feudalism, was bedecked with titles of nobility, escutcheons, armorial bearings, crowns, blue ribbons, cardinals’ caps, St Peter’s Keys and other symbols of aristocracy, royalty and the papacy, to which the King was to be asked to set fire.