The Days of the French Revolution (17 page)

The King, with his sister, wife and children, stood on a balcony to watch the parade of soldiers and
fédérés
pass by. He looked quite calm but his wife seemed almost in tears and had, so one observer thought, already been weeping. As the royal family waited, a huge crowd of people pushed their way into the Champ de Mars beneath them, shouting ‘Pétion for ever!’ They were followed by columns of
fédérés
marching along casually, arm in arm; by a group of men bearing a model of the Bastille; by the operators of a printing press which was put down from time to time so that sheets of patriotic songs could be produced and distributed to the bystanders; by the National Guard and regiments of the line; and finally by the members of the Assembly.

When the procession had passed beneath him, the King went forward as required to the ‘altar of the nation’–a truncated column placed at the top of the tiers of seats which had been constructed for the first festival – where he was expected to swear an oath of loyalty. Although surrounded by troops he had difficulty in making his way through the dense crowds of people; and the Queen, watching his progress with the aid of a glass, was frightened that he would be crushed to death or assassinated. She had had a thickly padded undergarment made for him which she hoped would resist the first thrust of a dagger, but she had not expected these suffocating crowds of people. She saw him stumble on a step by the altar and screamed as the confusion around him increased.

He took the oath, and was then escorted to the Tree of Feudalism which he was required to burn down. He protested at this indignity, and ordered the soldiers of his escort to take him away to the École Militaire. They marched off shouting ‘
Vive le Roi!
’ A few voices in the crowds took up the cry and an occasional murmur of sympathy could be heard, but most spectators watched him in silence. To Madame de Staël he looked like a martyr. To others, he was a
strangely pitiable figure who seemed, contrasted with the appearance of the people around him, to belong to another age, with his clothes ‘embroidered in the ancient Court fashion’ and his carefully dressed and powdered hair. He disappeared from view and was thereafter rarely glimpsed by the people until the day of his death.

As the King resumed his sad life at the Tuileries, the news from the front grew more alarming and demands for more decisive measures to meet the crisis became insistent. The Commune had already decreed that all citizens who possessed pikes should be enlisted as National Guardsmen, and soon the Assembly felt obliged to permit their general distribution. Gradually the distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens was being lost, the National Guard becoming less a bourgeois body than a force of the
sans-culottes
.

Towards the end of the month it became known in Paris that a manifesto, drafted by Count Fersen helped by an
émigré
, the Marquis de Limon, and signed at Coblentz by the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the enemy army, had threatened Paris with ‘total destruction’ if the royal family were not respected and protected, or if the Tuileries were again invaded. The manifesto had also declared that any National Guard who resisted the Austro-Prussian advance would be treated as an irregular, shot out of hand and have his home demolished. It was the provocation for which the King’s enemies had been waiting. The
fédérés
, who had refused to leave Paris for Soissons after 14 July until some decisive action had been taken, and who had been entertained while they remained by various of the city
sections
, marched about the city shouting, ‘Citizens to arms!’ A contingent of five hundred of them from Marseilles, who had put down a royalist insurrection in Aries, sang as they marched through the streets the stirring words of a song which had been written at Strasbourg for the Army of the Rhine by Rouget de Lisle, an officer of engineers. These
fédérés
from Marseilles-patriotic heroes, in the opinion of some citizens, to others, like the French Guards officer, General Thiébault, ‘an infernal gang of assassins’–
‘sing this song with the greatest fervour’, reported the
Chronique de Paris
, ‘and the passage where, waving their hats and brandishing their swords, they all sing together “
Aux armes, citoyens
” is truly thrilling…They often sing at the Palais Royal – sometimes in the theatre between two plays.’

The Assembly, hesitant and still for the most part innately conservative, was losing control of Paris to these
fédérés
and to the radical city
sections
, nearly all of which had now admitted ‘passive’ citizens to their committees and had enrolled volunteers for the defence of Paris. The
section
known as
Bon Conseil
which had enrolled 300 men – two thirds of them artisans and most of the rest, apart from two surgeons’ apprentices and two architects, shopkeepers and clerks – voted at a crowded meeting no longer to recognize the King and to march on the Assembly and thence on the Tuileries on Sunday, 5 August. The section
Quinze-Vingts
also voted for an armed march on the Assembly and the Tuileries on the 5th and asked all the other
sections
of Paris to come with them. By no means averse to such a march but anxious not to be found on the wrong side on Monday morning, Pétion persuaded the
Quinze-Vingts
to delay it until the 10th so as to give the Assembly time to dethrone the King themselves.

The
Quince-Vingts
and the other
sections
agreed to wait; but on 6 August a vast crowd of
fédérés
and
sectionnaires
gathered in the Champ de Mars to demand the King’s abdication. And since the Assembly still took no action, the
sections
, organized by the Jacobins, decided to act independently in accordance with their previous threats.

On the night of 9 August their delegates arrived at the Hôtel de Ville, announced that the Commune was summarily disbanded and replaced it with an Insurrectionary Commune of their own in which there were twice as many artisans as lawyers. Protests were answered with the claim, ‘When the people place themselves in a state of insurrection, they withdraw all power from other authorities and assume it themselves.’ The royalist commander of the National Guard, Mandat de Grancy, was arrested, executed and replaced by Antoine Santerre, while plans were laid to keep Pétion a prisoner in his own room in case he should take it upon himself to interfere.
Early the next day, a day of almost tropical heat, the march of some 20,000 armed people on the Tuileries began.

The main defenders of the palace were 900 Swiss Guards whose ammunition was severely limited. They were supported by about 2,000 National Guardsmen but these were suspected to be in sympathy with the marching citizens rather than the King to whom it was suggested that, if he went out to show himself to the National Guard, they might feel more inclined to protect him. He took the advice and went down into the courts. He had refused to put on the padded waistcoat which he had worn on 14 July, maintaining that, while such protection was acceptable against the dagger of an assassin, there was ‘something cowardly’ in wearing it when reviewing men who might be required to fight in his defence. As he appeared, untidily dressed in a purple suit, a sword at his side, his hair powdered on one side only, there were some shouts of ‘
Vive le Roi!
’ but these were not so loud as cries of ‘Down with the veto!’ ‘I can see him now as he passed along our front,’ a National Guardsman wrote. ‘He was silent and careworn and, with his swaying walk, he seemed to say to us, “All is lost.”’ An officer by his side advised him not to proceed with the review of the men drawn up in the courts and gardens, but to go over instead towards the battalion posted on the Pont Tournant. He agreed to do so, but while walking past the terrace of the Feuillants, which was crowded with people shouting insults and abuse, he was mortified to see this battalion followed by another move off with the evident intention of joining the demonstrators in the Place du Carrousel. Already several of the gunners had turned their cannon round to face towards the palace and had had to be disarmed; and, confronted by this further desertion, the King seemed to lose the last vestiges of hope. Mme Campan was watching him from a window of the palace. She saw ‘some of the gunners quit their posts, go up to the King and thrust their fists in his face. He went as pale as a corpse…The Queen later told me that the King had shown no energy, that this sort of review had done more harm than good.’

From inside the palace the shouts from the direction of the Place du Carrousel could now be heard quite clearly. The marching citizens, who were accompanied by about 400 Marseillaise and smaller
numbers of
fédérés
from other provincial cities, were far from being ‘
la dernière plèbe
’ of Hippolyte Taine’s description. From the casualty lists it appears that they came from nearly all the
sections
of Paris and, while there were few professional men – a surgeon, an architect and a drawing-master are mentioned – many of them seem to have been shopkeepers, small traders, manufacturers and master craftsmen. Far less than half were wage-earners. There were musicians, journeymen cabinet-makers and journeymen goldsmiths, domestic servants, clerks, jewellers, water-carriers, master glaziers and master locksmiths, gauze-workers and carters.

As they marched towards the Tuileries, Lucille Desmoulins anxiously waited for news in her lodging-house. She had spent an almost sleepless night listening apprehensively to the sound of the tocsin, her beloved husband’s head resting for a time on her shoulder.

We got up [she recorded, remembering every detail of the events of that day]. We had breakfast. Camille went off assuring me that he would not expose himself. Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock passed without our hearing a word. We picked up some of yesterday’s papers, sat on the sofa in the drawing-room and tried to read…I thought I heard the sound of cannon-fire…Jeanette, Camille’s cook, was bleating like a goat. We heard shouting and weeping in the street. We thought Paris would be running with blood…People were crying, ‘To arms!’

At the approach of the marching citizens, the King sent an urgent message to the Assembly asking them to send a delegation to the Tuileries for his protection. This request elicited no response but, soon after it had been sent, Pierre Roederer, the
procureur général syndic
of the Department of Paris, a body strongly opposed to the Jacobins, arrived at the palace in the hope, shared by the Girondins, that bloodshed might be averted and the Legislative Assembly afforded some chance of regaining control of the situation if the royal family were persuaded to throw themselves upon the protection of the deputies. Roederer was shown up to the room where the King and Queen and several Ministers were anxiously discussing their predicament. Roederer told them that the National Guard at the gates were talking cheerfully to the people who had already
begun to pour into the courtyard and he urged the royal family to hurry over to the Assembly.

The Queen strongly opposed such a move. It would be disgraceful, she said, to seek the protection of men who had behaved so badly towards them; she would rather be nailed to the walls of the palace. ‘Madame,’ Roederer answered her, ‘you endanger the lives of your husband and children. Think of the responsibility which you take upon yourself.’ The argument grew more and more vehement as the King turned indecisively first to his wife, then to the others who urged him to leave. At last he made up his mind to go. ‘
Marchons
,’ he said, raising his hand as though to silence the disputants.

He then walked round the circle formed by the members of the Court [Roederer recorded]. I did not notice that he spoke to anyone in particular; I just heard him say, ‘I am going to the National Assembly.’ Two files of guards arrived and we walked out of the Palace through one apartment after another. When we were going through the
Oeil-de-boeuf
the King removed the head-dress of the National Guardsman who was marching on his right, and put his own hat, which had a white feather in it, on the man’s head in its place. The man looked surprised, then, after a moment’s hesitation, took the hat off his head and put it under his arm.

When we reached the colonnade at the bottom of the great staircase the King asked, ‘What is going to happen to all the people we have left behind?’ ‘Sire,’ I replied. ‘The demonstrators from the
faubourgs
will soon be here…Our numbers are not sufficient. There is no one with the authority to resist even the crowds in the Place du Carrousel.’

When we were under the tree opposite the cafe on the terrace of the Feuillants, we walked through the leaves which had fallen in the night and had been swept up by the gardener into heaps. We sank up to our knees in them. ‘What a lot of leaves!’ said the King. ‘They have begun to fall very early this year.’ Manuel had written in a newspaper that the King would not last beyond the fall of the leaves. One of my colleagues told me that the Dauphin amused himself by kicking up the leaves on to the legs of the person in front of him.

As they crossed the garden numerous gentlemen of the court ran out after them, followed by palace servants. Roederer tried to prevent them, begging them to realize that their presence would not
only annoy the Assembly but would excite the rage of the populace; that they might even cause the King and Queen to be murdered. Only a few paid heed to him; the rest came on, getting as close as they could to the Swiss bodyguard, increasing the press and confusion of people now surging around the royal family. So dense did the throng become, indeed, that a soldier had to pick the Dauphin up and carry him over his head, and at the sight of what she took to be the child’s kidnapping the Queen, who could not reach him, shrieked in terror.

When they arrived at the gate which opened on to the passage leading up to the Assembly, a National Guardsman came up to the King and said to him in a strong Provençal accent, ‘Don’t be afraid, Sir. We are all decent people but we just don’t want to be betrayed any more. Be a good citizen, Sir, and get rid of those Holy Joes you keep in the Palace. Don’t forget. It’s high time to do as I say.’ The King, so Roederer commented, replied good-naturedly.