Read The Days of the French Revolution Online

Authors: Christopher Hibbert

The Days of the French Revolution (7 page)

BOOK: The Days of the French Revolution
3.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

With these words he walked out of the hall, followed by the Comte d’Artois, looking ‘full of pride’, by the contented nobles, who had been assured of their continuing privileges, and by some of the clergy, leaving it free for further debate by the Commons unrestrained by his presence. Mirabeau seized his opportunity. ‘Gentlemen,’ he called, rising to his feet, his powerful voice echoing round the walls while trumpets sounded outside as the royal coach rattled away. ‘We are being dictated to in an insulting manner…I demand that you assume your legislative powers and adhere to the faith of your oath. It allows us to disband only after we have made the Constitution.’

The twenty-seven-year-old Grand Master of the Ceremonies, Henri-Éverard de Dreux Brézé, interrupted him to remind him of the King’s order to disperse. But Mirabeau stood his ground. ‘Yes, Sir,’ he replied. ‘We have heard the orders that the King has been advised to give. But you have no right to speak here. Go tell your master that we are here by the will of the people and that we shall not stir from our seats unless forced to do by bayonets.’ Sieyès and Bailly both supported him. ‘The assembled nation,’ Bailly asserted, ‘cannot be given orders.’ The question of their inviolability was then put to the vote and carried by 493 votes to 34.

According to the Duc d’Orléans, Brézé then rushed off to report to the King what had happened; and ‘the King went pale with anger and uttered strong oaths. “Well then, clear them out by force,” he ordered…Brézé returned to carry out this order but found that the Deputies had by then dispersed.’ Other witnesses, however, reported that the King responded to the Third Estate’s revolt with weary resignation, saying ‘
Eh bien, foutre! Qu’ils restent
. Well, damn it, let them stay.’ Certainly, on 27 June, when most of the clergy and forty-seven of the nobility led by the Duc d’Orlèans had joined the National Assembly, he decided that he would have to give his approval to a measure which he felt no longer able to prevent. After news had been received from Paris that unless he authorized joint meetings of all three orders, a mob thirty thousand
strong would besiege the palace, he asked the remaining clergy and the rest of the nobility to follow the example of their colleagues.

 

The first stage of the Revolution was over and had been achieved without bloodshed. ‘History,’ Mirabeau proudly declared, ‘has too often recounted the actions of nothing more than wild animals, among which at long intervals we can pick out some heroes. Now we are given hope that we are beginning the history of man.’

But while the National Assembly, under the Presidency of the Archbishop of Vienne, turned to the business of framing a constitution, the King turned to the army to save him from forces over which he was losing all control. He ordered six regiments up from the eastern frontier, then, following riots in Paris, another ten. As these troops converged upon Paris and Versailles the atmosphere in the capital and in the country at large grew ever more tense. There were increasingly frequent outbreaks of violence, a military prison was invaded by the mob, passers-by who declined to declare their support of the Third Estate were attacked in the streets. As the price of bread rose, there were riots in protest against the landowners, tithe-owners and merchants who were held responsible. In many towns the liberal-minded upper bourgeoisie encouraged the
petite bourgeoisie
to voice their protests against the reactionary attitudes of the aristocracy. They urged them to provide a lead for the journeymen and workers, to ensure that the hopes of a fairer society aroused by the calling of the Estates General would not be shattered so soon.

‘Oh my fellow-citizens,’ ran one of the numerous pamphlets published at this time and written by a member of the upper bourgeoisie, a doctor, ‘keep close watch on the conduct of the King’s Ministers…Their aim is to dissolve our National Assembly, and the only means whereby they can do so is civil war. In private, Ministers are talking of…sending against you a formidable force of soldiers and bayonets!’

‘A large number of troops already surround us,’ Mirabeau declared in a violent speech on 8 July. ‘More are arriving each day.
Artillery are being brought up…These preparations for war are obvious to anyone and fill every heart with indignation.’

Already the troops, mostly foreign mercenaries, had reached the high ground around Paris and were dispatched to protect strategic points such as the bridges of Sèvres and St Cloud and the Royal Treasury. The National Assembly protested at these movements, asking why a King, who was loved by twenty-five million Frenchmen, should surround the throne ‘at such great expense with several thousand foreigners’. The King replied that the troops were in Paris to protect it from disorder, not to overawe it, but his words were rendered suspect by his dismissal of Necker whose place was filled by the sternly conservative Baron de Breteuil. To supervise the military actions, the experienced Maréchal de Broglie, a confirmed royalist, had already been summoned from Alsace to take over the Ministry of War.

The news of the dismissal of Necker caused the utmost consternation amongst the 600,000 people of Paris: treasury notes slumped in value, stockbrokers held an emergency meeting and closed the Stock Exchange, financiers and investors spoke gloomily of bankruptcy, artisans, journeymen and workers feared that the price of bread which had already almost doubled within the past two months would become more expensive still. They had long suspected that the aristocrats and land-owners had advocated the hoarding of grain so as to destroy the Third Estate. Now their suspicions seemed fully justified.

Concerned to defend property against the mobs that were rampaging about the town, breaking into gunsmiths’ and sword-cutlers’ shops and threatening the houses of the richer citizens, the Electors who had made the final selection of the Parisian deputies in the Estates General met at the Hôtel de Ville. Here they established themselves as an unofficial municipal authority and decided to organize a militia. Mostly well-to-do themselves – of the 379 men who attended the meeting the majority were lawyers, doctors and merchants – they agreed that the militia, soon to be called the National Guard, should be a bourgeois body composed only of respectable citizens prepared to serve one day in four, more than most wage-earners could afford to do.

As one Elector observed ‘the situation in Paris [was] becoming highly ominous’. In the Place Vendôme a band of demonstrators hurled stones at the troops of the Royal Allemand Regiment; near the Tuileries a regiment of dragoons, commanded by the Prince de Lambesc, were also stoned and bombarded with garden chairs. Two companies of
Gardes-françaises
, confined to barracks for insubordination, broke out and rushed off shouting, ‘We are the soldiers of the nation! Long live the Third Estate!’ They were arrested and incarcerated in the Abbaye prison but were released by the mob. Other mobs marched through the streets pillaging bakers’ shops and threatening to burn down the theatres if they did not close immediately, since people had no right to enjoy themselves in the midst of public misfortunes. Wax busts of Necker and the Duc d’Orléans, borrowed from Curtius’s waxworks, were paraded about accompanied by black and white standards, symbols of ‘mourning for the disgrace of an idolized Minister’. And in the gardens of the Palais Royal huge crowds collected. These gardens, which were surrounded by some of the most expensive shops and brothels in Europe and which had been thrown open to the public by the Duc d’Orléans, had long been the haunt not only of men-about-town and ladies of fashion but also of political agitators and public orators, and so it was here that people anxious for news, eager to spread rumours, or hungry for excitement naturally gathered. Most of them were delighted now to learn that the detested customs barriers which encircled Paris in order to exact heavy tolls upon all meat, wines, vegetables and other commodities entering the city, had been destroyed.

Among the crowd, standing on a table outside one of the cafes, was a tall young lawyer with a yellowish complexion and long, curly hair, Camille Desmoulins. The son of an official from Guise, Desmoulins had been admitted to the bar four years before, but a painful stammer as well as an unattractive manner and appearance had prevented his obtaining many briefs. He was then living in Paris in a poverty which his copying of legal documents and his authorship of several radical pamphlets had not done much to alleviate. There was, however, little trace of any impediment in his speech now as he excitedly harangued the people around him, re
ferring to the dismissal of Necker as ‘the tocsin for the St Bartholomew of the patriots’, and calling them to arms and to the barricades. He had recently had a good deal of practice at this kind of demagogy.

 

It’s simpler to go to the Palais Royal [he told his father, having failed to get elected to the Assembly], because you don’t have to ask the President’s permission to speak or to wait your turn for a couple of hours. One proposes one’s own motion. It is supported and the audience gets the speaker to stand on a chair. If he is applauded he calls the crowd to order; if he is booed or whistled at, he steps down. The Romans ran their forum this way…At the Palais Royal the patriots form a great chain with cavalry men, dragoons, chasseurs, Swiss guards, artillerymen, putting their arms round them, pouring out money in making them drunk or toasting the health of the Nation.

 

On this occasion Desmoulins, reckless, immature and uncontrollably passionate, drew two pistols from beneath his coat, declaring that he would never fall alive into the hands of the police who were closely watching his movements. He climbed down from the table into the arms of the crowd who loudly repeated his call ‘To arms!’ on every side. He had fastened a green ribbon to his hat as an emblem of spring and hope and liberty. And he urged everyone else to wear some sort of green cockade in token of their support for the ‘common cause’. Hundreds did so, some of them pulling off the leaves of the horse chestnut trees for the purpose, until, as Gouverneur Morris discovered, it became dangerous to be seen out of doors without a hat garnished with foliage. Then they all marched off into the city to search for arms. The crowd was becoming an irresistible force.

2
THE DAY OF THE VAINQUEURS DE LA BASTILLE

14 July 1789

‘Yes, truly we shall be free!
Our hands will never wear shackles again’

DUQUESNOY

The morning of Tuesday, 14 July 1789, was overcast; heavy clouds threatened rain. Throughout the night the atmosphere in Paris had been growing more and more tense as rumours flew from street to street of thousands of troops on the march. In the Hôtel de Ville a Permanent Committee established by the Electors issued urgent orders for the erection of barricades, for the organization of those
Gardes-françaises
who had declared themselves on the citizens’ side, for the protection of the banks, and for the arrest of all carts and carriages found entering or leaving Paris. Scores of these vehicles were assembled beneath the windows of the Hôtel de Ville in the Place de Grève which was soon littered with piles of stores and provisions of vegetables, with furniture, baskets, boxes and empty powder-barrels whose contents had been distributed the night before to those who had guns.

As yet, few citizens did have guns, and soon after dawn a crowd of about 60,000 people gathered on the parade-ground in front of the Invalides demanding to be supplied with them. They had already made similar demands at the Hôtel de Ville where one of the leaders of the Permanent Committee, an elderly merchant Jacques de Flesselles, had aroused their distrust by his unhelpful, prevaricating manner. The Governor of the Invalides refused to deliver the arms up without audiority. On Monday he had referred an earlier request for arms from a delegation of Electors to the Swiss General Baron de Besenval, Marshal Broglie’s second-in-command, who had told him he must do nothing without audiority from Versailles and had taken the precaution of ordering the pensioners on duty at the Invalides to render the muskets useless by unscrewing the hammers. The pensioners, unwilling to help their masters, set about this task with such extreme laboriousness that in six hours they had unscrewed scarcely more than twenty hammers of the 32,000 muskets awaiting their attention. The Governor told Besenval ‘that a spirit of sedition was rife in the hospital,’ so the General recorded, ‘and that for the past ten days the soldiers had had their pockets full of money. A legless cripple, whom no one suspected, had introduced into the establishment hundreds of licentious and subversive songs. In a word, the Governor concluded, it was hopeless to count on the
pensioners, who, if they received orders to load their cannon, would turn them on the Governor’s apartment.’

While they were still at their leisurely work, a representative of the Electors left the Hôtel de Ville with instruction to persuade the Governor to give way to the peoples’ demand. He found the crowd, larger than ever now, pressing round the gate of the Invalides, waving hats adorned with cockades and shouting for muskets. He forced his way up to the gate which was opened just wide enough to let him through. Inside, the Governor told him that no instructions had yet been received from Versailles and that he was, therefore, powerless to help him. The Governor then went out to try to explain this to the mob. But he could not make himself heard above their shouts and, as he withdrew, crowds of men rushed after him, forced the gate wide open and streamed into the building, while others clambered across the moat and up the parapet walls.

The guards of the Invalides stood by their cannon, disinclined to open fire, while 5,000 troops, encamped less than a quarter of a mile away on the Champ de Mars, also remained inactive. Indeed, Baron de Besenval could find no soldiers at all prepared to interfere. One after another their commanding officers told him that their men refused to march, and that, unless they were withdrawn from Paris, they were more likely to join the rioters than act against them.

So the crowd surged down the steps into the cellars of the Invalides undisturbed, seizing armfuls of muskets and dragging out whatever other weapons they could lay their hands on, pressing weapons on anyone who looked in need of them, including two servants of the British Ambassador who had wandered over to see what was going on. But although the rioters got away with over ten cannon as well as 28,000 muskets, they discovered very little powder and very few cartridges. And for these they turned to the Bastille in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Among them was Jean Baptiste Humbert, a watchmaker born in Langres who had come to Paris in 1787 having learned his craft in Switzerland. He had made first for a shop in the Place de Grève
where he had bought some nails which he hoped might serve instead of shot. On leaving the shop, so he later recorded:

 

I was accosted by a citizen who told me they were now issuing shot at the Hôtel de Ville. So I hurried there and was given a few pellets of buckshot. I then immediately set out for the Bastille, loading my gun as I went. I was joined by a group of people who were also on their way to the Bastille. We found four foot-soldiers of the Watch, armed with guns and I urged them to come along with us. They replied they had neither powder nor shot. So we clubbed together to give each of them enough for two shots. Thus armed they were pleased to join us. As we were passing in front of the Hôtel de la Régie we saw that two cases of bullets had just been broken up and their contents were being freely handed out. I filled one of my coat pockets with them to give to anyone who was short…[Then], passing through the courtyard of the Arsenal, we arrived at the Bastille.

 

The Bastille, a huge building of eight round towers linked by walls eighty feet high, had originally been built as a fortress in the fourteenth century. Since then it had been used as a state prison for men who had been arrested in accordance with
lettres de cachet
but who were not guilty of an offence punishable under common law. It was surrounded by an air of mystery. Prisoners, so it was said, their names not divulged to the gaolers with whom they were forbidden to talk, arrived in coaches with drawn blinds, and when they were escorted inside, the soldiers on duty had to turn to face the wall. Its sinister reputation – sustained by legends that owed much to the gruesome and imaginative
Mèmoires sur la Bastille
by the lawyer and journalist, Simon Linguet, who published them soon after his release in 1782–was much increased by stories of ‘the man in the iron mask’, of the imprisonment of writers like Voltaire and the Abbé Morellet, and of Latude whose thirty years of intermittent incarceration began when he was accused of attempting to poison Mme de Pompadour. Yet the Bastille was, in fact, one of the least unpleasant of Paris’s prisons. The food was adequate, prisoners were allowed to bring in their own possessions, and the dreaded dungeons, where it was believed scores of wretches lay in chains, had not been used for years. Indeed, the Bastille was never crowded, there being
rarely more than ten prisoners inside its massive walls. Discussions had recently been held as to the advisability of maintaining so expensive an establishment for the incarceration of so few offenders, and a suggestion had been put forward that the unsightly structure should be demolished and a square laid out on its site. The architects and contractors who supported this plan were encouraged when informed in the late spring of 1789 that the Bastille contained no more than seven prisoners, none of whom was of much importance. Four were forgers who had been transferred there from some other, overcrowded prison; one was a mentally unbalanced Irishman who, believing himself to be alternately Julius Caesar and God, was supposed to be a spy; the sixth, also deranged, was suspected of being involved in an attempt to assassinate the King; the last was the Comte de Solages whose family had arranged for him to be committed by a
lettre de cachet
for incest.

To the people of Paris, however, unaware either of its proposed demolition or of the number of prisoners held there, the Bastille was the symbol of an intolerable régime; and it was not merely to obtain powder for their muskets and to release the men held there that they marched so determinedly upon it this Tuesday morning.

For several days now the Governor of the Bastille, the Marquis de Launay, had been anticipating their arrival with the utmost apprehension. Neither a decisive nor an assertive man, de Launay was quite incapable of instilling his officers with any confidence. One of them, Lieutenant Louis Deflue, who had been sent with a detachment of thirty-two Swiss soldiers to reinforce the garrison of eighty-two superannuated soldiers or
invalides
, described him as being ‘without much knowledge of military affairs, without experience and without much courage’.

‘I could clearly see from his constant uneasiness and irresolution’ [Deflue afterwards wrote in a letter to his brothers],

 

that if we were attacked we should be very badly led. He was so terrified that at night he mistook me shadows of trees for enemies so that we had to be on the alert throughout the hours of darkness. The staff officers…and I myself often tried to assure him that our position was not as weak as he complained and to persuade him to attend to important matters rather
than to expend his energy on trifles. He would listen to us, appearing to agree with our advice. But then he would do just the opposite before changing his mind yet again.

 

Nervous and indecisive as he evidently was, de Launay had nevertheless done much to prepare the Bastille for an attack. Expecting that he would not have to hold out for long before troops came to disperse a hostile mob, he had not troubled to lay in more than two days’ supply of bread; but in the cellars he had a large stock of powder contained in 250 barrels which had been transferred there from the Arsenal. He also had numerous cannon. There were fifteen eight-pounders standing between the battlements on the towers, a further three eight-pounders below them with their muzzles levelled at the approaches to the entrance gate, as well as twelve smaller rampart guns. In order to give these guns a wider field of fire the embrasures had been widened. Other apertures and windows had been blocked up, the drawbridge across the deep dry moat had been strengthened and the defences generally repaired and improved. Loads of paving-stones had been dragged up to the top of the towers from which they could be hurled down through the machicolations on to the heads of any rioters who managed to approach the foot of the towers.

But if these measures gave some confidence to de Launay’s officers, his increasingly prevaricating manner certainly did not. Nor did the attitude of their men. Most of the
invalides
of the regular garrison were known to be in sympathy with the people of the surrounding
faubourgs
in whose shops they bought their tobacco and in whose cafés they sat drinking wine. It was hardly to be expected that they would eagerly obey orders to open fire on them, and not at all unlikely that they would flatly refuse to do so. Lieutenant Deflue’s Swiss soldiers did not share the same close ties with the people of Paris, but they were by no means hostile to their aspirations. They were rumoured already to have sworn to spike their own guns if they were ordered to fire on the crowd, and the next day seventy-five men of the same regiment, the Salis-Samade, billetted in Issy, Vaugirard and Sèvres, were to desert. Besides, the thirty-two men from the Salis-Samade in the Bastille had been
occupied throughout the night in carrying the heavy and cumbersome barrels of powder from the Arsenal down into the cellar, and by the morning of the 14th they were tired out.

To the people of the
faubourgs
, though, the Bastille, the muzzles of its guns depressed towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, the Rue des Tournelles and the Rue de Jean Beaussire, appeared not so much in a ready state of defence as in preparation for attack. And in response to their protests, a delegation of Electors went to the Bastille to ask the Governor to withdraw the guns which were both provocative and alarming. When they arrived shortly after ten o’clock, the Governor was about to sit down to his morning meal which was then usually eaten in France about this time. He invited the delegates to join him. He was a perfectly agreeable host, and entirely amenable to their demands. He readily consented to having the guns pulled back out of sight and to having the embrasures blocked up with planks.

By the time the meal was over, however, the relaxed atmosphere in the Governor’s dining-room had been suddenly shattered by noise from the streets outside. The crowds that had raided the Invalides had now arrived beneath the walls of the Bastille and had been joined by hundreds of demonstrators from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the surrounding districts who pushed their way into the outer court, the Cour du Passage, which was flanked on either side by shops and the barracks of the
invalides
. When they saw the cannon in the towers above them being withdrawn they presumed that the gunners were about to load them. It was also supposed that the delegates from the Electors, who had not yet risen from the Governor’s dining-room table, had been arrested and were being held as hostages.

Responding to the frantic appeals of a group of demonstrators, a second delegation of Electors, led by a lawyer, Thuriot de la Rozère, went up to the Governor’s lodging where they met the other delegates on their way out. Thuriot de la Rozère told the Governor that the people outside, believing that the guns had been withdrawn from view only to be loaded, were now demanding that a citizen’s militia should be allowed into the stronghold to hold it in the name of the city. The Governor protested that the guns were
certainly not being loaded, and he invited Thuriot – who knew the Bastille well having often visited one of his clients there – to satisfy himself that no attack on the people was intended. He took Thuriot up to the top of the towers to show him the unloaded guns and the blocked-up apertures; he urged him to believe that he would never open fire unless he were attacked; he gave his word of honour that he intended no harm to anyone and, in Thuriot’s presence, he asked the garrison to swear that they would not use their arms except in self-defence, an undertaking which they were only too willing to give. So eager, in fact, was the Governor to display his good intentions that Thuriot believed he would have agreed to accept a citizens’ militia had not his officers declared that they would all be dishonoured if they gave in so meekly.

BOOK: The Days of the French Revolution
3.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Storm Surge by Celia Ashley
Nurse in India by Juliet Armstrong
Twisted Proposal by M.V. Miles
Cyborg Nation by Kaitlyn O'Connor
Close to Home by Peter Robinson
Her Cyborg by Nellie C. Lind
Emma Bull by Finder
The Puzzled Heart by Amanda Cross