When the King Took Flight (14 page)

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the print version of this title.]

The Royal Family Approaches Paris. The king's berline and the smaller diligence holding the nurses pass below the customs gate of Le Roule just north
of the entrance to the Champs-Elysees. The hill of Montmartre, exaggerated
in height, is visible in the background.

As the procession passed through the Paris suburbs, the mood
grew decidedly more aggressive. There were several concerted attacks on the berline, probably aimed at the bodyguards. Barnave
and Petion began to fear for the safety of the passengers and
shouted for protection from the guardsmen, some of whom had
now arrived from Paris. Two officers were badly wounded, and Dumas was nearly pushed from his horse before they finally arrived
at the city walls, where General Lafayette met them with a large
contingent of cavalry." The cortege was then directed around the
perimeter of the city, again avoiding the working-class neighborhoods and entering from the northwest via the Champs-Elysees.
The whole of Paris had kept abreast of the king's progress, and tens
of thousands of men, women, and children pressed to watch the
slow advance down the avenue, with hundreds more clinging to
trees and rooftops. The occupants of the carriage appeared exhausted, dirty, ruffled. There were a few cheers for the deputies,
and for Drouet and Guillaume and the guardsmen from Varennes
who had made the long trek, and who were positioned prominently
at the front of the march. But for the most part the crowd remained silent, refusing to remove their hats and their bonnets, in an obvious
expression of disrespect for the monarch. As a similar sign of disapprobation, several companies of the national guardsmen lining
the street held their muskets upside down, barrels pointed at the
ground. In Paris, unlike in the provinces, the traditional salute of
"Long live the king!" was not to be heard.51 For Louis, always so
sensitive to the acclamations of the crowds, it could only have been
a moment of great sadness.

[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

The Royal Family Returns to the Tuileries. The berline crosses the Place de
Louis XV (today Place de la Concorde) and is about to enter the Tuileries
gardens. Almost all the spectators have left on their hats and bonnets, an obvious snub to the king. Note the women confronting a man (right) who has
taken off his hat.

At the end of the avenue they crossed the great square-known
today as the Place de la Concorde-and entered the Tuileries gardens, coming to a halt near the entrance to the palace. Discipline almost broke down now, as people in the crowds rushed toward the
coach and attempted to seize the bodyguards. Only with great difficulty were Dumas and Petion and several other officers able to
carry the three battered and bleeding men to safety. In the meantime
the royal family had quickly descended and walked untouched into
the Tuileries, the palace they had hoped to escape forever just five
days earlier.53

"What a strange destiny!" the baron Klinglin had exclaimed. Only
fifteen more miles, one or two hours' drive to Dun through the dead
of night, and the royal family could have been in the protective care
of General Bouille and his force of several hundred cavalry. From
the very moment of the king's capture, participants in and witnesses of the flight to Varennes began asking themselves what had
gone wrong, how they had failed, who was ultimately at fault.
Even the patriots, for whom the flight's failure was a great victory,
reflected at length on the strange workings of fate that had halted
the king of France so close to his escape. Indeed, generations of
historians have followed in their minds the divergent universes
of "contrafactual history," meditating on how different everything
might have been if Louis had succeeded in reaching Montmedy.
What would have happened if the servingwoman in the palace had
not become suspicious, compelling the royal family to postpone their departure; if Lafayette had not come by the Tuileries for a
late-night chat; if the duke de Choiseul had waited one more hour
in the meadow near Somme-Vesle; if Drouet had remained in his
fields a few minutes longer before returning to his post; if the drivers from Clermont had been convinced or bribed or coerced to continue beyond Varennes without a change of horses? The string of
"ifs" is almost endless. For indeed, the "event" of Varennes-like
almost any event in history-is constructed of a nearly infinite series of subevents, any one of which might have changed the outcome of that day.

Yet if one steps back from this sequence of circumstances, from
the minutiae of individual actions and reactions, one might argue
that two major factors shaped the experience of Varennes. The first
was the personality and behavior of the central figure of the whole
adventure, Louis XVI himself. The king's chronic indecision and
unreliability had profoundly affected the origins and course of the
entire Revolution. In the case at hand, an early and steadfast decision for flight would almost certainly have increased the chances of
success. Even after April 1791, when Louis seems finally to have
opted for escape, the act itself was postponed time after time, even
though all the plans were in place by early May, if not before. Every
day that the flight was delayed made it more likely that the complex
conspiracy would be found out-as it was in fact found out by the
queen's servingwoman sometime in early June. Every day that the
flight was delayed made it more likely that French soldiers-under
the ever-greater influence of the patriotic clubs-would refuse to
obey their aristocratic commanders, would act aggressively to halt
any action whose goals they rejected. During the months before the
departure, General Bouille had grown progressively more pessimistic about the reliability of his troops and the feasibility of the whole
plan .51 In the end, his decision to rely on foreign-born, Germanspeaking cavalry enormously raised the suspicions of the villagers
and townspeople who would observe their movements. But even
then the flight might have succeeded, if only the king had not
tempted fate by riding in his carriage with the window shades down
and by stepping outside and openly presenting himself to all by standers. Such actions were, of course, closely related to the king's
failure to comprehend the real meaning and wide appeal of the
Revolution, to his assumption that the Revolutionary changes he
detested had been provoked by a few radicals in the National Assembly and their demagogic control of the Parisian "rabble."

But in this sense a second fundamental cause of the failure of
Varennes was precisely the sweeping transformation in French attitudes and psychology engendered by the Revolution. A new sense
of self-confidence, of self-reliance, of identity with the nation as a
whole and not merely with the local community-the transformation that we observed in the small town of Varennes-had penetrated much of the French population. It was developments such as
these that help explain the extraordinary initiatives taken by smalltown officials in Sainte-Menehould and Varennes to halt the king.
Although the individual actions of Drouet and Sauce should not be
underestimated, those actions would scarcely have been possible
without the support of the town councils and indeed of the whole
citizenry. The readiness of support had been further activated by
the unusual and unexplained movements of mercenary cavalrymen
in the days before the escape and by the population's pervasive
suspicion of the aristocratic officers who led those troops. Nearinsurrectional conditions already existed in both Sainte-Menehould
and Clermont before the arrival of the king's caravan. MercyArgenteuil had not been mistaken when he warned the royal couple
that now, in the context of the new Revolutionary mentality, "Every village could be an insurmountable barrier to your passage."

Indeed, from one point of view, the real question is not why the
flight failed, but how it came so close to succeeding. The family's
spectacular achievements in exiting from the Tuileries palace undetected, escaping from the great wary and suspicious city of Paris,
and traveling along the main post roads to within a few dozen miles
of the Austrian border all underline the organizational talents of
General Bouille and, above all, of Axel von Fersen. Working together, they came close to pulling off what would certainly have
ranked among the greatest escapes of all time.

THE CITY to which Louis and his family returned on June 25, and
in which they were to find themselves virtually imprisoned, was a
universe unto itself, dramatically different from any other town or
region in the kingdom. With some 700,000 souls, Paris was the
second-largest city in all of Christendom and one of the ten largest
in the world. If one had climbed a tower of Notre Dame, the great
cathedral on an island in the Seine at the heart of the metropolis,
one might have gained some sense of the extraordinary diversity of
this teeming, vibrant, complex world., From this vantage point an
observer could easily make out many of Paris' architectural monuments, which eighteenth-century tourists already flocked to visit:
the great Gothic hall of justice, just to the west, where the Parlement of Paris formerly met; the splendid Renaissance city hall
across the river to the north; the Baroque dome of the French
Academy farther west along the river; and, just opposite it, the massive Right Bank structure of the Louvre and its western extension
of the Tuileries.

Besides the turrets and towers of these civil constructions, one
could count no less than two hundred spires and belfries erected
over the centuries by the Catholic church, many of them now
confiscated by the Revolution, along with much of the clergy's
property and revenues. To the west in general, and in pockets at several other points in the city, a visitor could also discern neighborhoods that were markedly whiter, with newer structures interspersed among greenery. These were the town houses and gardens
of what was perhaps the greatest concentration of aristocratic families in all of Europe. Although the Revolution had swept away the
distinct legal and political privileges formerly enjoyed by these families, they-unlike the clergy-retained most of their enormous
wealth and much of their cultural influence.

Alongside these imposing monuments of wealth and power,
much of the city would have appeared darker and rather tawdry, a
jumble of smaller, multistory structures, some leaning precariously
forward or holding one another up. Particular clusters of workingclass abodes could be seen in the eastern suburbs: notably in the
Saint-Antoine district, jutting eastward like a spur into the countryside from the square where the now-demolished Bastille had stood;
and in the Saint-Marcel neighborhood, clustered along the smaller
Bievre River winding into the Seine from the southeast. Fersen had
carefully avoided districts such as these when he drove the royal
family out of the city in the early morning of June 21. But similar
dwellings were visible in almost every part of the city, often directly
abutting the palaces and churches. Here were the homes of the
great mass of Parisian commoners, describing themselves until recently as the "Third Estate."

Many of the individuals in question, perhaps ioo,ooo scattered
across the city, lived comfortable and stable lives in families of government workers and professional men, merchants and shop owners, or master craftsmen. A substantial proportion of this group had
been born in the city, and virtually all the men and most of the
women were literate. This critical mass of the "middle class," more
numerous here than in the rest of the kingdom put together, was already providing the core of local Revolutionary leadership. But
the bulk of the Parisian population lived more uncertain lives.
There were journeymen and shop workers, laundrywomen and
street hawkers, lackeys and day laborers and prostitutes (some
40,000 by one estimate): the precariously employed, the unem ployed, the down-and-out. A great many were immigrants, arriving
with a motley mixture of costumes and accents from many different
regions of the kingdom and even from other countries: some with
trades and talents immediately fitting into the workaday world; others illiterate and unskilled, floating on the margins, unstable and
miserable. It was the juxtaposition of large numbers of both great
and small, rich and impoverished, highly educated and illiterateand of most everything in between-that gave the city its very particular character. Indeed, Sebastien Mercier, that inveterate observer
of Paris in the late eighteenth century, aptly described the city as "a
melting pot of the human race."'