When the King Took Flight (31 page)

Although the investigations were officially directed by the municipal courts and the Parisian police, they were supervised by the
Assembly's Committees on Research and Reports. Within days after the Champ de Mars, more than two hundred people had been
jailed for throwing stones or shouting nasty comments against the
national guards or for various other "crimes." The government also
went after the republican leadership, the principal speakers of the
fraternal societies, and the editors of several radical newspaperspeople such as Marat, Danton, Desmoulins, Keralio, and Robert.' And like many provincial officials faced with the crisis of the king's
flight, the National Assembly and the Parisian leaders had no
qualms about running roughshod over laws only recently enacted.
They ordered guardsmen and police to close publishing houses and
political clubs, imposing limited press censorship for the first time
since the fall of the absolute monarchy. They also reactivated a system of secret police informants, largely abandoned since the Old
Regime. Men were sent to eavesdrop on private conversations in
taverns or on street corners, listening for possible attacks against the
government. Using the pretense of a citywide census, they dispatched municipal agents to apartments throughout Paris, looking
for suspicious individuals or documents. The jailings and indictments continued well into August. Many complained of being held
for weeks in solitary confinement without seeing a judge, without
even being told the reason for their arrest. Cochon de l'Apparent,
one of the directors of the investigating committees, was frank
about the logic of such actions. "In extraordinary moments of crisis," he argued-echoing the language of Charles Lameth-"when
the survival of the state is at stake, illegal arrests are justifiable."3

Repression seemed all the more warranted in that widespread secret conspiracies were now thought to have been organized against
the Revolution. It was simply impossible, or so the moderates tried
to convince themselves, that the petitioners of the Champ de Mars
had acted on their own against the decrees of the sovereign National Assembly. They must have been corrupted or misled by outsiders. Although deputies had made similar accusations since the
beginning of the Revolution, most had long resisted a conspiratorial explanation of events. In late 1790 the deputy Gaultier had reflected on recent predictions of insurrections that had never in fact
materialized: "I have never really placed any credence in them," he
wrote, "and you have seen that such beliefs were totally unfounded.
Nothing can more surely arouse fears among the common people
than false announcements [of conspiracies]." But now almost everyone seemed to slip into a paranoid mode. Not only in their
speeches but in letters home to friends and constituents, they spoke of insidious counterrevolutionary plots and money distributed by
foreign powers: "Paris has been influenced by a horde of paid foreign agents"; "Prussian and English gold has been widely circulated
in the capital to corrupt the less Enlightened segment of the common people." Some moderates even convinced themselves that their
more radical opponents in the Assembly-Robespierre, Petion, and
others-were in the pay of such agents.'

Although spies were undoubtedly present in Paris, no reliable evidence has been found for the summer of I791 linking foreign emissaries to Republican agitation. Inevitably, a whole segment of the
Parisian population fiercely opposed both the actions and the interpretations of the National Assembly. Marie-Jeanne Roland and
her husband, who secretly sheltered Keralio and Robert from the
police, were incensed and frustrated by the turn of events. Every
technique possible, she wrote, had been mobilized in a general "system of persecution against good patriots" to blacken their reputations, including "fallacious tracts, agents provocateurs, every kind of
prejudice, and fabricated testimony." The American William Short
was also profoundly shocked: "the true principles of liberty," he
wrote to Jefferson, "are avowedly violated every day under the
long known pretext of public good." "No true act of habeas corpus
existing ... there is difficulty in extracting an innocent person from
prison."' Many of the republicans became convinced, in turn, that
their opponents in the Assembly were controlled by aristocrats or
foreign governments.

Entire neighborhoods in Paris were now polarized by the affair,
divided between those who sympathized with the Champ de Mars
demonstrators and those who supported the repression. In SaintMarcel, for example, individuals who served in national guard units
known to have fired on the July 17 petitioners were spat upon or attacked, and threats were made against their houses. The two principal leaders of Paris, Mayor Bailly and General Lafayette, were
praised by large segments of the citizenry. But for others "they have
become the object of an extremely violent hatred."6 The confrontation was dramatically illustrated by the terrible rift dividing the Paris Jacobin Club. In the midst of the crisis nearly all the deputies
sitting in the club had walked out of the meeting, claiming that the
society was now under the thumb of unruly outsiders who wanted
to depose the king. Only a handful of representatives, including
Petion and Robespierre, initially remained with the faithful. Little
by little, in the course of the summer about sixty radicals from the
Assembly returned to the society. But a larger group of dissidents,
led primarily by Barnave and the Lameth brothers, created a rival
club in the abandoned Feuillant convent just across the street from
the Jacobins. They rejected all efforts to arrange a reconciliation.
For the next several months the two clubs, Jacobins and Feuillants,
faced off in increasingly bitter competition, vying for power and
influence, not only in Paris but across the nation. Many of the
electoral assemblies for the new legislature, unfolding during the
summer in towns throughout the realm, were marked by rivalries
between local supporters of the Jacobins or Feuillants.'

The bright days of the early Revolution, when patriots felt confident that a new age of happiness and national unity was within
their grasp, now seemed only a distant memory. In the wake of the
king's flight and the ensuing republican movement, Paris was swept
by a climate of suspicion and hatred. Men and women who had
once thought they shared common goals now accused each other of
treacherous links with counterrevolutionaries or foreign powers.
Members of the two rival clubs were afraid to be seen in public with
those of the opposing faction, even with individuals who had once
been close friends. Rabaut Saint-Etienne, a Protestant pastor from
southern France and a key member of the Constitutional Committee, was overwhelmed with frustration to see himself accused of
complicity with the king-or with the English or with the Austrians. Like many of his colleagues, he felt besieged and attacked by
both the right and the left: by "factional" radicals on the one side
and "hypocritical friends of Louis XVI and false zealots of religion" on the other-as Gaultier put it. Theodore Vernier felt as
though "a sword is now suspended over our heads." Under such
conditions, the deputies' exhaustion and lassitude grew worse than ever. "No one could even describe our impatience to be finished."
"The great majority of the deputies," lamented Bouchette to a
friend in Flanders, "think only of the moment they can leave. Our
life here is wretched. If it doesn't finish soon, we will no longer be
able to hold up."8

Sensing a growing public impatience with the length of time they
had spent drafting a constitution-now well over two years-the
deputies pressed forward to finish their work as soon as possible.
The powerful Constitutional Committee and an associated Committee on Revisions had been at work for months, sorting through
the great mass of decrees passed haphazardly since the beginning
of the Revolution, attempting to decide which measures were
truly "constitutional" and which were merely "legislation." Yet the
whole process was prolonged for several weeks by the terrible factional feuds within the Assembly. The Feuillant group, which dominated the two committees, had come to believe that the danger from
the republicans was far greater than any potential threat from the
monarchy. Since late June, Barnave, Duport, and the Lameth brothers had reinitiated secret negotiations with the king. During a moment alone with the queen, while he accompanied the royal family
on their return from Varennes, Barnave had proposed a deal. He
and his friends promised to do everything in their power to preserve
the monarchy and to strengthen the king's authority. In return, they
asked only that Louis accept the constitution and obtain recognition
of the new French government from the Austrian empire.

But as the Feuillants tried to push through changes in the constitution, reinforcing the power of the king and limiting democracy,
they were strongly opposed at every step by Petion and Robespierre and the Jacobin group. And the Jacobins now found unexpected allies. A whole segment of the unaligned center of the Assembly began to suspect the motives of Barnave and his friends.
Thibaudeau, the moderate judge from Poitou, was convinced that the Feuillant leaders wanted only to make themselves ministers under the new government: "We have grown suspicious of these men
who once passed as such firm patriots but whom we now know to
be ambitious intriguers." Others were stunned that individuals who
had previously seemed so strongly democratic had abruptly reversed their position." In the end, the two factions and their allies
battled to a draw, and only a small number of changes were made to
the constitution as originally voted.

At last, on September 3, utterly exhausted by their struggles, the
representatives reached a final agreement, and the constitution was
declared complete. About nine that evening a delegation of more
than two hundred deputies, marching by torchlight and accompanied by national guardsmen on foot and on horseback, delivered the
document to the king at the Tuileries palace. Louis met them in his
great council hall with his ministers beside him and announced that
he was ready to examine the constitution. Everyone realized that if
Louis rejected it, the Assembly would have to remove him from the
throne and deal with all the problems of a regency in the name of
the young dauphin, the designated successor. "Now we will learn,"
wrote Bouchette, "if the king will be the friend or the enemy of the
nation. Everything hangs on his decision.""

As the deputies waited and as tensions continued to build, Louis
carefully read the text and considered his options. He was well
aware that more than two hundred noble and clerical deputies, deputies who had boycotted all debates in the Assembly since late June,
had already rejected the document. But finally, on September 13, he
announced that he would indeed accept the constitution. The next
day he appeared before the Assembly to affix his signature and pronounce his oath of adherence. He also issued a statement explaining
his position, a statement actually written by one of his ministers but
signed by Louis as though it represented his own words. In it he attempted once again to explain the flight to Varennes. Entirely ignoring his declaration of June 21-which he had written himself-he
claimed that he had only wanted to escape from the factions and violence of Paris: "I desired to isolate myself," he said, "from all the conflicting parties and determine which position truly represented
the will of the nation." He admitted that he was still not convinced
that the new government would have "all the energy necessary to
control and unify the diverse parts of so vast a nation as France."
Nevertheless, he announced his willingness to give it a try: "I consider that experience alone will judge whether it can work." And he
took an oath to do everything in his power to enforce the constitution: "I will accept it," he promised, "and I will ensure that it is executed.""

At the same time-whether through his own initiative or
through the urgings of his ministers-the king proposed a general
amnesty for all those convicted or indicted for actions related to the
Revolution. "To extinguish the hatreds, to ease all the troubles invariably created by a revolution of this kind, let us agree to forget the past." By acclamation, the Assembly immediately approved
the king's proposal. And throughout the country, jail doors were
opened to political prisoners of every stripe, both those awaiting trial and those already convicted. Republican radicals, counterrevolutionary nobles, refractory priests, as well as those implicated
in the king's flight-all were immediately granted their freedom.
For the first time in almost three months, the duke de Choiseul,
Goguelat, and Damas, key players in the "sublime conspiracy" to
rescue the king, were allowed to leave their prison cells." Soon
thereafter all three departed to join the emigrant armies across the
Rhine.

Louis, too, was granted freedom of action, to take up again his
functions as "chief executive" of the constitutional monarchy. For
many weeks the royal couple had been prisoners in their palace.
Guarded day and night, strictly limited in the number of people
they were permitted to meet, they were forbidden even to close the
doors of their chambers except to dress. Foreign ambassadors had
been allowed no contact with the king, but only with the minister of
foreign affairs. Yet now the monarch was given leave to resume a
"normal" life and to move freely within the capital. He was present
at several of the festivities in the weeklong celebration of the com pletion of the constitution-band concerts, dances, fireworks and
nighttime illuminations. As he traveled about the city, according to
some reports, he was met with cheers and the cry he so loved of
"Long live the king." About the same time, the Assembly voted to
reinsert the word king into the formal oath of allegiance that all officials and military officers were required to pronounce.' At the end
of September, with the "executive" in place again, the National
Constituent Assembly formally retired. After two years and three
months of existence, it handed over its power to an entirely new
group of deputies, the recently elected members of the Legislative
Assembly. In theory at least, the Revolution was over. In theory at
least, the king's flight had been forgiven and forgotten.