When the King Took Flight (32 page)

But could it really be forgotten? Louis had now solemnly sworn
to protect the constitution, yet only a few weeks earlier he had unilaterally annulled a previous oath to the same constitution. What
reason was there to think that he would not repeat the maneuver?
Like French men and women everywhere, the representatives agonized over this question. Many now believed, hoped to believe, that
the king had at last changed his ways and had sincerely accepted to
abide by the rules of the game. According to the Breton deputy
Legendre, the Assembly "is now persuaded that the king, enlightened by the school of hard experience, will freely accept and cherish the constitution." His colleague Vernier agreed: "After much reflection, we continue to think that the king is quite sincere." But not
all deputies shared this optimistic view. Thibaudeau was haunted by
the evil influence of the aristocrats who again seemed to surround
the monarch: "`Go ahead and accept the constitution,' they have
told him. `And then, when times have changed, you can say that you
were forced to do so and had no choice."' Faulcon, too, brooded
that the monarch "may have taken yet another false oath, in swearing a commitment he has no intention of keeping." The sardonic
abbe Lindet arrived at much the same conclusion: "The king has
sworn to uphold the constitution. He will keep his oath only insofar as it is convenient."" The deputies could easily have appreciated
a caricature of the king widely circulating in the weeks that followed. Louis was represented Janus-like, with two heads. One head, looking approvingly toward a deputy, proclaimed: "I will uphold
the constitution." The other, contemplating an emigre priest, announced: "I will destroy the constitution."

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

The Janus King. At one and the same time the king promises to uphold the
constitution and-with his crown slipping off-to destroy the constitution.

Such suspicions were only too well founded. Despite all their as surances to the contrary, both the king and the queen were as duplicitous after their attempted flight as they had been before. They
rapidly resumed a secret correspondence with the crowned heads of
Europe, disavowing in private all their public statements of support
for the constitution. Marie-Antoinette's actions in this regard were
particularly noteworthy. Whether the queen ever took seriously her
discussions with Barnave during the return from Varennes is difficult to say. Over the following weeks, she continued her clandestine meetings with the young deputy from Grenoble. Using all the
wiles of the practiced courtier, she led him along with fine affirmations of her frankness and honesty and her deep appreciation of
his sympathy for her cause. But again and again she smuggled out
letters written in code-to Fersen or the Austrian ambassador or
her older brother the emperor-letters in which she repudiated everything she had said to Barnave. She raged against the "insults"
committed toward the royal family after the attempted flight, denouncing the deputies as "brutes," "rogues," and "madmen." She
condemned the whole constitution as "totally impractical and absurd.""

And no less than the queen, the king continued to pursue a double game. Only a few weeks after his abortive flight, Louis managed
to slip out a note written in his own hand to the Austrian emperor.
He regretted, he said, that he had been unable to "recover his liberty" on June 21 and to "join with those French who truly desire the
best interests of their country." He continued to feel himself a prisoner with no control over his fate, and he wanted his brother-in-law
to know this fact. And for the first time, he urged the emperor to
"come to the aid of the king and the kingdom of France."" The
strong implication was that he hoped for military intervention. By
September, plagued perhaps with the old vacillation in decisionmaking, he may have modified his position somewhat. In a secret
letter to his two brothers in exile, he argued that the best policy was
to wait and allow the Revolutionary government to collapse from
its own absurdities. He exhorted the two princes not to foment a
war, fearing the consequences for the country that such an act might involve. But he also announced his conviction that the very idea of
the "Rights of Man" was "utterly insane." Even though some commoners now "hope to rise above the station where nature has placed
them," he still believed that the link between himself and the nobility was "the oldest and most beautiful jewel in my crown.""

In any case, by December 1791 the king appears to have again reversed course. In a letter to his "foreign minister" in exile, the
baron de Breteuil, he recommended the creation of "a Congress of
the principal powers of Europe, supported by armed forces." This
would be the best means, he believed, of "reestablishing a more desirable situation and ensuring that the evils which beset us do not
spread to the other states of Europe." Now, apparently, he had quite
set aside his moral scruples against war. He seemed to be pushing
for direct intervention by the great powers to alter the constitution
he had sworn to 19

SUCH WAS THE SITUATION at the beginning of I792. In another
time and another place, Louis XVI might have finished out his reign
in peace. He might even have been judged by posterity as a betterthan-average monarch. He undoubtedly desired the best for his
people. Prodded by a fiscal crisis of unprecedented proportions, and
in his own uncertain and inconsistent manner, he had attempted
sweeping reforms in his government. "Never has a king done so
much for a nation," he had proclaimed in all sincerity before the
National Assembly on June 23, 1789. But by the time he gave this
speech his vision of reforms and that of the patriots to whom he
spoke had already sharply diverged. Indeed, it was only through
wishful thinking on the part of the patriots and deception on the
part of the monarch that the myth of the "citizen king" had survived so long. Now, with the pressure of events and under the influence of his queen, Louis had fallen back on the values he had been
taught since childhood, values that included his own God-given
right to rule and the hierarchical and fundamentally unequal nature
of society. It was a vision that set him on a collision course with the
men and women of the Revolution.

The months and years that followed in the French Revolution
would not be kind to France or to many of the individuals encountered in this story. The constitution, which the men of 1789 had
struggled more than two years to perfect, and which they hoped
would "serve as a model for all nations of the world," would survive only eleven months.20 The new Legislative Assembly, created
by that constitution, was deeply torn from the beginning by bitter
struggles between Jacobins and Feuillants. Even more than the first
group of deputies, the "Legislators" were haunted by suspicions of
betrayal on the part of the king, especially after Louis used his
veto powers to block decrees against emigre nobles and refractory
clergymen. Rumors continued to circulate that a secret "Austrian
Committee," organized around the queen, was undermining the
new regime from within-rumors that were in fact not far from
wrong.21 Such fears were reinforced by the joint agreement signed
in August 1791 in the German castle of Pillnitz. Here the queen's
brother Leopold-reacting perhaps in part to Louis' urgent pleahad urged all European powers to use armed force to "restore" the
French monarchy. Fearful of conspiracies hatched by foreign powers in secret alliance with the French court, and spurred by the rhetoric of Jacques Brissot and others, who pushed for a great crusade
to spread the ideals of the Revolution throughout Europe, the deputies declared war on Austria in April 1792. Soon they found themselves involved in a conflict with Prussia as well. The Legislative
Assembly thus launched the nation into the very war that their predecessors had so hoped to avoid.

Initially the war went badly for the French. By the summer of
1792, the invasion everyone feared at the time of Varennes had become a reality. The Prussian and Austrian armies broke through
France's barrier fortresses, capturing Verdun and Varennes itself
and beginning a slow, methodical march toward Paris. Faced with
the approach of the German armies and convinced more than ever
of the king's treachery, the Parisians rose up in August of that year in a veritable second revolution. Following ideas first promoted by
republicans in July 1791 and urged on by many of the same men
and women who had participated in that movement, Parisians and
national guardsmen from the provinces led a general insurrection
against the monarchy. On August io Louis and his family were
forced to evacuate the Tuileries palace, which was stormed by the
insurgents in a bloody confrontation that left close to a thousand
people dead in the heart of the city. This second revolution brought
a new surge of democracy, with virtually all French men, regardless of wealth, now granted the right to vote and hold office. Six
weeks later a hastily assembled National Convention officially deposed the king, and on September 21, 1792, it created the first
French Republic.

Fortunately for the new republic, the French armies managed to
pull themselves together. Building on the nationalist fervor and selfconfidence revealed at the time of the king's flight, they halted the
Prussians at the battle of Valmy, only a few miles from SainteMenehould, where Drouet had first recognized the king. Eventually
those same armies would advance beyond the French frontiers to
invade and "liberate" whole areas of western Europe. But during
the following years, the nation would be gripped by periods of obsessive suspicion, fratricidal infighting, and near anarchy. With civil
wars and peasant uprisings breaking out over large areas of the
country, with most of Europe arrayed in battle against the French,
with sans-culottes radicals pushing for better economic conditions
and revenge against their enemies, the republican government instituted a repression vastly greater than that of 1791. Before the storm
had ended some eighteen thousand men and women of every social
group would be judicially executed, and many tens of thousands
more would be killed in civil wars and unofficial reprisals.

Of all the executions, none would be more dramatic and consequential than that of Louis XVI himself. In the last weeks of 1792,
after several months of imprisonment, the king was placed on trial
before the Convention. Throughout the proceedings he and his
lawyers insisted that the constitution of 1791 guaranteed him immu nity from prosecution and that before the constitution was signed
there had been no formal laws regulating his actions. He continued
to dismiss the flight to Varennes as a mere "trip." And he eloquently
rejected any suggestion that he was responsible for the shedding of
French blood. "The multiple proofs that I have given at all times
of my love for the people" should be clear to all. "My conscience
reproaches me for nothing." But shortly before the trial began,
the revolutionaries had uncovered a secret safe, hidden behind the
woodwork of the Tuileries palace, containing a cache of the king's
private papers. Many of the documents were written in Louis' own
hand, and they provided massive evidence of the king's past deception and deceit, his efforts to oppose and obstruct the Revolution,
and his collusion with certain counterrevolutionaries." Most of the
formal accusations against the king were directly based on these
documents. The single longest article of the indictment concerned
Louis' attempted flight, his expenditure of public funds to carry out
this plan, and his denunciation of the constitution in the statement
he left behind on his desk.23 After prolonged debate, the Convention
voted almost unanimously that the king was guilty of "conspiracy
against liberty and the security of the state." Soon thereafter, and
by a far closer margin, he was sentenced to death. On January 21,
1793, before tens of thousands of Parisians solemnly attending in
the Place de la Revolution-the future Place de la ConcordeLouis XVI went bravely to the guillotine. He protested his innocence to the last.

By 1795 only two of the six passengers in the berline who had
fled from Paris on that midsummer's night in 1791 would still be
alive. Marie-Antoinette, whose treasonous activities had been even
more flagrant than those of her husband (she had even smuggled
out the French war plans to the Austrians), followed Louis to the
scaffold in October of the same year. The king's sister, Elizabeth,
guilty of little beyond her Bourbon name and her loyalty to her
brother, was decapitated in May 1794. A little over a year later, the
young dauphin, whom the royalists insisted on calling Louis XVII,
succumbed to sickness in prison. His older sister might have fallen to a similar fate, but in one of the great ironies of the whole episode, she was liberated in 1796 in a prisoner exchange for jeanBaptiste Drouet. The man who had played a central role in halting
the king's flight-and who, as a member of the Convention, had
voted for Louis' death-had been captured by the Austrians two
years earlier while on mission with the French army. After his return to Paris and an amazing series of adventures, in and out of
France, in and out of prison and politics, Drouet married and assumed a new identity in another provincial town. He died there
peacefully in 1824.24

But in general, the principal patriot figures in our story did not
fare well. Neither of the two deputies who accompanied the royal
family back to Paris survived the Revolution. After the failure
of the Feuillant party and his retirement to his home province,
Barnave was arrested and executed for "royalism" in late 1793.
Petion, who had served for a time as mayor of Paris, eventually
broke with his friend Robespierre, fled the Convention, and committed suicide while in hiding in southern France. The philosopher
and academician Jean-Sylvain Bailly withdrew from politics in late
1791. But he, too, was arrested and sentenced to death for his part in
the shootings of July 17, executed at the very Champ de Mars
where the event had taken place. Rabaut Saint-Etienne and Condorcet, Brissot and Marie-Jeanne Roland, Danton and Robespierre
were also led to the guillotine, along with many of the leaders of
the major Revolutionary factions. General Lafayette survived, but
only after languishing for five years in an Austrian prison, where he
shared captivity with his friend Latour-Maubourg and his onetime
political rival Alexandre Lameth. Monsieur Sauce, the Varennes
grocer who had arrested the king and welcomed him to his upstairs
apartment, also lived on through the Revolution. But his life was
marred by unhappiness. Execrated by the royalists as an archvillain,
he was also suspected by the Revolutionaries for monarchist sympathies. After fleeing for his life and losing his first wife during the
Prussian invasion, he moved away from his hometown, dying in
obscurity in 1825.25