It was dark before the king returned. He had faced the crowd and was now wearing the red, white and blue cockade—soon to be the badge of the revolutionary—as he made his way back to his palace escorted by a citizens’ army. “Happily no blood has been shed,” he told his family, “and I swear that never shall a drop of French blood be shed by my order.”
Only five days later, Joseph Foulon, one of his ministers brought in to replace Necker, was recognized by the crowd and dragged to the Hôtel de Ville. “After tormenting him in a manner the particulars of which make humanity shudder,” reported Campan, he was hanged. “His body was dragged about the streets and his heart was carried—by women—in the midst of a bunch of white carnations!” It had been rumored that Foulon had said, “If the rogues haven’t any bread, they can have hay.” Now hay was stuffed in his mouth as his head was thrust on a pike and borne through the streets of Paris.
The terror in Paris ricocheted around the country in a wave of panic known as
la Grande Peur.
Angry mobs invaded the Bastilles at Bordeaux and Caen; fighting broke out in the streets of Lyon, Rennes, Rouen and Saint-Malo. With the harvest not yet in, the price of bread soared. Many feared that there was a plot to starve the people into submission. As the poor left their homes to scavenge for food it was widely believed that these vagrants were paid by the nobility to cause disruption and steal bread. Rumors were rife that the food shortages were exacerbated by the stockpiling of grain by the wealthy, including the royal family. As panic spread, peasants invaded the chateaux to exact bloody revenge on their masters.
At Versailles, the queen was increasingly concerned about the safety of her children. Following the departure of Gabrielle de Polignac, she chose as their governess the Marquise de Tourzel, a woman who combined “an illustrious ancestry with the most exemplary virtue,” according to the king. However, the marquise hesitated; she had children of her own and was under
no illusion of the “perils and responsibilities” of the post. It was only the “spectacle of desertion” by so many of their friends that persuaded her to accept.
On July 24, the queen wrote to the marquise with practical details of her new charges. “My son is two days short of being four years and four months old … . His health has always been good, though even in his cradle we noticed that he was very nervous and upset by the slightest sudden noise … . Because of delicate nerves he is always frightened by any noise to which he isn’t accustomed and, for example, is afraid of dogs after hearing one bark near him.” Despite these sensitivities, she portrays Louis-Charles as a good-natured child “with no sense of conceit,” although he could, on occasion, be a little thoughtless. His greatest defect, wrote the queen, was his indiscretion. “He easily repeats what he has heard; and often without intending to lie, adds things according to his imagination. This is his greatest fault and must be corrected.”
“My son has no idea of rank in his head and I would like that to continue: our children always find out soon enough who they are. He is very fond of his sister and has a good heart. Every time something makes him happy, a trip somewhere or a gift, his first impulse is to request the same for his sister. He was born cheerful; for his health he needs to be outside a great deal, and I think it is best for him to play and work on the terraces rather than have him go any further. The exercise taken by little children playing and running about in the open air is far healthier than making them go for long walks which often tire their backs.” The queen instructed her new governess never to let him out of her sight. Finding the virtuous marquise stricter than her predecessor, it wasn’t long before the dauphin dubbed her “Madame Sévère.”
In August 1789, the National Assembly moved quickly to destroy many of the pillars of the
ancien régime,
the previous or old order of France. On the night of the fourth, in a highly charged and emotional sitting, the nobles and clergy capitulated and agreed to relinquish all feudal privileges. All exemptions from taxation and a multitude of dues that peasants owed
their landlords were abolished. It was the overthrow of feudalism. Over the next two weeks, the National Assembly went further to try to establish equality throughout France in a
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
In this declaration, it was said “all men are born free and equal” and every citizen had the right to decide what taxes should be imposed. It also set out a definition for fundamental human rights: freedom of speech, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom of the press and religious liberty. The declaration was then given to the king at Versailles for his formal assent. He played for time and delayed approving the documents.
Feeling increasingly vulnerable at Versailles, in mid-September, Louis summoned a thousand troops that he knew to be loyal from the northern frontier: the Flanders regiment. According to tradition, the king’s bodyguards held a celebratory dinner to welcome officers of the new regiment to Versailles. On the first of October a lavish banquet was prepared by the royal chef, and set up beneath the gold and blue canopies of the Opera House. “There were numerous orchestras in the room,” says Madame Campan. “The rousing air,
‘O Richard! O mon Roi’
was played and shouts of
‘Vive le Roi!’
shook the roof for several minutes.”
The king and queen, who had not planned to attend, made an unexpected entrance with the dauphin. Immediately the orchestra struck up. “People were intoxicated with joy,” wrote Madame Campan. “On all sides were heard praises of Their Majesties, exclamations of affection, expressions of regret for what they had suffered, clapping of hands and shouts of
‘Vive le Roi!’ ‘Vive La Reine!’ ‘Vive le Dauphin!’
” A highly charged atmosphere was created with many tears and officers dramatically saluting the king with their swords. At one point, the young dauphin was lifted onto the horseshoe table at the center of the stage. Rising to the occasion, he walked the length of the table, smiling at everyone as he carefully picked his way through the fine china and glassware. When the king and queen finally left, the theater resounded with defiant shouts of “Down with the Assembly! Down with the Assembly!” Yet there were spies everywhere and reports of the grand banquet spread like fire around Paris.
It was an incendiary piece of news: while people were almost starving in
Paris, banquets were apparently being organized for counterrevolutionaries in Versailles! Reports became wildly exaggerated. The feast was no less than an orgy at which red, white and blue cockades were crushed underfoot, to gleeful shouts of “Down with the Nation!” Did not the queen personally distribute white rosettes to each person at the banquet? That week in Paris, bread was becoming increasingly scarce with many bakeries completely out of supplies. By Sunday, October 4, bread riots even led to one baker being hanged, accused of hoarding flour in the expectation of higher prices. Increasingly bitter charges were made against the queen. It was widely rumored that she was planning the counterrevolution and had given instructions for the stockpiling of flour at Versailles, hoping to crush the people with famine. The queen became a lightning conductor for much of the fury and frustration in Paris.
Monday, October 5. Church bells rang out around the Place de Grève by the Seine in Paris, traditionally the place used for executions and hangings. Women began to gather; the
poissardes
—or fishwives—and market women, servants and washerwomen converged on the square united by their desperate poverty and equally desperate need for bread, their anger and resolve strengthened by the sight of their own hungry children. Despite the rain, by early afternoon, more than six thousand women had assembled, armed with anything they could find: pitchforks, scythes, kitchen knives, even skewers and sticks. Nothing could deter them; they had nothing to lose as they began to march the twelve miles to Versailles, with the now-driving rain soaking their ill-clad bodies. Soon after they left, the National Guard of Paris, eager to support the women’s march, also began to assemble. By the late afternoon, fifteen thousand guardsmen set out for Versailles, reluctantly led by La Fayette.
Marie-Thérèse, the queen’s daughter, still only ten years old, later wrote vividly of “that too-memorable day,” which for her marked the beginning of the “outrages and cruelties” that her family was to endure. That morning, everything was tranquil at the palace; she was having her lessons, her aunt Elisabeth had ridden out to her property at Montreuil, her father was hunting, her mother was in her gardens at Trianon. Madame Élisabeth was the
first to hear that Paris was on the march and rushed to Versailles, in great agitation, to warn the queen. Her father raced back at three in the afternoon. The wrought-iron gates of the chateau were swung tightly shut against the people.
Soon after this, the army of women, soaked and splashed with mud, arrived at the gates, demanding bread and shouting violent abuse at
l’Autrichienne.
Marie-Thérèse was in no doubt of their intentions. “Their [principal] purpose was to murder my mother,” she wrote, “also to massacre the bodyguards, the only ones who remained faithful to their king.” Terror reigned at Versailles.
The captain of the guard asked the king for authority to disperse the crowd. Louis could not bring himself to fire against women and agreed to meet a delegation. Their spokesperson, a demure seventeen-year-old called Pierrette Chabry, in spite of fainting at the critical moment, managed to get across the need for bread. The king reassured her that he had given orders already for any grain held up on the roads around Paris to be delivered at once. Gratefully, she asked to kiss the king’s hand.
Outside the palace, the crowd were not so easily appeased and shots rang out. Marie-Antoinette begged Louis to flee Versailles with his family. The king delayed, tormented with indecision. “A fugitive king, a fugitive king,” he said over and over again, unable to come to terms with such a momentous defeat. How could he be driven from his palace merely by a crowd of hungry women? He missed his moment. When he finally decided on flight, the crowd was prepared and would not allow him to depart. They mounted the carriages, cut the harnesses and led the horses away.
As dusk fell, the crowd camped around the palace; bonfires were lit, a horse was roasted. The arrival of the National Guard of Paris was ambiguous. Would they protect the king or further the interests of the crowd? At midnight, La Fayette was presented before the king and reassured him that the National Guard would stop the mob from attacking the palace. Comforted by this, finally, at two in the morning the royal family attempted to get some rest. “My mother knew that their chief object was to kill her,” wrote her daughter. “Nevertheless in spite of that, she made no
sign, but retired to her room with all possible coolness and courage … directing Madame de Tourzel to take her son instantly to the king if she had heard any noise in the night.”
However, at five in the morning, some women discovered that the gate to the
Cour des Princes
was not properly locked. There was a call to action. The crowd surged into the palace, and entered the inner courtyard, the
Cour de Marbre,
by the royal quarters. Many rushed straight up the stairs leading to the queen’s apartments, yelling obscenities. A guard later reported that he heard, “We’ll cut off her head … tear her heart out … fry [
fricasser
] her liver … make her guts into ribbons and even then it would not be all over.” One of the bodyguards tried to defend the stairway. He was stabbed with pikes and knives and dragged half alive into the courtyard where his head was chopped off with an axe. Inside the palace, according to Marie-Thérèse, another guard, “though grievously wounded, dragged [himself] to my mother’s door, crying out for her to fly and bolt the doors behind her.” Just at this point, the queen’s
femme de chambre
opened the door of the queen’s antechamber and was horrified to see this bodyguard holding a musket valiantly across the door as he was struck down by the mob. “His face was covered with blood,” wrote Madame Campan. “He turned round and exclaimed, ‘Save the queen, Madame! They are come to assassinate her.’ She hastily shut the door on the unfortunate victim of duty and fastened it with a great bolt.” Seconds later, “the wretches flung themselves on him and left him bathed in blood.”
Hearing firing and shrieks outside her door, “my mother sprang from her bed and, half dressed, ran to my father’s apartment, but the door of it was locked within,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. Within moments, the rioters had burst into the queen’s empty bedroom and cut her bedclothes to shreds with their sabers and knives, to cries of “kill the bitch,” or “kill the whore!” Those protecting the king did not realize it was the queen herself—not rioters—at the door. For several terrifying minutes she was trapped, hammering on the door, unable to enter the king’s apartments. “Just at the moment that the wretches forced the door of my mother’s room, so that one
instant later, she would have been taken without means of escape … the man on duty … recognized my mother’s voice and opened the door to her.”
In the frenzy of the night, the king was trying to reach the queen’s apartment to bring her to safety; Madame de Tourzel was trying to protect the dauphin; the queen went in frantic search of Marie-Thérèse. Gradually, they all reunited in the
Salon de l’Oeuil de Boeuf,
where they could hear axes and bars thumping against the door as the guards tried to drive the rioters away with their bayonets. It was only after they had driven the rioters outside to the courtyard that La Fayette finally emerged with his men and managed to save the bodyguards.