Outside in the marble courtyard, the crowd demanded to see the king. He emerged onto the balcony, but this did not appease the crowd who began to shout for the queen. Inside, Marie-Antoinette turned white. “All her fears were visible on her face.” Dazed and numbed by the attempt on her life, she hesitated. Everyone in the room urged her not to face the crowd. Outside, the yells echoed ever more insistently around the courtyard and rose in a great cry, “The queen to the balcony!” Summoning extraordinary courage, she stepped out, her hair dishevelled, in a yellow striped dressing gown, her children by her side. For Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Charles, looking through the familiar gilded balustrade on the sea of hostile faces staring at them, it was a terrifying glimpse of the full force of the hatred of the French people. “The courtyard of the chateau presented a horrible sight,” recalled Marie-Thérèse. “A crowd of women, almost naked, and men armed with pikes, threatened our windows with dreadful cries.”
There were cries of “No children! No children!” The queen ushered her children inside to safety. For a few minutes, she faced out the murderous, armed crowds alone with incredible nerve. “She expected to perish,” reported her daughter, but happily “her great courage awed the whole crowd of people, who confined themselves to loading her with insults, without daring to attack her person.” No one fired. After a while, she simply curtsied and went back into the palace, gathered her son into her arms and wept.
However, their ordeal was not over. The menacing cry went up, “The
king to Paris.” The king felt he had no alternative but to agree, in order to avoid further bloodshed. He decided he must take his family with him as it was too dangerous to leave them behind. “I confide all that I hold most dear to the love of my good and faithful subjects,” he told the vengeful mob in the courtyard.
By one o’clock in the afternoon, everything was ready for the departure of the royal family. “They wished to prevent my father from crossing the great guard rooms that were inundated with blood,” reported Marie-Thérèse. “We therefore went down by a small staircase … and got into a carriage for six persons; on the back seat were my father, mother and brother; on the front seat … my Aunt Elisabeth and I, in the middle my uncle Monsieur and Madame de Tourzel … . The crowd was so great it was long before we could advance.”
It was the most extraordinary and grotesque procession. News had spread that the royal family was forced out of Versailles and thirty thousand, at least, had gathered to escort the king to Paris. The scene was terrifying; a great swirling mass of humanity, most intent on harm, some so drunk with hatred that any form of violent disturbance could erupt within seconds. Leading the “horrible masquerade”—in the words of one courtier—was the National Guard, with La Fayette always in view near the royal coach. The
poissardes,
market women and other rioters followed like so many furies, brandishing sticks and spikes, some with the heads of the king’s murdered guardsmen on their pikes. These gruesome trophies were paraded with devilish excitement as they danced around the royal coach, all too conscious that power was indeed an intoxicating mixture as they endlessly threatened obscene and imminent death to the queen. Many had loaves of bread from the kitchens of Versailles stuck on their bayonets and were chanting, “We won’t go short of bread anymore. We are bringing back the Baker, the Baker’s wife and the Baker’s boy.” Behind were the household troops and Flanders regiment, unarmed; many obliged to wear the revolutionary cockade. They were followed by innumerable carriages bearing the remnants of the royal court and deputies from the new National Assembly. Count Axel Fersen, who was in one of the carriages following the king, wrote of their six-and-a-half-hour
journey to Paris: “May God preserve me from ever seeing again so heartbreaking a spectacle as that of the last few days.”
For the royal family, forced to take part in this terrifying and, until then, almost unimaginable procession, it was a definitive end of an era. In the distance behind them, glimpsed only through a forest of pikes and a sea of hostile faces, the Palace of Versailles, which for more than a century had epitomized the Bourbon’s absolute power, slowly retreated from view, quietness descending, the only sound the hammers of workmen fastening the shutters. Now the king, impassive and silent, was a consenting victim to the barbarity of the mob, as he allowed his family to be led in humiliation to Paris. Inside the coach, he held a handkerchief to his face to hide his shame and tears. Next to him was the queen, clutching her four-year-old son tightly, her expression bearing “the marks of violent grief.” She tried to ignore the
poissardes
who climbed onto the carriage, yelling still more insults and abuse at her. “Along the whole way, the brigands never ceased firing their muskets … and shouted
Vive la Nation!”
wrote Marie-Thérèse. Occasionally the young dauphin—terrified as this horrific grown-up world suddenly burst in on his orderly life with such force—bravely leaned out of the window and pleaded with the crowds not to harm his mother.
“Grâce pour Maman! Grâce pour Maman,”
he cried. “Spare my mother, spare my mother.”
THE TUILERIES
The Tuileries Palace, a large jail filled with the
condemned, stood amid the celebration of destruction.
Those sentenced also amused themselves as they waited
for the cart, the clipping, and the red shirt they had
put out to dry. And through the windows, the queen’s
circle could be seen, stunningly illuminated.
—CHATEAUBRIAND,
MÉMORIES D’OUTRE-TOMBE
T
he royal family was taken to the Tuileries, a sixteenth-century palace in the heart of Paris by the Seine. For over sixty years it had been abandoned as a royal residence, and servants and artisans had settled into the rabbit warren of dark chambers and seemingly endless, dimly lit galleries and stairways. The place was crowded and in disrepair. Rooms were hurriedly prepared for the royal family, but it was soon found that the doors to the dauphin’s room would not close and had to be barricaded with furniture. “Isn’t it ugly here, Mama,” said Louis-Charles. Marie-Antoinette replied, “Louis XIV was happy here. You should not ask for more.” Yet he was clearly anxious. The young child who had lived surrounded by richness and elegance, with never a cross word, found, in the space of a few days, his world had become an unrecognizable, frightening chaos. The queen asked the Marquise de Tourzel to watch over him all night.
Woken by the clamor of the crowd outside their windows in the gardens of the Tuileries, Louis-Charles was still terrified. “Good God, Mama! Is it still yesterday?” he cried as he threw himself in her arms. Struggling to
understand their change in fortunes, later he went up to his father and asked why his people, who once loved him so well, were “all at once so angry with him and what he had done to irritate them so much?” The king took his young son on his lap. “I wanted money to pay the expenses occasioned by wars,” he replied. He carefully tried to explain how he had tried, unsuccessfully, to raise money through the
parlements
and then through the Estates-General. “When they were assembled they required concessions of me which I could not make, either with due respect for myself or with justice to you, who will be my successor. Wicked men, inducing the people to rise, have occasioned the excesses of the last few days; the people must not be blamed for them.”
The king and queen were forced to face the fact that they were now detained in Paris indefinitely—at the people’s pleasure. They no longer had their own bodyguards; the Tuileries was surrounded by the National Guard who answered to the Assembly. With six armed guards constantly tailing them and their movements closely monitored, the queen quickly made the young prince understand the importance of treating everyone about him politely and “with affability”—even those whom they distrusted. The dauphin “took great pains” to please any visitors. When he had an opportunity to speak to any important dignitaries, he often looked for reassurance from his mother, whispering in her ear, “Was that all right?” With his customary charm, he soon made friends with the sons of National Guards and established his own pretend “Royal Dauphin Regiment” with himself as colonel. People flocked to see him when he was allowed outside where he kept his own pet rabbits and tended a small garden.
Marie-Antoinette struggled to keep up a semblance of normalcy and various possessions claimed from Versailles helped as she set about making it as comfortable as possible. She drew strength from devoting herself to her children. “They are nearly always with me and are my consolation,” she wrote to Gabrielle de Polignac, who was now safely out of the country.
“Mon chou d’amour
[the dauphin] is charming and I love him madly. He loves me very much too, in his way, without embarrassment. He is well, growing stronger and has no more temper tantrums. He goes for a walk everyday which is extremely
good for him.” The queen still had a few of her friends around her, such as the loyal Princesse de Lamballe, who invariably accompanied her when she had to receive deputations of
poissardes
and others, who had come for a hundred reasons, but mostly to air their grievances. Count Axel Fersen also remained discreetly in Paris, in case he could be of any use to the queen.
The king desperately allowed himself to hope that all these arrangements would be temporary, and that he would eventually be restored to Versailles with full power. But power lay in the Assembly, renamed the Constituent Assembly, and gallingly, now installed in the building opposite the Tuileries and flying the new flag which bore the words FREEDOM. NATION. LAW. KING. Although Louis was still king, his authority to pass laws had been effectively taken over by the Assembly. In principle, he retained a delaying veto, yet in the intimidating atmosphere of his confinement in the Tuileries, he was fearful of using even this remaining influence.
For several months the king could not face the meetings of the Assembly, and took refuge in family life, spending more time with his children. While the deputies debated the future of France, he had a smithy installed in the Tuileries, and worked at making locks in his smithy, alone. For Louis, in his virtual prison, terrible despair and fragile hope had become the bread and butter of his daily life as he sank into helpless depression. “The late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable,” commented the English writer Edmund Burke. Burke was struck by “the portentous state of France—where elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it.” Stripped of the glory of Versailles and the powers of an absolute monarch, the king seemed a spent political force.
Royal authority was also undermined by the continuous outpouring of vicious slander, especially against the queen. Absurdly, even while under the close scrutiny of the National Guard at the Tuileries, she was accused of every conceivable sexual obsession and debauchery: with the guards themselves, courtiers, actors, there was no limit to her superhuman appetite. In an updated version of Madame de La Motte’s
Mémoires
published in 1789,
her passion for women was also set out in explicit detail. “Her lips, her kisses followed her greedy glances over my quivering body,” claimed La Motte. “What a welcome substitute I made, she laughed, for the lumpish, repulsive body of the ‘Prime Minister’—her mocking name for the king.” The image of her as an insatiable, tyrannical queen was invariably linked to her bloodthirsty lust for revenge on the French people for the uprising. “Her callous eyes, treacherous and inflamed, radiate sheer fire and carnage to gratify her craving for unjust revenge … . Her stinking mouth harbors a cruel tongue, eternally thirsty for French blood.” Letters were “found,” allegedly written by her and intercepted by spies. “Everything goes well, we shall end by starving them,” she was quoted as having written to Artois, one of her accomplices. The extremists in the Assembly knew that this skillfully orchestrated propaganda against the queen greatly advanced their political aims to slay royal power. She became the focal point, the hate object of all who were opposed to the monarchy.
As the moderates were forced out of the Assembly and radicals gained the upper hand, royal power continued to decline. Some extremists wished to abolish the monarchy altogether; others to limit its powers still further. It wasn’t long before the king found his religious beliefs were to come under attack and, for Louis, this was the final straw. The Assembly increasingly saw the clergy as a pillar of a now-discredited
ancien régime,
loyal to the king. Fearing it was a threat to the survival of the revolution, they searched for a way to reduce its powers. They still had to deal with the problem of the national debt and staving off bankruptcy and realized this problem could be tackled at a stroke. In November 1789, they simply nationalized all the church land, valued at a colossal three billion livres. The Assembly then moved swiftly to introduce the “civil constitution” of the clergy in which the state took responsibility for the administration of the clergy. By November 1790, it was decreed that every priest in the land had to swear an oath of loyalty to the state.
As a devout Roman Catholic, Louis’s instincts were to oppose this latest dictate from the Assembly. Yet fearful of where this might lead, finally that
Christmas he felt coerced into signing the decree. This prompted the pope, Pius VI, to intervene, opposing the revolution. Any priest who took the oath was suspended, decreed the pope, unless he retracted the oath within forty days. Once more the Paris mobs took to the streets; an effigy of the pope was burned and the king was denounced for treason for having received communion from a priest who had not sworn the oath. Louis came close to nervous collapse in the spring of 1791, and his doctors advised him to take a rest away from Paris. With the approval of the Assembly, the King resolved to take his family to Saint-Cloud.
On April 18, 1791, at one o’clock, the king, queen, Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Charles and their entourage were in their
berline
in the courtyard of the Tuileries, ready to depart. However, a large, menacing crowd had gathered at the gates and blocked their path. Far from protecting the royal family, the National Guard refused to disperse the rioters. “They mutinied, shut the gates, and declared they would not let the King pass,” recorded Madame Campan. Hearing of the emergency, La Fayette hurried to the Tuileries and ordered the guards to allow the king’s carriage to depart. It was impossible. The rioters became angry and abusive. The Marquise de Tourzel, who was in the carriage, wrote of the “horrible scene” as she observed the king himself, trying to appeal to the people. “It is astonishing that, having given liberty to the nation, I should not be free myself,” he pleaded. It was no use. The crisis lasted two hours. Some of the king’s attendants were dragged away; one was violently assaulted. At this point, the dauphin became frightened. He rushed to the window and cried out, “Save him! Save him!” The royal family was obliged to admit defeat and go back inside the Tuileries, the king deeply depressed. There was no escaping the fact that had been evident for months: they were prisoners.
The king felt his position was becoming untenable. Politically, he had been systematically stripped of his powers, sidelined and humiliated. The events of that “cruel day” had provided unnerving evidence that the National Guard could not be trusted to enforce the law and defend the royal family against a hostile mob. Up until this point, despite pressure from his wife and others, the king had been unwilling to reconcile himself to the idea of
fleeing from his own people. Now, at last, the urgent need for escape began to take shape in his mind.
Six hundred National Guardsmen, increasingly more loyal to the nation rather than the king, were now patrolling the Tuileries, and spies were everywhere. However, the king and queen could count on one very loyal and capable ally: Count Axel Fersen. Determined to rescue the queen from her impossible position, he told his father, “I should be vile and ungrateful if I deserted them now that they can do nothing for me and I have hope of being useful to them.”
Axel Fersen advised the king and queen to escape separately, in light, fast carriages, but they insisted on travelling together with the children, in a more capacious, but much slower,
berline.
They aimed to reach Montmédy, a border town almost two hundred miles to the east by the Austrian Netherlands. Here, protected by a garrison led by his faithful general, Marquis Louis de Bouillé, the king hoped to unite his supporters and challenge the right of the Assembly to usurp his authority.
Fersen coordinated arrangements for their escape. Fresh horses were needed at staging posts every fifteen miles from Paris. For the last eighty miles, once they had passed Châlons in the Champagne region, troops would be waiting at various points from the Pont de Somme-Vesle to escort them to the border. Throughout the spring meticulous arrangements were in progress. At the palace, secret doors were constructed to assist the escape. Disguises and passports were obtained for the royal family. The Marquise de Tourzel would pose as a wealthy Russian woman, “Baronne de Korff,” travelling with her two “daughters,” Marie-Thérèse as Amélie and Louis-Charles as Aglae. The king would be dressed simply as her valet and the queen, in black coat and hat, was to be the children’s governess.
On the planned day of departure, June 20, 1791, the king and queen tried to keep a semblance of normalcy but their anxiety did not pass unnoticed. Marie-Thérèse was only too aware that her mother and father “seemed greatly agitated during the whole day,” although she had no idea why. Her anxiety only increased when in the afternoon her mother found
an opportunity to take her aside and whisper that “I was not to be uneasy at anything that I might see,” and that “we might be separated, but not for long … . I was dumbfounded.”
“I was hardly in bed before my mother came in; she told me we were to leave at once,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. Marie-Antoinette had already woken the dauphin. Although more asleep than awake, Louis-Charles was annoyed to find himself being dressed as a girl. His daytime games were all of soldier heroes and now he thought he was about to command a regiment, shouting for his boots and sword. At half past ten Marie-Antoinette escorted them downstairs and out through an empty apartment to a courtyard where Fersen was waiting, dressed as a coachman and even smoking tobacco.
The dauphin, in his plain linen dress and bonnet, hid at the bottom of the carriage under Madame de Tourzel’s gown. To attract less attention, the carriage made several turns around the nearby streets before waiting near the Tuileries for the king and queen. “We saw Monsieur de La Fayette pass close by us, going to the king’s
coucher,”
recalled Marie-Thérèse. “We waited there a full hour in the greatest impatience and uneasiness at my parents’ long delay.” Eventually, to her alarm, “I saw a woman approach and walk around our carriage. It made me fear we were discovered.” However, it was her aunt Élisabeth, disguised as a nurse to Baronne de Korff. “On entering the carriage she trod upon my brother, who was hidden at the bottom of it; he had the courage not to utter a cry.”