To the scaffold (31 page)

^ OR weeks the twelve hundred deputies to the Estates m General had been converging on Versailles, buying up every room in every lodging in the town, swarming over the palace grounds, eager to catch a glimpse of Necker or the royals, meeting in little knots to talk and speculate and frown over the coming session. Hundreds of deputies demanded to see the Petit Trianon, the Queen's special pleasure-house about which they had heard and read so much. They tramped through the little farm, peered into the miniature dairy, startling the cows and goats and scattering the chickens. The keepers on guard at the Trianon were interrogated: where were the Queen's apartments, they demanded to know, the ones decorated with diamonds and sapphires and rubies?^

In the evenings the deputies gathered in wine shops and coffeehouses to argue and debate, and to sing the newest popular song:

In his time Sully the great Saved the kingdom and the state Necker is as great as he Savior of France he shall be! Alleluia!

There was but one topic of conversation: the Constitution the Estates General would devise. For months the politically conscious part of the populace had been thinking, reading, and talking of

little else—except the weather, and the shortages of food, of course. But now it was May, the bleak winter had given way to the warm showers and mild days of spring, and the ferment of ideas was well advanced.

"It is all a delirium," Fersen wrote. "Every one is an administrator and talks of nothing but ^progress;' in the antechambers the lackeys are busy reading political pamphlets, ten or a dozen of which appear daily; I do not see how the printing-offices suffice for them all."2

Many of the pamphlets were about America, the new nation across the water where, it was widely believed, a determined group of progressive thinkers had created an ideal commonwealth free of the wastefulness and corruption that weighed France down. America showed the way. At a single stroke the American colonists had established a new society, on their own sovereign authority. They had thrown off the English King who restricted them, the privileges and titles that separated them one from another. Liberty and equality were the only principles they worshiped, representative government their only ruler. The deputies admired the Americans and their government—a number of the younger nobles among them had fought on the side of the colonists against the British, and were known as "/ey AmSricains'' —and expected that the forthcoming meeting would accomplish the transformation of France into a state not unlike the United States—albeit with a monarch, whose powers would no doubt be much reduced.

It was an idealistic vision—and one that tended to dissolve when confronted with the hard realities of self-interest. For as one deputy, a lawyer, wrote, everyone was "in favor of innovations tending to a free government," yet everyone understood the concept of "free government" differently. The provincial nobility no longer wanted to be inferior to the courtiers, the lower clergy wanted to share in the wealth of the Bishops and Archbishops, and the great nobles wanted everyone to be ruled by the King except themselves, his natural peers and companions. What the rest of the French wanted was anyone's guess, although it was clear that they wanted Necker in charge of reforming the finances and they did not want any more interference in government affairs by the Queen, or any of her greedy friends. Some hoped that the King would step aside and let the Due d'Orleans take his place.

To the Scaffold loj

Traditionally the Estates General was constituted from among the three social orders: the First Estate, or clergy; the Second Els-tate, or nobility, and the Third Estate, men of consequence and property who were neither clerics nor nobles. But the precise numbers of deputies to be drawn from each group was not fixed. Necker, in a crucial meeting of the royal council held at the end of December 1788, had argued that because the First and Second Estates would most likely vote against reform, and in opposition to the monarchy—just as the members of the Paris parlement and Assembly of Notables had done—it would be prudent for the King to woo the deputies from the Third Estate, and to make their numbers as large as possible so that he could rely on them to out-vote the clergy and nobles in any vital show of support. Antoinette was present at the council meeting and she too favored enlarging the numbers of the Third Estate deputies.

Thus when in January the instructions were issued for the deputies to be chosen, the King ordered that there be selected nearly twice as many deputies from the Third Estate (some 621 in all) as from the First and Second Estates, which had 308 and 285 respectively. He also recommended that the deputies compile lists of specific grievances for the general body to consider, a traditional procedure in the past.

These lists, or cabiers, disclose a wide range of concerns. "We beg His Majesty to have pity on our farmland because of the hail we have had," reads the cahier from M^nouville, a village in the Paris basin. "We state that salt is too dear for poor people." The peasants of M^nouville complained that there were stones blocking the main road that forced travelers to tramp through their cornfields, "doing a lot of harm," and wanted the King to understand that their crops meant everything to them, as they were unable to produce sweet hay and thus could not raise livestock. But broader issues were mixed in with the pressing local troubles. "We state that there should not be any tax men," the villagers decided, and that "there should be no militia duty, because this ruins many families." "We inform His Majesty that our goods are too heavily burdened with seigneurial and other charges." The cabier concludes, "Given and decreed today 25 February in the presence of us, undersigned inhabitants of this parish."'

The townspeople of Gisors in Normandy, after saluting "the best of Kings," and offering him their "gratitude, respect, love and submission," made known their opinion that the King had no

authority to impose taxes "except by the general agreement of the assembled nation." The nobles of Roussillon in the south echoed this sentiment in their cahier, stating "that to the nation legally assembled in the Estates General belongs exclusively the right to grant subsidies, to regulate the use made of them, to assign to each department the agreed necessary funds, and to demand an account of them." They extolled "the liberty of the citizen" as "the most precious of all possessions and most sacred of all rights," but insisted that the privileges of the nobles must be maintained, as they were "of the essence of monarchic government."^

Each of the three estates sent in hundreds of cahierSy drawn up by nobles and townspeople, villagers and clergy. The ecclesiastical grievance lists called for reform of the church as well as the state, to give parish priests a greater voice in the governance of church affairs. Virtually all of the cahiers were deeply and sincerely monarchist; their authors could not conceive of a state without a king, and not only a king but a ruling dynasty. That the powers of the King should be circumscribed, and those of the three orders of his subjects extended, seemed good and right. But no cahier even hinted that the King might step down (though some of Orleans's most ardent supporters certainly hoped for this), or that the monarchy might become a republic.

On May 4, the day before the Estates General was to hold its first session, the deputies met at the church of Notre Dame to walk in procession to the cathedral of St. Louis. Preceeded by heralds on white horses, and by the clergy of Versailles, the deputies of the Third Estate marched in two long lines, past cheering crowds. They wore suits of plain black cloth with short silk mantles, and with black tricorn hats to match. The etiquette of dress had been prescribed in detail; the deputies of the Third Estate were prohibited from wearing any conspicuous adornment, even plumes in their hats. Behind them came the deputies of the Second Estate, most of them noblemen, all of them in black silk coats embroidered with gold thread and mantles trimmed in gold, gold vests, and black breeches. Silk stockings and lace ties completed their uniform, and their hats had white plumes. The parish priests who formed the majority of deputies in the First Estate were also in sober black, but the Bishops wore scarlet robes and the Archbishops were in violet. The higher clergy formed an escort for

the Holy Sacrament, carried by the Archbishop of Paris under a canopy.

Immediately behind the deputies came the King, a glittering figure in his robes of cloth of gold sparkling with jewels, a huge diamond in his hat. He was not wearing his customary benevolent expression, one observer thought—possibly because, although there were loud cheers of ''Vive le Roi!'' there were even louder shouts of ''Vive le Roi (TOrleans!'' and "Vive notrepere!'^ ("Long live King Orleans! Long live our father!").

Louis was still recovering from a shock. Only days before, he had been supervising some repairs being made at the palace, climbing up onto some scaffolding where the laborers were, forty feet above the marble courtyard. He took a clumsy step—and would have fallen to his death had one of the workmen not grabbed his clothes and saved him. With typical generosity the King had rewarded his rescuer with a pension of twelve hundred livres, to be paid on condition that the man not change his profession. The accident was a bad omen, as was the slow wasting of the dauphin; that both should occur now, just as the country was poised for a great change, seemed ominous to many.

Equally ominous, in the view of the court conservatives— among whom were Artois and the senior Princes of the blood, the Dukes of Conde and Conti—was the meeting of the Estates General itself, and its constitutional agenda. A few months earlier the three Princes had petitioned the King to dismiss Necker, and to silence the republican thinkers and pamphleteers who were pushing the country toward democracy. Popular rule, in any form, was dangerous, the King's brother told him. It could lead to nothing but chaos and violence. Antoinette too was deeply worried about the outcome of the upcoming meeting of the Estates. According to Mercy, she "tried to coax her august husband into being a little firmer," but he plodded stolidly ahead, leaving to Necker the task of guiding and shaping the forces of change while he put his trust in his subjects' love for him.

In reality the King was isolated, and his isolation was weakening him politically. "It is as yet impossible to tell how far the effects of this madness will go," Mercy wrote as the deputies gathered at Versailles, "but to judge by the sort of solitude in which the sovereign finds himself, by the weakness and fear in his ministry, by the audacity with which even the Princes of the blood

oppose the monarch, one must consider the entire subversion of the monarchy as entirely possible."^

On the King's left, behind the Princes and royal Dukes, was Antoinette. She had aged, her ash-blond hair was noticeably thinner and threaded here and there with white. She was still, as one visitor had written the previous August, "a fine portly looking woman," but her expression was sad, and her face careworn.

Over the past year and more she had taken on herself much of the burden that was properly her husband's. According to Mercy, she was "entirely occupied with the arrangements regarding the interior, the economies, the reforms, the parliamentary discussions." She attacked these issues as they presented themselves, handling crises, meeting with ministers, reading documents, generally working to solve whatever difficulties Louis's incapacity presented her with. She applied herself to these matters "without any method or prearranged plan," Mercy observed, and the result, predictably, was confusion and frustration—made worse by Louis's maddening secrecy.^

With only partial information to work from, and guided, Madame Campan thought, by "persons more ambitious than skill-fill," Antoinette was often frustrated in her efforts to apply herself to government. "One day," Campan recalled, "while I was assisting her to tie up a number of memorials and reports, which some of the ministers had handed to her to be given to the King, [she] sighed. . . . *Every woman who meddles with affairs above her understanding, or out of her line of duty, is an intriguer and nothing else," the Queen told her chamberwoman, "The Queens of France are happy only so long as they meddle with nothing, and merely preserve influence sufficient to advance their friends and reward a few zealous servants."''

The effort it cost her to involve herself with the ongoing tasks of government, the eccentricity of the King, the worsening condition of her dying son all preyed on her, exacerbating her usual nervous state. She was "so acutely distressed that her temperament was much affected by it," Mercy thought. And now the Estates General was about to convene, and no one knew what might come of it.

Antoinette had recently put a great deal of effort into writing the speech Louis was to deliver the following day at the formal opening of the meeting. The draft that she produced is revealing;

as always, she saw the situation in simple terms. The King's subjects were in a rebellious mood, and they needed to be reminded that it was their duty to obey the King. "To the burden of the taxes and the debts of the state, there has been added a spirit of restlessness and innovation that will bring about the greatest disasters if it is not promptly checked," her draft reads. "I hope that this assembly will show the obedience which [is] as necessary to the people's happiness as it is to the conservation of the monarchy."^

It was a speech worthy of Maria Theresa's daughter, and indeed Antoinette's life had come to resemble that of her tireless mother in recent months. Like the Empress, Antoinette spent hours mulling over letters, reports, and memoranda. Unlike her, however, Antoinette had no talent for organization, or for efficiency, or for politics. Where wisdom and effective leadership were called for, she offered only anxiety and diligence. And she knew perfectly well that her talents were limited, and this must have saddened her.

Now as she rode through the streets of Versailles, her head held proudly, acutely aware of the silence with which the spectators greeted her, she must have suffered, though she tried not to reveal her suffering. (Several observers noted that while the King was "repeatedly saluted as he passed," the Queen received only "deep and universal silence.") She had been frustrated in her efforts to convince her husband to hold the meeting of the Estates General far from Paris, preferably forty or fifty miles away, so that the Paris crowds and the Parisian rebelliousness would not influence the deputies unduly. But he had taken Necker's advice instead of hers, and decided to hold the meeting at Versailles, in the shadow of the palace and only a few hours' walk from the city. And this was the result, this coldness, this hostility. Madame La Tour du Pin thought that the Queen looked "sad and cross," angry at the limitations and restrictions she encountered all around her, and at the attitude of her subjects, sad because of the constant wounding of her sensitive nature.