To the scaffold (33 page)

Feeling ill-used, suspicious of the nobles and, now, of the monarchy, filled with a sense of their own recently declared sovereignty, the National Assembly voted to continue to meet, whatever the circumstances (that is, even if the King ordered them not to), until they had "established the constitution of the kingdom on solid foundations."

This monumental step was quickly followed by more unrest as, following the royal session on June 23, Necker resigned, leading to noisy demonstrations, more defections of deputies from the First and Second Estates to join the National Assembly and, most worrisome, mutinies of companies of the French Guard. Louis was concentrating more and more troops around the capital, among them foreign regiments that he hoped would prove loyal.

Versailles was full of chanting, shouting crowds, cheering for Necker (who, after Louis and Antoinette jointly appealed to him, agreed to return to office), abusing and even assaulting those deputies who had not joined the National Assembly. The aged Archbishop of Paris was nearly stoned to death because he declared himself to be an opponent of the commons, and several of his servants were wounded. "Three or four madmen lead the whole thing," Fersen wrote dismissively, but in truth the crowds were enormous and largely leaderless. They gathered, coalesced around the chanting of a slogan or around a symbol—such as a bust of Necker—and gained momentum as they tramped through the streets, their tone angry or exultant depending on the most recent turn of events.

By June 27, having ordered reinforcements to join the troops already massing around the capital, and more troops to protect Versailles, Louis had done all he could. Their strength corroded by continuing mutinies, the regiments were at best a flawed bastion between the court and the energized multitude. The newly constituted National Assembly had at least a chance of gaining control of the situation. The King ordered all those deputies who still clung to their delegated identities to join the National Assembly.

Versailles was jubilant, there were fireworks and people illuminated their houses in celebration. But at the palace, Antoinette, Artois, and dozens of others in the King's inmiediate entourage were in grave distress. Reason tottered, hysteria spread. Antoinette alternately wept and harangued her husband. Didn't he know that Orleans was bribing the hungry Parisian workmen of

the faubourgs to rebel and overthrow the government? Didn't he realize that Necker wanted to depose him and become a dictator? Where was his pride, where was his loyalty to his family, to the dynasty that had ruled France for so many centuries? Why didn't he order the soldiers to massacre every rioter, to capture the National Assembly and imprison the deputies, to bum the rebellious faubourgs if need be? If he wasn't prepared to do these things, Antoinette cried, then they had better leave Versailles, perhaps leave France altogether, as Artois was preparing to do.

Weeping, pleading, commanding—even begging. Antoinette used every emotional stratagem she knew, yet Louis remained immobile, save that on July 1 another twelve thousand troops were ordered to march to Paris. Everyone around the King saw, or imagined that they saw, the approach of catastrophe, yet he remained resolutely, stolidly confident that the worst would not happen, that somehow, through the people's sacred link with their sovereign, calm would be restored and the work of reform could proceed. He believed this, even if his intuition told him that he and his family were in danger; he denied his intuition, and went on denying it, day after day.

Meanwhile in Paris, the grain shortage was so severe that thousands of hungry people stood outside the bakeries all day waiting for bread, only to be told that there was no bread, or to be sold a handful of sour crusts. E^ch morning there were fresh rumors that all the bread was gone, or very soon would be. And what bread there was was blackish and coarse, all but inedible. "Swallowing it scratched the throat," Bailly recalled later, "and digesting it caused stomach pains." What flour remained in the grain markets was of the worst quality, yellow and smelly, and the bread made from it was hardly bread at all, but "rock-hard lumps" that could be cut only with an ax. Even so, people fought like snarling wolves over the scraps. "There was frequent bloodshed," Bailly wrote. "Food was snatched from the hand as people came to blows. Workshops were deserted, workmen and craftsmen wasted their time in quarreling, in trying to get hold of even small amounts of food."^ Hunger and fear drove many to the edge of sanity, they craved revenge on those who had made them suffer.

And so when, on July 12, word spread outward from the Palais Royal that the King had dismissed Necker, the pent-up ven-

geance and hatred were loosed. All morning and into the early afternoon, people streamed into the streets, outraged that their champion had been sent away, angry over a rumor that the King had had the meeting hall of the National Assembly mined in order to blow it up, provoked by the dragoons and hussars that clattered into the Place Lx)uis XV and by the Swiss Guards standing behind their artillery in the Champs Ely sees.

In the Palais Royal, the young journalist Camille Desmoulins made an impassioned speech, accusing the Parisians of cowardice and shaming them into resisting the tyranny to which they were being subjected. He and others shouted "To arms! To arms!" Heedless of the danger from the soldiery, an immense crowd marched to the gardens of the Tuileries behind a bust of Necker, screaming and shouting, their clamor tremendous and frightening in its intensity.

Suddenly they were met by a regiment of German soldiers, the Royal-Allemand. At their head was the Prince de Lambesc, horseman extraordinaire and distant cousin of the Queen. Drawing his saber, he urged his mount forward, driving a path through the wall of bodies, knocking over women and children and cutting down an unarmed guardsman who had joined the citizens' procession. The savage attack brought forth cries of anger, and more shouts of "To arms! To arms!" It was nearly evening, and after a brief scuffle the Royal-Allemand, in need of reinforcements to confront so immense a horde of rioters, was withdrawn.

Stories of the ferocious Lambesc were told and retold in the neighborhood of the Tuileries, in the wine shops of the Palais Royal and in the faubourgs where the starving laborers gathered in purposeful knots to curse the government. All the troops had been withdrawn from the city, but they still ringed the suburbs in their tens of thousands, ready to march in and massacre the citizenry, already being starved into submission. The massacre must not happen. The people had to be armed, to defend themselves.

On the following morning, July 13, the bourgeois electors of Paris—who after electing their representatives to the Elstates General, had claimed governing authority in the capital—set up a permanent governing committee for the city. To keep order a new civic militia was formed, the garde bourgeoise, to be composed of forty-eight thousand men. People were burning the hated customs barriers and breaking into gunsmiths' shops to obtain weapons.

More members of the French Guard joined the armed civilians. Paris was rapidly passing beyond royal control.

At Versailles, informants brought word of the most recent happenings in the capital. Artois went to his brother and tried to convince him that his policy of tolerance and moderation was inviting rebellion.

"I have thought it over," pronounced Louis. "To resist at this moment would be to expose the monarchy to peril; it would lose us all. I have retracted my orders; our troops will quit Paris. I shall employ gentler means. Do not speak to me about a coup d'au-torite, a mighty act of force. I believe it more prudent to temporize, to yield to the storm, and above all to bide my time, for the awakening of the men of good will and the love of the French for their King."^

The King's sentiment was noble, his policy fatal. Emboldened by the fact that no troops were being sent into the city—yet still fearful that they would be at any moment—more and more Parisians were putting everyday concerns aside and undertaking the work of defending themselves and finding food for themselves. The stores of grain were thoroughly and systematically looted, while the search for arms continued.

On the next day, July 14, the city was fiill of new rumors. The soldiers were on the point of attacking in force, it was said. The governing committee urged Parisians to erect barricades in the streets to hinder the attackers. All those without arms gathered at the Hotel des Invalides, demanding that the governor in charge turn over to them what weapons he possessed. When he refused, the crowd muscled its way past the gates (the defending guards did not fire) and looted the cellars, where some twenty-eight thousand muskets and ten cannon were stored. Now they had arms—but there were no cartridges, or very few, and only a small store of powder. These, it was generally believed, were kept in the dark bastion that guarded the Faubourg St.-Antoine, the Bastille.

The squarish medieval castle built of yellow stone, whose thick round watch-towers loomed eighty feet high, had been built in the fourteenth century on the site of what was then one of the main gates of the city. Both architecturally and in function the Bastille was an anachronism, a "great, heavy and clumsy" structure as one English tourist thought, which had long outlived its

usefulness. Another found it "horrible to look at." Used as a warehouse for military stores and as a prison for small numbers of elite prisoners—aristocrats guilty of sexual offenses, outspoken journalists (Voltaire had been imprisoned in the Bastille twice, Diderot and the Marquis de Sade once each), printers of dangerous books and pamphlets—the fortress was spacious and even comfortable by the standards of most eighteenth-century prisons, but it had acquired a sinister reputation.

Behind the ancient towers, it was said, were torture cells where enemies of the King languished interminably. People unlucky enough to be imprisoned in the Bastille never came out again, or so it was popularly believed (though Cardinal Rohan had been imprisoned there only briefly following the diamond necklace affair). Tourists shown around the outer courtyards reacted with a frisson of horror, detesting the "accursed mansion" whose gloomy walls were an embodiment of absolutism at its most threatening.

Antiquated and underused as it was, the Bastille was a powerful symbol, and the crowd that approached it on the morning of July 14 did not know that there were plans to demolish it before long.^ They knew only that they needed ammunition, and that as members of the newly created garde bourgeoise they represented the city's only means of defense.

Hordes of unemployed workmen from the neighborhood of the Bastille rushed to join the crowd from the Invalides, which included a number of professional soldiers who had mutinied from the French Guard. The defenders of the fortress, a feeble garrison of eighty-two old soldiers and a contingent of thirty-two Swiss, were known to be reluctant to fire on the demonstrators, yet there were cannon displayed on the ramparts, aimed at the heart of the multitude. A delegation from the new municipal government tried to persuade the Bastille's nervous governor, the Marquis de Launay, to capitulate and hand over his store of powder and cartridges to the Parisians. But De Launay resisted for hours, even after the attackers managed to lower the outer drawbridge and hundreds of people rushed in to fill the courtyard beyond it. Shots were fired, whether by the defenders or the attackers will never be known for certain. Men began falling on both sides, and in the noise and tumult fresh efforts to persuade De Launay to capitulate were fiitile.

Finally, when some sixty of the former French Guards, supported by hundreds of armed civilians and four cannon, tried to breach the walls De Launay ordered the inner drawbridge opened.

Cheering and shouting, the besiegers ran into the courtyard, snatching muskets out of the hands of the defending soldiers— many of whom had tried to indicate their sympathy with the citizens, turning their muskets upside down and waving white handkerchiefs—destroying records and papers, rushing into the cavernous old chambers of the fortress searching for prisoners. Only seven prisoners were found, which must have surprised the attackers. Four were criminals convicted of forgery, who had been transferred to the Bastille from overcrowded quarters elsewhere. Another was the Comte de Solages, imprisoned at his family's request as guilty of incest. Another was a mad Irishman (possibly driven mad by his captivity), and the last another madman who called himself Major White, and who claimed to have been confined in the Bastille for nearly thirty years.

The decrepit Major White, with his dazed look, his white beard nearly a yard long, his matted hair hanging in trailing pigtails, was the sort of prisoner the besiegers had expected to see in hundreds. He could hardly talk, and when he was led out into the sunshine, an eyewitness wrote, he walked in amazement as if he were blind, his "face directed toward the sky." It was a touching sight, many who saw the old man must have been in tears.^

The fortress was despoiled of its cannon and cartridges and powder. And then the work of revenge began.

The captured soldiers were hauled to the Hotel de Ville, forced to run a gauntlet of blows, threats and insults. Several of the men were set upon and murdered, all went in fear for their lives, dodging stones and knife-thrusts. The Swiss were especially harassed and menaced. The Marquis De Launay, blamed for the deaths of nearly a hundred men during the attack, was surrounded and butchered. His mutilated body was repeatedly stabbed and shot, one man cut off his pigtail as a keepsake. "His head! Cut off his head!" The head was partially severed with a sword, then finished off with a pocketknife. Then the grisly trophy was stuck on the end of a pike and paraded before cheering spectators.

The story spread quickly. The old, impenetrable fortress in

the Faubourg St.-Antoine had been captured by the valiant citizens of Paris, defenders of liberty against the tyranny of the King. Dozens—no, hundreds of prisoners had been freed. The dungeons of the Bastille had been full of them, it was said, wretched victims of injustice, dying in the fetid darkness. And the brave conquerors of the prison had freed them all. In the Place des Morgues lay the bodies of those slain in the assault, mourned by their grieving relatives. They were heroes, all of them, the living and the dead. They would hearafter be known as Conquerors of the Bastille, that hardy corps of cobblers and cabinet-makers, merchants and soldiers, masons and tailors who had dared to capture the grimmest monument in Paris, inaugurating, so the British ambassador thought and so tradition would hold, "the greatest revolution that we know anything of."