To the scaffold (35 page)

the Bastille had inspired uprisings in many towns. Crowds stormed fortresses, city officials were driven out and new municipal governments formed on the model of the one in Paris, with committees appointed to alleviate the scarcity of grain and citizen militias organized. In some towns the transition was peaceful, but often it was not. Violent riots broke out at Rennes, at Rouen, at Strasbourg. At St.-Germain, only a few miles from Versailles, hungry villagers hanged all the millers. And in the countryside, where the price of bread was half again as high as in the capital, and where rumors spread wildly of a government plot to create famine and of "brigands" being sent out to harry the villagers and create havoc, hysteria led to anarchy.

Afterwards, it became known as the "Great Fear." Terror spread with the rumors: the brigands were coming to destroy the crops, to pillage the bams and rape the women. The brigands were burning villages, slaughtering livestock, harassing peasants. In some places the brigands were said to be Austrians, elsewhere they were imagined to be Spaniards or Sardinians. In the popular imagination, all France was under assault. Soon people imagined that they actually saw, on the horizon, hordes of armed men bent on mayhem. (What they may actually have seen were bands of itinerant laborers or beggars or mutinous soldiers.)

Madame La Tour du Pin was staying with her husband at the town of Forges-les-Eaux in Normandy, in the last days of July. Her lodgings overlooked the high road from Neufchatel and Dieppe. One morning, very early, she heard a mass of people rushing into the square below her window, "all of them showing every sign of desperate fear. Women were weeping and wailing, men were raging, swearing, threatening, some were raising their hands to heaven crying We are lost!'"

In the midst of the frightened crowd was a man on horseback in a torn green coat, shouting that "they will be here in three hours; they are pillaging everything at Gaillefontaine [a town five miles away]; they are setting fire to the bams."

The noblewoman went out into the street, joined the crowd and tried to convince them that the mmor was false. But the town cur6, as terrified as his flock, sounded the tocsin and created more alarm. Finally both madame and her husband volunteered to ride to Gaillefontaine to prove that there were no ravaging bands of brigands to fear. After an hour's ride they reached Gaillefontaine

where a man armed with a rusty pistol challenged them and asked them whether or not the pillagers had reached Forges-les-Eaux. When they replied in the negative, he took them to the town square and shouted to all the people gathered there, "It isn't true! It isn't true!" For the moment, the great fear receded.^

Incidents of rural violence proliferated. People armed themselves, took refuge and waited for the dreaded marauders to arrive. When they failed to materialize, the armed villagers went in search of them, and became marauders themselves, burning the chateaux of landowners, destroying feudal records as symbols of the hated taxes they paid to their overlords, in some instances looting and murdering. Tax offices were broken into, prisons opened and the prisoners released. Their authority undermined by the chaos in Paris, the inactivity of the National Assembly and the passive compliance of the King, local officials could do litde to restore order. And with no effective force to check the mayhem, it fed on itself, and on fresh rumors of counterattacks from the rebels, who were said to be hoarding supplies of grain so that the villagers would starve and poisoning the wells they drank from.

Versailles too was fiill of rumors and grim stories, of crimes in the countryside and mounting vengeance against the nobles in Paris. "All bonds are broken," Fersen wrote. "Riots are taking place in all the cities of the kingdom, but they seem to be only a parody of what is going on in Paris." And in Paris, no one was allowed to leave the city, yet every day people evaded the ban and departed in droves. "By winter, unless quiet is restored, it will be deserted," Fersen thought. "All is confusion, disorder, consternation."® Emigration became a necessity, to many military officers, a point of honor, now that the National Guard was assuming control. Soldiers who remained in France with their regiments received stem letters from emigre officers accusing them of cowardice and of betraying the monarchy.

Antoinette, anxious and fretful, was continually alarmed by reports of disorder and what increasingly seemed like anarchy. The King's authority was all but annihilated, laws were disregarded, discipline broken down. There was no government, merely committees exercising limited power within limited jurisdictions. "The city of Paris is now really the King," Mercy wrote—but if Paris was King, what was Versailles? And what was to become of the royal family?

"We are surrounded by nothing but difficulties, misfortunes and unhappy people," Antoinette wrote to Yolande de Polignac on August 12. "Everyone is fleeing." "My health is fairly good," she added, "although necessarily a bit weakened by all the continual shocks which I have undergone." She told her friend that she spent the day in her apartments, shut up with her servants and children, receiving no one but the messengers who continually brought her bad news.

Every day brought word of new riots, of atrocities, of radical political steps being taken by the National Assembly, which was rapidly becoming the de facto locus of sovereignty. On the night of August 4, the Assembly took the remarkable step of abolishing many feudal rights—thus overturning, in a matter of hours, a network of social and economic relationships centuries old. Many nobles stepped forward to surrender their privileges, carried away by the fervor of the moment and fearful of the agrarian unrest. On August 26 the Assembly decreed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which furthered the subversion of royal power by setting forth the inalienable rights of individuals and claimed political equality and liberty for France. Antoinette may or may not have read, or heard repeated, its lofty phrases—that government exists for the benefit of the governed, and not of those who govern, that nature has made all men free and equal, that resistance to oppression is the right of every free citizen—but she certainly knew their import.

Everything she heard made her fearful for her own safety and that of her family. On August 30, a man was arrested in Paris on charges of conspiring to attack the palace with a band of several hundred insurgents. Day after day, demonstrators crowded the palace courtyards, making audible threats, ridiculing the monarchy, calling for the destruction of the nobles. There was no safety to be found inside the palace, as many of the servants were known to be paid spies of the politicians in the National Assembly or of the agitators in Paris. "The majority of the domestics of the royal family had been gained over by the factious spirits," wrote Madame de Tourzel, whose memoirs chronicle the private lives of the King and Queen and their children after August of 1789. "They had become their spies, and gave a most exact account of everything that transpired, as well as of the persons admitted to the royal circle."^

Privacy was a thing of the past—even letters were opened and read. ("Don't answer this," Antoinette warned Yolande de Polig-nac in one of her letters. "Only write what may be read [by others], for everything is ransacked and nothing is safe.") She was still able to wander through her fantasy village and visit her miniature farm and dairy. A visitor to court saw her there one day at the height of summer. She was alone, wearing a plain linen dress with a lace cap. She thought she was unobserved, yet even without an audience, the traveler wrote, she held her head proudly and walked like a queen. Her outward assurance was deceptive, however, for in letters she confessed herself "sad and afflicted," and in need of the affection only her absent friends could provide. Still, she never lost heart. "Believe always," she told Yolande, "that adversity has not diminished my strength or my courage." "We must hope that one day there will be calm again."*^

On August 25, the feast day of St. Lx)uis, a large deputation from Paris came to pay their respects to the King and Queen as was customary on this day. But this year the ritual was different. Sylvain Bailly marched at the head of the delegation, followed by Lafayette and his entire staff. A group of fishwives was also present, with a bouquet of flowers for the King.

"The Queen received them all in state in the green salon next to her bedroom," wrote Madame La Tour du Pin, who had returned to Versailles from Normandy. ^^ Unlike Louis, who had been willing to wear the tricolor cockade and show himself in sympathy with the Parisians, Antoinette made no concessions to the changing times. She wore her diamonds, her rubies and her emeralds, taken from the little traveling box in which she now kept them, and glittered defiantly as the Parisians entered the room. Her expression showed none of her usual graciousness; in fact she was angry, and she let her anger show, which Madame La Tour du Pin privately judged to be a grave mistake. ("She was incapable of gauging the importance of an occasion, she allowed her feelings to be seen without reflecting what the consequences might be.")

The usher announced, "The City of Paris!" and the delegation came forward. "The Queen waited for the Mayor to go down on one knee, as was customary," wrote the Duchess, "but M. Bailly made only a very deep bow as he entered. The Queen replied with an inclination of the head which was not sufficiently

friendly." Bailly then made a short and eloquent speech, assuring Antoinette of the devotion the Parisians felt for her, and referring tactfully to the general fears of a food shortage.

Antoinette listened impassively, her displeasure evident. She knew what people were saying about her in the capital, how some accused her of engineering the shortage of bread and the high price of flour, how they repeated a vicious anecdote in which, after being told that the people had no bread, she allegedly said, "Then let them eat cake!" It was an old story at the Bourbon court, first told about the wife of Louis XIV and later about the reigning King's Aunt Sophie. There was no truth in it. But it gained plausibility with constant retelling, and in the popular mind it made Antoinette a monster. ^^

Lafayette stepped forward to present the staff officers of the National Guard to the Queen. Here Antoinette's anger visibly flared. Her cheeks grew red and everyone could see, the Duchess wrote, "that she was under the stress of some very strong emotion." She managed to stammer a few words to the men "in a shaking voice" and nodded her head to indicate that the entire delegation was dismissed. All the Parisians felt snubbed. They left, according to Madame La Tour du Pin, in a very bad humor, angry with the haughty Queen who had treated them so shabbily and "resolved to take their revenge."

=^22^^

^ VERYONE knew that the danger lay in Paris. If the King would not emigrate, he ought at least to move the court and the National Assembly farther from

^ the turbulent capital. Compi^gne would do, or

Soissons. Anywhere that could not be reached within hours by an angry crowd incited by a newspaper report, an orator, a conspirator, a rumor.

In September, with the town of Versailles itself in the grip of a crime wave, Louis thought seriously of leaving. Antoinette had been ready to go for months. Now the children's governess, Madame de Tourzel, was told to ready herself to leave "without any preparation, if circumstances should so require."^ Yet no destination had been decided on, and the provincial towns were in turmoil, the countryside scorched by violence. Soldiers were deserting and emigrating. The King must be pardoned for wondering whether there was safety to be found anywhere.

And in any case, he declared, his "feeling heart" forbade him to abandon his recalcitrant subjects. "All Frenchmen are my children," he had told Artois shortly before the latter left for the border. "I am the father of a big family entrusted to my care. Ingratitude and hatred are arming against me, but the eyes are merely clouded, the minds misled, the heads troubled by revolutionary torment."2 Once the clouds blew past, the minds recovered their good sense, the heads cleared, all would be as before. He had only to wait, like a patient father, and all would be well.

In the meanwhile, the government was in limbo. Necker was preoccupied with schemes to sell bonds to fill the empty treasury. No taxes were being collected, there was disorder throughout the kingdom, and the National Assembly had yet to draft a constitution. The King's role was unclear, though it was evident that his actual authority had dwindled. Paris, as ever in the vanguard of change, reorganized itself on September 18, setting up a central ruling body, the Commune, and giving a great deal of autonomy to each of the sixty municipal electoral districts of the city. Each district was henceforth to have its own assembly, its own committees to regulate police, judiciary, military and food services. The city was a miniature kingdom, where the subjects were sovereign. (Although only men could vote, and not only were women excluded but workers and servants and soldiers as well, the non-voters could attend the discussions and make their voices heard.)