To the scaffold (39 page)

Fashion journals prescribed a "constitutional costume" for the stylish woman, gowns in "colors striped in the national fashion." Patriotism was chic. The loyal French woman was expected to wear blue, with a hat of black velvet, hatband, and tricolor cockade. Moderates and aristocrats continued to display their politics by not wearing the cockade, and continued to be regarded with suspicion as a result, all the more so after the trial and execution of the Marquis de Favras.

A member of Provence's Swiss Guard, Favras was accused of acting as Provence's agent in an elaborate counter-revolutionary plot to raise an army of thirty thousand men, kidnap the royal

family, and assassinate Lafayette and Bailly, Mayor of Paris. Letters from Provence were found on the Marquis when he was arrested by a suspicious Lafayette, and though Favras denied his guilt the Parisians had no doubt of it. His long trial had been one of the chief political diversions of the winter, with large crowds gathering each day outside the Chatelet, site of treason trials, to threaten the judges and shout ''A la lanteme!'' ("To the lamppost!"—meaning "Hang him from the lamppost!") The Chatelet courtyard was full of troops and guns, but there was no rioting. In the end the judges had ordered the Marquis hanged, an ignominious death for a nobleman (highborn criminals were by custom beheaded), and the Parisians had the satisfaction of watching him die in the Place de Gr^ve.

Suspicion was in the air, the sentinels were kept constantly busy. Spying, always pervasive, now became suffocatingly so, made all the more urgent by the political turmoil. The Blacks and the royal ministers spied on the constitutionalists and the ultra-liberals, Lafayette and the deputies spied on the counterrevolutionaries, the Patriots spied on everyone. "The post is not safe," Fersen noted early in February, shortly after he returned to Paris. "There is such great inquisition, so many committees of search, and so much conspiracy, that no one dares either speak or write."* Despite the danger, communication went on, with Fersen serving as messenger, go-between, cipherer and secretary. There exist drafts of letters in Fersen's handwriting, with notes and corrections in Antoinette's hand, so he must have helped her compose the urgent requests for money and military support that she sent to the European monarchs.

Fueling the highly charged atmosphere in Paris were the political clubs that served in lieu of formal parties to focus ideas and policies, and to put forward candidates for office. Part debating societies, part news-gathering organizations, part philanthropic groups, the clubs—which often took their names from the monasteries or churches where they met—charged fees and dues and attracted Assembly deputies and middle-class Parisians. The Jacobin Club, so-called from its meeting place in the monastery of the "Jacobins," or Dominicans of St. James, was also known as the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, and attracted a variety of adherents, from deputies to liberal nobles to Parisians of modest means. The Jacobins were vigilant in denouncing local au-

thorities if they neglected to enforce the Assembly's laws, and they spread discord by insisting that the King was making preparations to leave the country.

Lawlessness was everywhere. As the authority of the King tottered, that of the laws, moral and civil, seemed to crumble. Beyond the rioting and violence that had by now become endemic, there were mutinous upheavals in the army—commanding officers ignored and insulted, regulations disregarded, officers murdered before the eyes of their men. Petty crime flourished. Burglars ransacked the homes of the rioters while they were carrying out their grisly protests, and pickpockets did a brisk business among the crowds at the Tuileries. The Assembly voted itself the power to declare martial law, but the majority of the lawbreakers went unpunished. There were simply not enough police or National Guard to keep up with the mayhem, or to track down the perpetrators in its aftermath.

What shocked visitors to Paris, beyond the widespread criminality, was the immorality. "Paris is perhaps as wicked a spot as exists," wrote the American envoy Gouvemeur Morris. "Incest, murder, bestiality, fraud, rapine, oppression, baseness, cruelty; and yet this is the city which has stepped forward in the sacred cause of liberty." The cause of the apparent paradox was not far to seek. "The pressure of incumbent despotism removed," Morris observed, "every bad passion exerts its peculiar energy."^ Morris was hardly an innocent himself, with several French mistresses and a wide knowledge of the sophisticated world. But even he was appalled by fathers who kept their own daughters as their mistresses, and by the relative prevalence of incest generally. (Mira-beau was far from unique in having slept with his sister in his youth.) The revolution seemed to have accelerated the loosening of morals that was already far advanced.^

More urgent than the disintegration of morality was the disintegration of the economy. "Poverty and discontent are increasing," Fersen wrote in his diary. "Most of the workmen and artisans have come to beggary. The shopkeepers are earning nothing, for nobody buys. The best workmen are leaving the kingdom, and the streets are full of paupers.""* There were no coins, or almost none; anyone who possessed coins hoarded them. With the royal treasury as ever in extremis, paper money had been issued in the form of state bonds backed by the sale of Church lands

which had been appropriated the previous November. The bonds, or assignats, were exchanged, but not with confidence, and little or no credit was extended. The political assault on the old governmental and social system had had a severe and unanticipated result: with so many nobles emigrating, thousands of servants, craftsmen and small tradesmen whose livelihoods had depended on the orders and trade from noble households lost their livings. The royals' move to the Tuileries had also had its effect—because the King could no longer hunt, six hundred people were dismissed from the palace staff.

Ardent as many of them were for equality and liberty, the Parisians were suffering, and they blamed the Assembly for the severity of the economic upheaval. A group of eighty painters, tailors, woodworkers, shoemakers and the like addressed a petition to the King, lamenting their loss of business, the increasing food prices and the general misery inflicted on them in the name of political reform. "Sire, liberty and equality are chimeras which have broken all social ties, confounded all authority, destroyed order, disseminated discord, invited anarchy. ..." They implored the King to remedy the abuses, and above all to "punish those seditious persons who in the name of being friends of the constitution, are its most cruel enemies."^ Louis had received many such petitions by the spring of 1790, and their tone was becoming increasingly strident. To be sure, there were some enterprising businessmen who profited from the revolution, such as the contractor Palloy, who, having been commissioned by the municipal government to remove the debris of the demolished Bastille, made a fortune by selling the broken old stones as souvenirs. But Palloy was the exception, and the desperate manufacturers and builders and wig-makers who petitioned the King spoke for the majority of their peers.

Though action was urgently called for, Louis would not act. He sat inert in his apartments, he worked at his locks, he dozed, he stayed in his study for hours on end, reading newspapers and journals. When he was informed that the Assembly had discarded the old map of France with its provinces and decreed a new geographical division of the country into eighty-three departments, he amused himself in drawing up a map combining the old system and the new, and indicating the changes. He played billiards with Antoinette, chatted with his daughter, whom he adored, spent

time with his son. He even played game after game of whist with Provence, though the latter annoyed him by continually giving him advice and talking politics. He ate like a glutton and slept long and heavily, sleep being the best refiige of all from the multiple distresses of his waking situation.

Though he was looking for aid from Spain, from the Haps-burg Empire, and from Swiss bankers Lx)uis was publicly denying that he was a captive of the Assembly. He boasted that, once the weather improved sufficiently, he would take himself on a tour of the new departments. He gloried in the medal presented to him by the municipality of Paris saluting him as "the best of Kings" and "Restorer of French Liberty and the true Friend of his People." He had been told that there were new monuments erected in his honor in Lyons and Marseilles, and he wanted to see them, to receive the plaudits of his people. The revolution had made many changes, he seemed to be saying, yet France was still a monarchy, and he was still the monarch. At the urging of his ministers, Louis met with the Assembly and, in a remarkable speech—remarkable for its politics, not its rhetoric—proclaimed that he was himself the leader of the revolution.

This bold move was in keeping with Louis's eccentric but carefully thought out interpretation of his situation. As he saw it, he was in exactly the same position as King Charles I of England a century and a half earlier. King Charles had opposed the radicals in the English Parliament; eventually the conflict had deteriorated into civil war, and when the royalists lost the war, the King had lost his head.

"I am menaced by the same fate," he said. "The only way to escape from it is to do the opposite of everything that unfortunate monarch did." He read and reread the Earl of Clarendon's multi-volume History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, and kept a portrait of King Charles on his wall. His preoccupation with the martyred King was reinforced by his advisers, formal and informal. He had been hearing about King Charles from the start of his reign, when Turgot had warned him that he might share the English King's fate. "Never forget, sire, that it was weakness that put the head of Charles I on the block. . . . You are considered weak, sire." Provence, Antoinette, his minister Montmorin all talked the same way. But by showing himself to be, not the enemy of the revolution, but the true friend of the people, he could avoid be-

coming a martyr. And if he avoided it long enough, in time his people were sure to come to their senses and recover from the temporary spasm of rebellion that shook them.

Meanwhile he was saddened by the polarization of the realm, by the defections and mutinies in the army and the plots and rumors of plots to kill him and his family. His loyal servants were his consolation. "I need to look at those which have remained faithful to me, by way of consoling my afflicted heart," he told Madame de Tourzel.^ There were still many of these loyal servants—the two chief valets de chambre, Thierry and ChamiUi, the numerous ushers and gentlemen of the bedchamber, the Grand Master of the Ceremonies, the Marquis de Breze, the grand quartermaster of cavalry, the Marquis de Suze, and the first bedchamber gentleman, the Due de Ville-quier. The soldiers of the bodyguard had gone, replaced by the National Guard whose members, unused to the court, were awkward at best and at worst, truculent and surly.

The guardsmen, along with millions of others, were outraged in April of 1790 when the Assembly made public the King's expenses. From 1774 to 1789, it was disclosed, the monarch and his court had expended the unimaginably huge sum of 227,983,716 livres on buildings, gardens, jewelry and other luxuries, pensions to favorites, entertainments. Nearly thirty millions had been paid to Provence and Artois for their costly establishments. Another six millions had gone to the Polignacs and other nobles, while only two hundred and fifty thousand had been paid out in charity to the poor. To be sure, one-half of the huge total had gone to pay the costs of war, and to support the army and navy. But twelve millions had been spent on the personal expenses of the King and Queen—to buy Antoinette's diamonds, people said—when only a small fraction of that amount would have eased the destitution in the capital and kept Paris supplied with bread.

The reaction to these disclosures was predictably harsh. Crowds in the Tuileries gardens sang the menacing revolutionary song "C^ ira," to which new and threatening lyrics were constantly being added:

Ah! it will happen all right, it will The people are saying over and over Ah! it will happen all right, it will Despite the unruly ones all will be well!

Ah! it will happen all right, it will Hang the aristocrats from the

lampposts! Ah! it will happen all right, it will Well hang all the aristocrats.

There was no end to the verses. "Despotism will die and liberty will triumph," "We'll have no more nobles, nor priests, only equality for all," and so on, with the "infernal clique" of Austrians consigned to the devil.^

Privilege and inequality were anathema. On June 23 the Assembly suppressed all titles of nobility. "No more Highness, excellency or eminence!" shouted one excited deputy. From there it was only a short step to calling for "No more King!"

No one saw this more clearly than Mirabeau, who for months had been offering to make himself useful to the King and Queen. Finally Louis had agreed to talk with him in secret, and they had struck a bargain. In return for paying the Count's numerous heavy debts, and giving him a pension of six thousand livres a month (plus a bonus of another million livres should the Assembly be permanently dissolved), Louis was to receive the full benefit of Mirabeau's powers of persuasion in the Assembly, and his pledge to commit himself to the formation of a constitutional monarchy.

Mirabeau was an impressive ally, though even the idealistic Louis must have realized that his motives were far from disinterested. He wanted wealth, and he expected to be given a place—as chief minister, perhaps—in any new royal government. It flattered the Count to meet with the King—and even more to meet the Queen, which he finally managed to do in July. But deep down he was ambivalent; his friend La Marck noted how he wavered between "an apparent desire to serve and inaction." Part of him wanted to save the monarchy, but an equally important part wanted to be King himself.

When Mirabeau finally met Antoinette she was at St.-Cloud. The Assembly had permitted the King and Queen to spend the summer there, provided they returned to the Tuileries to dine every Sunday and on other important occasions. The Count drove to St.-Cloud with his nephew, Victor, and told the younger man to wait for him at the palace gate. He was cautious about the prospective meeting, he couldn't be certain he was not being used

in a counter-plot. But when he eventually returned to the carriage some time later, he was in a state of rapture. Antoinette had enchanted him and quite overawed him.

"She is very great, she is very noble, she is very unfortunate," Mirabeau told Victor in a voice that shook with emotion, "but I am going to save her." He saw in Antoinette the regal daughter of the great Maria Theresa, who had donned the mantle of her mother's dignity. She, not her ineffectual husband, was in charge, it had been her decision to summon him to a meeting. "The King has only one man near him," the Count declared, "and that is his wife." Convinced as he was of Antoinette's ability, he was equally convinced that she would soon have to emigrate. "The moment will come, and soon," he declared, "when she will have to try what a woman and child can do on horseback."

The first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille approached, and the National Guard, which had become a nationwide organization, chose this date for all its members, or Federates, to assemble in Paris in celebration. The Assembly approved a great Festival of the Federation, with tens of thousands of guardsmen from the departments gathering on the vast Champ de Mars between the Ecole Militaire and the river to swear an oath of loyalty to the nation. It was meant to be an apotheosis of liberty, this massing of provincial guardsmen, yet at the same time the festival was designed to demonstrate loyalty to the Church and the monarchy as the guardsmen were to hear an open-air Mass, celebrated by Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, and the royal family was to take a prominent part in the spectacle.

The Champ de Mars was converted into a broad amphitheater surrounded by thirty tiers of benches for the onlookers. In the center of the amphitheater an Altar of the Country was erected, ornamented with figures and inscriptions. Here Talleyrand would celebrate Mass. The Exole Militaire itself was transformed by canvas and streamers into a platform for the King, members of the Assembly and other notables. Opposite it was an enormous triumphal arch designed along classical lines, whose carved inscriptions extolled constitutional monarchy.

All this was created in only a few short weeks, in a frenzy of eagerness brought on by the rapidly approaching deadline and by a genuine outburst of patriotic zeal. In spite of the economic debacle, the shortages, the spying and the lawlessness, Parisians were

gripped by a desire to celebrate all that had been achieved in the space of a single year. The excavations in the Champ de Mars became a symbol—like the tricolor cockade—of loyalty to the revolutionary government, and of hope for the future. Spontaneously people of all sorts joined the three thousand workmen toiling away to dig out the field, build the artificial hills, construct the altar and triumphal arch. And those who were not moved to pitch in and help were forced to do their share. Avid patriots roamed the streets impressing merchants, professional men, aristocrats of both sexes to dirty their hands and bend their backs on the Champ de Mars. Some said they even broke into convents, rousting out the monks and nuns and forcing them to take part in the conunon labor and to sing the "C^ ira."

The day of the festival dawned gray and threatening, and soon rain began to fall in torrents. The two hundred thousand spectators who had managed to secure seats or advantageous places to stand quickly became wet through, yet they waited patiently for the spectacle to begin, and every place was filled. Thousands of umbrellas made a multicolored canopy over the crowd, obstructing the view. Still, as the ranks of guardsmen, each group carrying its distinctive banner, marched past, followed by the line regiments and their officers, swords drawn, the sailors and cavalry, the rain was forgotten by all but the most tepid lovers of liberty. The marching and countermarching went on for hours, there were parades in every street all converging on the enormous amphitheater which became a single gigantic parade ground. The blue and white of the National Guards wove itself neatly in and out among the multicolors of the chasseurs and carabineers and hussars. Wet banners, drooping from their poles, were waved aloft as black clouds opened overhead and turned the parade ground into a sea of mud.

Still the spectators did not budge. The men waved their hats, some held up sabers and bayonets with loaves of soaked bread speared on their tips. Hundreds of people who had managed to get to the top of the triumphal arch sang and shouted and waved tricolor flags. On the Altar of the Country, three hundred priests in white robes and tricolor scarves stood in their places, waiting for the Bishop to arrive. An orchestra of over a thousand musicians trooped in and tuned up. Amid the shouting and singing, the thumping and shrilling of the military bands and the cacoph-

ony from the orchestra order was lost at times. Soldiers broke from their ranks and ran joyfully loose, joining hands to dance peasant dances, eating the ham, fruit and sausages people had tossed to them along the route of march. It was a very festive anarchy, almost playful, yet not without a hint of menace. Several of the priests were swept off the altar and forced to march up and down, muskets on their shoulders, grenadiers' caps on their heads. Wine flowed freely, orders were forgotten at times and some of the guardsmen, dripping with sweat and rain, forced their way past the sentinels into the special sheltered boxes where the ambassadors sat. Only the arrival of the Assembly deputies and the King brought all attention to the Ecole Militaire and put a stop to the merrymaking.

Artillery boomed a salute to the deputies, who marched in between two lines of flags. Then Louis made his appearance, in great state and with a colorful entourage. Beside his throne was a chair for the President of the Assembly, and above him was a space for Antoinette and the other members of the royal family, who were all cheered loudly as they took their places. Now the Bishop celebrated Mass, blessing the banners of the Guard units and leading the spectators in the traditional hymn of thanksgiving, the Te Deum. The oath-taking followed. One by one Lafayette, the officers of the Parisian National Guard, army officers and provincial guardsmen came before the Bishop to swear to uphold the nation, the law and the King. With "every sword drawn and every head raised," the King stood up and swore his solemn oath.

"I, King of the French, swear to employ the power delegated to me in maintaining the constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by me." He reminded the massed thousands that he was "their father, their brother, their friend." He could only be happy if his subjects were happy, he said, his strength came from their liberty, his wealth from their prosperity. "Repeat my words, or rather the feelings of my heart, in the humble cottages of the poor," he shouted as the rain poured down all around him. "Tell them that, if I am not able to go with you to their homes, I want to be among them with my affection and the laws which protect the weak; to watch over them, to live for them, if necessary to die for them."^

Tears mingled with the rain, people shouted "Down! Down!" to those whose umbrellas blocked their view. ''Vive le Rot! Vive la

Reine! Vive Monsieur le dauphin!!'' Antoinette, wearing red, white and blue ribbons in her hair, held up her son to the crowd, and a fresh wave of shouting burst forth from thousands of throats. Finally the entire crowd repeated in unison their oath to be faithful to the nation, the law and the King. Trumpets blared, the spectators applauded, all was pandemonium as the soldiers once more broke into round dances and mingled with the crowd. Lafayette was so mobbed that he could barely move, screams and huzzas followed Louis as he made his way to his coach for the return to the Tuileries.

"For a few hours Louis became once again the idol of his subjects, the master of his empire," Hezecques wrote, recalling the festival. He was once again the people's champion, their enlightened ruler and friend. In the following days, throughout the banquets and balls and jousts on the river, the informal street dances and parties, the King's name was invoked with reverent fondness. Paris was the city of liberty, whose liberty-loving King dwelt in the shadow of his capital, the contented captive of his faithful French.

r

^ HERE were plots astir to kill the Queen. A would-be

assassin named Rotondo was found lurking in the inner gardens of the Tuileries, weapon in hand, waiting to assault Antoinette when she took her daily walk. No one knew how he penetrated the ring of guardsmen surrounding the palace, or how, once inside, he avoided detection for so long. Had the day not been rainy, and the royal promenade postponed, Rotondo might have succeeded.

The King's informers uncovered a conspiracy to poison Antoinette, and warned her to be cautious about what she ate. According to Campan, she took the warning calmly—or perhaps she was numbed by fear following the previous assassination attempt—and went to her doctor to get advice about antidotes. He told her to keep a bottle of oil of sweet almonds within reach, to mix with milk as an emetic, and to empty the bottle and refill it frequently lest the oil be poisoned. Madame Campan became concerned about the basin of sugar Antoinette kept in her bedchamber to sweeten her drinking water. Rotondo's escapade proved that anyone could gain access to the palace (had he bribed the guardsmen?) and many of the servants were presumed to be in the pay of the revolutionaries, or to hold strong revolutionary sentiments. To slip a toxin in with the sugar would be only too easy—and so Campan changed it three or four times a day.^ Antoinette remarked wryly that her enemies would more likely kill her by calumny than by poison, but the plots and rumors of plots must have frightened her, making her realize how vulnerable the entire family was.

Several people claiming to be religious visionaries came to St.-Cloud and insisted on speaking to the King. They were turned away, but they kept coming back, and finally they were arrested. Both seemed slightly mad, and ultimately proved to be genuine. They had wanted nothing more than to urge the King to "put his trust in God and the holy Virgin, and so recover his authority."

Most of those who clamored to see the King, or to gape at the Queen, were harmless—as harmless as the silent, brooding Chevalier Castelnaux who was still Antoinette's shadow. But no one could be trusted completely, not when Paris was inundated with inflammatory pamphlets calling for the murder of the King and Queen. Murder, pillage, and arson were the common vocabulary of the journalists, who sold their papers throughout the city and even at the very door of the Assembly, a few minutes' walk from the palace. The most ferocious of the journalists was Marat, the doctor who had abandoned science for politics and whose indictments of the privileged fairly seethed with hatred. In the summer of 1790 he circulated a new pamphlet goading Parisians to seize Louis and the dauphin, to throw Antoinette and Provence in jail, and cut off the heads of six hundred people in authority. All taxation should be abolished, he insisted. Then and only then would the French be content—and safe from the enemies of the revolution, who were plotting to overturn it.

Fearing that Marat's vision of destruction was a harbinger of things to come, property-owning Parisians left the city, alarmed by the disorder, by the continuing economic collapse (the assig-nats were losing value at a frightening rate), and by the large numbers of vagabonds and deserters who streamed in from the provinces. The Assembly tried in vain to stem the exodus, but people left anyway, hoping to find stability away from the political maelstrom that was Paris. Yet many provincial cities too were convulsed by revolts and violent protests. At Toulon the dockyard laborers, enraged by rumors that they would not be paid, attacked the senior naval officer and were in the process of hanging him when a party of grenadiers came on the scene and saved his life. At Nancy, three regiments revolted and in the resulting chaos the arsenal was pillaged and hordes of townspeople rose in rebellion against the town authorities. In Lyons there were riots against the revolution—riots prompted, in part, by recent legislation which attempted to bring the Church under the control of the revolution.