The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  The flight to Varennes was the Revolution’s second great turning-point. Like the oath of the clergy, it forced everybody to make choices that most would have preferred not to face. Even if it had succeeded choices would have been unavoidable. Whether the king merely intended, as he claimed, to go to Montmédy and negotiate from that safe distance; or whether, as most suspected (and his brother, Provence, who at the same time did reach the Austrian Netherlands, put about), he intended to emigrate and return at the head of Austrian armies, the achievements of the Revolution up to that moment would have been fundamentally challenged. Diplomats thought war would have been precipitated there and then. The failure of the attempted escape postponed that danger—but demanded choices of a different order. The monarch had renounced the Revolution, and had explained why at great length in the proclamation he left behind. He complained of imprisonment in Paris, violation of property, and ‘complete anarchy in all parts of the empire’. He denounced betrayal of the wishes expressed in the cahiers, the lack of power accorded to the Crown under the new constitution, the tentacular power usurped by the Jacobin clubs, and, implicitly, the new religious order. How could such a man remain head of State? The blackest suspicions of the Parisian populace and radical leaders were confirmed. Republicans now came into the open. All over the capital symbols of royalty were attacked and defaced, and on 24 June the Cordeliers Club delivered a petition to the National Assembly to depose the king or consult the Nation on his fate in a referendum. A crowd of 30,000 escorted its presenters.

  Most members of the National Assembly, however, had been thoroughly frightened by the king’s departure. Their very behaviour when the crisis broke, paradoxically, showed that public business could go on perfectly well without a king: ministers were summoned, military dispositions checked, and debate proceeded as nothing untoward had happened. ‘One would never have imagined’, marvelled one noble deputy, ‘that at this moment there was no longer a King in France.’9 But to depose the king would mean at best a regency, notorious in French history for their perils; or at worst a complete redrafting of a constitution that was all but completed. Revisions in a republican direction could only lead to a strengthening of those popular forces which increasing numbers of deputies had found so alarming over the spring. Within a day of the news of the flight breaking, however, the Assembly had found a way out of the dilemma. It would pretend, against all the evidence, that the king had been kidnapped. It said so in a proclamation issued on 22 June urging the nation to keep calm. The denunciations he had left behind had been wrested from an unwilling monarch by wicked advisers. Those who objected to such patent fictions were heavily voted down. The king was suspended from his functions: for the rest of its life the Constituent Assembly controlled the executive as well as made laws. But there was never any doubt that the vast majority of deputies were determined to retain the monarchy at the cost of however many fudges and fictions were required. On 15 July the entire blame for the flight was imputed by decree to Bouillé and his subordinates, who were to be prosecuted. By then, however, as the deputies well knew, most of the accused had emigrated, and were safe in Austrian territory.

  The sense of emergency at the news of Varennes was nation-wide. There was a general expectation that the Austrians would invade to rescue the royal captive. National Guards were stood to, local authorities organized permanent committees to maintain revolutionary vigilance, and in many places there was renewed persecution of refractory priests and their congregations. The assumption was that they were in league with aristocrats and foreigners in some vast plot. Jacobin clubs were filled to bursting with anxious patriots. The religious turmoil of the spring had revitalized the Jacobin network, with the need to drum up support for oath-taking and promote participation in the election of priests and bishops. By July there were well over 900 affiliated clubs, almost three times as many as at the start of the year; and in his parting manifesto the king had pinpointed them as the source of much of what had gone wrong. But Varennes confronted the clubs with serious problems. Many of their members clearly thought that the king’s betrayal of his trust ought to lead to his deposition. At least sixty clubs called for him to be put on trial. But only a handful called openly for a republic, and many others explicitly repudiated the idea. It was soon apparent that the ‘mother society’ itself was split. Few speakers in its debates seemed to find the Assembly’s policy satisfactory, but outright republicanism also found few supporters. Even Robespierre only advocated leaving the decision to the people. But the club felt unable to resist the sense of outrage which swept Paris on 15 July when it became known that the Assembly held the king blameless. That evening its meeting was swamped by a crowd of 4,000 organized by a hitherto obscure radical club called the Social Circle. Before Varennes, the Social Circle had been noted for somewhat Utopian political discussions, but afterwards it had cooperated with the Cordeliers in their call for a republic, and had publicized their petition of 24 June in its newspaper, the Bouche de fer (Iron Mouth). The intruders now urged the Jacobins to join them in drawing up a petition against the king’s reinstatement. They hoped to attract mass signings by promulgating it on the altar to the Fatherland which had been erected on the Champ de Mars for the celebration of the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille the day before. A joint committee was set up to draft the petition overnight. Among those elected to it were Danton and Brissot, who had built himself a democratic reputation in Paris through his newspaper, Le Patriot Français, and his activities in the Social Circle. They were joined by the English radical Thomas Paine, famous for having advised the Americans in 1776 that is was common sense to renounce monarchy. As finally drafted and published in the Bouche de fer the next afternoon, the petition declared that the king had abdicated, and should not be replaced unless a majority of the Nation so decided. It was in effect a republican manifesto; and its result was to split the Jacobin Club. Lafayette, the Lameths, and a majority of its active members were committed monarchists, and they now seceded. They took with them every deputy except Robespierre, his close ally Pétion, and one or two others and set themselves up as a rival club meeting in the former convent of the Feuillants. Robespierre was appalled at the fragmentation of his most secure platform, and after a heated debate he persuaded the rump of the Jacobins to withdraw their support for the petition. It was too late. The Feuillants were only too delighted to have shed their radical colleagues. In any case, the Cordeliers had now taken up the petition, and were determined to push ahead with the signing ceremony.

  On 17 July, accordingly, perhaps 50,000 people gathered on the Champ de Mars. By late afternoon 6,000 had signed. But long before that two unfortunates found hiding beneath the patriotic altar were lynched by excited and suspicious crowds, and this gave Bailly, as mayor of Paris, an excuse for declaring martial law under the decree of October 1789. Lafayette and the National Guard now marched to the Champ de Mars flying the red warning flag. They were greeted with a hail of stones and some shots. Thereupon they opened fire on the largely unarmed crowd, shooting them down, as one participant put it, ‘like chickens’.10 Perhaps 50 people were killed and several more wounded as the crowd scattered. In the weeks that followed the ‘Massacre of the Champ de Mars’ another 200 or so known activists in Parisian popular circles were arrested, although Danton escaped to England, and Desmoulins and Marat went into hiding. It seemed that the nascent republican movement had been broken. Radical newspapers ceased to publish; the Cordeliers and the Social Circle ceased to meet, and the latter never resumed. Even the Jacobins had been shattered, and the Feuillants drafted a confident manifesto to provincial affiliates inviting them to recognize the new club as the only legitimate Society of the Friends of the Constitution. Untroubled, therefore, by further popular pressure, the Constituent Assembly now set about producing a final and definitive version of the Constitution on which it had laboured for two years.

  In this process Lafayette and the triumvirate, bitter rivals right down to June 1791, co-operate
d. Barnave, who, as one of the Assembly’s commissioners sent to escort the royal family back from Varennes, had been captivated by the queen, took a lead in trying to secure last-minute amendments that would make the constitution more acceptable to the king. They scored some successes. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was excluded from the constitution: that meant an oath to the constitution did not imply acceptance of the new ecclesiastical order, and also that the Civil Constitution might be amended or even replaced as an ordinary law without going through the deliberately cumbrous, ten-year process laid down for changing the constitution itself. Meanwhile a proposal that all refractory priests should be ordered not to come within thirty miles of any place where they had been beneficed was thrown out as inflammatory. In a disingenuous gesture, the ‘silver-mark’ qualification for election as a deputy, which had proved a particularly useful issue for rallying the Parisian popular societies in the spring, was abolished; but qualifications for voting in secondary electoral assemblies, which actually chose deputies, were raised to a level far above the silver mark, to put control of the important levers of power securely in the hands of very rich landowners. In any case, by the time these amendments passed, on 27 August, the elections to the subsequent Legislative Assembly had already been held, and all those chosen had had to pass the silver-mark test. Finally the Feuillants were able to carry a law to restrict the freedom of the press. Holding press licence responsible for much of the popular effervescence curbed (it was hoped finally) in July, the Assembly decreed on 23 August, against the lonely opposition of Robespierre, that any writer who ‘deliberately provokes disobedience to the Law, [or] disparagement of the constituted powers and resistance to their acts’ might be prosecuted, and that public officials whose probity or honest intentions were impugned might sue for damages. The Lameths, and Malouet (who unlike them had always believed in such safeguards), also dreamed of making the royal veto absolute, allowing deputies to be ministers, and even a second chamber; but it was too late now to revive the monarchien programme of 1789. The king was to be asked to accept a constitution the same in all but detail as had been envisaged ever since the laying of its corner-stones in 1789.

  Nor was it at all certain that Louis XVI would accept it. Bombarded with conflicting advice from both France and abroad, he seemed undecided until the very last minute. Sometimes he seemed resolved to try to make the constitution work: on 31 July he wrote to Artois asking him to return to the country and abandon his counter-revolutionary plottings. The next day the Assembly provided sterner incentives by passing the first law imposing penalties on émigrés. They were summoned to return within a month on pain of subjection to triple taxation. Now for the first time, too, official lists of émigrés were to be drawn up. The first proposal for such a law had come the preceding February, but it had been defeated when Mirabeau denounced it. Since that time, however, the stream of emigration had swelled enormously, especially after Varennes. Already alienated by a new oath of loyalty to the nation, the law, and the king (in that order) imposed on 11 June, army officers were outraged by the Varennes débâcle. Bouillé’s emigration was followed, over the next six months, by the disappearance of perhaps 6,000 of his fellow officers, well over half the officer corps of the entire army. The flow was not staunched by the abrogation of the new law against emigration on 14 September, as part of a general amnesty to mark the promulgation of the constitution. By this time, discipline throughout the army had all but collapsed amid new mutinies. Many officers who might have been prepared to stay were positively driven out.

  In aristocratic circles, in fact, the Feuillants received no credit for their efforts to restore a national consensus around a constitutional king. Every effort was made to block them. In the Assembly nobles, or, as they were now being called, Blacks or Ci-devants (‘hithertos’), either abstained from voting or took a perverse pleasure in supporting Robespierre and Pétion. Despite its avowedly conservative aims, few right-wingers joined the Feuillant Club; yet it also failed spectacularly to win over most of the provincial clubs. Only seventy-two severed their links with the Jacobins, and many of those had drifted back by the end of the summer. When martial law was lifted early in August, and newspapers began to reappear, no important Parisian journal came out for the Feuillants. Nothing did more to keep politics polarized than rumours of war, which persisted throughout the summer. The left assumed that the flight to Varennes had been part of an international conspiracy to crush the Revolution; and that, indeed, was what the queen and the émigrés had hoped to forge. When the flight failed, all sides assumed that the German powers would now redouble their efforts, and that the crumbling French army would not be able to stand up to them. On 10 July, in fact, the ‘Padua Circular’ issued by the Emperor Leopold invited fellow monarchs to join him in a campaign to restore the liberty of the French royal family. But only the king of Prussia responded positively, and the result was merely a further appeal for concerted action when the two monarchs met at Pillnitz on 27 August.

  The Declaration of Pillnitz stated that the situation of the king of France was an object of common interest to all the sovereigns of Europe. It invited the other powers to join in the employment of ‘the most effectual means … to put the king of France in a state to strengthen, in the most perfect liberty, the bases of a monarchical government equally becoming to the rights of sovereigns and to the wellbeing of the French Nation’. If the other powers agreed, the two kings declared themselves ready to ‘act promptly’. Privately the Austrians, at least, recognized that there was no prospect of other powers joining a crusade, and at this very moment they were disbanding regiments. For them the declaration was to satisfy monarchical and family honour, a move that might even promote some moderation within France, but scarcely a serious threat. But in that case it was needlessly provocative to state that it was issued at the request of the émigré princes, or to allow the latter to publish it together with an inflammatory letter to Louis XVI urging him to reject the constitution. The Constituent Assembly, therefore, came to an end amid rumours of an émigré invasion backed by foreigners; and in the last gesture of defiance towards international opinion, the deputies finally voted on 14 September to annex Avignon and the Comtat.

  The princes’ appeal to their brother had come too late. On 3 September the constitution was completed and presented to the king for acceptance. On the thirteenth, he signified his acceptance, amid scenes of rejoicing and a general amnesty. The Revolution, the Feuillants were determined to believe, was now complete, and ordinary constitutional life could begin; ushering in, so they hoped, calmer times. But much of the rejoicing was really at the approaching end of the Constituent Assembly, which came on 30 September.

  Its achievements had been enormous. In twenty-six months it had dismantled the ancien régime, the product of centuries of slow evolution. At the same time it had laid down the principles of a new order and established structures whose outlines were to endure down to our own day. When, later in the Revolution, or well into the next century, men spoke approvingly of the principles of 1789, they meant those accepted by Louis XVI in 1791, before the Revolution went to extremes. Yet the seeds of those later extremes had already been sown, and the Constituent Assembly was responsible for them, too. By forcing the clergy to choose between Church and State, it had split the country and given counter-revolutionaries a higher cause than self-interest. In its very last days the Assembly deepened this self-inflicted wound by unilaterally seizing papal territory. The religious schism made it impossible for millions to give the new order their whole-hearted support—beginning with the king himself. Only those who dared not think anything else believed, by September 1791, that his acceptance of the constitution was sincere. He had already shown, and said, what he really thought at the time of what he now chose to call his ‘journey’ in June. But that created a further split, between constitutional monarchists and a rapidly growing republican movement all the more alarming in that its mainstay was the turbulent populace of Paris. A
s to the nobles who had done so much to launch the Revolution, most had by now opted out, hiding themselves in rural obscurity or slipping across the Rhine to join the princes. None of this promised well for the Feuillant dream of post-revolutionary life. The British ambassador’s prediction of April 1791 was truer than ever by October: ‘The present constitution has no friends and cannot last.’11

  7

  Europe and the Revolution, 1788–1791

  The French Revolution took the whole of Europe by surprise. To be sure, all educated Europeans were aware in the 1780s that they lived in an age of upheaval and defiance of authority. America had thrown off British sovereignty, and Ireland had defied it. In the Dutch Republic self-styled patriots were struggling to deprive the prince of Orange of what quasi-monarchical powers he retained. But if any great monarchy seemed destined soon to collapse, it was not that of the French Bourbons, but that of the Habsburgs. Restless and unpredictable, the Emperor Joseph II was turning his German dominions upside-down in a headlong attempt to create a rational, efficient military despotism. By the middle of the decade he was switching his attention to his more outlying territories, Hungary and the southern Netherlands, and soon both were in turmoil.

  French diplomats positively encouraged all these developments. Without French help American independence could not have been achieved so rapidly and decisively. The Dutch patriot movement also stood in the way of Orangist attempts to reforge the century-long alliance with the British, ruptured in 1780; so the patriots were promised every support from Versailles. And anything which preoccupied Joseph II domestically was to be welcomed if it curbed his international adventures. But Vergennes, the friend of foreign rebels, was a stern authoritarian at home. Neither he, nor the foreign observers who watched him confidently deploying his master’s international influence, discerned that the ground was crumbling beneath him. Yet within six months of his death in February 1787 France, too, was in turmoil.