Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  The Third Estate had no permission to declare itself or act as a national assembly, and the king threatened to dissolve the entire Estates-General, by force if necessary. The Count of Mirabeau, a nobleman elected as a commoner who quickly became the leading presence among the delegates of the Third Estate, confronted the king’s messengers. “Go tell those who have sent you,” he said, “that we are here by the will of the people and that we will not be dispersed except at the point of bayonets.” On June 27, a decree from Louis terminated all meetings of the Estates-General, declaring them “null, illegal, and unconstitutional.” Riots in cities and uprisings in the countryside were the result. The most famous of these was the storming of the Bastille.

  The Bastille, a fourteenth-century fortress with eight round towers and walls five feet thick, had been converted into a state prison to which men who had broken the law or offended the government were spirited away, sometimes never to reappear. By 1789, however, this had changed and the prison had become more a symbol of tyranny than a grim place of incarceration. The Marquis de Sade, a prisoner in the Bastille until a week before the fortress was stormed, hung family portraits on his walls and kept a wardrobe of fashionable clothing and a library of dozens of volumes. On the day of the attack, the fortress contained only seven prisoners: five forgers and two people who were mentally adrift. Still, because it was considered a royal arsenal and possessed a garrison of 114 soldiers, the government decided to use it as a place to deposit 250 barrels of gunpowder.

  On July 14, twenty thousand Parisians, incensed by the royal dismissal of the Estates-General, the presence of a growing number of soldiers in Paris, and the stocking of gunpowder, marched on the Bastille. A few hours later, the fortress had surrendered, and the mob had liberated the seven prisoners and taken possession of the gunpowder. The governor of the fortress was stabbed with knives, swords, and bayonets, his neck was sawed through with a pocket knife, and his head, mounted on a pike, was bobbing at the head of a street parade.

  The fall of the Bastille was a political and psychological turning point. The National Assembly wrote a new constitution and voted on August 4 to abolish most of the aristocratic rights and fiscal privileges of the nobility and clergy. On August 26, the assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a charter of liberties whose wording reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment and the language of the American Declaration of Independence.

  Louis XVI and his family remained at Versailles. On October 5, a procession of five thousand women (and men disguised as women; it was rightly believed that the king would not order soldiers guarding the palace to fire on women) walked ten miles from Paris, invaded the palace built by the Sun King, and, the following day, forced the royal family to return with them to Paris. The family was installed in the Tuileries Palace in a state of semidetention (afternoon carriage rides in city parks were permitted). They remained there for nine months while the leaders of the National Assembly, most of them intellectuals and lawyers, with a few noblemen, all of whom thought in terms of maintaining order while bringing reform, tried to create a new form of constitutional monarchy. While they worked, and until the spring of 1791—twenty-four months after the summoning of the Estates-General, and twenty-two months after the storming of the Bastille—France was governed by a National Assembly with a monarchist majority led by Mirabeau.

  On the night of March 25, 1791, Mirabeau took two dancers from the opera home with him, slept with them, became violently ill, and, eight days later died. His departure removed the one figure whose political reputation and oratorical powers might have ensured the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. Even without him, on May 3, the National Assembly proclaimed a new constitution, establishing a limited monarchy. The monarch now would be titled King of the French rather than King of France, but France remained a monarchy and bourgeois politicians remained in control.

  On June 20, Louis and Marie Antoinette opened the door to personal and political catastrophe. Managing to escape from the Tuileries disguised as servants, the king and queen fled Paris with their children and headed toward the eastern frontier and the Austrian Netherlands. The royal carriage traveled no faster than seven miles an hour because the queen insisted that the whole family remain together in a single large overweight vehicle. Believing that they were out of danger, they stopped for the night at Varennes, only a few miles from the border. There, the awkward figure wearing a bottle-green coat and a lackey’s hat was recognized, apprehended, and, with his family, ignominiously brought back to Paris.

  Politically, the failure of the flight to Varennes cut the ground from under the king. It discredited the leaders of the National Assembly, who had been negotiating with Louis to create a new form of monarchy and who now felt themselves betrayed. Many abroad also condemned the king. Until Louis’s capture and return from Varennes, Catherine had still regarded him as a free agent—weak, but free. But after he had been trundled back to Paris like an animal in a cage, any illusion of freedom disappeared. “I fear that the greatest obstacle to the escape of the king is the king himself,” Catherine said. “Knowing her husband, the queen does not leave him, and she is right, but it complicates the problem.”

  The disastrous muddle of the escape attempt spurred talk elsewhere of the need to rescue the monarch and his family. Before the end of June, Marie Antoinette’s brother, the new emperor Leopold II of Austria, appealed to all European powers to assist in the restoration of the French monarchy. Leopold, succeeding his older brother, Joseph II, on the imperial throne, had been emperor for only a year. His appeal was halfhearted, even duplicitous, since at that moment he had no intention of leading, or even joining, an anti-French military crusade. But Leopold’s concern did precipitate a meeting with King Frederick William of Prussia, at the spa of Pillnitz, in Saxony. The two monarchs were joined by Louis XVI’s arrogant brother the Count of Artois, who arrived uninvited and demanded immediate armed intervention.

  The Declaration of Pillnitz, signed on August 27, 1791, stopped short of the demand made by Artois. It restated Leopold’s argument that the fate of the French monarchy was of “common interest” and invited other European monarchs to assist in taking “the most effective means of putting the king of France back on his throne.” No concrete steps were proposed. Leopold was cautious because the empire he had inherited from his brother was in a state of revolt in the Netherlands and dissent elsewhere. At the same time, he could not ignore the fate of his sister and brother-in-law in Paris, who, he realized, could now be in physical danger. On the other hand, Leopold worried that the kind of military action Artois was urging might increase his sister’s peril. Leopold’s final decision was that he could act against France only in concert with other powers, and, in this stipulation, he knew he was safe. Therefore, the Pillnitz Declaration committed Austria to nothing. In fact, its only achievement was to so outrage the French National Assembly that, eight months later, in April 1792, France declared war on Austria. By then, Leopold, who died suddenly in March, had been replaced by his inexperienced twenty-four-year-old son, Francis II.

  During the first two years of the French Revolution—from the spring of 1789 to the summer of 1791—information about events in France was freely available in the Russian press. No censorship was imposed on news from France, just as news about the newborn United States, which had just drafted its own republican constitution, was openly presented. The summoning of the Estates-General, the declaration by the Third Estate that it had transformed itself into the National Assembly, the storming of the Bastille, the surrender of noble privileges, the Declaration of the Rights of Man—all this was published in full Russian translation in the St. Petersburg Gazette and the Moscow Gazette. According to Philippe de Ségur, the fall of the Bastille aroused widespread enthusiasm: “French, Russians, Danes, Germans, Englishmen, and Dutch … all congratulated and embraced each other in the street.”

  When the Third Estate proclaimed itself the National Assembly and Catherine realized that t
he peasants and the bourgeoisie had been joined by a group of noblemen willing to give up their own political and social privileges, she was astonished. “I cannot believe in the superior talents of cobblers and shoemakers for government and legislation,” she wrote to Grimm. As the weeks went by, astonishment turned to alarm. “It’s a veritable anarchy,” she exclaimed in September 1789. “They are capable of hanging their king from a lamppost!” She was especially concerned about Marie Antoinette. “Above all, I hope that the situation of the queen will match my lively interest in her. Great courage triumphs over great perils. I love her as the dear sister of my best friend, Joseph II, and I admire her courage.… She may be sure that if I can ever be of use to her, I shall do my duty.” But as long as Russia was fighting wars on two fronts—against Turkey in the south and Sweden in the Baltic—she could not do her “duty,” however she might interpret it.

  By October 1789, Catherine had realized that if France slid into genuine revolution, it could threaten all European monarchies. This put her in a difficult position with Philippe de Ségur. When the ambassador’s four years of service in Russia were concluded, he came to say goodbye to the empress. Catherine gave him a friendly message for his king and also some personal advice,

  I am sad to see you go. You had far better stay here with me than to throw yourself into the eye of the storm which may spread further than you think. Your leanings toward the new philosophy, your passion for liberty will probably lead you to adopt the popular cause. I shall be sorry for I am and shall remain an aristocrat. It is my métier. Remember, you will find France very feverish and very sick.

  Ségur, equally distressed, replied, “I am afraid so, Madame, and that is what makes it my duty to return.” When she invited him to stay for dinner and displayed the warmth of her feelings toward him, the parting became difficult. “When I went, I thought I was only going on leave,” he wrote later. “The departure would have been still more painful had I known I was seeing her for the last time.”

  Catherine’s comments about events in France became increasingly caustic. The National Assembly was “the Hydra with twelve hundred heads.” In the new governing figures, she discerned “only people who set in motion a machine which they lack the talent and skill to control.… France is the prey of a crowd of lawyers, fools masquerading as philosophers, rascals, young prigs destitute of common sense, puppets of a few bandits who do not even deserve the title of illustrious criminals.” Her defense of monarchy followed from her belief in the need for efficiency in administration and the preservation of public order: “Tell a thousand people to draft a letter, let them debate every phrase, and see how long it takes and what you get.” She hated to see order crumbling and anarchy looming in France because she knew something about anarchy; she had seen it in the Pugachev rebellion.

  She was unable to support her views with military action half a continent away, but even before the flight to Varennes, she was not wholly passive. She told her ambassador in Sweden that she wanted the future of France to become the concern of all European monarchs. It was not merely a question of crushing revolution, she wrote, but also of France resuming its role in the European balance of power. Knowing that Gustavus III of Sweden, always in search of glory, coveted the leadership of a monarchist crusade against the revolution in France, she chose him as the figure to support. In October 1791, only a year after the end of the short, pointless Baltic war between Russia and Sweden, she offered to provide Gustavus a subsidy to maintain a corps of twelve thousand Swedish soldiers to be used in an invasion of France. The date discussed for this operation was the spring of 1792.

  A violent event in Sweden prevented this military enterprise. On March 5, 1792, Gustavus III was shot in the back and gravely wounded at a masked ball in Stockholm; he died at the end of the month. Although the assassin was a Swedish aristocrat and the issue was peculiar to Swedish politics, Catherine immediately saw it as part of a rising tide of antimonarchical violence. There were police reports that a French agent was on his way to St. Petersburg to assassinate the empress, and the number of guards at the Winter Palace was doubled. There was no further talk of landing Swedish troops in France.

  In the spring of 1792 Catherine issued a ten-page memorandum, suggesting measures to suppress anarchy in France, reestablish the monarchy, and set France back on the road to tranquillity and greatness. She began by writing that “the cause of the king of France is the cause of all kings.… All the works of the [French] National Assembly have been devoted to the abolition of the form of monarchy established in France for a thousand years. [Now] it is important to Europe to see France resume her position as a great power.” As to how this could be achieved, she said, “A body of ten thousand men would suffice to march across France from one end to the other.… Perhaps mercenaries—the best would be the Swiss—could be hired, and perhaps others from the German princes. With this force, one could deliver France from the bandits, reestablish the monarchy, chase away the impostors, punish the rascals and deliver the kingdom from oppression.” Once a restoration was achieved, the empress advised against widespread, vindictive repression. “A few genuine revolutionaries should be punished and amnesty should follow for those who have submitted and returned to their allegiance.” She believed that many delegates in the National Assembly would accept forgiveness, realizing that “they had gone beyond their powers because the electorate had not demanded the abolition of the monarchy, much less the Christian religion.” It was essential in the newly restored kingdom, she continued, that there be a balance of the original three estates: the nobility, the clergy, and the common people. The property of the clergy should be restored, the nobility should regain their privileges, and the popular and valid demand for liberty “could be satisfied by good and wise laws.” Before everything else, she wrote, the royal family must be liberated: “As the troops advance, the princes and the troops must focus on the most essential point: the deliverance of the king and the royal family from the hands of the population of Paris.”

  This document, written only months before the September massacres, the formal abolition of the French monarchy, and the beheading of the king, was hopelessly naïve; it displays Catherine’s complete misunderstanding of the evolving political, economic, social, and psychological condition of the people of France. Even as Catherine was writing, the radicalization of France was accelerating. The Jacobin Club, immensely powerful in Paris, was extending its membership and influence across the country. Meeting at a former convent of the Jacobins in the rue St.-Honoré, it had begun its revolutionary role as a place for reading and discussion of needed reforms; then it evolved into an arena of radical thought, fiery speeches, and demands for drastic action. Its leaders, Georges Danton, Jean Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre, were reaching the summit of political power. By the summer of 1792, the Paris Commune, the new municipal government supported by the sansculottes—ordinary citizens “without fine knee breeches”—controlled the city. Danton, the new, thirty-year-old minister of justice, assumed responsibility for the royal family at the Tuileries.

  On August 10, a mob, organized by the Commune, stormed the Tuileries Palace. Six hundred members of the Swiss Guard protecting the royal family resisted until the king, to prevent bloodshed, ordered them to surrender. The Swiss obeyed, were taken prisoner, and slaughtered. The royal apartments were invaded and the king, his wife, and their children were seized and carried off to the prison of the Temple.

  That spring of 1792, Prussia had entered the Austrian war against France. By midsummer, a Prussian army stood on the Rhine, ready to march on Paris. As the army began to move, the Duke of Brunswick, commanding the Prussian forces, learned that Louis XVI and his family had been taken from the Tuileries. The duke’s response was to issue a manifesto threatening that Paris would be singled out for “an exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance … if the king and his family came to any harm.” This threat produced a result opposite to that intended. The Brunswick manifesto seemed to exp
ose Paris to a terrible retribution. Having been told that they had already committed acts for which they would be punished, Parisians were persuaded that they had nothing more to lose. Rumor declared that when the enemy arrived, the population of the city would be massacred.

  On July 30, 1792, five hundred men wearing red caps arrived in Paris from Marseilles and the south. Described by one member of the Assembly as “a scum of criminals vomited out of the prisons of Genoa and Sicily,” they had been hired by the Commune to come to Paris to help defend the city. To further bolster these ranks, the Commune drew on the local criminal population. Prisoners were released on condition that they would obey orders given by the Commune.

  The savagery of the prison massacres of September 2–8, 1792, was planned. During the final two weeks of August, hundreds of Parisians, described as “presumed traitors,” were arrested. Destined to be killed, they were gathered in prisons to make this more convenient. Many of the prisoners were priests taken from seminaries and churches and accused of antirevolutionary beliefs. Some were former personal servants of the king and queen. Those arrested also included the playwright Pierre Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette’s close friend the Princesse de Lamballe, who had fled to London and then returned to Paris to be with the queen. Most were ordinary people. Danton was not an instigator, but he was aware of what was about to happen. “I don’t give a damn about the prisoners,” he said. “Let them fend for themselves.” Later, he added that “the executions were necessary to appease the people of Paris.” Robespierre said simply that the will of the people had been expressed.