In any case, servants in the Tuileries were stunned at seven in the morning on June 21, when they pulled aside the king's curtain and found his bed empty. At first they hoped the monarch had simply gone to the queen's room, but when they found that her bed had not been slept in and that the royal children and Madame Elizabeth were also missing, pandemonium swept through the palace. Many of the servants quickly changed into street clothes and fled for their lives, fearing they would be accused of complicity." By the time Lafayette and Bailly arrived, tipped off by yet another rumor that they had initially refused to believe, the news had spread outside the Tuileries and was coursing through the streets with amazing speed.'9 One Parisian remembered the experience: "I heard a roar approaching, similar to the sound made by waves in an approaching storm. It came closer, it grew louder, and it passed by with ever greater force." The young magistrate Felix Faulcon, deputy from Poitiers, was writing in his room when he noticed shouting in the streets and in the house next door and then caught the words that the king was gone. Another deputy, the lawyer and historian Antoine Thibaudeau, was awakened by a cannon firing warning shots near the Seine. Soon everyone was at his window, calling for news from houses across the street or from the people below. Between eight and nine, as the news spread, church bells began ringing in every parish in the city. As the ominous drum roll of the call to arms started up, men rushed through the streets, still fastening their uniforms, to join their national guard formations.20
Many people hurried to the Tuileries to see for themselves, and by half past eight a huge crowd had burst through the gates and climbed the stairs to the royal chambers, intimidating and shouting insults against guards and servants who had not already slipped away. The soldier assigned to the king's sister was pushed against the wall and threatened, until the crowds were shown a newly discovered secret door built into the bookcase. There were reports of the people destroying portraits of the royal family and a certain amount of furniture in the queen's room. But for the most part, people simply gawked and talked to one another. When municipal officials arrived, urging the need to seal off the premises to preserve evidence, the crowds readily departed.21 Elsewhere hostile groups of people surrounded Bailly and Lafayette, initially held responsible for the flight, as the two tried to make their way to the city hall. But the imperturbable general stood his ground and led the mayor to safety, accompanied by only a few guards. The duke d'Aumont, commander of the Tuileries guards during the night, was not so fortunate. Cornered by a large crowd, he was beaten and his clothes badly torn before he was rescued by a unit of the militia. In other sections of the city, rumors spread that the prisons housed dangerous counterrevolutionaries who might soon break out and attack the people, and municipal forces had to be rushed in to prevent a potential massacre.22
Yet on the whole, after the first shock and excitement, the city remained calm, and almost all observers commented on the relatively mild reaction. "There is complete tranquillity here," wrote the Spanish ambassador, "as well as a kind of stupor, as though everyone has been struck with apoplexy." "Never," observed the roaming reporter of the newspaper Le babillard (The Chatterer), "has Paris been both so touched with emotion and so calm. The common people, in particular, have remained orderly." The young German writer Konrad-Engelbert Oelsner wondered at the atmosphere of determined and almost jovial optimism reigning in the streets: "There was much movement and curiosity, but nowhere destruction or disorder. The indignation manifested itself less in bitterness than in amusing pleasantries. People questioned each other, spoke to those they had never seen before, discussed, joked. An extraordinary event, affecting the whole community, had wrenched a million people from their daily affairs; torn them from their petty cares, bringing them closer to one another."23 In the short term, the open reality of conspiracy turned out to be far less disruptive than the previous rumors and fears of conspiracy.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
People Rushing to the Tuileries after Learning of the Kings Departure. Citizens and national guardsmen cross the Pont-Neuf and head down the quay toward the Louvre on the morning of June 21. The towers of Saint-Germain- l'Auxerois are visible on the right.
Clearly, one of the keys to the popular restraint was the immediate and vigorous action taken by the municipal authorities. Hastily convened by Bailly at ten that morning, the city council was to remain in session around the clock for the next six days.z" The councilors quickly established liaisons with the National Assembly, from which designated officials shuttled back and forth almost hourly. They also attempted to work closely with the neighborhood section committees, each of which was invited to maintain two representatives in the city hall to assure communication with the local bodies. In this way, the new laws decreed by the Assembly to meet the crisis were rapidly proclaimed to the sound of trumpets on street corners throughout the city. In addition, Bailly and the city councilors quickly investigated even the most far-fetched accusations-reports of impending jail breakouts or of "enemies" planning to bombard the city from the surrounding hills. They thus succeeded in disarming fears as soon as they arose."
Even before they had been contacted by the mayor, most of the sections had swung into action. As chance would have it, many were meeting that morning for the election of the new legislature. When word of the emergency reached them, they immediately declared themselves to be in permanent session and mobilized the national guard units in their neighborhoods. For the first time, more humble "passive citizens"-those too poor to qualify for voting rights-were widely welcomed into the units. Some of these inhabitants seized arms for themselves by breaking into government magazines. A few sections went further, claiming complete control over the local militias and denying the authority of Lafayette, whom many suspected of involvement in the king's disappearance. The general and the city leaders had long been suspicious of the radicalism of the sections, and for the time being they were able to reassert their control over all guard units and thwart the creation of independent paramilitary groups. But in the midst of the national crisis, the municipality tolerated the permanent sessions of the sections and acquiesced to their claims as de facto administrative units. These were significant precedents. Within a year after Varennes the sections would evolve into the principal institutional base of the armed "sans-culottes" radicals, a primary force in the overthrow of the king and in the ascendancy of the Terror in Paris.26
Equally significant for the future of the Revolution was the dramatic change in attitudes toward the king. Throughout the first two years of the Revolution, Louis had retained a remarkably positive image among the great majority of Parisians of every political persuasion. When the king's elderly aunts emigrated to Rome in February, a female contingent of the Fraternal Society of Les Halles wrote to the monarch: "We love you as our good father, and we want to tell you how sad we are that your family is abandoning you." A month later, when Louis had recovered from a severe cold and sore throat, there was an extraordinary outpouring of affection and goodwill everywhere in Paris, a general rejoicing marked by a thanksgiving service in the cathedral of Notre Dame, a series of cannon salutes, and a special illumination of the city throughout the night. The most serious source of antagonism before June 21 had been the king's refusal to hear mass from the "constitutional" clergy. This was the single most important grievance motivating the events of April 18, and since that time there had been a distinct cooling toward Louis in the radical press. Yet the king seemed rapidly to admit his error and to mend his ways (in fact, as we know, to help screen his plans for escape). Most Parisians were ready to invoke the time-tested formula of the "good king badly advised," and to attribute his "mistakes" to the influence of the aristocrats or the queen.27
But everything was transformed by the king's flight. It was not only Louis' departure that stunned the Parisians, but also his letter renouncing much of the Revolution and declaring that his previous acquiescence to the new laws had been coerced. Oelsner was st
ruck by the number of people he saw reading and discussing copies of the king's letter in the street. Here, in his own hand-written note, the monarch made it clear that the flight had been entirely his own idea and not the work of his advisers. It now seemed obvious that Louis had lied to the French. His solemn oath pronounced just one year earlier-an oath sworn before God and the nation to uphold the constitution-had been insincere.28
Indeed, after June 21 it was difficult to find a single newspaperaside from those of the most reactionary royalists-with anything positive to say about the monarch. The Chronique de Paris wrote of the king's "perfidious treachery," of his "atrocious and black dissimulation" in plotting his departure. The generally moderate Journal de Perlet played on the contrast between the king's previous statements and his new manifesto. "How," the editor asked, "could one ever again have confidence in anything the king might say?"29 The harshness of the reaction, the veritable flood of scorn, revulsion, and disgust toward the monarch, impressed all contemporary observers. Some reports even commented on the cowardly manner in which the monarch had deserted his ministers and his royalist supporters to the wrath of the crowds. In a deluge of articles and pamphlets-over a hundred published during the next three weeks-he was variously labeled a "traitor," a "liar," a "coward," or simply "Louis the False." "Try to think of the most degrading expressions you could possibly use," wrote the Paris scholar and bookseller Nicolas Ruault, "and you will still underestimate what is actually said." "There are no epithets of shame," concurred Swiss writer Etienne Dumont, "which have not been repeated unsparingly and with cold-blooded scorn."30
The Parisian radicals, already obsessively sensitive to plots and conspiracies, felt especially perturbed, even humiliated. How could they have been so blind, lulled to sleep and oblivious to this, the greatest conspiracy of all? "We relied on the king's fine words, his honeyed speeches," protested Jacques-Pierre Brissot, an ambitious journalist and Parisian political figure. "We were lulled to sleep. It seemed a crime even to doubt the king's promises. So now this 'patriot' king has fled ... and is unmasked." There were endless refer ences to the king as a "parjure," one who is faithless to his oaths. William Short found everyone in Paris referring to him as such: "Louis the Traitor, Louis the Faithless." "He has fled," wrote the Chronique de Paris, "despite all of his faithless promises. He even chose the moment of his flight to correspond [almost] with the anniversary of the Federation oath taken before heaven and earth and in the presence of the nation, a nation that had forgiven him for his earlier mistakes." The Cordeliers published a paraphrase of a passage from Brutus, a popular play by Voltaire:
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
The Family of Pigs Brought Back to the Stable. Another version of the return to the Tuileries palace-just visible on the far right. The transmogrified royal family is pulled along in a toy wagon.
There was no clearer evidence of the depths of the popular outrage than the change in the representation of the king. Before Varennes, simple engraved portraits of Louis had been affixed to walls in almost every home and shop in Paris. But now, almost overnight, they were removed, and large numbers were said to have been thrown ostentatiously into the gutters.32 Indeed, there was a striking reformulation of the images used to portray the king. Above all, he was pictured as an animal, and especially as a pig. It was an obvious allusion to his reputation for overeating-a trait once viewed as almost endearing but now depicted as disgusting. For weeks thereafter the "pig-king" appeared everywhere in newspapers and brochures, in posters and engravings. Often there were whole families of pigs: a pig-queen and various other pig-members of the royal family in company with the porcine Louis. Someone even attached a sign to the wall of the Tuileries palace shortly after the flight: "A large pig has escaped from the premises," it read. "Anyone finding him is urged to return him to his pen. A minor reward will be offered."33
Birth of the SansCulottes
It was late on the evening of June 22 when Parisians learned that the missing monarch would indeed be returned to the "premises." At about half past ten the master barber Mangin, dispatched from Varennes almost twenty-four hours earlier, finally arrived in Paris. He shouted as he rode through the streets, "The king is taken! The king has been stopped!" Covered with dust and obviously exhausted after his long ride, he presented the National Assembly with a written report and breathlessly delivered a somewhat garbled and inaccurate version of the events in his hometown. The account was further transformed by those Parisians who had followed him into the Assembly and who then rushed out to relate the story to their friends. But the essence of the capture was soon understood, and the news spread rapidly throughout the city. Most people had already gone to bed, but they were roused by the noise and rushed to their windows or into the streets, anxiously asking for more details, and musing throughout much of the night on the possible ramifica tions of this unexpected turn of events. They had all assumed that by now the royal family must have escaped to a foreign country and that war might soon be declared. The capture in a small town in Lorraine seemed all but miraculous, bringing a new sense of exhilaration, self-confidence, and power. Once again it seemed that fate, perhaps God himself, was on the side of the Revolution.34
As chance would have it, the next day was Corpus Christi, a celebration in honor of the sacrament of the Eucharist and one of the great feast days in the Catholic liturgical year. Plans had been in the works for weeks-as they were each year at this time-to carry the Sacred Host around each of the city's fifty-two parishes, through streets adorned with colorful tapestries, flowers, and other decorations. Religious hymns were to be sung; processions of the national guard would march behind the local clergy, followed in turn by the religious confraternities of various worker groups with their flags and banners. In the evening there would be bonfires and fireworks and a veritable carnival atmosphere.35
But now the ceremony was transformed into a citywide celebration of the capture of the king. The most grandiose of all the processions was the one that encircled the parish church of Saint- Germain-l'Auxerrois, the Gothic structure just east of the Louvre and the official parish of the Tuileries palace. The march had originally been conceived to include the king and the royal family, as well as a large contingent from the National Assembly and hundreds of the elite national guard, led by Lafayette himself. But with the king absent, and with the news of his capture, the traditional religious music was replaced in large measure by an array of patriotic songs. Observers were impressed, above all, by the repeated renditions of the vigorous and optimistic popular song that had swept through the city: "Ah, ca ira! (;a ira! (;a ira!" (It'll all work out! It'll all be okay!). The patriot-priest Thomas Lindet, who was present and heard the song for the first time, congratulated the unknown composer "for helping to excite the courage of the French and rekindle their natural cheerfulness." Nor did anyone miss the symbolism in the fact that it was the deputies of the National Assembly who had taken the place in the procession of the missing king-still riding in his carriage somewhere in Champagne on the return route to Paris. One newspaper noted that the Assembly's appearance "had something triumphal about it. Vigorous applause and cries of happiness were mixed with the music of the national guard."36
Whether by plan or through improvisation, many of the guardsmen who had marched in the procession followed the deputies back to their meeting hall and asked to be allowed to take the same oath of allegiance to the constitution that the Assembly had administered one day earlier to all deputies who were military men. After a break for dinner, other guards from throughout the city converged on the hall, clamoring to swear an identical oath. The event was perhaps partly staged by Lafayette, who was anxious to reclaim the good opinion of the patriots after his failure to prevent the king's flight.37 But the general did not plan the remarkable sequel. As though reviving their processions of earlier in the day-and transforming a religious act into a political one-common citizens from all over Paris marched to the Assembly hal
l through the gathering dusk, arriving by neighborhood or worker confraternity, asking that they, too, be permitted to take the oath. Musicians took up seats in the largely deserted benches on the right side of the hall, where the conservative and aristocratic deputies sat in theory, but were usually absent. Once again the band took up the stanzas of "(~a ira!" and a variety of other patriotic songs. Column after column of citizens passed through the candlelit hall, in one door and out another, joining in the songs and raising their hands to shout "I so swear!" as they passed in front of the Assembly's president. Still in a festive mood, they arrived in an extraordinary mixture of clothing styles and colors. There were guardsmen in bright blue or green and white uniforms, and men in a diversity of more sober middle-class dress with knee breeches, buckled shoes, and three-cornered hats. But there were also large numbers of common people, women with aprons and bonnets, men in the long workingman's trousers-the "sans-culottes" (without knee breeches), as they were now coming to be called. Marching through the hall, six abreast, were butchers and colliers and fishwives, bakers with loaves of bread on the end of pikes, and stocky porters with their large round hats from the central market: men and women of every age and profession, some of the women holding up their babies as they shouted out their oaths, as though the next generation was also to be included in this common allegiance to the nation. They marched by in rapid order for at least two hours. Guittard estimated upward of 15,000; others thought it was more like 5o,ooo. The popular eastern suburbs of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel were particularly well represented. Marie-Jeanne Roland, the thirty-seven-year-old wife of a provincial official and herself a passionate radical Revolutionary, claimed that virtually the entire district of Saint-Antoine had arrived in a column stretching back across town to the neighborhood itself, some two miles away.38
When the King Took Flight Page 11
