When the King Took Flight

by Timothy Tackett

  The citywide celebration began on the evening of July 13, with a great musical event in the cathedral of Notre Dame, attended by various Revolutionary dignitaries and by the individuals who had led the attack on the great medieval fortress two years earlier. A ritual thanksgiving Te Deum was sung by the pro-Revolutionary clergy, and the composer Francois-Joseph Gossec organized a musical extravaganza titled The Fall of the Bastille.56 The festivities continued the next morning when a long procession set off at ten o'clock from the site of the now-demolished Bastille in the direction of the parade grounds across the city. Led by Bailly and the municipal government, the march included a long line of officials from the government ministries, the judiciary, the military, and the fortyeight sections, all interspersed with bands, batteries of drummers, national guard units, and a model of the Bastille carried like a religious reliquary in an Old Regime procession. For three hours the musical parade wound through the city: past the city hall, down the right bank of the Seine, across the river near the Tuileries, through the Left Bank district of Saint-Germain, and into the stadium. When everyone was in place, around two o'clock, there was a mass and another Te Deum, led by the newly elected "constitutional" bishop of Paris. The ceremony ended with a series of military maneuvers by the national guards, directed by General Lafayette astride his white horse.57

  In certain respects the event appeared to be a success. Most observers thought that the crowds were at least as large as in 1790, and perhaps larger. And no one could deny that the weather was better. The day had dawned warm and beautiful, in sharp contrast to the miserable rain and mud of a year earlier." But there were also ample signs of a sea change in attitudes from the previous year and of the sharp political differences now dividing the Parisians. Claiming that they were too occupied with debates, the National Assembly sent only twenty-four delegates instead of the entire body, which had arrived in procession in I79o. Even more obvious was the absence of the king and the rest of the royal family. No one had even considered asking Louis to renew his oath to the constitution. Some witnesses also noted the apparent last-minute changes executed by unknown artists on the Altar of the Fatherland. There was a basrelief of the "Triumph of Voltaire," alluding to the anticlerical procession celebrated only a few days earlier in honor of the patriarch of the Enlightenment. There was another scene that witnesses took to be a monument to citizen Drouet, the hero of Varennes. And most conspicuous of all, the word king had been effaced from the altar, which now read "the Nation, the Law, the [blank]." References to the monarch had also been removed from virtually all the flags of the national guard units. At several points during the ceremony, people even cried out, "No more Louis XVI, no more king! "s1

  There were also reports of tension and violence of a kind quite unknown twelve months earlier. The visiting Creole noble HenriPaulin Panon Desbassayns made the mistake of wearing his cross of Saint Louis, an Old Regime marker of aristocratic status, and he was insulted and badly handled by the crowds. Even worse treatment was meted out to two supporters of the refractory clergy, who threw stones at the national altar. Early in the proceedings a rumor spread that the National Assembly was going to profit from the people's presence at the Champ de Mars to vote the exoneration of the king, and some individuals rushed back across town to the Assembly hall. Indeed, members of several of the popular societies, including the Cordeliers, had not even attended the ceremony. They had sent their own procession to the Assembly earlier in the day to demonstrate their continuing opposition to its policies, presenting the deputies with yet another petition. Once again they demanded that the deputies take no decision on the king until all the people of France had been consulted in a referendum. And this time, they went even further. The true sovereign body, they argued, was not the Assembly at all, but "the people." A failure to recognize this reality, they continued, might well lead to civil war.60

  Clearly, all eyes were now on the deputies of the National Assembly. The men who only a few months earlier had been universally heralded as "the Fathers of the Nation" were being castigated and threatened with insurrection by a vociferous minority of the Parisian population. Now the deputies would have little choice but to act.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Fathers of the Nation

  FOR OVER TWO YEARS the deputies had been at work in the National Assembly, drafting a constitution and reorganizing the country from top to bottom., in many respects, they were an exceptional group of men. The electoral system, patched together by the royal government in 1789, had brought in elites of local, regional, and national stature from every part of the kingdom. There were close to 30o nobles, most of them titled and exceedingly wealthy, representing the greatest families in France. There were several dozen aristocratic bishops and archbishops, and over 200 parish priests from towns and villages across the country. And there were some 6oo deputies of the Third Estate, commoners for the most part, from a wide range of professions: lawyers, judges, doctors, merchants, landowners, and a variety of government employees. Most of the Third Estate deputies were men of property, and many had experience in municipal government. But their cultural common denominator was training in the law. Perhaps two-thirds of them had pursued legal studies, and several ranked among the finest legal minds of their age.

  For the commoner deputies of the Estates General and for the minority of liberal nobles and clergy who supported them, the early weeks of the Revolution had marked an extraordinary, almost magical moment. Faced with the intransigence of most of the aristoc racy and with the near abdication of power by the royal government, encouraged by the support of the Parisian crowds, they had learned from one another, stimulated one another, and pieced together ideas from a whole range of eighteenth-century notions of reform. Soon they found themselves moving further and more rapidly toward a radical transformation of France than any of them would previously have imagined. By the middle of June 1789 they had converted themselves into a sovereign National Assembly, solemnly dedicating themselves-in the dramatic "Tennis Court Oath"-to drawing up the country's first constitution. A few weeks later, on August 4, during a particularly stunning nighttime session, they had swept away large portions of the Old Regime's political and social institutions and the whole system of seigneurial rights and caste privilege. Soon thereafter they had issued their "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen," anticipating many of the provisions of the Bill of Rights, ratified in the United States just two years later. Following the king from Versailles to Paris after the October Days, and moving their meetings to an adapted indoor riding arena just north of the Tuileries gardens, they had taken up with unflinching energy the task of restructuring the country. Having largely dismantled the previous regime, they had been compelled to rebuild almost everything from scratch: the central government, the regional administration, the courts, the legal code, the tax system, the organization of the armed forces and of the church.

  To End a Revolution

  But as the deputies moved into the second year of the Revolution, subtle changes in their mood and outlook had begun to appear. In part, it was a question of sheer fatigue. For those who took their mission seriously, for those who attended sessions regularly, participated in committees, read the endless proposals written by other deputies, and maintained correspondence with their constituencies, the relentless responsibilities could easily lead to exhaustion and lassitude. Few had been accustomed to such a pace of life before their arrival in the capital, and few could now afford secretaries. "Our brains can no longer cope with such intense and sustained exertion," wrote one of the deputies. They were "harassed," thought another, "with too much work, with too many sessions, with too many struggles." In their correspondence they described themselves as "exhausted" and "worn out," suffering from headaches, insomnia, and weight loss. By early 1791, absenteeism had risen precipitously. Most of the nobles and a great many of the priests had simply ceased attending, and only about 400 of the nearly 1,200 representatives actually appeared on a regular basis.2
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  The exhaustion and overwork may also have contributed to the terrible factional conflicts that marked the second year of the Revolution. "The Assembly no longer works as efficiently as in the beginning," wrote the deputy Doctor Jean-Francois Campmas. "It is utterly exhausted and a prey to political passions." Since the end of 1789 the most progressive representatives had begun meeting separately at night in a large abandoned convent a block or two north of the Assembly hall. Here the Friends of the Constitution, or Jacobins-after the convent of Saint-Jacques-debated issues and developed political strategies in advance of Assembly sessions, anticipating in many respects the activities of a modern political party. Soon they had also developed a network of affiliated societies throughout the country-the very network that the patriots of Varennes had joined in early 1791. But only a few months after their creation, the Jacobins found themselves at odds with a breakaway contingent of more moderate deputies, organized as the Society of 1789. And both of these patriot "clubs" were frequently riven by bitter personal and political rivalries. Lafayette, who early left the Jacobins for the "Eighty-Niners," lamented the situation to his friend George Washington in May 1791: "Even among those who call themselves patriots, the passion for factions has gone as far as it can go without leading to bloodshed."3

  The challenges faced by the deputies were also complicated by a series of unanticipated developments. In the spring of 1790 a diplomatic crisis between England and Spain first raised the threat of international intervention into France's affairs, a threat that continued to preoccupy the Assembly to the eve of the king's flight. The pros pect of war seemed particularly unsettling in that rising hostilities between commoner soldiers and aristocratic officers-the same hostilities encountered by General Bouille in his efforts to organize Louis' escape-had brought the French army to the verge of collapse. Even more disturbing was the opposition aroused in certain areas of the country by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the requirement of a clerical oath. Most patriot deputies saw this legislation as a rational and necessary reform of church organization, but some segments of the population became convinced that the Assembly was trying to change the Catholic religion itself. The seriousness of the crisis came home to the deputies when portions of their own constituencies-sometimes including wives and close friends-began attacking the religious policies of the Assembly.

  At the same time, the representatives had been forced to confront the problems of ever-increasing popular riots and unrest. The daily threats of "anarchy" in Paris, in the very neighborhoods in which the deputies lived and worked-the bread riots, the labor protests, the insubordination of national guard units-caused many patriots to question the democratic positions they had previously embraced. Once considered the saviors of the Revolution, the common people of Paris were soon viewed by many moderates as ungrateful, unpredictable, and dangerous. They had become all the more dangerous, in this view, through the irresponsible demagoguery of the Cordeliers Club and the radical press. Beginning in the winter of 1790-91 a group of moderate Jacobins began pushing through a series of decrees intended to disarm popular radicalism. These measures included the exclusion of poorer citizens from the national guard; the enforcement of laws against "crimes of the press"; and the Le Chapelier law, banning worker organizations and strikes.4 At the head of this group were the young lawyer from Grenoble Antoine Barnave and his close friends, the nobles Charles and Alexandre Lameth-both veterans of the American Revolutionary War-and the liberal Paris magistrate Adrien Duport. For Barnave and the group around him, it was now time to end the Revolution, to put the French people back on the normal course of their lives and to reinstill some sense of stability and civic discipline.

  [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

  Antoine-Pierre-JosephMarie Barnave. Leader of the moderate Jacobins, and later of the Feuillants.

  [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

  Jerome Petion. Leader of the radical Jacobins.

  Yet ending a revolution was to prove every bit as difficult as beginning one. All of the moderates' measures were opposed tooth and nail by a small group of radical Jacobins in the Assembly, led by Jerome Petion and Maximilien Robespierre. An ascetic in his lifestyle, though intensely passionate in his political convictions, Robespierre, like Petion, refused to abandon his belief in the rights and basic goodness of the common people. Indeed, the two men and the group of deputies who followed them believed that the Revolution was not in fact complete. Democracy should be expanded and suffrage extended to all male citizens, whatever their status or economic condition.

  But in the spring of 1791 Robespierre and his allies were rarely able to prevail. As one former radical put it, "a time for moderation has arrived."5 The desire to curb the popular influence in Paris and to end the Revolution was even pushing many moderates to shore up the power and prestige of the king. The Spanish ambassador had already detected this policy reorientation at the end of 1790. "Through secret intermediaries," he announced in December, "the democratic leaders are now seeking to reach an understanding with the monarchy, and are promising to work toward the prompt restoration of order." By April 1791 Barnave and the moderates had largely ceased attending the Jacobin Club and-as Robespierre suspected but was unable to prove-had even entered into clandestine negotiations with Louis XVI.6 The majority's desire to strengthen the monarchy helps explain the exceptionally positive attitude toward the king among a great many of the patriot deputies, the wishful thinking with which they evaluated Louis' every action. It was for this same reason that the king's sudden dash for freedom would seem like such a harsh blow.

  The Interregnum

  When the president of the National Assembly announced the terrible news at nine in the morning on June 21, the deputies sat in stunned silence. One member remembered vividly "the consterna tion painted on every face" as they all tried to comprehend the implications of the event. Jean-Francois Gaultier de Biauzat, writing on his lap during the meeting, noted simply: "may God help us now."7 Over the previous weeks they had all heard predictions that the king might be abducted. But there were always dozens of unproved rumors floating about, and, as jurists trained in sorting evidence analytically, they had learned to dismiss most of the stories out of hand. And if truth be told, these were not rumors the deputies wanted to believe. As they came increasingly to envision the monarch as the linchpin in the constitutional system, they had convinced themselves that the king could be trusted.

  A parade of embarrassed officials soon arrived in the Assembly hall, attempting to justify themselves and explain what had happened. Lafayette, who was ultimately responsible for security at the Tuileries palace, entered "with a doleful and downcast appearance." Mayor Bailly and several deputies charged with investigating the earlier rumors also spoke and admitted their failure. Indeed, the rumors in question now appeared far more substantial than most deputies had realized. The queen's servingwoman-the very woman the royal couple had so feared in the weeks before the flight-had informed officials of the coming evasion with great accuracy. Extra guards had supposedly been placed near the door she had indicated, and still the royal family had disappeared as if by magic. Some deputies speculated that Lafayette himself was in on the plot or had knowingly allowed it to succeed.' It seems more likely that the general never really believed the rumors. If we can trust his memoirs, he had directly broached the reports with Louis himself, and the king had given "such solemn and forceful denials that [Lafayette] would have wagered his life that the king would not leave." Like nearly everyone else, he had wanted to believe that the king was incapable of lying. Perhaps for this reason he had failed to impress upon the guards the need to be especially vigilant.'

  In any event, the deputies soon overcame their consternation. They bravely reminded one another of all they had been through, comparing the present situation with the summer of 1789, when ob stacles had seemed all but insurmountable. They declared themselves to be in permanent session, and
for the next several days they met around the clock, with a skeleton crew of deputies spending the night at their benches, ready to confront whatever emergencies might arise." And in the face of the unprecedented crisis, they put aside their factional feuds and pulled together. The members were particularly impressed when Barnave, the former Young Turk of the Jacobins, came to the defense of his longtime rival Lafayette. "This act of justice and generosity stunned the Assembly and brought to a halt all accusations against the general. It was a day on which all those previously divided by ideas, passions, rivalries, or personality were brought together." The next morning, June 22, nearly all of the deputies who were members of the military, most of them sitting on the conservative right of the Assembly, came forward and, with swords raised and one knee to the ground, swore a solemn oath of allegiance to the constitution. The oath was particularly dramatic in that it now lacked all reference to the king. It was the same oath taken the following evening by the colorful procession of Parisians who would march through the Assembly."

  Over the next two days there was a flurry of motions and decrees, most of them passed by unanimous assent. The first order of business was the attempt to halt the royal flight. Lafayette himself had sent out couriers even before the deputies convened on June 21. Now the Assembly did likewise, dispatching messengers along the main roads with orders to stop the king and all members of his family. In French the same word is used for both "stop" and "arrest," and the sobering ambiguity was clear to all.12

  Almost as quickly, the representatives took steps to keep the government functioning. Never in its history had France been without a king or a king's regent, and now, in these difficult circumstances, the Assembly was forced to improvise. Unanimously and without debate the deputies ended the requirement of a royal "sanction" for the ratification of decrees, adding that all decrees previously voted and still awaiting the king's approval would immediately pass into law. Someone suggested the creation of an executive "committee of public safety" drawn from the Assembly to meet the emergency. But the deputies opted to work through the existing ministers, who were immediately summoned and asked to declare their allegiance to the Assembly. When all had done so, they were set up in an adjoining building in order to maintain close contact with the representatives and to work directly with the appropriate committees in coordinating policy. Other decrees enabled the finance minister to continue paying the nation's bills without the monarch's signature and instructed foreign ambassadors to deal directly with the Assembly through the minister of foreign affairs."