Throughout the afternoon and evening of July 16 the Cordeliers and their allies made careful plans for a giant petition-signing ceremony to take place the following day, with or without the support of the Jacobins. Militants from all over the city would assemble at the open square near the demolished Bastille at eleven in the morning and then march across town to the stadium of the Champ de Mars, following the very path taken by municipal and national leaders three days earlier during the July 14 celebration. The symbolism seemed clear: the fraternal societies were now replacing the administrative elites whose authority they no longer recognized. The opposition leaders were also eager to maintain a peaceful demonstration, and instructions went out that no one was to carry a weapon, not even a club or a cane. But some individuals were clearly anticipating trouble, and there was talk of filling one's pockets or apron with rocks in case they were harassed by guardsmen. A few men carried pistols under their coats."
In the end the march across the city never came off. Lafayette and his subordinates had been informed of the militants' plans, and national guardsmen remained busy throughout the night breaking up street meetings wherever they were found. Early the next morning, Sunday, July 17, when popular societies and neighborhood groups tried to converge on the Place de la Bastille, they found hundreds of guardsmen occupying the area and barring their way. After a period of consternation, the demonstrators abandoned the idea of a group march and made their way to the Champ de Mars by whatever route they could.56
Despite the efforts of the organizers, there were a number of episodes of violence during the day. On several occasions people threw rocks at guardsmen in the streets, and one man even tried to shoot Lafayette-though the pistol failed to go off. The most serious incident, however, occurred in the stadium itself, and it was to change the whole character of the event. Toward noon, before the fraternal societies and their supporters had begun arriving, a group of people from the neighborhood adjoining the Champ de Mars spotted two individuals hiding under the Altar of the Fatherland at the center of the stadium. A young wigmaker and an older man with a wooden leg were found crouching with a stash of food and wine and a few carpenter's tools. Later commentators were convinced that the two had only planned to drill holes and spy on the women from below as they crossed the altar to sign the petition. The rumor spread rapidly, however, that they had planned to blow up the patriots with a bomb. Some of the crowd tried to escort the culprits to the local authorities for interrogation. But others-led by a group of boatmen, laundrymen, and other workers who lived nearby-seized the two men and dragged them away to be lynched on a light post and then decapitated."
Once the petition ceremony itself got under way everything seemed to proceed smoothly and peacefully. Now that the Jacobins had abandoned the field, Francois Robert-the journalist and Cordeliers stalwart who had published a republican tract the previous December-sat on the steps of the altar, placed a plank across his knees, and drew up a new petition. The document strongly denounced Louis XVI and declared that the will of the people was to end the kingship. It suggested that the National Assembly was now under the influence of the 250 conservative deputies who had rejected the suspension of the king. Although Robert carefully avoided the word republic, the meaning was perfectly obvious: the deputies were urged to "reconsider their decree" and "to convene a new constituent body" that would ensure "a judgment against the guilty party [the king] and his replacement by a new organization of the executive branch." It was a clear call for a new revolution and the election of a National Convention to create a central authority without a king.i8
Seven or eight copies of the petition were quickly produced and placed at different locations around the stadium; long lines of people soon formed to affix their signatures or their marks. As best we can tell from those who examined the original documentbefore it was destroyed in the nineteenth century-some 6,ooo individuals had already signed it at the time the ceremony was disrupted. They represented all elements of the Parisian population: a few professional men, local officials and national guardsmen, and a great mass of lower-class citizens, both men and women, many of them unable to sign their names. An estimated 50,000 others-men, women, and children-had also come out to watch the proceedings, taking advantage of the hot summer weather for a Sunday outing.51
But in the eyes of the National Assembly, the peaceful behavior of the vast majority of the petitioners could not outweigh the earlier murders or the underlying threat to the integrity of the Revolution's leadership. At the beginning of the afternoon the Assembly addressed yet another angry letter to Bailly and the municipal council, demanding "the most vigorous and efficient measures possible to halt the disorder and find the instigators." "It is time," thundered Michel-Louis Regnaud, the eloquent young deputy from southwestern France, "to unleash the full rigor of the law." Indeed, if it were up to him, "I would demand an immediate proclamation of martial law."" In a climate of growing uncertainty and under continuing pressure from the Assembly, the city council finally resolved to act. In a speech, the mayor linked the whole affair to a plot of outsiders and foreign agents: "a clearly defined conspiracy against the constitution and the nation, financed by foreigners who are attempting to divide us." It was they who, "hidden behind a variety of disguises, are fomenting the popular movements."6' We will never know whether the mayor truly believed what he said or was simply seeking to justify himself in an impossible situation. But at half past five in the afternoon, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Enlightened academician and scientist, the onetime friend of Voltaire and of Benjamin Franklin, ordered the red flag of martial law unfurled above the city hall and issued the general call to arms.
At half past six he set off from the city hall, accompanied by a portion of the city council and by two detachments of armed infantry and cavalry. Witnesses who participated claimed that they were cheered by most of the Parisians as they marched across the city, but that there were also scatterings of angry jeers, especially after they had crossed the Seine to the Left Bank. Near the stadium they were joined by General Lafayette and additional contingents of guardsmen, who were already on the scene.62 By this time the demonstrators and bystanders in the stadium were well aware of the arriving forces. But the official decree of martial law specified that no force could be used until the mayor had pronounced three successive summons for the crowds to disperse. The leaders of the demonstration urged everyone to remain calm and not to leave until the first of the three commands had been given.
As the first armed guardsmen entered the passage into the stadium through the earthen embankment that served as a grandstand, many of the demonstrators began shouting their disapproval: "No bayonets, no red flags!" Soon some pelted the guardsmen with rocks from the surrounding stands. What happened thereafter is somewhat confused, and interpretations depended in part on the political positions of the witnesses. Apparently, after a few moments a lone gunshot rang out, the ball passing precariously close to Bailly himself and hitting a cavalryman in the hip, knocking him off his horse. Alarmed by the violence against them, the guardsmen then entered rapidly with their drums beating a double-time cadence and took up position inside the stadium, facing the central altar from the north. No formal summons to disperse, as specified by the law, was ever pronounced. The soldiers claimed that they had first fired several warning shots in the air. But with stones raining down on them and with other demonstrators trying to cut the skins of their drums, the guardsmen opened fire on the crowds, aiming primarily at those in the stands, but also at others on the floor of the stadium. Soon a second column of guardsmen entered from the opposite side of the altar and charged to the north, catching many demonstrators in a pincers movement. Apparently some soldiers on horseback even pursued people outside the stadium into the surrounding fields and gardens, trampling some, cutting down others with their sabers. According to the elderly Nicolas-Celestin Guittard de Floriban, who was present and who was far from sympathetic with the aims of the protesters, the firing continued for at least thr
ee minutes. General panic broke out, and "in trying to save themselves, people knocked over and trampled on women and children." Many of the casualties, he reported, were among the bystanders, "people of every condition, attracted to the site by curiosity and by the beautiful Sunday weather."63
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
Declaration of Martial Law at the Champ de Mars, July zy, zy9z. Troops and guardsmen attack republican petitioners on the national altar, atop which a lone man holds copies of the petition toward heaven. Bailly, wearing his mayor's sash, is visible in the left foreground, near the red flag of martial law.
When the troops finally ceased their attack, many dozens of men and women, wounded or dying, lay inside the stadium or in the surrounding fields. No careful count was ever made. Bailly himself, in a report the next day, claimed that only twelve demonstrators and two soldiers had been killed. But the usually cautious Guittard was angered when he heard Bailly's statement: "His account is not right! It's outrageous! Everyone knows there were a great many deaths." A nearby resident who visited the hospital outside the stadium testified that he saw "the dead and the dying on every side." Various contemporary estimates ranged from a few dozen to over two thousand. But Francois Robert, who successfully fled and hid out for a time with Marie-Jeanne Roland and her husband, claimed that about fifty had been killed and far more had been wounded. This was the figure used at the time of Bailly's trial during the Terror, and it probably represents the historian's best estimate."
THE KING'S ATTEMPTED FLIGHT and the National Assembly's efforts to deal with its effects had led to a bloodbath on the outskirts of Paris. Even those Parisians-undoubtedly a large number-who sympathized with the Assembly's decision on the king were shocked by the shootings at the Champ de Mars. No one, wrote Guittard, would ever forget "this terrible atrocity."65
CHAPTER 6
Fear and Repression
in the Provinces
FOR MANY PARISIANS at the time of the Revolution and for most historians since, the massacre at the Champ de Mars was the single most dramatic event in the wake of the king's flight. Yet the city of Paris represented only one small portion of the total French nation in 1791-perhaps 700,000 people out of the 28 or 29 million inhabiting the tens of thousands of villages and towns across the kingdom. It is impossible to understand the full impact of Varennes without leaving the banks of the Seine and following reactions across the great expanse of French territory, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, from the Rhine River to the Pyrenees, from the Breton peninsula to the Alps.
In the provinces as in Paris, news of the departure and then capture of the king caused an extraordinary sensation. "France," wrote cure Lindet, "has been struck by an electric shock. It traveled from one end of the kingdom to the other with unbelievable rapidity."' Initially word went out from the capital by official messengers. As soon as General Lafayette learned that the monarch had disappeared, early on the morning of June 21, he commissioned several trusted subordinates to ride at full speed along different roads in an effort to find and halt the royal family. A few hours later the National Assembly followed much the same procedure, dispatching its own couriers carrying handwritten summaries of the deputies' first decrees toward the Austrian and German frontiers, the most likely directions of the flight.' But soon a whole array of unofficial messengers had also set out from the capital. Several deputies in the Assembly hired private horsemen to inform their constituencies as rapidly as possible, horsemen who spread the story haphazardly wherever they rode. A number of Parisian clubs and even neighborhood sections appear to have done the same. Thus, SaintQuentin in northern France first learned of events from the QuatreNations Section, perhaps at the instigation of the Cordeliers Club. Parisian newspapers were also quick to capitalize on the breaking story with editions dispatched rapidly into the provinces.'
Once the news had breached the walls of the capital, it rapidly resonated through local communications networks in much the same manner as the Great Fear two years earlier, with a variety of individuals on horseback, in carriages, and on foot fanning out across the nation. Incidental travelers and impromptu local messengers teamed up with official couriers. Townspeople and villagers who heard the story through unofficial sources, sometimes in garbled and fantastic versions, grew even more tense: "our anxiety increased," remembered the citizens of Bar-le-Duc, "as time dragged on and we waited for more news." In their apprehension, officials sent their own messengers back along the chain, seeking confirmation and further details. Soon there was a press of riders charging about in every direction, all exchanging information and misinformation as they passed one another on the roads.'
By midnight on Tuesday, June 21, knowledge of the king's disappearance had spread about a hundred miles from Paris in an amoeba-shaped area extending along the principal roads.' After a delay in passing the city gates-where overzealous guardsmen initially halted all movement-the messengers had ridden scarcely beyond Chalons-sur-Marne to the east and Cambrai to the north. But by the end of Wednesday, moving day and night at about five or six miles per hour, "like fire along a powder trail," knowledge of the royal flight had reached most of the northern frontier, as far as Metz and Nancy in the east, Rouen in the west, and Moulins in the south.' One messenger-perhaps commissioned by the Breton deputieshad even reached Nantes, at the mouth of the Loire River. By Thursday the event horizon had attained the northeastern frontier along the German and Swiss borders and most of the Atlantic coast from Dunkerque to La Rochelle-with the exception of the Breton peninsula. Riders pulled into Strasbourg, on the Rhine, at five in the morning, and into Lyon, the nation's second-largest city, by half past ten that night. By Friday at dawn, the great seaport of Bordeaux received reports, forwarding the startling news up the Garonne River to Toulouse, where a messenger arrived about eight that evening. On Saturday, at the end of the fifth day, couriers had reached Marseilles and the Mediterranean, racing along the coast as far as the port of Toulon to the east and Perpignan to the south, within twenty miles of the Spanish border. At about the same time, word finally arrived in Brest, at the tip of Brittany. But it would take another day or two to reach the most isolated mountain villages in the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Massif Central. The village of Aumont, accessible only by mountain track through the southeastern mountains of Gevaudan, still appeared uninformed at the beginning of the following week.'
Once Louis and his party had been identified and halted, another wave of news spread out from Varennes in much the same manner. The master barber Mangin, riding around the clock, had brought his account to the National Assembly in less than twentyfour hours. But elsewhere the second surge of news often moved slightly more slowly, perhaps because it first traveled primarily by the chain of local messengers, until official notification could be relayed from the capital on June 23. It reached Bordeaux only on the fifth day, Toulouse on the sixth, and Perpignan on the morning of the seventh day after the king's arrest. In the confusion of currents and crosscurrents, radiating from multiple sources, many towns learned of Varennes only a few hours after-and in some cases before-hearing of the king's disappearance from the Tuileries.'
It was one of those events with such a powerful emotional impact that people would remember all their lives where they had been and what they had been doing when they were first informed. Depending on the day and the time when the various messengers arrived, the news caught people in their fields, or at work in their shops, or marching in Corpus Christi processions, or asleep at home, awakened by church bells in the middle of the night. In a number of towns, citizens were in the midst of primary assemblies, convoked to elect a new legislature, when "the deplorable event of the king's disappearance threw everyone into turmoil."9 Almost everywhere, as citizens recounted in moving letters to the National Assembly, the unexpected news provoked intense grief, consternation, and stunned incredulity. In the southern town of Auch, "emotions have reached their peak"; in Beauvais, north of Paris, "everyone is
filled with intense sorrow over this frightful event which has afflicted the nation"; in Chateauroux, in central France, "people sense an abyss of evil and suffer the torments of an agonizing situation." The Jacobins of Montmorillon must have described the feelings of a great many others when they recalled their hopes, on the eve of Varennes, that the Revolution had at last come to an end, that threats of counterrevolution had disappeared, that they might now return to normal lives: "But the disappearance of the king has crushed all our hopes, and has warned us not to count on such a return.""
The Meaning of Fraternity
Confronting this unprecedented emergency throughout the country were the officials of the newly transformed regional government. The Revolution had brought a dramatic reorganization and democratization of the administrative system, with the thirty-odd intendants, the king's appointed governors under the Old Regime, replaced by thousands of elected officials. It was they who staffed the new bureaucratic system into which France was now divided: the 83 departments, the Soo districts, and the 40,000 municipalities large and small. With little or no experience in such positions, the officials had been undergoing massive on-the-job training over the previous year. At times they had struggled with the sheer number of new laws and directives passed down to them by the National Assembly on almost every aspect of economic, fiscal, religious, and agrarian life. Yet for the most part-especially at the department and district levels and in the larger towns-the new administrators were drawn from the educated professional and merchant elites. They had closely followed and embraced the Revolution from its beginning, and they were ready, confident, and resolutely determined to perform their duties as best they could.
When the King Took Flight Page 16
