When the King Took Flight

by Timothy Tackett

  In some cases, attacks on individual nobles seem to have arisen from antagonisms long predating the Revolution. In the wake of Varennes, guardsmen from several villages near Reims converged on the chateau of the marquis d'Ambly, deputy to the National Assembly. Finding few arms, they compelled the marquis' wife to give them money to purchase guns and then marched off with the nobleman's terrified young grandson, whom they claimed to have adopted as their "mascot." In this case the guardsmen seem to have picked on d'Ambly in part because of his reputation as a reactionary in the Assembly, but also because of a grudge over feudal rights that had pitted villagers against their lord for some twenty-five years.60 Far more violent was the attack on Guillin du Montet, the lord of Poleymieux, in the countryside near Lyon. Guillin was already hated before 1791 for his brutal treatment of the peasants and his general refusal to accept the Revolution. Soon after the Varennes crisis broke, inhabitants arrived a hundred strong to seize the large store of weapons that Guillin kept in his chateau. When he resisted, a gun battle broke out, ending only after the chateau had been stormed and Guillin had been killed, his body torn to pieces and thrown into the burning castle." The events in Poleymieux were soon widely publicized, to the horror of people throughout France. Yet extreme violence of this kind was rare during the crisis. Only four individuals, all nobles, are known to have been killed in the wake of the king's flight, and at least three of these were already detested for a variety of long-standing grievances.62

  In most instances, the repression practiced by local leaders and guardsmen was pursued on a case-by-case basis, targeting specific "suspect" individuals. But in certain instances the authorities, fearful of real plots or succumbing to popular pressures, gave orders to search or arrest without trial whole categories of persons. Here the status of suspect arose not from any act that a particular man or woman was thought to have committed, but from the fact of belonging to a specific social or political group. Such reasoning was probably widespread among elements of the common people. In Varennes, at the height of the invasion panic, a crowd of peasants and guardsmen fell upon one of the cavalry commanders who had been attempting to cooperate with the patriots. "He's an officer! He's a noble! He must be a traitor!" they shouted, with a lapidary logic, reducing guilt to the fact of wearing an officer's uniform.63

  More significant were the actions of public officials who classified suspects in this manner. The most obvious targets for such collective indictments were the clergymen who had refused the oath of allegiance. In those regions struggling with large numbers of refractories, local patriots were immensely impatient with the National Assembly's decrees on "freedom of religion" and toleration for refractories who stayed out of trouble. Was not the very refusal to take an oath an affront to the constitution and a threat to the nation? Liberals might push "freedom of opinion"-as citizens of one small town argued-but "dear God, what kind of opinion is fanaticism, which can only offer a vision of carnage, scorched villages, and a devastated kingdom!" In some areas the repression of refractories was sweeping indeed, unlike anything previously pursued in the Revolution. As soon as they heard news of the king's flight, officials in the city of Nantes ordered the immediate deportation of all refractories in the region and the arrest of any priest suspected of counterrevolutionary activities. Some district leaders in Normandy and Brittany did much the same, arguing that such clergymen were threatening a return to the Wars of Religion and that all refractories, "without exception, are enemies of the state."64 Within a short time similar measures were taken, illegally arresting or deporting hundreds of nonjuring priests, in a total of at least nine departments throughout the country.65

  A second target of blanket repression was the nobility. In the departments of Cher and Indre, in the center of the kingdom, refractories were relatively rare and not generally perceived as a danger, but the news of Varennes raised fears that aristocrats in the region were organizing counterrevolutionary aggression. Several districts sent out guardsmen systematically to disarm every chateau. The town of Bourges went even further, ordering all resident nobles to remain in town and guarding the city gates to ensure that none slipped out, so as "to prevent joint action by all those who openly profess principles contrary to the general will." For the most part such policies were pursued peacefully, with guardsmen specifically instructed to act "in a reasonable and polite manner, without violence.""

  Nowhere, however, was the collective repression of nobles more violent than in the province of Brittany. Here officials found them selves plagued not only with one of the highest proportions of refractory clergymen in the country, but with long-standing tensions between nobles and commoners that had been exacerbated by provincial politics on the eve of the Revolution. Following the king's flight, and encouraged by local administrators, Breton national guardsmen from many towns launched a veritable terror in the countryside, harassing suspect nobles and clergy, searching for arms, and occasionally destroying chateaus. In one department authorities gave free rein to pursue all members of the two suspect groups: "Our enemies," they wrote, "are making a final push. Hatred and fanaticism will be stirring up trouble as never before, and there is no limit to the measures we should take in order to thwart their efforts." Following these orders, guardsmen began breaking into every manor house to "remove from the enemies of the constitution the means they might use to overthrow the state." Leaders in a neighboring department went even further and ordered the seizure of the property of all nobles who had already emigrated. Since the National Assembly's June 21 decree had forbidden the carrying of money or precious metals across frontiers, it seemed justifiable to impound the profits of absentee nobles, profits that might otherwise be sent abroad in support of counterrevolutionary schemes against the nation.67

  With administrators encouraging repression and tensions raised to explosive levels by the invasion panic, Brittany would be the scene of several especially violent incidents. In the region east of Rennes, the news of Varennes sent some three to four thousand citizen militiamen into the villages looking for refractories. Frustrated at not finding a particular nobleman who had supported the dissident clergy, the guardsmen burned down his castle, and soon several other chateaus in the area went up in flames. With word of the king's flight, another detachment of a hundred guardsmen was dispatched to the chateau of Le Preclos near Vannes, where a group of suspicious nobles were said to have gathered. Arriving at four in the morning and awakening the residents with drums and musket fire, the patriot militia carried away eighteen men in carts, their hands tied behind their backs, to be interred in a local citadel as "prisoners of war." Leaders in La Roche-Derrien, near Brittany's northern coast, had also set out to disarm all the "former privileged" in their region. Apparently no one resisted until guardsmen arrived at the chateau of Tralong, where the irascible count du Roumain greeted them with shots from a seventeenth-century blunderbuss and a "Breton Billy," an antiquated device that fired stones. After several citizens had been wounded and another unit of guardsmen had been called in, the patriots stormed the castle, killing du Roumain in the process."

  As the crisis of June and July abated and as the central government received more reports from the provinces, the National Assembly began criticizing the more flagrant examples of collective repression. Department officials in Quimper, perhaps under pressure from Paris, took the district of Landerneau to task for its massive arrests of nobles and refractories, people "whose only crime was to have been suspected of anticonstitutional opinions, but who had never done anything to disrupt public order." Not only were such activities against the law and the rights of man; they could further inflame the situation: "To incite trouble in this way, to frighten individuals and to threaten their property, is all the more reprehensible in that it compromises liberty and the principles of the constitution." But the district of Landerneau forcefully defended its actions. The circumstances of the crisis and the fundamental goal of saving the Revolution justified all the measures they had taken. "Blood would soon
have been spilled," they declared. "We had only one choice: to seize our enemies before they could commit crime and murder." Refractories and nobles were simply too dangerous to be trusted, even those-perhaps especially those-who hid behind "the hypocritical mask of patriotism." In the end, Landerneau officials remained unrepentant: "We have served both humanity and the constitution, in separating out those who would cause trouble and disorder.... We strongly denounce them and we will not cease pursuing them until the sacred fire, which we hold in our breast, has purified every corner of the French nation."69

  The debate between Landerneau and Quimper was emblematic of the quandaries encountered by French people everywhere in the face of the crisis of the king's flight. Even in the twentieth century, in societies where liberal democratic culture is deeply rooted, periods of war and the threat of terrorism have created legal dilemmas over demands for "preventive repression." For men and women who had lived most of their lives under authoritarian rule and who were only just learning the meaning of equal justice and civil rights, the events of June 1791 posed problems that were particularly perplexing. Revolutionaries found themselves forced to negotiate a delicate balance between principle and expediency, between the rule of law and the needs of "public safety," between individual liberty and community defense, between preserving the rights of man and preserving the state. In their groping efforts to confront these dilemmas, many citizens in the provinces had wandered into the byways of repressive actions-guilt by association, guilt by unproved suspicion, lengthy imprisonment without due process-that were clear harbingers of the tactics of the Terror.

  CHAPTER 7

  To Judge a King

  THROUGHOUT THE THREE WEEKS following the king's flight and return, the citizens of Paris had continually referred to opinion in the provinces. For the Cordeliers Club, a nationwide referendum was essential before any decision could be made on the fate of the king, and the members were hopeful that the majority of the country would opt for a republic. Moderates, on the other hand, were convinced that the French, both inside and outside the capital, overwhelmingly backed the monarchy. In the meantime, the National Assembly had put off its decision on the question, in part to wait for reactions from the hinterlands, reactions that were aggressively solicited by the deputies in letters addressed to their constituencies.' In short, everyone realized that Paris was not France and that the views on the king of the great majority of citizens were still unknown. Everyone, in a sense, was waiting for the French to speak.

  And eventually the French would speak. Beneath all the sound and fury of the nationwide mobilization-the marshaling of the national guard, the shoring up of border defenses, the preventive repression-people everywhere had begun to ponder the fate of the one individual whose actions had launched the whole episode. How were they to explain Louis' sudden disappearance? What were the implications for the new constitution that the National Assembly was struggling to complete? What was the place, was there a place for a monarch-this or any monarch-in the brave new world that the Revolutionaries hoped to construct?

  A Citifen King

  Such questions were particularly wrenching and unsettling in that people throughout the country, no less than in Paris, had long linked themselves to their king through exceptionally strong bonds of emotion and tradition. Of course, individual kings had never been free of reproach, and the present monarch's two predecessors, Louis XIV and Louis XV, had often been the subject of caustic criticisms from both intellectuals and the popular classes. Yet the myth of the monarchy-as opposed to the reputation of individual monarchs-persisted with extraordinary vigor. It was built on a whole array of classical and historical traditions and of secular legends, as well as on the images of grandeur cultivated by seventeenthand eighteenth-century monarchs through their military prowess and the splendor of their palaces and court life. French children and adults alike were continually exposed to a folklore of popular stories in which the existence of a monarchy and the ideal of the good king-as opposed to the bad king or the weak king poorly advised-remained as undoubted assumptions. Many among the lower classes maintained to the end of the Old Regime their belief in the "king's touch," his magical powers to cure the common skin disease scrofula. And the virtues of the first Bourbon monarch, Henry IV-his strength, his good sense, his love for his peoplewere still mentioned at the beginning of the Revolution when people described the ideal sovereign. Indeed, from 1788 to 1791 Louis XVI was himself commonly compared to "good king Henry."2

  To be sure, the royal image had evolved somewhat in the decades before 1789. Over the centuries all kinds of descriptive phrases had been used to extol the king's grandeur: the king as great warrior, as chief magistrate, as highest feudal lord. But by the eve of the Revolution the portrayal of the monarch as "father of the people"-a designation mentioned at least since the sixteenth century-had in creasingly come to predominate. There can be no doubt that the image was consciously encouraged by Louis XVI himself. He had been enormously proud of his own paternal success, a success achieved only after a long period of sexual failure and psychological turmoil, and he took great personal interest in the upbringing of his children. He had continually drawn on the paternal metaphor in his statements to the National Assembly. He had done much the same in Varennes, when he revealed his identity to his "faithful children" in Monsieur Sauce's apartment. Of course, the figure of the father, like the image of the king, had complex and sometimes ambiguous meanings. It could imply the paterfamilias, with his near-absolute authority in law and custom over wife and children, a figure patterned to some extent on the religious conception of an all-powerful God the Father. But as the image came to be embraced in the late eighteenth century by large elements of the educated population, the paternal king was perhaps linked above all to the literary fashion of the family melodrama. In plays and novels of the period there was endless praise for the "good father," a father who was not authoritarian but conciliatory, even egalitarian with his wife and children, treating all members of his family almost as friends and companions.'

  There can be no mistaking the feelings of respect shown for Louis XVI in the grievance lists of 1789, the thousands of formal statements drawn up by the French during the elections to the Estates General. Almost everywhere people continued to address the king with the traditional epithets of honor and consideration"Sire" or "His Majesty"-coupled with formal phrases of supplication. "His Majesty is most humbly beseeched" to grant such-andsuch a request, as the expression commonly went. More than half of the grievance lists opened with statements of enthusiastic praise for the reigning monarch, and well over a third made references to his paternal virtues. Nearly as many stressed his goodness, and a fourth commented on his justice-though none made mention of his military prowess. Almost one in five specifically used the word sacred in reference to the king. Although this word was also occa sionally used in speaking of abstract concepts, such as the "sacred right of property" or the "sacred constitution," in no other instance was it utilized to describe a specific individual.' It was the cultural strength of the royal mystique-coupled with gratitude for Louis' actions in summoning the Estates General-that rendered most patriots so tolerant of and forgiving toward the king during the first two years of the Revolution.

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

  "How Precious Is This Image to All Good Frenchmen!" Rural people of all ages kneel before the portrait of Louis XVI in 1789.

  We have seen that from October i789-if not earlier-Louis had self-consciously followed a policy of deceit. Even while he publicly accepted the laws sent to him by the National Assembly, he se cretly announced to the king of Spain that he was signing them under duress. But the French in general knew nothing of this. The moderate patriots, determined to strengthen the constitutional monarchy, had done all in their power to promote Louis' image through carefully orchestrated speeches and appearances that they persuaded the king to make.' And if we are to judge by the letters flooding into the Nati
onal Assembly, Louis' popularity may even have increased during the first two years of the Revolution. Soon after the king's speech to the deputies in February 1790, the small western town of Ernee wrote of "this happy and blessed day, forever memorable, when the best of kings, the restorer of French liberty, the gentle father of the nation, honored our Assembly with his presence and gave his approval to all its labors." The leaders of Troyes were scarcely less enthusiastic in describing their filial links to the king: "Children of a common father, listen to the king's words and unite behind him as he desires. The paternal heart of His Majesty asks for this proof of our love."6

  There could be no doubt that the Revolution had substantially diminished the authority of the king. The constitution had transformed his status from that of absolute monarch to that of chief executive, with institutional powers not unlike those of the American presidency only just created across the Atlantic. Yet for most citizens the special, semireligious aura of the monarch persisted. They remained convinced that the king supported the Revolution and that ultimately the will of the monarch and the will of the nation would always correspond. The smattering of critical remarks from Jacobin clubs in the first half of I791-some urging the king to ban refractory clergymen from his court-were overwhelmed by a chorus of affection and respect. The small town of Coudray, not far from Paris, expressed its indignation over the violent acts committed in the royal palace on February 28 and the supposed insults to "the sacred person of our good king."' When Louis came down with his sore throat in March of that year, hundreds of municipal councils and Jacobin clubs held solemn masses for his recovery, and virtually every town in France organized thanksgiving celebrations upon learning of his return to good health. "The God who oversees the destinies of empires did not wish to deprive us of our strongest supporter, the anchor of our happiness. Our churches ring out with prayers of thanksgiving" (Laval, in western France); "as the adoptive children of the Great Henry, we will forever maintain our attachment to this Bourbon prince, so worthy of his name and so precious to France" (Belley, in eastern France); "may God save the idol of the nation" (Bourges, in central France). A few weeks later, the small town of Chateaurenard in Provence unveiled a portrait of the king on the wall of the city hall, and the recently elected mayor gave a dedication speech. The French monarch, he argued, had created an entirely new relationship to his people, so that Louis seemed hardly even to belong in the same category as other monarchs: "Kings seek to be powerful through the use of terror, but Louis XVI wants only that confidence which his virtues inspire; kings command respect and obedience, Louis XVI asks only for the love of the French; kings wish to be the masters of their people, Louis XVI wants only to be his nation's father; kings work to enchain their subject's freedom, Louis XVI is the restorer of ours. 0 friend of mankind! 0 citizen king!"'