Although the investigations were officially directed by the municipal courts and the Parisian police, they were supervised by the Assembly's Committees on Research and Reports. Within days after the Champ de Mars, more than two hundred people had been jailed for throwing stones or shouting nasty comments against the national guards or for various other "crimes." The government also went after the republican leadership, the principal speakers of the fraternal societies, and the editors of several radical newspaperspeople such as Marat, Danton, Desmoulins, Keralio, and Robert.' And like many provincial officials faced with the crisis of the king's flight, the National Assembly and the Parisian leaders had no qualms about running roughshod over laws only recently enacted. They ordered guardsmen and police to close publishing houses and political clubs, imposing limited press censorship for the first time since the fall of the absolute monarchy. They also reactivated a system of secret police informants, largely abandoned since the Old Regime. Men were sent to eavesdrop on private conversations in taverns or on street corners, listening for possible attacks against the government. Using the pretense of a citywide census, they dispatched municipal agents to apartments throughout Paris, looking for suspicious individuals or documents. The jailings and indictments continued well into August. Many complained of being held for weeks in solitary confinement without seeing a judge, without even being told the reason for their arrest. Cochon de l'Apparent, one of the directors of the investigating committees, was frank about the logic of such actions. "In extraordinary moments of crisis," he argued-echoing the language of Charles Lameth-"when the survival of the state is at stake, illegal arrests are justifiable."3
Repression seemed all the more warranted in that widespread secret conspiracies were now thought to have been organized against the Revolution. It was simply impossible, or so the moderates tried to convince themselves, that the petitioners of the Champ de Mars had acted on their own against the decrees of the sovereign National Assembly. They must have been corrupted or misled by outsiders. Although deputies had made similar accusations since the beginning of the Revolution, most had long resisted a conspiratorial explanation of events. In late 1790 the deputy Gaultier had reflected on recent predictions of insurrections that had never in fact materialized: "I have never really placed any credence in them," he wrote, "and you have seen that such beliefs were totally unfounded. Nothing can more surely arouse fears among the common people than false announcements [of conspiracies]." But now almost everyone seemed to slip into a paranoid mode. Not only in their speeches but in letters home to friends and constituents, they spoke of insidious counterrevolutionary plots and money distributed by foreign powers: "Paris has been influenced by a horde of paid foreign agents"; "Prussian and English gold has been widely circulated in the capital to corrupt the less Enlightened segment of the common people." Some moderates even convinced themselves that their more radical opponents in the Assembly-Robespierre, Petion, and others-were in the pay of such agents.'
Although spies were undoubtedly present in Paris, no reliable evidence has been found for the summer of I791 linking foreign emissaries to Republican agitation. Inevitably, a whole segment of the Parisian population fiercely opposed both the actions and the interpretations of the National Assembly. Marie-Jeanne Roland and her husband, who secretly sheltered Keralio and Robert from the police, were incensed and frustrated by the turn of events. Every technique possible, she wrote, had been mobilized in a general "system of persecution against good patriots" to blacken their reputations, including "fallacious tracts, agents provocateurs, every kind of prejudice, and fabricated testimony." The American William Short was also profoundly shocked: "the true principles of liberty," he wrote to Jefferson, "are avowedly violated every day under the long known pretext of public good." "No true act of habeas corpus existing ... there is difficulty in extracting an innocent person from prison."' Many of the republicans became convinced, in turn, that their opponents in the Assembly were controlled by aristocrats or foreign governments.
Entire neighborhoods in Paris were now polarized by the affair, divided between those who sympathized with the Champ de Mars demonstrators and those who supported the repression. In SaintMarcel, for example, individuals who served in national guard units known to have fired on the July 17 petitioners were spat upon or attacked, and threats were made against their houses. The two principal leaders of Paris, Mayor Bailly and General Lafayette, were praised by large segments of the citizenry. But for others "they have become the object of an extremely violent hatred."6 The confrontation was dramatically illustrated by the terrible rift dividing the Paris Jacobin Club. In the midst of the crisis nearly all the deputies sitting in the club had walked out of the meeting, claiming that the society was now under the thumb of unruly outsiders who wanted to depose the king. Only a handful of representatives, including Petion and Robespierre, initially remained with the faithful. Little by little, in the course of the summer about sixty radicals from the Assembly returned to the society. But a larger group of dissidents, led primarily by Barnave and the Lameth brothers, created a rival club in the abandoned Feuillant convent just across the street from the Jacobins. They rejected all efforts to arrange a reconciliation. For the next several months the two clubs, Jacobins and Feuillants, faced off in increasingly bitter competition, vying for power and influence, not only in Paris but across the nation. Many of the electoral assemblies for the new legislature, unfolding during the summer in towns throughout the realm, were marked by rivalries between local supporters of the Jacobins or Feuillants.'
The bright days of the early Revolution, when patriots felt confident that a new age of happiness and national unity was within their grasp, now seemed only a distant memory. In the wake of the king's flight and the ensuing republican movement, Paris was swept by a climate of suspicion and hatred. Men and women who had once thought they shared common goals now accused each other of treacherous links with counterrevolutionaries or foreign powers. Members of the two rival clubs were afraid to be seen in public with those of the opposing faction, even with individuals who had once been close friends. Rabaut Saint-Etienne, a Protestant pastor from southern France and a key member of the Constitutional Committee, was overwhelmed with frustration to see himself accused of complicity with the king-or with the English or with the Austrians. Like many of his colleagues, he felt besieged and attacked by both the right and the left: by "factional" radicals on the one side and "hypocritical friends of Louis XVI and false zealots of religion" on the other-as Gaultier put it. Theodore Vernier felt as though "a sword is now suspended over our heads." Under such conditions, the deputies' exhaustion and lassitude grew worse than ever. "No one could even describe our impatience to be finished." "The great majority of the deputies," lamented Bouchette to a friend in Flanders, "think only of the moment they can leave. Our life here is wretched. If it doesn't finish soon, we will no longer be able to hold up."8
King Again
Sensing a growing public impatience with the length of time they had spent drafting a constitution-now well over two years-the deputies pressed forward to finish their work as soon as possible. The powerful Constitutional Committee and an associated Committee on Revisions had been at work for months, sorting through the great mass of decrees passed haphazardly since the beginning of the Revolution, attempting to decide which measures were truly "constitutional" and which were merely "legislation." Yet the whole process was prolonged for several weeks by the terrible factional feuds within the Assembly. The Feuillant group, which dominated the two committees, had come to believe that the danger from the republicans was far greater than any potential threat from the monarchy. Since late June, Barnave, Duport, and the Lameth brothers had reinitiated secret negotiations with the king. During a moment alone with the queen, while he accompanied the royal family on their return from Varennes, Barnave had proposed a deal. He and his friends promised to do everything in their power to preserve the monarchy and to strengthen the king's authority. In return, they
asked only that Louis accept the constitution and obtain recognition of the new French government from the Austrian empire.
But as the Feuillants tried to push through changes in the constitution, reinforcing the power of the king and limiting democracy, they were strongly opposed at every step by Petion and Robespierre and the Jacobin group. And the Jacobins now found unexpected allies. A whole segment of the unaligned center of the Assembly began to suspect the motives of Barnave and his friends. Thibaudeau, the moderate judge from Poitou, was convinced that the Feuillant leaders wanted only to make themselves ministers under the new government: "We have grown suspicious of these men who once passed as such firm patriots but whom we now know to be ambitious intriguers." Others were stunned that individuals who had previously seemed so strongly democratic had abruptly reversed their position." In the end, the two factions and their allies battled to a draw, and only a small number of changes were made to the constitution as originally voted.
At last, on September 3, utterly exhausted by their struggles, the representatives reached a final agreement, and the constitution was declared complete. About nine that evening a delegation of more than two hundred deputies, marching by torchlight and accompanied by national guardsmen on foot and on horseback, delivered the document to the king at the Tuileries palace. Louis met them in his great council hall with his ministers beside him and announced that he was ready to examine the constitution. Everyone realized that if Louis rejected it, the Assembly would have to remove him from the throne and deal with all the problems of a regency in the name of the young dauphin, the designated successor. "Now we will learn," wrote Bouchette, "if the king will be the friend or the enemy of the nation. Everything hangs on his decision.""
As the deputies waited and as tensions continued to build, Louis carefully read the text and considered his options. He was well aware that more than two hundred noble and clerical deputies, deputies who had boycotted all debates in the Assembly since late June, had already rejected the document. But finally, on September 13, he announced that he would indeed accept the constitution. The next day he appeared before the Assembly to affix his signature and pronounce his oath of adherence. He also issued a statement explaining his position, a statement actually written by one of his ministers but signed by Louis as though it represented his own words. In it he attempted once again to explain the flight to Varennes. Entirely ignoring his declaration of June 21-which he had written himself-he claimed that he had only wanted to escape from the factions and violence of Paris: "I desired to isolate myself," he said, "from all the conflicting parties and determine which position truly represented the will of the nation." He admitted that he was still not convinced that the new government would have "all the energy necessary to control and unify the diverse parts of so vast a nation as France." Nevertheless, he announced his willingness to give it a try: "I consider that experience alone will judge whether it can work." And he took an oath to do everything in his power to enforce the constitution: "I will accept it," he promised, "and I will ensure that it is executed.""
At the same time-whether through his own initiative or through the urgings of his ministers-the king proposed a general amnesty for all those convicted or indicted for actions related to the Revolution. "To extinguish the hatreds, to ease all the troubles invariably created by a revolution of this kind, let us agree to forget the past." By acclamation, the Assembly immediately approved the king's proposal. And throughout the country, jail doors were opened to political prisoners of every stripe, both those awaiting trial and those already convicted. Republican radicals, counterrevolutionary nobles, refractory priests, as well as those implicated in the king's flight-all were immediately granted their freedom. For the first time in almost three months, the duke de Choiseul, Goguelat, and Damas, key players in the "sublime conspiracy" to rescue the king, were allowed to leave their prison cells." Soon thereafter all three departed to join the emigrant armies across the Rhine.
Louis, too, was granted freedom of action, to take up again his functions as "chief executive" of the constitutional monarchy. For many weeks the royal couple had been prisoners in their palace. Guarded day and night, strictly limited in the number of people they were permitted to meet, they were forbidden even to close the doors of their chambers except to dress. Foreign ambassadors had been allowed no contact with the king, but only with the minister of foreign affairs. Yet now the monarch was given leave to resume a "normal" life and to move freely within the capital. He was present at several of the festivities in the weeklong celebration of the com pletion of the constitution-band concerts, dances, fireworks and nighttime illuminations. As he traveled about the city, according to some reports, he was met with cheers and the cry he so loved of "Long live the king." About the same time, the Assembly voted to reinsert the word king into the formal oath of allegiance that all officials and military officers were required to pronounce.' At the end of September, with the "executive" in place again, the National Constituent Assembly formally retired. After two years and three months of existence, it handed over its power to an entirely new group of deputies, the recently elected members of the Legislative Assembly. In theory at least, the Revolution was over. In theory at least, the king's flight had been forgiven and forgotten.
But could it really be forgotten? Louis had now solemnly sworn to protect the constitution, yet only a few weeks earlier he had unilaterally annulled a previous oath to the same constitution. What reason was there to think that he would not repeat the maneuver? Like French men and women everywhere, the representatives agonized over this question. Many now believed, hoped to believe, that the king had at last changed his ways and had sincerely accepted to abide by the rules of the game. According to the Breton deputy Legendre, the Assembly "is now persuaded that the king, enlightened by the school of hard experience, will freely accept and cherish the constitution." His colleague Vernier agreed: "After much reflection, we continue to think that the king is quite sincere." But not all deputies shared this optimistic view. Thibaudeau was haunted by the evil influence of the aristocrats who again seemed to surround the monarch: "`Go ahead and accept the constitution,' they have told him. `And then, when times have changed, you can say that you were forced to do so and had no choice."' Faulcon, too, brooded that the monarch "may have taken yet another false oath, in swearing a commitment he has no intention of keeping." The sardonic abbe Lindet arrived at much the same conclusion: "The king has sworn to uphold the constitution. He will keep his oath only insofar as it is convenient."" The deputies could easily have appreciated a caricature of the king widely circulating in the weeks that followed. Louis was represented Janus-like, with two heads. One head, looking approvingly toward a deputy, proclaimed: "I will uphold the constitution." The other, contemplating an emigre priest, announced: "I will destroy the constitution."
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
The Janus King. At one and the same time the king promises to uphold the constitution and-with his crown slipping off-to destroy the constitution.
Such suspicions were only too well founded. Despite all their as surances to the contrary, both the king and the queen were as duplicitous after their attempted flight as they had been before. They rapidly resumed a secret correspondence with the crowned heads of Europe, disavowing in private all their public statements of support for the constitution. Marie-Antoinette's actions in this regard were particularly noteworthy. Whether the queen ever took seriously her discussions with Barnave during the return from Varennes is difficult to say. Over the following weeks, she continued her clandestine meetings with the young deputy from Grenoble. Using all the wiles of the practiced courtier, she led him along with fine affirmations of her frankness and honesty and her deep appreciation of his sympathy for her cause. But again and again she smuggled out letters written in code-to Fersen or the Austrian ambassador or her older brother the emperor-letters in which she repudiated everything she had said to Barnave. She raged against t
he "insults" committed toward the royal family after the attempted flight, denouncing the deputies as "brutes," "rogues," and "madmen." She condemned the whole constitution as "totally impractical and absurd.""
And no less than the queen, the king continued to pursue a double game. Only a few weeks after his abortive flight, Louis managed to slip out a note written in his own hand to the Austrian emperor. He regretted, he said, that he had been unable to "recover his liberty" on June 21 and to "join with those French who truly desire the best interests of their country." He continued to feel himself a prisoner with no control over his fate, and he wanted his brother-in-law to know this fact. And for the first time, he urged the emperor to "come to the aid of the king and the kingdom of France."" The strong implication was that he hoped for military intervention. By September, plagued perhaps with the old vacillation in decisionmaking, he may have modified his position somewhat. In a secret letter to his two brothers in exile, he argued that the best policy was to wait and allow the Revolutionary government to collapse from its own absurdities. He exhorted the two princes not to foment a war, fearing the consequences for the country that such an act might involve. But he also announced his conviction that the very idea of the "Rights of Man" was "utterly insane." Even though some commoners now "hope to rise above the station where nature has placed them," he still believed that the link between himself and the nobility was "the oldest and most beautiful jewel in my crown.""
When the King Took Flight Page 22
