In answer to these demonstrations, and under the influence of the queen, who opposed his attempts to reform the nation’s finances, Louis XVI dismissed his popular chief minister Joseph Necker. On 12 July, suspecting that the king was about to order troops into Paris to arrest his opponents, the young lawyer Camille Desmoulins, pistol in hand, leapt on to a table outside the Cafe Foy, in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, with the cry: ‘To arms! To arms! There’s not a moment to lose, I’ve just come from Versailles. Necker has just been dismissed. This will be another Feast of St Bartholomew [the Massacre of the Huguenots by Catholics in Paris in 1572], comrades. This evening the Swiss and German guards will be marching along the Champs de Mars to massacre us. Come on, this is a call to arms.’
Seizing a cluster of leaves from a chestnut tree, he urged his comrades to adopt this cockade as a symbol of liberty, soon to be replaced by the red and blue colours which represented both the city of Paris and the House of Orléans. When the colour white was added to the cockade it was transformed into the famous tricolore. The spontaneous action of Desmoulins showed how ordinary people rather than leading politicians could influence key events, something that was to assume greater importance as the Ancien Régime collapsed in the forthcoming months.
On 14 July, the Bastille prison was captured by the Parisian mob and the governor and his Swiss guards brutally murdered. Many suspected Orléans of involvement, and the behaviour of his supporters in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, where the event was celebrated in a semi-hysterical orgy of obscenity and drunkenness, seemed to bear out their fears. Philippe, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen, and Grace Elliott, one of his mistresses, was later to assert that he was on a fishing excursion while these momentous events were taking place. Dr Edward Rigby, an ardent English Whig who supported the aims of the French reformers, had taken rooms in the Palais-Royal. On 14 July he and his companions were swept along with the crowd, and warmly embraced as freemen and brothers when they were recognized as Englishmen. His feelings of delight turned to disgust, however, when a mob appeared, carrying the bloody heads of two murdered Swiss guards on pikes. They were impaled on spikes in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, a highly provocative gesture.
On 5 October the situation finally exploded. A large crowd, dominated by angry women demanding bread, and inflamed by the fiery oratory of Danton, Marat and Desmoulins, all supporters of Orléans, marched from Paris past the Palais-Royal where the duke, attired in a grey riding coat, watched them from the balcony, heading for Versailles. On arrival, the mood of the mob soured, and, after breaking into the royal apartments, the lives of the royal family were only saved by the prompt action of Lafayette, commander of the National Guard, whose status as a popular hero, celebrated for his passion for liberty and his unimpeachable honesty, gave him the stature to defy the mob.
Lafayette was, however, unable to prevent the royal family from being taken back in captivity to Paris by the triumphant mob, where they were imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace. It is still unclear exactly what role Philippe played in the day’s events, and many people thought he was implicated in a plot to overthrow the royal family. When a report was published the following year, exonerating Orléans from any involvement in the events of the preceding October, Marie Antoinette is reputed to have said to her husband: ‘If you really want to see who is the real King of the French, just take a drive to the Palais-Royal.’
Orléans’s supporters had worked tirelessly to promote him as a potential regent, but the duke, at this critical juncture, chose to spend the period between October 1789 and July 1790 in England, ostensibly on a diplomatic mission. He was persuaded by his opponent Lafayette, who regarded him as a disloyal trouble-maker, that his removal would scotch persistent rumours that he wanted to become regent or even seize the crown for himself. When the king also appealed to his cousin to leave France, Philippe felt unable to refuse. For his supporters, leaving France at this critical juncture was tantamount to cowardice. Mirabeau commented derisively: ‘The coward! He has the appetite for crime, but not the courage to execute it.’ Talleyrand was even more scathing. ‘He is the slop-pail’, he declared, ‘into which is thrown all the filth of the Revolution.’
In fact, Philippe had a more pressing reason to go to England, to contact friends who would help him to solve his disastrous financial position. Despite Orléans’s popularity, he had many opponents in the National Assembly, which had now moved from Versailles to Paris, and they passed a vote in August to exclude the two minor branches of the royal family, the Bourbon kings of Spain and the House of Orléans, from the royal succession. More importantly, the Assembly ordered the sale of all land belonging to the Duke of Orléans and to Louis XVI’s two brothers, the Counts of Provence and Artois, the future Louis XVIII and Charles X (despite Philippe’s left-wing credentials, it was indicative of the growing hostility to the aristocracy as a whole that he should have been bracketed with two of his main opponents). Since the total rents from all his properties, agricultural land and forests, covering the equivalent of three French departments, amounted to the vast sum of just over 5 million livres, far more than that of the king’s brothers, this was a devastating financial blow.
Philippe had visited England several times in the 1780s, he was a firm anglophile, owned a house in London and numbered the Prince Regent among his close English friends (like the prince he was a member of Brooks’s Club, a centre for francophile Whigs). He was a great admirer of the security of the country’s political system and had deposited large sums of money in English banks. Philippe also knew that if he was to raise substantial sums of money to pay his debts, rich English aristocrats were the most likely buyers of his magnificent art collection. Two years earlier, in 1787, he had been compelled to raise money by selling his priceless collection of precious stones, cameos and medallions to the acquisitive Catherine the Great of Russia. They were soon on display in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, including a wonderful agate-onyx of Nero’s mother Agrippina, which bore a remarkable likeness to the Russian empress.
On his return to Paris in July 1790 Philippe instructed his agent Nathaniel Parker Forth, an old friend with whom he shared a passion for horse racing, to contact James Christie, head of the reputable firm of auctioneers in England, regarding the sale of his paintings. During the autumn, after considerable negotiations, a contract was drawn up stating that Christie would offer a deposit of 100,000 guineas for the paintings. However, although the well-connected auctioneer persuaded the Prince of Wales to put up £7,500, and his brothers the Dukes of York and Clarence £5,000 each, he found great difficulty in attracting further backers. This may have been due to the perception that the lion’s share would go to the royal princes. In the event Christie’s bid was unsuccessful. Shortly after negotiations broke down the duke was declared bankrupt. He now had little alternative but to sell.
A second Englishman, Thomas Moore Slade, formed another consortium. The lure of acquiring the famous Orléans Collection was so great that he was prepared to risk visiting Paris in the middle of a Revolution. On 8 June 1791 Slade set off for Paris with the backing of Lord Kinnaird and Messrs Morland and Hammersley (the three men were partners in the banking firm Ransom, Morland and Hammersley in Pall Mall), carrying letters of credit for £50,000. Slade arrived on 20 June to discover that the royal family had just escaped from the capital. The king was persuaded that his family was in grave danger if it remained in Paris in the hands of the revolutionaries, who were proving more and more hostile, and that his best hope lay in joining the Austrian army massed on the border at Metz (France had declared war on Austria in April). Unfortunately, the carriage known as a berline, travelled very slowly, and the royal party, although in disguise, was recognized by a postmaster who persuaded the local guardsmen at Varennes to apprehend the king and queen. They were brought back in disgrace to Paris.
Slade described his experiences:
I arrived in Paris the very day the king fled: the city was in the greatest confusion and
under martial law; however, the keepers of the gallery [of the Palais-Royal] had orders to let me have free access at all hours, and to take down any pictures which I wished to inspect … After two or three days that I had been in Paris, I was requested on the part of the Duke of Orléans to make a valuation of all the pictures in the collection, and to make an offer.
Slade was reluctant to do this, since he expected Orléans to have fixed a price, but the duke insisted that he do so. He continued:
I was therefore compelled to make a valuation, which I presented to the Duke; but when he saw it, he got into a rage, and said he was betrayed, and that I was in league with Monsieur le Brun, the director of His Royal Highness’s gallery, as there was only 20,000 livres difference between his valuation and mine. I most positively assured the duke that such could not be the case as I was not acquainted with Monsieur le Brun; had never spoken to him in my life; and only knew him by reputation. This casualty, however, gave a check to the affair.
In fact Philippe’s reputation was in the ascendant following the Flight to Varennes, as it was known, and he felt less need to sell. He therefore felt that he no longer needed Slade, who recorded:
The Orléans party at this time became every day stronger at Paris, and the duke so popular, that he flattered himself he should speedily be elected regent – he suddenly, therefore, resolved not to sell that collection, on the credit of which he had already borrowed considerable sums of money for the purpose of influencing the public mind: thus was this first, and most important negotiation broken off, to my great mortification, and I returned to England, having accomplished nothing.
But the vacillating duke changed his mind and his rejection of the Regency, partly due to the robust opposition of Lafayette, effectively ended his role in the French Revolution. And Philippe still desperately needed to raise money. Slade was once more in the frame:
I had not long left France, when Lord Kinnaird informed me that the Italian part of the Orléans Collection [the Rape of Europa and other valuable masterpieces] had been disposed of; that the duke had lost a large sum of money at billiards to Monsieur la Borde [another example of Philippe’s fecklessness], and that the bankers were so pressing upon him that he was compelled to let them have the Italian pictures [the most valuable part of the collection], to pay his debt; that the Flemish and Dutch pictures still remained, but there was not a moment to be lost in endeavouring to secure them for his country.
Although Slade would have loved to handle the Italian paintings – there were five so-called Titians hanging in his house in Rochester – he was determined to acquire the remainder of the collection and set off post-haste for Paris, where he made a new valuation. This was accepted, a memorandum of agreement signed, only for the fickle duke to change his mind yet again, as Catherine the Great, who had already bought his collection of cameos, had made a rival offer. After an argument about exchange rates, Slade’s offer of 350,000 livres was restored but now he had to deal with Orléans’s creditors who had their eyes on the Palais-Royal. His account continued: ‘The numerous creditors, to whom he had pledged various parts of the palace, rose up and claimed the pictures as part of the furniture, and refused to let them be removed.’
The enterprising dealer now consulted an advocate, and, following a meeting with some 30 claimants in the great hall of the Palais-Royal, he enforced the legality of his claim and the next day removed the paintings discreetly to a warehouse adjacent to the palace. Aware of potential objections to the paintings leaving France, and keen to avoid the duke’s many creditors, he informed anyone who asked questions that they were going down the Seine to Le Havre, but instead transported them secretly by night to Calais. He had hired the sloop Grace, and informed the skipper Thomas Cheney to sail from Chatham, with one Thomas Aldridge, an expert on paintings, on board. The Grace sailed across to Calais, where Cheney, Aldridge and some of the crew disembarked and headed for the house of a Monsieur Dessein, who had in his possession 15 crates, filled with paintings from the Orléans Collection. Having brought them aboard, the sloop was then delayed by a gale for several days, before crossing the Channel and sailing up the Medway to Chatham where Cheney waited until dark before unloading the crates and carrying them to his house. This stealthy operation meant that Slade avoided paying any duty on an immensely valuable cargo. Within a few days they were on view in the Old Academy Rooms in Pall Mall.
Slade cashed in on the Dutch and Flemish paintings but it was a banker from Brussels, Edouard Walckiers, who scooped the pool by acquiring the Italian and French pictures from the collection in 1792 for 750,000 livres, more than double what Slade had paid for the Dutch and Flemish paintings. He immediately sold them on for a handsome profit to his cousin François Louis Jean-Joseph de Laborde-Mereville, who acquired them, with the help of a mortgage from the banker Jeremiah Harman, for 900,000 livres (£40,000). The paintings were briefly exhibited at Laborde-Mereville’s house in the Rue d’Artois but, in an increasingly dangerous political situation, the aristocratic banker fled from Paris to England in the spring of 1793, bringing the paintings with him (his father, a former minister in Louis XVI’s government, was to be executed in Paris in the Reign of Terror the following year).
There was surprisingly little comment in Paris on the dispersal of one of the finest art collections in Europe. This was due to the worsening political situation. On 10 July 1792, the National Convention voted for the abolition of the French monarchy. On the same day 600 Swiss Guards were massacred at the Tuileries Palace (Orléans’s former protégé Jerome Pétion, as Mayor of Paris, was instrumental in allowing the mob to ransack the palace and insult the royal family). The population of Paris waited fearfully for news of the invading Austrian army advancing on the capital, accompanied by numerous émigrés intent on extracting revenge. This climate of fear led to the decision to slaughter 1,400 defenceless royalist prisoners in September.
The destruction of the Ancien Régime included a transformation of the arts. The leading revolutionaries wanted to get rid of images of the hated royalty and aristocracy, and encouraged the destruction of the royal tombs in the Abbey of Saint-Denis. There was no place for the Palais-Royal, dismissed by the painter-turned-politician Gabriel Bouqier for its ‘luxurious apartments of satraps and the great, the voluptuous boudoirs of courtesans, the cabinets of self-styled amateurs’. But the revolutionaries also wanted the Louvre Museum to be a show-case for Paris as a worldwide capital of the arts. Parisians turned out in their thousands to witness an extraordinary Festival of Unity on 10 August 1793, organized by the painter David, which demonstrated the themes of national unity and the regeneration of the people. The French Revolutionaries were ruthless in pursuit of their idea that art represented the new order, and throughout the 1790s looted the finest works from the countries they conquered. They were brought to the Louvre, which now housed the most magnificent collection of art France had ever seen, and the Orléans Collection, representative of the Ancien Régime, was quietly forgotten.
The Duke of Orléans, despite his left-wing credentials, had no place in these events. During 1792 he continued to sit among the Jacobin faction in the National Convention, but this only attracted derisive comments about why a Bourbon prince was sitting ‘among the sans-culottes’. Marat, a former close supporter, was even more scathing, denouncing Orléans as ‘an unworthy favourite of fortune, without virtue, soul or guts, whose only merit was the gibberish of debauch’. When not at the Convention, Philippe was to be found sitting disconsolately in the Palais-Royal. In September 1792 he was informed that his family name was now to be Egalité and the gardens of the Palais-Royal were to be known henceforth as the Garden of the Revolution. Citoyen Philippe Egalité, as he was now known, had been one of the most powerful and richest men in France but had contrived to lose both his political power and his vast fortune.
Now he was to lose his reputation. On 11 December, Louis XVI was brought to trial before the National Convention. Among those sitting in judgement was his cousin
Philippe. On 16 January 1793, he voted the king guilty. Although his family and his household urged the duke not to attend the following evening when the Convention was to take the crucial vote on whether the king was to be sentenced to imprisonment or death, he felt it was his duty. When his name was called, he descended to the bar of the court in utter silence and proceeded to proclaim: ‘Motivated solely by my duty, and convinced that those who threatened or will threaten the sovereignty of the people deserve the ultimate punishment, I vote for death.’ Even his former supporters were stunned that the First Prince of the Blood, first cousin of the defendant, could have voted in this way, and he returned to his seat amid a cacophony of catcalls, insults and boos.
That evening his son the Duke of Montpensier found him, sitting at his desk in the Palais-Royal with his head in hands, weeping, some indication of the depth of the shame he felt in betraying his cousin. His former mistress, the Scottish courtesan Grace Dalrymple Elliot (she numbered George, the Prince of Wales among her many lovers), later recorded her reaction on hearing the news: ‘I never felt such horror for anybody in my life as I did at that moment at the Duke’s conduct.’ The behaviour of the Prince of Wales, a close friend and fellow libertine, was typical of many who felt that this was the ultimate betrayal. Leaping up from his chair in Carlton House, he tore down the portrait of the duke that he had commissioned from Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Philippe’s action did little to regain his position among the Jacobins. He fell under suspicion when his eldest son the Duke of Chartres, serving in the French army under General Dumouriez, followed his commander in changing sides and joining the Austrian army. On 9 April 1793 officials from the Committee of Public Safety, dominated by the fanatical Robespierre, known as the Sea-Green Incorruptible, arrived at the Palais-Royal with warrants for the arrest of Philippe and his younger sons the Dukes of Montpensier and Beaujolais. They were sent to a prison in Marseilles. After six months’ captivity, Orléans was brought back to Paris and finally committed to trial on 6 November. Although he mounted a spirited defence, the verdict of guilty was inevitable. Returning to his cell, where he consumed a final dinner of oysters and lamb cutlets, washed down by a bottle of Bordeaux, Philippe Egalité, having powdered his hair and put on a green frockcoat, in the style of the Ancien Régime he had so affected to despise, was led to the guillotine.
The Rape of Europa Page 13
