To the pleasure of many of the deputies, their formal dress had been abolished and they were arrayed in a bewildering variety of outfits. They looked, Morris complained, extremely shabby. In the first issue of the new Journal de la Mode et du Goût, the truly democratic man, dressed à la Révolution, was decreed to be one who wore, with his plain black cloth coat, a red waistcoat and yellow breeches. If he was very patriotic, he wore buckles à la Bastille, for fashion continued to mirror life. Clothes everywhere but at court were becoming simpler and more comfortable: for women, no hoop, no heels to their shoes and hair worn loose and long, falling in curls to the shoulder.
For a majority of the deputies, especially those from the Third Estate or the lower orders of the clergy, this was their first visit to Paris. They had come to Versailles from all over France expecting a stay of just a few months; they had already been away from home for six. As the winter grew colder, they sent for warm clothes, for supplies of wine and cheese, and even for their families. The Assembly met every day, from eight in the morning until after ten at night, with a couple of hours off to eat. With a thousand people packed into a space so small that not all of them could sit down at once, they were soon complaining of the bad air; many caught colds and wrote home to their wives that Paris was filthy, its streets deep in mud, rubbish and sewage.* On 9 November, they moved into the Salle du Manège, the indoor riding school of the Tuileries, where they complained of the heat.
The deputies were confronted with a daunting task: that of drafting a Constitution in which it was clearly laid down where power resided. Nothing was made easier by the extraordinary process of change going on around them. ‘Everything is new to us,’ said M. Clermont-Tonnerre, a moderate royalist who would for a while side with the Third Estate. ‘We are seeking to regenerate ourselves; we are having to invent words to express new ideas.’ The old and arbitrary privileges, the powers of ancient lineage, the patchwork of illogical and overlapping jurisdictions, all had to be swept away and replaced by rational, equalising institutions. The very word ‘revolution’ had acquired new meaning, that of the total transformation of all areas of life, opening on to a limitless future. Even death would be more equal. On 28 November, a deputy called M. Guillotin proposed that all executions, regardless of class or crime, be henceforth carried out by a single plunging blade.
When the Assembly settled in Paris, several of the deputies, fearful of the confusions of this enormous, volatile city, decided to look for a place where they could meet and talk, not too far from the Tuileries. For 400 francs a year, they rented one wing of the Convent of the Jacobins, in the rue Saint-Honoré. At first, they called themselves the Club Breton, after the 40 deputies from Brittany, and their early meetings were attended by some of the monks, who sat together at the back of the room in their white habits and black hoods. As their numbers grew, to include journalists and lawyers, the meetings became noisier and more passionate, and were soon overflowing into the library. To welcome their new friends, they renamed themselves the Société des Amis de la Constitution; but soon they were simply known as the Jacobins.
The meetings in the Salle du Manège were also passionate and so noisy that the delegates at the back had trouble in making themselves heard. They were dominated by a group of the most forceful members, most of them lawyers from Paris or other large cities and all but a few Jacobins. One of these was a rigid, fastidious lawyer from Arras called Maximilien Robespierre, who was repelled by all forms of vulgarity and disorder and who, with the mind of a grand inquisitor, searched for hidden meanings behind every word. Lucie, at her father-in-law’s dinner parties where Robespierre was an occasional guest, was impressed by his apple-green coat and his thick white hair, elegantly dressed. ‘Before starting out,’ Robespierre declared, ‘you must know where you want to end up.’ There was Georges-Jacques Danton, another lawyer, a previously rather unassuming man turned street agitator; Danton would later be called the ‘Mirabeau of the gutter’. There was Camille Desmoulins, the young journalist from Picardy who had called on the citizens of Paris to rise. The court and the clergy, Desmoulins announced, were ‘ne’er-do-wells…who, despite their great wealth…are merely vegetables’. And there was Jean-Paul Marat, at 46 one of the eldest, a broad-shouldered, muscular journalist with an inflammatory skin disease, barely 5 feet tall; in his paper L’Ami du Peuple, Marat was busy inventing the language of the Terror. For his persistent calls for blood, Marat would be branded the ‘street-corner Caligula’.
But it was rapidly becoming clear that political harmony in the Assembly was fracturing, even among men whose similar backgrounds might have suggested unity. The ‘anti-monarchicals’, described as of the ‘left’–the first such use of the term–split away from a new grouping, the Club de 1789. Two of the de Lameth brothers, Alexandre and Théodore, joined Robespierre, Marat and Danton in agreeing that the real threat to the revolution would come from a royalist conspiracy; they wanted the state subjugated to the citizen. Members of the Club de 1789, on the other hand, which included Talleyrand, Lafayette, Mirabeau and the Abbé Sieyès, were more frightened of anarchy, and hoped to retain a strong, powerful France with a reformed monarchy. Among their supporters were Frédéric, his father and Arthur.
What gave their debates an edge was the fact that Necker’s measures were not paying off. France was running out of wheat. The nobility were being forced to reduce their households and dismiss many of their servants; merchants complained that they had no customers. Eighty thousand families had already left Paris. Writing to George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, who had stayed on in Paris after Jefferson’s departure in October, said that though Necker ‘understands Man as a Covetous Creature, he does not understand Mankind, a Defect that is remedyless’. What was more, he was a poor financier, with ‘feeble and ineptious’ plans. This new Order of Things,’ he added, ‘cannot endure.’ That winter, Morris dined with Arthur Dillon, ‘whose wine is very good’. Even when insolvent, Lucie’s father drank well.
On 10 October, even before the Assembly moved to Paris, Talleyrand, who had defrocked himself in dress if not in title, had proposed that since financial disaster threatened, the Church’s vast wealth in lands, monasteries and foundations should be used as collateral for a new loan. Great dangers, he said, demanded ‘equally drastic remedies’. Since the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen had expressly stated that property was inviolable, this prompted fury among the higher reaches of the clergy. Horace Walpole, hearing the news in London, observed that Talleyrand was a ‘viper that has cast its skin’. But Talleyrand pressed on, and the Assembly, by 564 votes to 346, decreed on 2 November that all property owned by the Church would be placed at the disposal of the nation–the palaces, the thousands of acres of forest and farming land, the riches in gold and silver and art. As Barnave, the young deputy from the Dauphiné put it, since the clergy only ‘existed by the virtue of the Nation, so the Nation…can destroy it’.
In February came a further assault on the Church: there were to be no more perpetual monastic vows or vocations, though a few of the teaching and nursing orders would for the time being be reprieved. The new citizen of France, a man of liberty, patriotism and happiness, would not be allowed to surrender his freedom, except for the public good. Even as commissioners arrived to begin the task of drawing up inventories and preparing for sales, monks from the great Cistercian abbeys of Clairvaux, Cluny and Cîteaux took off their cowls and prepared to rejoin the world. France’s 51,000 nuns proved rather less willing to abandon their cloisters but they, too, were soon driven out, to settle, forcibly deprived of their habits, with their families or in small groups. Lady Jerningham, Lucie’s aunt, whose house near Norfolk included a hidden Catholic chapel, offered shelter to a group of Blue Nuns from Paris. Over the next two years, the secularisation of the Church would go further than anyone had imagined, with churches demolished or turned into warehouses, church bells and plate melted down, religious orders made destitute, and priests turned into public s
ervants.
On 19 May, Lucie gave birth to a healthy, but rather thin, son. He appeared to consist only of ‘skin and bones’, but a good wet-nurse was found and the baby soon put on weight. She called him Humbert-Frédéric, and had him christened in the Church of St Eustache by Les Halles, appointing as godparents the Princesse d’Hénin and her father-in-law. Humbert filled her with delight. There was talk of Lucie taking the Princesse d’Hénin’s place at the court in the Tuileries, but Marie Antoinette decided against it, as it looked as if Frédéric might be appointed Minister for Holland. ‘And who knows,’ she added, ‘if I might not expose her to further dangers?’
Paris itself, day by day, was changing. The imagination of the men shaping the revolution had been seized by a cult of antiquity, which owed little to Aeschylus or Herodotus, but much to Horace, Virgil and Cicero, writers living at a time when the greatest days of Rome were effectively past, and attributing to that earlier age all the virtues of the simple life. The revolution of 1789 was, as they saw it, a similar moment, a society in which self-made men, Cicero’s homines novi, new men, might, solely by virtue of their eloquence, rise to hold the very highest positions. Among the painters similarly enchanted by antiquity was David, whose martial and patriotic Oath of the Horatii had caused such an uproar at the Salon of 1784, and who now, in an equally famous but unfinished work on the Tennis Court Oath, used the same outstretched hand of the Horatii as the fitting gesture for revolutionary oaths. The Phrygian cap, the red woollen bonnet worn by the freed slaves of Greece and Rome, was beginning to be seen around the streets of Paris, as were haircuts à la Brutus. Men abandoned powder and wigs for short, severe cuts.
This obsession with the ancient republicans extended to the theatre, where Talma, the rising star of the Comédie-Française, turned to David for help in designing costumes. Talma, who looked remarkably like a Roman senator himself, took to the boards as Brutus in a toga. From the theatre, antiquity moved to the streets where, by early 1790, classical festivals of public games and displays of gymnastics, as recommended by Rousseau and described by Plutarch, were being staged. With them came catchy new tunes and a new revolutionary musical form, a ‘genre hymnique’, easy to sing, mixing antiquity with allegory, and sung by immense choirs, often in outdoor settings, all designed to unite the crowd in communal emotion. Paris resounded to ‘Ça ira’, with its ominous refrain ‘Les aristocrates, on les pendra! Le despotisme expirera! La Liberté triomphera!’*
Very early on, Robespierre had understood that revolutions need celebrations. But it was Talleyrand, by June 1790 the only bishop still sitting in the Assembly, of which he was now President, who would star in one of the first and most magnificent of the revolutionary festivals, the celebration, on 14 July 1790, of the fall of the Bastille. It was to be held on the Champs de Mars, the open field used by cadets of the École Militaire to drill, but because no one could quite decide where the King should sit, work did not begin until the end of June. There were just two weeks to transform a stony, uneven patch of open ground into an amphitheatre able to seat an expected 400,000 people. The Gardes Nationales from all over France were invited to send deputations. Frédéric had been given the task of organising their lodgings, food and entertainment, and Lucie often went to the Champs de Mars to watch the progress.
It was a formidable task. Two hundred thousand Parisians, drawn from every class and every occupation, were drafted in to carry earth, which was to form a semicircle round a central ‘altar of the fatherland’ and a triple, arched Arc de Triomphe. Lucie spotted Capuchin friars harnessed to little carts, Knights of Malta with wheelbarrows, nuns with baskets. The nobility lent their horses. Workshops across the capital stood idle. All round the rising amphitheatre, taverns set up tables, laden with free food and barrels of wine and ale. It rained. Sand and gravel were brought to stiffen the sifting mud. The indefatigable and sentimental Mercier lyrically described seeing citizens ‘making the most superb picture of concord, labour, movement and joy that has ever been witnessed…’. Even Lucie, normally cool on such matters, admitted that it was the most ‘extraordinary spectacle’ and one that would not be seen again.
On the night of the 13th, Lucie and her sister-in-law Cécile went to sleep in an apartment lent to them in the École Militaire, overlooking the Champs de Mars, from whose windows they could watch the crowds arriving. M. de la Tour sent food with them, so that they could offer lunch to the military officers during the festivities.
The 14th dawned with heavy rain. The Guardsmen in their red, white and blue uniforms, marched, squelching, to the sounds of military bands. The King and Queen, standing on a special platform, held up the Dauphin to the crowds. The child wore the uniform of a little Guardsman. Lucie reported later that Marie Antoinette had said to an officer, pointing to the child’s bare head: ‘He has not got the cap yet.’ No, the man replied, ‘but he has many at his service’. Lucie had become ‘accustomed to the Queen’s various expressions’, and thought that she looked displeased, and should have made more effort to conceal her ill-temper. The carefully chosen red, white and blue feathers and plumes in Marie Antoinette’s hat dripped. In driving rain and gusting winds, Talleyrand–‘the least estimable of all French priests’, as Lucie noted tartly–celebrated Mass in full episcopalian regalia at the high altar and blessed the banners of the assembled troops, before Lafayette, on his white charger, led the chorus of oaths to the constitution and to the new nation. All around the amphitheatre, spectators sheltered under brightly coloured umbrellas, a novelty introduced to Paris not long before.
The ceremony was interminably drawn out. Humbert was not yet 2 months old and Lucie did not feel strong enough to join the crowds, so she remained inside. No provisions had been brought from the Tuileries to feed the Dauphin and his sister, who became very hungry, and Lucie offered to let them share the food prepared for the officers.
Despite the reassuring presence of Talleyrand at the altar, and the King on his special platform, plans were proceeding at considerable pace to dechristianise and make equal France’s 26 million citizens. On 19 June 1790, late at night when few of the remaining nobles were present in the Assembly, all titles of hereditary nobility had been abolished, and with them went liveries, coats of arms, which were painted over, and any name that suggested a place rather than a family. The Duc d’Orléans opted for the name Philippe-Egalité. The Assembly pressed on with its destruction of the Church, despite the protests of the King. A Civil Constitution of the Clergy made priests subject to appointment by the state, like all other public officials. Soon, priests would be required to sign oaths of allegiance to the state: those who refused would be branded ‘refractory’ or ‘non-juror’ and lose their jobs.
Archbishop Dillon, who had refused to return to Narbonne since the previous winter, on the grounds that he was greatly in debt as a result of the loss of his revenues, retired quietly to Hautefontaine with Mme de Rothe, far from his creditors. The size of his debts–nearly 2 million francs–only became known later, when they were paid out of what remained of Lucie’s inheritance. For many people, the new law against the clergy marked a turning point. The primacy of the Pope on matters of faith and morality was a verity recognised since the beginning of time: to deny it was to cease to be Catholic. Out of 160 bishops, only 7 would agree to become ‘jurors’. Talleyrand was one of them. Archbishop Dillon was not. It was impossible, he wrote to the King, for him to ‘acquiesce in the degradation of the Church’. Retribution followed swiftly. ‘It is time,’ wrote the new administrator for Church affairs in Montpellier, ‘to rid ourselves of this overweening priest who so impudently dares slander the nation’s representatives.’ Dillon, the last Archbishop of Narbonne, had no further role to play. In the following months, Hautefontaine would become a refuge for refractory priests, men like him who refused to give up their allegiance to the Pope and the old Church. With his administrative skills no longer wanted, the Archbishop retreated to a quiet life of prayer and Mme de Rothe.
The Gre
at Fear had driven many nobles to seek safety outside France, their numbers swelling after each new decree or violent incident. After the attacks on the Tuileries in October 1789, the Princesse d’Hénin, taking her lover, the obedient Lally-Tollendal, with her, departed for Switzerland. Towards the end of July, Lucie, leaving Humbert with his wet-nurse and Marguerite in the Hôtel de Choiseul, decided to join them. Paris was calm.
It was still just possible to believe, as Lucie and Frédéric did, that the great and bold transformation of France into a constitutional monarchy might be accomplished without further bloodshed.
CHAPTER SIX
Deep and Dark Shades
The journey to Switzerland almost proved disastrous. France was in so volatile a state that the smallest event was enough to trigger sudden, irrational violence. Lucie, the Princesse d’Hénin, who had come to Paris for the birth of Humbert, and a young cousin, Pauline de Pully–three aristocratic women accompanied by a cook, a maid and three menservants, travelling in two carriages with uniformed coachmen–were precisely the kind of sight likely to inflame republican tempers.
They had taken care to equip themselves with every form of passport, and believed that these would see them safely to Geneva, where Lally-Tollendal awaited them. But at Dôle, after Mme d’Hénin insisted on changing the route, they found themselves suddenly in a busy market square. They had passed through other towns without incident but Dôle was packed with people and the two carriages were forced to slow down to walking pace. Suddenly, as at Forges, cries went up: ‘It’s the Queen.’ A crowd converged on the carriages, unharnessed and led away the horses, and dragged the three women to the house of the local commander of the Garde Nationale. There they found the remains of a delicious meal, but no sign of anyone. Being hungry, the three young women sat down to a stew, a meat pâté and some fruit.
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