WHEN STATES AND GOVERNMENTS find that home conditions are critical and are tending to pass out of control, they are wont, following a traditional recipe, to seek relief from tension in some foreign imbroglio. For months the spokesmen of the Revolution in France, hoping to escape an almost inevitable civil war, had been clamouring for war against Austria. Although, by accepting the constitution, Louis XVI had lowered his kingly status, he had for the time being safeguarded the monarchy. Simple-minded persons like Lafayette believed that the Revolution had reached its term. The Girondists, however, who were dominant in the newly elected Assembly, were at heart republican. They wanted to do away with the monarchy, and it seemed to them that a war would be the best method of bringing that about, for it could not fail to entangle the royal family in a conflict with the nation. The Count of Provence and the Count of Artois were in the vanguard of the proposed coalition against revolutionary France, and had the support of the foreign general staffs.
Marie Antoinette was well aware that a declaration of war could only do harm to her cause. Whatever its upshot, it would be disastrous to herself and her husband. If the revolutionary armies got the better of the émigrés and the Emperor and the King, it was certain that France would no longer tolerate a ‘tyrant’ within its borders. If, on the other hand, the national troops were defeated by the King’s and the Queen’s relatives, beyond question the Paris mob (on its own initiative, or under due incitement) would regard the prisoners in the Tuileries as responsible. If France were victorious, they would lose the throne; if the foreign powers were victorious, they would lose their lives. Guided by these considerations, in letter after letter Marie Antoinette implored her brother Leopold and the émigrés to keep their activities within bounds, and the Emperor, cautious, hesitant, cold-blooded and temperamentally opposed to war, did in fact discountenance the fire-breathing princes and refugees and scrupulously avoided anything that could be regarded as challenging behaviour.
Alas, Marie Antoinette’s star was setting. Henceforwards Fate had nothing but misfortunes awaiting her. On 1st March 1792, Leopold, the pacific-minded, died after a brief illness, and a fortnight later a conspirator’s pistol made an end of Gustavus III, the most ardent and the ablest champion of royalism among the monarchs of Europe. His death made war inevitable. His son and successor, Gustavus IV, only fourteen years of age, was not to be counted upon as a prop to the monarchical cause. As for the new emperor, Francis, the son of Leopold II, he had no concern for the fate of his royal relatives in France, and thought only of his own interests. He was rather dull-witted, hard of heart, this man of twenty-four, with no trace of Maria Theresa’s genius. From her nephew, Marie Antoinette could expect neither understanding nor will to understand. He gave her messengers a chill reception, and was indifferent to her letters, caring not a jot that the position of affairs in France and throughout Europe involved her in a most distressing spiritual conflict, or that her life was endangered by his policy. All that he could see was a fine chance of enlarging his own power, and he therefore contemptuously rejected the demands of the National Assembly.
This suited the Girondists’ book, and gave them the upper hand. On 20th April 1792, after long resistance (and, we are told, with tears in his eyes), Louis XVI was compelled to declare war upon the ‘King of Hungary’. The armies were set in motion, and destiny took its course.
To which side did the Queen’s heart turn in this war? Towards the land of her birth or the land of her adoption? Did she wish success to the French or to the foreign armies? Royalist writers, her unstinted defenders and eager to extol her every action, have gone so far as to falsify or interpolate passage after passage in memoirs and letters in the hope of concealing the obvious fact that she whole-heartedly desired the triumph of the foreign allies and the defeat of the French troops. Her attitude was unmistakable, and one who tries to conceal it is misrepresenting her. Whoever denies it, lies. Nay more, Marie Antoinette, whose primary feeling was that she was Queen, whereas only to a secondary degree did she regard herself as Queen of France, was not opposed only to those who had restricted her royal power, nor a supporter only of those who wished to strengthen her dynastic position—for she was active in the endeavour to do all in her power, legitimate or illegitimate, to hasten the defeat of France and to favour the victory of the allies. “God grant that vengeance will at length be taken for the provocations we have received from this country,” she wrote to Fersen, and although she had long since forgotten her mother-tongue, and had to have letters penned in it translated to her, she added: “Never have I been more proud than at this moment to have been born a German.”
A few days before war was declared, she acquainted the Austrian ambassador with the revolutionists’ plan of campaign, insofar as it was known to her. To use plain terms, she betrayed it. There was not the slightest ambiguity about her position. For Marie Antoinette the Austrian and the Prussian flags were those of her friends, and the tricolour was the banner of her enemies. Beyond question most readers will say that this was flat treason, and that there is no modern land in which the law courts would fail to condemn it as a crime. Still, it must not be forgotten that a century and a half ago the concepts of ‘national’ and ‘nation’, as we understand them today, could hardly be said to have come into existence, and it was not until the revolution we are now considering that they began to become generalised for Europe. Whatever may be said for the view that the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) signalized ‘the birth of the nations’, the fact remains that the eighteenth century, to whose outlooks those of Marie Antoinette inseparably belonged, did not recognise until its last decade any other than the purely dynastic standpoint. A country belonged to its king; where the king stood, there stood the law; he who fought on behalf of the king and the monarchy was fighting for the just cause. He, on the other hand, who opposed the monarchy was a rebel, even though he was defending his own country.
The undeveloped condition of patriotism was strikingly shown in this particular war by the fact that many of the ablest and best among the Germans of that day—Klopstock, Schiller, Fichte and Hölderlin, for instance—being enthusiasts for liberty, actually hoped for the defeat of the German troops, which were not popular armies, but armies of professional soldiers fighting on behalf of despotism. They rejoiced at the retreat of the Prussian forces, whereas in France the King and the Queen acclaimed the defeat of their own French troops as a personal advantage. On both sides of the fighting front the war was waged, not in the interests of this country or of that, but to further a spiritual idea, that of sovereignty or that of freedom. The disparity of outlook as between that time and our own cannot be better instanced than by the fact that the Duke of Brunswick, a month before he became commander-in-chief of the united German forces, had been seriously considering whether he would not prefer to lead the French troops against the Germans. We see, then, that, in 1792, the notions of fatherland and nation had not yet become clarified for the men and women of the eighteenth century. It was the war of the allied monarchs against the French republicans which brought into being popular armies, a national consciousness in this state and in that, with the result that there was a terrible struggle of nation against nation. The upshot was the birth of the idea of national patriotism which was handed down to become dominant throughout the nineteenth century.
The Parisians had no proof that Marie Antoinette longed for a victory of the foreign powers, no proof of her treasonable views and practices. But even though the masses never think logically or purposively, they have a more elemental, more animal-like flair than has any individual. They work with instinct instead of with reasoned considerations, and their instincts are almost infallible. From the outset the French people sensed the atmosphere of hostility in the Tuileries. Although it had no producible evidence, it was intuitively aware that Marie Antoinette had betrayed its army and its cause. No more than a hundred paces away from the royal headquarters, Vergniaud, one of the Girondists, was outspoken in his declamation to the National Assembly: “From this tribune whence I speak, I can see the dwelling place in which false counsellors lead astray and deceive the King who has given us the constitution, forge the fetters with which they wish to chain us, and prepare the manoeuvres that are designed to hand us over to the House of Austria. I see the windows of the palace where they are hatching counter-revolutions, and where they are contriving ways and means of thrusting us back into the horrors of slavery.” In order to point out Marie Antoinette as the central mover in the conspiracies he thus denounced, he added threateningly: “Let those who dwell in the aforesaid palace realise that our constitution guarantees inviolability to the King alone. Let them know that our laws will run there without distinction among the guilty, and that there is not any head proved to be criminal which can hope to escape passing beneath the axe.”
The revolutionists were beginning to understand that they could only get the better of their foes abroad by settling accounts with their enemies at home. If they were to win the great game they were playing against the world, the influence of their own King must be checkmated. Energetically, therefore, those who were heart and soul for the Revolution drummed to the assault. Once more the newspapers led the way, demanding the deposition of Louis. New editions of the notorious publication La vie scandaleuse de Marie Antoinette were sold in the streets to vivify the old hatred with fresh energy. In the Assembly, extremist proposals were brought forward, with the deliberate hope that the King would feel impelled to make use of his constitutional right of veto; the most notable of these schemes being one to which Louis XVI, as a devout Catholic, could never agree, namely that priests who refused to swear loyalty to the constitution should be expelled from the country. To speak plainly, a breach was provoked. In actual fact, the King asserted himself for the first time, and vetoed the measure. While still strong, he had made no use of his rights, his privileges and his powers. Now, when his destruction was imminent, the unhappy man chose the most ill-omened of hours in which to display his vigour. The people, however, were no longer in a mood to tolerate the activities or objections of this puppet. The veto was to be the King’s last word against and to his people.
In order to read the King, and above all in order to read the arrogant Austrian woman, his wife, a convincing lesson, the Jacobins, the shock-troops of the Revolution, fixed upon a symbolical day, the twentieth of June. This same day three years earlier, in the tennis court at Versailles, the representatives of the third estate had solemnly sworn that they would not yield to force, and that they would, with their own unaided powers, establish a new order in France. On 20th June 1791, the King, disguised as a lackey, had slunk out of the postern of his own palace hoping to escape from the dictatorship of the people. Now, when the anniversary of the ‘Serment du jeu de paume’—Tennis Court Oath—had come round once more, he was to be reminded that he counted for nothing and the people for everything. As in October 1789 the storming of Versailles had been sedulously prepared, so now in June 1792 was the storming of the Tuileries. In 1789, however, the levying of the army of amazons had been an underground and illegal affair, carried out behind the veil of darkness. Today it was in the broad sunlight, to the sound of the tocsin, that five thousand men assembled under the command of Santerre, the brewer. The town council was in attendance, with banners flying. The National Assembly opened its doors to the levies, and Pétion, mayor of Paris, who was responsible for order in the capital, placed himself at the disposal of those who were determined to humiliate King Louis.
The march of the revolutionary columns began as a mere festival performance in front of the hall of the National Assembly. The five thousand carried huge placards bearing legends of “Down with the veto!” and “Liberty or death!” In time with the strains of the ‘Ça ira’—It’ll be fine—they paraded along the front of the Manège. At half-past three, this phase of the spectacle was over. But now came the real demonstration. For, instead of going peaceably to their homes, the huge crowd that had gathered, together with the five thousand organised demonstrators, made for the entrance to the Tuileries, doing so without express command from anyone, but thanks to the promptings of unseen leaders. The palace front was lined with National Guards, who stood there with fixed bayonets, but the court, with its customary indecision, had given no orders as to how an obviously probable invasion was to be dealt with. The soldiers offered no resistance, and the masses pushed in a steady stream through the narrow gateway. The invaders speedily made their way into the palace and up to the first story. Now there was no holding them. The doors were forced, and before anything could be done to safeguard the King, the foremost were in his presence, separated only by a small body of National Guards. Now within his own dwelling Louis XVI had to take orders from his rebellious ‘subjects’, and nothing but his imperturbable phlegm, his masterly equanimity, prevented a collision. Patiently, courteously, he complied with the most outrageous demands, obediently donning the red Phrygian cap which one of the sansculottes snatched from his own head. For three and a half hours, amid the blazing heat, without attempting to resist, he gratified the curiosity and the scorn of these hostile guests.
Simultaneously another troop of the insurgents had stormed the Queen’s apartment, and it seemed not unlikely that the scenes of 5th October 1789, at Versailles, would be repeated in Paris. Since, however, the Queen was known to be in much greater danger than the King, the officers on guard had speedily summoned a number of their men, had pushed Marie Antoinette into a corner of the room, and had drawn a large table in front of her, and the National Guards were then stationed in three ranks on the other side of the table. The furious men and the still more furious women of the mob could not get at her to do her bodily mischief, but they were close enough to contemplate the ‘monstre’ as a loathsome spectacle, close enough for the Queen to hear every syllable of their invectives and their threats. Santerre, whose only purpose was to humiliate Marie Antoinette, and to give her a thorough fright (while avoiding violence), ordered the grenadiers to draw to either side, so that the populace could have its will in the way of securing an unrestricted view of its victim. At the same time, he did his best to tranquillize the Queen, saying: “You have been misled. The people wishes you no harm. If you liked, there would not be one of them who did not love you as sincerely as you love that little boy” (pointing to the Dauphin who trembled as he pressed close to his mother). “Besides, you need not be afraid, for no one will do you any harm.” But, as invariably happened when one of the ‘factieux’ offered assistance to the Queen, she hardened her heart and stiffened her pride. “I have not been misled, I have not been deceived, and I am not afraid,” she answered fiercely. “There is no occasion for fear, why should anyone be afraid who is among decent folk?” Coldly, impassively, she endured the hostile glances and the rude utterances. Not until they tried to make her put the ‘cap of liberty’ upon her little boy’s head, did she revolt, saying to the officers: “This is too much, and passes the limit of human patience.” That was her only outburst. Otherwise, not for a moment did she betray alarm, not for an instant did she lose composure. After a long time, when the invaders had ceased to be really threatening in their demeanour, Pétion arrived on the scene and requested the crowd to disperse—“lest occasion should be given to doubt the worthiness of your intentions”. The palace, however, was not evacuated by the ‘enemy’ until the evening was far advanced, and when the need for putting a brave front on the matter had passed away, the Queen, the humiliated woman, at length realised the torment of her defencelessness. She knew that all was lost. “I am still alive, though by a miracle. The twentieth was a terrible ordeal,” she wrote to Fersen. “However, do not be too anxious about me. Have faith in my courage.”