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.
Three hours later a rather solemn man, who introduced himself as the President of the Dôle commune, appeared. After much discussion, Lucie’s cook was despatched to Paris to fetch letters to authenticate their story, and the three women were sent to sleep in a nearby house. Next morning, they were subjected to hostile questioning, one man asking Lucie why she needed quite so many shoes for a 6-week stay in Switzerland. The rumour in Dôle was that Mme d’Hénin was the Queen and Lucie her sister-in-law. It was now that Lucie realised that some of the officers who had come to lunch on the day of the celebration at the Champs de Mars were probably stationed in the garrison near Dôle. They were fetched and quickly recognised her and an embarrassed President bowed them on their way, but not before the young officers had terrified her with their professions of loyalty towards the ancien régime, and much flowery language. The party crossed the border and reached Nyon late that night; Lucie woke with delight next morning to see the lake of Geneva sparkling in the dawn light. It was her first visit to a foreign country.
The first French émigrés, dusty, exhausted and weighed down by luggage, had arrived in Switzerland soon after the fall of the Bastille. By the summer of 1790, many of the hotels along the lake of Geneva were full to overflowing with unhappy marquises, counts and senior prelates. Switzerland, being neutral, was attractive, even if each of the 13 cantons had somewhat different reactions to the revolution in France; the Catholic cantons of Fribourg and Soleure were the most welcoming to the nobility and to the nuns and monks forced out of their monasteries. Mme de Staël’s father, M. Necker, departing the French court for the third and last time, had bought a property at Coppet, a two-storey manor house overlooking the lake, with vineyards and orchards. Mme de Staël herself loved the property but complained that life in Switzerland was narrow and puritanical and that there was something hypocritical about the Swiss, saying that their love of equality was ‘no more than a wish to bring everyone down’.
Lucie spent the first fortnight in Lausanne. She was introduced to Gibbon, a frequent resident of the large English community, and found his appearance ‘so grotesque that it was difficult not to laugh’. Gibbon, whose last volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had appeared not long before, was suffering from a chronic and disfiguring inflammation of the testicles, all too visible in an age of tight clothes. Lally-Tollendal was also in poor shape: he had not only caught smallpox–from which he recovered–but had been forced by the imperious Mme d’Hénin to marry his former mistress, a Miss Halkett, niece to Lord Loughborough, by whom he had a daughter. It was a marriage in name only, for Mme d’Hénin had no intention of parting with him.
In the 18th century, the French aristocracy travelled very little, preferring to stay in surroundings and company they found congenial and considered superior to anything they might find abroad. Growing up in a sheltered world, where position and manners were so carefully prescribed, many were finding exile trying. Some rose to the challenge, and as their money started to run out, turned their hand to giving lessons or making hats. In Lausanne, the Vicomtesse de Montmorency-Laval was embroidering waistcoats, while her son Mathieu, a fervent royalist and friend of Frédéric’s, farmed. Forced to give up her carriages and footmen, the Princesse de Conti ordered a pair of stout walking shoes and could be seen striding in the countryside, evidently enjoying a lack of formality denied her by the pretentiousness of the ancien régime. Some of these exiles ventured as far as Chamonix, which by the 1780s had become a fashionable resort for climbers.
But among the émigrés, as Lucie soon noted with disgust, there were many who struggled to hold on to the world they knew, complained of their small lodgings and frugal food, and behaved with disdain towards their Swiss hosts, mocking the simplicity of their ways. ‘They all brought,’ she wrote, ‘the airs and insolence of Paris society…and were everlastingly amazed that there should exist in the world anything besides themselves and their ways.’ In the summer of 1790, the inn at Sécheron became a haven for these ungrateful exiles, and their arrogance and ignorance drove Lucie away to share a house with Pulchérie de Valance and her children at Paquis, near Geneva. As the celebrated novelist Isabelle de Charrière, who had a salon to which she invited the émigrés, remarked: ‘These French are unbelievable…They are spoiling their cause wherever they go, they destroy all sense of pity for them…You can see that the French nobility is nothing but wind, that it isn’t worth a thing, that its day is past and it is already being forgotten.’ Lucie, observing the insularity and self-absorption of her compatriots, worried that she herself might come across as equally ridiculous. ‘I cannot be certain,’ she wrote, ‘that I did not sometimes fall into these same errors.’ She was after all, as she noted many years later, of their class and their world, and these were the manners she had grown up with. But Lucie, though never as clever as Mme de Staël, was shrewd, practical, generous-spirited and far better educated than most of them. More important, perhaps, she was full of curiosity and eager to learn; and she never took herself too seriously.
Soon after reaching Switzerland, Lucie received a letter from Frédéric saying that he was being sent by his father to Nancy, with orders for the Marquis de Bouillé, commander-in-chief in Lorraine and Alsace and a veteran of the American wars, to quell a local mutiny of three regiments. By 1790, sporadic mutinies were flaring up throughout France’s army, which like other institutions was riddled with anomalies and ancient privileges. Though the troops were frequently well trained and well led, their officers were still all of noble birth, and most of the appointments were bought. Morale was low and army discipline savage.
At Nancy a group of soldiers, vowing to throw off the tyranny of their officers, had barricaded themselves into their garrison, having first seized the regimental funds, and taken hostage the commandant of the town, M. de Malseigne. A cavalry regiment had then gone over to the rebels. M. de la Tour du Pin’s orders to M. de Bouillé, to be transmitted by Frédéric, were to put down the mutiny with utmost severity, but only if certain of victory, because the men were ‘in a mood for insurrection’. An example, he and Lafayette agreed, had to be made.
On reaching M. de Bouillé’s headquarters, Frédéric was sent into Nancy to negotiate with the rebels. He found M. de Malseigne safe, but the mutineers adamant that they would not capitulate without guarantees of reform. Frédéric refused to make any such promise. He returned to M. de Bouillé and a decision was taken to march on the town, despite fears that M. de Malseigne would pay for the attack with his life. Before they left, however, M. de Malseigne appeared, exhausted and wet, having managed to slip away from his guards and reach a river, pursued by the rebels, across which he forced his horse to swim. Next morning, M. de Bouillé ordered the attack.
As Frédéric and his men neared Nancy, they saw a young officer on the rebel side ordering his men not to fire, and indicating that he wished to talk. Frédéric ordered his own men to hold their fire and then rode ahead to meet him. But as he neared the city gates, soldiers in the town lit the fuse of a cannon loaded with grapeshot. Frédéric’s horse was hit. Behind him, many of his men were killed. While Frédéric’s soldiers forced their way forwards, entered the town and overpowered the mutineers, his servant discovered him lying bruised and shaken among the dead bodies and carried him away to safety. M. Désilles, the courageous young officer who had tried to prevent the fighting, was badly wounded by shots fired by his own men.
Among the rebels were men from a Swiss regiment, which had retained the privilege of trying its own soldiers. There was a court martial, after which 27 men were executed. The two mutinying French regiments were disbanded and their troops sent to other units; a considerable number were either shot or sent to penal servitude. Frédéric, who soon recovered, was despatched to Paris with news of the assault on Nancy. Arriving at the Ministry of War in his dirty uniform, he was taken straight to the King, who for once agreed to overlook the etiquette that demanded that no military uniforms be worn at court.
A mutiny had indeed been successfully crushed, but it would have repercussions, many of them adding to the chaos into which France was sliding. And it would have repercussions for Frédéric too, now marked as an enemy of the ordinary soldier. A number of reforms were indeed immediately instigated–cruel punishments and press-ganging were abolished, along with venal posts, and officers were to be selected henceforth on the basis of merit rather than lineage–but something about the bloodshed at Nancy, and the fact that it had been until that moment a garrison of model discipline, was not forgotten. Officers from across the entire French army began to emigrate, crossing the borders to join the Princes at Koblenz: in the next 18 months, the army would lose a third of its officer class in resignations or emigration. And many ordinary soldiers, lured by better pay and greater freedom, drifted away from their regiments to join the Garde Nationale, in whose clubs they heard much talk about the perfidy of the nobility. Soon France possessed a whole parallel army, over which M. de la Tour du Pin, as Minister for War ostensibly in charge, had no control. ‘The army,’ he warned, ‘risks falling into the most turbulent anarchy…Today, the soldier has neither judges nor laws: we need to give him back both.’
What Lucie did not know, and Mme d’Hénin did not tell her, was that the first news of the defeat of the mutiny at Nancy to reach Geneva contained a rumour that Frédéric had been killed. She learnt the full details of his escape only in a letter that reached her after he had recovered. His death would have been such a profound blow that she could not bear to dwell on the thought of it. In early October, he arrived in person to collect her. But he was anxious not to spend too long away from his father, whose problems at the Ministry of War were becoming more acute every day. They travelled back by way of Alsace, where Frédéric had a brief meeting with M. de Bouillé on the road near Neuf Brisach, the two men pacing up and down as they talked, while Lucie waited in the carriage. M. de Bouillé had sent Frédéric a horse, ‘which I hope you will keep for affection of me’, to replace the one shot under him at Nancy. As they drove on through Nancy their carriage passed below the windows of the room in which M. Désilles, the brave young officer, lay dying, a sentinel posted at the door to prevent passers-by from making too much noise. They reached Paris to find Humbert in excellent health and ‘much improved in looks’, lovingly watched over by Marguerite with what Lucie called ‘incomparable, unfailing care’.
Lucie, returning to the Hôtel de Choiseul, resumed her life of dinners, rides, musical soirées at the Hotel de Rochechouart, and visits with Frédéric to Mme de Staël’s salon where she endured, rather than enjoyed, the hours of her forceful hostess’s ‘masculine attitude and powerful conversation’. The abolition of noble titles had done little to curb the sense of privilege in many of the older families, and Lucie found herself acting as chaperone to the young Nathalie de Noailles, whose mother, Mme de Laborde, though pleasingly rich, was not considered sufficiently well bred to take her daughter into society. Nathalie’s father-in-law was the Prince de Poix, in whose house Lucie had lived at Versailles, and she looked on Nathalie as a younger sister; the two girls often went out in matching dresses and with similarly dressed hair. Looking back on this friendship many years later, Lucie remarked complacently that she had never ‘suffered from that smallness of mind which made some women jealous of the success of other young women’.
More surprising, perhaps, was how unreflective Lucie appeared to be of the revolution gathering pace around her. Even as the army was losing all its officers, as the Assembly was turning steadily more hostile towards the aristocracy and senior prelates, as friends and relations were frantically packing to leave France–all things she witnessed every day and heard about at length from Frédéric, from her father-in-law and from Arthur–Lucie continued to pay visits and to enjoy herself. If her refusal to acknowledge what was happened seems wilful, it has to be remembered that she was just 20, that she had a small baby, that she had finally escaped her terrible grandmother and that she was very much in love with her husband. She was happy.
In the winter of 1790, Paris was busier, more frenetic, than it had ever been. Leaving Versailles deserted, the several thousand courtiers and ministers, together with their relations and servants, in all some 60,000 people depending for their livelihood on the court, had followed the royal family back to the capital and were established in mansions in the faubourgs of Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré, where their carriages added further chaos to the crowded narrow streets. Even the now daily departures of frightened noble families, for whom, noted Lucie, ‘to emigrate was a point of honour’, did little to diminish the bustle of the city.
In the Tuileries, the elaborate ritual of the lever and the coucher remained unchanged, the royal family dined in public on Thursdays and Sundays and the 5-year-old Dauphin, using a special small hoe and rake, gardened in a little railed-off corner of the park, guarded by two grenadiers. Though not in formal attendance at court, Lucie occasionally joined the diminishing throng of courtiers in the gloomy galleries of the Tuileries. In the Tuileries gardens, aristocratic women in the latest fashions strolled and gossiped, while at the same moment a crowd in the nearby Palais-Royal listened to a speaker haranguing against ‘the perfidy of the court, the arrogance of the nobles and the cupidity of the rich’. Visitors remarked on a new air of pride and independence in ordinary men and women, who seemed to walk and stand differently.
Even the salons, where Lucie spent her evenings, were changing. Gone were Suzanne Necker’s polite disquisitions on the nature of piety, or Mme du Deffand’s play of words on platonic love. In their place had come gatherings of furious debate and partisanship, where the talk was all of the new Constitution, of how far liberty could be allowed to govern the workings of a modern state. The salons had lost their lightness, the Goncourt brothers would later write; they were no longer schools for manners and gallantry, but political debating societies. Manon Philipon, passionate admirer of Rousseau and married to Roland de la Platière, former inspector general of manufactures for Picardy, held a salon for the rising Jacobin stars; Mme de Staël, back in the rue du Bac, drew the liberal royalists; while Josephine de Beaumarchais, the Creole wife of a member of the lower nobility and related to Lucie through her new stepmother, gathered the centrists, in what would later be called a ‘nest for the Assembly’.
In the house of the romantic novelist Adelaïde de Flahaut, Talleyrand, father of her son, held sway and here guests debated the political nuances of events that seemed to come fast one upon another. Talleyrand, noted Gouverneur Morris, was referred to as the ‘monstre mitré’, the mitred monster. Morris himself was having an affair with Mme de Flahaut, and recorded in his diary that she was an ‘elegant woman and a snug Party’. One of the few remaining Americans in Paris, Morris was enjoying himself. He found the city to be ‘in a sort of Whirlwind which turns [one] round so fast that one can see nothing…as all Men and Things are in the same vertiginous Situation, you can neither fix yourself nor your Object for regular examination’. The Parisians, he added, were good, but the background was ‘deeply and darkly shaded’.
The cafés, too, of which, according to Mercier there were now over 600 and more opening all the time, had taken on different political hues. In the Café Turc, on the rue Charlot, men of the centre played billiards, draughts, chess and tric-trac. The Jacobins met in the rue de Turnon, while in the Taverne Anglaise in the arcades of the Palais-Royal, surrounded by Chinese wallpapers and lanterns, entrepreneurs and soldiers discussed finance and political stability over cutlets, sweetbread and fricassees of chicken. Zoppi’s was where Danton and Marat drank punch. Street life, too, had changed. Reformers, looking to nature as a source of freedom and to natural laws as the way to restore it, had succeeded in getting public animal fights banned. Posters all over the city showed birds bursting out of cages. Festivals and street theatre were to be about peace, not ferocity. In caricatures, the nobility was portrayed in the shape of carnivores; in one picture, the King appeared as a voracious pig-like animal, timid and very fat, who spent his days drinking.
Nor had fashion ever been so full of meaning. Always a mirror to French life, it now provided subtle indications of political allegiances. A tricolour cockade, worn in the buttonhole or pinned to a hat, was mandatory, but a red-and-black pierrot jacket with white feathers indicated that you supported the ‘non-juror’ clergy, while plain déshabillé, with white fichu and bonnet, were signs of democratic leanings. A military look was also in fashion; as the Magasin des Modes Nouvelles observed: ‘We have all become soldiers now.’ Plates, cups, posters, even prints from the toile-de-Jouy factory, all bore scenes of social commentary, one of the favourites being the fall of the Bastille. The ‘bizarre and enchanting’ spirit of Louis XV, with its soft and sentimental contours, had given way entirely to a taste for purity and antiquity, lines that were rigid, straight, ‘inexorable’ and ‘unfriendly’. All shades of pink, citrus yellow and maroon had disappeared: everything was now red, green or dark brown, which was known as Etruscan. Beds were ‘patriotique’ or ‘à la Fédération’. The bolder ci-devant nobles painted clouds over the coats of arms on their carriages, to suggest a mist temporarily obscuring their glory, and dressed their servants in outrageous costumes, since liveries were forbidden. When she went out visiting now, Lucie dressed more simply and used a plain, unadorned carriage.
Paris in the winter of 1790 was still full of the English, residents who had stayed on, travellers, seamstresses, grooms, soldiers of fortune who had served with the French. The new fashions, and the debates in the Assembly, were noted and reported back to London where Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution had been published in November. It caused a great stir. The fall of the Bastille had been greeted initially with enthusiasm, the British Ambassador to Paris, the Duke of Dorset, writing in a glowing despatch about the ‘greatest revolution that we know anything of’ while Wordsworth composed his memorable lines: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven’.
However, the England of the 1790s was no longer the revolutionary England of the 17th century, but a thriving, conservative land, and stories of heads on pikes and the assault on Versailles had troubled even those who strongly opposed absolute monarchy. Burke’s view–that reform based on abstract philosophical principles was doomed to failure, and that only slow modifications, produced over time, lasted–found willing listeners in London. To make a tabula rasa of the past, Burke warned, was to ‘insult nature’. Though he attacked the profligate spending of the nobility, and maintained that the existing order needed to be reformed, his views were somewhat tempered by his great admiration for the French court and particularly for Marie Antoinette, whom he described as ‘glittering like the morning star, full of life, splendour and joy’. As for the nobility, they were ‘men of high spirit and a delicate sense of honour…well bred, humane and hospitable’.
In France, Reflections sold well, particularly to the royalists and those who still believed it possible to combine reform and monarchy. For Frédéric and his father, as for Mme de Staël, Burke’s words struck a chord. The Jacobins preferred to buy Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man with its attacks on despotism and tyranny and its celebration of God-given ‘rights’.
After the mutiny at Nancy, M. de la Tour du Pin appeared discouraged and depressed. He was, wrote Lucie, increasingly ‘powerless before the intrigues of the Assembly’. It was becoming clear to him, as it was to the Marquis de Bouillé, that discipline in the army was collapsing and that civil war threatened. After the plans he had drawn up for the reform of the army were rejected, he had written to offer his resignation to the King. It was refused, but in the Assembly there were cries of ‘Sack the ministers’ from deputies who wanted the appointment of diplomats and ministers to be put in the hands of the people rather than the King. Later, M. de Bouillé wrote that it had been exceptionally fortunate to have had such an excellent and virtuous man in so essential a post at that time; he urged M. de la Tour du Pin to make whatever concessions were needed in order to remain at his post ‘for you may find yourself one day in the position to render the King a great service’.
But Frédéric’s father’s position was becoming untenable. On 10 November, Danton accused him in the Assembly of being an enemy of the revolution, a despot and an incompetent; he called for him to be tried. Clamours for his dismissal followed; the ministers, the deputies shouted, were all ‘clowns who do nothing but move their lips’. M. de la Tour du Pin again tendered his resignation; this time it was accepted. Writing to the King, he said that every day he had seen his honour compromised and been forced to witness ‘every kind of sickening event’. Later, among the King’s papers, was found a draft of a letter Louis had written to his Minister for War. M. de la Tour du Pin had been, it said, a good and devoted servant to him, and he would never forget it.
Frédéric himself had spent some months working on a plan for the reorganisation of the army: the King now proposed to him that he take his father’s place at the ministry. Frédéric, fearing a political backlash, refused. But he did agree to go instead to Holland as Minister Plenipotentiary in the autumn, after the Constitution had been accepted. Since they were obliged to move out of the Hôtel de Choiseul, Lucie, Frédéric, Humbert, Marguerite and M. de la Tour du Pin accepted the Princesse d’Hénin’s offer of her house in the rue de Varennes, taking with them Cécile and her children. Augustin was away with his regiment. For the first time, Lucie began to understand the precariousness of their financial position. With her father-in-law’s salary gone, and their seigneurial dues vanished, there would be only Frédéric’s wages to support a considerable number of people.
Cécile was fascinated by the deliberations in the Assembly and spent most of her days in a box at the edge of the Chamber lent to her by one of the King’s equerries. Lucie occasionally accompanied her, but preferred her piano and Italian lessons. In the afternoons, she rode in the Bois de Boulogne with her cousin Dominic Sheldon, on a lively thoroughbred whose ‘step and manner I enjoyed tremendously’. Since game was no longer protected as a royal privilege there was little to be seen in forests once teeming with deer, wild boar, pheasants, partridges and rabbits. The King had given up his hunt, and most of the birds and animals had been slaughtered. It was characteristic of the strange sense of calm that pervaded Paris, 18 months after the fall of the Bastille, that a young woman on a fine horse, evidently a member of the nobility, could ride in safety in the company of only her cousin or a single groom, often staying out until dusk.
But even Lucie could not be oblivious to the violence that now marked most Parisian days. One afternoon, in the spring of 1791, returning home in the early evening accompanied only by her English groom, Lucie was stopped at the end of the rue de Varennes by the Garde Nationale. She turned back and tried to enter the street by one of the other roads leading to it. All were blocked. Eventually, in the rue de l’Université, she was allowed in. As she rode past the Hôtel de Castries, she saw that the house had been ransacked, its furniture dragged out into the courtyard, its mirrors shattered, the windows and doors wrenched off their hinges. A riot, it turned out, had been orchestrated by Charles and Alexandre de Lameth, after Charles had been slightly injured in a duel with the Duc de Castries that morning. Lucie knew the duke and his family well, having been a visitor to the house all her life. Lafayette had been warned in advance of the attack, she wrote later, and had delayed sending the Gardes to the house, through ‘laziness’, and she hoped that it had not been through some more sinister motive.
From her windows in the rue de Varennes, Cécile had watched the de Lameths’ Italian secretary urging the rioters on. Since the fall of the Bastille, the three de Lameth brothers had taken very different political paths. Augustin, Cécile’s husband, remained a liberal monarchist, like Frédéric and his father, while Charles and Alexandre were emerging as powerful voices among the Jacobins, trying to become, Lucie contemptuously noted, ‘the idols of the people’. Neither Cécile nor Augustin any longer spoke to his brothers, and Lucie herself cut them dead if she met them in the street.
On the eve of Epiphany, Talleyrand had written to his former mistress, Mme de Flahaut: ‘Poor Kings! I think that their celebrations and their reigns will soon be a thing of the past. Mirabeau himself fears that we are moving too fast, with too large steps, towards a republic.’ For some time now, Mirabeau, who, for all his booming oratorical skills, had a shrewd sense of the workings of government, had been fighting in the Assembly to preserve for the King at least some of his powers, hoping to find ways to reconcile the revolution with the monarchy, in order to safeguard liberty. ‘The people,’ he warned, ‘have been promised more than can be promised; they have been given hopes that will be impossible to realise…’. When, at the end of February, the Assembly debated whether to set up a committee to determine the right of anyone to enter or leave France, Mirabeau, seeing in this the beginnings of a police state, fought hard against it, saying that it was not constitutional. Among the Jacobins, he was loudly criticised for betraying the revolution, but his standing was such that he survived: his flourishes of rhetoric and passion charmed his audiences.
Then, one morning, he was struck down with severe pains to his stomach. He struggled on, making speeches, while day by day his great voice shrank to a gravelly whisper. On 2 April, he asked to be shaved; then declared that he was dying. ‘When one has come to that,’ he observed, ‘all one can do is be perfumed, crowned with flowers, enveloped in music and wait comfortably for the sleep from which one will never awaken.’ He was 42.
The idea of transforming Soufflot’s stark neo-classical Church of Sainte Geneviève into a Pantheon for patriots and heroes, stripped of all religion, a place to celebrate life and not death, well predated the revolution. As Paris mourned the turbulent, philandering Mirabeau–his sexual appetites and colossal debts obligingly forgotten–plans were made to give him the most magnificent funeral. On 4 April, at six o’clock in the evening, a lead urn containing Mirabeau’s heart, where his passion and candour were said to reside, was borne through the streets of the capital by eight black horses covered in black velvet studded with silver stars, followed by a procession of Guardsmen, their rifles reversed and their drums muffled, and a band with piccolo, flutes, oboes, clarinets, French horns, bassoons and trumpets. Virtually the entire Assembly as well as most of the Jacobins followed behind. It was later said that 300,000 Parisians had turned out, in the fading dusk, to watch their dead hero carried past by the light of flaming torches. ‘It seemed,’ wrote Nicolas Ruault, to his brother, ‘that we were travelling with him to the world of the dead.’
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ were being used regularly in the Assembly–the patriots sitting to the left of the President, the monarchists to the right–where debates, as the spring of 1791 wore on, were increasingly divisive and acrimonious. Out of power, but anxiously aware of the anger which seemed to consume Paris, Frédéric and his father listened, talked and felt powerless. They were sometimes joined by Arthur, still a member of the Assembly.
The lifting of censorship meant that pamphleteers and editors on all sides could join in the discussions, so that the speeches of the men who were coming to dominate the Assembly and the Jacobins–Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Desmoulins–were printed in the newspapers. The Jacobins, taking some of their rituals and symbols from the Freemasons, had won followers in provincial towns and regarded themselves as guardians of revolutionary purity. But there were many other clubs, where men came to discuss politics and the new order. Paris was alive with orators, spinning webs of revolutionary fervour.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen had generously promised freedom and equality to all Frenchmen. But on the subject of slaves and women it had been silent. Among the debates raging in the Assembly were calls for the abolition of France’s highly lucrative slave trade and the granting of rights to the men, women and children working the sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton plantations of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue. Just before the revolution, Brissot de Warville, spurred on by the new anti-slavery movements among English and American Quakers and liberals, had founded a Société des Amis des Noirs, with the goal of bringing to an end the ‘horrible traffic in negroes’. Among its early members were three dukes, two princes, seven marquises, eight counts, one archbishop and any number of merchants, magistrates and financiers. For Condorcet, long an outspoken abolitionist, slavery was a crime far worse than theft.
But the Antilles were extremely important to France. The small colony of Saint-Domingue alone, with its 30,000 whites and 465,000 blacks, produced greater riches in sugar and coffee than any other colony in the world. And in the Assembly were many delegates–Lafayette and Talleyrand, both absentee owners of plantations, among them–who opposed abolition on the grounds that the slaves were necessary for the prosperity of France, and that in any case humane slavery was a better condition for black people than freedom in their own heathen African countries. As Montesquieu had written, it was hard to comprehend how God, in all his wisdom, could have put a soul, let alone a good soul, into a totally black body.
One of these anti-abolitionists was Arthur who, having come from the Antilles with a mission to safeguard the economy of the colonies, spoke passionately in the Assembly against over-hasty abolition. To counter the arguments of the Société des Amis des Noirs, Dillon and a number of plantation owners set up their own club, the Massiac, pointing out that there was no one among the abolitionists who had actually ever been to the Antilles or understood how colonialism worked. The Massiac established branches in the French ports, to keep a close eye on the comings and goings of ‘négrophiles’. But as the tide of liberty swept on, Arthur and his friends were overruled. After many fierce debates and reports of growing revolutionary ferment in the islands, the Assembly voted to grant full legal rights to blacks, whether in the colonies or in France; but only, for the moment, to those born to free parents.
Arthur, having argued that France would end up losing its colonies and its trade to the English by pandering to egalitarian chimeras and been defeated, resigned from the Assembly. He was now without a job and, as always, without money, though his fortunes took a turn for the better when compensation was at last paid for the confiscated Dillon regiment which had been formally incorporated into the French army as the 87th regiment of the line. Lucie, visiting her father frequently, was conscious of the many years she had been without him. She had become extremely fond of him, as had Frédéric, though their views on many issues–such as slavery–were markedly different.
Women, however, fared rather less well than slaves in the Assembly. In 1789, France’s for the most part illiterate female population had listened to the discourse of rights and wondered what it might achieve for them. It was women who had, after all, led the march on Versailles. Freed at last to reimagine a world made on their own terms, they began to suggest that they should have a say in their choice of husband, and even over how they wished to live. Like Frédéric’s mother, any adulterous woman could be put away by her husband in a convent for two years, and forced to remain there indefinitely if he did not want her back. In Paris, groups of women now opened their own clubs, went to meet friends and talk in cafés, and sat in the public gallery of the Salle du Manège, where they heckled the delegates.
They soon found a champion, in the shape of the 42-year-old daughter of a butcher and widow of a banker called Olympe de Gouges, who came up with her own Declaration of the Rights of Women. It was time, said de Gouges, that Frenchwomen were made aware of their ‘deplorable fate’. Contrary to the opinion of dozens of tendentious philosophers, she declared, there was no proper evidence to prove that women, supposedly frail creatures with poor powers of reasoning, were actually inferior to men. They should be entitled to vote, to take government jobs, to have parity with men over money and, ‘especially’, they should resist the ‘oppression’ under which they currently lived. And they also needed their own, female, national assembly. A devoted monarchist, de Gouges dedicated her Declaration to Marie Antoinette, which may have done neither her nor the Queen any good.
Another champion for women was a novelist and journalist called Louise de Kéralio, who achieved rather more when she proposed in an article in the Mercure Nationale, of which she was editor-in-chief, that the polite form of ‘vous’ should be put in quarantine, and the more familiar ‘tu’ used instead, suggesting that this would lead to more ‘fraternity’ and consequently to ‘more equality’. Not long afterwards, tutoiement became obligatory, the polite form effectively vanishing for some years, along with Monsieur and Madame, who became Citoyen and Citoyenne. But neither de Gouges nor de Kéralio made much progress against 18th-century men’s fears that women would cease to be women if given rights. It would not be long before the Committee of Public Safety disbanded the successful women’s clubs, after so-called ‘Jacobines’ were spotted in the markets wearing red trousers and red bonnets. As the committee pointed out, man, born strong, robust, full of energy, courage and boldness, destined to play a part in commerce, navigation, wars and ‘everything that demands force, intelligence, capability’, was alone suited to ‘great mental concentration’.
Lucie, growing up in a world in which clever and articulate women wielded considerable subtle influence, would see herself, not freed, but silenced, relegated to a life of domestic obscurity, forbidden all political activity. The day of the true salon hostess, with her deft and delicate sense of power, was, for the time being, over. The role of the citoyenne was to be the virtuous Roman matron of David’s republican paintings, not a politician.
After a winter of incessant rain, spring had arrived early, bringing blossom to the Tuileries gardens, where pear, apricot and peach all flowered in March. By May 1791, there were peas, asparagus and strawberries in the markets. Frédéric’s job as Minister to Holland had been confirmed and in the rue de Varennes, where Lucie was packing cases to send ahead to The Hague, the lilac smelt very sweetly. The city was quiet enough for a visiting soldier called Desbassayns to spend a peaceful day at Versailles, where he visited the very dilapidated Ménagerie, to find the rhinoceros sharing its cage with a dog, and a strange, pale, stripy animal which he identified as a cross between a zebra and a donkey. The novelty on the streets of Paris was a horseless carriage, propelled by two men pedalling, while a third sat in front to steer.
When Voltaire became the third person to be interred in the Panthéon–the first had been Descartes, the second Mirabeau–his coffin removed from the abbey in which he had been buried, Lucie and Frédéric went to watch what she called the ‘unseemly splendour’ of the procession. An immense chariot, drawn by four white horses, its wheels cast in bronze, carried the porphyry sarcophagus on which an effigy of Voltaire reclined, asleep; in front of it walked 20 young girls in white robes strewing flowers from golden baskets to the martial beat of military bands. In the midst of such turmoil and uncertainty, it was a curiously innocent scene.
Mirabeau’s vision of a modified monarchy, with ministers accountable to a legislative body, might perhaps have worked; but by the late spring of 1791 too many forces were stacked against it. Its chief architect, Mirabeau, was dead; the King’s chronic indecisiveness was getting worse; and Marie Antoinette was in fact behaving precisely as her enemies suspected, encouraging schemes for counter-revolution. Hostility towards the woman they now called ‘l’Autrichienne’ was turning more vicious all the time; in the Tuileries gardens, when Marie Antoinette went walking, her clothes were sometimes ripped by jeering passers-by. Mesdames Tantes, Adélaïde and Victoire, the King’s elderly aunts, had signified their distaste for the way the revolution was going by leaving for Rome (having taken the precaution of ordering four ‘grand tabliers de taffetas vert d’Italie’ to take with them, the current fashion being to wear little aprons in bright colours), though their departure was delayed by angry crowds.
From early 1791, there had been secret plans on all sides–from Gouverneur Morris to Lucie’s father-in-law–to rescue the royal family and spirit them abroad, but the depressed and bewildered King continued to waver. In the evenings, in the rue de Varennes, Frédéric, Arthur and M. de la Tour du Pin talked urgently about what might be done to help them. An idea to take at least the Dauphin, who had recently been decreed as belonging to the nation rather than to his family, had been abandoned after the King and Queen announced that they did not want the family to be separated. Only after Easter did the King make up his mind.
Louis XVI had never reconciled himself to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. In order to avoid taking communion from a ‘juror priest’, the royal family decided to spend Holy Week at Saint-Cloud, where it would be easier to smuggle in a non-juror. But their departure from the Tuileries, misconstrued by the people as an attempt to flee the country, ended in insults and threats, and even Lafayette was unable to persuade the Gardes to allow their carriage to pass. Something of the horror and hatred of the day, the hour and a half spent trapped in a carriage while the crowd shouted abuse all around them, suggested that flight might now be the only course left.
Lucie, having sold her saddle-horses, had gone to join Cécile at Hénencourt. She had taken with her not only Humbert’s wet-nurse, but Zamore, her fashionable black manservant, one of the 400 or so black Africans working for noble families in Paris at the time of the revolution. One morning, Zamore appeared in her rooms in a state of agitation. Two strangers, he told her, had passed through Hénencourt with a story that the royal family had vanished from the Tuileries. Lucie, fearing that Frédéric had been involved and was now in great danger, sent Zamore to Paris for news. She waited, in a ‘state of indescribable anxiety’. ‘The days,’ she wrote, ‘seemed centuries long.’
It was not until the evening of the third day that Zamore returned, bringing with him a ‘long and desperate’ letter from Frédéric. In it, he described how at midnight on 20 June, a coach carrying the King, the Queen, the two children–the Dauphin dressed as a girl–Mme Elisabeth, and the children’s governess, driven by Axel von Fersen, Marie Antoinette’s supposed lover, and accompanied by a small number of outriders, had left Paris on a circuitous route to the border with the Austrian Netherlands, leaving behind an open letter full of bitterness and accusations; how, on discovering their flight, a furious mob had besieged the Tuileries; and how, through a succession of errors, misjudgements, faulty timing and simple bad luck, they had been recognised at the small village of Sainte-Ménehould by a zealous postmaster called Drouet, and returned, disgraced, exhausted and frightened, through dust and blistering heat, to virtual imprisonment in the Tuileries. As their carriage had trundled back into Paris, crowds lined the streets to watch; ordered to show respect, Parisians remained silent, but they did not take off their hats. Lucie, learning that one of the courtiers who had been with them had offered to take the Dauphin on his horse and gallop off to safety, but that the Queen had refused, observed: ‘Unhappy Princess, mistrustful even of the most faithful among her servants!’
The King’s brother and his wife, travelling by another route and in a faster carriage, had managed to get away; even Fersen had been able to reach the border. The entire flight, Lucie wrote, had been nothing but a succession of ‘blunders and imprudences’, starting with the amount of luggage the royal party had insisted on taking with them: chamber pots, a heater, a walnut travelling case, along with the King’s robes and his crown, all of which served to slow down the carriage to little more than walking pace. Even so, when caught, the royal family were just 40 miles from the border. Before hearing of their capture, Gouverneur Morris wrote to Tom Paine: ‘If the King escapes, it means war; if not, a republic.’
For the next two months, until the Constitution was finally drafted and ready for signature, the royal family lived mournfully as prisoners inside the Tuileries, their existence tolerated as necessary by the dwindling number of deputies who continued to favour the retention of a king and a court. Many others were now calling openly for a republic. Louis and Marie Antoinette were closely watched day and night, by men who no longer bothered to show them much deference. On the gates of the Tuileries, someone had put up a placard: ‘maison à louer’, house for rent. The sacrosanct mystique and inviolability of the monarchy had effectively disappeared, never to return. Barnave, the deputy despatched by the Assembly to escort the royal prisoners from Varennes to Paris, casually ate his meals with them, an act of lèse-majesté that had not been seen before. ‘People call him Louis the false or the Fat Pig,’ wrote Mme Roland. ‘It is impossible to envisage a being so totally despised on the throne.’
The Constitution, redefining citizenship and setting out the role of the monarchy and the election of a government to serve the people, was presented to the King early in September. Louis was to remain king, with limited powers: he would be allowed to veto new laws, and to choose new ministers, but little else. Frédéric drew up a long memorandum which he signed ‘M. de G’, urging him not to endorse it; but Louis did so. The memorandum, instead of being destroyed, went into an iron chest, together with other documents. Frédéric’s position, as an aristocrat loyal to the King in a country hastening towards republicanism, was becoming very dangerous.
At the beginning of October, Lucie, Frédéric, Humbert and various servants set out for Holland, leaving behind them uncertainty, intrigues and talk of counter-revolution. On 21 September, the National Convention had proclaimed France a republic and abolished the monarchy. ‘To aggravate the horrors of this place,’ wrote William Augustin Miles, a pamphleteer and friend of Pitt, ‘every maniac almost is an assassin either in thought or deed.’ Cécile, Frédéric’s sister, who was ill and coughing constantly, went with them, taking her sons and their tutor, finding the thought of a lonely winter at Hénencourt unbearable. Augustin, who had left the army in March and had ceased to call himself a marquis, stayed behind to put together a local militia.