Paris, November 1821
THE YEAR 1789, so famous in our history and in the history of the human race, found me still on the moors of my Brittany. I could not leave the province until late in the year and did not get to Paris until after the pillaging of the Maison Réveillon, the opening of the Estates-General, the transformation of the Third Estate into the National Assembly, the Tennis Court Oath, the Royal Speech of June 23, and the incorporation of the Clergy and the Nobility into the Third Estate.
There was great turbulence on the way to Paris. In the villages, peasants were stopping carriages, demanding to see passports, and interrogating travelers. The closer we came to the capital, the more disorderly things became. Passing through Versailles, I saw troops quartered in the orangery, artillery trains parked in the courtyards, makeshift chambers for the National Assembly erected on the Place du Palais, and deputies coming and going amid a swarm of sightseers, palace servants, and soldiers.
In Paris, the streets were glutted with crowds standing at bakery doors; passersby stopped to talk on street corners; merchants left their shops and stood on their doorsteps to hear and tell the latest news; agitators massed together at the Palais-Royal: Camille Desmoulins was just beginning to stand out from the throng.
I had hardly alighted, with Madame de Farcy and Madame Lucile, at a hotel in the rue de Richelieu, when a riot broke out. The people rushed to the Abbaye to liberate a few French Guards who had been arrested on the order of their officers, and the noncommissioned officers of an artillery regiment quartered at the Invalides went with them. Military defection had begun.
The Court, sometimes yielding, sometimes trying to resist, a tangle of stiff-necked bravado and craven fear, let itself be harangued by Mirabeau, who asked that the troops be removed, but would not make any effort to remove them: it accepted the affront and did not destroy the cause. A rumor spread through Paris that an army was going to come up through the Montmartre sewers, and that dragoons were going to force the barricades. Somebody suggested that they tear up the paving stones from the streets, carry them up to the fifth floor, and hurl them at the tyrant’s henchmen; everyone went to work. In the midst of this babble, M. Necker received an order to resign. The new ministry was to consist of Messrs. de Breteuil, de la Galaisière, Marshal de Broglie, de la Vaugoyon, de Laporte, and Foulon, who would be replacing Messrs. de Montmorin, de la Luzerne, de Saint-Priest, and de Nivernais.
A Breton poet, newly arrived in Paris, had asked me to take him to Versailles. There are people who visit fountains and gardens while empires are being overthrown. Scribblers especially have this capacity for isolating themselves in the world of their obsessions, even during the most historic events: for them, their sentence or their stanza takes the place of everything.
I took my Pindar to Mass in the gallery of Versailles. The Oeil-de-Boeuf was radiant: M. Necker’s dismissal had lifted everyone’s spirits, and they were feeling sure of victory. Perhaps Sanson and Simon, mingling in the crowd, were spectators of the royal family’s good cheer.
The Queen passed by with her two children. Their blond heads seemed to be awaiting their crowns. The eleven-year-old Madame le Duchesse d’Angoulême, in particular, attracted all eyes with her virginal dignity. Beautiful by dint of her noble blood and her girlish innocence, she seemed to say, like Corneille’s orange flower in the Guirlande de Julie:
I have all the splendor of my birth.
The little Dauphin walked under his sister’s guidance, and M. Du Touchet followed close behind his pupil. He noticed me and obligingly pointed me out to the Queen. Casting her eyes on me with a smile, she made me the same charming curtsy as she had on the day of my presentation. I will never forget those eyes, which were so soon to be extinguished. When Marie-Antoinette smiled, the shape of her mouth was so clear that the memory of this smile (horrible thought!) allowed me to recognize the jaw of this daughter of kings when the unfortunate woman’s head was discovered in the exhumations of 1815.
The counter-blow to the blow struck in Versailles resounded in Paris. On my return, I ran headlong into a multitude of people who carried busts of M. Necker and the Duc d’Orléans draped in mourning sheets. They shouted, “Long Live Necker! Long Live the Duc d’Orléans!” and among these shouts a bolder and more unexpected cry could be heard: “Long Live Louis XVII!” Long live a child whose very name would have been forgotten in his family’s funeral epitaph if I hadn’t recalled it to the Chamber of Peers! If only Louis XVI had abdicated, Louis XVII would have been placed on the throne, the Duc d’Orléans would have been declared regent, and what would have happened then?
In the Place Louis XV, the Prince de Lambesc, at the head of the Royal German Guards, drove the people back into the Tuileries garden and wounded an old man. Suddenly the signal bell sounded. Munitions shops were looted and thirty thousand muskets were taken from the Invalides. The people provided themselves with pikes, staves, pitchforks, sabers, and pistols; they pillaged Saint-Lazare and burned the barricades. The voters of Paris took over the government of the capital, and, in one night, sixty thousand citizens were organized, armed, and equipped as National Guards.
As for July 14, the taking of the Bastille: I was present as a spectator at this attack on a few invalids and a timorous governor. If they had kept the gates shut, the people never could have stormed the fortress. I saw two or three cannonballs fired, not by the invalids, but by French Guardsmen who had already climbed the towers. De Launay, the governor, was dragged from his hiding place, suffered a thousand outrages, and was bludgeoned to death on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. Flesselles, the provost of merchants, had his brains blown out by a pistol. This was the spectacle that the heartless bigots found so beautiful. Between these murders, the people gave themselves over to orgies, as during the troubles in Rome under Otho and Vitellius. The so-called “conquerors of the Bastille”—those happy drunks declared victorious in every cabaret—were paraded through the streets in hackney cabs, escorted by prostitutes and sans-culottes, who were then just beginning their reign. Bystanders, out of a respect born of fear, doffed their hats to these heroes, some of whom died of fatigue in the course of their triumph. Keys to the Bastille quickly multiplied and were sent to all the simpletons of importance in every corner of the world. I am always missing my chance at fortune! If only I, a spectator, had signed my name in the registry of conquerors, I would have a pension today.
The experts rushed to conduct an autopsy of the Bastille. Makeshift cafés were set up under tents, and people congregated there as if it were the Saint-Germain fair or Longchamp. A long line of carriages threaded past or stopped at the foot of the towers whose stones were now being thrown to the ground in a maelstrom of dust. Elegantly appareled women and fashionable young men stood on the various levels of the Gothic rubble and mingled with half-naked laborers who were busy demolishing the walls to the cheers of the crowd. At this rendezvous one saw the most famous orators, the best-known men of letters, the most celebrated painters, the most renowned actors and actresses, the most acclaimed dancers, the most illustrious foreigners, the grandees of the Court, and the ambassadors of Europe. Old France had gone there to end, new France to begin.
No event, no matter how wretched or odious in itself, should be treated lightly when its circumstances are serious and it brings about a new epoch. What should have been seen in the taking of the Bastille (and what no one saw at the time) was not the violent act of emancipating the people, but the emancipation itself, which resulted from that act.
Everyone admired what he should have condemned, the accident, and no one looked to the future to see what was in store for the people, the changes in manners, ideas, and political power—a renovation of the human race in which the taking of the Bastille was only the prelude to an era, a sort of bloodstained jubilee. Brutish anger made ruins, and beneath this anger was a hidden intelligence that laid among these ruins the foundations of a new edifice.
But the nation, deceived by the grandeur of material facts, was not deceived by the grandeur of moral facts. In the nation’s eyes, the Bastille was the trophy of its servitude; it seemed erected at the entryway to Paris, across from the sixteen pillars of Montfaucon, as a gallows on which liberties were hanged.* By razing this fortress of the State, the people thought to break the military yoke and thereby tacitly agreed to take the place of the army that they were disbanding. And we know what marvels were born when the people became soldiers.
*Fifty-two years later, fifteen Bastilles have been erected to oppress that same liberty in the name of which they razed the first one. (Paris, 1841)