April 1790
Gypsy girls like lizards
lost in the tiniest porch way.
Sarcophagi, urns, dankness of gondolas,
verselets brush past him
like the elbow of a child
as she runs. Damp, dirty, idle movement,
troubled hours in the nest of stone and water.
Foreigners cheated any way.
The gazette reports the National Assembly.
O Boredom, mother of the Muses!
One single talent remains:
to write in German language
following a tribe of jugglers.
But the servant unearths among the dunes
a skull at the Jewish cemetery.
And in the decayed muzzle of a ram,
sphenoid, ethmoid, ear socket,
shines the Primal Bone.
From one vertebra
descends the All.
“So ends the best day of our life,” wrote the fédérés of a French village, closing their account of the celebration of July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, day of the General Federation. “France’s wedding with France,” wrote Michelet, and this was just one of dozens of images he used to describe the occasion. He would not allow himself to break the flow of the story with a single comment: “even the smallest remark could have created an interruption, a discord, perhaps, in that sacred moment.” It was an age to which there could be no return, when the Revolution was “innocence and credulity.” Moments “prior to fulfillment” (as was written on the tortoise shell of the I Ching), to the promise of a Final Deed, moments which then—on recollection, as with love sickness—become the Deed itself. Once it is over, “the little fox wets its tail” and the Final Deed becomes oppressive: never push as far as complete happiness, with its persecutory element. Stay with the promesse de bonheur.
That day—of double significance, recalling both a bureaucratic innovation (the creation of départements put forward by Sieyès) and the storming of a prison (the Bastille, swept by erotic flames and cruel familiar vengeance)—mobilized the primordial images that came before Temples and Priests, images that inhabited Holy Places, Altars of the Soil, the Sacred spread over the countryside, split between sun and shade.
The fact that it really was a return to the beginning is assured by the seal of kitsch that authenticates all the images here: from the anonymous accounts of the provincial fédérés up to Michelet, to Jaurès, to the perennial quaver in the democratic voice, brought together in the oath of that day. At noon on July 14, the villages seemed empty, the occasional dog crossed the road. “No temple would have been enough.” No witnesses, everyone taking part. The Altar of the Soil is reconstructed at the center of the Holy Place, between north- and south-facing slopes, lines of young people facing each other, but the record does not suggest the verses of the Shih Ching, which respond like the belling of deer. It is the sad lot of Liberty to have to improvise. And if the mind, gliding and sleepwalking in the past, moves once more toward human sacrifice, the euphemism of the Enlightenment will produce this scene: “The newborn child was taken and carried, a living bloom, among the harvest flowers. His mother offered him, placed him on the altar. But he didn’t have just the passive role of an offering, the newborn child was also active, he counted as a person, he swore a civic oath through his mother’s mouth, he claimed his dignity as a man and as a Frenchman, he took possession of the fatherland, he entered hope.”
Provincial France celebrated its rite in open countryside, but Paris had to find the appropriate place inside the city. The vast Champ de Mars was chosen, and an invisible architect shaped it sufficiently to give it the ceremonial hallmarks of the Holy Place: no longer a formless expanse, but a valley excavated by thousands of hands between two hills. “By day, by night, men of all classes, of all ages, even children, everyone, citizens, soldiers, abbés, monks, actors, Sisters of Charity, smart ladies, fruit sellers, all holding a mattock, pushing a wheelbarrow or a cart. Children went ahead of them, lighting the way; strolling orchestras cheered the workers: they themselves, leveling the ground, sang that leveling song: ‘Ah! Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira! Celui qui s’élève on l’abaissera’ (‘Ah! It’ll be fine! It’ll be fine! It’ll be fine! He who thinks himself high shall be brought down’).” Excavation work was also the society event of the week: the Duchesse de Luynes had a splendid mahogany wheelbarrow made, with which she moved gravel and soil as her contribution to the enterprise.
On the day of the Celebration, amid squalls of rain and wind, brought by the “Good Lord,” who (they said) is “an aristocrat,” a hundred and sixty thousand people (or two hundred and fifty thousand? or four hundred thousand?) looked down from the artificial hills of the Champ de Mars at the great central valley, where a large pyramid stood: the Altar to the Fatherland. According to one witness: “This altar was an immense construction, one hundred feet high; it rested on four buttresses that occupied the angles of its vast square and supported tripods of colossal proportion. These buttresses were joined together by flights of steps which were so wide that a whole battalion could climb each one. Rising from the platform to which they led was a pyramid-shaped rampart with a great number of steps, crowned by the Altar of the Fatherland, shaded by a palm tree.”
A few weeks before the Fête de la Fédération, a wealthy Prussian nobleman, Jean-Baptiste de Cloots, arrived at the door of the Salle du Manège at the head of a delegation calling itself the “Embassy of the Human Race.” In the same way that Rousseau’s elusive “general will” would be palpably manifest among the mattocks and wheelbarrows of the Champ de Mars, likewise Humanity, this figure of more or less eighteenth-century invention, was now sending her representatives out to reconnoiter. “Who are you?” they were asked. “We come from Europe, we come from Asia, we come from America. We are Humanity!” Georges Avenel, the inspired nineteenth-century biographer of Cloots, describes this arrival with all the thrill of a race at the Vél’ d’Hiv’: “The excitement increases; there is general elation. Now it’s the turn of the human race! From the nation to the human race there is barely an inch. Yes, for sure, the human race itself is at the gate. It is waiting. Make way! Everyone feels it, they long for it. It’s about to arrive, it’s arriving!” At last they appeared at the Assembly, thirty-six of them. There was Pio, a Neapolitan; Don Pablo Olivares, a Spanish victim of the Inquisition; the baron von Trenck, who had been shackled to sixty-eight pounds of chains in a Prussian jail; there were Dutch and English patriots, a Turk, an Arab, and a Chaldean who had just been hired as extras at the opera house; others included an interpreter in Oriental languages at the Collège de France and various out-of-work servants. That evening, urged along by the excitement stirred by the “Embassy of the Human Race,” the Assembly voted to abolish hereditary titles, with the consequent Fall of Names. Cloots’s embassy, dispatched from the Realm of Operetta to announce the imminent infiltration of its subjects into Europe, gave the final impetus to the decapitation of those noble titles with whose aroma operetta would be spiced.
La Fête de la Fédération had only just finished. Still quivering with excitement, Jean-Baptiste de Cloots wanted to recount it all to the turbulent “Sappho of the Gauls,” Fanny de Beauharnais, his friend, writer, and Joséphine’s aunt by marriage: “We have won, we have triumphed, and you were not there! Hurry. Madame, hurry. Come, be a witness to the joy of a free nation which, in its happy struggle, takes its place among the Greeks and the Romans. Now we can believe the amazing stories of the father of history and his emulators, those like Thucydides and Titus Livy. I won’t describe to you a solemn ceremony that eclipses the memory of all celebrations, ancient and modern. The picture I gazed at for twelve hours cannot be adequately depicted, either with a paintbrush or in words. The place, prepared with our own hands, is breathtaking for its enormity, simplicity, arrangement. Imagine the largest coliseum in the world, crowned by the fine hills of Chaillot, Passy, Meudon, Montmartre; and the dense branches of eight avenues of trees forming a verdant enclosure that surrounds the arena and provides a charming setting for three hundred thousand spectators. The triumphal arch, the bridge over the river, the elegant altar, and the Roman edifice together provided an enchanting scene, with all the flags, all the banners, all the French Empire’s weapons of attack and defense. The cannon, the music, and the applause shook heaven and earth.
“In my capacity as ambassador of the human race, I was at the head of the foreigners in the palace galleries, and the ministers of the tyrants looked upon us with a jealous and fearful eye. This national celebration transports us back two thousand years, through its own indescribable patina of antiquity, and it transports us forward two thousand years, through the swift progress of reason, for which this federation is the sweet and early fruit. I will not describe, Madame, all that I experienced yesterday; my heart is delicate and my patriotism ardent: imagine the rest and come as soon as you can.”
Talleyrand limped up to the altar of the Champ de Mars to carry out the ceremony. He was then bishop of Autun, and considered by both the old and the new religion as a most godless being. It is not the clumsy king, nor the treacherous queen, but the Priest of the Fête who is the blot that assures the presence of deceit at the center of the paradise improvised by the General Will. And such Will, above all, in its tumultuous vagueness, needed a light finishing touch from Talleyrand himself to stir the feast. To some extent it has to thank him that this day remains the most luminous for those who dream of the quiet and spontaneous embraces of the masses. A month earlier, speaking at the Constituent Assembly, it was Talleyrand who claimed that “that Fête de la Fédération would never have been solemn enough,” and then went on to suggest the reasons for its utility: “Strengthening the ties of brotherhood between all citizens, making everyone aware of the Patriotism that stirs the French, it will end up convincing the enemies of the revolution, if any still exist, how vain their efforts would be in destroying it.”
Talleyrand had not celebrated many masses as bishop. The day before the Fête, he rehearsed the ceremony at the house of the Marquis de Saisseval, in rue de Lille, together with his friend Mirabeau, who was more familiar with the liturgy. Mirabeau had learned it in prison, to pass the time. They used the mantelpiece as the altar. The other guests sat laughing in their armchairs. Talleyrand’s small dog bit his episcopal cassock in fright.
The vast procession set off from the Bastille at seven in the morning. The sky was gray and overcast. Repeated showers of rain. Delays. Crowds pressed everywhere, breaking through the ranks. A floating bridge was built across the Seine. Then everyone, near and far, surrounded the blue-and-gold tent of the royal tribune. On the steps the king, the dauphin, the queen, dressed in tricolor. Flags everywhere. Lafayette cantering on a white horse. Three hundred robed priests and servers in smocks and tricolor sashes. Talleyrand follows them with his miter, limping along with the aid of his crook. The orchestra plays, twelve hundred instruments. Passing in front of Lafayette, who has just climbed down from his steed, Talleyrand murmurs: “Please, don’t make me laugh…”
At the end of this ceremony—a strident idyll that marked the beginning of the age of mass politics—Talleyrand took off his bishop’s vestments and immediately went to a gaming hall. He won, won massively—he broke the bank. Then he left. “I had more gold on me than I could put in my pockets, without counting the bills from the Caisse d’Escompte.” He went to the house of the Vicomtesse de Laval and, in front of his friends, he turned the piles of gold onto the table. After dinner he went back to play. He won again, won massively. “I went back to the vicomtesse, to show her the gold and the banknotes. I was covered with them; they were even stuffed into my hat. And note well: it was July 14.”
The day after the Fête de la Fédération, Talleyrand sent the following comment to his mistress en titre, Madame de Flahaut: “If you were as satisfied with your place at yesterday’s ridiculous celebration as I was at seeing you and admiring you sitting there, you must have endured the storm with the same philosophy as your friend Sieyès, who, in the presence of sixteen people, asked me, with the sardonic smile that you well know, how I had managed to keep a straight face while performing the buffoonery of the Champ de Mars with such skill, and how many Christians I thought there were among those hundred thousand spectators present who swore the National and Christian oath. I told him I had no idea how many. ‘According to my calculations,’ he went on, ‘there may have been five hundred, including the Duc [de Biron], you, me and those of our party.’ To tell the truth, dear friend, I fear he was exaggerating the number of believers. And I will say this: despite being a philosopher, I deplore the progressive lack of faith in the people. I share the opinion of Voltaire: whether we ourselves believe in God or not, it would nevertheless be dangerous for any society if the multitude thought that, finding no punishment in this world nor retribution in the next, it can therefore steal, poison, murder. We find ourselves in an age when doctrines against morality are to be feared more than ever, since the mass of the people believe themselves superior to it. And the most deplorable thing is that the Assembly shows an interest in stirring up among the people this spirit of political and moral anarchy. I well know that it is quite unromantic to entertain one’s beloved with idle philosophical thoughts. But in who else could I ever confide my innermost thoughts if not in you who are above the biases and prejudices of your sex? … … …
“So far as I am concerned—between ourselves—I couldn’t say who I feel more sorry for: the sovereign or the people, France or Europe. If the prince takes for granted the love of the people then he is lost, and if the people, for their part, don’t guard themselves against the character of the prince, I see it ending in terrible disaster, I see years of bloodshed to cancel out the enthusiasm of a few months. I see the innocent and the guilty embroiled in the same devastation. Whatever happens, either the cause of freedom is under threat, or the peace of France is at risk.
“Far be it for me to suspect Louis XVI of thirsting for blood, but a weak monarch surrounded by bad advisors easily becomes cruel, or, to put it another way, his weakness allows certain cruelties to be practiced under the authority of his name. In whatever way I look at the consequences of yesterday’s events, I fear for the future. … … …
“Burn this letter.”
The unreliability of the historian. Louis Madelin, an eminent Napoleonic historian, considers Talleyrand’s remark to Lafayette during the Fête de la Fédération to be unreliable, because it is “improbable.” Pasquier, who recorded it in his Mémoires, claimed he heard it from Lafayette himself. But Madelin insists: “The man [Talleyrand] was not a sacrilegious loudmouth and, as for Lafayette, a very serious character, he was never able to make anyone laugh.”
Between the Fall of Names, indirectly provoked by Cloots’s embassy, and the Fête de la Fédération, Michelet is gripped by pathos; several times he is caught up in the eloquence of great moments, he bows before the “prophetic symbol.” But the emphasis also serves to delicately protect the gleaming nucleus of the Revolution: “In this system there is no passing on of previous merit, there is no nobility. But neither is there any transmission of earlier guilt.” The task of the Revolution is to wipe out original sin. The abolition of the merits of birth is no more than the exoteric face of a much more radical abolition: that of the guilt of mankind, Adamic guilt, the cancellation of original sin. Evil is now reduced to a conscious action willed by an individual: it is not a legacy that weighs on the fabric of life, that oversteps all limits of will and consciousness, that leaves its mark on everything. Here, all of a sudden, Michelet is a theologian—and from the shadows he summons his rival theologian, Joseph de Maistre, a man who, when he refers to the Revolution, will always refer to the indelibility of original sin.
What is striking above all in the Fête de la Fédération is the nakedness of the symbolism. No one recognizes symbols when they emerge from sleep, from carelessness, and from mockery—and then they seek to be transformed into Fact. The specter that guides the Revolution is that of the coniunctio, of the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage. But the first gesture of union immediately ebbs toward unity: “Alas! Experience of the world teaches us something strangely sad, though true, that union is often reduced to unity.” Thus it happens that “yesterday, the Revolution was a matter of religion; and now it becomes police.” Yesterday, in Michelet’s dream, it is the Fête de la Fédération; now it is the massacre that would be carried out, exactly a year later, in the same Holy Place.
Lafayette’s white horse cantered once again over the Champ de Mars, on Sunday, July 17, 1791. It was just as laughable, but this time the ceremony would find the symbol that was absent the first time, the symbol of all symbols: bloodshed.
According to Michelet, “the fiercest royalists were not perhaps the nobles, nor the priests, but the hairdressers.” The slogan of the age—“Return to nature”—had mortally wounded them. “Everything was moving toward a horrifying simplicity.” During the night of July 16, an out-of-work hairdresser with lustful intent began wandering the Champ de Mars. He had a tawdry scheme. He wanted to hide himself under the planks of the Altar of the Fatherland to peep under the petticoats of his lost clients, “the haughty women republicans, women tribunes with caps, women orators of the clubs, women in Roman dress, women literati,” who would soon “proudly be climbing onto it.”
The city was in turmoil. The Assembly, amid opposition, had just decreed “the inviolability” of the king. But a petition from opponents, which proposed no longer to recognize “Louis XVI or any other king,” had been carried to the Champ de Mars. The people were to sign it that Sunday, on the Altar of the Fatherland. The hairdresser had chosen an old disabled soldier as his accomplice. They took with them something to eat and a cask of water. Hidden in the darkness, they began to bore holes into the planks with a gimlet. But early in the morning, a woman vendor who was already there, waiting at the Altar of the Fatherland, heard a strange noise beneath her feet. The two scoundrels were busy making holes. They had been found out. A crowd soon gathered around them. The formidable washerwomen of Gros-Caillou rushed to the scene. It was rumored the two men had been caught with a barrel of gunpowder, that they wanted to “blow up the people.” Shortly after, their throats were slit. Around nine in the morning, the two heads were carried in procession to the Palais-Royal. It marked the beginning of a sequence of orders, counterorders, ploys, rumors, misunderstandings, altercations. Meanwhile the crowd gathered on the Champ de Mars. Many people were signing the petition with their names or with crosses. There was an air of celebration. Toward noon, some people started to organize dancing. One witness saw the Altar of the Fatherland as a “lively mountain, formed by so many human beings on top of each other.” Then Lafayette arrived with his men. Someone fired at him and was immediately arrested. Lafayette, magnanimous and vain, ordered him to be released. Later other guards arrived, together with cavalry, artillery, and along with Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the astronomer and mayor of Paris, who looked pale and overwhelmed by the events. A group of hairdressers also arrived carrying arms: they wanted to avenge their colleague. There were shots, clouds of dust, screams. The dead lay strewn over the planks of the Altar of the Fatherland. The number is not known: many were thrown into the Seine. From that time, the history books talk about the “Champ de Mars Massacre.”
On the same hot afternoon, Gouverneur Morris, ever curious, attempted to climb up toward Passy to see the fighting on the Champ de Mars from above. But he didn’t get there in time. Morris had arrived in Paris from Philadelphia at the beginning of the Estates General. In the United States he had put the finishing touches to the Constitution with a solid sense of the facts and for what was possible. He had lost a leg in an accident. His faltering French was that of a distant province, inadequate for the aphoristic flashes of conversation. But his American credentials were still good enough in Paris to stir well-meaning curiosity. In short, he was a trusted guest in many illustrious houses. He assiduously courted Madame de Flahaut, and with some success. At that time she had an apartment at the Louvre and was already Talleyrand’s mistress. Gouverneur referred to Talleyrand as “the bishop.” Once he had got to know him, he found him “sly, cunning, ambitious and malicious.”
Back down from Passy, Morris spent that Sunday evening of July 17 with Madame de Ségur. Returning home, he spent a contemplative moment—rare for him—looking at the Seine: “I think one of the finest views I ever saw was that which presented itself this evening from the Pont Royal. A fine moonshine, a dead silence, and the river descending gently through the various bridges between lofty houses, all illuminated (for the sake of the police), and on the other side the woods and distant hills. Not a breath of air stirring. The weather has this day been very hot.”