‘Quand la lutte s’engage entre le peuple et la Bastille, c’est toujours la Bastille qui finit par avoir tort.’
‘When a struggle breaks out between the people and the Bastille, it is always the Bastille that ends up in the wrong.’
Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), French general and president, in a speech on Bastille Day, 1943
AS WE HAVE seen, in early 1789 there was a window of opportunity for a smooth transition to constitutional change, led by articulate, thoughtful democrats like Bailly and Mounier, who were determined to impose equal rights for all (all males, at least), but who wanted to avoid violence.
However, this window was about to be slammed shut, rather like the falling blade of a guillotine, plummeting France into a period of mob rule, mass panic, civil war and state-endorsed massacre that would continue, with periodic explosions of violence, for almost a hundred years.
The problem was that no one would summon the courage or possess the power to oppose the more violent tendencies of populism. The English traveller Arthur Young attended early sessions of the Assemblée nationale debates in Versailles. He was caught up in the excitement of the fundamental debates going on, and praised the ardour of speakers like Sieyès, Mounier and Mirabeau, but noted something disturbing:
The spectators in the galleries are allowed to interfere in the debates by clapping their hands, and other noisy expressions of approbation: this is grossly indecent; it is also dangerous; for, if they are permitted to express approbation, they are, by parity of reason, allowed expressions of dissent; and they may hiss as well as clap … this would be to over-rule the debate and influence the deliberations.
Over the next few years, both in the streets and in the debating chamber, the opinionated, extremist elements of ‘the people’ would wage a successful campaign of shouting down or physically intimidating the more rational, peaceful reformers.
In this, they would be supported, and even encouraged, by some of the greatest revolutionary ‘heroes’ like Danton, Robespierre and Marat, who were all rabble-rousers, and all ended up with French blood on their hands. Fittingly perhaps, they were all doomed to fall victim to the violence they encouraged in the mob. Today, the French would be loath to admit it, but what is usually remembered as the most glorious period in their historyfn1 was in fact a time when a few opportunistic, populist politicians seized power by claiming to be the mouthpiece of le peuple, when what the majority of French citizens really wanted was pain et paix – bread and peace.
It has always puzzled me why France should have chosen the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille as its national holiday. Admittedly, England commemorates the day when a dragon supposedly got beheaded (or rather, usually forgets to commemorate it). America, on the other hand, which in part served as an example for the French Revolution, never fails to celebrate the adoption of its Declaration of Independence. Every 4 July, Americans are meant to remember the famous sentence ‘We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ These idealistic sentiments were slightly tainted by the continuation of slavery for almost 90 years and segregation for 100 more, but on 4 July every year, it’s the thought that counts. The same cannot really be said of Bastille Day.
Like the Americans, France also adopted a new democratic constitution and a declaration of human rights during its Revolution, but it still chooses to commemorate what in fact was a riot designed to grab a stock of gunpowder held inside a castle. French historians will object that, non, it was an attack on a notorious prison, a bastion of royalist authority. But this again is largely fake news – the Bastille was where people were sent by royal lettres de cachet, and many of the letters were requested by the prisoners’ own aristocratic families, who wanted their errant sons to get a dose of tough love, or to stop them committing more crimes that would dishonour the family name.
On 14 July 1789, there were only seven inmates in the Bastille – four forgers awaiting trial, two men who had been declared insane (including one aristocrat), and a count, Hubert de Solages, who had been sent there at the request of his own family on suspicion of incest with his sister.
Yet, out of all the momentous changes that occurred during the revolutionary years after 1789, this is the event that France has chosen as its greatest national triumph – the morning when disgruntled Parisians took it upon themselves to ignore the fundamental reforms being achieved for them out in the debating halls of Versailles, and decided to start blowing things up.
The storming of the Bastille was not even the first event of its kind in Paris that year. As we saw above, a mob had stormed the Réveillon wallpaper factory in April – though it would have been impossible to choose that as the anniversary of the start of the Revolution, because it was little more than misdirected vandalism.
Fearing a repeat of the Réveillon riot, in early July, around 30,000 royal troops were moved into Paris, some of them setting up camp very visibly on the Champ de Mars, by the river where the Eiffel Tower now stands.
On 11 July, Louis XVI sacked his Finance Minister Necker again, less than a year after reinstating him. It is often said that this was because Necker refused to attend the last royal session of the États généraux on 23 June, or that Louis wanted to install a more conservative Finance Minister, but it was also because Necker’s dull, purely economic speech during the opening debate had shown that he was badly out of touch with the political climate. Necker was also refusing to work with the new Assemblée – he had to go so that progress with the new constitution could be made.
But by the time news of Necker’s dismissal reached Paris the next day, it had been distorted. Instead of the inevitable firing of a man who was resisting change, it was presented as a despotic move by the King who wanted to get rid of the people’s champion, the national provider of subsidized grain. Along with the arrival of troops in Paris, it ‘proved’ that Louis XVI was preparing to stamp out democracy in France.
When this piece of fake news hit the Parisian cafés, where the latest political pamphlets were constantly being dictated and digested, it took very little for the heated atmosphere there to be teased into flames of revolt. A little-known lawyer called Camille Desmoulins, a member of the hot-headed Mirabeau’s entourage, is now credited with making the speech that inflamed the mob. It is said that around noon on Sunday, 12 July, he stood on a chair in the Café de Foy,fn2 one of the cafés that lined the Palais-Royal gardens (which belonged, incidentally, to the royal troublemaker Louis Philippe), and, with a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, gave an impromptu speech along the lines of:
Monsieur Necker has been dismissed. His dismissal is a bell to announce a St Bartholemew’s massacre of patriots [a reference to the mass murder of Protestants in Paris in 1572]. Tonight, the Swiss and German battalions [of royal mercenaries] will come out of the Champ-de-Mars to cut our throats. It leaves us with one resource – to take up arms.
This was inflammatory nonsense, a lot like Mirabeau’s rant about bayonets a few days earlier. Far from having their throats slit, the patriots were safely installed in Versailles, working on the new constitution. The King’s Swiss and German guards were in their barracks, along with their French colleagues, with no orders to massacre anyone.
But when it suits them, people will believe anything. Arthur Young, the English agriculturalist, was in Paris and Versailles at this time, and was generally sympathetic to the Assemblée nationale’s aims, but he was appalled by the way fake news about the monarchy was believed in the cafés of the Palais-Royal: ‘The reports that were circulated eagerly, tending to show the violent intentions of the court, as if it was bent on the utter extirpation of the French nation … are perfectly incredible for their gross absurdity: but nothing was so glaringly ridiculous but the mob swallowed it with undiscriminating faith.’ He was also ‘stunned by the hawkers of seditious pamphlets and descriptions of pretended events, that all tend to keep the people ignorant and alarmed’.
On 12 July, after Camille Desmoulins’s speech, an armed but ill-informed mob began parading along the nearby Tuileries gardens, led by men carrying busts of Necker and Louis Philippe. As darkness fell, cavalrymen of the Royal German Regiment came to dispel the crowd, though no one’s throat was cut in the process.
Partially fulfilling Desmoulins’s prophecy, the Swiss Guards were also sent out into the streets, but their only action was to clash with members of the French Guard when the two royal regiments bumped into each other outside the latter’s barracks in the north of Paris.
That night, and during the following day, rioters attacked and burned 40 of the 54 toll booths in the disastrously misconceived Mur des Fermiers généraux, the wall erected in 1784 around the centre of Paris to collect taxes on products brought into the city. With grain scarce and prices high despite Necker’s attempt to control them, a tax on wheat was the last thing Paris needed, and the pompous, château-like booths were obvious targets for public resentment.
Just as obvious, but more ill informed, was the attack on the Convent of Saint-Lazare, which was situated near the current railway station of the same name, not far from the barracks of the French Guards. At about 2.30 a.m. on 13 July, around twenty men armed with axes and guns broke into the convent.
Once the first gang had forced its way past the main gate, another twenty-odd men arrived, and began firing their guns into the air. A student came and asked them what they wanted: ‘Food and drink,’ they answered, so the student opened up a refectory and the men were given meat, bread, wine and cherries. They then threatened to kill him if he didn’t give them money. The convent’s treasurer came and offered the men a small fortune to leave, but they decided they would rather stay and pillage the place.
Meanwhile, attracted by the sound of gunfire, poor people from the surrounding neighbourhood began a rampage around the corridors of the convent, trashing, burning and stealing, and beating up anyone who stood in their way. The convent’s library of some 20,000 books was completely destroyed, as were all the remedies in its dispensary.
The attack is usually explained away by historians as a sort of accident; they say that the rioters were reacting to a rumour that Saint-Lazare was a depot for weapons and grain – implying that the looters were victims of misinformation. But the people who were in the convent at the time describe an outbreak of untamed, random violence. One of the men who lived there even wrote regretfully about the deaths of ‘around thirty men and women in the cellar, floating in the wine, drowned after getting drunk’, and several who poisoned themselves drinking the spirits in the dispensary.
Predictably, the priests, novices, nuns and philosophy students at Saint-Lazare had no weapons. They did have grain, which was to make bread for the 500 or so members of the community, for a nearby hospital and for distribution to the poor. All this was stolen, along with anything of value that the rioters didn’t smash, burn or simply throw out of the windows. A witness called Cousin Jacques lamented after the attack that ‘the poor people of the neighbourhood are now deprived for a long time of the abundant help they received [from the convent].’
These eyewitness accounts are collected in a book called Histoire de Saint-Lazare, published in 1912 by a certain Eugène Pottet, who had no anti-revolutionary axe to grind – in fact, he says in his introduction to the chapter about the 1789 attack that he believes in the ‘progress, true justice and humanity that we owe to the French Revolution’. He is, however, horrified by the senselessness of the attack – ‘is it in blood that the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity must flower?’
It is a question that could be asked of almost everything that was to happen in France over the next four or five years.
With even royal troops brawling amongst themselves, it was clearly up to civilians to step in and restore order. The man whose job it now became to keep the peace in Paris was called Jacques de Flesselles. In April 1789, he had been made prévôt des marchands de Paris (de facto mayor), replacing a more old-school aristocrat, Louis le Peletier, a former president of the obstructive Paris parliament.
Closer to Necker, Flesselles was a liberal choice. He had been intendant (royal administrator) of Lyon for 16 years, during which he had partially democratized the city’s income tax system and overseen a boom in its textile industry.
On 13 July 1789, he let 12 of Paris’s électeurs (men who had voted for the États généraux delegates) come to the Hôtel de Ville (city hall) to join a new municipal council, which elected him president and then demanded the formation of a militia (a garde bourgeoise) to protect Paris against mob rule. It was decided that their uniform would be a cocarde (rosette) in the city’s colours – a blue circle surrounded by red.
That same night, this decision was modified, and white was added between the two colours, forming the now-famous tricolour (which would be adopted as the national flag in 1794). It is usually forgotten, though, that white was then the royal colour. Louis XVI was being symbolically invited to join the new regime.
However, as soon as the formation of this ‘guard’ was announced, a mob gathered outside the Hôtel de Ville demanding weapons. Apparently fearing that public order was the last thing on his new militia’s mind, Flesselles promised (truly or falsely – the debate still rages on) that 12,000 muskets were being sent to arm them. Unsatisfied, a crowd broke into the royal museum of decorative arts, the garde-meuble royal (literally, the monarchy’s furniture store), on present-day place de la Concorde. Alongside its collection of chairs and tables it held a hoard of historic weapons that were now stolen by the mob. These were quite literally museum pieces, but a mob armed with swords, spears, maces and pikes is a dangerous thing, as Flesselles was soon to find out – to his cost.
In a more orderly fashion, a delegation of formally appointed members of the new militia went to the military hospital at Les Invalides and demanded their weapons – the governor, a 76-year-old general called Charles François de Virot de Sombreuil, refused, fearing that they were unlikely to be used to appease the climate of violence that was spreading throughout the city. He even got 20 of the hospital’s invalids to spend the night of 13–14 July removing the hammers from muskets so that they would be useless. Legend has it that these old soldiers worked extra slowly, thereby making them revolutionary heroes. But given that the armoury at Les Invalides contained 32,000 muskets, even at full speed they would have been hard-pressed to finish.
Early next morning, 14 July, the delegation of militiamen returned, with an armed escort this time, as well as a horde of followers, to repeat their demand for weapons. Sombreuil assured them that he had sent a letter to Versailles asking the King’s permission to hand over his muskets. Predictably, the crowd of around 80,000 people surrounding the Invalides didn’t want to wait for the morning post, and began to attack the hospital’s gates, which were opened without opposition. Either fearing for their lives or supporting the mob’s cause, the sentries refused to fire.
The new garde bourgeoise, which had been created to maintain public order, was now armed with ancient blades and modern muskets, along with about 20 cannons that had also been taken from the Invalides. All they needed was gunpowder and bullets. And where were they stored? Ah oui, an hour’s stroll along the river, at the Bastille…
The future héros de la nation who were parading around Paris with their mismatched weapons on 14 July 1789 were, it should not be forgotten, meant to be preventing anarchy while the Assemblée nationale constituante finished itemizing the demands in the cahiers de doléances and then voted through urgent reforms. In theory, the garde bourgeoise was meant to stand side by side with royal troops doing the same peacekeeping job. But for the moment, no royal troops had been ordered to step in.
The only recent use of the army against the people had been to dispel the mob that was trying to stir up trouble in the Tuileries by spreading rumours of an impending massacre. And the regiments of infantry and cavalry encamped on the Champ-de-Mars, literally a ten-minute march from the Invalides, were not sent to protect the weapons store there. Advised that his men would probably refuse to oppose the (enormous) mob, the 67-year-old Swiss general in charge at the Champ-de-Mars, a friend of Marie-Antoinette’s called Pierre Victor de Besenval, chose to withdraw his soldiers outside Paris.
The storming of the Bastille (called in French the completely neutral ‘prise’, or ‘taking’) began, like the Invalides the previous day, with a civilized delegation asking for co-operation from its governor, Bernard-René Jourdan de Launay.fn3 A notoriously nervous type, he had already moved his stocks of lead and powder from a store above the entrance gate into an inside courtyard. And like Sombreuil at the Invalides, Launay refused to empty his armoury into the hands of a barely controlled rabble, who had now been joined by some of the people who had ransacked Réveillon’s wallpaper factory nearby.
At first, the atmosphere at the Bastille was perfectly cordial, and Launay invited a deputation of citizens inside to share a late breakfast. After all, it had been a restless night for everyone concerned. Predictably, though, when no one emerged from the castle after an hour, a rumour went round that the breakfast guests had been taken prisoner. Even after they came out, full-bellied but empty-handed, feelings were running high.
A second delegation went into the Bastille, and obtained a promise that the governor would not fire the first shot in any confrontation. But no sooner had they made this pact than three cannons from the Invalides, as well as two antique artillery pieces that had been taken from the garde-meuble, were turned on the Bastille’s gates. At the same time, rioters began trying to hack their way in with axes.
A five-hour siege ensued, during which the guards returned fire from the castle’s turrets. The 32 Swiss Guards and 82 French military invalids on sentry duty killed about a hundred rioters – less than one each. Given that they were firing down on to a compact mob of tens of thousands, this was, by military standards, by no means a murderous riposte. The Bastille also had cannons. Half a dozen volleys of grapeshot (Napoleon’s favourite weapon, which he would use against a Paris mob a few years later) would have killed hundreds in just a few minutes, let alone three hours.
Around 3 p.m., a group of official mediators arrived from the Hôtel de Ville, hoping to end the siege peacefully. They were attacked by the mob. More cannons were brought up, and at about 5 p.m., Launay decided to bow to the inevitable and surrender, though only after shouting through a hole in the castle wall that he wanted to be sure that neither he or his men would be executed. According to whom you believe, he either received a guarantee, or didn’t.
In any case, if he received a promise, it did not extend to lynching, because several of his soldiers were selected for immediate reprisals. Then, while most of the rioters helped themselves to gunpowder and ammunition, Launay and his troops were marched towards the Hôtel de Ville, being badly man-handled on the way (or not, if you believe those who claim that the Revolution was a demonstration of pure humanitarianism). At one point, Launay seems to have had enough of the mistreatment, because he apparently gave an out-of-work baker a hearty kick in the profiteroles, prompting the mob to shoot and stab him to death, before a butcher carved off his head. This trophy was soon being paraded around the place de Grève on the end of a medieval-style pike.
Launay was not alone for long. In his office at the Bastille, a note had been found. It said ‘I am keeping the Parisians amused with rosettes and promises. Hold out until this evening and you will get reinforcements.’ It was signed ‘Flesselles’.
The note was brought back to the Hôtel de Ville by some of the besiegers and read out before the city council and Flesselles himself. According to a rather partisan author called Philippe le Bas, who published an encyclopedia in 1842, the note ‘completed the people’s exasperation’. One of the members of the council, which only the day before had elected Flesselles its president, told him: ‘Get out, Monsieur de Flesselles. You are a traitor. You have betrayed the nation; the nation abandons you.’
This wasn’t exactly fair. Flesselles had been trying to keep weapons out of the hands of excitable rioters. And buoying up the nervous Launay with a jokey note might have prevented the governor of the Bastille from panicking and causing unnecessary bloodshed. At worst, Flesselles was guilty of flippancy and disrespect for the new national rosette.
However, the order to ‘get out’ was as good as a death sentence. Although some French sources insist that most people in the crowd wanted to escort Flesselles to the Palais-Royal to be tried, he emerged from the relative safety of the Hôtel de Ville into a mob that had just carved off the head of an aristocrat. Within seconds, Flesselles had been shot and decapitated, and his head was on a spike alongside Launay’s, being taken on a bird’s eye view tour of Paris.
Philippe le Bas concludes his chapter on Flesselles by saying that his ‘demise was probably awful, but how can one explain his offences?’
The explanation seems pretty simple. His ‘offences’ were a combination of aristocratic arrogance, solidarity with a scared colleague, and misinterpreting the mood of ordinary Parisians – all of this in the face of violence from a mob drunk on its first taste of blood and power. The mob were also forgetting the aims of the democrats it had recently elected to the États généraux, who had just managed to persuade the King to reform the country’s whole political system.
Interestingly, the Paris riots of 13 and 14 July are what the Assemblée nationale delegate Jean Sylvain Bailly, in his memoirs, calls ‘la révolution’, underlining the fact that this violence was separate from what he and the peaceful democrats were doing out at Versailles.
Describing events out in Versailles on 15 July, Bailly records in his memoirs that Louis XVI came to the Assemblée at the members’ request, ‘without guards and without any accompaniment except his brothers’. Ignoring an armchair that had been placed on a dais as an improvised throne, Louis ‘stood, bare-headed’ as a sign of respect. He also used the name ‘Assemblée nationale’, formally acknowledging its status, and did not once refer to ‘estates’. All this delighted the delegates, as did his speech. He told them that he had come to…
… consult [them] on the most important affairs of state. The most urgent, and the one that most affects my heart, is the terrible disorder that reigns in the capital. The head of the nation comes confidently amongst its representatives to express his sadness and to invite them to find a way of restoring order and calm.
After acknowledging the rapturous applause, and listening to a speech of thanks, Louis XVI informed the Assemblée that he had ordered all his troops out of Paris. It was up to the elected representatives of the people to show that they knew how to govern.
Ten years of political infighting were about to begin. However, for the moment, it was joy and mutual congratulations all round. A group of Assemblée delegates accompanied Louis back – on foot – to the palace, forming a protective cortège, not because a mob wanted to behead him, but to keep his admirers at bay. The King’s personal gesture of submission was seen to have saved the nation. Bailly says that he felt ‘drunk with an unexpected happiness that put an end to our cruellest worries’.
At 8 p.m. that evening, a group of 94 delegates decided to go to Paris to reassure the citizens that, contrary to the rumours, they weren’t about to be attacked by a royal army. Mob rule could end. This procession of politicians included Bailly himself, Sieyès, Mounier, the Archbishop of Paris and the Marquis de La Fayette, one of Louis XVI’s army officers who was now vice-president of the Assemblée nationale.
Their arrival in Paris was greeted with unbridled joy. Bailly – who had been appointed the new Mayor of Paris by representatives of its 60 districts – says that the crowds in the street and people at every window were shouting ‘Vive la nation! Vive le Roi! Vivent les députés!’ He adds that: ‘This triumph was sweet; but if I may say so, we deserved it.’
Armed men were everywhere, ‘a forest of rifles’, but Bailly (diplomatically) notes that it was ‘a militia keeping order, not with force and discipline, but with freedom’ – a hint, perhaps, that the mob was still unpredictable.fn4
At the Hôtel de Ville, the Versailles delegates met the Paris council. La Fayette assured the Parisians that ‘the King had been misled, but that has changed; he knows our troubles, and will stop them recurring. Bringing words of peace from him, gentlemen, I also hope to bring him the peace that his heart requires.’ La Fayette then read out a transcript of the King’s speech to the Assemblée, and was cheered. Gérard de Lally-Tollendalfn5 (a noble delegate to the États généraux) told the Paris council that ‘we bring you peace on behalf of the King and the Assemblée nationale. You are generous, you are French, you love your wives, your children, your homeland. There are no more bad citizens amongst you … Now peace must be reborn.’ It was time to stop the raiding, pillaging and lynching. Lally-Tollendal was cheered to the rafters and carried out on to a balcony to be hailed as a hero.
Back inside the Hôtel de Ville, the aristocratic president of the Assemblée, François de la Rochefoucauld, deflated the montgolfière of collective euphoria somewhat by saying that the garde bourgeoise had been officially recognized by the King, and that their excesses had been ‘pardoned’. At this, Bailly says:
Several guards came forward and one of them said heatedly that they did not want a pardon, that they did not need it; in serving the nation, they meant to serve the King. His intentions, which were now clear, proved to the whole of France that only they had been truly loyal to King and country.
It is worth reiterating this. Bailly does not describe the speaker, but it was almost certainly one of the rioters who had grabbed weapons from the Invalides, stormed the Bastille, and cheered as treacherous heads were impaled on spikes outside the very building where this meeting was being held. This was one of the cocarde-wearing militiamen who are regarded today as the real heroes of the Revolution, the noble citizens who took up arms on 14 July 1789, and who toppled the monarchy. And here he was, defiantly defending his actions and yet saying with evident sincerity that he and his colleagues had been serving the King. His spontaneous outburst seems to prove once and for all that July 1789 was not about ending the monarchy. The mob violence in Paris was mainly inspired by hunger, impatience with politicians and false rumours about an imminent attack by royal troops, but at its heart there was a desire to protect the King’s interests.
This is the complete opposite of what modern France would have us believe.
On 17 July, Louis XVI proved once again that, despite his failings, he was a pretty courageous man. With an estimated 100,000 armed citizens roaming the streets of Paris, and knowing full well that two of his representatives there had recently been lynched by those same citizens, Louis came to the city – entirely of his own free will.
The previous day, Bailly had been to see him at the palace of Versailles, pushing through a crowd of panicking courtiers before reaching the King, who calmly announced that he intended to go into the capital. Bailly wrote in his memoirs that Louis was ‘deeply affected by the murders that the people had committed’, but thought that Launay ‘deserved his fate’ (no doubt because he had allowed the situation to degenerate into chaos, and lost his stock of ammunition). At first, Bailly says, Louis wanted to limit his visit to Notre-Dame and the royal palace at the Tuileries. But Bailly quickly persuaded him that this would not satisfy the people, so Louis agreed: ‘I will go to the Hôtel de Ville. When one does something, one must do it completely.’
The King completed his day’s work on the sixteenth by acceding to the Assemblée’s most recent demands – he sacked all his ministers and recalled Necker yet again. To all intents and purposes, France seemed to be operating as a fully functional constitutional monarchy.
On the morning of 17 July 1789, accompanied by a few soldiers and a deputation of Assemblée members to vouch for his peaceful intent (Bailly says that ‘the loyalty of [Paris’s] citizens was well known, but … one could not deny that brigands were operating amongst the good citizens’), Louis XVI was driven to Paris. According to Marie-Antoinette’s confidante Madame Campan, as he left Versailles, ‘a deathly silence reigned throughout the palace, the fear was extreme; we hardly expected the King to return.’
Louis was met by Mayor Bailly and around 50 city representatives at Chaillot, on the western edge of Paris, opposite where the Eiffel Tower now stands. There, Bailly gave a speech telling the King that in Paris he would ‘enjoy the love of his faithful subjects’, and that ‘neither your people, nor Your Majesty will ever forget this great day. It is the monarchy’s most beautiful day. It marks the start of an eternal alliance between the monarch and the people.’
Again, it is timely to remember that this was only three days after the original Bastille Day, and that Bailly was not some nostalgic aristocrat expressing relief that the King had not yet been deposed, imprisoned or executed. He was a commoner, one of the men who had overturned the ancient estates system, and the newly appointed head of the people’s council that had seized control of Paris.
Louis XVI replied briefly that he was happy to receive this homage from Paris and its representatives, and then his carriage set off for the five-kilometre ride to the Hôtel de Ville, its whole route lined by massed ranks of men and women armed with rifles, swords, pikes, lances and scythes (Paris was surrounded by small farms). There were, Bailly says, even monks with muskets on their shoulders. For a king accustomed to the protection of his personal guard, it must have been an unnerving spectacle.
As he was crossing the place Louis XV (the present-day Concorde) three musket shots rang out, one of them killing a woman not far from the royal coach, another making a hole in the hat of a marquis riding alongside the King. A failed assassination attempt perhaps, though the incident does not seem to have caused much panic, either in the crowd or the royal entourage. By now the city was probably inured to sudden death on the streets. Besides, it must have been hard to hear three shots, because the huge crowd was chanting ‘Vive le Roi!’ and ‘Vive la nation!’ while trumpets were sounded and cannonades were fired to welcome the royal visitor.
Two kilometres further on, the procession passed a line of cannons guarding the Pont-Neuf, their barrels loaded with flowers – like 1967, it seems that 1789 was a summer of love.
At the Hôtel de Ville, Louis XVI got out of his carriage and was presented with a tricolour cocarde that he pinned to his hat. He then walked into the building surrounded by a tight group of citizens who formed a clinking canopy of sword blades over his head – a bizarre and unexpected gesture that apparently did not frighten Louis.
Inside the council chamber, he was greeted with applause and ‘Vive le Roi!’ before taking his seat on a throne and being hailed by the city representatives as ‘Notre roi, notre père!’ A councillor called Louis de Corny, a former cavalryman who had served in the American War and taken part in the storming of the Bastille, proposed a motion to commission a statue of Louis XVI, inscribed with the words ‘Restorer of public liberty and father of the French’. This suggestion was greeted, Bailly says, ‘with universal acclamation’, and a vote was taken to erect the statue on the ruins of the Bastille.
The crowd outside was chanting the King’s name, so he went to a window, wearing his hat with the cocarde nationale, a sight that, according to Bailly, ‘provoked cheers and applause in the square, in the nearby streets, as far as he could be seen’. As Louis left the building, the cheers were even louder than when he arrived, because he had proved that he accepted the changes that had been forced upon him. He was escorted out of the city and back to Versailles, through crowds that were now pointing their muskets, blades and pikes down towards the ground as a gesture of peace.
As soon as Louis arrived home, Marie-Antoinette and their children rushed to embrace him. According to Madame Campan, he repeated several times that ‘happily, no blood was spilt’.
Once again, let us not forget that Louis XVI had voluntarily offered himself up, with almost no guards, to the armed crowds that had stormed the Invalides and the Bastille just three days earlier. His denigrators say that it was mere resignation that took him to Paris to be paraded around like a tame bear. In his diary, he wrote simply ‘Voyage à Paris à l’Hôtel de Ville.’ For once his bland indifference reads like extreme bravery.