‘Thus it is in revolutions. One rascal writes and an hundred thousand fools believe.’
Arthur Young (1741–1820), in his book Travels in France (1792)
WHILE THE PARIS council set about disarming the mob by offering to buy back weapons, and the Assemblée nationale constituante continued its work in Versailles on a new constitution, news of events in the capital spread across the country.
Often, this caused similar outbreaks of violence in smaller towns. The travelling British farmer Arthur Young arrived at an inn in Strasbourg on the morning of 20 July to find people discussing the storming of the Bastille and the lack of intervention from royal troops. That same night, he watched a mob break into the city’s hôtel de ville: ‘From that minute, a shower of casements, sashes, shutters, chairs, tables, sofas, books, papers, pictures, etc. rained incessantly from all the windows of the house … which was then succeeded by tiles, skirting boards, banisters, framework, and every part of the building that force could detach.’ He adds that ‘they destroyed all the public archives, the streets for some way around strewed with papers.’ Meanwhile, Young says, ‘the troops, both horse and foot, were quiet spectators.’ All the soldiers did, he says, was guard churches and public buildings to stop the damage spreading.
In other large towns, Louis XVI’s administrators, the intendants, handed over control more peacefully. Within days, people’s committees had taken over Marseille, Rouen, Strasbourg, Nantes and the towns along the Loire Valley. By 20 July, in Lyon, Bordeaux, Nancy, Limoges and Amiens, power was being shared by royal and popular administrators. In a few places, like Lille, Toulouse and Grenoble, the status quo was maintained.
Almost everywhere, both in towns under the control of people’s committees and those where royal administrators were hanging on, militias were formed to keep the peace. Everyone was afraid of food riots, wanton destruction of shops (especially bakeries) and flour mills, and that stocks of grain intended for the poor or to be released on to the market to reduce prices would be stolen.
French historians often point out that these local militias were organized by les notables – prominent citizens such as lawyers, administrators, businessmen, landowners and leaders of the clergy. Their commanders would have been a mixture of aristocrats and bourgeois, all of them from the wealthier, more educated classes. The implication is, of course, that they weren’t really people’s militias – they were there to protect the establishment. But even today, it is a sad fact that education and wealth are closely correlated, and in eighteenth-century France, as we have seen in earlier chapters, if you weren’t rich, noble, male or or all of those, your chances of getting a decent education were practically zero. Sifting truth from rumour and maintaining calm were therefore inevitably tasks that fell to the educated upper echelons of the community. You could say – and it is often said – that the members of the Assemblée nationale were all notables, too, but they were perfectly capable of defending the people’s interests and working for democracy.
In any case, peacekeeping militias were urgently needed because, by 20 July, France was descending (or rising) into mass hysteria.
With partial, garbled, contradictory accounts of events in Paris circulating by word of mouth, the country succumbed to what has become known as ‘la Grande Peur’, or ‘the Great Fear’. (This is not to be confused with ‘la Terreur’, which would strike later, and be much more justified.) The name seems to have been chosen by French historians as an excuse, or at least an explanation, for uncontrolled mob brutality. Rather like the people who voted for Brexit because they truly believed that Brussels dictated the shape of bananas in British supermarkets, the implication is that the perpetrators of the violence of July and August 1789 were victims of misinformation and/or their cruel lack of a decent education. In 1989, on the bicentenary of the Revolution, an American food historian called Mary Matossian went even further and suggested that la Grande Peur (and, incidentally, the Salem witch-hunt of 1692–3) had been caused by the LSD-like effect of microtoxins in badly kept rye flour. But surely a much more credible cause for the outbreak of mob violence across France in July 1789 was a mixture of hunger, resentment and a feeling that if the Parisians can do it, pourquoi pas nous aussi?
French historians usually say that the Grande Peur was a rural phenomenon, because much of the violence that summer was done to châteaux, which were usually situated outside towns. But in truth, fear spread almost everywhere. From small villages to the largest cities, in inns and cafés, at toll gates and markets, rumours were repeated about revolutionary hordes, royalist armies or just plain ‘brigands’ being on their way to kill everyone.fn1
Vivid accounts of non-existent battles and massacres did the rounds. There were also rumours that aristocratic landowners were either burning crops or hoarding grain to increase the price of flour and bread.
Travelling through Alsace, Arthur Young heard a story that ‘the Queen had a plot, nearly on the point of execution, to blow up the National Assembly by a mine and to march the army instantly to massacre all Paris.’ In Dijon, he was told that Marie-Antoinette had been convicted of a plot to poison the King. There was a common belief, supported by seditious pamphlets, that the Queen was the lover of her husband’s cousin Louis Philippe, and wanted to put him on the throne. Another rumour during the Grande Peur was that Louis XVI’s brother Charles had assembled an army and was preparing to sweep across France. In the southwest, people even thought the English were invading to conquer Aquitaine, as they had done in the fourteenth century.
All across France, gangs of peasants erected roadblocks and threatened anyone who wasn’t wearing a tricolour cocarde or who looked or spoke like a seigneur. Riding though the Vosges, Arthur Young was accosted by a group of men. Rather rashly, he asked them, ‘Suppose I am a seigneur, what then, my friends?’ and was told, ‘Why, be hanged, for that most likely is what you deserve.’ He immediately bought himself a cocarde, but while he was riding it blew off his hat into a river, and he was soon stopped again. This time, he assured the crowd that he was just an English traveller, but they accused him of being a seigneur in disguise, and he only escaped unscathed by giving a speech about the English tax system, in which the rich were subject to window tax, and even paid ‘for the liberty to kill their own partridges’. After he shouted, ‘Vive le tiers état!’ he says they ‘seemed to think that I might be an honest fellow’.
Real aristocrats were not so lucky. Young was told in the Besançon region of eastern France that:
Many chateaus have been burnt, others plundered, the seigneurs hunted down like wild beasts, their wives and daughters ravished … and all their property destroyed: and these abominations not inflicted on marked persons, who were odious for their former conduct … but an indiscriminating blind rage for the love of plunder.
At an inn he spoke to men who had received letters from Mâcon, Lyon, the Auvergne and other regions saying that ‘similar commotions and mischiefs were perpetrating every-where; and that it was expected they would pervade the whole kingdom’.
However, it wasn’t always random violence – when pillaging a château, peasants often grabbed anything that looked like a landowner’s deed, tax-collection register or list of tenants, and threw them on bonfires, as if to destroy the last traces of feudalism.
Young was horrified that wherever he went in late July and early August 1789 there were no reliable sources of information that might have eased the tensions. At a café in Dijon, he had to wait an hour to get a look at the only newspaper. Elsewhere, he found either no papers at all, editions that were two weeks old, or copies of the Gazette de France, the official royalist paper that no one believed. Fearful gossip was filling the information vacuum and whipping the population into a frenzy of violence.
In Paris, however, the general mood amongst ordinary people was not fear. It was one of suspicion, accusation and bloody revenge.
Stories about people hoarding grain and/or guns were so rife that rumour-peddlers coming to the Hôtel de Ville with accusations were threatened with imprisonment if their story turned out to be false. Guards had to be sent to protect a convent in Montmartre from a rabble that was accusing the abbess of hiding a stock of weapons – luckily for her, an inspection proved the rumour to be unfounded. According to the American businessman (and later ambassador) Gouverneur Morris, between 14 and 22 July the Marquis de La Fayette and his men saved 17 people from Parisian lynch mobs.
The former intendant (royal administrator) of Paris, Louis Bénigne François Bertier de Sauvigny, was not so lucky. On 20 July, he was grabbed by a crowd in Compiègne, to the north of Paris. They had been told that he was a wanted man in Paris, although Bailly wrote in his memoirs that this was not true: Bertier ‘was not accused by the city of Paris, and there was no reason to hold him prisoner’. The Paris council sent guards to bring Bertier into the city for his own protection.
Two days later, peasants in Viry, to the south of Paris, performed a more violent citizen’s arrest on Bertier’s father-in-law, who was hiding out at a friend’s country house. This was 74-year-old Joseph Foullon de Doué, who had very briefly been Finance Minister after Necker’s dismissal on 11 July. There was a rumour going around accusing Foullon of suggesting that if people had no bread, they should eat hay or grass (a precursor to the fake news that Marie-Antoinette recommended cake).
The peasants at Viry therefore beat up the old man, stuffed hay in his mouth, fitted him out with collars of nettles and thistles, and marched him to Paris with a bale of hay strapped to his back, giving him only vinegar to quench his thirst. Amazingly, Foullon survived the march, and arrived at the Hôtel de Ville at around 5 a.m. on 22 July, much to the embarrassment of the Paris council, who quickly convened to issue a statement saying that people suspected of treason should simply be made ‘prisoners in the hands of the nation’ – again, Bailly says that this was for Foullon’s own protection.
News of Foullon’s presence spread, and a crowd filled the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville, calling for him to be hanged. Bailly tried to calm them, but eventually they burst into the building and demanded an instant trial. The councillors objected that this was illegal, and Foullon was grabbed, taken outside and hanged from the nearest lamp post. The rope broke twice, so finally he was decapitated and his head stuck on a pike, after the fashion of the time. His body was mutilated and dragged through the streets.
Unfortunately for Bertier, he was just arriving in Paris under escort, en route to the Hôtel de Ville. His guards were having to beg and cajole their way through armed hordes baying for Bertier’s blood. When his father-in-law’s head was brandished at the carriage, the guards told Bertier it was probably Launay, the governor of the Bastille.
At the Hôtel de Ville, Bailly questioned Bertier, before dictating a document guaranteeing his safety. However, Bailly says, ‘Howls were heard in the square … The tumult that had reigned there for so long turned into fury and revolt.’ Bailly consulted the council, who agreed that Bertier should be taken to prison, and that his guards ‘would answer to the nation and the city of Paris’ for his safety. What this seems to have meant is ‘we’ve got to get him out of here and it’s not our fault if something unpleasant happens to him on the way.’
Predictably, as soon as the guards took Bertier outside, he was grabbed by the mob and strung up from a lamp post. A soldier came into the council chamber a few minutes later, carrying a bloody piece of meat, and announced, ‘This is Bertier’s heart.’ His head, meanwhile, had joined that of his father-in-law as part of a roving horror show doing the rounds of Paris.
In a book called La Chute de la monarchie (The Fall of the Monarchy), written in 1972 and still studied by French history students today, there is a timeline of the Revolution which drily states for 22 July 1789 that: ‘Bertier de Sauvigny, intendant of Paris, was hanged by the people.’
The suggestion seems to be that during the Revolution, ‘the people’ represented justice. For at least this one French historian, collectively ‘le peuple’ was ‘right’, and had the authority to hang anyone it wanted. But this is clearly a detached, romanticized view of 1789. At the time, we know from Bailly and others that the lynching of Bertier was carried out against the express instructions of the people’s elected council of Paris. Bailly, its leader, was horrified by the violence. He said of Foullon and Bertier’s killings that they ‘sullied the Revolution’.
What is clear from Bailly’s record of events is that he and his fellow councillors realized that, to their shame, they could not control ‘the people’. Bailly concludes his account of 22 July by saying: ‘What kind of magistrature lacks the authority to stop crimes committed before its very eyes!’
This mob violence (or justified popular vengeance, depending on how you interpret it) all over France taught the men at the Hôtel de Ville, the members of the Assemblée, and Louis XVI and his court, a very simple lesson: ‘the people’ were going to be a menace.
For the moment, the lynchers, pillagers and aristo-hunters were prepared to side with the notables (including many aristocrats) who had taken power under cover of the tricolour cocarde. In most towns, the armed crowds had been given the status of an official people’s guard. But if the hordes of pike-toting citizens weren’t satisfied with the reforms that were promised, or became impatient to see concrete results, they were going to turn nasty, and the men forming the new regime would end up on the same lamp posts as Foullon and Bertier.
In short, after a brief period of idealism, the new politicians understood that it was necessary to harness this potential violence in favour of the Revolution. They had to endorse the mob for fear of becoming its new victim.
Mob violence didn’t always go unpunished. In the town of Cluny, in central France, around thirty peasants were hanged for looting. It was also said that the soldier who had ripped out Bertier’s heart was executed that same night by his horrified comrades-in-arms. But this kind of punishment was rare. The new councils and the Assemblée had to be careful not to be seen as supporters of the aristos. The regime therefore began to pay lip service to the idea that the people’s militias, including lynch mobs, were entirely made up of good citizens who wanted to defend their nation against reactionaries and traitors. Even Bailly becomes a little ambivalent about the Paris mob, at one point calling them ‘generous citizens who have become warriors’. The new ruling class began to suffer from a kind of ‘Grande Peur de la Grande Peur’ – a fear of the people.
In the following few years, what this would mean for France was that any aspiring politician who claimed to be on the side of a murderous mob could grab power. The mass guillotinings, massacres of political prisoners and general climate of violence – collectively known as la Terreur – which was to reign in France until 1794 would simply be a state-sanctioned version of la Grande Peur.
Understandably, amongst the rich and privileged, the general reaction to the people’s Grande Peur was Grande Panique. They started to run for their lives. Louis XVI’s brother Charles was one of the first to leave the country, and had fled Paris on 16 July 1789. He had been opposed to the whole idea of abolishing the system of the three estates, and had plotted to have Necker removed from office when the Swiss economist proposed to reduce aristocratic and royal privileges. Arthur Young reports that one day, Charles saw Madame Necker walking in Versailles and began hissing at her. It is usually said that Charles left France on the insistence of Louis XVI and their brother Louis Stanislas, so that there would at least be one heir to the throne out of reach of the revolutionaries. Charles went first to Italy to stay with his in-laws (his wife was the daughter of the King of Sardinia), and then toured Europe trying to raise a counter-revolutionary army – thereby endangering Louis XVI’s life.
Other prominent aristocrats who left France around this time were Victor-François de Broglie, commander of the royal troops, whom Louis XVI had appointed Minister of War only a few days earlier; Charles-Eugène de Lorraine, who led the troops that confronted a Paris mob on 12 July; Louis Joseph de Bourbon, one of Louis XVI’s cousins (not to be confused with the so-called ‘democrat’ Louis Philippe), who would later go to Germany and help to raise a counter-revolutionary army; Louis Joseph’s son, Louis Henri de Bourbon, and grandson, the 17-year-old Louis d’Enghien (who would later be executed by Napoleon Bonaparte on spurious treason charges); and Yolande de Polignac, Marie-Antoinette’s confidante and ‘co-star’ in pornographic plays, who was a hate figure for many people, a living symbol of the Queen’s excesses.
Marie-Antoinette confided to Yolande that she was ‘terrified’ for her own safety. She knew that she was in imminent danger of attack by anyone who believed the stories circulating about her. Marie-Antoinette was also afraid of being locked up in a convent. This was a serious prospect, because errant French females were often sent away to live like nuns as punishment. Adulterous wives could be imprisoned for two years in a convent, and if their husband died during that period, the unfortunate woman would stay cloistered for life. There was talk amongst Assemblée delegates of preparing an apartment for Marie-Antoinette at the Val-de-Grâce convent hospital in Paris, supposedly for her own protection, but surely also as penance for her formerly extravagant (and allegedly adulterous) lifestyle. In the summer of 1789 she and Louis wondered about fleeing to the heavily garrisoned town of Metz in the east of France, but in the end they decided to stay in Versailles and continue to represent the monarchy.
For the moment, Louis XVI’s brother Louis Stanislas also decided to remain in Versailles, even though he was fiercely opposed to the idea of the Assemblée nationale, and was constantly urging the King to stand up to the democrats – not particularly helpful, or wise, advice.
Meanwhile, many aristocrats who hadn’t nailed their colours to the revolutionary flagpole by becoming Assemblée delegates, especially those who had been living in vulnerable rural châteaux, grabbed what they could and headed for the nearest border. The great emigration of some 140,000 French men, women and children had begun.
The Assemblée reacted to events with a similar sense of urgency. In modern France, nothing official happens in August unless there is a national emergency, at which point politicians will make a big show of interrupting their well-earned holidays to save the nation. But back in 1789, deliberations on the new constitution suddenly became more focused, as delegates tried to show that they were determined to deliver concrete results as well as ideals.
The debate during ‘la nuit du 4 août’ has gone down in revolutionary legend as one of the key moments in the founding of a democratic republic. During the night of 4–5 August, there was an emergency session to discuss the abolition of all remaining feudal rights. Some of the most radical proposals were put forward by aristocrats like the Duc d’Aiguillon, who called for all droits seigneuraux, or lords’ rights, to be scrapped. These included symbolic privileges like the best pew in church and being bowed to by peasants, as well as the rights to demand taxes from tenants, to force them to use the lord’s windmill, and de facto control over food prices, because lords were allowed to sell their produce early, at a higher price, before their tenants’ harvests were released on to the market.
The Bishop of Chartres, another aristocrat, suggested abolishing the landlords’ exclusive right to hunt on their land. Other delegates demanded democratic moves such as sharing the Church’s wealth with the poor and making all legal processes free of charge.
One of the most vital reforms was suggested by yet another member of the privileged classes, the Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais,fn2 who proposed allowing commoners access to all posts in civil, religious and military institutions. He would later command a revolutionary army and be guillotined for losing a battle.
It was not until mid-September that the Assemblée finally compressed all its ideas from 4–5 August into a highly legalistic-sounding 18-point plan. Almost all the above-mentioned privileges were to be abolished, though in the end some were watered down. For example, the dîmes (clerical taxes) were still payable if they covered clergymen’s salaries or were used to finance seminaries, hospitals or religious schools. Worse, landlords would be able to buy back certain privileges like the right to tax their tenants. In effect, of the truly feudal privileges, only the physical servitude of the corvée (obligatory labour for the lord or the Church) and the mainmorte (whereby lords inherited their tenants’ belongings) were abolished outright.
Nevertheless, it was still a daring set of decrees that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks earlier.
Another momentous decision taken on the night of 4 August 1789 was that the new Constitution would be prefaced by a declaration of citizens’ fundamental rights. Between 20 and 26 August, delegates debated what these should be. Partly inspired by the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 (13 of the Assemblée’s aristocratic delegates, including La Fayette, had been officers there during the American War), partly by the Lumières philosophers’ notions of individual freedom, the resulting, and highly succinct, 17-article text is still part of the French Constitution today.
La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789fn3 contained such famous clauses as ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in law’, ‘The law must be the same for all’, ‘The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of Man’, ‘No man may be accused, arrested or imprisoned except in cases determined by law, and in the ways decreed by law’ (a reaction to the recent lynchings), and article 17, which was added under pressure from fearful aristocratic delegates: ‘Property is an inviolable and sacred right, and no one may be deprived of it, unless public necessity, affirmed by law, clearly demands it, and on condition that fair compensation is given in advance’ – a pretty clear attempt to stop the looting of châteaux.
On 26 August, the delegates turned to the draft of the Constitution itself, setting out the Assemblée’s power to make the laws that would be ratified (no longer proposed) by the King, as well as its sole right to fix income taxes and budgets. The Constitution would undergo many changes over the following years, but that August, its basic demands were established. The key phrase in the draft was: ‘There is in France no authority superior to the law; the King reigns only by law.’ It was the end of ‘Qui veut le roy, si veut la loy.’ The King was to stay on, but as a second-class citizen, subject to the Assemblée.
All in all, the mob violence of the early summer seemed to have produced some startlingly rapid political results. The only problem was that, for the moment at least, it was all talk. By the end of the summer, the law on the abolition of feudal rights had not been published; the Declaration of Men’s and Citizens’ Rights was not finalized; and the Constitution still needed honing down from sweeping idealism into a practical working document.
The first of these ground-breaking texts to be ready for public distribution was the law abolishing feudal rights. This announcement was due for publication on 18 September. People accused Louis XVI of holding things up for almost a month by not signing the decree. In private, he had raised objections to the law, saying that he did not agree with ‘the despoiling of my clergy and my nobility’. In a letter to the Archbishop of Arles, he wrote that he would not ‘surrender to this enthusiasm that has seized all the orders [of society]’.
The job of printing the text of the law was given to the royal press and, somehow or other, the documents did not get sent out to the towns and villages where the laws were meant to be enacted, which was a pity because it would have brought some positive, and non-fake, news to the poor.
Again, Louis XVI was blamed for this hiccup – more petty delaying tactics. But the official excuse given for the holdup was that the Assemblée had ordered the documents to be printed, but had not given the order to distribute them.
In any case, not until 3 November would the law abolishing the ancient privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy be published. Even watered down, it still freed whole swathes of the population from at least some of their taxes (and many peasants would subsequently take this as a hint that they didn’t need to pay any tax at all). It also opened the way for commoners to become judges, bishops, officers and administrators of all sorts, and allowed peasants to hunt any wild animals that strayed into their paths (a right that is still enjoyed today, making country walks in France dangerous for most of the year).
And yet again, these reforms were sanctioned by the King – the document ended with a note to the effect that ‘the King commands that the above orders be printed’. The new anti-feudal law also acknowledged his status – article 17 ‘solemnly proclaims King Louis XVI as Restorer of French liberty’. On paper at least, he was playing his role as a second-class citizen, and the constitutional monarchy was still functioning.