‘Il s’est trouvé des méchants qui ont fait soulever le peuple, et les excès où il s’est porté les jours derniers sont leur ouvrage. Il ne faut pas en vouloir au peuple.’
‘There were some nasty rogues who made the people rise up, and the recent excesses are their fault. We mustn’t blame the people.’
Louis XVI explaining mob violence to his son in October 1789
IF THE DELAYS in signing and publishing the feudalism laws were deliberate on Louis XVI’s part, it was a foolish move. His usually laconic diary (which shows that he continued hunting merrily throughout the summer of 1789, after the events of 14–17 July) becomes almost wordy in early October. On the fifth, he notes that a hunt was ‘interrupted by events’. On the following day, he records a ‘departure to Paris at twelve-thirty, visit to the Hôtel de Ville, supper and bed at the Tuileries’.
Thanks to a mixture of personal courage and tactical resignation, Louis XVI had so far managed to ride the wave of Revolution. He was still held in high personal esteem by the vast majority of his subjects. In Paris he had been cheered by the people who stormed the Bastille; at least one of the scare stories during the Grande Peur had been about an attempt on his life; and no one was accusing him of trying to overthrow the Assemblée, even if his brothers, his wife and several of his cousins were considered suspect. As Madame Campan put it in her memoirs, as the summer of 1789 came to an end, ‘the people still spoke of the King with love, and seemed to think that, thanks to his character, he would favour the wish of the nation to reform what they called the abuses.’ He was still part of the revolutionary process, and, in public anyway, approved of most of it.
As summer turned into autumn, though, with the new laws marooned at the printer’s, Louis XVI was seen by some as partially guilty of delaying practical solutions to the everyday problems that were crippling France. After the riots of July, food prices had not come down. On the contrary, some grain merchants were scared of sending their supplies to market, in case it was all stolen by the mob. Many employers, too, had shut up shop for fear of looting, or because their former workers were out on the streets carrying muskets. Many domestic servants had no one to serve. As a result, by October, the poor and hungry were poorer, hungrier – and angrier. And, despite the general goodwill towards him, some of the resentment was directed at Louis XVI.
The events of ‘les 5 et 6 octobre 1789’ are usually presented by French historians as a tipping point in the Revolution – a 20-kilometre women’s march from Paris to Versailles to fetch the King. This, so the legend has it, was when the female half of le peuple took the Revolution in hand, forcing Louis XVI to come into the city and face up to his daily responsibilities amongst his people, instead of hiding away in his palace.
As with most tales of revolutionary heroism, that is at best a partial truth. In fact, protesting had started a day earlier, when some women traders from Les Halles market marched the 600 metres to the gardens of the Palais-Royal, where they knew that vocal and influential men gathered to drink, give speeches and write pamphlets. There, the women made their own, loud and vulgar voices heard about the scarcity of bread despite a good grain harvest.
Predictably, rumours about the food shortage were doing the rounds. It was alleged that vast stores of grain, flour and bread were being hidden from the people to starve them into submission. Some of those rumours had almost certainly passed through, or even originated at, the cafés of the Palais-Royal. And it is often said that, on 4 October, the male agitators there saw the group of angry women and had the eighteenth-century equivalent of a lightbulb moment – a candle moment. Here was a chance to stir up even more trouble.
Fortunately for the rumour-mongers, a few days previously, Louis XVI had committed a major politicial blunder. He had summoned a regiment of 5,000 soldiers to guard him and his entourage at Versailles. Understandable, perhaps, given that Marie-Antoinette could not walk in her own gardens without fear of being insulted or worse, and that many former palace servants were now to be seen touting pikes and muskets in the town’s streets.
The soldiers summoned to Versailles were all French, but they belonged to the régiment de Flandres, a Belgian-sounding name, and people were highly suspicious of foreign troops thanks to the presence of the Swiss and German guards in Paris during the July events.
Even less prudently, on 1 October, Louis XVI allowed his regular gardes du corps to throw a huge banquet for the newly arrived officers in the palace theatre – 240 slap-up dinners in Versailles at a time of chronic food shortages in Paris. It was to be a case of nibbling while Paris burned with resentment.
Piling on the provocation, the gardes du corps invited only officers who were known to have little or no sympathy for the Revolution. Many French soldiers had already defected to the improvised revolutionary forces; others had stayed on in the army but were in favour of reform, but this banquet was to be a get-together for the royalist faithful.
A Parisian newspaper called Le Courrier de Versailles à Paris et de Paris à Versailles gave a vivid account of the evening. The paper was pro-Revolution but claimed to report ‘in a spirit of peace and conciliation’, and its account rings true. There is no sensationalism or outrage, as there often was in partisan publications at the time. ‘The room was lit as it had been during the greatest parties,’ the Courrier reported, there was an orchestra, and the event was attended by ‘the most beautiful women of the court and the town [who] provided very agreeable distractions’.
Soldiers being soldiers, they got royally drunk, and when Louis XVI put in an appearance after a day’s deer hunting, along with Marie-Antoinette, they were hailed with shouts and toasts of ‘Vive le Roi!’ and ‘Vive la Reine!’ The Courrier de Versailles said that the toasts to the King were performed ‘with the honours of war, the drawn sword in one hand, the glass in the other’. One brave voice proposed a toast to the nation, a revolutionary idea, but was shouted down. At one point, someone yelled out, ‘Down with the tricolour cocarde!’ and any man who was wearing it was forced to take it off, or replace it with a white, royalist, rosette, or even the black of Austria and Marie-Antoinette.
To crown the evening of royalist sentiments, a few soldiers climbed on to the balcony of the banqueting hall to wave the white cocarde.
After the dinner was over, the soldiers went out on to the terrace to shout royalist slogans, and, according to the Courrier de Versailles, ‘make madness and music’, much to the annoyance of all the townspeople within earshot (and no doubt of Louis XVI himself, who was not a party animal).
By 3 October, highly detailed – often strategically exaggerated – accounts of the banquet had reached Paris. Less scrupulous newspapers and pamphlets than the Courrier de Versailles gave lavish descriptions of an ‘orgie des gardes du corps’ during which, so it was claimed in the provocative, anti-monarchist paper L’Ami du peuple, the tricolour cocarde had been trampledfn1 underfoot by royalist troops who, it was widely assumed, had been brought to Versailles to overpower the Assemblée and then attack Paris.
Even the fair-minded Bailly reported in his memoirs (no doubt quoting sources he read at the time) that ‘officers vomited terrible imprecations against the Assemblée nationale, and anxiety reigned in Versailles until fatigue and drunkenness reduced their perpetrators to incapacity.’
The implication was that a royal coup d’état had been narrowly avoided, or was being plotted in the barracks at Versailles. A whole new scare story had been created, and Louis XVI’s months of diplomacy had been undone by one over-indulgent French soirée.
With feelings about this ‘orgy’ running high in Paris on 4 October, it was not difficult to whip up support for a larger demonstration the following day. Who did the whipping has been a subject of contention ever since. Some allege that radical factions based at Palais-Royal, unhappy with the Assemblée’s allegiance to the King, seized the chance to make their move. Others see it as the work of Louis XVI’s cousin Louis Philippe d’Orléans and his supporters – Madame Campan describes being threatened by some of them just before the events in question. Given that the Palais-Royal belonged to Louis Philippe, his hangers-on would certainly have been present when the women arrived. But there is of course a valid argument for saying that it was the women market traders themselves who decided to organize a much bigger demonstration. Many of them were members of the guild of female market traders, the Dames de la Halle (women of the market hall) – so they were already an organized body.fn2
On 5 October, a Monday morning, women from Les Halles and the faubourg Saint-Antoine (just beyond the Bastille) began to gather outside the Hôtel de Ville, defying the pouring rain.
Contrary to common belief, they were there not to demonstrate against Louis XVI or his soldiers, but to remind the Paris councillors of their duty to provide for its citizens. According to Mayor Bailly himself, they wanted to ‘complain to the representatives of the community about the negligence and ineptitude regarding food supplies’. At the start of the day, it was the newly appointed democrats rather than the King who were being told to face up to their responsibilities.
Once this crowd of women had formed, armed men began to join in, and they squared up to the guards who were blocking the entrance to the city hall. After a short struggle, the men managed to force the gate. According to Bailly (who wasn’t yet present himself) the women objected to this male intervention, and said that all they wanted was to obtain assurances from the councillors. Some of the women even formed a barricade on the steps and ‘managed to let in only members of their own sex, and to keep out men who tried to accompany them’.
Unfortunately, there were plenty of men with more than bread on their minds. A group of them managed to smash open a side entrance and, according to Bailly, emptied the Hôtel de Ville’s armoury, stole 200,000 livres (a huge amount of cash) from the treasury, and ‘were stopped when, torch in hand, they were about to set light to the most combustible parts of the building’. Without this last-minute intervention, 5 October 1789 would be remembered for a far less defensible version of the storming of the Bastille, directed this time against the bastion of Paris’s new democratic council.
The Courrier de Versailles summed up these events in dramatic fashion: ‘Our Hôtel de Ville has been pillaged! Disorder! Confusion! Armed women! The people have turned against the people!’ (And this was a pro-revolutionary newspaper, not a disapproving royalist pamphlet.)
It was more proof that le peuple was no unified, heroic force for justice, despite what modern French historians might tell us.
By now, some women had decided to march out to Versailles to see Louis XVI. This was, for the moment at least, not an aggressive move. The Dames de la Halle had a semi-official role as spokeswomen for the people, and would regularly go to plead with the King, or congratulate the royal couple on a new baby. As we saw earlier, after the birth of her first son, Marie-Antoinette had been less than amused to receive a spontaneous visit from some Paris market fishwives.
As recently as 25 August, a large crowd of women market traders had been to Versailles to attend the annual party for the festival of St Louis. Bailly went with them, and was delighted by the joyfulness of the whole occasion. He and some of the women were received by Louis XVI in his bedroom (though not in his bed – this wasn’t Louis XV), and Bailly describes how he ‘presented the King with a superb bouquet that the market women had given me for His Majesty. It was wrapped in a gauze veil, on which was inscribed, in gold letters, “To Louis XVI, the best of kings”.’ The visitors were then taken to see Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVI’s aunts, and practically the whole family. It was apparently all very cordial, even if Marie-Antoinette herself was still thought of by most common people as an over-privileged foreigner.
So this women’s march to Versailles on 5 October was a conventional monarchist gesture. Obtaining no satisfaction from lesser authorities, the Dames de la Halle were simply going to see the man in charge. Besides, under the old absolute monarchy, the King had usually had stocks of wheat at his disposal, to be released on to the market during a shortage. Louis XVI was still a genuine source of hope during a famine.
Several thousand women began the five-hour march to Versailles. Estimates vary between five and ten thousand. Given these numbers, it is doubtful that they were all market traders. And breaking even more with tradition, they brought along a couple of cannons that they had ‘liberated’ from outside the Hôtel de Ville. Many were also armed with pikes.
It is often alleged that this all-female procession was infiltrated by men in drag. If this was true, it is hard to imagine why the men would have bothered. If they thought the women wouldn’t notice, they were almost certainly mistaken – for one thing, razors at the time were not as efficient as they are today, or as frequently used. If the men wanted to fool observers into thinking that it was an all-female march, again why would they bother? Until that point, no mob had shown any such scruples.
It is true that the most famous illustration of the march, a primitively drawn colour print, shows some very masculine-looking dames, including one who seems to have a moustache. More importantly, the drawing suggests that, whether their intentions were peaceful or not, and whatever their real gender, the women presented a frightening spectacle – almost every one of them is armed with a pike, musket, sword, axe, scythe, club or cannon.
The only unarmed marcher visible in the drawing is a chic and reluctant-looking lady, who is being ‘helped’ along, with a marcher’s arm round her waist and a guiding hand clamped to her wrist. The Dames de la Halle were apparently determined that female citizens of all classes should support their demands for food.
One thing that no illustrations of the march show – perhaps in an attempt to mythologize the joyous event – is the hardship and dirt that the women must have suffered that day. With little or nothing to eat or drink, they dragged their weapons, their long skirts, and in many cases their children, through 20 kilometres of mud, as the heavens poured chilly autumnal rain on their heads. These were desperate people at the end of their tether who, so far, had been let down by the Revolution.
Most accounts are adamant that the procession was greeted by the people of Versailles with cries of ‘Vivent les Parisiennes!’ (a shout often repeated by modern Parisian men, but for different reasons). However, the Journal de Paris says that ‘the avenues and streets were full of terrified people running in all directions.’ This sounds credible – the arrival of the marchers was like something out of la Grande Peur. There are not many towns that would be pleased to see a several-thousand-strong armed mob approaching, unless they were expecting an army of liberation. And Versailles didn’t need liberating. It was the seat of a functioning, reasonably democratic government.
The women marched straight to the palace, and while most of them rested in the place des Armes, by the royal stables, a small deputation went into the Assemblée building, where the delegates had been discussing a letter that they had received from Louis XVI about the anti-feudal laws that he was being asked to sign. ‘It is not that they all represent my idea of perfection,’ the King had written almost wittily, ‘but I think it would be praise-worthy of me not to delay my acceptance of the present wishes of the representatives of the nation.’ In government, it seemed that all was harmony.
Suddenly, in burst about twenty women, to the disbelief of the male-only delegates. Typically, though, the women were no longer alone. A man was now proclaiming himself their ‘orator’, and addressed the startled Assemblée. This was a 25-year-old bailiff called Stanislas Maillard. An ambitious opportunist, he had been one of the men who arrested Launay, the governor of the Bastille, and had since appointed himself ‘Captain of the Bastille Volunteers’.fn3
Maillard informed the Assemblée delegates that ‘we [clearly he had elected himself an honorary woman] have come to demand bread and to punish those who insulted the patriotic cocarde.’ Given that the women themselves had only ever mentioned food, he was already overstepping the mark.
According to the president of the Assemblée, Jean-Joseph Mounier – the man who had drafted the new Constitution – Maillard and another self-appointed male spokesman also repeated a rumour that a miller was being paid 200 livres per day not to make flour, and that ‘the aristocrats want to starve us to death.’
The delegates shouted, ‘Name him!’ and received a hesitant reply from the two ‘spokesmen’ about having heard the story from some women who in turn had heard that it was a clergyman – probably the Archbishop of Paris. This was met with howls of disbelief from the Assemblée delegates.
As Maillard began shouting demands and threats, Mounier replied calmly that ‘the only way to get more bread is to re-establish order. The more you massacre, the less bread there will be.’ He then gave orders that the Parisian women (and their male hangers-on) should be given food and drink.
It was quickly decided that Mounier should lead a deputation of women, along with Maillard, to see the King and request food aid for Paris. The canny Mounier also decided to take along the draft Constitution and the Declaration of Men’s and Citizens’ Rights, thinking that this turn of events might force Louis into ratifying them at last. Even when faced by the hectoring ‘Captain of the Bastille Volunteers’, here was a calmer, more principled mind working for democracy.
Despite being president of the new Assemblée, or rather because he respected its due processes, Mounier was obliged to obey protocol, and had no power to march over to the palace and demand an audience with the King – especially if he wanted to bring along several angry demonstrators. He therefore negotiated a group visit for himself, Maillard the mansplainer, and five women.
In his memoirs, Mounier describes walking through the rain-swept streets of Versailles and seeing the crowds of women outside the palace ‘among whom mingled a certain number of men, most of them in rags, a ferocious look in their eyes, gesturing menacingly and shouting horribly’. These were not the alleged transvestites who had marched with the women – since then, hearing about the women’s march, a predominantly masculine Parisian mob had followed on. These men, Mounier saw, were armed with ‘guns, old pikes, axes, iron bars and long poles mounted with sword or knife blades’.
A few of the men decided to accompany Mounier and his deputation, but they were mistaken for an attack mob and dispersed by royal sentries. Mounier tried again, and this time he was recognized and ‘received with honour’, though as the lines opened to receive him and his companions, the crowd surged forward and almost broke into the palace. The situation was on a knife edge.
Inside, Mounier told Louis XVI about ‘the terrible situation in Paris, these women’s complaints, the promise we gave them to make every effort, along with His Majesty, to supply Paris with food, and our pleas that they should withdraw in peace and commit no violence’. Louis expressed his sympathy, and the women present, Mounier said, were ‘moved’. One of them, a 17-year-old girl, had already fainted at the shock of meeting the King.
While Louis signed the Assemblée’s promise of food aid, and gave instructions for several wagonloads of bread to be sent to Paris (a gesture that would be quoted by agitators as proof that the food shortage was deliberate), Mounier played his political trump card. He told some of the King’s advisors that it was now or never if Louis was going to sign the Constitution and the Declaration of Men’s and Citizens’ Rights. Any further delay, he said, would be taken as a refusal and ‘would ignite the fury of the Parisians’. On the other hand, if Louis signed, ‘it would be announced to the people as an act of benevolence, and would dispel the unrest’.
It was an astute piece of political blackmail, and Louis immediately went into a meeting with his advisors to decide how to react. At the end of this, he gave what Mounier calls ‘pure and simple acceptance’.
Suddenly, France had a new democratic Constitution and its citizens (the males, at least) had a written guarantee of their fundamental human rights. All this and a promise of food to ease the shortages in Paris.
Mission accomplished, n’est-ce pas?
It is often said that it was during this October confrontation in Versailles that Marie-Antoinette delivered her famous line: ‘Let them eat cake.’ In French, she is supposed to have suggested that poor people should turn to brioche – bread with added eggs, butter, milk and sugar – if they couldn’t get bread.
But this was just another of the scurrilous rumours about the Autrichienne that people wanted to believe. In fact, the quip was doing the rounds well before Marie-Antoinette was born. In his autobiography, Les Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes how he was feeling hungry one day in 1736 when he remembered ‘the solution suggested by a great princess, who was told that the peasants had no bread, and answered: Then why don’t they eat brioche?’ His Confessions were published in 1782, seven years before October 1789. Of course it is possible that Marie-Antoinette revived Rousseau’s old joke, but given the political tensions of 1789, it is highly unlikely that she would have done so, and there are no eyewitness accounts of her making the remark.
The truth was that Marie-Antoinette inspired so much bad feeling that it was easy to pin the tasteless joke on her. This distrust of royal attitudes to baked goods might also explain why, when the women emerged from the palace to break the good news to their fellow marchers, they were accused of lying about the promise of bread, and threatened with lynching. They had to beg to be let back in so that the King could give them written proof that they were telling the truth.
Sadly, while Mounier and co. had been inside (incidentally, he never mentions Maillard entering the palace), violence had already broken out. This was partly Louis XVI’s fault because the meeting with his advisors had taken four hours, more than enough time to read the 30-odd clauses in the declarations he was meant to sign. In fact, he and his counsellors had been discussing whether to make a run for it. Reports were coming in that some of the women outside were saying they intended to return to Paris with Marie-Antoinette’s head on a pike, and a cocarde made out of her entrails. They were threats that had to be taken seriously.
The King’s advisors urged him to leave immediately for the garrison town of Metz. Typically he hesitated, and then declared that he refused to become a ‘fugitive king’. Meanwhile, coaches had been ordered from the stables, so that at least Marie-Antoinette and the children could escape. These had been stopped by the crowds, but there were other means of transport within the palace grounds, and the Queen could have been spirited out via a distant rear entrance without running the gauntlet of the mob. However, Marie-Antoinette decided that she should stay by her husband’s side. Later, Louis would admit that he regretted this missed opportunity. But for now, despite the noise of shooting outside, the King and Queen stayed in their palace.
During these overlong deliberations, an order had been given for the royal troops to withdraw in the hope that this would calm the mob. As they left the scene, they were fired upon by members of the Versailles people’s militia (supposedly a peacekeeping force) and, according to Mounier, ‘several men and several horses were wounded’.
While Mounier sat waiting for a reply to his requests, he was being given regular updates on the situation in the streets. Many marchers had taken refuge in churches or had been invited in by townspeople, but there were still plenty of violent-looking protesters gathered at the palace gates, apparently looking for trouble. The account in his memoirs of all this remains factual until his frustration bursts through and he expresses his amazement that the situation had been allowed to get out of hand: ‘Women, whose numbers had been vastly exaggerated! Followed by a few vile brigands! … It should have been so easy to repulse them.’
To avoid a large-scale confrontation between royal troops and armed citizens, what was needed was a large peacekeeping force. And at last, some time between nine and ten o’clock, Mounier received word that they were on their way.
Back in Paris, the city council had been disastrously slow to react to the news that several thousand armed Parisians – of both genders – were marching towards the royal palace and the seat of government. It was almost inevitable that there would be violence, possibly a miniature civil war if Louis XVI’s recently arrived troops waded in.
There was, in theory at least, a solution to the dilemma. This was the city’s section of the Garde nationale that had now been formed, and hurriedly trained, by the Marquis de La Fayette, hero of the American War. Soon after the attacks on the Invalides and the Bastille, and the Grande Peur, the Assemblée had called for volunteers from the spontaneously formed people’s militias to create a National Guard that would prevent future unrest. The Assemblée had inserted a clause into their draft Declaration of Men’s and Citizens’ Rights: ‘The guarantee of men’s and citizens’ rights necessitates the formation of a public army.’
Louis XVI had appointed La Fayette as head of the Paris branch of this new National Guard, and he had taken charge of about 10,000 men whose job was to keep the peace, a difficult job given that they were outnumbered about ten to one by other armed citizens. After the lynchings of Foullon and Berthier, La Fayette had resigned, but been pressed upon to take up his post again. There probably weren’t many candidates for such an impossible job.
During the pillaging of the Hôtel de Ville on 5 October, La Fayette did not arrive in situ until about two in the afternoon, when there was still a large, volatile crowd in the square demanding food and action. He then refused to march out to Versailles until he received an official order from the city council – which couldn’t be given until Mayor Bailly arrived. Bailly didn’t turn up until 4 p.m., so several more hours were lost, a delay that has since caused royalist sympathizers to accuse him of plotting against Louis XVI.
Once La Fayette had assembled several thousand National Guards, he marched them from Paris to Versailles, posted them outside the palace, and then went straight to bed. Or so it is often alleged.
Apparently unconcerned by the furious mob now filling the town, he assured first Mounier and then Louis XVI that his men had all sworn allegiance to the King and would ‘tolerate no violence’. He was, he told Mounier at about 3 a.m., ‘certain of general tranquillity’; he was going to ‘retire for some rest’ and Mounier should do the same. Again, this insouciance has earned La Fayette the fury of the royalists, who dubbed him ‘General Morpheus’, after the Greek god of dreams.
Louis then met Mounier again, and promised him that ‘I have no intention of leaving, and will never distance myself from the Assemblée nationale.’ Mounier knew that this was to dispel a rumour now circulating around Versailles that the royal family were about to flee to Metz.
As everyone except La Fayette expected, at about four in the morning, an armed crowd broke into the palace.
First they went to the royal guards’ barracks, cut a few throats and dragged about 15 men to the palace gates. Some of these were lynched; others were kept alive while the mob discussed how best to kill them. Meanwhile, unhindered by La Fayette’s men, intruders entered the palace grounds through gates that had been left open, killing two guards and taking one of the bodies to be beheaded with an axe below Louis XVI’s bedroom window. The murderous mob then flooded up the main staircase into the palace, heading for Marie-Antoinette’s apartment.
It was widely rumoured at the time that the attack was led by Louis XVI’s cousin Louis Philippe. There were reports that he had been seen that night in the palace, wearing a woman’s coat and hat, and shouting, ‘We’re going to kill the Queen!’ The rumours were almost certainly more fake news, because Louis Philippe didn’t need to take the risk of leading a mob. As a supposed revolutionary sympathizer, he was in a strong enough position to seize power as regent, whether Marie-Antoinette was dead or alive.
There are many accounts of heroic royal guards barring the door to the Queen’s apartments, shouting to wake everyone up as they were stabbed and slashed at by the intruders. One of these, Miomandre de Sainte-Marie, later claimed that he tried to reason with the attackers, telling them, ‘My friends! You love the King!’ But they attacked him and he was forced to fall back, shouting to the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, ‘I am alone against two hundred tigers!’
Luckily for Marie-Antoinette, she had been lying half-awake on her bed and, along with her two children, was whisked away to the King’s apartment via a hidden staircase that Louis had had installed so that his occasional visits to his wife’s bed would be less public and embarrassing.
It is a testament to the enduring personal respect felt for Louis XVI that the royal family actually found refuge in his bedroom. The mob got as far as an antechamber, and disarmed the guards, but then a royal attendant came and ordered them, in the name of the King, to stand down. And, probably to his surprise, they obeyed. For the moment, at least, Marie-Antoinette’s head was going to stay attached to her body.
Meanwhile, La Fayette had got out of bed and was urging his men to resist. Reminding them of their oath of allegiance, he rushed around rallying the defences, and ordering the National Guard to take control of the situation. They stopped thieves who were emptying the royal stables, saved some royal guards from being burned alive, and even killed a few of the ‘brigands’.
With order restored and dawn breaking, the crowd outside the palace began calling for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to show themselves. Marie-Antoinette was terrified she would be used for musket practice, but she appeared at the King’s side, to be met by cries of ‘Vive le Roi!’ (not ‘la Reine’, of course). Louis XVI was in shock, so La Fayette made a speech, promising everyone that the King was going to do everything he could to provide food for Paris.
According to most accounts, it was at this time that the crowd began to chant: ‘Le Roi à Paris!’ Louis must have known that this was more than an invitation to drop by for breakfast, but he appeared on the balcony again and announced: ‘My friends, I will go to Paris with my wife and my children. It is to the love of my subjects that I entrust that which I hold most precious.’ This was a cue for more cries of ‘Vive le Roi!’ and even a few of ‘Vive la Reine!’ The mood, it seemed, had changed.
The Assemblée convened early and decided to send a message of support to the King. Thirty-six delegates came to the palace and delivered a formal promise whereby ‘the Assemblée has just voted unanimously to declare the King inseparable from the representatives of the nation.’ Despite the tumultuous events of the past 24 hours, the democratic government still saw itself as part of a constitutional monarchy. As one of the delegates put it, ‘The ship of state maintains its course, no matter what gusts of wind assail it.’
Intentionally or not, this was a partial quotation of Paris’s motto: ‘Fluctuat nec mergitur’, which could be translated as ‘It gets tossed about, but has never sunk’. What had just happened was the equivalent of this unsinkable Parisian vessel sailing out to Versailles and ramming it amidships. The Assemblée delegates were still sounding optimistic, but their civilized, respectful version of a democratic constitutional monarchy had just been holed below the waterline.
At about half past midday on 6 October 1789, the Assemblée was debating recent developments when those present were informed that a procession was going past the building. The delegates went outside to see the royal family setting off for Paris. According to Mounier’s eyewitness account, the carriage was preceded by two women, each waving a guard’s head on their pike.fn4 Other women were holding up loaves of bread, suggesting that the two types of trophy were somehow equivalent. And as if it was all just a surreal, gigantic picnic, there were some 50 or 60 wagons loaded with bread and flour, and people were singing a folk song with the chorus ‘Nous ramenons le boulanger, la boulangère et le petit mitron’ (‘We’re bringing back the baker, his wife and the baker’s boy’) – a witty reference to the King, Queen and four-year-old Dauphin.
This motley cortège was under the escort of La Fayette and his men, who had supposedly come to Versailles to protect the royal family and the Assemblée from any disruption at the hands of the rioters. Now they were, according to Mounier, ‘firing their weapons, as if they had just won a victory’. Some of the royal guards who had been saved from the lynch mob were walking near the front of the procession, dressed in National Guard jackets. The guards too had become trophies.
Mounier ends his account of the day by expressing his shame that the Assemblée had not used their power to defend Louis XVI – they had allowed him ‘to leave accompanied by the murderers of his servants’. Mounier says that many ordinary Versaillais were waking up to the idea that their raison d’être (and in many cases their source of income) was being confiscated. The Parisians were reassuring them, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be back.’ Probably, though, many Versaillais already suspected that this was just another piece of fake news.
These few tumultuous hours had brought about momentous changes. The previous day, Louis had been hunting in the forest at Meudon (a good day, ‘shot 81 pieces’, before he was ‘interrupted by events’); Marie-Antoinette had been in her rural idyll at le Petit Trianon (with, it was said, her alleged lover, Fersen), while the Assemblée calmly debated their reforms. Old and new Versailles, standing shoulder to shoulder, had been patiently forging the new France with their politely worded speeches and co-signed decrees. Already, the exchanges between King and Assemblée had become a new form of Versailles etiquette, with rules being obeyed on both sides, and every word and gesture calculated to promote progress.
Then, surging out of the Parisian mud and rain, an armed crowd had stabbed and battered its way through all the decorum. In the space of just a few hours, the 160-year reign of Versailles had been terminated. Mob rule had won. And the mob was only just discovering its own strength.