FEW POLITICALLY INFORMED PARISIANS COULD HAVE BEEN ENTIRELY SURPRISED on the morning of June 20, 1791, when they woke to the news that the king and the entire royal family had disappeared from the palace of the Tuileries. Talk of a royal escape had been a constant feature of life in the capital since the storming of the Bastille two years earlier. More surprising was the outcome of the king’s flight. Many had expected that such a move would provoke civil war within the country, foreign war against Europe’s other monarchies, and the end of kingship in France. All of these things would ultimately come to pass within little more than a year, but in the summer of 1791, the royal escape attempt did not result in a major domestic or international conflict or the king’s removal from the throne. The decisions the National Assembly took in June and July to resolve the crisis caused by the king’s flight allowed implementation of the new constitution, but they ended up adding to the unresolved tensions that would soon undermine the effort to transform France into a constitutional monarchy.
Desperate to protect the king and the traditional authority of the throne, courtiers had tried to convince Louis XVI to flee to some location at a safe distance from Paris in July 1789. They tried again at the time of the October Days later that year. Worried about the safety of his family and genuinely reluctant to set off a civil war among his subjects, the king would not commit himself to any of their plans. An unlucky conspirator, the marquis de Favras, was hanged in February 1790 for his participation in a plot to kidnap the king and move him out of Paris. The crisis caused by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy convinced Louis that he had to try to escape from the capital, but he now had to choose between rival plans. As part of his effort to convert the king to his vision of a genuinely popular monarchy, Mirabeau urged Louis XVI to flee to a safe location inside the kingdom, where he could negotiate with the National Assembly without involving foreign powers in French affairs. The queen and the baron de Breteuil, the leader of a network of émigré supporters of the monarchy, put forward a rival plan in which the king would escape to a fortress near the Belgian border, where Austrian troops could intervene on his behalf if necessary. Louis XVI finally accepted this option. Months of secret negotiations secured a promise from Marie-Antoinette’s brother Leopold to provide the necessary funds and forces if the escape plan succeeded. “To lull the faction parties to sleep concerning his true intentions,” as a key conspirator put it, Louis personally addressed the National Assembly on April 19 to renew his promise to accept the new constitution, and he sent a public statement to other European courts with the same message.1
The escape attempt on June 20 required lengthy preparations. From the time of the October Days, Louis XVI had insisted that he would not abandon his family to secure his own safety; he and the queen decided that, in any flight attempt, they and their children would have to travel together. Axel von Fersen, the Swedish nobleman who had become the queen’s lover before the Revolution, handled the practical details of getting the royal party out of Paris. He had a large carriage, or berline, constructed with room for the king, the queen, the two children, their governess, and Louis XVI’s sister Elisabeth. The royal family would have to slip out of Paris unescorted, but royalist military officers with small detachments of loyal men would be stationed at key points along the route, ready to protect the passengers once they were in the countryside. The presence of these troops could alert the population that something unusual was happening, but the conspirators assumed that country folk would be sympathetic to the king. The soldiers were told that they would be guarding a “treasure”; they may have assumed that this meant money for the pay of troops at the frontier. General Bouillé, who had put down the army mutiny in Nancy the previous August, would be waiting near Montmédy with a strong contingent of soldiers, ready to back up the king’s authority with force.
Even after cavalrymen along the route had arrived at their stations, the date of the escape had to be postponed several times. As the cavalrymen lingered in the countryside, local peasants took notice and became increasingly alarmed by their presence. Nevertheless, the first stages of the plan went off successfully. In the afternoon of June 20, the king said goodbye to his brother, the comte de Provence, who left to make his own way to Belgium, disguised as an English merchant. After their customary nighttime rituals, the royal family retired to their bedrooms. Then, one by one, they made their way out of the darkened palace through an unguarded door and joined Fersen in a Paris horse cab. In the dark, the queen nearly stumbled into Lafayette, the National Guard commander, who had unexpectedly visited the palace. He had tied the king up in conversation for quite a while earlier in the evening, delaying the escape, but he did not recognize the queen.
Fersen drove the royal family to a nearby street where their carriage awaited; he then set off on his own secret journey to the frontier. Louis XVI promised him that “whatever may happen to me, I shall never forget all that you are doing for me,” but he forbade his wife’s lover from traveling with them. Three loyal bodyguards escorted the fugitives; they had been given yellow uniforms, an unfortunate decision because yellow, a color associated with the émigré prince de Condé, attracted hostile attention along their route. At 2:30 a.m., the group was finally ready to begin their journey, several hours later than originally planned but still well before sunrise. As their large and conspicuous carriage jolted along the main road to the east, Louis XVI was in a good mood, telling his family that “once I’m back in the saddle, I’ll be very different from what you’ve seen up to now.” He imagined how he would welcome back the émigrés and reestablish the Church.2
Relieved to be away from Paris and its hostile crowds, the king incautiously got out of the carriage at relays while the horses were changed and even engaged in conversation with bystanders. Rumors of possible sightings of the king spread along the route. Louis XVI had assumed that, outside of Paris, he would find loyal supporters, but in fact local officials and National Guardsmen, already alarmed by the unexplained presence of soldiers along the roads, went on heightened alert. At 6:30 p.m., the royal family reached the posthouse where the first detachment of loyal cavalrymen was supposed to be waiting for them. To their consternation, there was no sign of the troops or their commander, the young Claude Antoine Gabriel Choiseul. When the carriage hadn’t appeared at the scheduled time, Choiseul had decided that something must have gone wrong with the plan and decided to leave before his presence aroused too many suspicions. He sent a confusing message to the other units waiting farther along the route; it did not occur to him to leave anyone behind who could let the travelers know what he had done.
With no other choice, the royal party continued down the highway. When they reached the town of Sainte-Menehould, the local postmaster, Jean-Baptiste Drouet, thought he recognized the king when he peered into the berline after hitching up fresh horses to it. Drouet communicated his suspicions to town officials, who sent him and a companion to chase after the carriage. At 11:00 p.m., the king and his family reached Varennes, the last town where they were to change horses before reaching the planned rendezvous with Bouillé and his troops. Precious minutes were lost because of a mix-up about where the travelers’ fresh horses were waiting for them. Meanwhile, Drouet arrived. He improvised a barricade to block the bridge out of town and alerted Jean-Baptiste Sauce, the town procureur, or manager. Sauce inspected the passengers’ documents and found no reason to arrest them, but Drouet made such a fuss that it was finally decided to keep them in the town until morning. As the fugitives were settling down unhappily for the night, a local resident who had once visited Versailles was brought to the town inn. Recognizing the monarch, he could not keep himself from kneeling in homage. His identity given away by a loyal subject, Louis XVI replied wearily, “Yes, I am indeed your king.”3
The townspeople were initially swayed when the king appealed for their aid, telling them how he and his family had been “forced to live in the capital in the midst of daggers and bayonets.” But the town’s church bell sounded the tocsin, bringing several thousand National Guardsmen and ordinary peasants to Varennes to prepare defenses against any effort to attack the town. The town council, made up of humble residents, reached a decision: they would not obey the king’s orders. Although they assured him of their love, they told him “that his residence was in Paris, and that even those living in the provinces eagerly and anxiously called him to return there.” As dawn approached, two couriers sent in pursuit of the king by the National Assembly two days earlier reached Varennes, carrying a decree requiring all local officials to compel him to return to the capital. “There is no longer a king in France,” Louis XVI sadly concluded.4
Realizing that their gamble had failed, the exhausted royal family reluctantly returned to their ill-fated carriage. Bouillé reached a hill overlooking Varennes with four hundred cavalry shortly after their departure, but with thousands of armed men now surrounding the carriage, he decided that liberating the royal family was not impossible. Any illusions Louis XVI still cherished about the population’s sympathy for his cause were severely tested by the hostile receptions he received at most of the towns along the route back to Paris. Local officials, Madame de Tourzel recalled, “had only one thought in mind: to glory in their own triumph and to humiliate the royal family.”5 A nobleman who cried out “Vive le roi!” as the carriage passed by was killed by local peasants. The return journey proceeded much more slowly than the attempted escape had, since the berline now had to move at the pace of the guards marching alongside it. The heat was sweltering, and the cloud of dust stirred up by the thousands of marchers made breathing difficult.
Halfway back to Paris, the royal party was met by three National Assembly deputies who had been appointed to accompany them. Reflecting the Assembly’s effort to unite in the face of the crisis caused by the king’s flight, the delegation consisted of a devoted royalist, Charles Latour-Maubourg; a leader of the mainstream Jacobin faction, Barnave; and a democratic radical and close ally of Robespierre, Pétion. Hoping that direct exposure to the king and queen might soften their hostility, Latour-Maubourg let his two colleagues ride inside. So cramped that Pétion had to hold the royal princess on his lap, they listened to a long harangue by the king’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, who emphasized above all the measures the revolutionaries had taken against the Church. “This speech made such an impression on Barnave that from that moment on, he changed his conduct and his ideas,” Madame de Tourzel claimed.6
In reality, Barnave and his closest associates had already begun to distance themselves from the more radical Jacobins. Indeed, they had tried to establish secret contact with the king. Barnave and Marie-Antoinette clearly reached some kind of understanding during the hours they spent in the carriage; after their return to Paris, Barnave would follow in the footsteps of Mirabeau and establish a secret correspondence with her. In these letters, he attempted to forge an alliance between the king and the Assembly and negotiate a revision of the constitution to restore some royal powers. Even as the king and queen began to realize that there might still be a chance of saving a portion of his authority, they still had to face the hostility of the Paris populace. At several points as they neared the city, crowds surged toward the carriage, threatening to kill the three royal bodyguards who had assisted in the escape attempt. Lafayette, the National Guard commander, gave orders for guards and spectators to maintain a strict silence and to keep their hats on their heads, rather than removing them in the traditional gesture of respect for authority. Five days after they had left, the royal family found themselves back in the Tuileries.
More surprising than the king’s desperate flight to Varennes was the reaction of the National Assembly and the population to the crisis. The king’s valet had been the first to realize the royal family had left the palace, and within an hour of the discovery, the news had spread throughout the capital. Large, angry crowds gathered around the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of the city government. Lafayette and Bailly, the mayor of Paris, who were responsible for the king’s security, fell under suspicion because they had failed to stop the plot. When the deputies accepted Bailly’s assertion that “the king and some of his family were carried off last night by enemies of the public welfare,” revolutionary patriots extended their suspicions to the National Assembly as a whole. The story that the king had been abducted, “as if he had been given a sleeping potion and hauled away without his knowledge,” as a skeptical journalist put it, fell apart within hours, when it was discovered that he had left behind a lengthy denunciation of the Revolution. In this document, Louis XVI declared all the actions he had taken during his “captivity” invalid because they had been performed under duress. He claimed that for two years, he had been powerless as he watched “the destruction of the monarchy, the subversion of all authority, the violation of properties, the endangerment of personal security, crime left unpunished and the establishment of a complete anarchy.”7
Even moderate deputies were outraged by the king’s violation of the repeated oaths he had sworn to accept the new constitution and his apparent willingness to risk the outbreak of a civil war. The Assembly quickly asserted its authority to issue decrees and orders to the ministers without his approval. It dispatched couriers to alert local officials throughout France and banned anyone from leaving the country. The Assembly’s actions gave France its first taste of what would come to be called “revolutionary government,” the invocation of emergency powers justified by an overwhelming crisis. In the streets, ordinary people took their own revenge on their unfaithful monarch. “All the signs, where ‘Perfumer to the king,’ or ‘to the Queen,’ or ‘Royal lottery,’ &c. was written up, are knocked down, and perhaps in a short time their names will not even be mentioned,” an Englishwoman wrote. Madame Roland, who had scrupulously confined herself to “the kind of influence that seemed proper for my sex,” decided that circumstances required her to take a public role and signed up as a member of a political club that admitted women.8
For the first time since the Revolution began, serious voices now put forward the idea that France could do without a king at all. Thomas Paine, who had helped establish one republic in America, now sought to help found another. He hoped that the French would see “the absurdity of monarchical governments; here will be a whole nation disturbed by the folly of one man.” On June 21, while the royal carriage was still rolling toward Varennes, the radical Cordeliers Club issued a proclamation calling “royalty, especially hereditary royalty… incompatible with liberty.” The club urged the National Assembly to “immediately declare that France is no longer a monarchy, that she is a Republic.” Radical journals, such as Jean-Louis Carra’s Annales politiques, the favorite newspaper of provincial Jacobin clubs, denounced the king in the strongest terms: “This morning, Louis XVI deserted the throne, the capital, the empire, and, by this cowardly defection, intended to come back, with foreign executioners, to rule over twenty-five million corpses.” There was considerable popular support in Paris for these ideas. On June 24, two days after news of the king’s capture had reached the capital, some thirty thousand people marched to present a Cordeliers petition to the National Assembly. For devoted royalists, the king’s flight sent a different kind of message. On June 23, just before he learned that the king had been stopped at Varennes, the outspoken editor of the Gazette de Paris gave free rein to his excitement. “He found a way to break his chains, this unfortunate king.… In whatever place where he has sought asylum, he will have found real Frenchmen. What inexpressible joy they must feel in crying, ‘The king! The king!’”9
The leaders of the National Assembly and the city government were determined to save their constitutional project from both republicans and royalists. When Cordeliers representatives tried to read their proclamation to the more mainstream Jacobin Club on June 22, a speaker reminded the members that “you are the Friends of the Constitution and… the monarchy is part of the constitution.” The club voted unanimously not to listen to the petitioners. As the many Assembly deputies who belonged to the Jacobins realized, their own legitimacy depended on the still-uncompleted constitution, and the monarchy was an essential element of the elaborate structure they had been drawing up. Preoccupied for months before the king’s flight with the problem of containing popular unrest, the Assembly was not eager to restart the revolutionary process. The law passed on May 10 banning collective petitions, and the Le Chapelier law against workers’ organizations, showed their mood. The mayor and the National Guard commander would not tolerate the behavior of radical individuals, such as the wagondriver who was arrested for “having dared to say that M. Bailly and M. Delafayette must be hanged.”10
Outside of Paris, the king’s flight and arrest set off a variety of reactions. In border regions, and especially in the northeast, where Louis had hoped to take refuge, there was fear of a foreign invasion. Local authorities sometimes arrested nobles, refractory priests, and others suspected of harboring royalist sympathies, a foretaste of the increasingly harsh measures that would characterize the Revolution in the coming years. In rural Brittany, a National Guard unit tried to track down a refractory priest who had come out of hiding when he learned the news of the royal family’s attempted getaway. He “cried out in the village of Génezé, with a face radiant with joy, ‘Good news, my friends, the king has fled, it’s good news for us.’” A petition from the Jacobin club in the city of Montpellier, on the Mediterranean coast, urged the establishment of a republic, showing that it was not only Parisians who were willing to consider this radical option. Some of the deputies in Paris were convinced by the letters they received from their home regions urging them to do away with the monarchy. One constituent wrote that the nation was “ready to set an example of a people that knows how to manage without a king.”11 Once it became clear that the National Assembly intended to preserve the monarchy, these debates faded away. Nevertheless, the possibility of a republican government had been established in the minds of at least a part of the population.
Unwilling to consider an alternative to the monarchy or even to the existing monarch, the leaders of the National Assembly handled the king gingerly after he returned. The suspension of his powers until the circumstances of the flight could be clarified was too much for the royalist deputies in the Assembly, who refused to take any part in the proceedings. Disregarding their protests and those of the radicals, the Assembly’s leaders decided that the king would be treated as “the first victim of a conspiracy formed by the enemies of France,” as a centrist journalist put it, rather than as a suspect.12 Louis was allowed to make a statement about his motives without being subjected to interrogation; while he did not pretend to have been kidnapped, he promised not to continue opposing the constitution and said he now recognized that the population supported it. General Bouillé, who had fled to safety in Belgium, provided cover for the royal family by announcing, falsely, that he had initiated the plot.
Arguments in favor of maintaining the monarchy combined appeals to political theory with practical considerations. No less an authority than Montesquieu, the most widely quoted political thinker during the early years of the Revolution, had insisted that republican government was possible only in small states; the new United States had not existed long enough to show the French that he was wrong. The Gazette universelle, a newspaper that supported the moderates in the Assembly, editorialized, “It is not for Louis XVI that the monarchy has been established.… It is to prevent a perpetual clash of private ambitions striving for the highest post; it is to assure the separation of powers, without which there is neither liberty nor constitution; it is to maintain the indivisibility of the empire, without which we are at the mercy of any ambitious neighbor.” More candidly, Lafayette told a British friend that the Assembly’s leaders thought it was in their interests “to keep a monarch who is weak, in truth, and who has not been sincere with us,” but who could be pressured into accepting the nearly completed constitution. Fear of foreign governments’ reactions was a genuine concern: the leaders of the Assembly wrote to Emperor Leopold II, hoping to convince him to endorse the French constitution rather than expressing hostility toward it. The latter could easily drive the French population to demand “a complete overturning of everything” and a war against all other monarchies.13
On July 12, 1791, the committee appointed by the National Assembly to propose a response to the crisis issued its report. Since the constitution had promised that the king would be inviolable and could not be punished for his actions, the committee members concluded that he should be reinstated, provided that he was willing to swear to obey the constitution once it was completed. The radical minority in the National Assembly was incredulous. “How could you ever restore the nation’s confidence in Louis XVI?” Grégoire asked. “If he promises to be loyal to the constitution, who would dare vouch for him?” Speaking for the majority, Barnave, still remembered as one of the patriot firebrands of 1789, hammered home the argument that removing the king would threaten the basis of society. “Are we going to conclude the Revolution, are we going to start it all over again?” he asked. “Is there any other aristocracy left to destroy except that of property?… It is time to conclude the Revolution.… It needs to stop now that the nation is free and that all the French are equals.”14 On July 15, the Assembly approved the committee’s recommendation.
The National Assembly’s decision to restore the king to the throne set off a showdown with the newly emboldened democratic radicals, led by the Cordeliers Club. The Cordeliers immediately sought support from other groups, including the Society of the Friends of Truth and the Jacobins. A petition drawn up by the journalist Brissot after a joint meeting of the clubs on the evening after the Assembly vote asserted that “it would be as contradictory to the majesty of the outraged nation as to its interests to continue to entrust the reins of the empire to a man who has lied, betrayed, and fled.”15 Robespierre, respected by the radicals because of his unswerving devotion to the popular cause in the National Assembly, urged them not to circulate the petition. He was trying to head off a confrontation that he feared would be used to justify a crackdown on the democratic movement; his advice, however, went unheeded. The Cordeliers and the more cautious Jacobins spent several hours arguing about exactly what the petition should say: Should it call for the king to be removed “by constitutional means,” or should it leave open the possibility of calling for a popular insurrection?
The day of July 16 was filled with political intrigue. The deputies who had followed Barnave’s lead in pushing for the reinstatement of the king set out to disrupt and defeat the radical movement. Warned by Barnave’s close collaborator Alexandre Lameth, several prominent Cordeliers, including Danton and Desmoulins, dropped out of sight, but others called for a mass meeting at the Champ de Mars, where the “altar of the fatherland” from the great Festival of the Federation in July 1790 still stood. While the Cordeliers were trying to mobilize their supporters, Barnave’s allies quit the Jacobin Club and founded a new group, the Feuillants, so called because it met in a former monastery by that name. Of the some three hundred Assembly deputies who had been Jacobin members, only six, led by Robespierre, remained. Initially, the majority of the provincial societies affiliated with the Jacobins backed the Feuillants, whose meeting place was next door to the Manège, giving it the appearance of being an annex of the legislature.
Meanwhile, the Cordeliers’ supporters gathered at the altar of the fatherland to draft yet another petition. They were careful not to directly challenge the authority of the Assembly by calling for a republic, but they asked that the question of the king’s fate be referred to the “primary assemblies” that would soon be gathering everywhere in the country to choose deputies for the new legislature. As they dispersed for the night, they announced that citizens would be invited to come to the Champ de Mars on the next day to sign the new petition, which would then be delivered to the Assembly. People began to gather at the Champ de Mars on the morning of July 17. The meeting was disrupted when two men were pulled from under the platform at the altar, where they had been drilling a hole, probably in the hope of looking up the skirts of women coming to sign the petition. With the city crackling with political tension, however, members of the crowd imagined that they might have been planning to disrupt the rally or even plant explosives. The two men were hustled to the nearest police station and then killed.
News of this incident provided the pretext that hardliners in the Assembly and the city government had been waiting for to suppress the radical movement. The Assembly rushed through a resolution calling on the mayor to disperse the crowd at the Champ de Mars. Lafayette and Bailly assembled their forces and marched across the city, carrying with them a red flag to announce the imposition of martial law. Many of the National Guardsmen, frustrated by months of trying to contain an unruly population, were more than ready to use force. As the troops reached the Champ de Mars, a shot rang out, causing panic in the crowd and among the guards, who immediately charged toward the “altar of the fatherland.” They did not give the warning that was supposed to precede the use of force, and at least sixty members of the crowd were killed. The shock caused by the massacre was enormous. For the first time, the National Guard, the citizen militia created by the revolutionary movement itself, had become “f—ing villains and rogues who had the baseness to fire on the people,” as a cabdriver arrested on the following day said.16
The Cordelier journalists were temporarily silenced, although the chronicler Nicolas Ruault told his brother that “their opinion has nevertheless become stronger; it’s the usual effect of persecution.”17 Plans to stage a mass trial of those arrested were shelved, as it was clear that eyewitness testimony would not back up claims that the crowd had started the fighting. Two months later, when the National Assembly was winding up its meetings, it approved a general amnesty for political crimes. Many who had sided with the Cordeliers never forgot the massacre, however. Two years later, when Mayor Bailly was caught up in the Reign of Terror and sentenced to death, the guillotine was transported to the Champ de Mars so that he could be executed on the site of what his enemies regarded as his greatest crime.
With the issue of the king’s fate settled and the radical opposition temporarily silenced, the National Assembly undertook a final push to finish work on the constitution. The efforts of the Feuillant leaders Barnave and Duport were complicated by the continuing reluctance of the king and queen to sincerely embrace the constitution. Barnave tried to persuade the royal couple that Louis’s powers under the new arrangements would still be eminently respectable. His veto power would be more effective than the rights he had previously possessed to override the parlements; he would still choose all the important government officials; and his “civil list,” the money he could spend at his own discretion, would be greater than that of any other European ruler. “What more does it take to be king?” Barnave asked. Although Marie-Antoinette sent her brother Leopold II a letter, essentially dictated by Barnave, asking him to promise to respect Louis’s acceptance of the constitution, she continued to regard it as a “tissue of impractical absurdities.” In secret notes she told the Austrian government that she and the king were just pretending to go along with the Feuillants, “in order to better double-cross them later.”18
Although Leopold remained reluctant to get drawn into French affairs, the failure of the flight to Varennes put pressure on him and other European rulers to make some gesture on behalf of their fellow monarch. Up to this point, the major European powers had been content to treat the turmoil in France as an internal French matter; some of them were secretly pleased to see the continent’s major power sidelined while they pursued their own agendas. For the three eastern powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, developments in Poland were more pressing than the situation in France. On May 3, 1791, “patriot” reformers, acting together with King Stanislas, staged a parliamentary revolution, trimming the powers of the aristocracy and granting political rights to wealthier urban residents, although not the peasantry. The Gazette de Leyde contrasted the Polish revolution, which “has not cost a drop of blood,” with the upheaval in France, but Poland’s neighbors, who were not prepared to tolerate a movement that threatened their influence, began planning military intervention that would result in a partition of the country in 1792.19
Emperor Leopold and the king of Prussia met in the Saxon town of Pillnitz on August 17, 1791, and issued a joint declaration calling “the present position of His Majesty the King of France… a matter of common concern to all the sovereigns of Europe,” thus designating the French Revolution as an international issue. They avoided making any firm commitment to defeat it, however. In fact, they made it clear that they did not intend to act unless all the other European powers agreed, a condition unlikely to be met. As the loyal Fersen, now in exile in Brussels, told the queen, for many European powers “it is useful that disorder and anarchy continue and the kingdom is thereby weakened, without them seeming to contribute to it and without it having cost them a thing.” The king’s brothers, now together in Coblentz after the comte de Provence’s successful escape from France, had the Pillnitz declaration published and circulated in France along with their own cover letter, in which they optimistically insisted that the European monarchs were now ready to intervene in France. They adjured Louis XVI not to abandon “the fundamental maxims of the monarchy” and outraged him by trying to appoint a new royal governor for the colony of Saint-Domingue without his approval.20 The royal brothers’ actions raised fears about an invasion of France and undercut the credibility of the king’s assurances of support for the constitution.
Meanwhile, Barnave, Duport, and the other leaders of the newly formed Feuillants worked to revise the constitution in ways that they claimed would give further protection to property rights and strengthen the executive branch of the government. They proposed raising the property requirement for voting to a level that would have completely excluded peasants and urban artisans. Barnave insisted that “for most men, tranquility is more important than liberty,” which allowed the radicals to portray him as a hypocrite. They claimed that he had abandoned the core values of the Revolution that he had done so much to launch in the summer of 1789. Robespierre, who had taken on the mission of salvaging the Jacobin Club after the split with the Feuillants, was at his most devastating in denouncing them for their efforts to create a new aristocracy: “What good does it do for me as a citizen if there are no more nobles,” he demanded to know, “if I see that privileged class succeeded by another to whom I am forced to give my vote so that it can discuss my most cherished interests?” Popular militants demanded that poorer citizens be allowed to participate in the elections for the new assembly that was about to be chosen. “Workers are urged to rise up on the pretext that, since all men have been declared equal by the law as well as by nature, one should not let wealth create differences among them,” the chronicler Adrien Colson reported.21
The Feuillant leaders’ efforts to revise the constitution were deeply unpopular, and this allowed Robespierre to regain the loyalty of many of the Jacobins who had initially shifted their loyalty to the new club. He emphasized his unswerving commitment to the constitution and his lack of personal ambition at a moment when Barnave and Duport appeared to be trying to find some way to make it possible for them to be appointed as ministers, despite the provisions of the self-denying ordinance passed the previous May. Robespierre gained the nickname of “the Incorruptible,” and became known as a politician who was ready to put the public interest ahead of his own career. In the provinces, patriotic militants like Goujon stood by the Jacobin network and worked to win over the population. Goujon browbeat the local priest into letting him use the church to give lectures to the local villagers every Sunday. He did not aim to destroy religion—“he admired above all the morality of Jesus, in which he found all the principles necessary for the happiness and the peace of families and society,” his friend Tissot wrote—but he thought priests distorted the true teachings of Christianity. Through his lectures, he enacted the revolutionaries’ dream of “regenerating” the population by explaining the Declaration of Rights and announcing that “the poor and virtuous farmer, bent over the soil that he works with his hands… is a thousand times greater… than the haughty rich men who think that they have been raised above other men.” Tissot later remembered seeing tears in the peasants’ eyes as Goujon depicted for them “the happiness that true liberty promises.”22
On September 13, 1791, the king announced that he would accept the constitution as it stood, without further revisions. By this time, the elections for the new Legislative Assembly that would replace the National Assembly were well under way. Although many of the new deputies shared the views of the Feuillants, it was clear that the Jacobins would also have powerful spokesmen in the new body, including well-known figures such as Brissot and Condorcet and new ones like Pierre Vergniaud, who represented Bordeaux. However, there would be no more deputies elected to represent the privileged orders of the old regime, who had made up half of the original membership of the National Assembly. In the last days before they handed over power to their successors, the deputies of the National Assembly reversed the decisions they had made earlier on several controversial issues. After long hesitations, they voted to annex the papal enclave of Avignon in southern France, setting a precedent that threatened to cause conflicts with the country’s neighbors. Barnave roused himself to defend the white colonists of Saint-Domingue, who had vowed to “bury themselves under its ruins, rather than to allow the promulgation of the decree of May 15,” which had granted rights to free men of color born to free and legally married parents. As the deputies listened to Barnave’s reminder that “this regime is oppressive, but it provides a living in France for several million men,” they were unaware that thousands of enslaved blacks in the country’s richest colony had just risen up against that oppression; news of the rebellion that began on the night of August 22, 1791, would not reach Paris for another month. After a debate as angry as the original clash on the issue in May, Barnave won a last political triumph by getting the National Assembly to repeal the decree of May 15. The deputies would leave the issue of rights for free men of color to the discretion of the white colonists.23
Although it refused to maintain its earlier stand on behalf of the rights of free people of color, the Assembly then overturned the restrictions it had continued to impose on the Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace. A decree adopted on September 28 offered them citizenship rights on the same basis as all the other inhabitants of the country, although, unlike members of other minority groups, they were required to take a civic oath. As part of this oath, they had to explicitly renounce the special privileges and legal exemptions that organized Jewish communities had previously held; these had allowed them to follow their own laws on matters such as marriage and divorce and to settle legal disputes among themselves in Jewish courts. Whereas the status of the Jews occasioned considerable debate, another minority saw its status transformed without any discussion. As part of a general revision of the country’s criminal code, the deputies voted to eliminate penalties for “those phony offenses, created by superstition, feudalism, the tax system, and despotism.”24 Among those “phony offenses” were homosexual acts: France thus became the first country to completely decriminalize them.
On September 30, 1791, the deputies of the National Assembly gathered for the last time in the Salle de Manège, the improvised meeting hall created for them when they had come to Paris from Versailles. There was no equivalent to the elaborate ceremony that had opened the Estates General more than two years earlier. Some of the leading personalities who had decisively shaped the Assembly’s extraordinary history were missing. Mirabeau, whose thundering oratory had rallied the deputies to defy the king at the royal session of June 23, 1789, was dead; Mounier, so influential in the early debates, had resigned after the October Days and returned to his native Dauphiné. On their last day of work, as usual, the deputies had a crowded agenda. It included a report on the financial situation, mention of troubles in the provinces, and last-minute amendments to various decrees. Their president thanked the staff who had assisted them in their work and reminded them of the etiquette to be observed when the king came to officially declare their session over.
It was left to Emmanuel Pastoret, a newly elected deputy to the Legislative Assembly that was about to replace the National Assembly, to deliver the only substantial assessment of what the legislators had accomplished during the twenty-nine months of their labors. “Liberty had fled beyond the seas, or hidden itself in the mountains,” he told them:
You put it back on its throne among us. Despotism had erased all the pages of the book of nature; you put back into it this immortal declaration, the Decalogue of free men.… You created a political representation that… made the law the general expression of the will of the French.… You broke all the links of the feudal chain under which [the people] was oppressed. Pride had separated men; you worked to reunite them. Equality had been so distorted that it was regarded as a privilege to defend the country. All citizens have become soldiers.… You made the service of the altar more venerable.… You freed commerce, agriculture, industry, thought. Not satisfied with having created the most beautiful constitution in the universe, you gave yourself over to such immense labor on the laws that those who may someday try to imitate you will perhaps say… what Alexander said of Philip: he left me nothing to conquer.25
Few of the deputies who listened to Pastoret could have entirely accepted this rosy vision of their accomplishments. There were official celebrations of the completion of the constitution—the king paid for the illumination of the Tuileries Gardens and the Champs-Élysées on September 25, and the city put on an even larger display a week later. But even as the deputies took part in these events, they were well aware that the country was still beset by conflicts. Many nobles signed a protest against the constitution, and the pace of emigrations picked up. On the left, dissatisfaction with the constitution was equally strong. The Révolutions de Paris told its readers how street demonstrators had surrounded Robespierre and his close ally Pétion and placed crowns of oak leaves on their heads, honoring them for their dogged opposition to the document’s antidemocratic features. As for the rest of the deputies, the journal wrote, “They are gone, these faithless representatives, covered with gold and curses.” The militant and self-proclaimed atheist Sylvain Maréchal told the departing deputies that they had accomplished nothing: “I still see, as before, two distinct castes, the rich and the poor… in spite of the Declaration of Rights.”26
As she saw the constitution going into effect without any mention of rights for women, the always outspoken Olympe de Gouges was inspired to rewrite the document’s most celebrated section in the form of a “Declaration of the Rights of Woman,” beginning with the assertion that “woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights.” Her creative appropriation of the National Assembly’s own language gave her document special force. She insisted that “male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honors, positions and public employment,” and she defended the right of women to speak in public with a striking formulation: “Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.” She concluded her manifesto with a call for a completely egalitarian marriage contract.27 In the uproar of 1791, de Gouges’s publication attracted little attention, but with the rise of modern women’s movements, it has come to be recognized as a milestone of feminist thought.
As they prepared to disperse, many of the deputies had come to regret the sweeping changes brought about by the decrees they had voted for on the night of August 4, 1789; others were convinced that not enough had been done to fulfill those promises to establish equality and extinguish the remnants of feudalism. Still, most of the deputies were proud of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which they had left untouched in August 1791 during their debates about revising the constitution, even though they were acutely conscious of the bitter disputes that had divided them about the meaning of its principles. Ferrières assured his wife that “the king and the queen seem to be entirely for the constitution,” but it required considerable optimism to believe in their sincerity.28 Whether deputies had supported or opposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, they could hardly have agreed with Pastoret’s claim that their legislation had settled the religious questions facing the country. They knew how divided the military had become as a result of the changes wrought by the Revolution. Another of their last acts in September 1791 had been an effort to reconcile the principles of economic freedom Pastoret celebrated with the realities of life in the peasant communities, whose unrest continued to trouble them. Whatever their true feelings about the Assembly’s accomplishments, however, the departing deputies knew they had made immense changes in their country’s life. For better or for worse, they had truly inaugurated a new era of history, for their own country and for the world that surrounded it.