CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HATED, HUMBLED, MORTIFIED
“The Queen [is] hated, humbled, mortified . . . to know that she favours a Measure is the certain Means to frustrate its Success.”
GOUVERNEUR MORRIS, 1 JULY 1789
Crucial decisions of the Third Estate were taken during the week beginning 14 June 1789 when the King and Queen were at Marly, mourning the “first Dauphin” (as Louis Joseph became known with time, the little ghost who had to be distinguished from Louis Charles). Louis XVI’s geographical separation from Versailles, where the political action was taking place, had the effect of subjecting him further to the conservative pressures of his brothers, especially Artois. On this occasion, Marie Antoinette did not mount an independent initiative. The King continued to vacillate, something that for the last few years had given her the opportunity to display contrasting firmness. Recent events had, however, sapped her strength. Whether it was due to the private grief she felt or the public odium she had to endure, the Queen’s confidence had waned. That feeling of being ill-fated, one whose destiny was to bring misfortune, haunted her anew.
This was the woman about whom it was earnestly believed in certain quarters that she intended to poison the King and install Artois—on the grounds that he was her long-term lover—as ruler of France. This was the woman who, according to a play of 1789 called La Destruction de l’Aristocratisme, loathed the French people with such intensity that “with what delight I would bathe in their blood.” She was also the woman of whom it was believed that she had secretly spirited away millions to her brother Joseph.1
And always the pamphlets poured forth their lubricious slime. Artois in L’Autrichienne en Goguette took the Queen from behind in public with obscene exclamations about her “firm and elastic” body. If not an ardent lover of men, Marie Antoinette was an ardent lover of women; the message was always hammered home that the Queen was insatiable—even when alone. In Le Godmiche [Dildo] Royal of 1789 the Queen was satirized as the goddess Juno, in a text which began with Juno sitting alone “with her skirts hitched up . . .” and went on from there.2 Perhaps it was her “Germanic vigour” that was responsible, which had led to her deflowering even before she left Austria. Now it led her to indulge in orgies with bodyguards where drink featured as well as constant sex, although Marie Antoinette was in fact, as has been noted, a teetotaller.
Who could respect such a creature as a woman, let alone a queen? A woman who, quite apart from her sexual appetites, was a dangerous agent of a foreign power. It all had to be true. The stories had, after all, been printed over and over again, repetition being a cynical substitute for veracity. In the words of the radical “Gracchus” Babeuf about this time, Louis XVI was a donkey, weak and obstinate but not cruel, who should have been mated to a young and gentle she-donkey; instead he had been given a tigress.3
Gouverneur Morris summed up the situation harshly in a report back to the United States. Little was to be expected in any way from the King. As for Marie Antoinette, she was “hated, humbled, mortified” and although she was intriguing to save “some shattered Remnants of the Royal Authority,” it was enough to know that she favoured a measure for that to be “the certain Means to frustrate its Success.” But Morris’s words were no harsher than the reality of the Queen’s situation in June and early July. An English doctor, John Rigby, an ardent Whig freshly arrived in France, saw her at Versailles about this time and was struck by how the Queen’s countenance had assumed “the character of severity.” As she went on her way to Mass, that familiar journey in which the grace of her passage had once caused general remark, her brow was deeply “corrugated” and she looked from side to side with narrowed eyes and an expression of suspicion that he found quite spoilt her beauty.4
Hardly a natural politician, let alone a brilliant political thinker, the Queen floundered in an unprecedented situation. But then so did the King, Necker and the vast majority of politically minded people in France. Artois might think that strength was the solution but it remained to be seen whether such strength would not arouse an even more perilous counteraction. On 17 June, three days after the court reached Marly, the Third Estate declared itself unilaterally to be a National Assembly, and that it was intent on providing France with a new Constitution. On 20 June, locked out of the usual salon in which they met, the deputies adjourned to one of Versailles’ tennis courts and a general oath was administered. This oath ignored the theoretical powers of the monarch and, as such, was a gross—or courageous—act of defiance. Necker, the moderate, the conciliator of the Third Estate, advocated concessions to defuse the situation. Artois and Provence on the other hand urged the King strongly the other way, carrying the Queen along with them.
In a scene probably stage-managed by the Duchesse de Polignac, Marie Antoinette appeared in the King’s presence with her two surviving children. Pushing them into his arms, she pleaded with him to remain firm. The maternal card was, after all, the one good card in her hand. Five days later Marie Antoinette would receive the deputies charmingly, holding little Louis Charles, the “second Dauphin,” by the hand. On 27 June she once again appeared on a balcony with both her children this time, at the King’s side. According to the Parman envoy, Virieu, the Queen, mourning her lost son, looked pale and her eyes were red.5 But she was still able to make the point of her position in the state. And she could still put on a show; it was at this time that the young Chateaubriand at Versailles received a smile from a Queen who seemed “delighted with life,” something that he would remember nearly thirty years later under bizarre circumstances.6
As for Louis XVI, who was as temperamentally disinclined towards firmness as he was disinclined towards the strife, he first adopted one attitude, and then reversed it. In the process, he sacrificed any possible advantage that strength and clarity of purpose might have brought. The Tennis Court Oath, he muttered disconsolately, was “merely a phrase.” On 23 June the King held a séance royale — that is, a session in which edicts would be promulgated; the Queen was not present. He refused to permit all three Estates to meet together although he recognized the need for the Estates to approve taxation in the future. Four days later he went back on his decision and accepted the composite meeting of the Three Estates, since the Third Estate showed no sign of going to their allotted (separate) chamber. Meanwhile Mirabeau, whose eloquent speeches given without notes were holding the deputies in thrall, declared of the Third Estate turned National Assembly: “We are here by the will of the people, we shall only go away by the force of bayonets.”*70 The desperate atmosphere at court was reported by the Comtesse de Provence to her close friend Madame de Gourbillon in a letter of 2 July: “You have no idea what life at Versailles is like . . .” Stones were being thrown and shots fired at night.7
On 4 July, Count Mercy reported to Joseph II that the King, wavering once more, was now inclining towards the interests of the clergy and nobility, while Necker continued to believe in the potential of the Third Estate to throw its weight on the side of the monarchy. As Gouverneur Morris wrote, Louis was “an honest Man and wishes really to do Good” without having either “Genius or Education” to discover what that good might be.8 In the meantime, with the royal brothers holding firm conservative views on the authority of the monarchy, it was not likely that Necker would last long in the seat of power.
On 9 July there was another revolutionary step forward as the previous National Assembly turned itself into a Constituent National Assembly, with the power to make laws. La Fayette, the deputy for Riom where his estates were, put forward a draft declaration concerning human rights that was based on the American Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile the plotting against Necker went forward, also at Versailles, while in Paris troops, up to 30,000 of them, were brought in against possible repetitions of those sinister Réveillon riots of April. On 11 July Necker was dismissed (for the second time) by the King, and with him went Montmorin and others associated with his ministry. In Necker’s place came the notoriously conservative Breteuil, and other aristocrats such as the aged Marshal Duc de Broglie as Minister of War, and the son of the Duc de Vauguyon, Louis’ Governor of years before.
Since Necker had remained popular with the public, his disappearance—the King told him that he counted on his departure being “prompt and in secret”—was one more element in the savage general discontent.9 Rioting on 12 July, which led to the closure of the theatres and the opera, was succeeded by much worse violence on the 13th. There was a seemingly minor incident, when the troops of the Royal German Regiment, under the Prince de Lambesc, were pelted with stones. But the situation erupted when they responded. Later, Lambesc and his men were accused of cutting down not only rioters but also innocent civilians with their sabres.
Perhaps Lambesc was not guilty of inordinate brutality; he was subsequently acquitted after an investigation. His own explanation was that he had to stop the mob seizing the Pont Tournant over the Seine. Marie Antoinette remained loyal to him: “How wrong that someone should be punished for being faithful to the King and obeying orders!” she told Mercy. Lambesc, son of the Comtesse de Brionne, was a distant cousin, a non-royal Lorrainer, and the Queen retained her sympathy for him after he emigrated, advocating his cause to her brother Joseph.10 However, she kept these feelings private, declining, for example, to plead Lambesc’s cause with the Marquis de La Fayette, the dominant figure of the National Assembly. Her explanation—“I would give the impression of believing him guilty if I spoke for him”—was probably not the real one; the truth was that the Queen knew that her days as a successful petitioner were drawing to a close.
The Lambesc Affair certainly did great harm to the royal reputation with the idea that the king’s troops were deliberately assaulting his people. It was only a portent of the trouble to come. The following day the great prison fortress, the Bastille, was stormed by a determined crowd who wanted the weapons and powder that they believed were stored there, in order to arm themselves against the depredations of the state. Some of their members who rifled the Opéra for the weapons used on stage were frustrated, “the axes and clubs being only made of cardboard.”11
There were nearly a hundred deaths and over seventy wounded in the course of the assault. These were mainly minor tradesmen and artisans, one of whom was a woman, a laundress. Such casualties became instant martyrs in the legends of the city. The Governor of the fortress, the Marquis de Launay, was killed by the furious crowd after his surrender, together with another official; their heads were paraded through the streets on pikes. There were fantastic reports afterwards of the discovery of secret cartloads of grain intended for the King’s personal consumption, or of wagons, emblazoned with the Queen’s arms and loaded with clothes for her to use as a disguise. In fact a total of seven prisoners of state—two madmen, four forgers and one nobly born criminal—were released.12
The security of Paris against mob rule was immediately thrown into question by this day of bloodshed and destruction. The ordinary Gardes Françaises, who had held to their duties at the time of the Réveillon riots in April, could no longer be counted upon to keep order. Where, then, were the Swiss Guards, under their colonel, the Baron de Besenval, that amusing man who had enjoyed membership of the Queen’s Private Society for so long? Besenval was widely blamed by both sides for withdrawing the Swiss to Saint Cloud instead of standing fast to prevent the tumult spreading. Royalists believed that Besenval, now in his late sixties, had acted thus in order to distract the mob’s attention from his Paris home, which was stocked with art treasures. Revolutionaries were convinced of the exact opposite: that Besenval had deliberately left the mob to do their worst, in order that Paris itself might be destroyed.13
This was symptomatic of the growing incomprehension between the various parties. The Parisian bourgeoisie began to see in the National Assembly their bulwark not so much against royal authority as against mob rule. Meanwhile the King wrote “rien” for 14 July in his Journal.14 It was true that there had been no hunting; but Louis XVI did not even give the Fall of the Bastille that brief mention he had accorded to the death of Vergennes, the departure of Necker and a few other major political events.
So the ancient stones of the Bastille, that symbol of oppression, were beaten down. As Bailly wrote in his memoirs: “Holy august Liberty, for the first time, was introduced to the reign of horror, that fearful abode of despotism.” Thereafter fragments of the stone were set into brooches and bracelets, as symbols of liberty. In a further outbreak of radical chic, buckles were fashioned in the shape of the towers of the Bastille, and a bonnet à la Bastille, also a tower but trimmed with tricolour ribbon, became all the rage.15 The red, white and blue tricolour itself sprang into prominence in the shape of innumerable cockades. Green, the traditional colour of liberty, was originally suggested by a radical deputy and journalist called Camille Desmoulins; awkwardly enough, this was also the colour of Artois’ livery. In the end red and blue, the colours of Paris, separated by the Bourbon white, were adopted; fortunately these were the colours of the popular Duc d’Orléans—the subject of so much enthusiastic acclamation these days.16
The Queen, who would come to dislike the tricolour enormously—but in private—passed the day of 14 July, like the rest of the court, in ignorance of what was taking place in Paris. Nor was anyone, it seemed, in a hurry to tell the King. He was in bed when the Duc de Liancourt, an aristocrat of liberal sympathies, broke the news.
“Is it a revolt?” asked Louis XVI.
“No, Sire,” came Liancourt’s reply (which there is no reason to suppose he did not make). “It is a revolution!”17
In seething Paris, a National Guard or citizens’ militia was formed, under the command of La Fayette, with the tricolour as its badge, to replace the Gardes Françaises; further militias were created all over France. The astronomer Bailly was elected Mayor of Paris. These developments were less immediately important to Versailles than the future of the court. There was an acute sense of panic at the violence, apparently unstoppable, that had recently taken place. King and Queen united in believing that particular targets of popular wrath should probably withdraw for the time being from France.
The day after the storming of the Bastille—15 July—the King visited the National Assembly in its salon at Versailles. Mirabeau put a stop to the applause that greeted the sovereign with the ominous words: “The people’s silence is a lesson for kings.” Louis was, however, acclaimed as he returned “on foot,” as he noted in his Journal. It was not until the next day that he made the real concessions demanded by the Assembly: the abandonment of the new ministers including Breteuil who had held office for a mere “Hundred Hours,” and the recall of Necker on the simple but radical grounds that the people wanted him back. Before that, a vital discussion took place behind closed doors as to who should flee where and when. The timing was the easiest thing to decide. In view of the hatred felt for the Duchesse de Polignac (back from England), notorious as the extravagant and vicious favourite of the Queen, it was thought right for the Polignac family, husband, wife and children, to leave at once for the Swiss border. Others counselled to go were the Comte and Comtesse d’Artois, the Princes of the Blood, Condé and Conti, and Marie Antoinette’s reader, the Abbé de Vermond, her confidential advisor for twenty years.
Everyone wept at the scene of farewell. At first Yolande de Polignac refused to go, but the Queen was in agonies of fear every moment the favourite remained in France. In floods of tears, Marie Antoinette told her: “I am terrified of everything; in the name of our friendship go, now is the time for you to escape from the fury of my enemies.” She pointed out that in attacking the Duchesse, they were really attacking the Queen, adding: “Don’t be the victim of your attachment to me, and my friendship for you.” At this point the King entered. Marie Antoinette asked him to help her persuade “these good people, these faithful friends” that “they must leave us.” The King then joined his pleas to hers, telling them that he had just commanded the Comte d’Artois’ departure, and he would repeat the same order to them: “Don’t lose a single minute.”18
By now the King, whose genuine affection for Yolande was not simply a by-product of her usefulness to the Queen, was in tears as well. It was an intimacy that would be attested in the future by his informal correspondence with Yolande when she was in exile; some of these letters would be unwontedly self-revelatory, as when he disclosed how much popular accusations of greed had hurt him. But perhaps his last reported words to her, which were most kindly meant, went to the heart of the Polignac character: “I will keep on your charges.” By this the King meant those paid positions for which the Polignacs could no longer carry out their duties.
At midnight Marie Antoinette sent a last message to Yolande: “Adieu! the most tender of friends. This word is terrible to pronounce but it must be said. Here is the order for the horses. I have no more strength left except to embrace you.” The Polignacs took three days and three nights to reach Switzerland, during which time the Duchesse was disguised as a maid. In Basle she adopted for the time being the pseudonym of “Madame Erlanger” for the purpose of correspondence, as not only Louis XVI but also Marie Antoinette poured out their fears to her in their letters; the Queen followed the progress of Yolande’s family, whom she considered her adopted children, with as much keenness as if they had been her own.
The significance of the flight of the most right-wing members of the royal entourage, including the Polignacs, was twofold. First of all, Marie Antoinette was back in that position of loneliness which she had taken so much trouble to avoid by forming intense female relationships, by joining, in effect, the Polignac set and by creating her Private Society. Whatever the ups and downs of her feelings for the Duchesse, those clouds and changes that sometimes marred the beauty of the day, in the words of Tilly, it had been an enormously long friendship—it was fourteen years since Count Mercy had first bewailed Yolande’s rise to favour. At this sad time, it was natural for the Queen to dwell more on her memories of emotional dependency, than on the recent cooling-off, particularly as the summer had once more brought the Queen closer to Artois and the Polignacs, in the political sense. In September, Louis wrote to Madame Erlanger (Yolande) about her unnamed “friend” (Marie Antoinette). She was “keeping well” but, being “much tormented by all that passed,” was especially sad that she did not have “the consolation of friendship round her.”19
The second, more politically serious effect of the flight, which was followed by a flood of emigrating aristocrats, was to create a centre of would-be royal policy outside France. Provence, next heir to the throne after the four-year-old Louis Charles, was still at Versailles, but Artois and his sons were outside the reach of the revolutionaries, whatever their intentions might be towards the monarchy. The first stop of Artois, with his Savoyard wife, was Turin, the capital of his father-in-law the King of Sardinia; the Duchesse de Polignac also subsequently arrived there. The Princes of the Blood ended up in Coblenz in Germany. Here rumours and conspiracies were equally rife. In particular there was a story that the Duc d’Orléans might be adopted as king, or even as Regent for Louis Charles. The pamphlets pouring forth from the Palais-Royal were extremely favourable to the radical Duc, and “Long live Orléans!” became a popular placard. All this might be nothing more than provocation but certainly the potential royal rights of Artois and his sons were threatened by any suggestion of an Orléanist succession. The Queen, however, who had remained in France, was no longer part of their counsels, as she had been during the summer interlude. Insofar as her interests and those of her surviving son were bound up with the fate of Louis XVI, she was now in a subtle sense on the opposite side to the émigré Princes.
Why did the Queen stay behind? The question must arise, because she was by far the most unpopular member of the court. The answer lies in Marie Antoinette’s concept of duty. Frightened as she was by the grim spectre of her unpopularity and apprehensive that there might be worse to follow, Marie Antoinette was nevertheless determined to preserve her position as the King’s wife and the Dauphin’s mother. In some quarters there was beginning to be talk of putting aside the wicked Queen—possibly into a convent, that traditional receptacle of inconvenient royal females. It was relevant in this connection that, while there was as yet no legal divorce in France, one of the penalties for adultery on the part of the wife was to be shut up in a convent for two years (after a whipping); if her husband happened to die during this period, the erring woman was obliged to remain cloistered for the rest of her natural life.20
The immurement of Marie Antoinette was not a new idea. As long ago as the Diamond Necklace Affair, the benevolent Duc de Penthièvre, father-in-law of the Princesse de Lamballe, had supposedly declared that in view of the threat to public morality, it would be prudent to shut up the Queen in the convent of Val-de-Grâce. The rumour continued to circulate. Now Queen Charlotte in England reported on 28 July 1789 that apartments were being prepared for the French queen at Val-de-Grâce: “for Safety as some say but others say that the Third Estate insist upon her going there.” It was not true; neither was it true that Marie Antoinette was obliged to go first to Paris, accompanied by the Dauphin, and give formal thanks at Notre-Dame “for the Revolution that has taken place.” Yet a madman who declared publicly at the Palais-Royal that the Queen should be shut up in a convent, after taking the King and his son to Paris, was loudly applauded.21
There was general talk of excluding queens from the role of Regent—despite the traditional right of a Queen of France to act for her young son— citing the same Salic Law that forbade females from succeeding to the French throne. These observations were deliberately pointed at Marie Antoinette: no “stranger,” that is, one foreign born, should have any part in a Regency.22 Rumours apart, getting rid of the Queen in a non-violent manner remained an interesting option for those like La Fayette, who did not envisage the abolition of all royal authority, yet saw in the Queen an obvious area of weakness in the King’s situation. The Queen, however, viewed this same situation in quite a different light. Latterly it had become her explicit double duty to bolster up the King with her wifely strength, while providing maternal care for the Dauphin. Separation would prevent her carrying out those duties on the one hand, while providing ammunition for her enemies to make an assault on her status.
If the Queen would not go alone, why did the King, Queen and royal children not move to some more secure place after the outrageous demonstration of violence on 14 July? One possibility was Metz, in the north-west of France on the Moselle. This was one of the strongest fortresses in Europe and it was also not far from the borders of both Germany and the Netherlands. It was the suggestion of Breteuil, endorsed by Artois, and according to Madame Campan, Marie Antoinette approved the idea, ordering her packing to begin.23 Then the King, as usual, took advice. Unfortunately it was conflicting, and the strongest character present, in terms of influence over Louis XVI, the Comte de Provence, advised staying put. The old Marshal de Broglie also challenged his master’s decision to go.
Much later the King told Fersen, in a confidence that was not without self-pity, that he regretted missing the opportunity of 14 July. “I should have gone then and I wanted to, but what could I do when Monsieur [Provence] himself begged me not to go, and the Marshal de Broglie, as commander, replied: ’Yes, we can go to Metz, but what shall we do when we get there?’” The King then repeated sadly: “I missed my opportunity and it never came again.”24
Instead of departing for the frontier, the King went to Paris on 17 July—without the Queen—with the intention of promoting calm. The Queen stayed at Versailles in a state of trepidation, having a presentiment that her husband would not return, a feeling underlined by the fact that Provence was instructed to assume full powers in his absence as Lieutenant General of the kingdom. But this presentiment at least was unjustified; the King was not detained. The Duke of Dorset thought it was “certainly one of the most humiliating steps that [the King] could possibly take,” describing him as being “like a tame bear” as he was “led in triumph” by the deputies and the city militia. One of those deputies leading “the bear” was a lawyer from Arras in his early thirties named Maximilien Robespierre who had, as a student, delivered a Latin address to the King on his coronation, but now embraced rather different political opinions.
Louis XVI approved the appointments of Bailly as Mayor and La Fayette as commander of the National Guard, and in an important speech, mumbled something about his people being always able to count upon his love. Most significantly of all in this time of symbols, Louis XVI allowed himself to be displayed on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville (the City Hall) with the tricolour cockade, which Bailly called “the distinctive emblem of the French Nation,” in his hat.25
“The Revolution in France has been carried out,” wrote the Russian Minister in Paris, Jean Simolin, to his Chancellor in St. Petersburg on 19 July, “and the royal authority annihilated.” He went on to comment on the ferocity that the French had displayed in its course—he was referring to the deaths of Bastille Day, the parading of heads on spikes. One read “with horror” of this same kind of French ferocity in accounts of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (of Huguenots, 200 years earlier). But as Simolin pointed out, there was a difference: this was political rather than religious fervour. Count Mercy, writing to Kaunitz, was equally emphatic that a revolution had taken place, “however unbelievable it may appear.” Mercy himself had had to retreat to the country and ask for guards at his Paris house, due to the hatred felt by the people for “the representative of the brother of the Queen.” Although the guards were granted, there was also a thorough (if unsuccessful) inspection of Mercy’s house for the great store of armaments that it was generally believed that he, being an Austrian, must have stored there.26
So began that eerie summer at Versailles. Against a background of peasant revolts in various regions, inspired by a powerful if irrational emotion known as the “Great Fear”—in essence a panic about the safety of property, a number of measures were suggested in the National Assembly.27 It concentrated the mind that stones were thrown at the windows of the Archbishop of Paris, breaking them, on the night of 3 August. Males everywhere were transformed into members of the National Guard, mere valets becoming lieutenants and even the musicians in the Royal Chapel wearing military uniform, although Louis XVI drew the line at an Italian soprano dressed up as a grenadier. On the same date, the abolition of all feudal privileges was suggested; at the end of August La Fayette’s La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme was given official status.
Meanwhile the Queen adopted the lowest possible profile. Although she was popularly supposed to have remained in France with the aim of destroying the National Assembly, while asking for 50,000 troops from her brother, she actually devoted her time to her children. As Joseph II told his brother Leopold on 3 August, the private role of mother was the only one that really suited their sister (something that the Emperor might perhaps have appreciated earlier).28 It was a foretaste of what life was to be like without the adult friends who were so vital to her.
Yet all ceremony at Versailles could not be abandoned, any more than the King thought of abandoning the routine by which he hunted three or four times a week, including at the moment when the abolition of feudal privileges was raised. In England, Queen Charlotte reflected in her diary: “I often think that this cannot be the eighteenth century in which we live at present for Ancient History can hardly produce anything more Barbarous and Cruel than Our Neighbours in France.” She cheered herself up by reading a history of the reign of the absolutist Louis XIV, when things had been done so much better.29 Yet if much of Louis XVI’s royal authority had been stripped from him, he was still condemned to carry out the same court routine that his great ancestor had instituted—as was his Queen. Marie Antoinette gave the traditional party to celebrate the Feast of St. Louis on 25 August and found herself receiving the market-women, who arrived in some force from Paris. On the one hand they were exercising another traditional right—to pay their respects; on the other hand their presence reminded everyone exactly how short the twelve-mile route from Paris to Versailles really was. The figure of the majestic Queen who still presided over the most formal court in Europe contrasted with that of the despised woman, who by September was unable even to stroll upon the terraces for fear of hostile comment.
In the meanwhile nothing that had happened so far had alleviated the food crisis. There were bread riots in Versailles itself where a baker was half-hanged on 13 September for allegedly favouring his richer customers with better-quality loaves. In Paris, approaching starvation made the women increasingly aggressive on behalf of their families. Mayor Bailly at the Hôtel de Ville had to receive angry deputations on the subject of the bakers from women who shouted publicly that “men understood nothing.”30 These demonstrations existed in parallel with the discussions of the National Assembly on the King’s surviving powers. Should he have an absolute right of veto on legislation or was the legislative power of the Assembly paramount? And there were, of course, many shades of opinion in between. What both movements had in common was a growing feeling that matters would go better if the King, absent since 17 July, returned to Paris.
There were changes. The vanishing of the Duchesse de Polignac, Royal Governess for nearly seven years, meant that she had to be replaced in this position of such vital concern to the royal mother. The new choice was summed up by the Queen herself. She was confiding her children to “Virtue,” whereas with the Duchesse they had been confided to “Friendship.” The Marquise de Tourzel was at the age of forty a widow with five children; her husband, like herself a devoted adherent of the royal family, had been killed in 1786 while out hunting with Louis XVI, but they had enjoyed twenty years of perfect conjugal felicity. A strong character as well as a famously upright one, the Marquise de Tourzel would be nicknamed “Madame Severe” by the lively little Dauphin although he also loved her, and in particular he adored her eighteen-year-old daughter Pauline who accompanied Madame Severe into the royal household.
The Marquise’s rectitude was, however, accompanied by two absolute beliefs. The first concerned the divinely ordained place of royalty in the world, at the head of a hierarchy where others also had their allotted places. Her motto was “Faithful to God and the King,” the latter being only a little lower than the former. It was this consciousness, as well as the kindnesses she had received from the King and Queen, that made the Marquise accept the post, although she foresaw dangers ahead that might threaten Pauline. The second belief concerned “the precious trust” that she personally had been given by their “august” Majesties. As a result, the Marquise intended to dedicate her life to the royal children she called “divinities.”31 In 1789 this concept of duty, which meant she must always be at the Dauphin’s side, seemed to have no disadvantages.*71
The arrival of the new Royal Governess gave Marie Antoinette an opportunity to display her common-sense approach as a mother in a long memorandum on the subject of her son’s character.32 It was not a starry-eyed document and the child delineated was not quite the healthy, merry little peasant boy of her letters to Princess Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt. One may discern in it not only Marie Antoinette’s dissatisfaction with the way her husband had been brought up (a dissatisfaction that he himself shared) but also, perhaps, memories of her own less than helpful upbringing, an injudicious mixture of spoiling and neglect. Certainly the admonition to the Royal Governess not to neglect Marie Thérèse entirely for her brother—a temptation generally felt by servants where the male heir is concerned—may also have its roots in Maria Teresa’s favouritism of Marie Christine. The very frankness of the document also makes it valuable as a clue to certain aspects of Louis Charles’s nature, already present at the age of four and a half.
The Queen described Louis Charles’s chief fault as being a strong tendency to indiscretion. He would repeat all too easily what he had overheard and at the same time, without exactly meaning to lie, he would embellish the truth still further with things that he imagined he had witnessed. The Marquise de Tourzel was to take particular care to curb the Dauphin in this weakness. He was also nervous, with a hatred of loud noises; in particular the barking of the many Versailles dogs, if allowed to come too close, frightened him. The little boy was, however, loyal, affectionate and especially fond of his sister; if he was given anything, he immediately asked for the same gift to be bestowed on her. But Louis Charles was also quick-tempered and hated to have to say the word “sorry” above all things, going to great lengths to avoid it. Yet as his mother admitted, this “inordinate pride” in himself might one day be to the Dauphin’s advantage if he conducted himself well; she was presumably thinking of his father’s unfortunate lack of self-esteem.
The scene was set for the events of October 1789, when the inviolate image of the French monarchy—that image cherished, for example, by the dutiful Marquise de Tourzel—was shattered for ever. Tragically, it was the very attempt to prove the security of the royal family in such an ominous situation that turned out to be the spark that led to the conflagration. The Royal Flanders Regiment was brought from Douai to Versailles and on 1 October a banquet was given in the theatre at Versailles, at which the King’s bodyguards fraternized with the new arrivals, being seated alternately. The King and Queen, the latter with her new policy of retirement, did not, however, plan to attend. It was only the wild enthusiasm of the soldiers that prompted an unwise courtier to suggest that they appeared.33
So not only Louis XVI, but Marie Antoinette decided to be present. The Queen was dressed in white and pale blue, with matching feathers in her hair and a turquoise necklace. She carried Louis Charles, wearing a lilac-coloured sailor suit, in her arms and led Marie Thérèse, in green and white, by the hand. The young Pauline de Tourzel never forgot the enthusiasm that greeted her, the cheers, the tears, the cries of loyalty and devotion . . . As Saint-Priest wrote later in his memoirs, the whole scene was inspired by “wine and zeal.”34 Appropriately enough, as it seemed at the time, it was a celebrated song by the composer Grétry from his opera of 1784, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, that provided the theme of the evening. With the words “O Richard! O mon roi!” the minstrel Blondel called for his imprisoned master, and it now found an echo in a mass of loyal hearts.
Unfortunately the whole occasion was transformed in the Parisian press the next day into something that was a deliberate affront to the new national regime. “In the course of an orgy,” according to the revolutionary newspaper L’Ami du Peuple, the tricolour cockade had been trampled underfoot. This was a charge strongly denied by those who were there, although Madame Campan, a witness at the behest of the Queen, admitted that certain cockades worn by the few National Guards present were turned inside out to show their white linings; white being the royalist colour.35 The fervent songs of Grétry and others were construed as incitements to counter-revolution. Thus were the flames lit.
On Monday, 5 October, the routine at Versailles still had a semblance of normality. The Queen was at the Petit Trianon. Count Fersen had arrived at Versailles a week earlier, to spend the winter there in a house he had acquired in the town. It is therefore not improbable that he was present at some point with the Queen on what was to be the very last day she spent in her “pleasure house.” The King was out shooting in the woods above Meudon and was having some good sport. He had killed some eighty-one head when he received an urgent message from Saint-Priest as Minister of the Royal Household, and, as his Journal recorded, this prowess was “interrupted by events.”36 The events in question concerned a march of market-women who had set out from Paris at ten o’clock that morning. They were intending to demand grain or flour from their sovereign at Versailles, as well as his assent, hitherto denied, to certain constitutional changes proposed by the Assembly which would have formally diminished his authority (Louis argued for seeing the new Constitution as a whole). The King turned immediately for home at top speed, galloping all the way up the Grand Avenue. He was back by three o’clock. At the same time a message was sent to the Queen, and she too returned. The Dauphin’s daily outing in his carriage was cancelled.
A series of agitated discussions took place as to how the royal family should prepare for the expected invasion. They knew the mob to be surging towards them, undaunted by patches of thick fog on the road and heavy downpours of rain. Would it not be more secure to decamp to Rambouillet, twice the distance of Versailles from Paris and far more secure than the latter ever-open palace? There was a strong body of opinion that the Queen and children at least should be transported away; this would not be difficult to achieve, since, as the Marquise de Tourzel pointed out later, the horses were still hitched to the Dauphin’s carriage. François Hüe, the Dauphin’s premier valet for the last two years, an intelligent and loving man, thought the advice to go to Rambouillet, urged by Saint-Priest, was good: “If only it had been God’s will that it should be followed.” It was Marie Antoinette who initially rejected the idea and for the same reasons that she had elected to remain in France in July: her place was at the King’s side. Louis XVI, for his part, could not make up his mind to flee, expressing deep reluctance to become a “fugitive King.”37
No decision had been made by the time the first market-women reached Versailles at about four o’clock, with the main body arriving between five and six. A message from La Fayette—that he was bringing his National Guards to secure the situation—was also received about six, giving the royal family the impression that they still had an opportunity to reconsider their position. When a deputation of market-women made its way to the Oeil-de-Boeuf antechamber of the King’s apartments, Louis was conferring with his ministers. In the end he consented to receive a single woman whose appearance and dress, according to one observer, indicated neither “misery nor an abject condition.” (Nonetheless, one of the strongest memories of the ten-year-old Madame Royale was of the near-nakedness of the women—she had never witnessed such utter poverty before.) This individual was certainly strong-minded enough to harangue the King on the need of the people of Paris for bread. When the King offered to tell the directors of two granaries to release all possible stores, she went away to join her comrades, only to return so as to get the King’s order in writing. He gave it to her.38
There was now an uneasy stand-off between the seething crowds in the courtyard of Versailles and the royal family and their bodyguards. The original objective of securing food had now been overtaken by the idea of transferring the King bodily to Paris. The idea of the royal family departing for Rambouillet, now revived, was found to be impossible since all the traces of the King’s carriages in the courtyard of Versailles had been cut. At the request of the National Assembly, the King—greatly upset—did sign their preliminary decrees to do with the Constitution in an attempt to alleviate the situation.
There were rumours that men in disguise had participated in the market-women’s march when its members had first been summoned by the tocsins in Paris. That was certainly not impossible. What was extremely unlikely was that the Duc d’Orléans himself had marched as a woman. Although contemporaries were generally convinced that he had encouraged the march, it was psychologically implausible for the Duc to adopt female dress when he was enjoying his popularity with the crowd.*72 But there were now numbers of “armed brigands” present as well as women like one Louise Renée, who was reported in the Journal de Paris as having been straightforwardly excited at the idea of going to Versailles to ask for bread. Louise, incidentally, strongly denied having ever said that “she wanted to come back with the head of the Queen on her sword”; in proof of this, she ingenuously pointed out that she did not have a sword, “only a broomstick.”40
If Louise Renée personally did not utter threats against the Queen, there were plenty who did. The royal bodyguards were quickly alarmed by the oaths they overheard—vows to cut off Marie Antoinette’s head and worse. There were, for example, the proud declarations of the market-women that they were wearing their traditional working aprons in order to help themselves to her entrails, out of which they intended to make cockades. The Queen’s role as scapegoat for the weaknesses and failures of the monarchy as a whole had never been more evident. In the uneasy calm that spread across the palace of Versailles after midnight, when La Fayette departed, it was the Queen who recognized her peculiar vulnerability. She refused to share the apartments of the King, where she would surely have been safer, in order not to put him—and her children—in danger, but at two o’clock went to lie sleepless on her own bed. Madame Auguié, sister of Madame Campan, was in attendance with Madame Thibault. The Queen told them to go to sleep but their “feelings of attachment” to her prevented them. The Marquise de Tourzel, as was her custom, shared the Dauphin’s bedroom and was instructed in a crisis to take the little boy to his father.*73
The attack came at about four o’clock in the morning. Madame Auguié heard yells and shouts. Afterwards Marie Antoinette believed that it was inspired by the Duc d’Orléans who wanted to have her killed at the very least. It was a view she passed on to her daughter Marie Thérèse who recorded that “the principal project [of the attack] was to assassinate my mother, on whom the Duc d’Orléans wished to avenge himself because of offences he believed he had received from her.” There was another rumour that Orléans himself, dressed in a woman’s redingote and hat, had guided the surge of people, shouting, “We’re going to kill the Queen!” But although Orléans, as his mistress Grace Elliott admitted, was “very, very violent” against the Queen, there was no need of his active participation.42 The real work of destruction had been done long before by satire, libel and rumour; Marie Antoinette had become dehumanized. The actual assault by a body of people inspiring each other with their bloodthirsty frenzy was the culmination of the process, not the start of it.
When Madame Auguié went to the door of the antechamber leading to the guardroom, she was appalled to see a guard covered in blood who cried out to her: “Save the Queen, Madame, they are coming to assassinate her!” Now the ladies dressed their mistress with frantic haste in the exact obverse of the elaborate daily routine to which she was accustomed, in their panic leaving one ribbon of her petticoat untied. The decision was taken to flee to the safety of the King’s apartments and here the secret staircase played its part—that staircase that had been constructed years before in order that the King might make his nervous “conjugal visits” in more privacy. Scarcely had the Queen left than the howling mob, having put to death two of the bodyguards, broke in. According to several accounts, they pierced the Queen’s great bed with their pikes, either to make sure she was not hiding or as a symbolic act of defiance.43
It can never be known for sure what they would have done if the bed had still had its royal occupant. After all, it took only one of the invaders to carry out the demonic threats that they were all making for the situation to ignite. The temperament of any crowd is uncertain and this one had just killed two people. Marie Antoinette’s absolute conviction that her assassination had been intended—which marked her for the rest of her life, becoming as formative an experience in its own way as the Diamond Necklace Affair—was therefore hardly unreasonable.*74 Marie Thérèse paid tribute later to her mother’s extraordinary courage and sang-froid throughout her ordeal; Pauline de Tourzel also always remembered her calming gestures and her kind words: “Don’t be frightened, Pauline.”45 But her outwardly brave demeanour coexisted with an inward terror from which she never totally recovered.
Once the royal family were gathered together in the King’s apartments, he too behaving with commendable resolution, there were hasty conferences as to what to do. With the coming of day, a mass of people had assembled in the courtyard outside the balcony that led from the King’s apartments, and they demanded a royal appearance. Such had been the confusion of the night past that various members of the crowd may have believed that the Queen had been killed or wounded, or even the King; they wanted to check, as it were, the casualty list. But when the King duly appeared, accompanied by his wife and children, that was not what was desired. Marie Antoinette was not to be allowed to make the point that she was still the Mother of the Nation . . . The image was sharply rejected with cries from down below: “No children! No children!”46 Louis Charles and Marie Thérèse, already terrified by the night-time ordeal, in which they found themselves quickly dressed and removed from their familiar apartments, were duly taken away. Marie Antoinette, very pale and uncertain whether she was supposed to appear alone in order to be shot down by an assassin, nevertheless continued to stand there.
Soon the loudest cries drowned out all the rest. “To Paris! To Paris!” they were demanding. In view of what had happened and what was happening—the gross insults and threats to the Queen proceeding unabated from an anonymous and perhaps murderous crowd, to say nothing of his children’s security and his own—it was hard for the King to feel he had any alternative. The mob might want to separate the King from his power base at Versailles but on the other hand the National Guard promised more control in Paris than they had been able to exercise at Versailles.
At twelve-thirty an extraordinary procession set out on the road from Versailles to Paris. It would take nearly seven hours to reach the capital. The raucous crowd cried out in joy the words of a popular song, that they were taking “the Baker, the Baker’s wife, and the Baker’s boy” to Paris, with the implication that bread would now be freely available. Yet this procession—“What a cortège! Great God!” exclaimed the King, as though in sheer disbelief—contained in its midst not only his immediate family still in France, but also the decapitated heads of the bodyguards who had been their familiar companions. The sixteen-year-old Duc de Chartres watched them go, these cousins who had been brought so low, from a balcony at Passy. He raised his eyeglass in order to make out some odd objects carried by the crowd—and found himself staring at the bloody heads.47
In the King’s carriage, where the occupants were in a state of slumped horror, a significant exchange took place between Louis XVI and Madame Elisabeth. He saw her gazing out of the window as they passed her beloved Montreuil. “Are you admiring your lime avenue?” he asked in his kindly way. “No, I am saying goodbye to Montreuil,” replied his sister.48
Back at Versailles, the coiffeur Léonard, left behind in a situation that for once did not require his ministrations, found that nothing had changed in the Queen’s apartments. There were the slippers Marie Antoinette had not put on, lying there; there was a fichu, and half-turned silk stockings ready for the royal foot. The gilt panels were, however, desecrated and the wind of this blustery day blew through the splintered door. Some members of the diplomatic corps actually travelled to Versailles from Paris on that day because it was a Tuesday, the usual day of their reception; they found complete disorder and they also encountered bands of marauders who offered them some bloody relics. Being diplomats, they indicated cautious approval before departing.49
Henceforward Versailles, the château out of whose windows eager spectators had watched the arrival of the young Dauphine nearly twenty years ago, would have the desolate air of a place fallen under a spell.