CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
VIOLENCE AND RAGE
“It was a case of violence and rage on one side, feebleness and inertia on the other.”
MARIE ANTOINETTE TO COUNT MERCY D’ARGENTEAU CONCERNING 20 JUNE 1792
On 20 April 1792, Louis XVI declared war upon what Marie Antoinette significantly described as “the House of Austria.” The Marquise de Tourzel remembered how the King left the Tuileries for the Legislative Assembly with sadness painted on his face. Less compassionately, Madame de Staël described how Louis XVI looked left and right with the vacant curiosity of the short-sighted, and proposed war in the same flat voice as he would have proposed the least important measure in the world.1 For the time being, Prussia was not mentioned although there were many denunciations of the Austro-Prussian defensive treaty of February. The Declaration of War followed an ultimatum of 5 April, calling for the removal of the émigré forces from their bases along the Rhine, which was ignored by Austria. The Feuillants, unwilling war-makers, gave way to a ministry of Girondins who had been pressing for a cleansing war since October.
Above all, Austria must avoid the appearance of meddling in the internal affairs of France, wrote Marie Antoinette to Mercy on 30 April. In another letter she emphasized the point again: “The French will always repulse all political intervention by foreigners in their affairs.” In fact Marie Antoinette understood Austria to be embarking on a mission to rescue the French royal family, not as a war of aggression to add territory to the Austrian Empire at France’s expense. The latter project was unacceptable: she told the Dauphin’s valet Hüe firmly, for her “the interests of France” came first—“before everything.”2
Unfortunately there was a new Emperor in Austria. Leopold II died at the beginning of March, and was succeeded by his son, a man of a far more zealous and militaristic turn of mind. Francis II, Leopold’s son, that boy whose birth had been greeted with such enthusiasm by Maria Teresa with her public announcement at the theatre, was now twenty-four. If his young wife, Maria Carolina’s daughter, was said to resemble Marie Antoinette, more positive signs of family closeness hardly existed. Whatever the lack of an emotional bond between Marie Antoinette and Leopold, they had at least grown up in the same environment and shared the same august parentage. Francis II had never even met his aunt.
The Queen needed to bear in mind the trenchant warnings of Count Mercy. In February, Mercy had written in sharp terms to the French Queen about “the lack of consideration by which in the Tuileries they allowed themselves to believe that all the conveniences of the Austrian monarchy should yield to those of France.” The previous summer there had even been a suggestion that the French King should be prepared to cede the border fortresses, such as Cambrai’s Donai and Valenciennes, in exchange for imperial support as a kind of advance on expenses.3
If the Queen was hoping for rescue as a result of military action, the King’s new Girondin ministry under General Dumouriez had a very different agenda. This was to be a national campaign in support of revolutionary ideals, or rather—a double negative—in opposition to counter-revolutionary ones. Hostility to “the Austrian woman” was inevitably intensified by the war; she was now, in crude modern terms, an enemy alien. The Queen’s anger at the idea of Austrian territorial claims on France would have been scarcely credible to those who demonized her. Instead, the Girondin orator Pierre Vergniaud pointed dramatically to the Tuileries itself: “From here I can see the windows of a palace where counter-revolution is being plotted, where they are working out ways to plunge us once more into the horrors of slavery.” These were sentiments that found a more vulgar expression in the behaviour of the guards at the Tuileries, who, not content with insults, indulged with roars of laughter in a practice now called mooning.4
The beginning of a war that he had himself reluctantly declared provoked in Louis XVI one of those fits of silent gloom that were his customary reaction to an intolerable situation. Ten days in May passed without his speaking at all to his family, except for the terse words necessary to play backgammon with Madame Elisabeth. Marie Antoinette for her part saw it as her duty to provide Count Mercy and also Fersen, both in Brussels, with any details that she could glean about the conduct of the war. (However, the assassination of Gustav III and the coming to power of his brother as Regent, a man of very different political sympathies, meant that a Swedish rescue was no longer an option; as Fersen told the Queen, “this loss is a cruel one.”)5
The Queen’s new obsession was to avoid the dismemberment of France at the hands of Austria, particularly in the German-speaking east, that she imagined might take place if Austria lost Belgium in the west. This theme of distrust of Austria—the country that she nevertheless hoped would save them—was hammered home in her correspondence throughout the summer.
It is a nice point as to whether the Queen was a traitor for writing in her letters to Mercy such things as “the plan is to attack by the Savoy and Liège”—even before the declaration of war. A coded letter of 5 June to Fersen reported that the army of General Luckner had been ordered by the Girondin ministry to attack without cease, although Luckner was against it and the troops were both ill supplied and disordered. Eighteen days later the Queen reported, also to Fersen, that Dumouriez was leaving for the army of Luckner the next day, with the intention of causing an insurrection in Brabant.6 “The Austrian woman” was, of course, ritually accused of treachery—by those who did not know of this correspondence—simply on the grounds of her birth. By her own lights, however, she was certainly not.
As she told Fersen on 23 June in an elliptical communication concerning the King: “Your friend is in the greatest danger. His illness is making terrible progress . . . Tell his relations about his unfortunate situation.”7 Threatened as she believed with being “put away” by the Jacobins; her son, now seven years old, being a target for schemes to take over his education; herself subject to daily menaces in the Tuileries, she still was convinced that she put “the interests of France” first. In her view these interests were best served by the re-establishment of a proper unfettered monarchy. The present situation had, after all, been brought about by duress—to which in law no loyalty need be given. It was now clear to her that this re-establishment would not take place without some rescue at the hands of a foreign power and to this end she had no wish for the Girondins to win their war. But the army of her dreams was certainly not to be an army of occupation.
The ill-prepared French campaign against Austria in the Netherlands did not prosper. At the same time the Girondins continued to present Louis XVI with challenges that were predestined to provoke his veto. These included proposals for the deportation of non-juror priests and the establishment of a large body of provincial armed troops known as Confederates (fédérés) in a camp outside Paris. As the Girondin ministry foundered, slanderous rumours envenomed the King’s new constitutional relationship with the country. The use of the King’s veto became the subject of much popular indignation, Marie Antoinette receiving a new abusive nickname of “Madame Veto.” The genesis of the next demonstration of people power, on 20 June, lay in the excited belief that the King intended to regain full power by force. The dismissal of the Girondins seemed positive proof of that, as Necker’s dismissal had aroused rage four years earlier.
As 20 June was the anniversary of the flight to Varennes (to say nothing of the Tennis Court Oath in 1789), its approach was regarded with dread by the King, Queen and the much curtailed court. All felt unprotected. The King’s new personal bodyguard under the Duc de Brissac, which had recently been granted him as part of the package of the Constitution, was removed again by the Girondins at the end of May. The National Guards, so much less assured in their loyalties, returned. The Feast of Corpus Christi fell on 10 June this year; the gorgeous processions and radiant royal appearances were things of the past. The King made a brief showing alone in the chapel of the Tuileries. He was not in court dress. His air of stupor, the product of desperation, led to stories that he had been drunk.8
On 20 June itself, a mob of terrifying aspect was allowed into the Tuileries gardens by the National Guards. Sweating with the heat, they wore clothes so filthy that they could be smelt from the windows beneath which they demonstrated. These people carried pikes, hatchets and other sharp implements, which did not seem the less threatening because they were decorated with cheerful tricoloured ribbons. When they broke into the palace they were found to be also bearing some grisly symbols such as a gibbet from which a stained doll dangled, labelled “Marie Antoinette à la lanterne.” (The traditional practical way in which Parisian crowds disposed of their enemies was to hang them from the nearest lamp-post.) A bullock’s heart was labelled “The heart of Louis XVI”; the horns of an ox bore an obscene reference to the King’s cuckoldry.9
As members of the mob broke into the King’s apartments, cries were heard of “Where is he, the bougre?”10 Then placards were thrust into Louis XVI’s face with messages like “Tremble, Tyrant!” When Sieur Joly, a dancer at the Opéra as well as a cannoneer in the National Guard, found the King, he saw the aged Duc de Mouchy, Marshal of France, sitting firmly in front of him, determined to protect his sovereign to the last with his own body.
Louis XVI behaved admirably. It was a situation where impassivity had its uses. He did not tremble. He adopted the small bonnet rouge proffered on the end of a butcher’s pike with equanimity, being only surprised that such a low-class individual should address him simply as “Monsieur” instead of “Majesté.” The cap, despite the King’s efforts to enlarge it, perched uneasily on his big head. But the King happily drank a toast to the health of the people. In a famous anecdote—probably true—he asked a grenadier to feel his heart and test whether it was beating any faster. It was not. Madame Elisabeth also behaved with great nobility. When she heard the death-threats to her sister-in-law, she tried to act as a decoy so that the hated Marie Antoinette could escape: “Don’t undeceive them, let them think that I am the Queen . . .”
Marie Antoinette, who must have expected a rerun of 6 October 1789, was helped to safety by her entourage. She had originally wished to take her place at the King’s side, telling those who tried to stop her that they were trying to damage her reputation. However, the Queen was reminded by her servants that her presence might pose an additional danger to the King, who would certainly try to defend her if she was threatened and thus be killed himself. Furthermore the Queen must remember that she was “also a mother” as well as a wife.11
Marie Antoinette took the point. Afterwards, having cowered with her children listening to the blows of hatchets on the panelling of the Dauphin’s doors before getting away through a secret exit, the Queen was asked if she had been “much afraid.” “No,” she replied. “But I suffered from being separated from Louis XVI at a moment when his life was in danger.” Instead, she had the consolation of staying with the children, which was also “one of my duties.” When it was all over, the King sent for his family. There was a touching scene as Marie Antoinette rushed into his arms, the children fell at his knees and Madame Elisabeth, not to be left out, embraced her brother from behind.
The effects on the two children, whose world had once again been turned upside down, may be imagined. Afterwards one of the deputies of the Legislative Assembly, investigating how such an undisciplined attack could possibly have taken place, asked how old Madame Royale was—he called her “Mademoiselle.” The answer was thirteen and a half but the Queen merely replied that her daughter was old enough to feel the horror of such scenes all too keenly. It was no wonder, as Pauline de Tourzel pointed out, that Marie Thérèse became increasingly serious and withdrawn, losing “all the joy of childhood.” The Dauphin, who had been half extinguished by the vast bonnet rouge presented to him, could not speak at all. He simply hugged both his parents. The next morning, however, he came up with one of his poignant questions to the valet Hüe, of the sort that were beginning to punctuate his family’s ordeals. “Is it still yesterday?” he asked, just as he had interrogated Hüe about the turnaround at Varennes, and the Marquise de Tourzel on the morning after 6 October 1789.12
Despite the dozen deputies, including Pétion, who belatedly came from the Legislative Assembly to the King’s assistance and the presence of the National Guards, proper order was not restored until the evening. By this time all the doors of the royal apartments were broken. As the Queen told Mercy afterwards, it was a case of “violence and rage” on one side, “feebleness and inertia” on the other—the side of the people who were supposed to protect them. All the same, she emphasized to Hüe the need for discretion when he gave evidence at the ensuing investigation. “No impression must be given,” she told him, “that either the King or I retain the slightest resentment for what has happened.”13
Her real feelings, hardly surprisingly, were very different. Resentment was too mild a word for the panic she had experienced, for all the “calm nobility” of her outward demeanour. This was particularly true of the danger to her children: “Save my son,” the Queen had cried at one point. Madame Campan believed that it was as a result of the events of 20 June 1792 that Marie Antoinette turned to foreign aid as the only hope.14 In fact, as we have seen, her decision predated the invasion of the Tuileries. The experience of this day amply confirmed—and indeed justified—what she felt already.
With the approach of 14 July, another potentially devastating anniversary, it was feared that worse was to come. Should the royal family attempt another precipitate flight as being the least bad option? Count Mercy, influenced by the attack of the mob on 20 June, thought it was. Schemes were discussed. One possibility was to head for Compiègne with La Fayette protecting them. Château Gallon, near Rouen in Normandy, was also mentioned, where the Duc de Liancourt—he who had broken the news of the “revolution” to Louis XVI in 1789—offered some loyal Norman troops. But from the coast of Normandy they might end by having to take ship to England. According to Hüe, the Queen shuddered away from the fate of the Stuart King James II; in 1689 he had fled in a fishing boat to France, never to regain his realm. Bertrand de Molleville offered another explanation: the Queen disliked Liancourt’s previous democratic or constitutionalist views (just as she had never come to trust La Fayette).15
The real explanation for the Queen’s reluctance to consider such schemes, leaving their plausibility aside, was different. For one thing, the capital might actually be safer than the French provinces, which were already the scene of revolutionary violence. Second and more importantly, Marie Antoinette believed that it was from Paris that the royal family would be rescued. Prussia entered the war in early July, and the joint Austro-Prussian army was now under the command of the Duke of Brunswick. She told Madame Campan that the Duke’s plan, “which he has communicated to us, is to come within these very walls to deliver us.”16
The commemoration of the fall of the Bastille, on 14 July, was attended by a host of Confederate troops, thronging into Paris from the provinces. The King attended on horseback. After his experience of 20 June, he consented to wear a thickly quilted under-waistcoat as a guard against possible assassination. The Queen, the children and Madame Elisabeth, with the Princesse de Lamballe and the Marquise de Tourzel in official attendance, went by carriage. The Marquise wept as she witnessed what she called “the saddest ceremony”: the King taking the oath to the patriotic “Federation,” while the Queen watched him through a spyglass. It was, however, the cries accompanying the ritual that were the most depressing element, rather than the oath itself. “Down with the veto!” was frequently heard, along with acclamations for the Mayor: “Long live Pétion, good old Pétion!” Most strident of all were the cries of “Long live the sans-culottes!”*94 People waved branches, while banners with the same anti-monarchical messages bobbed up and down among the heads.17
In the following tense weeks, during the full heat of the Parisian summer, the quality of the royal family’s life at the Tuileries deteriorated. All this year the King had been allowed a surprising freedom in riding to the environs of the city, including Saint Cloud and Meudon, as well as to the Bois de Boulogne, as his Journal bore witness. But in July there were no rides. On 20 July the sentence against that stormy petrel, Jeanne Comtesse de Lamotte Valois, was officially quashed by the Paris court as a deliberate affront to the monarchy, although the Comtesse herself was already dead in London, under circumstances which were, like the rest of her life, both scandalous and mysterious. This was a signal for further demonstrations of hostility, if any were needed. The next day the Queen reported to Fersen that the insults were now so terrible that none of them, not the King, the Queen nor Madame Elisabeth, dared walk in the gardens.18
It was a horrible, humid, brooding atmosphere as the nation—la patrie—was officially proclaimed in danger of invasion. Armed men paraded the streets singing the “Ça Ira,” that jaunty revolutionary song generally regarded as “the signal of sedition,” of which one key line ran: “We shall hang all the aristocrats.” There were renewed distressing rumours that the Dauphin would be removed from his parents, with the possibility of a Regency in his name; the Girondins were said to actively favour this. One story suggested that the King had gone mad and was roaming crazily around the Tuileries—which of course made a Regency a necessity.19 Marie Antoinette moved from her ground-floor apartment to one close to that of her husband and the Dauphin.
Into this world of suspicion and fear, the Brunswick Manifesto of 25 July came as a match to dry timber. The Duke of Brunswick himself was a veteran campaigner who had fought brilliantly for Prussia in the Seven Years’ War and later for Prussia in the cause of the Stadtholder in Holland against the Patriots; he was an enlightened man who had been close to many of the philosophes. The manifesto was, however, fatally permeated with émigré sentiments. The French people were openly invited to rise up against “the odious schemes of their oppressors”—that is to say, the existing government, for better or for worse. The Manifesto also threatened “an exemplary and ever-memorable vengeance” and the “total destruction” of Paris if the Tuileries was the subject of a further attack and if the King and royal family “suffered even the slightest violence.” The campaign was intended “to put an end to anarchy in the interior of France” as well as to deliver the royal family.20
Where now was Marie Antoinette’s unreal dream of rescue by a force that would not interfere with the country’s internal affairs? Nothing could have been more helpful to the republican sentiments in the opposition than this manifesto. They now had the excuse they needed to discuss openly the imperative to depose the King—and the means by which it should be done. On 31 July, one of the forty-eight administrative sections into which Paris was now divided, that of Mauconseil, publicly pronounced Louis XVI to be “a despicable tyrant . . . Let us strike this colossus of despotism.” In a grim way the Mauconseil resolution stood the Brunswick Manifesto on its head. Yes, the French people must indeed turn against the odious schemes of their oppressors—in order to declare with one accord: “Louis XVI is no longer King of the French.”21
A few days earlier, a public dinner had been held in the ruins of the Bastille, at which calls were made for the fall of the monarchy, while petitions to that effect flooded into the Assembly. By 3 August, Pétion was able to ask for an end to monarchical government in the name of forty-six out of the forty-eight sections. The importation of further Confederate troops from the provinces, especially from Marseilles, described to Fersen by Marie Antoinette as “the arrival of a great quantity of extremely suspicious strangers,” signified the armed fist by which this message might shortly be struck home.22
The day of the Mauconseil resolution, 31 July, was also the day of the King’s last entry in his Journal; predictably it read “Rien.” Louis XVI now took refuge in “incessant” reading of the history of Charles I. He told his wife that everything that was happening in France was an exact imitation of what had happened during the English Revolution, and he hoped that his studies would enable him to do better than that monarch (from whom he was descended) in the coming crisis—for no one was in any doubt by now, whether revolutionary or monarchist, that the Tuileries was going to be attacked. On Sunday, 5 August, the King held his usual lever at the Tuileries. It was well attended by members of the current administration, which was rapidly losing its grip on power in the city. There was respect—of a sort—and Bertrand de Molleville even thought the occasion “brilliant.” An English doctor, John Moore, recently arrived in Paris, reported a very different scene at the Palais-Royal. Adrenalin was flowing—republican adrenalin, any mention of the name of the King being generally received with hoots of derisive laughter.23 Moore’s experience was more prescient than that of Molleville.
The day of 9 August, hot as before, began with a delusive calm inside the Tuileries. The King, Queen, Madame Elisabeth and Marie Thérèse attended Mass as usual although one person present noted how the royal ladies never raised their eyes from their prayer books.*95 Outside, the news that the attack was planned for that night began to flow through the city. The young Comte de La Rochefoucauld, son of the Duc de Liancourt, was at a matinée at the Comédie Française when he heard the rumours that the crowds were beginning to assemble in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Immediately he returned to the Tuileries. The drums of the National Guard were sounded and a body of them arrived at the palace, saying they were “voluntary soldiers in the service of the King.” Some members of the National Guard were, however, less reliable politically and there were already cries of “No more King!” from among their number. There was another armed force of volunteer aristocrats, about 300 of them, some of whose weapons were rudimentary if heroic. The main defence of the King was expected to be provided by his ultra-loyal Swiss Guards.24
The Cent-Suisses du Roi constituted an impressive body of crack troops. They led somewhat segregated lives in their barracks, preserving their own language and customs, although they had been in the service of the French King since the late fifteenth century and had a French colonel-in-chief, the Duc de Brissac. On ceremonial occasions, they still wore the ancient uniform of the liberators of Switzerland, but were otherwise dressed in blue uniforms braided in gold, with red breeches. When the Guards were drawn up in formation to the roll of their huge drums, wrote the Comte d’Hezecques, you would still think you saw “the elite of a Swiss canton” marching against the oppressor.25
Tough and dedicated, the Swiss Guards were easily interpreted as symbols of the monarchy by its enemies. On 1 August one Swiss had written back to his homeland: “The Confederates from Marseilles have announced that their objective is the disarmament of the Swiss Guards but we have all decided to surrender our arms only with our lives.” As the attack was expected, the Swiss Guards at the Tuileries were drawn up like “real walls,” their soldier-like silence in marked contrast to the perpetual din made by the much less professional National Guards.26
An extraordinary concession to the impending crisis was now made: the King’s coucher was omitted. This ceremony had even taken place on the evening on 20 June, following the King’s humiliation at the hands of the sans-culottes. Nothing could have made clearer the sense of a regime—a way of life—coming to an end. Instead, as the night wore on, the scene in the King’s bedchamber was one of chaos, with people crowding in and sitting everywhere, on the ground, on chairs, on console tables. Even so, with an obstinate maintenance of standards, some minor members of the royal household tried to prevent anyone sitting down in the presence of the King. Louis XVI himself, having not undressed (or been undressed), was still wearing his purple coat and the wreckage of his formal powdered hairstyle. Camille Durand, of the National Guard volunteers, noticed how flushed the King was, his eyes extremely red.27
The Queen, Madame Elisabeth and their ladies did not undress either; only the children went to sleep. At one o’clock Marie Antoinette and her sister-in-law lay down together on a sofa in one of the little rooms of the mezzanine floor. All of the adults were still awake when the raucous tocsins began sounding, summoning revolutionaries all over Paris to the long-anticipated assault. Durand in the Tuileries heard one tocsin at midnight, taking over as the clock’s bell ceased to toll, as did John Moore. But the streets were still clear and Moore was not awakened again until two o’clock when his landlord informed him that the Tuileries was about to be attacked. La Rochefoucauld, sleeping at the Tuileries, was not awakened until 3 a.m. when he went down to the King. At four o’clock the Queen went to the King’s bedchamber. When she came back, she informed Madame Elisabeth that the King refused to don his quilted waistcoat. He had done so on 20 June when he might have been the solitary target of an assassin. Now he was determined to share in the general fate on equal terms.28
But there was a more serious development. The Marquis de Mandat had been put in charge of the National Guard at the Assembly the day before with the instruction to “repel force with force.” He was then called to the Hôtel de Ville by the new revolutionary Commune of Paris, which considered itself in charge of the National Guard. As Mandat left, he was struck down and killed by a bullet. The defence of the Tuileries was now in the hands of Pierre Louis Roederer, Procurator-General of the Paris Prefecture (Département de la Seine) and a deputy from Metz. The substitution was liable to cause additional dismay in such a critical situation since Roederer was inevitably regarded as the Assembly’s man rather than the King’s. Furthermore Roederer was timid and not absolutely sure of the limits of his authority.29 At one point Madame Elisabeth tried to distract the Queen by drawing her attention to the red streaks beginning to appear in the sky: “Sister, come and see the dawn rise.” Red sky in the morning—rouge matin, chagrin—is regarded as a bad omen in many countries; certainly the forewarning was justified on 10 August. By five o’clock one estimate had 10,000 men pressing towards the courtyards and gardens of the Tuileries.
The decision was now made that the King should inspect the defences in order to improve morale. By this time “pale as a corpse” but nevertheless composed, Louis XVI proceeded on his tour of the various posts about five o’clock; the Comte de La Rochefoucauld accompanied him. Marie Antoinette wished to go too with the children. Fifty years earlier the young Maria Teresa, under threat from Frederick II, had used the image of herself and the infant Joseph to arouse the chivalry of her subjects: “What will become of this child?” Perhaps Marie Antoinette had in mind some similar appeal. The danger was, however, reckoned to be too great. As it was, the King’s mission was an unfortunate failure. Not only did he fail to rise to such an occasion with the presence and oratory that it demanded, but he also exhibited himself to the scorn of the disaffected National Guards. And this proved to be contagious. To the horror of the royal party inside the Tuileries, the King was greeted with jeers. “Good God! It is the King they are shouting at,” exclaimed Dubouchage, the Minister of the Navy.30
Afterwards Marie Antoinette confided to Madame Campan that it would have been better for the King to have remained inside rather than be subjected to such insults. Certainly, the idea that the National Guards could not be trusted contributed to the urgent debate now taking place between Roederer and the Queen as to whether or not the royal family should take refuge with the Assembly, situated on the far side of the Tuileries precinct. Roederer thought this course presented “the least danger,” whereas Dubouchage countered: “You are proposing to hand over the King to his enemy!” Similarly disinclined to throw them all on the mercies of the Assembly, Marie Antoinette believed that it would be better to stay where they were. She pointed out to Roederer: “Sir, there are some forces here.” The discussion was soon joined by the King, rather hot and breathless from his experiences but otherwise untroubled, even though one observer had compared him outside to an animal being furiously tormented by pursuing flies.31
The Queen was right about the forces. Estimates of numbers vary. However, with the Swiss Guards outside and those lining the Great Staircase, about 1000 in total, a force of the mounted gendarmerie of about the same size and the 300 or so aristocratic fighters determined to defend the King to the last, there were over 2000 armed men available, leaving aside those National Guards who would continue to protect their chief executive. Therefore it is possible at least that the Tuileries could have been held, with further consequences that can only be the subject of speculation.32 In reality it was Roederer who won the argument by playing his ace: the Queen’s natural concern for the safety of her family.
“Madame, do you really want to make yourself responsible for the massacre of the King, your children, yourself, to say nothing of the faithful servants that surround you?” he asked her. “On the contrary, what would I not do to be the only victim?” she replied.33 By this time there were growing noises outside, and the pounding on the main door had reached fever pitch.
Eventually, at eight o’clock, Marie Antoinette gave way. She agreed to take shelter with the Assembly. Her anguish was palpable but she contented herself with telling Roederer that she held him personally responsible for the safety of her husband and son. “We can at least die with you,” replied Roederer. Although Marie Antoinette was the major advocate of remaining, she made “no show of masculinity or heroics” in presenting her case, in the approving opinion of Roederer. As ever in a crisis, Marie Antoinette showed herself the forceful one who nonetheless could not bring herself finally to impose her will. The King could not make up his mind, but was inclined to favour staying put, since he had formed an incorrectly low estimate of the hostile numbers outside (due to his short-sightedness, perhaps). But the King went with the decision without fuss. He told the courtiers around him: “I am going to the National Assembly.” Then he looked steadily at Roederer and glanced at the Queen. He raised his hand: “Let’s go [Marchons].”34
There were embraces and farewells—and brandy for the troops who would be left behind. Marie Antoinette made a gracious speech, in order to heal the jealousies between the National Guards and the aristocrats: “Gentlemen, we all have the same interests . . . These generous servitors will share your dangers, fight with you and for you to the last extremity.” Durand of the National Guard listened to a proclamation given in the Cour des Suisses: “Citizen soldiers, soldier citizens, French and Swiss . . . Our chief of executive power is menaced. In the name of the law it is forbidden to you to attack; but you are authorized to repel force with force.”
Most of the waiting-women were going to be left behind, the Queen with difficulty having secured Roederer’s agreement to take the Princesse de Lamballe and the Marquise de Tourzel with them. The Princesse de Tarante who was staying offered to look after the latter’s daughter Pauline. The women asked what they should do. “We’ll find you back here,” replied the Queen positively. “If the King’s downfall is decreed by the Assembly, he will accept it.” As a result, no one thought to provide the royal family with any personal belongings. The Queen’s confidence in the outcome was paralleled by that of the King. He may have genuinely believed that his departure from the Tuileries would distract the mob and assuage its fury against the remaining inhabitants of the Tuileries. It was the Princesse de Lamballe who said grimly: “We shall never come back.”35
The little procession that now filed its way through the western garden door, across a courtyard, to the site of the Assembly, consisted of six ministers as an additional escort as well as Swiss Guards and grenadiers from the National Guard. In spite of this, the crowd pressed round them. If the Princesse de Lamballe was fearful, Madame Elisabeth maintained the heroic religious composure of one about to be martyred; she even preached forgiveness to La Rochefoucauld, who could not help replying that he personally was only thinking of vengeance. Marie Antoinette attempted a semblance of cheerfulness but broke down every few minutes and had to wipe her eyes with her handkerchief. La Rochefoucauld who gave her his arm found that she was trembling uncontrollably.36
Only the Dauphin managed to maintain some kind of childish normality, kicking at the leaves. The King peered at the heaps gathered by the Tuileries gardeners and with a spark of animation at this interesting natural phenomenon observed: “What a lot of leaves! They have fallen early this year.” Later the press was so great that the Dauphin had to be carried by a giant soldier above the heads of the crowd.
Deputies from the Assembly met them in the course of the journey and formally offered the King asylum. On arrival at the hall, however, the entire royal family with their attendants were penned into the reporters’ box behind the chair of President Vergniaud. This was a recess about ten feet square, with a grating fully exposed to the sun. It was now ten o’clock. During the whole of a blazing hot day, they all remained there, apart from a rudimentary meal at about two o’clock served by one Dufour; he left an account of his adventure, including his successful search for the Queen’s missing locket containing a miniature family portrait.*96
So the future of the monarchy was debated between the extremist republican Jacobins and the more moderate Girondins. The King’s words on arrival had been dignified: “I have come here to avoid a great crime and I believe that I cannot be safer than in your midst.” Now he gazed at the Assembly through his lorgnettes without any visible emotion. The Queen was more agitated. By the evening the fichu of her dress was wet through with perspiration, while her handkerchief was soaked with mopping up her tears. She asked the Comte de La Rochefoucauld, who had managed to get into the box too, for his handkerchief. But the Comte did not dare to lend it to her; instead he went in search of another one.37
The reason for his refusal was that his handkerchief was saturated with blood. This came from staunching the wounds of the aged Vicomte de Maillé, one of the survivors of a frightful massacre, which began at the Tuileries about an hour and a half after the departure of the royal family. The responsibility for this orgy of killing would be long debated—and the details will always be subject to controversy. It seems probable that in the confusion, the King failed to give any order for a ceasefire when he left the palace. By the time the message was conveyed that the Swiss Guards should retreat and join him at the Assembly—a message that may not even have got through—the palace had been stormed and the fighting had begun. Possibly the first shot was fired by one of the Swiss. The republicans were in any case convinced that the Swiss had been ordered by the King to destroy them, and certainly the Swiss sold their lives dearly . . .38
And so began the killings, which left the Tuileries a shambles of blood, corpses, severed limbs, broken furniture and bottles. People were hurled out of windows, killed in cellars, stables and attics, and even in the chapel where some had sought sanctuary, pleading vainly that they had not fired their guns. Rioters broke open the King’s wardrobe. Bloodstained hands were wiped on torn velvet mantles that once glittered with gold and the fleur-de-lys. The pike of an assailant, carried in triumph through the streets, was equally likely to be crowned with a fragment of Swiss uniform or a gobbet of human flesh. A young woman called Marie Grosholz, an apprentice sculptor in wax (who would be known to history as Madame Tussaud), never forgot the gravel stained with blood and littered with “appalling objects” as the “deep red sun” climbed up the sky. Many of those who tried to flee, whether Swiss or courtiers, were cut down by the mounted gendarmerie in the Place Louis XV. Paris became one huge abattoir, its gutters filled with the corpses of the Swiss, stripped naked and often mutilated. Traumatized wayfarers saw men kneeling in the streets and pleading for mercy before being beaten to death.39
Human decency did prevail in one instance. The terrified waiting-women, who had been left behind, cowered together in the Dauphin’s apartments with the shutters drawn. At Pauline de Tourzel’s suggestion, however, the rooms themselves were illuminated lest the women be mistaken for soldiers. When the sans-culottes burst in, they saw the candle-lit female reflections in the mirrors. With shouts of “We don’t kill women” and “Get up, you trollop [coquine] the nation pardons you,” the sans-culottes spared these victims at least.40
It was not until the evening that the royal family was released into the nearby accommodation that was to be theirs for the night. This was the sixteenth-century Convent of the Feuillants, which as their clubhouse had earlier given its name to the constitutionalists. The excuse given—that the Tuileries was uninhabitable—was true enough. Soon ordinary citizens would be queuing to goggle at the wreckage of the royal apartments where the Queen’s wardrobe had also been pillaged and strewn around, with some people adorning themselves with fragments. Spectators included Thomas Paine, the staunch republican, who was mistaken for an English royalist; he was only saved by being taken equally incorrectly for an American. The progress of the King and Queen to and from the Assembly over the next few days was small in distance. Nevertheless there was plenty of opportunity for gross insult to the “infamous Antoinette who wanted to bathe the Austrians in our blood”—insults delivered by hordes who were themselves heavily stained with the blood of Frenchmen. In the Place Vendôme they called for the head of the King and the entrails of the Queen.41 The question remained as to whether the King was not now the Assembly’s prisoner, his “enemy’s prisoner,” as had been feared by Dubouchage.
The convent provided spartan accommodation only: four rooms with brick floors and whitewashed walls, except for the Queen’s narrow cell, which had a green paper. The first need was for clothes; there was a desperate search for fresh linen. The Duchesse de Gramont provided some, while the Countess of Sutherland, the English ambassadress, who had a little boy the same age as Louis Charles, supplied clothes for him. The Princesse de Lamballe sent a note to the Princesse de Tarante asking for a chemise since she had not undressed for two days. About eleven o’clock at night they were visited by representatives of the Assembly to make sure they were still in their designated quarters. The Dauphin was crying. His mother explained that he was worried about the fate of his dear Pauline.42
All next day was spent listening to the debate, which would be summed up by the statement of the president, Vergniaud: “The French people are invited to form a National Convention. The Chief of the Executive Power [the King] is provisionally suspended from his functions.” In short, it was to be left to a National Convention, to be elected by the people, to decide the ultimate fate of the monarchy. The Queen had recovered her usual composure. That pleased no one, just as her misfortunes evoked no compassion. Doctor Moore attended the scene and remarked with surprise: “Her beauty is gone!” A Frenchman nearby was convinced that her expression indicated “rage and the most provoking arrogance.”43
At least the old regime struggled to recreate the conditions of the court in the unpromising surroundings of the convent. The King still managed to have his hair dressed. Dinner on 12 August—a day so hot that it became hazy—was a magnificent affair by most standards, if not those of Louis XVI. It included two soups, eight entrées, four roasts and eight desserts. An equally lavish supper followed. The Queen hardly touched her food. The King on the other hand ate heartily, “as if he was in his own palace,” which upset his wife. Further surviving servitors managed to get into the convent. These included Pauline, to the general joy. “My dear Pauline, don’t let us ever be separated again!” cried Marie Thérèse. Pauline also had escaped from the Tuileries with nothing but the clothes she had on; the royal ladies hastily began to adapt one of Madame Elisabeth’s dresses for her.44
Then there was Madame Campan to whom Marie Antoinette showed a less optimistic face. Stretching out her arms to the First Lady of the Bedchamber, she said: “It ends with us!” Madame Campan’s sister, Madame Auguié, presented her mistress with twenty-five louis; lack of money, essential equipment for a prisoner dealing with jailers, was likely to prove as awkward in the future as lack of linen. In fact, other royal servants tried to present their master with funds before they were dismissed, until the King said that their own need was the greater.45
The whereabouts of an appropriate residence for the royal family was the new subject of debate in the Assembly. The original plan had been to use the Luxembourg Palace, former residence of the Comte de Provence. Then the revolutionary Paris Commune, which saw the guardianship of the royal family as its right—or perquisite—protested that the security there was not good enough; other places were dismissed on the same grounds. The Prince de Poix, who had accompanied the King on that progress to the Assembly, offered the family the Hôtel de Noailles. But the choice of the Commune was in fact the Temple, in the Marais district.46 The Assembly, to whom the King had so happily entrusted himself and his family, where he expected to be “never safer,” now cheerfully abandoned their responsibility and allowed the Commune to have its way.
Painful negotiations followed as to how many attendants were to be allowed to the royal party. At one point Louis XVI, the suspended King, observed that his role model Charles I had at least been allowed to keep his friends with him until the day he mounted the scaffold. In the end the party that set out for the Temple at six o’clock on the evening of Monday, 13 August, consisted of the following: the five royals, the Princesse de Lamballe, the Tourzels, mother and daughter, Mesdames Thibault, Saint Brice and Navarre, the valets Chamilly and Hüe.
Marat signed an article in L’Ami du Peuple in which he hailed “The glorious day of the Tenth of August,” which could be decisive for “the triumph of liberty.” But he warned his readers not to give in to “the voice of false pity.” There was not much danger of that as the thirteen-strong party set out in two heavy-laden carriages, drawn by only two horses apiece, which made progress intolerably slow. Altogether it took two and a half hours to reach the Temple. Along the way they saw the equestrian statue of Louis XV, which had been toppled and smashed by the mob. One of the commissioners accompanying them, Pierre Manuel, Procurator-General of the Commune, remarked with satisfaction: “That is how the people treat their kings.”
“It is pleasant that this rage is confined to inanimate objects,” commented the real-life King with a flash of acerbity.47
In the meantime a wag had affixed a placard to the Tuileries, “House to Let,” and miles away in the east the army of the Duke of Brunswick was on the march.