Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
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? C
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!” fro
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