Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (102 page)

By October 1789, Catherine had realized that if France slid into genuine revolution, it could threaten all European monarchies. This put her in a difficult position with Philippe de Ségur. When the ambassador’s four years of service in Russia were concluded, he came to say goodbye to the empress. Catherine gave him a friendly message for his king and also some personal advice,

Ségur, equally distressed, replied, “
I am afraid so, Madame, and that is what makes it my duty to return.” When she invited him to stay for dinner and displayed the warmth of her feelings toward him, the parting became difficult. “When I went, I thought I was only going on leave,” he wrote later. “The departure would have been still more painful had I known I was seeing her for the last time.”

Catherine’s comments about events in France became increasingly caustic. The National Assembly was “
the Hydra with twelve hundred heads.” In the new governing figures, she discerned
“only
people who
set in motion a machine which they lack the talent and skill to control.… France is the prey of a crowd of lawyers, fools masquerading as philosophers, rascals, young prigs destitute of common sense, puppets of a few bandits who do not even deserve the title of illustrious criminals.” Her defense of monarchy followed from her belief in the need for efficiency in administration and the preservation of public order: “
Tell a thousand people to draft a letter, let them debate every phrase, and see how long it takes and what you get.” She hated to see order crumbling and anarchy looming in France because she knew something about anarchy; she had seen it in the Pugachev rebellion.

She was unable to support her views with military action half a continent away, but even before the flight to Varennes, she was not wholly passive. She told her ambassador in Sweden that she wanted the future of France to become the concern of all European monarchs. It was not merely a question of crushing revolution, she wrote, but also of France resuming its role in the European balance of power. Knowing that Gustavus III of Sweden, always in search of glory, coveted the leadership of a monarchist crusade against the revolution in France, she chose him as the figure to support. In October 1791, only a year after the end of the short, pointless Baltic war between Russia and Sweden, she offered to provide Gustavus a subsidy to maintain a corps of twelve thousand Swedish soldiers to be used in an invasion of France. The date discussed for this operation was the spring of 1792.

A violent event in Sweden prevented this military enterprise. On March 5, 1792, Gustavus III was shot in the back and gravely wounded at a masked ball in Stockholm; he died at the end of the month. Although the assassin was a Swedish aristocrat and the issue was peculiar to Swedish politics, Catherine immediately saw it as part of a rising tide of antimonarchical violence. There were police reports that a French agent was on his way to St. Petersburg to assassinate the empress, and the number of guards at the Winter Palace was doubled. There was no further talk of landing Swedish troops in France.

In the spring of 1792 Catherine issued a ten-page memorandum, suggesting measures to suppress anarchy in France, reestablish the monarchy, and set France back on the road to tranquillity and greatness. She began by writing that “
the cause of the king of France is the cause of all kings.… All the works of the [French] National Assembly have been devoted to the abolition of the form of monarchy established in France for a thousand years. [Now] it is important to Europe to see France resume her position as a great power.” As to how this could be
achieved, she said, “A body of ten thousand men would suffice to march across France from one end to the other.… Perhaps mercenaries—the best would be the Swiss—could be hired, and perhaps others from the German princes. With this force, one could deliver France from the bandits, reestablish the monarchy, chase away the impostors, punish the rascals and deliver the kingdom from oppression.” Once a restoration was achieved, the empress advised against widespread, vindictive repression. “A few genuine revolutionaries should be punished and amnesty should follow for those who have submitted and returned to their allegiance.” She believed that many delegates in the National Assembly would accept forgiveness, realizing that “they had gone beyond their powers because the electorate had not demanded the abolition of the monarchy, much less the Christian religion.” It was essential in the newly restored kingdom, she continued, that there be a balance of the original three estates: the nobility, the clergy, and the common people. The property of the clergy should be restored, the nobility should regain their privileges, and the popular and valid demand for liberty “could be satisfied by good and wise laws.” Before everything else, she wrote, the royal family must be liberated: “As the troops advance, the princes and the troops must focus on the most essential point: the deliverance of the king and the royal family from the hands of the population of Paris.”

This document, written only months before the September massacres, the formal abolition of the French monarchy, and the beheading of the king, was hopelessly naïve; it displays Catherine’s complete misunderstanding of the evolving political, economic, social, and psychological condition of the people of France. Even as Catherine was writing, the radicalization of France was accelerating. The Jacobin Club, immensely powerful in Paris, was extending its membership and influence across the country. Meeting at a former convent of the Jacobins in the rue St.-Honoré, it had begun its revolutionary role as a place for reading and discussion of needed reforms; then it evolved into an arena of radical thought, fiery speeches, and demands for drastic action. Its leaders, Georges Danton, Jean Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre, were reaching the summit of political power. By the summer of 1792, the Paris Commune, the new municipal government supported by the sansculottes—ordinary citizens “without fine knee breeches”—controlled the city. Danton, the new, thirty-year-old minister of justice, assumed responsibility for the royal family at the Tuileries.

On August 10, a mob, organized by the Commune, stormed the
Tuileries Palace. Six hundred members of the Swiss Guard protecting the royal family resisted until the king, to prevent bloodshed, ordered them to surrender. The Swiss obeyed, were taken prisoner, and slaughtered. The royal apartments were invaded and the king, his wife, and their children were seized and carried off to the prison of the Temple.

That spring of 1792, Prussia had entered the Austrian war against France. By midsummer, a Prussian army stood on the Rhine, ready to march on Paris. As the army began to move, the Duke of Brunswick, commanding the Prussian forces, learned that Louis XVI and his family had been taken from the Tuileries. The duke’s response was to issue a manifesto threatening that Paris would be singled out for “
an exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance … if the king and his family came to any harm.” This threat produced a result opposite to that intended. The Brunswick manifesto seemed to expose Paris to a terrible retribution. Having been told that they had already committed acts for which they would be punished, Parisians were persuaded that they had nothing more to lose. Rumor declared that when the enemy arrived, the population of the city would be massacred.

On July 30, 1792, five hundred men wearing red caps arrived in Paris from Marseilles and the south. Described by one member of the Assembly as “
a scum of criminals vomited out of the prisons of Genoa and Sicily,” they had been hired by the Commune to come to Paris to help defend the city. To further bolster these ranks, the Commune drew on the local criminal population. Prisoners were released on condition that they would obey orders given by the Commune.

The savagery of the prison massacres of September 2–8, 1792, was planned. During the final two weeks of August, hundreds of Parisians, described as “presumed traitors,” were arrested. Destined to be killed, they were gathered in prisons to make this more convenient. Many of the prisoners were priests taken from seminaries and churches and accused of antirevolutionary beliefs. Some were former personal servants of the king and queen. Those arrested also included the playwright Pierre Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette’s close friend the Princesse de Lamballe, who had fled to London and then returned to Paris to be with the queen. Most were ordinary people. Danton was not an instigator, but he was aware of what was about to happen. “
I don’t give a damn about the prisoners,” he said. “Let them fend for themselves.” Later, he added that “the executions were necessary to appease the people of
Paris.” Robespierre said simply that the will of the people had been expressed.

News that the Prussians had seized Verdun reached Paris on Sunday morning, September 2. The massacres began that afternoon. Twenty-four priests being brought to the prison at the Abbaye de St.-Germain-des-Prés were pulled from the carriages transporting them and, before entering at the prison gate, slaughtered with swords, knives, axes, and a shovel on the cobbles of the narrow street. Prisoners already held in the abbey were pushed, one by one, down steps into a garden, where they were hacked to death with knives, hatchets, and a carpenter’s saw. Other bands attacked other prisons: 328 prisoners were slaughtered in the Conciergerie; 226 at the Châtelet; 115, including an archbishop, at a Carmelite convent. At the Bicêtre, 43 adolescent boys were butchered. Thirteen were fifteen-year-olds, three were fourteen, two were thirteen, and one was twelve. Women of all ages including adolescent girls were brutally violated. When the Princesse de Lamballe refused to swear an oath of hatred against the royal couple, she was hacked to death. Her head was taken to the Temple to dance on a pike before the eyes of the king and queen.

On September 9, the French defeated the Prussians at Valmy, ending the allied invasion and forcing the Prussian army to retreat to the Rhine. The French did not stop there; they swept on to capture Mainz and Frankfurt. On September 21, three weeks after the massacres, the French monarchy was abolished and a republic established. In December, the National Assembly proclaimed that wherever France’s armies marched, the existing form of government would be replaced by the rule of the people.

On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was executed. This was too much for some who, until then, had believed in the revolution. General François Dumouriez, the military victor of Valmy, who had been Danton’s friend, deserted to the Austrians; Lafayette had defected after the storming of the Tuileries. The provinces rose against the Paris government and then paid dearly. When Lyon, France’s second city after Paris, capitulated, those to be killed, most of them peasants or laborers. were roped together in groups of two hundred, herded to fields outside the city, and executed by cannon firing grapeshot into the bunched human mass. One of Robespierre’s agents was present and reported to his master: “What delights you would have tasted could you have seen national justice wrought on two hundred and ninety scoundrels! Oh, what majesty! What a lofty tone! It was thrilling to see all those wretches chew the dust!”

A new executive committee of the government, the Committee of Public Safety, was created that included Danton and Robespierre. Eventually, Robespierre decided that the revolution was ideologically impure. A Reign of Terror was instituted “
to protect the republic from its internal enemies … those who whether by their conduct, their contacts, their words, or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny or enemies of liberty” or those “who have not constantly manifested their attachment to the revolution.” Over nine months, the official count of those executed was sixteen thousand; there were estimates that the Terror actually claimed two or three times that number.

Informed that Louis of France had been sent to the guillotine, a shaken Catherine became physically ill. She remained in seclusion for a week and ordered six weeks of court mourning. She ordered a total break in relations with France. The French chargé d’affaires, Edmond Genet, was expelled. The Franco-Russian commercial treaty of 1787 was annulled and all trade between the two countries was prohibited. No vessel flying the tricolor flag of the revolution was allowed in Russian waters. All Russian subjects living or traveling in France were recalled, and all French citizens in Russia were given three weeks to publicly pledge allegiance to the king of France or leave Catherine’s empire. Of fifteen hundred French citizens in Russia, only forty-three refused to take this oath. In March 1793, two months after his brother’s death, she welcomed the Count of Artois to St. Petersburg, agreed to finance him, and exhorted him to work together with other émigrés. But she still held back from military involvement in the war against France. With Austria and Prussia rebuffed, she believed that little could be achieved without Britain and that Britain had no intention of going to war. William Pitt, the prime minister, had said as much: that British policy was concerned with the security of Europe, not with the nature of the French government. The execution of Louis XVI changed Pitt’s mind. The king’s execution, Pitt said, was “
the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.”
^*
The French ambassador was ordered to leave
England. Once again, France acted first. On February 1, 1793, France declared war on Great Britain.

Six months after her husband’s death, the widowed Marie Antoinette, her hair white at thirty-seven, was taken from her children in the Temple tower and placed in the prison of the Conciergerie. The former queen of France—a Hapsburg archduchess, the daughter of an Austrian empress, the sister of two Austrian emperors, and the aunt of a third—remained alone for two months in a cell eleven feet by six feet. On October 5, 1793, she was placed in a tumbrel and taken through the streets to the guillotine.