Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (20 page)

There were, however, ways in which Paris had not recovered from 1789. The rearrangement of the city’s sixty districts into forty-eight new sections had not destroyed local loyalties, and in poorer sections like Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel popular militancy did not disappear with the fall of the Bastille. Even though day-to-day policing was probably as effective in 1791 as it had been before the Revolution, tension between patriots and aristocrats, together with anticlerical feelings exacerbated by the disputes over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, led to many incidents of violence.
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In April, for example, rampaging patriotic women in the rue Saint-Antoine broke into local convents and dragged the nuns into the street for public whippings. Of course, the scurrilous press was delighted by this, exaggerated what had happened, and inspired repetitions of the incident in other parts of the city. There was also widespread fear of brigands, or troublemakers, recently arrived in the capital. Such “enemies of the people” could easily conceal themselves among Paris’s transient population: six out of ten people in the city at the time had been born elsewhere. The growing fear of malicious outsiders led to demands for a new census, and the municipal police department ordered a survey of the city’s
logeurs
, or people letting furnished rooms, who might be harboring suspicious newcomers.
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In this context, the National Guard became all the more important. People throughout France had imitated the Parisians and formed local battalions of national guards, but the relationship of these citizen militias to the Revolution was increasingly vexed. In theory, the National Guard was designed both to protect the Revolution and to maintain public order. In practice these two objectives sometimes conflicted. Soon after the fall of the Bastille in 1789, Robespierre had been horrified by the move to exclude nontaxpaying citizens (
citoyens passifs
) from the National Guard, and he never ceased to oppose it. In his newspaper, on 5 December 1790, Marat—who had heard but still could not spell Robespierre’s name—had written, “Robertspiere, Robertspierre alone in vain raised his voice against the perfidious decree regarding superior conscripts, but his voice was muffled.”
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Afterward, Robespierre composed a speech on the topic, read it to the Jacobins at Versailles, then published and circulated it through the network of affiliated clubs across France. In February of the following year, he wrote sarcastically to the newly wed Camille Desmoulins, reminding him to advertise the published speech in his newspaper:

Camille did as he was told and a notice about Robespierre’s recent work appeared in
Révolutions de France et de Brabant
a week later, on 21 February. Even so, it was not until the end of April that the assembly got around to discussing the subject again.

Robespierre argued that the institution of the National Guard was an unprecedented revolutionary act, resulting from a kind of patriotism previously unknown among free peoples. The assembly was busy formulating constitutional laws intended to protect the people’s liberty, but only force—force deployed in the name of the people—could ultimately guarantee that liberty:

This idea was straight out of Rousseau, and when he spoke in the assembly, Robespierre mentioned the philosopher by name:

The French still had a professional army and Robespierre was particularly insistent that it must be kept separate from the National Guard. He argued that the king, as nominal head of the professional army, must not be allowed to nominate the heads or officers of the National Guard, that officers in the professional army must not hold posts in the National Guard, and that the king and his ministers must not be allowed to deploy or discipline the National Guard either. Robespierre was mindful of recent problems inside the army. During the summer of 1790, at Béthune (near Arras) and Metz, there had been a series of conflicts between rank-and-file soldiers sympathetic to the Revolution and aristocratic officers intent on maintaining old-style discipline. In Nancy things had gone completely out of control when a cousin of General Lafayette’s, the Marquis de Bouillé, used severe military discipline to suppress a rebellion in the Châteauvieux regiment.

The rebellious soldiers had the support and encouragement of their local Jacobin Club. But this did not save them from the draconian measures of General Bouillé’s military tribunal: one soldier was broken on the wheel, twenty were hanged, and forty-one were sentenced to the galleys for life—all of which astonished enlightened citizens, who thought such barbarism had been banished from France along with the old regime. Even more astonishing, though, was the assembly’s decision to praise Bouillé for this pitiless repression. At first, only Robespierre, Pétion, and a handful of other radical deputies protested. Robespierre was shouted down at the tribune. Outside the assembly, however, he had the support of the Jacobins, and soon there were public demonstrations of solidarity with the heroes of the Châteauvieux regiment. To show their sympathy with those forty-one soldiers now toiling their lives away in the galleys, some patriots took to wearing the
bonnet rouge
, the cap of the galley slaves.
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Robespierre himself disdained this fashion and was extremely irritated when, at the Jacobins one evening, someone leaned over and dumped a bonnet on top of his meticulously maintained wig.
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Nevertheless, events in Nancy had made an impression on him, and he was adamant that there must be no confusion in the future between the National Guard and what remained of the old regime army. He wanted to see the former organized along rigorously democratic lines, free of the authoritarian hierarchy that had caused such suffering at Nancy. Throughout his speech in April, he kept referring to “the people” until someone interrupted, demanding to know what he meant exactly. “I myself protest against all manner of speaking that uses the word
people
in a limited sense,” he said:

This was all very well in theory, but in practice the National Guard’s dual responsibilities—to protect the Revolution, and to maintain public order—were bound to come into conflict, sooner or later, with particular sectors of this much-invoked people. Robespierre, following Rousseau, could define the people and their National Guard as one and indivisible, but theirs was not a definition that would hold up in a public brawl, still less a Revolution.

AS EASTER 1791 approached, the king and queen, eager for a rest and change of atmosphere, hoped to be permitted to leave Paris for Saint-Cloud. In this suburb west of Paris, Marie Antoinette owned a splendid château, surrounded by twelve hectares of gardens and terraces overlooking the Seine. It was here that she had held her secret audience with Mirabeau, the occasion on which his ugliness overwhelmed her. Now Mirabeau was dead, the king was wracked by terrible headaches, and Marie Antoinette longed more than ever to escape the confines of the Tuileries palace, where privacy was impossible and she scarcely dared open a window for fear of the abuse that would greet her. Back in December 1790, the king had finally given in and signed the proposed Civil Constitution of the Clergy despite the pope’s disapproval, but now his conscience was troubling him. At Saint-Cloud it might be possible to celebrate Easter in the old way, without political interference. However, for the last few weeks Marat had again been spreading panic, this time telling his readers that a hostile foreign army was massing at the Austrian border. “It is all up with liberty, it is all up with the country,” he warned, “if we suffer the royal family to quit the Tuileries.”
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It was true that during the nine months that had passed since a battalion of Austrian troops asked permission to cross into France, foreign troops had been gathering at the border.
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It was also true that it would be much more difficult for the Parisians to influence the course of the Revolution if the king abandoned the capital. So when the royal party tried to set off on 18 April, it was stopped by the mob. The next day, Louis XVI strode purposefully across the Tuileries gardens to the Manège and addressed the Assembly:

This was a strong and dignified speech, but to no avail. Over at the Hôtel de Ville, the municipality of Paris, urged on by Danton with the Cordelier Club behind him, decreed that the king was not to go to Saint-Cloud. The assembly decided not to interfere, there was nothing General Lafayette could do to help, so the king, who had behaved well and wisely, had no choice but to walk back despondently across the garden and break the news to his disappointed wife.

Marie Antoinette had been planning an escape for many months. Mirabeau had fully shared her belief that removing the king from Paris was the only way to restore royal authority over the Revolution. All sorts of schemes had been auditioned—getting him out was, obviously, a difficult project—but now even the famously indecisive king was determined to try. He was equally determined, however, not to leave France, not to flee as so many nobles had done and abandon what he still thought of as a kingdom entrusted to him by God. This narrowed his list of possible destinations down to one: he must try to reach the loyal troops under the command of General Bouillé, who were encamped at Montmédy, near the Austrian border, about 170 miles away. Bouillé was highly regarded by Louis for his successful 1778 campaign against the English in the West Indies during the American Revolutionary War, and, much more recently, for suppressing the controversial rebellion in Nancy, with cavalry that remained under his control even as insubordination spread through the rank and file. Bouillé could not reach the king in Paris, but if the king could get to Bouillé, they could together start to assemble forces for reasserting royal authority, with or without reinforcements from abroad.

The most direct route from Paris to Montmédy ran through Reims. For this reason, the king rejected it, convinced he would still be widely recognized in the place of his coronation fifteen years ago. Unfortunately, the alternative road was not only longer but also less remote, passing through many small towns, where the royal fugitives might easily arouse suspicion. Nevertheless, that was the road chosen, and the departure date was set for 20 June. The decision to travel in an unusually shaped, extra-large custom-made coach capacious enough for at least eight people did nothing to lower the risk of attracting attention. Since this striking vehicle could hardly pull up outside the Tuileries, on the night of 20 June it was parked discreetly near the city wall, while a more ordinary coach waited close to the palace on the corner of the rue de l’Echelle, the royal party’s first point of assembly. Shortly after ten, the king’s two children, heavy with sleep and dressed in disguises, were carried out and left in the coach with their governess. The princess asked her young brother what he thought they were going to do that evening. “Act in a play, I suppose,” he replied, “since we have all got these odd dresses.”
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An hour later, their aunt, Mme Elisabeth, joined them, stepping on the dauphin, who had fallen asleep on the floor as she entered the carriage: “He had the courage not to cry out,” his sister loyally recalled. Then the king and queen arrived, separately, Marie Antoinette shaken because her face had been caught for a few fleeting seconds in the lights of General Lafayette’s carriage, sweeping past unexpectedly at that late hour.

The royal family were conveyed successfully to their special traveling coach and set off for the border accompanied by three guards in flamboyant yellow livery. If they were stopped and questioned, the plan was to pass themselves off as the family and traveling companions of a Russian woman, the Baroness de Korff, played by the governess. Marie Antoinette would assume the now-vacant role of governess, the king’s sister would pose as a friend named Rosalie, and Louis XVI—most improbably of all—would take the part of a valet. The dauphin had been quite right to guess that amateur dramatics were in store. As the sun rose behind the carriage window blinds, the occupants settled into their journey, practiced their parts, and began on a picnic breakfast that lifted their spirits. It was pretty funny to think of the shock on Lafayette’s long face when he learned of the empty beds in the Tuileries that morning. The king, always keen on lists and maps, was suddenly in his element, providing a running commentary on the group’s progress for the benefit of his children. By the afternoon he was relaxed enough to get out and engage people in pleasant conversation about the weather and crops as the horses were changed at relay stops. As far as the town of Varennes, fresh horses were ordered in the ordinary way by sending a courier ahead. But at Varennes arrangements had been made for a special relay of horses to be protected by a small detachment of Bouillé’s troops. These troops drew suspicious comment from nervous locals—many of them newly signed-up members of the National Guard—even before the peculiarly shaped coach arrived in the middle of the night and squeezed through the narrow arch in the town wall. In the twenty-four hours since the escape from the Tuileries had commenced, the royal family had got to within twenty miles of their final destination.