Lafayette (47 page)

Abbé Sieyès, however, demanded that all orders meet as one and abandon the unit rule in favor of a head count—a change that would automatically have given the Third Estate control of the entire assemblage. “There cannot be one will as long as we permit three orders,” he declared, echoing Rousseau’s
Le Contrat Social
. “At best, the three orders might agree. But they will never constitute
one
nation,
one
representation, and
one
common will.”
²⁰
Lafayette stunned the members of his order by agreeing. Although the Third Estate voted for the change, Sieyès was unable to capture a majority of the clergy’s votes and Lafayette rallied only 46 of the 234 noblemen to his side. Many of those who voted against him dropped angry hints of retaliation for his disloyalty to his order. “I begin to worry about you,” Jefferson told him. “Your principles are decidedly with the
Tiers Etat
, but your instructions are against it.”
²¹

“I smother in our chamber,” he replied. “The mephitic odors of their prejudices are not good for my lungs.”
²²

On June 4, the dauphin, or crown prince, died, and the king retired to his hunting lodge in the Marly Forest to mourn. His departure left conservative ultra-royalists—the so-called “court party”—without direction. With each passing day, Fayettistes won new converts among the clergy, and, on June 17, Abbé Sieyès proclaimed a majority of his order ready to vote with the Third Estate. “Considering that we now represent ninety-six percent of the nation,” he moved that they declare themselves a “National Assembly.” They agreed, and ended five centuries of rule by the nobility and clergy. They elected the commoner-scientist Bailly as their first president. Although the voting represented a social and political revolution, it was far from national in character, as Sieyès pretended. The Assembly barely represented 10 percent, let alone 96 percent, of the nation, but the vote did force the two, tiny controlling minorities of nobles and clerics to share some of their power with a slightly larger minority of privileged commoners. The nobles and clerics did not cede power graciously, however.

The following day, when members of the new National Assembly went to enter the great hall to begin deliberations, a ring of troops barred the
doors. While they stood in the rain, the members of the nobility and the clergy who had voted against change took their seats inside and pronounced all resolutions of the National Assembly null and void. Outside, the members of the National Assembly moved to the royal tennis court, where President Bailly declared, “Considering that the National Assembly has been called to prepare a constitution, restore public order, and uphold the principles of monarchy, nothing will impede the continuation of its deliberations. Regardless of the site it is forced to use and wherever its members assemble, it remains the National Assembly.” The members then took the “Oath of the Tennis Court,” pledging not to separate. On June 22, the Assembly, with the entire Third Estate, 150 members of the clergy, and 2 noblemen, met in the Church of Saint-Louis in Versailles. Lafayette remained home, putting the finishing touches on a document he and Jefferson had written: “The First European Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens,” which became the
Première Déclaration européenne des droits de l’homme et des citoyens.
²³

On June 23, the king emerged from his isolation at Marly, appeared at the church, and ordered the National Assembly “to separate immediately and return tomorrow morning to the chambers assigned to your order to resume your deliberations.”
²⁴
The Assembly sat paralyzed in silence, agasp at their king’s pompous waddle down the aisle and out the church door. The two nobles in the Assembly and several clergymen stood and obediently followed the king, but Bailly sprang to his feet: “A nation assembled does not accept orders,” he cried angrily. The ambitious Mirabeau struggled to raise his huge frame and outshine Bailly: “We are here by the authority of the people; only the authority of bayonets can remove us.”
²⁵
The delegates cheered both challenges to royal authority and added a challenge of their own by declaring the inviolability of the Assembly and declaring an end to a millennium of absolute royal rule in France. The following day, the majority of the clergy joined the Third Estate, and, a day later, forty-seven nobles, including Lafayette, took their places in the Assembly.

“This day will be celebrated in our annals,” declared Bailly, a man as optimistic and idealistic as Lafayette. “It makes the family complete. It ends forever the divisions which have mutually afflicted us. . . . The National Assembly will now concern itself, without distraction or rest, with the regeneration of the realm and the public welfare.”
²⁶

The cynical Gouverneur Morris saw things more clearly: “The nobles deeply feel their situation,” he wrote to Foreign Affairs Secretary John Jay. “The king after siding with them was frightened into an abandonment of them. He acts from terror only. The soldiery in this city . . . declare they will not act against the people.”
²⁷
Morris said that after a group of drunken soldiers were jailed, a mob marched to demand their release and “soldiers on
guard unfixed their bayonets and joined the mob. A party of dragoons, ordered to disperse the riot, thought it better to drink with the rioters. The soldiers, with others confined in the same prison, were then paraded in triumph to the Palais Royal,
²⁸
which is now the Liberty Pole of this city, and there they celebrated as usual their joy. Probably this evening some other prisons will be opened, for
Liberté
is now the general cry and
Autorité
is a name, not a real existence . . . the sword has slipped out of the monarch’s hands.”
²⁹

As anarchy spread across Paris, 30,000 troops massed in and about Versailles to protect the king. The rest of the regular army in Metz—200,000 men—were on alert, awaiting the king’s order to march into Paris, but, according to Morris, “all my information [is] that he will never bring his army to act against the people.”
³⁰

On July 7, the National Assembly declared itself a National Constituent Assembly—in effect, a constitutional convention—and three days later Lafayette proposed his “Declaration of the Rights of Man” as a preamble to the nation’s first constitution. Jefferson’s contributions gave many provisions a familiar ring.

“All men are created free and equal,” declared the first article, which also abolished all social classes and distinctions. “All men are born with certain inalienable rights,” read the second, “including life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, the right to work, the right to hold and express opinions and religious beliefs, and the right to defend their persons, their lives and their honor.” Article three restricted “the exercise of natural rights” to those which did not interfere with the rights of others. Subsequent articles imposed separation of legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government, open government, impartiality of judges, and “clear, precise and uniform laws for all citizens.” It called for legislative consent for all government spending and gave “succeeding generations” the right to change the constitution, to adapt to social and economic change.
³¹

Lafayette called the document a “profession of faith, fruit of my past, pledge of my future . . . at the same time, a manifesto and an ultimatum.”
³²
Jefferson also hailed it and, like Lafayette, misread the character of the French people and their leaders. “I think it probable,” he predicted in a letter to his Virginia protégé James Monroe, “this country will, within two or three years, be in the enjoyment of a tolerably free constitution, and that without its having cost them a drop of blood.”
³³
Morris scoffed at both men, saying it failed to draw a line between liberty and license. He read it at Jefferson’s house, where he, the Lafayettes, and a large party of Americans had celebrated July 4.

“Our American example has done them good,” Morris admitted, “but like all novelties, liberty runs away with their discretion, if they have any.
They want an American Constitution with the exception of a king instead of a president, without reflecting that they have not American citizens to support that Constitution. . . . Different constitutions of government are necessary to different societies. . . . A democracy [in France]? Can that last? I think not. I am sure not, unless the whole people are changed.”
³⁴

As Washington had warned him it might, Lafayette’s declaration of human rights proved the additional “irritation” that Washington had said he feared would “blow up the spark of discontent into a flame that might not easily be quenched.”
³⁵
Street-corner orators shouted the provisions of Lafayette’s bill of rights to illiterates whom priests had always cowed into believing God had ordained them inferior. Lafayette’s document told them they were born equal to priests, noblemen, and kings, and, like beasts unleashed, they interpreted liberty as license and pursuit of happiness as plunder. Pamphleteers added to the frenzy with charges that the Court had conspired with the nobility to withhold grain and starve the people. The presence of troops and cavalry at every bridge and along the major streets provoked still more rumors; a
grande peur
—a “great fear”—swept across France that the nobility had hired an army of foreign brigands to wreak vengeance on farmers and shopkeepers.

On Sunday, July 12, thousands of Parisians poured from their churches and milled about the streets and squares. Orators harangued them at every street corner, denouncing priests as purveyors of the king’s lies. In the gardens of the Palais Royal, a huge crowd gathered under the plain trees, hypnotized by the echoing voice of Georges-Jacques Danton, an ugly but nonetheless glib lawyer who thrilled as he watched his words seduce the great mass before him. Suddenly the cry “To arms!” rang out. As some raced for refuge under nearby arcades, the rest of the mob sprang like a great beast of prey out the gates onto the rue Saint-Honoré, hungering for bread and thirsting for blood. Shots rang out near the Tuileries, where palace guards raked the crowd with fire. By day’s end, anarchy raged in the streets. The mob burned and demolished forty of the fifty-four hated customs posts, or
barrières
, that the
ferme
had built to collect taxes on foodstuffs entering Paris. Brigands took advantage of the surging mob to loot shops and homes in their path. Ordered by officers to fire on the mobs, army regulars—themselves commoners—refused, and, when several of their sergeants were jailed for disobedience, the mob and the soldiers smashed through the prison gates and released them and all other prisoners.

“The little City of Paris is in as fine a tumult as any one could wish,” Morris lamented in his diary. “They are getting arms wherever they can find any. Seize sixty barrils of powder in a boat on the Seine. Break into the Monastery of St. Lazar and find a store of grain which the holy brotherhood had laid in. Immediately it is put into carts and sent to market, and on every
cart a friar. The Gardemeuble du Roy
³⁶
is attacked and the Arms are delivered to prevent worse consequences.”
³⁷

To try to restore order, some four hundred electors of the Paris Third Estate formed an ad hoc government at the Hôtel de Ville—the city hall— and organized a “citizen’s militia”—a Corps Bourgeois—to patrol the streets and protect property, but it had little effect.

On the evening of July 13, rumors reached the floor of the National Assembly at Versailles that the king had acceded to the queen’s demand that troops seize the building and arrest the deputies. The deputies voted to remain in session throughout the night and, the next morning, took up the question of adopting Lafayette’s bill of rights. The debate continued past noon and, after a recess for a midday meal, dragged on through the afternoon. Suddenly, at six, the door of the chamber burst open; Lafayette’s brother-in-law, the vicomte de Noailles, ran down the aisle, whispered to the chair, then shouted the news that a mob in Paris had seized the medieval Bastille fortress-prison.
³⁸
The mob had run amok all day, searching for arms and powder. More than seven thousand had stormed the Hôtel des Invalides and seized thirty thousand muskets, but, finding little powder, they cried out, “To the Bastille,” where they knew they could find a large supply. While the prison governor tried to negotiate, part of the crowd broke into the inner courtyards, and he ordered his troops to fire. Ninety-eight besiegers fell dead and seventy-three others lay wounded. Two detachments of French guards who had joined the insurrection brought up five cannon stolen from the Invalides and blasted through the outer walls. After setting free the only prisoners they could find—four forgers, a libertine, and two madmen—they massacred six of the prison’s defenders and seized the prison governor, dragging him through the streets to the Hôtel de Ville before hanging his torn body by the neck from a lamppost.

As the mob’s lust for blood intensified, the provost of merchants—the nearest equivalent to a mayor in Paris—accidentally wandered into their midst. Before he could breathe a whisper of protest, they had butchered him, severing his head from his lifeless body and impaling it on the end of a pike to display along the line of march. As an afterthought, they cut down the body of the prison warden and used his head as a similar trophy, with many in the mob reaching over one another to dip their fingers in the blood of their victims and smear their faces with it.

The following morning, a horror-stricken assembly at Versailles assigned Lafayette to head a delegation to implore the king to cooperate with them in restoring order. Before Lafayette could leave the hall, his cousin the duc de Liancourt, the grand master of the wardrobe, appeared and announced the king’s imminent arrival. The night before, as he learned of the rioting in Paris, the king is said to have asked Liancourt, “Then is it a full-blown riot?”