The War of Wars (5 page)

However, the Duc was not Lafayette’s mentor: his military tutor was the Comte de Broglie, a former head of the French secret service, who plotted the extraordinary objective of becoming commander-in-chief of the forces in America in place of Washington, whom he and other French military leaders considered ineffectual, and then, fantastically, the elected leader of America. With an aristocratic Frenchman in charge of the colonies, he believed, the French court could be reconciled to supporting a republican revolution.

De Broglie conspired with Silas Deane, the American envoy to Paris, to persuade the wealthy but naïve Lafayette to buy his own ship and travel to America. Arriving just south of Charleston on 13 June 1778, the young aristocrat made his way across country to Philadelphia. There Congress had learned of the Broglie plot; and Lafayette, who was not a party to it, was able to save his position only by offering to serve without pay.

Washington and Lafayette had dinner together at Philadelphia’s city tavern after the British evacuation of the city, and the forty-five-year-old got on famously with the twenty-year-old – Washington, who had no sons of his own, asking the youth to treat him as ‘a father and friend’. While there was clearly an instant personal bond between the two, it also seems likely that, with France joining the war, Washington saw the advantage in having at his right hand a prominent Frenchman, whom he could hope to dominate because of the age disparity, and who could act as the eyes and ears of France. By the spring of 1778 he was given command of his own division. Lafayette proved a brave but poor military commander at best, but he remained closely in touch with his American ‘revolutionary’ friends and believed himself to be the arbiter of his country’s destinies: indeed, he fancied himself as France’s George Washington.

At this early stage in June, the Third Estate was moderate and timid. Then, on 20 June, the King, under pressure from the strong-willed Queen, locked the Assembly hall before it was due to meet, and the deputies responded by going to a nearby tennis court, where they took an oath to stand fast. But the King still thought he could defuse their power with a highly enlightened series of concessions such as equality of taxation, unlimited liberty and freedom of the press, as well as in effect a sitting parliament. He was proposing nothing less than an English-style constitutional monarchy. The King still felt strong enough to threaten the representatives of the people:

If you abandon me in this great enterprise I will work alone for the welfare of my peoples . . . I will consider myself alone their true representative . . . None of your plans or proceedings can become law without my express approval . . . I command you to separate at once, and to proceed tomorrow morning each to the hall of his own order to renew your deliberations.

They took no notice. The nobility and clergy by now realized that they had to make common cause with the monarchy against more radical threats. Both decided to strike against what was now still a relatively moderate majority in parliament. In early January, the King assembled 18,000 troops from different parts of the country to enforce his claim to authority and dissolve the Estates-General. But they made no immediate move.

On 12 July the Paris mob, largely consisting of shopkeepers and craftsmen, took to the streets for the first time. The first disturbances spread with the building of barricades on the following night. The next day the crowd flocked to the barracks and seized 32,000 muskets. The mob moved into the Bastille prison, a hated symbol of authority even though it housed just three mental cases and four forgers, and was guarded by eighty retired soldiers and thirty Swiss guards. Unwisely the governor of the Bastille ordered his men to open fire on the demonstrators, killing ninety-eight and wounding seventy-three. After a time, the crowd went berserk, invaded the prison and killed six soldiers, as well as, later, the governor, whose head was carried about the city on a pole.

The mob now announced that they were forming a ‘government’ with its own National Guard, asking Lafayette to lead this. He gave the ‘citizen soldiers’ a cockade consisting of the colours of Paris, red and blue, with the colour of the King, white, in the middle. The next day the King appeared before the tennis court assembly to urge calm and then went to Paris, where he was given a cockade which he fastened to his hat. But Lafayette was not in complete control: district assemblies met around Paris and another mob attacked three prominent officials. The new Assembly decided to set up a popular revolutionary tribunal and a committee of investigation to prevent the mob taking the law into its own hands.

Uprisings broke out in towns and the country, as well as peasant riots. Châteaux and private houses were burned in a terrifying outbreak of anarchy which alarmed even the bourgeois leaders of the Revolution, who considered calling in the army, then decided to try and make concessions to the peasants and the mob by, in effect, abolishing privileges. The King arrogantly refused to sign these measures, where-upon it was asserted that ‘the convention needs no royal approval, for it is anterior to the monarchy’.

On 26 August the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was enacted: this had largely been drawn up by Lafayette in consultation with Thomas Jefferson, the American envoy to Paris, who appended a memorandum in his own hand. It bore a marked resemblance to the American Declaration of Independence. The American role in the French Revolution was considerable, spearheaded by Lafayette and Jefferson, who saw the opportunity not just to spread America’s revolutionary republican ideals across the globe but to get back at their joint traditional enemy, Britain. Although a powerful and mainly moderate document, the declaration omitted the American constitution’s careful prescription of checks and balances. This proved controversial, with those advancing a bicameral system, to preserve the powers of the nobility, dubbing those who sought a royal veto, to preserve the powers of the King, ‘Monarchicals’. The latter’s ideas were rejected, and the King in turn hardened his opposition to the new regime.

Versailles itself was a small town whose economy was dominated by the royal family. But it was intense anti-royalist sentiment that
motivated its local National Guard of several thousand; against this were some 400 Gardes de Corps, or lifeguards, of sworn loyalty to the King; and a rival force of grenadiers. At a feast for these men who sought to replace the lifeguards, the King made an unscripted appearance, giving rise to rumours he was plotting a crackdown.

The radical Jacobin tendency and the militant ‘Dames des Balles’ and other groups, initially of women, decided to march on Versailles with the cry of ‘Bread. Bread! To Versailles.’ The National Guard was called up to stop them, but instead fraternized with the mob, its commander Lafayette swept away by the tide of humanity. One of his soldiers remarked: ‘Is it not strange that Lafayette attempts to control the people when it is his role to receive orders from them?’ It took Lafayette some four hours after the departure of the march for Versailles to return to his post at the head of the National Guard.

The mob’s allies in the former Estates-General, now the National Assembly at Versailles, were ecstatic. One of the mob declared of the nobility that ‘the gentlemen wanted more light – they shall have lanterns, they may rely upon it’. He was talking of using the lines holding lanterns to hang aristocrats from the lamp-irons. A famous aristocratic retort by the Abbé Maury, was, ‘My friends, when you have put me in the lantern, will you see more clearly?’

The mob broke into the Assembly, the women occupying the seat of the president and shouting at or cuddling its scandalized members. The leaders were granted a brief audience with the King, which so impressed them that they shrank back at that stage. But others were preparing to strangle members of the Assembly with their garters. During the night the extremists discovered that the few remaining soldiers were not prepared to resist, for fear of starting a bloodbath.

The King’s loyalists begged him to leave: but he was prevailed upon to wait for the arrival of Lafayette and the National Guard. The mob performed a kind of drunken advance on the palace guard, then stayed there for the night, drinking, singing and firing their guns; they caught a horse, roasted it and ate it. Lafayette arrived at last with his orderly National Guard. He saw the King, guaranteed the security of the palace, persuaded the National Assembly to adjourn and then – astoundingly – went to bed.

At around three in the morning a group of extremists broke through an unlocked gate to the vast palace grounds and forced their way into the Queen’s apartments before pushing aside the few guards there and killing one. They forced their way into her bedroom, from which she had escaped through a secret passage. They slashed the bed she had just been occupying with pikes and swords: allegedly she had just been in the arms of a lover, but this seems unlikely at such a trying time. The assailants’ leader, Jourdain (later known as the ‘head-cutter’ or ‘man with a beard’), was a male model from Paris armed with an axe.

At around this time Lafayette was roused from his slumbers and the grenadiers at last cleared the royal courtyard of the rabble. But a much larger mob was outside the palace itself, shouting for the ‘Austrian’ – Marie Antoinette – to appear. This she did with extraordinary courage on the balcony, holding the hands of her two children, who then went inside as the crowd demanded. Some jeered; but now there were shouts of ‘
Vive la Reine
’ from the crowd.

A new cry arose: ‘To Paris.’ This had in fact been the objective of the Jacobin clubs who had inspired the march, and must have been their intention all along. Lafayette’s National Guard, along with the 1,000 or so grenadiers, as well as the few hundred bodyguards, could certainly have resisted this: maybe he feared the National Guard would not have obeyed orders. Displaying his characteristic poor judgement – or opportunism, seeing this as a chance to bring the King under his control, for he certainly did not lack courage – he refused to defend the King and instead ordered the royal family out into that bitterly cold night.

This was the first real turning-point of the Revolution. As an anonymous account written soon afterwards, based on eye-witness description, vividly put it:

The carriages of the royal family were placed in the middle of an immeasurable column, consisting partly of Lafayette’s soldiers, partly of the revolutionary rabble whose march had preceded his, amounting to several thousand men and women of the lowest and most desperate description, intermingling in groups amongst the bands of French guards, and civic soldiers, whose discipline could not enable
them to preserve even a semblance of order. Thus they rushed along, howling their songs of triumph.

The harbingers of the march bore the two bloody heads of the murdered
Gardes de Corps
paraded on pikes, at the head of the column, as the emblems of their prowess and success. The rest of this body, worn down by fatigue, most of them despoiled of their arms, and many without hats, anxious for the fate of the royal family, and harassed with apprehensions for themselves, were dragged like captives in the midst of the mob, while the drunken females around them bore aloft in triumph their arms, their belts, and their hats. These wretches, stained with the blood in which they had bathed themselves, were now singing songs, of which the burthen bore, – ‘We bring you the baker, his wife, and the little apprentice’; as if the presence of the unhappy royal family, with the little power they now possessed, had been in itself a charm against scarcity.

Some of these Amazons rode upon the cannon, which made a formidable part of the procession. Many of them were mounted on the horses of the
Gardes de Corps
, some in masculine fashion, others
en croupe
. All the muskets and pikes which attended this immense cavalcade, were garnished, as if in triumph, with oak boughs, and the women carried long poplar branches in their hands, which gave the column, so grotesquely composed in every respect, the appearance of a moving grove. Scarce a circumstance was omitted which could render this entrance into the capital more insulting to the King’s feelings – more degrading to the royal dignity.

After six hours of dishonour and agony, the unfortunate Louis was brought to the Hotel de Ville, where Bailli, then mayor, complimented him upon the ‘splendid day’, which restored the monarch of France to his capital; assured him that order, peace, and all the gentler virtues, were about to revive in the country under his royal eye, and that the King would henceforth become powerful through the people, the people happy through the King; and ‘what was truest of all’, that as Henry IV had entered Paris by means of reconquering his people, Louis XVI had done so, because his people had reconquered their King. His wounds salved with this lip-comfort, the unhappy and degraded Prince was at length permitted
to retire to the Palace of the Tuileries, which, long uninhabited, and almost unfurnished, yawned upon him like the tomb where alone he at length found repose.

Louis himself remarked: ‘It is wonderful that with such love of liberty on all sides, I am the only person that is deemed totally unworthy of enjoying it.’

This was the real beginning of the Revolution; for with the King virtually a prisoner in Paris it became impossible for him to become the standard around which the country could rally against the revolutionary extremists – as Charles I of England had. It is said that the Duc d’Orleans, the King’s jealous cousin and rival, had in fact suborned this particular mob, and that he himself had planned the Queen’s assassination and his own assumption of power as regent: he was said to have been present and watching the proceedings at Versailles, but had failed to come forward himself. Mirabeau, his supporter until then, was scathing in his denunciation of the Duc’s duplicity, and the Duc was exiled to London.

Lafayette, who detested D’Orleans, was now in such control as there was and guardian of public order. The King merely bowed to the decisions of the Assembly and was surrounded in the Tuileries by 800 men placed there by Lafayette as both his protectors and his gaolers. But meanwhile two men plotted that he should escape and become a rallying point for resistance. One was Lafayette, the other Mirabeau himself. He urged the King to flee to Metz, controlled by a tough old rogue, the Marquis de Bouille, a relative of Lafayette. A first attempt to get the King to safety failed when the National Guard in April 1791 blocked him and refused Lafayette’s orders to let him leave. In June the King tried again, leaving behind him a long attack on the proceedings of the Assembly, such was his confidence of success. He was arrested at Varennes, having failed to rendezvous with the forces under de Bouille, and was conveyed back exhausted and covered in dust.