When the King Took Flight (17 page)

It was late on the evening of June 22 when Parisians learned that
the missing monarch would indeed be returned to the "premises."
At about half past ten the master barber Mangin, dispatched from
Varennes almost twenty-four hours earlier, finally arrived in Paris.
He shouted as he rode through the streets, "The king is taken! The
king has been stopped!" Covered with dust and obviously exhausted
after his long ride, he presented the National Assembly with a written report and breathlessly delivered a somewhat garbled and inaccurate version of the events in his hometown. The account was further transformed by those Parisians who had followed him into the
Assembly and who then rushed out to relate the story to their
friends. But the essence of the capture was soon understood, and
the news spread rapidly throughout the city. Most people had already gone to bed, but they were roused by the noise and rushed to
their windows or into the streets, anxiously asking for more details,
and musing throughout much of the night on the possible ramifica tions of this unexpected turn of events. They had all assumed that
by now the royal family must have escaped to a foreign country and
that war might soon be declared. The capture in a small town in
Lorraine seemed all but miraculous, bringing a new sense of exhilaration, self-confidence, and power. Once again it seemed that fate,
perhaps God himself, was on the side of the Revolution.34

As chance would have it, the next day was Corpus Christi, a celebration in honor of the sacrament of the Eucharist and one of the
great feast days in the Catholic liturgical year. Plans had been in the
works for weeks-as they were each year at this time-to carry the
Sacred Host around each of the city's fifty-two parishes, through
streets adorned with colorful tapestries, flowers, and other decorations. Religious hymns were to be sung; processions of the national
guard would march behind the local clergy, followed in turn by the
religious confraternities of various worker groups with their flags
and banners. In the evening there would be bonfires and fireworks
and a veritable carnival atmosphere.35

But now the ceremony was transformed into a citywide celebration of the capture of the king. The most grandiose of all the processions was the one that encircled the parish church of Saint-
Germain-l'Auxerrois, the Gothic structure just east of the Louvre
and the official parish of the Tuileries palace. The march had originally been conceived to include the king and the royal family, as
well as a large contingent from the National Assembly and hundreds of the elite national guard, led by Lafayette himself. But with
the king absent, and with the news of his capture, the traditional religious music was replaced in large measure by an array of patriotic
songs. Observers were impressed, above all, by the repeated renditions of the vigorous and optimistic popular song that had swept
through the city: "Ah, ca ira! (;a ira! (;a ira!" (It'll all work out! It'll
all be okay!). The patriot-priest Thomas Lindet, who was present
and heard the song for the first time, congratulated the unknown
composer "for helping to excite the courage of the French and rekindle their natural cheerfulness." Nor did anyone miss the symbolism in the fact that it was the deputies of the National Assembly who had taken the place in the procession of the missing king-still
riding in his carriage somewhere in Champagne on the return route
to Paris. One newspaper noted that the Assembly's appearance
"had something triumphal about it. Vigorous applause and cries of
happiness were mixed with the music of the national guard."36

Whether by plan or through improvisation, many of the guardsmen who had marched in the procession followed the deputies back
to their meeting hall and asked to be allowed to take the same oath
of allegiance to the constitution that the Assembly had administered
one day earlier to all deputies who were military men. After a break
for dinner, other guards from throughout the city converged on the
hall, clamoring to swear an identical oath. The event was perhaps
partly staged by Lafayette, who was anxious to reclaim the good
opinion of the patriots after his failure to prevent the king's flight.37
But the general did not plan the remarkable sequel. As though reviving their processions of earlier in the day-and transforming a
religious act into a political one-common citizens from all over
Paris marched to the Assembly hall through the gathering dusk, arriving by neighborhood or worker confraternity, asking that they,
too, be permitted to take the oath. Musicians took up seats in the
largely deserted benches on the right side of the hall, where the
conservative and aristocratic deputies sat in theory, but were usually
absent. Once again the band took up the stanzas of "(~a ira!" and a
variety of other patriotic songs. Column after column of citizens
passed through the candlelit hall, in one door and out another, joining in the songs and raising their hands to shout "I so swear!" as
they passed in front of the Assembly's president. Still in a festive
mood, they arrived in an extraordinary mixture of clothing styles
and colors. There were guardsmen in bright blue or green and
white uniforms, and men in a diversity of more sober middle-class
dress with knee breeches, buckled shoes, and three-cornered hats.
But there were also large numbers of common people, women with
aprons and bonnets, men in the long workingman's trousers-the
"sans-culottes" (without knee breeches), as they were now coming
to be called. Marching through the hall, six abreast, were butchers and colliers and fishwives, bakers with loaves of bread on the end
of pikes, and stocky porters with their large round hats from the
central market: men and women of every age and profession, some
of the women holding up their babies as they shouted out their
oaths, as though the next generation was also to be included in this
common allegiance to the nation. They marched by in rapid order
for at least two hours. Guittard estimated upward of 15,000; others
thought it was more like 5o,ooo. The popular eastern suburbs of
Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel were particularly well represented.
Marie-Jeanne Roland, the thirty-seven-year-old wife of a provincial
official and herself a passionate radical Revolutionary, claimed that
virtually the entire district of Saint-Antoine had arrived in a column
stretching back across town to the neighborhood itself, some two
miles away.38

After the long hours of uncertainty and fear, this colorful evening festival marked a release of tension and seemed to reinforce a
new sense of unity and self-confidence. Mobilized in part, no doubt,
by the fraternal societies and the more radical sections, the common
people present were also armed with a rough sort of political message. Some carried banners with the words "Live free or die." Others added new verses to "(;a ira," sending both the aristocrats and
the king to the devil. Although in general their allegiance was directed toward the National Assembly, they also made it clear that
they did not intend to be subservient to the Assembly's decisions if
those decisions were not to their liking. "Long live the good deputies!" some of them called out, "but let the others watch out!"39 And
though their mood was generally joyous, the people were also well
armed with an incredible assortment of weapons, from sickles to
pitchforks, from clubs to pikes. Many of the pikes were covered
with bright red "liberty caps"-now the hat of choice among the
patriotic workingpeople. But underneath the caps were razor-sharp
spikes and hooks, originally conceived for slicing up cavalry horses
but more recently used to carry the severed heads of the victims of
popular violence. Some of the pikes had almost certainly been
seized illegally from the municipal armories during the last two days."0 It was the first time such weapons had been seen in the Assembly since the harrowing October Days of 1789. In a symbolic
sense, then, this extraordinary nighttime procession marked a major
moment in the emergence of the sans-culottes as a self-conscious,
well-organized political force. It was a force that the National Assembly and the whole of France would soon have to reckon with.

For well over a thousand years the Parisians had always had a king.
When one died, so the theory went, another one, his closest male
heir, immediately assumed the royal powers-"The king is dead;
long live the king!"-even if the monarch in question was only a
child and his powers were exercised by a regent. But now, for a
great many Parisians, the myth of the kingship had been shattered.
Once Louis had been brought back from Varennes, led through the
streets of Paris, and reinstalled in the Tuileries, the great question in
everyone's mind was what should become of the monarch and the
monarchy. The bookseller Nicolas Ruault sized up the situation in a
letter to his brother: "We have to decide what we will do with this
king, who is now a king in name alone. The question is delicate and
awkward in the extreme."41 Everyone in Paris began mulling over
the situation and proposing solutions. Louis should be maintained
as king, but only as a figurehead; he should be deprived of all power
until the constitution was completed and then offered the throne,
to take it or to leave it; he should be exiled from Paris or from
the country; he should be imprisoned and tried for treason; he
should be deposed, and his power should pass to the little dauphin, who would be carefully educated in the ideals of the Revolution. But from the very first day of the king's flight, and in the midst
of the confusion, some Parisians went even further. They asked
themselves if the monarchy itself was truly inevitable, if it was not
time for the French to live independently in a republic without a
king.

To be sure, this was not the first time the word republic had been mentioned in Paris. Almost a year earlier Louis Lavicomterie, a future member of the Convention, had published an essay called "Of
People and Kings," which openly advocated a government without
a monarch. Louise Keralio, the novelist and historian turned radical
publisher, quickly picked up the idea in her newspaper the Mercure
nationale, an idea that her husband, Francois Robert, further elaborated in a small booklet at the end of the year. By the spring of 1791
the concept of republicanism had become almost fashionable in certain radical intellectual circles. Yet there was always something
speculative and academic about such discussions. The principal preoccupation of the radicals continued to be the expansion of voting
rights to all men, regardless of income. And the idea of a French
government without a king had virtually no popular support. The
young duke de Chartres-the future Louis-Philippe, "king of the
French" in 1830-described the reactions of a patriotic audience to
a performance of Voltaire's Brutus. When an actor pronounced the
line "Oh, to be free and without a king," only a few people applauded, while the great majority began shouting, "Long live the
king!" followed by the "triple refrain" of "Long live the nation, the
law, and the king!"42

Yet the flight to Varennes brought a dramatic change in attitude
for many Parisians. Within hours after the news had broken a popular onslaught against symbols of royalty began throughout the city.
Anything smacking of kings or kingship was removed, pulled down,
covered over, or defaced. Establishments with names suggesting
royalty in any form-like the Queen's Hotel or the Crowned Ox
Restaurant-found their signs removed and destroyed. Coats of
arms of the Bourbon family on public buildings or notary offices
were blacked out with a mixture of soot and oil. Soldiers and
guardsmen were urged to remove the royal fleur-de-lis insignia
from their uniforms; busts of kings were pulled over, and larger
royal statues, too massive to be moved, were covered in black cloth;
even streets like Rue du Roi de Siam (the King of Siam) were renamed with a more patriotic designation."3 Marie-Jeanne Roland
was amazed and delighted by the extraordinary rapidity with which the new idea seemed to take hold in the popular quarters of the city.
"The masses have a healthy and correct understanding," she wrote
on June 22. "The word `republic' is now being uttered almost everywhere.""

[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Parisians Covering Symbols of Royalty. In the days after the king's flight, people cover in black the word royal on the lottery office and the crown on the
Golden Crown inn, and remove fleur-de-lis shields from a notary's office.

In addition to the spontaneous attacks by common people on the
symbols of monarchy, a significant number of Parisian intellectuals,
political figures, and radical newspaper editors openly declared for a
republic. Within days, several of the most advanced journalists had
come out in support of the idea. Brissot was particularly emphatic
as he inveighed against Louis XVI, who "has destroyed his crown
with his own hands. One can never convert a despot to the cause of
liberty." The writer and founder of the populist Society of the
Friends of Truth, Nicolas de Bonneville, began militating for a republic. With his friends, the celebrated mathematician and philosopher the marquis de Condorcet and the Anglo-American liberal
Thomas Paine, he launched a newspaper dedicated to the republican ideal. "It is only with the event of June 21," as the abbe Sieyes
wrote to Paine, "that we have suddenly seen the emergence of a republican party."as

From the beginning, the most effective and dynamic leadership
for such a party came from the Cordeliers Club, whose membership
included many of the journalists who would most vigorously adopt
the new position. On the very day of the king's flight, the club resolved to call into question the whole idea of a constitutional monarchy as it had been elaborated by the National Assembly over the
two previous years. The members seem to have adopted a twopronged strategy. On the one hand, they urged the deputies to
redraft the constitution as a republic. But on the other hand, aware
that the majority of French citizens might well oppose such a measure until they were properly informed and educated, the members
supported a national referendum to elicit a general debate on the issue. "Legislators," they wrote, in a formal petition addressed to the
Assembly, "you can no longer hope to inspire the people with the
least degree of confidence in a state functionary who is called a
`king.' On the basis of this fact, we beg you, in the name of the fa therland, either immediately to declare that France shall no longer
be a monarchy, but a republic; or, at the very least, to wait until all
the departments and all the primary assemblies have announced
their will on this critical question."46 Thereafter the club became a
whirlwind of activity and energy, promoting and explaining its
idea. Members had posters printed and affixed them to walls at
street corners throughout the city. They urged all the Parisian fraternal societies with which they were so closely linked to coordinate
their efforts and to debate and adopt the same position. In addition,
they organized a citywide march of adherents to present their petition to the National Assembly."