When the King Took Flight (27 page)

In most instances, the repression practiced by local leaders and
guardsmen was pursued on a case-by-case basis, targeting specific
"suspect" individuals. But in certain instances the authorities, fearful of real plots or succumbing to popular pressures, gave orders to
search or arrest without trial whole categories of persons. Here the
status of suspect arose not from any act that a particular man or
woman was thought to have committed, but from the fact of belonging to a specific social or political group. Such reasoning was
probably widespread among elements of the common people. In
Varennes, at the height of the invasion panic, a crowd of peasants
and guardsmen fell upon one of the cavalry commanders who had
been attempting to cooperate with the patriots. "He's an officer!
He's a noble! He must be a traitor!" they shouted, with a lapidary
logic, reducing guilt to the fact of wearing an officer's uniform.63

More significant were the actions of public officials who classified
suspects in this manner. The most obvious targets for such collective indictments were the clergymen who had refused the oath of allegiance. In those regions struggling with large numbers of refractories, local patriots were immensely impatient with the National Assembly's decrees on "freedom of religion" and toleration
for refractories who stayed out of trouble. Was not the very refusal
to take an oath an affront to the constitution and a threat to the nation? Liberals might push "freedom of opinion"-as citizens of one
small town argued-but "dear God, what kind of opinion is fanaticism, which can only offer a vision of carnage, scorched villages,
and a devastated kingdom!" In some areas the repression of refractories was sweeping indeed, unlike anything previously pursued in
the Revolution. As soon as they heard news of the king's flight, officials in the city of Nantes ordered the immediate deportation of all
refractories in the region and the arrest of any priest suspected of
counterrevolutionary activities. Some district leaders in Normandy
and Brittany did much the same, arguing that such clergymen were
threatening a return to the Wars of Religion and that all refractories, "without exception, are enemies of the state."64 Within a
short time similar measures were taken, illegally arresting or deporting hundreds of nonjuring priests, in a total of at least nine departments throughout the country.65

A second target of blanket repression was the nobility. In the departments of Cher and Indre, in the center of the kingdom, refractories were relatively rare and not generally perceived as a danger,
but the news of Varennes raised fears that aristocrats in the region
were organizing counterrevolutionary aggression. Several districts
sent out guardsmen systematically to disarm every chateau. The
town of Bourges went even further, ordering all resident nobles to
remain in town and guarding the city gates to ensure that none
slipped out, so as "to prevent joint action by all those who openly
profess principles contrary to the general will." For the most part
such policies were pursued peacefully, with guardsmen specifically
instructed to act "in a reasonable and polite manner, without violence.""

Nowhere, however, was the collective repression of nobles more
violent than in the province of Brittany. Here officials found them selves plagued not only with one of the highest proportions of
refractory clergymen in the country, but with long-standing tensions between nobles and commoners that had been exacerbated by
provincial politics on the eve of the Revolution. Following the
king's flight, and encouraged by local administrators, Breton national guardsmen from many towns launched a veritable terror in
the countryside, harassing suspect nobles and clergy, searching for
arms, and occasionally destroying chateaus. In one department authorities gave free rein to pursue all members of the two suspect
groups: "Our enemies," they wrote, "are making a final push. Hatred and fanaticism will be stirring up trouble as never before, and
there is no limit to the measures we should take in order to thwart
their efforts." Following these orders, guardsmen began breaking
into every manor house to "remove from the enemies of the constitution the means they might use to overthrow the state." Leaders in
a neighboring department went even further and ordered the seizure of the property of all nobles who had already emigrated. Since
the National Assembly's June 21 decree had forbidden the carrying
of money or precious metals across frontiers, it seemed justifiable to
impound the profits of absentee nobles, profits that might otherwise
be sent abroad in support of counterrevolutionary schemes against
the nation.67

With administrators encouraging repression and tensions raised
to explosive levels by the invasion panic, Brittany would be the
scene of several especially violent incidents. In the region east of
Rennes, the news of Varennes sent some three to four thousand citizen militiamen into the villages looking for refractories. Frustrated
at not finding a particular nobleman who had supported the dissident clergy, the guardsmen burned down his castle, and soon several other chateaus in the area went up in flames. With word of the
king's flight, another detachment of a hundred guardsmen was dispatched to the chateau of Le Preclos near Vannes, where a group of
suspicious nobles were said to have gathered. Arriving at four in the
morning and awakening the residents with drums and musket fire,
the patriot militia carried away eighteen men in carts, their hands tied behind their backs, to be interred in a local citadel as "prisoners
of war." Leaders in La Roche-Derrien, near Brittany's northern
coast, had also set out to disarm all the "former privileged" in their
region. Apparently no one resisted until guardsmen arrived at the
chateau of Tralong, where the irascible count du Roumain greeted
them with shots from a seventeenth-century blunderbuss and a
"Breton Billy," an antiquated device that fired stones. After several
citizens had been wounded and another unit of guardsmen had been
called in, the patriots stormed the castle, killing du Roumain in the
process."

As the crisis of June and July abated and as the central government received more reports from the provinces, the National Assembly began criticizing the more flagrant examples of collective
repression. Department officials in Quimper, perhaps under pressure from Paris, took the district of Landerneau to task for its massive arrests of nobles and refractories, people "whose only crime
was to have been suspected of anticonstitutional opinions, but who
had never done anything to disrupt public order." Not only were
such activities against the law and the rights of man; they could further inflame the situation: "To incite trouble in this way, to frighten
individuals and to threaten their property, is all the more reprehensible in that it compromises liberty and the principles of the constitution." But the district of Landerneau forcefully defended its actions. The circumstances of the crisis and the fundamental goal of
saving the Revolution justified all the measures they had taken.
"Blood would soon have been spilled," they declared. "We had only
one choice: to seize our enemies before they could commit crime
and murder." Refractories and nobles were simply too dangerous to
be trusted, even those-perhaps especially those-who hid behind
"the hypocritical mask of patriotism." In the end, Landerneau officials remained unrepentant: "We have served both humanity and
the constitution, in separating out those who would cause trouble
and disorder.... We strongly denounce them and we will not cease
pursuing them until the sacred fire, which we hold in our breast, has
purified every corner of the French nation."69

The debate between Landerneau and Quimper was emblematic
of the quandaries encountered by French people everywhere in the
face of the crisis of the king's flight. Even in the twentieth century,
in societies where liberal democratic culture is deeply rooted, periods of war and the threat of terrorism have created legal dilemmas
over demands for "preventive repression." For men and women
who had lived most of their lives under authoritarian rule and who
were only just learning the meaning of equal justice and civil rights,
the events of June 1791 posed problems that were particularly perplexing. Revolutionaries found themselves forced to negotiate a delicate balance between principle and expediency, between the rule of
law and the needs of "public safety," between individual liberty and
community defense, between preserving the rights of man and preserving the state. In their groping efforts to confront these dilemmas, many citizens in the provinces had wandered into the byways
of repressive actions-guilt by association, guilt by unproved suspicion, lengthy imprisonment without due process-that were clear
harbingers of the tactics of the Terror.

THROUGHOUT THE THREE WEEKS following the king's flight and
return, the citizens of Paris had continually referred to opinion in
the provinces. For the Cordeliers Club, a nationwide referendum
was essential before any decision could be made on the fate of the
king, and the members were hopeful that the majority of the country would opt for a republic. Moderates, on the other hand, were
convinced that the French, both inside and outside the capital, overwhelmingly backed the monarchy. In the meantime, the National
Assembly had put off its decision on the question, in part to wait for
reactions from the hinterlands, reactions that were aggressively solicited by the deputies in letters addressed to their constituencies.' In
short, everyone realized that Paris was not France and that the
views on the king of the great majority of citizens were still unknown. Everyone, in a sense, was waiting for the French to speak.

And eventually the French would speak. Beneath all the sound
and fury of the nationwide mobilization-the marshaling of the
national guard, the shoring up of border defenses, the preventive
repression-people everywhere had begun to ponder the fate of the
one individual whose actions had launched the whole episode. How
were they to explain Louis' sudden disappearance? What were the
implications for the new constitution that the National Assembly
was struggling to complete? What was the place, was there a place for a monarch-this or any monarch-in the brave new world that
the Revolutionaries hoped to construct?

Such questions were particularly wrenching and unsettling in that
people throughout the country, no less than in Paris, had long
linked themselves to their king through exceptionally strong bonds
of emotion and tradition. Of course, individual kings had never
been free of reproach, and the present monarch's two predecessors,
Louis XIV and Louis XV, had often been the subject of caustic criticisms from both intellectuals and the popular classes. Yet the myth
of the monarchy-as opposed to the reputation of individual monarchs-persisted with extraordinary vigor. It was built on a whole
array of classical and historical traditions and of secular legends,
as well as on the images of grandeur cultivated by seventeenthand eighteenth-century monarchs through their military prowess
and the splendor of their palaces and court life. French children and
adults alike were continually exposed to a folklore of popular stories in which the existence of a monarchy and the ideal of the
good king-as opposed to the bad king or the weak king poorly
advised-remained as undoubted assumptions. Many among the
lower classes maintained to the end of the Old Regime their belief
in the "king's touch," his magical powers to cure the common skin
disease scrofula. And the virtues of the first Bourbon monarch,
Henry IV-his strength, his good sense, his love for his peoplewere still mentioned at the beginning of the Revolution when people described the ideal sovereign. Indeed, from 1788 to 1791 Louis
XVI was himself commonly compared to "good king Henry."2

To be sure, the royal image had evolved somewhat in the decades
before 1789. Over the centuries all kinds of descriptive phrases had
been used to extol the king's grandeur: the king as great warrior, as
chief magistrate, as highest feudal lord. But by the eve of the Revolution the portrayal of the monarch as "father of the people"-a
designation mentioned at least since the sixteenth century-had in creasingly come to predominate. There can be no doubt that the
image was consciously encouraged by Louis XVI himself. He had
been enormously proud of his own paternal success, a success
achieved only after a long period of sexual failure and psychological turmoil, and he took great personal interest in the upbringing of
his children. He had continually drawn on the paternal metaphor in
his statements to the National Assembly. He had done much the
same in Varennes, when he revealed his identity to his "faithful children" in Monsieur Sauce's apartment. Of course, the figure of the
father, like the image of the king, had complex and sometimes
ambiguous meanings. It could imply the paterfamilias, with his
near-absolute authority in law and custom over wife and children, a
figure patterned to some extent on the religious conception of an
all-powerful God the Father. But as the image came to be embraced
in the late eighteenth century by large elements of the educated
population, the paternal king was perhaps linked above all to the literary fashion of the family melodrama. In plays and novels of the
period there was endless praise for the "good father," a father who
was not authoritarian but conciliatory, even egalitarian with his wife
and children, treating all members of his family almost as friends
and companions.'