When the King Took Flight (3 page)

Such a tale might well have met with disbelief. But these were
very special times, and Drouet's intensity and self-assurance carried
conviction and stirred the men to action. The Le Blanc brothers
rushed to awaken several other members of the national guard and
a couple of town councilmen who lived nearby and then went home
to fetch their muskets. At the same time Drouet and Guillaume and
some of the others hurried down to the river and blocked the bridge
with a wagon loaded with furniture.

The first council member to arrive on the scene was jeanBaptiste Sauce, the town manager, or procureur, who had taken
over the day-to-day operations of the municipal government while
mayor George was away in Paris. A grocer and candlemaker by
profession, he was thirty-six years old, tall, somewhat stoopshouldered, and balding. Although he had only a limited education
and wrote awkwardly with an improvised phonetic spelling, he
was a dedicated patriot and carried himself with a quiet distinction that had won the respect of the townspeople. Flabbergasted by
Le Blanc's wake-up call, he nevertheless dressed as best he could,
grabbed a lantern, and sent his two sons to rouse the rest of the
town with the traditional cry of "fire, fire!" By about twenty minutes past eleven Sauce, George, Ponsin, the Le Blanc brothers, and
the two men from Sainte-Menehould had assembled with perhaps a
half-dozen others in the street near the inn. Just then the two carriages described by Drouet, accompanied by two riders on horseback, clattered under the archway.

While some of the guardsmen held torches, others raised their
muskets and forced the drivers to stop and get down. Sauce approached the first carriage, a two-horse cabriolet, and found in it
two startled and trembling women who told him that their identity
papers were being carried by those traveling behind them. The grocer then moved to the second, much larger carriage, pulled by six
horses and heaped high with baggage. He held his lantern to the
window and cautiously peered in. The carriage seemed to contain
six people. There were two children-he could not tell at first if
they were boys or girls; three women in middle-class dress, one
about twenty and rather pretty, and two others somewhat older and
distinguished in bearing; and a heavyset man with a large nose and a
double chin, dressed in the clothes of a merchant or a legal agent.
Sauce had never before laid eyes on the king, but he felt there might
be a resemblance to the royal portraits he had seen.

Despite their protests, he took the travelers' passport into the
inn for a closer look. As several city officials gathered around, he
read the papers of a Russian baroness, Madame de Korff, and her
suite, bound for Frankfurt, signed by the foreign minister and by "Louis," the king himself. Although the document was somewhat
vague about the number of people traveling, and although Varennes
hardly seemed on the most direct road from Paris to Germany, the
papers appeared to be in order, and Sauce and his colleagues were
inclined to let them pass. But Drouet, who had already invested a
great deal of his time and his honor, was adamant. He knew he had
recognized the king. He had also seen a noble cavalry captain in
Sainte-Menehould salute the carriage and take orders as though he
were obeying a commanding officer. If the officials were to let the
royal family escape to foreign territory, they would be accomplices
to treason. In addition, Drouet asserted, the passport was not valid,
since it had not been cosigned by the president of the National Assembly. In fact the president's signature was not legally required,
but no one knew this for certain, and in the end the town fathers decided to play for time.

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

Jean-Baptiste Drouet.

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

Jean-Baptiste Sauce.

The occupants of the carriage were told that it was too late for
their documents to be properly examined, that in any case the road
ahead was in poor condition and dangerous at night, and that it was
better to wait for daylight. Despite their angry objections, the party
of eight travelers and three other men in yellow uniforms who accompanied them were forced to descend and were offered hospitality in the grocer's home. They were led several paces down the cobblestone street from the inn to Sauce's store and then crowded up a
wooden stairway and into his small two-room apartment. At first
the group studiously stuck to their story. One of the older women
announced herself to be the baroness de Korff, insisting that they
were in a great hurry and must be allowed to leave for Germany.
But still intrigued by the man's resemblance to the king, Sauce remembered that a local judge, Jacques Destez, had married a woman
from Versailles and that he had seen the royal family on several occasions. He went up the street to the magistrate's house, woke him,
and led him back to his home. Destez had scarcely entered the upstairs quarters when he fell on one knee, bowing and trembling with
emotion. "Ah! Your Highness!" he said.

It was the stuff of fairy tales: the king of France, Louis XVI, here in their town, in the storekeeper's bedroom. There, too, were
the queen, Marie-Antoinette, their twelve-year-old daughter and
five-year-old son-the dauphin, heir to the throne-the king's sister, Elizabeth, and the children's aristocratic governess, Madame de
Tourzel. Everyone stood in wonder. Sauce's elderly mother came in
soon afterward and fell to her knees sobbing, never having imagined that she might one day see the king and the little crown prince.
Realizing that his incognito was broken, Louis XVI now spoke to
them. "Yes, I am your king," he said. "I have come to live among
you, my faithful children, whom I will never abandon."3 And then
he did a remarkable thing. He took the members of the municipal
council in his arms, one by one, and embraced them. And he appealed to them and told them his story. He had been forced to flee
his palace in Paris. A few fanatical revolutionaries, the Jacobins,
had taken over the city. Worse, these agitators had repeatedly put
the life of his whole family in danger. In fact, he now told them, he
had no intention of fleeing to Germany, but only of traveling to the
citadel of Montmedy near the frontier. There, far from the mobs of
Paris, he could retake control of his kingdom and end the chaos and
anarchy that, he said, were increasingly rampant. "After having
been forced to live in the capital in the midst of daggers and bayonets, I have journeyed into the country to seek the same freedom
and tranquility which you yourselves enjoy. If I remain in Paris,
both I and my family will die."' The townspeople must prepare his
horses and allow him to complete his journey.

And overcome by the emotion of the moment, awed and overwhelmed by the religious mystique of the monarchy and the aura
of the king there in their presence, the town leaders agreed to help.
If necessary, they said, they would accompany him themselves to
Montmedy. As soon as dawn came, they would organize members
of their own national guard and escort him. Their heads still swimming, they returned to the town hall to make arrangements. How
could they not obey a command from Louis XVI himself, from the
successor of a line who had ruled France for more than eight hundred years?

Yet after they had left the presence of the king, after they had
talked to others and had come to realize the implications of the situation in which they found themselves, they began to have second
thoughts.

For the people of Varennes were no longer the same as they had
been just two years earlier. Over the previous months, the town
had been swept up in an extraordinary series of developments that
had touched every corner of the kingdom and irrevocably changed
the way in which the inhabitants viewed themselves and their place
in the world. In March 1789, following a complex conjunction of
events over which they had no influence whatsoever, all townsmen
over twenty-four years of age who paid any taxes-the overwhelming majority-had been invited to participate in a national election, a process that would designate deputies to the representative
assembly of the Estates General, which had not met for 175 years.'
Varennes had been the site of both a municipal election and a secondary regional election leading to the choice of their own mayor, a
former lawyer, first as an alternate deputy and then as a deputy in
full standing. Perhaps equally important, the electoral assemblies in
March had been asked to draw up statements of grievances that the
citizens wished to bring before the king. Although the grievance list
of the people of Varennes has been lost, it probably was not unlike
the one preserved for the small town of Montfaucon, only six miles
away.6 As in communities all over France, the citizens began with a
passage of extravagant praise for King Louis, who had convoked
the elections. Then, scattered among demands for changes in a miscellany of local institutions, they asked that many burdensome taxes
be lowered or suppressed; that all citizens, including nobles and
clergymen, pay taxes in equal proportion to their revenues; that administrative authority be decentralized and shared with local provincial assemblies; and that more money be spent for the education
of children. But whatever the specific demands made, the very act by which the citizens in Varennes and throughout the kingdom had
systematically reflected on their lives and debated the institutions
and practices that might best be changed or improved or abolished
altogether had been a revolutionary event in itself. It had enormously raised expectations for a general transformation of a whole
range of political, economic, social, and ecclesiastical institutions.

In the following weeks and months, the people of Varennes had
watched in amazement as the Estates General they had helped to
elect converted itself into a National "Constituent" Assembly. The
new Assembly not only set to work drawing up France's first constitution, but engineered a wholesale transformation of French political and social structures that went far beyond anything most of
them had requested in their grievance lists. At the beginning of August 1789, the news of the fall of the Bastille in Paris and the victory over an apparent plot to overthrow the Revolution had led to
a great townwide celebration.' There were cannon salvos, festive
bonfires, a public ball in the town square, even a distribution of
bread to the poor-as might have occurred during a major religious
festival. There was also a rare "illumination" of the town, in which
every household was expected to place candles or lanterns in its
windows at night. For a society unaccustomed to public lighting,
such a display of concentrated candlepower would have made for a
stunning spectacle indeed.

But it was not only a question of cheering from afar. Soon the
citizens of Varennes had been asked to elect their own municipal
and regional governments and to participate directly in the day-today implementation of the new laws. They entered into regular
communication with the National Assembly, seeking advice and information, corresponding with their deputies, sending off a "lob-
biest," and sometimes even offering their own suggestions for the
drafting of the constitution. After centuries of domination by others-by nobles and churchmen and royal administrators in everything but their most immediate family and local concerns, they had
now been invited, indeed compelled, to participate in their own
government, their own destiny. Such a process had imparted an ex hilarating sentiment of involvement and local initiative. It had also
instilled a new feeling of national identity, French identity, replacing the narrow world of the Aire Valley and the Argonne Forest,
which had previously served as the inhabitants' principal points
of reference. The great movement of the Enlightenment, the surge
of intellectual emancipation and reevaluation that had blossomed
among the cultural elites of the major cities of eighteenth-century
Europe, had been very distant indeed for the people of Varennes.
Perhaps it was only with the institutional transformations of the
Revolution itself that Immanuel Kant's "motto of the Enlightenment," sapere aude-dare to know and to understand for oneselfcame to have any real meaning for the great mass of small townspeople and villagers of provincial France. It is only in the light of
this accrued sense of self-confidence and of identity with the nation
as a whole that we can understand the actions of men like Drouet
and Sauce and the various municipal leaders throughout the region
during the crisis of June 21-22.

But two other institutional creations also played an important
role in forming the Revolutionary psychology of the people of
Varennes in the summer of 1791. In August 1789, confronted by the
threat of anarchy and of possible counterrevolution after the collapse of the Old Regime, the town had formed its first citizens' militia.' Two companies of a local "national guard" were formed, the
"chasseurs" and the "grenadiers," each with its distinctive uniforms, flags, and drummers, commanded by officers elected by the
members themselves. One can scarcely exaggerate the feelings of
pride with which the men of Varennes, some three hundred strong,
aged sixteen to fifty, practiced marching through the streets and
around the town square, accompanied by an improvised corps of
local musicians. At first they carried only a few real weapons, hunting muskets or antique guns preserved by their families. But decked
out in their new uniforms, the bright green of the chasseurs and the
royal blue and white of the grenadiers, they felt an extraordinary
sense of purpose and importance.' The status of uniformed officer,
once the near-exclusive privilege of the nobility, was now within the reach of anyone-even the innkeeper Jean Le Blanc or the lawyer's son Justin George. Indeed, another of the officers leading
the guardsmen of Varennes on June 21, the young Etienne Radet,
would make a rapid wartime transition to the regular military, eventually emerging as a general in Napoleon's army.