Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (101 page)

H
IS
M
OST
C
HRISTIAN
M
AJESTY
, Louis XVI, king of France and Navarre, was a gawky, amiable, well-intentioned man whose joys in life came from eating heartily, hunting stags, and tinkering with the inner workings of locks. Surrounded by ministers offering contradictory advice, he had difficulty making decisions. Demands that he choose one way or another threw him into confusion; once he had chosen, he continued to vacillate and sometimes changed his mind. This unfortunate thirty-five-year-old monarch was in his sixteenth year on the throne when, in May 1789, he summoned the Estates-General to meet at Versailles. Louis did not do this because he wished to, or because it was part of the usual practice of French kings. Rather, Louis acted because he had no choice; his government desperately needed to raise money to avoid national bankruptcy.

Outwardly, France still seemed to be at the summit of European culture and power. Its population of twenty-seven million was the largest in Europe. It possessed the richest, most productive agriculture on the continent. It was the center of intellectual thought, and its language
was the lingua franca of literate, educated people everywhere. Since William of Normandy had triumphed at Hastings in 1066, it had been the victor on numberless battlefields. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, the great kings of France—Francis I, Henri IV, Louis XIV—had been preeminent among the monarchs of Europe. But when, in 1715, the Sun King had been succeeded by his great-grandson, Louis XV, and still the endless wars continued, success had become intermittent. In the Seven Years’ War, ending in 1763, England had stripped away most of France’s important colonial possessions in North America and India. In return, by backing the American colonists in their fight for independence, France had taken revenge. The euphoria following the military triumph in America was as great in Paris as in Philadelphia.

But wars cost money and the bills had to be paid. The nation’s finances had been depleted, then ravaged, by war; still, government expenditures continued to mount. The treasury responded by borrowing, and by 1788 interest on the debt absorbed half the government’s spending. Taxes, levied most heavily on the lower class, were crushing, and in the fertile land of France, common people were impoverished. Poor harvests in 1787 and 1788 resulted in grain shortages and rising food prices. Facing financial collapse, the king and the government had no choice but to call a meeting of the Estates-General, France’s long-dormant representative body. By summoning this assembly, the government was admitting that it could raise taxes no further without the consent of the nation.

The Estates-General met at Versailles on May 5, 1789. Three estates—classifications of people—were represented by twelve hundred delegates. The clergy, considered the First Estate, owned 10 percent of the land in France, were exempt from most taxes, and had three hundred delegates. The nobility, the Second Estate, owned 30 percent of the land, enjoyed many tax exemptions, and made up another three hundred delegates. One hundred of these noblemen were liberal-minded, and fifty, under forty years old, were ready, even eager, for change. The commoners of the Third Estate, represented by six hundred delegates, were there to speak for the people who made up 97 percent of the French population. The great majority of these people were agricultural peasants, although the Third Estate also included urban laborers. Bread constituted three-fourths of an ordinary person’s diet and cost one-third to one-half of his or her income. The bourgeoisie,
or middle class—bankers, lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, shopkeepers, and others—were also reckoned among the Third Estate. Plagued by heavy taxes, food shortages, unemployment, poverty, and general restlessness, the Third Estate was anxious, even desperate, for change. Its delegates were aware, however, that they had been summoned not for the purpose of improving the condition of the people they represented but because the government was desperate for money.

Within a few weeks of the first meeting, delegates from the two privileged estates, the clergy and the nobility, succeeded in making the commoners feel their inferior status. On June 20, members of the Third Estate arrived at the usual meeting place to find themselves locked out by armed guards and forced to stand and wait in a heavy rain. Someone remembered the existence of a covered tennis court nearby and it was to this place that the six hundred delegates hurried. Once there, they vented their feelings by declaring themselves to be the true National Assembly and swore “
to God and the country never to be separated until we have written a solid and equitable constitution as our constituents have asked us to.” Forty-seven members of the liberal nobility joined this new National Assembly and swore to what became known as the Tennis Court Oath.

The Third Estate had no permission to declare itself or act as a national assembly, and the king threatened to dissolve the entire Estates-General, by force if necessary. The Count of Mirabeau, a nobleman elected as a commoner who quickly became the leading presence among the delegates of the Third Estate, confronted the king’s messengers. “
Go tell those who have sent you,” he said, “that we are here by the will of the people and that we will not be dispersed except at the point of bayonets.” On June 27, a decree from Louis terminated all meetings of the Estates-General, declaring them “
null, illegal, and unconstitutional.” Riots in cities and uprisings in the countryside were the result. The most famous of these was the storming of the Bastille.

The Bastille, a fourteenth-century fortress with eight round towers and walls five feet thick, had been converted into a state prison to which men who had broken the law or offended the government were spirited away, sometimes never to reappear. By 1789, however, this had changed and the prison had become more a symbol of tyranny than a grim place of incarceration. The Marquis de Sade, a prisoner in the Bastille until a
week before the fortress was stormed, hung family portraits on his walls and kept a wardrobe of fashionable clothing and a library of dozens of volumes. On the day of the attack, the fortress contained only seven prisoners: five forgers and two people who were mentally adrift. Still, because it was considered a royal arsenal and possessed a garrison of 114 soldiers, the government decided to use it as a place to deposit 250 barrels of gunpowder.

On July 14, twenty thousand Parisians, incensed by the royal dismissal of the Estates-General, the presence of a growing number of soldiers in Paris, and the stocking of gunpowder, marched on the Bastille. A few hours later, the fortress had surrendered, and the mob had liberated the seven prisoners and taken possession of the gunpowder. The governor of the fortress was stabbed with knives, swords, and bayonets, his neck was sawed through with a pocket knife, and his head, mounted on a pike, was bobbing at the head of a street parade.

The fall of the Bastille was a political and psychological turning point. The National Assembly wrote a new constitution and voted on August 4 to abolish most of the aristocratic rights and fiscal privileges of the nobility and clergy. On August 26, the assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a charter of liberties whose wording reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment and the language of the American Declaration of Independence.

Louis XVI and his family remained at Versailles. On October 5, a procession of five thousand women (and men disguised as women; it was rightly believed that the king would not order soldiers guarding the palace to fire on women) walked ten miles from Paris, invaded the palace built by the Sun King, and, the following day, forced the royal family to return with them to Paris. The family was installed in the Tuileries Palace in a state of semidetention (afternoon carriage rides in city parks were permitted). They remained there for nine months while the leaders of the National Assembly, most of them intellectuals and lawyers, with a few noblemen, all of whom thought in terms of maintaining order while bringing reform, tried to create a new form of constitutional monarchy. While they worked, and until the spring of 1791—twenty-four months after the summoning of the Estates-General, and twenty-two months after the storming of the Bastille—France was governed by a National Assembly with a monarchist majority led by Mirabeau.

On the night of March 25, 1791, Mirabeau took two dancers from
the opera home with him, slept with them, became violently ill, and, eight days later died. His departure removed the one figure whose political reputation and oratorical powers might have ensured the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. Even without him, on May 3, the National Assembly proclaimed a new constitution, establishing a limited monarchy. The monarch now would be titled King of the French rather than King of France, but France remained a monarchy and bourgeois politicians remained in control.

On June 20, Louis and Marie Antoinette opened the door to personal and political catastrophe. Managing to escape from the Tuileries disguised as servants, the king and queen fled Paris with their children and headed toward the eastern frontier and the Austrian Netherlands. The royal carriage traveled no faster than seven miles an hour because the queen insisted that the whole family remain together in a single large overweight vehicle. Believing that they were out of danger, they stopped for the night at Varennes, only a few miles from the border. There, the awkward figure wearing a bottle-green coat and a lackey’s hat was recognized, apprehended, and, with his family, ignominiously brought back to Paris.

Politically, the failure of the flight to Varennes cut the ground from under the king. It discredited the leaders of the National Assembly, who had been negotiating with Louis to create a new form of monarchy and who now felt themselves betrayed. Many abroad also condemned the king. Until Louis’s capture and return from Varennes, Catherine had still regarded him as a free agent—weak, but free. But after he had been trundled back to Paris like an animal in a cage, any illusion of freedom disappeared. “
I fear that the greatest obstacle to the escape of the king is the king himself,” Catherine said. “Knowing her husband, the queen does not leave him, and she is right, but it complicates the problem.”

The disastrous muddle of the escape attempt spurred talk elsewhere of the need to rescue the monarch and his family. Before the end of June, Marie Antoinette’s brother, the new emperor Leopold II of Austria, appealed to all European powers to assist in the restoration of the French monarchy. Leopold, succeeding his older brother, Joseph II, on the imperial throne, had been emperor for only a year. His appeal was halfhearted, even duplicitous, since at that moment he had no intention
of leading, or even joining, an anti-French military crusade. But Leopold’s concern did precipitate a meeting with King Frederick William of Prussia, at the spa of Pillnitz, in Saxony. The two monarchs were joined by Louis XVI’s arrogant brother the Count of Artois, who arrived uninvited and demanded immediate armed intervention.

The Declaration of Pillnitz, signed on August 27, 1791, stopped short of the demand made by Artois. It restated Leopold’s argument that the fate of the French monarchy was of “common interest” and invited other European monarchs to assist in taking “the most effective means of putting the king of France back on his throne.” No concrete steps were proposed. Leopold was cautious because the empire he had inherited from his brother was in a state of revolt in the Netherlands and dissent elsewhere. At the same time, he could not ignore the fate of his sister and brother-in-law in Paris, who, he realized, could now be in physical danger. On the other hand, Leopold worried that the kind of military action Artois was urging might increase his sister’s peril. Leopold’s final decision was that he could act against France only in concert with other powers, and, in this stipulation, he knew he was safe. Therefore, the Pillnitz Declaration committed Austria to nothing. In fact, its only achievement was to so outrage the French National Assembly that, eight months later, in April 1792, France declared war on Austria. By then, Leopold, who died suddenly in March, had been replaced by his inexperienced twenty-four-year-old son, Francis II.

During the first two years of the French Revolution—from the spring of 1789 to the summer of 1791—information about events in France was freely available in the Russian press. No censorship was imposed on news from France, just as news about the newborn United States, which had just drafted its own republican constitution, was openly presented. The summoning of the Estates-General, the declaration by the Third Estate that it had transformed itself into the National Assembly, the storming of the Bastille, the surrender of noble privileges, the Declaration of the Rights of Man—all this was published in full Russian translation in the
St. Petersburg Gazette
and the
Moscow Gazette
. According to Philippe de Ségur, the fall of the Bastille aroused widespread enthusiasm: “
French, Russians, Danes, Germans, Englishmen, and Dutch … all congratulated and embraced each other in the street.”

When the Third Estate proclaimed itself the National Assembly
and Catherine realized that the peasants and the bourgeoisie had been joined by a group of noblemen willing to give up their own political and social privileges, she was astonished. “
I cannot believe in the superior talents of cobblers and shoemakers for government and legislation,” she wrote to Grimm. As the weeks went by, astonishment turned to alarm. “It’s a veritable anarchy,” she exclaimed in September 1789. “
They are capable of hanging their king from a lamppost!” She was especially concerned about Marie Antoinette. “
Above all, I hope that the situation of the queen will match my lively interest in her. Great courage triumphs over great perils. I love her as the dear sister of my best friend, Joseph II, and I admire her courage.… She may be sure that if I can ever be of use to her, I shall do my duty.” But as long as Russia was fighting wars on two fronts—against Turkey in the south and Sweden in the Baltic—she could not do her “duty,” however she might interpret it.