Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (19 page)

Manon had backed war from the start–like Brissot she believed that it would cement the revolution and bring about the king’s final demise–but she was anxious about the rift between Robespierre, whom she respected, and her friends. She knew that the resolution she desired could only come about through unity. As his political relations with Brissot and Roland were breaking down towards the end of March that year, Manon wrote to Robespierre, asking him to visit her and assuring him of her unalterable admiration for him. ‘I hope only to be able to make some contribution to the common weal with the help of enlightened, devoted and wise patriots. You are for me at the head of this class.’

She wrote again a month later, five days after the declaration of war, repeating her request that he come to see her because she believed him ‘an ardent lover of liberty, entirely devoted to the public good’, and assuring him that she had nothing to do with ‘those whom you regard as your mortal enemies’. Her appeals came to nothing. Robespierre was not interested in dealing with a woman–if anything,
Manon’s interference would only have confirmed his dislike of Roland, Brissot and their friends–and he already recognized that he must take command of his political destiny.

The early stages of the war did not go well. At the beginning of May, the Assembly was in constant emergency session as unhappy news kept rolling in from the front. Fears of invasion were intense. Arms were distributed among the Parisian
sections
(wards) so that sans-culotte patriots could defend themselves. On 29 May the king agreed that his personal bodyguard, a privilege granted to him as a safeguard of his constitutional role, be disbanded, amid worries that it would rise to join an invading Austrian force.

Louis agreed to relinquish his bodyguard because his attention was focused elsewhere; he was determined not to allow two other proposals through the National Assembly. He used his hard-won veto once to reject a decree that would force into exile refractory priests, and a second time to prevent an armed camp of twenty thousand provincial soldiers, or
fédérés
, being established just outside Paris. Manon Roland was enraged by his presumption: the king’s behaviour ‘proved his lack of good faith’ and she was determined that her husband, as the minister concerned, should resign in a blaze of publicity. A quiet withdrawal would not be enough–Roland ‘must make his gesture openly and vigorously, so as to enlighten public opinion about the evils which had led to it and turn his resignation to good account for the Republic’.

On 11 June, Roland had delivered to the king a letter of resignation written entirely by his wife and in the most searing of tones. She castigated Louis for his policies and attitude to the revolution, and forcibly reminded him of his duties to France and of the risks of civil war. The revolution ‘will be accomplished and cemented at the cost of bloodshed unless wisdom forestalls evils which it is still possible to avoid,’ she warned. ‘I know that the austere language of truth is rarely welcomed near the throne but I also know that it is because it is so rarely heard that revolutions become necessary.’

Two days later, without acknowledging the letter, the king dismissed Roland and the rest of the Brissotin ministers. Manon urged Roland to send a copy to the National Assembly so that the reasons for his leaving office–and the fact that it was a resignation rather than
a dismissal–were made clear. The Assembly ordered the letter printed and sent out to all the regional departments of France. Manon’s words were greeted with admiration by Roland’s supporters. Condorcet praised it in the highest terms, saying Roland spoke ‘the most pure language of probity, patriotism and reason’. Rosalie Jullien thought the letter immortalized him, and would win him the admiration and respect of the entire country.

Her experience of Roland’s opponents and colleagues during the few days leading up to this crisis reduced still further Manon’s already low opinion of most of the men involved in affairs of state. ‘I would never have thought, if I had not seen it with my own eyes, that good judgement and firmness of character were such rare commodities and that so few men are fit to govern,’ she remembered. Asking for those qualities to be combined with honesty was ‘like asking for the moon’. What struck her most about the people Roland worked with was their ‘universal mediocrity’. This realization gave her a new confidence in her own opinions and abilities. ‘Really! I am not surprised that I was much sought after. They could see that I was worth something.’

After the king’s dismissal of his ministers, a huge demonstration took place on 20 June in front of the royal palace of the Tuileries where the National Assembly met. With the Brissotin Pétion in the
mairie
, or mayor’s office, there was little chance of official opposition to the protest. Popular leaders and activists–including the sans-culotte butcher Louis Legendre; Fournier l’Américain, one of the seditious National Guardsmen who had followed the women who marched on Versailles in October 1789; Théroigne’s friend Santerre; Théroigne herself; and Pauline Léon–had spent several days mobilizing artisan and working-class Paris wards such as the faubourg Saint-Antoine to come out on the 20th to plant a ‘liberty tree’ in the Tuileries grounds.

The people gathered at the palace and asked permission to present their petition to the National Assembly, which, given the king’s recent dismissal of the Brissotins, was sympathetic to their demands. Carrying pikes and wearing red caps–the Phrygian cap worn by freed Roman slaves, symbol of liberty–they planted a poplar in the Capuchins’ garden; as Bertrand Barére said in front of the Assembly, ‘the tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants’. They waited
for a response to their request, according to Rosalie Jullien, who was sitting in the Assembly tribunes, ‘in the most profound silence’. Finally they were admitted to the
manége
, singing the ‘Ça Ira’. ‘Never has the Assembly been so brilliant and so majestic,’ recorded Rosalie. ‘What a beautiful day! What a triumph!’

Afterwards, as the huge crowd swelled around the
manége
, the Tuileries gardens and up to the palace railings, the gates burst open and a multitude swarmed into the undefended palace and came face to face with the king, attended by only a few unarmed guards and courtiers. Some were said to have waved in his face a calf’s heart, stuck on a pike, intended to represent ‘the heart of an aristocrat’; others yelled insults at him. The butcher Louis Legendre, at the head of the mob, is said to have said to King Louis, ‘Monsieur, you must hear us; you are a villain. You have always deceived us; you deceive us still. Your measure is full. The people are tired of this play-acting.’

The king, backed into an alcoved window, responded with dignity and composure. He was given a red cap which he put on, then toasted the Parisians and the French people, but he refused to declare that he would relinquish his right to the veto or that he would reinstate the Brissotin ministers. Marie-Antoinette was subjected to abuse, but kept out of sight: Rosalie Jullien, scathingly republican, reported that ‘
la femme du roi
[not
la reine
] was away in the morning, I don’t know where’. Finally at six that evening, Pétion appeared: he had just been informed of what was going on, he told Louis. He managed to disperse the exultant crowd and the exhausted king was reunited with his terrified wife and children.

Although Pétion was briefly suspended from office and letters of support for Louis flooded into the Assembly, after 20 June the political momentum rested entirely with the people of Paris. They could smell the march of their own power. Lafayette made his final attempt to dominate events, returning to Paris to demand controls on the press and the closure of the popular societies, but when he was challenged
in the Assembly about having left his troops without permission he was forced to back down and return to his command in Alsace. Marie-Antoinette, who hated Lafayette, had informed Pétion of his plans to rally his Guardsmen to support a
coup d’état
.

The atmosphere in Paris became steadily more disorderly throughout July 1792 as fears of invasion escalated, thousands of ardently revolutionary
fédérés
converged on the city, and the divided leaders of the weak National Assembly made and broke alliances with one another. On the 11th an emergency government was declared, requiring every council, ward and department to sit in permanent session, and the Assembly assumed the executive role, effectively removing from Louis the vestiges of his official duties as monarch.

Private life was changing too. From 5 July, every
citoyen
was required to wear a tricolour cockade as a demonstration of his devotion to the
patrie
. Five days earlier Catherine Grand, the future Mme Talleyrand, had ordered forty-six yards of tricolour ribbon. Gradually the wards and departments began formally to adopt a more egalitarian style of address, reflecting the common revolutionary usage between strangers of the unceremonious second-person-singular
tu
instead of the more polite second-person-plural
vous
.

Louis made what would be his last public appearance before his death on 14 July, the third anniversary of the Bastille’s fall. Cheers of ‘
Vive Pétion!
’ drowned out the few feeble shouts of ‘
Vive le roi!
’, which sounded to Germaine de Staël ‘like a last cry, like a last prayer’. She watched the king’s old-fashioned embroidered court coat and his white head–conspicuously alone in a sea of plain black coats and patriotically unpowdered hair–as he mounted the steps of the altar with his touchingly shambling gait, to renew his oath to the constitution. ‘He seemed,’ she wrote, ‘a sacred victim offering himself as a voluntary sacrifice.’ The queen’s eyes were red from crying.

A week later, the émigrés gathered in Mainz for the coronation of the new emperor of Austria, Francis II. Their hopes for victory were quixotically high. The politician Lord Granville Leveson Gower described the scene to his mother, and reflected that ‘the pleasure of seeing these great people’ was enhanced by the thought ‘that they are preparing to crush the Democrats and to bring back the people of
France to their senses. The French here speak as confidently of living at Paris next year as if they were in actual possession.’

As Paris spiralled out of control and the power of the popular wards swelled, Manon Roland and her friends debated how to preserve the revolution and protect liberty if the Austrians did reach Paris. They were willing to try to harness popular energy to their cause, uniting the radical sans-culottes on the street with the patriotic soldiers newly arrived in the capital from the provinces. If they could not defeat the king’s supporters, as a last resort the Brissotins were prepared to move the revolutionary government away from Paris.

A battalion of five hundred soldiers from Marseille marched into Paris at the end of July singing the stirringly patriotic ‘War Song for the Army of the Rhine’, which would become known as the ‘Marseillaise’. Scuffles between rival groups of soldiers, sans-culottes and ‘aristocrats’ began to break out on the streets. The city’s radical wards–in which any man, regardless of his wealth or property, was allowed a voice and a vote–were in constant session. Almost unanimously, they called for the establishment of a republic: ‘Let us strike this colossus of despotism…let us all unite to declare the fall of this cruel king, let us say with one accord, Louis XVI is no longer king of the French.’ One ward declared that if the Assembly did not accept their petition and declare Louis dethroned, they would sound the tocsin from nine until midnight. Even Robespierre, who hoped to see Louis removed from power by a legitimately elected Assembly rather than by a popular uprising, declared in the Jacobin Club on 29 July that the king had been overthrown.

‘
Pauvre Louis XVI
,’ wrote Rosalie Jullien, sympathetic to his plight despite her strident republicanism. Her husband had chastised her a few days earlier for writing to him (he was away from Paris) of nothing but politics. ‘So you don’t want me to talk politics to you?’ she asked. ‘In truth that is a great contradiction, because I think of nothing else, and public affairs become so personal that one can’t stop oneself taking them to heart as that is what controls our fortune and our life.’ A few weeks later, she wrote, ‘the affairs of state are my love affairs; I do not think, or dream, or feel but of them’.

Prussia had allied itself with Austria by declaring war on France in
early July. As their troops marched towards the French border, their commander, the Duke of Brunswick, issued a manifesto unwittingly demonstrating Louis’s treasonous collusion with France’s foreign enemies. Brunswick urged the French to rise up against the revolutionaries who controlled their nation and threatened to raze Paris to the ground and torture anyone who resisted his reimposition of the monarchy. Patriotic Parisians were drunk on a toxic combination of cheap wine, fear and defiance.

On 6 August, the travel writer and francophile Dr John Moore landed in Calais. As he and his party travelled from the coast to Paris, wherever they stopped they encountered more carriages full of people fleeing the capital, each giving alarming accounts of the mood there and urging Moore and his companions to turn back. ‘They all seemed to be impressed with the notion that an important event is about to happen.’ But when Moore’s group got to Paris, they were surprised to find the general public there apparently unconcerned by the prospect of invasion or by the impending elections. An uninformed visitor, wrote Moore, would have imagined ‘from the frisky behaviour and cheerful faces’ of the people he met on the streets that this was a holiday ‘appointed for dissipation, mirth and enjoyment’–not the day before one of the defining moments of the revolution.

On the night of 9 August, delegates from the forty-eight Paris wards overthrew the moderate municipal government and formed an ‘Insurrectionary Commune’ (replacing Paris’s usual governing body), which immediately gave orders to march on the Tuileries palace the following day. Robespierre would sit on its new governing committee; Antoine Santerre was put in charge of the National Guard.