The Days of the French Revolution (12 page)

The preparations for the festival and the festival itself had, indeed, provided a convincing display of national unity and given grounds for hope that the bitterness of the past would soon be forgotten.

In the spring and summer of 1791, however, this national unity was undermined by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. People came out into the streets in support of recalcitrant priests wearing royalist cockades, there were riots in several towns and violent disturbances in many villages from which
curés
who refused to take the oath were evicted.

The King had signed the Civil Constitution, on the advice of a majority of his Ministers, with evident reluctance. Soon afterwards he received a long-delayed letter from the Pope expressly declaring that if he lent his approval to it he would be leading his nation into schism. This was followed by another letter suspending all priests who accepted the Civil Constitution and firmly condemning the
election of clergy by the people. The King thereupon replaced his confessor who had taken the oath by one who had not, and consulted a distinguished theologian, the Bishop of Clermont, as to whether he could now take communion from his parish priest who had also taken the forbidden oath.

Up till now the Paris which the King overlooked from his first-floor windows above the Seine had remained quite calm. The upheavals of the summer of 1789 had not been repeated. While outbreaks of violence and sporadic riots were troubling several provinces – particularly in the south where many regiments were so close to mutiny that Mirabeau thought it would be a good idea to disband the whole army and ‘enlist another on revolutionary principles’–the life of the capital had continued largely undisturbed. The cafés were crowded, the theatres played to full houses, the salons were as well attended as ever and rich aristocrats continued to walk the streets and patronize the fashionable shops. ‘We have had several delightful tea parties the last few days,’ one of these aristocrats wrote. ‘We are all amusing ourselves.’ To some the Revolution had become a kind of joke. Women wore Constitution jewellery and Liberty caps decorated with ribbons the colour of that vivid red known as Foullon’s blood; men took pinches of snuff from boxes elegantly enamelled with the tricolour. ‘Feudal’ became a popular word of playful denigration to be used of coffee-grinders that failed to work or watches that refused to keep time. There was a strange light-heartedness in the air. When Madame de Simiane was hit by an apple thrown from the upper gallery of the Théâtre Français, she sent it to her brother-in-law, Lafayette, with the comment, ‘Here, my dear General, is the first fruit of the Revolution that has so far come into my hands.’

In this atmosphere the King had begun to suppose that he might yet recover his lost authority. At the beginning of 1790 he had made a speech to the Assembly in which he had promised to educate his son in the new principles of constitutional monarchy, of freedom with justice, and had associated himself with those plans which the Assembly were carrying out ‘for the benefit of France’. He had been loudly cheered and escorted back to the Tuileries as a hero. More recently, and more than once, he had been vociferously cheered
again as he had been during the celebrations of the
Fête de la Fédération
. ‘I am still King of the French,’ he said with some satisfaction.

When he had first arrived at the Tuileries he had seemed listless and despairing. Although it was not suggested to him that he must forego the pleasure of hunting, he had sulkily indicated that he had lost his zest for it. Followed everywhere by six National Guardsmen who were ordered by the Assembly never to lose track of him, he had grown fat and discontented. But as the months passed his spirits revived. The Queen, too, became less unpopular. She was still the victim of libels, accused of plotting to starve the poor, of sending money to Austria, of continuing to indulge a voracious sexual appetite with both men and women. Yet deputations of citizens came to wish her well, while she herself attempted to prove herself worthy of their regard by visiting hospitals and workshops.

Encouraged by the respect which the monarchy still commanded and by a growing feeling in the Assembly, except on the Left, that the Revolution had gone far enough and it was time to conciliate the King, the counter-revolutionaries now urged him to strike back, to turn to the army and to prepare for civil war. This was the advice of the Comte d’Artois given from the safety of exile in Savoy; this was the advice, too, of their sister Elisabeth. The King, however, could not face the prospect of civil war, clinging to his hope that there were now sufficient deputies in favour of compromise with the Court to ensure a return to the quiet pleasures of Versailles. This hope was shattered by the Pope’s firm stand against the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and by the King’s decision that, in loyalty to his faith and conscience, he must accept the view of Bishop Bonal that he could not receive Holy Communion from a ‘
Constitutionnel
’ priest.

The Pope’s unequivocal pronouncement against the Civil Constitution, made public in a brief, led to serious disturbances in Paris where the people’s anti-clericalism was fostered both by political clubs and by the theatres which, when not presenting plays celebrating civic virtue, put on others that displayed the horrors of the Inquisition, the tribulations and hypocrisy of monastic and convent life, and the greed and dissipation of real and fictional leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. Outside the theatres and in the gardens of the Palais Royal effigies of the Pope were set alight on
bonfires, a severed head was tossed through the windows of the Papal Nuncio’s carriage, convents were broken into and nuns assaulted and revolutionary slogans were scrawled on church doors. A mob broke into the Church of St Sulpice, calling out for the head of the
curé
who had protested against the Civil Constitution and forcing the organist to play the tune of ‘
Ça ira
’, the words of which they sang with frightening intensity. The King was called upon to dismiss his new confessor and condemned in pamphlets as a traitor for having flouted the laws of the nation by receiving Communion from a priest whose allegiance was to the Pope rather than to the state.

In fact, the King had not yet committed this breach of the Civil Constitution, but he had made up his mind to do so, and at Easter he and his family prepared to leave the Tuileries for Holy Communion at Saint-Cloud. The gates of the palace, however, were shut against them by a shouting crowd that had intimidated the National Guardsmen on duty in the courtyard. Lafayette arrived on the scene. So did Bailly. But neither of them could persuade the mob to let the carriage pass. Nor could the King who put his head out of the window to ask for that freedom for himself which, he told them, he had given to the nation. His words were met by insults and by a rattling of fists on the carriage doors. For nearly two hours the uproar continued while the Queen, pale yet composed, comforted the weeping Dauphin and the King waited vainly for the crowds to disperse. Then he told the coachman to return to the palace.

In the Tuileries he was advised once again, as he had so often been in the past, to escape from Paris: once he had got away to the army on the frontier he would be able to persuade his brother-in-law, the Austrian Emperor, to take part in an armed congress if not actually to order an invasion of France; he would then be in a position to act as negotiator and the Assembly would be obliged to have him back on his own terms. He would also be free to worship as his conscience urged him to do. Slowly convinced by suggestions and propositions such as these, and by the Queen’s strong endorsement of them, the King came to the conclusion that he must make a dash for the frontier. After all, both the King of Spain and the Austrian Emperor had stressed that they could not help him until he and his
family were in a place of safety. Once they were, the foreign powers would at least be given the opportunity of proving that they were not using the French royal family’s present confinement merely as an excuse for doing nothing as the Queen suspected. The time chosen for the dangerous attempt was the night of 19 June 1791.

Escape from the Tuileries was not to be easy. For weeks past it had been expected that an attempt would be made. When a rumour got about that the Comte de Provence had already gone abroad to join the Comte d’Artois, a mob surrounded the Luxembourg, demanding that he show himself if he were there, and forced him to drive about the streets in a carriage accompanied by market-women who cheekily kissed him and fondled him. His two maiden aunts, Adélaïde and Victoire, daughters of Louis XV, had succeeded in escaping across the frontier with passports for Rome. They had been held for a time in Burgundy before being allowed to proceed, and crowds had besieged the Tuileries calling for their recall and insisting that a deputation be admitted to the palace to ensure that they had not taken the Dauphin with them. Since then the palace had been patrolled by hundreds of National Guardsmen in addition to those who closely watched the movements of the King and Queen. Sentinels stood at each garden gate and at intervals along the river terrace; 600
sectionnaires
watched all the approaches. Several of the palace servants were paid informers, and no one could enter or leave the apartments which had been allocated to the royal family without the production of a stamped pass. As well as being difficult, escape would be expensive; and Louis had little money of his own readily available, while the Queen could not sell her jewels without arousing suspicion. But fortunately there was a man in Paris with both the means and the inclination to help them, a man of courage and resource. This was Hans Axel, Count von Fersen.

Fersen, a tall, amusing, strikingly handsome man of thirty-six, was the son of the distinguished Swedish soldier and politician, Frederik Axel von Fersen. After a rigorous education in Sweden, Germany and Italy, he had entered the French military service and had served as aide-de-camp to General Rochambeau in America, being promoted
colonel propriétaire
of the
Royal-Suédois
regiment in 1785. Since then he had been appointed King Gustavus III’s special
representative at the French Court. He had grown fond of the King and was devoted to the Queen, ‘an angel’, as he described her in a letter to his sister, a woman both brave and sensitive. He was, he added, doing all he could to console her in her misfortune. Needless to say, it was rumoured that they had become lovers. Perhaps they had. Certainly Fersen was very attractive to women and much attracted by them: he already had one devoted lover in Paris, Eleonora Sullivan, a voluptuous Italian woman, once a circus acrobat and courtesan, now the wife of an Anglo-American millionaire and the mistress of a Scottish one.

Fersen, as generous as he was debonair, offered to lend the King and Queen all the money he had; and if this sum, 600,000
livres
, proved insufficient for their purposes, he undertook to borrow the rest. He also took it upon himself to provide a four-wheeled covered carriage which would be commodious enough to carry the two royal children and their aunt Elisabeth as well as the King and Queen; for Louis and Marie Antoinette were both determined that the family should not be parted. This carriage, a sumptuous berlin with dark green and yellow bodywork, paler yellow wheels and white velvet upholstery, ordered in the name of a friend of Fersen, Baroness von Korff, was kept in the courtyard of Fersen’s hotel so that it should become a familiar sight to the citizens of Paris. It was occasionally to be seen, drawn by six horses, driven as fast as it would go – which was disappointingly slowly – along the Vincennes road so that Fersen could test its reliability.

On the night of the escape from Paris the berlin was to be taken first to the courtyard of the house of Eleonora Sullivan’s rich Scottish lover, then to an agreed spot just beyond the customs post on the road outside the Porte Saint-Martin. Three of the King’s former bodyguard were to wait there with it, dressed in yellow liveries which Fersen had bought at a sale of the effects of an
émigré
prince. Fersen himself, dressed as a cabman, was to drive the royal family to the rendezvous in a hired carriage. Once he had got them, suitably disguised, into the carriage Fersen foresaw no difficulties. The berlin to which they would be transferred outside the Porte Saint-Martin would rattle off under cover of darkness through Châlons. Ponte de Sommeville, Saint-Ménéhould, Clermont,
Varennes, Dun and Stenay towards the north-east frontier where troops of the Marquis de Bouillé, whose headquarters were at Metz, had been asked to provide an escort on the last stages of the journey. But the great difficulty would be in spiriting the family out of the palace.

The first problem arose when a woman who worked in the palace as a cleaner and who was known to spy for her lover, a convinced republican, decided to postpone the holiday which she had been due to take. The proposed flight would have to be put off until she had gone. The new date set was the night of Monday 20 June.

At ten o’clock that night the Queen woke her children, dressed the Dauphin in a girl’s frock and pulled a wide-brimmed bonnet down over his eyes. ‘He looked so beautiful,’ his sister recalled, ‘but was so sleepy that he could not stand and did not know what was happening. I asked him what he thought we were going to do, and he answered, “I suppose to act in a play since we have got these funny clothes on.”’ His mother then led him and his sister downstairs to rooms which had until recently been occupied by the King’s First Gentleman who had emigrated. Since his departure the door of these lodgings had been left unguarded. The Queen unlocked it. The children’s governess, the Duchesse de Tourzel, crept out with her two charges to find Fersen waiting for them, whip in hand, playing the part of a hackney-coachman to perfection, so the Duchess thought, whistling, gossiping with a passer-by, taking occasional pinches of snuff. When she and the children came out he hurried them away to the waiting carriage while the Queen went back into the palace and eventually to bed. Soon after eleven when all seemed quiet she got up again, put on a brown dress and a black hat with a heavy veil, and waited for the King to come to her bedroom where it had been arranged he would change into a brown suit and a dark green overcoat and cover his hair with a grey wig. Wearing similar clothes and such a wig, the Chevalier de Coigny, who looked rather like the King, had left the Tuileries for the past twelve nights at the same time each night. So it was hoped that when the King left on the night of the 20th he would be mistaken for the Chevalier. And so he was. He walked past a sentry who did not challenge him; and as Fersen emerged from the shadows to join him,
he made for the line of carriages which was habitually drawn up in the courtyard for the use of those whose business detained them at the palace until late at night. He climbed into one of them with Fersen and found the children already inside. Soon afterwards the Queen, who had left the palace the same way as the children, joined him there.