The War of Wars (6 page)

The second major turning point of the Revolution now occurred; for Lafayette, fearing that matters were getting out of control, decided at last to make a stand. A meeting was held on 17 July 1791, at the
Champ de Mars, with Jacobin and republican leaders for the first time calling for the King’s removal. Unfortunate bystanders were seized by the crowd and killed, their heads being put on pikes. Lafayette arrived with a detachment of National Guardsmen who were met with a hail of stones. He ordered his men at last to open fire and the mob dispersed. Order was restored and the Assembly behaved with moderation: at that stage the King should have made his escape, as many suggested; but he chose to remain.

Lafayette belatedly emerged as his defender. But in the new National Assembly, elected countrywide again by voice vote, more extreme men were preponderant: the majority were Girondins, after the southern department from which they mostly came, bourgeois lawyers determined to end the monarchy. Their leader was Brissot, who frequented the cultural salon of Madame Roland. The minority were Jacobins, more extreme men like Maximilien Robespierre, the ‘sea-green incorruptible’, and his corrupt but eloquent Girondin ally Danton, as well as the radical philosopher Marat, who was insatiably bloodthirsty; they controlled the Paris mob –
Les sans-culottes
(trouser-less ones).

In five short months the Assembly the King had called to rein back the power of the aristocracy had ended in the overthrow of both by the middle classes, backed by the threat of mob force. Even so, the majority of the Assembly still had no intention of setting up a republic. But Louis had lost his authority, and thenceforth the real opposition to the Revolution was to come from the aristocracy. The authority of the central state, which had overreached itself in the power struggle with the nobility, had been seized by the middle classes; and although the Declaration of Rights ensured legal and property rights and did not call for economic equality, it also gave the ‘nation’, as enshrined in the will of the people, virtually absolute power through the National Assembly and the local assemblies, the only real holders of authority. The French central state had become, if anything, even more absolute, because the nobility was weaker before it: but power was exercised by self-appointed people’s representatives, not the King.

The moderate leadership of Lafayette in the Champ de Mars in July 1791 was reinforced by a group called Les Feuillants, consisting of some 200 members of the new Assembly, constitutionalists in opposition to the Girondins and Jacobins. But they had no leader. Mirabeau had died in April 1791 and Lafayette, volatile as ever, had been bitterly criticized for his role in the Champ de Mars bloodbath. He found his supporters deserting him. As an anonymous historian wrote thirty years later, his supporters were fickle. Those who supported him:

were Parisian citizens of substance and property, but timorous, even from the very consciousness of their wealth, and unwilling, either for the sake of La Fayette, or the Constitution which he patronized, to expose themselves to be denounced by furious demagogues, or pillaged by the hordes of robbers and assassins whom they had at their disposal. This is the natural progress in revolutions. While order continues, property has always the superior influence over those who may be desirous of infringing the public peace; but when law and order are in a great measure destroyed, the wealthy are too much disposed to seek, in submission, or change of party, the means of securing themselves and their fortunes. The property which, in ordinary times, renders its owners bold, becomes, in those of imminent danger, the cause of their selfish cowardice.

Lafayette was defeated when he stood for mayor of Paris by Petion, his radical opponent. At that stage he decided to secure his power by
urging France into war – of which more later. He also believed that command of the army would be critical to the outcome of the Revolution. With his departure, the National Guard was ruthlessly attacked by Jacobin mobs, and the Girondists tried to create their own army from among their followers. But this was subverted by the Jacobins.

Louis vetoed this proposal to set up a ‘departmental’ army, as well as a measure excluding parties who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the new constitution. In thus seeking to exercise a veto when he was virtually powerless, with no real support behind him (‘Think not to terrify me by threats. My resolve is fixed.’) Louis showed himself to be suicidally stubborn: he had united the rival Girondists and Jacobins. One described the outcome: ‘Terror, just in the name of the people, burst its way into yonder palace, whence she has so often sallied forth at the command of monarchs.’

On 20 June a carefully staged insurrection was organized involving a mob of
sans-culottes
armed with scythes, pikes and hay-forks. One flag was a pair of tattered trousers, another a pig’s bloody entrails. The bourgeois citizens defended the slopes of the Palais Royale, but the mob went on to occupy and terrorize the Assembly, then moved on to the Tuileries.

Louis was trapped there, within the arch of a window with a few loyalists who erected a barricade of tables, where he was joined by the Queen and her children. Thus they faced the mob, with the King being forced to don a red cap and drink from a communal bottle – his ‘Calvary’. At last Petion, mayor of Paris, called on the huge crowd of 50,000 to disperse. This humiliation led to a backlash of sympathy for the King, and Lafayette returned speedily from the war front – but without a body of supporting troops, perhaps because he feared diverting them from the fighting, more probably because he did not want to be denounced as attempting to instigate a military takeover. Lafayette made a powerful speech to the Assembly and summoned a review of the National Guard for the following day, but this had more or less disintegrated in his absence, and few dared to appear.

Lafayette, who had twice prevented the King from leaving Paris, now urged him to do so. But it was too late. Lafayette, whose
ambition, hesitations and miscalculations had done so much to create the whole crisis, and who was now responsible for France’s aggressive attitude towards its neighbours, returned to the war front, while Paris descended into virtual anarchy, a band of 500 citizenry from Marseilles adding their numbers to the Girondin and Jacobin mobs.

The King had become hopelessly fatalistic: ‘I have no longer anything to do with earth,’ he declared. ‘I must turn all my thoughts to heaven.’ On 10 August the mobs again descended on the Tuileries, which were protected by a force of National Guardsmen divided in their loyalties, as well as faithful Swiss Guards and a few grenadiers who were slaughtered. The King received them not in uniform but in a violet costume, the colour of monarchy. The Queen seized a pistol and urged the King to fight: those witnesses present, as well as Napoleon afterwards, believed the National Guard would have followed him if he had given the command. But he proposed to go to the Assembly to seek its protection. The Queen was plundered of her purse by the pressing crowds. The King and his family were imprisoned in the grim and forbidding keep of the Temple.

The Jacobins set about intimidating the Assembly. Some 8,000 people were rounded up on suspicion of counter-revolution: a denunciation by a single opponent was enough, and any trace of gentility or good behaviour was damning. Marie Antoinette’s friend the Princess de Lambaille was chopped to pieces and her head paraded to the Temple where the crowd called upon the King and Queen to look upon it. Priests were among the most frequent victims.

Some 4,000–6,000 died in just four days that September. The Girondins, who represented most of the countryside outside Paris, had in fact won a majority in the Assembly, but the Jacobins controlled the Paris mob, which could intimidate the Assembly. The Girondins tried to organize a ‘Departmental Legion’ – again a kind of army from outside Paris – but were blocked by the Jacobins. General Dumouriez, commander of the French army outside Paris, offered to bring back an army to defy the Jacobins – but the Girondins would have none of it, for fear that he would also sweep them away.

Instead they went along reluctantly with Jacobin calls for the trial and execution of the King. A committee of twenty-four was set up to
report on his misdeeds: they proved so inept at finding a reason for executing this weak but good-natured man that the National Assembly as a whole had to pronounce justice. The wily Robespierre brilliantly exploited their dilemma:

One party must be clearly guilty; either the King, or the Convention, who have ratified the actions of the insurgent people. If you have dethroned an innocent and legal monarch, what are you but traitors? And why sit you here – why not hasten to the Temple, set Louis at liberty, install him again in the Tuilleries, and beg on your knees for a pardon you have not merited? But if you have, in the great popular act which you have ratified, only approved of the deposition of a tyrant, summon him to the bar, and demand a reckoning for his crimes.

The King and Queen were exposed to appalling conditions and indignities at the Temple, where conditions were spartan; partisan songs were sung under their windows and obscenities poured forth when they went out for the single daily walk they were permitted.

The Assembly was surrounded by the Jacobins, intimidating the delegates and jeering at the King as he arrived for his trial – where, unlike Charles I of England, he answered the charges reasonably and with saintly patience. As he said with dignity when indicted under the name Louis Capet:

Capet is not my name – it was that of one of my ancestors. I could have wished that I had not been deprived of the society of my son during the two hours I have expected you – but it is only of a piece with the usage I have experienced for four months. I will attend you to the Convention, not as acknowledging their right to summon me, but because I yield to the superior power of my enemies.

When the motion was put to the vote, the Duc d’Orleans, who had returned from England under the name Citoyen Égalité, voted for death, to a gasp of horror, along with 387 Assembly members to 334 – a majority of 53. An historian soon after wrote:

Upon the scaffold [the King] behaved with the firmness which became a noble spirit, and the patience beseeming one who was reconciled to heaven. As one of the few marks of sympathy with which his sufferings were softened, the attendance of a confessor, who had not taken the constitutional oath, was permitted to the dethroned monarch. He who undertook the honourable but dangerous office, was a gentleman of the gifted family of Edgeworth of Edgeworths-town; and the devoted zeal with which he rendered the last duties to Louis, had like in the issue to have proved fatal to himself. As the instrument of death descended, the confessor pronounced the impressive words – ‘Son of St Louis, ascend to heaven!’

The King was executed on 21 January 1793. Marie Antoinette was beheaded on 16 October, at the age of thirty-eight. The King’s sister Elizabeth was executed in May 1794. The seven-year-old Dauphin was placed under the control of a shoemaker named Simon who, it is said, asked: ‘What was to be done with the young wolf-whelp: Was he to be slain?’ – ‘No.’ – ‘Poisoned?’ – ‘No.’ – ‘Starved to death?’ – ‘No.’ – ‘What then?’ – ‘He was to be got rid of.’ He died of cold, malnutrition, beating and general ill-treatment in June 1795. Only his sister, the Princess Royal, was permitted to live. It had been a massacre, to prevent a rallying point for a restoration emerging.

For too long and far too often the wars of 1792–1815 have been dubbed the ‘Napoleonic Wars’ when, in fact, Napoleon was unknown at the outset and not the ruler of France until 1799. Other Frenchmen initiated the war with England and the rest of continental Europe, for elemental reasons connected with French politics and nationalism, and by the time Napoleon took control the motives, direction and even the kind of warfare involved had been established by men who are virtually unknown today. It is one of Napoleon’s more remarkable feats that he is entirely associated with French expansionism at this time: yet in fact he took over a vessel already built and whose course had long been set. One of those most significant in this process was Dumouriez (the others were Hoche and Carnot), an extraordinary personality well in advance of his time who, had he not been so, might have become as celebrated as Napoleon.

Charles Dumouriez was a tough, feisty soldier who had risen to prominence during campaigns in Poland. Extremely shrewd in his political dealings, he had no firm political convictions, but was loyal to the King while being prepared to swear loyalty to the Revolution as long as the two marched in tandem. Dumouriez was the arch-rival of the political, posturing Lafayette for control of France’s revolutionary army; as long as the latter was preoccupied with internal politics, the former was militarily pre-eminent.

With the outbreak of the French Revolution, the country had been immediately endangered by two of the ‘big seven’ countries in Europe. Absolutist Russia, while detesting everything the Revolution stood for,
took no action; nor did decadent Spain; nor, initially, did Britain. Austria, however, under Emperor Joseph II, and its rival Prussia, under King Frederick William, rose to the challenge. Joseph, a well-meaning reformer, had succeeded in stirring up dissent across his far-flung dominions by seeking to improve conditions there and overriding the local vested interests. Consequently, he had too much on his hands to fight France as well. On his death, he was succeeded by his half-brother, Leopold, a more limited but sensible man who succeeded in putting down the insurrection in Flanders and then treated the insurgents with moderation. He was alarmed by the prospect of France stirring up more trouble in Flanders and pursued a pragmatic line towards the Revolution, which had not yet tilted towards excess, partly out of concern for his sister Marie Antoinette and her husband: the correspondence between them shows that far from attempting to take advantage of the Revolution he was seeking to urge a moderate middle course upon Louis XVI. His son and successor in 1792, Francis II, pursued the same policy.