Revolution! France – Chapter 12 – The Brick Chronicle

After nearly two years of deliberations, the Assembly was on the cusp of completing their founding mission: to provide a written constitution. But could plans go ahead for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy now that the king had attempted to flee his own country? As the Assembly debated this, on July 17, 1791, during celebrations of the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, a petition written by Jacques Brissot—author of the revolutionary newspaper The French Patriot and a former prisoner in the Bastille—was read aloud by Georges Danton. It called for the “replacement of Louis XVI by constitutional means” and was laid upon the Altar of the Nation in the middle of the crowded Champ de Mars for the masses to sign.

As thousands lined up to affix their signatures, two men were discovered hiding beneath the stairs leading up to the altar. Though they had likely staked out that position for the views it provided up women’s skirts, they were nonetheless dragged out, accused by the crowd of being counterrevolutionary spies, and hung on the spot. Alerted to the potential start of a riot, Lafayette and Mayor Bailly arrived on the scene with the National Guard, but they were jeered, insulted, and pelted with stones. After a round of warning shots fired in the air failed to disperse the angry crowds, Lafayette gave the order to fire on the people, and dozens of citizens fell dead—men, women, and children.

The crowd dispersed, but a furious group of men headed for Lafayette’s residence with shouts of “Kill his wife and take him her head!” Lafayette’s wife Adrienne, his son Georges Washington, and his daughters Anastasie and Virginie cowered inside as the angry voices approached. Some of the men were climbing over the garden wall when a passing cavalry troop happened by and drove off the attackers. Martial law was declared in Paris and, fearing arrest, radicals like Danton, Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins—who had called for the king to be put on trial—went into hiding. Jean-Paul Marat literally went underground, living in the Paris sewers where he contracted a painful and disfiguring skin disease.

Over the summer of 1791, Lafayette and the more conservative revolutionary delegates completed work on the Constitution. It was signed by the king on September 13 and, to mark the occasion, a tricolored hot air balloon took flight over the Champ de Mars. Having at long last completed its task, the National Assembly was duly dissolved. A new constitutional legislature was elected in October, bringing fresh faces to power; due to a constitutional provision that had been championed by Robespierre, no member of the National Assembly was eligible to become a member of the new Legislative Assembly. Voting eligibility was limited to those paying a certain base level of annual taxes, thus granting suffrage to only about half the male population.

Among those new to power was the author of the recent petition— journalist and anti-slavery advocate Jacques Brissot. With a reputation as an expert in knowledge of foreign affairs, he was appointed to a diplomatic committee of the new legislature, giving him power to shape foreign policy. In late 1791, with nobles who had fled France gathering counterrevolutionary forces across the border at Coblenz in Austrian-controlled Germany, and the schism within the Church threatening to develop into a civil war in the provinces, Brissot and others pushed for a preemptive offensive war to unite the country. “Do you wish at one blow to destroy the aristocracy, the refractory priests, the malcontents?” Brissot asked. “Then destroy Coblenz.”

With the end of martial law declared upon the signing of the Constitution, radical leaders and journalists returned to Paris. Most supported the proposed war with the notable exception of Robespierre, whose speeches at the Jacobin club failed to convince his peers that while defeat in war would surely bring an unthinkable return to despotism, even victory ran the danger of creating despots out of generals. The new Constitution had granted the king the exclusive power to propose war. Acceding to the will of the people, on April 20, 1792, the king came before the Assembly and announced, “Having done my best to maintain peace, as I was in duty bound to do, I have now come—in conformity with the terms of the constitution—to propose war.” Amid great cheers, war against Austria was declared.

Having been successfully tested on cadavers, the guillotine made its debut in front of City Hall in Paris on April 25. Nicholas Pelletier, convicted of armed robbery and murder, was led up on a scaffold, laid down on the device with his hands tied behind him, and then cleanly beheaded. Parisians had flocked to see the new device in action. Some were wearing the pointed red cap of liberty that had become fashionable among the sans-culottes—revolutionaries from the working classes. Expecting some sort of spectacle, there was a great disappointment with the swiftness of the death and a few calls for a return to the use of the gallows (on which victims often dramatically convulsed for minutes before dying).

Lafayette had run for mayor of Paris the previous fall, but lost out to the more radical Jérôme Pétion, who received twice as many votes. To further ensure that Lafayette could not influence events in the capital, his enemies in the Assembly had him appointed to lead one of three fifty-thousand-man armies sent north to attack Austrian-controlled Belgium. But the financial crisis and events of the revolution had left the professional army in disarray, and the war began disastrously for the French. At Lille, General Théobald Dillon’s army panicked at the sight of the well-disciplined Austrians. Ordered to stand and fight, Dillon’s own men slaughtered him and continued fleeing. After losing multiple battles, General Rochambeau resigned from the army.

News of the army’s disastrous defeats prompted rioting in the streets of the capital. The Assembly declared a state of emergency. They passed measures ordering deportation of all refractory priests and called for twenty thousand soldiers from the south of France to converge on Paris for its protection. When the king attempted to stop these measures with his constitutionally granted veto power, the Parisian crowds took matters in their own hands. On June 20, during a demonstration against the veto, members of the National Guard stood aside as a Jacobin-inspired mob broke into the Tuileries Palace with axes, knives, pistols, and pikes. Breaking down the door, they found the king alone in an anteroom.

“Here I am,” Louis XVI said to them, keeping remarkable composure. Weapons were brandished in his face amid shouts of “Down with the veto!”, “No aristocrats! No veto! No priests!”, and “Long live the nation!” When the crowd demanded he put on a red cap of liberty and drink a toast to his unexpected visitors, he obliged, raising a bottle of wine they’d pilfered from the palace cellar. “People of Paris,” said the king, “I drink to your health and that of the French nation.” He remained defiant, however, in his refusal to rescind his recent vetoes. Just then Mayor Pétion arrived and, after many exhortations, managed to convince the demonstrators to leave.

On hearing of the invasion of the royal residence, Lafayette rushed back to Paris from the front and made a desperate attempt to steer the revolution back to the rule of law. “The Jacobin faction is causing all the disorder. I accuse them openly,” he said in an address to the Assembly. “I beg the National Assembly, first, to find and punish the leaders and instigators of the violence of June 20 for treason; second, to destroy the sect that is threatening the sovereignty of this nation and is tyrannizing its citizens.” The Jacobins responded by branding Lafayette “the most dangerous enemy of France.” “Smite Lafayette,” declared Robespierre, “and the nation is saved.” Crowds outside the Jacobin club cheered and burned Lafayette in effigy.

While Lafayette returned to his troops with hopes of mustering enough of a force to manage a coup d’etat of the Jacobin-controlled Assembly, the war became enlarged as Austria’s ally, Prussia, declared war on France. In response to the news of the king and queen’s brush with mob justice in Paris, the new commander of the combined Prussian and Austrian armies issued a proclamation warning that if any harm came to Louis XVI or Marie Antoinette, all of Paris would be reduced to rubble as an object lesson. Further, any Frenchmen who resisted the advance of his army would be killed without mercy and their homes demolished. As August began, tens of thousands of Austrian and Prussian troops massed on the border, preparing an invasion.

Declaring “the fatherland in danger,” the Assembly called upon all citizens to bear arms and distributed pikes to the masses. They openly defied the king’s veto and allowed thousands of troops from the provinces into Paris, many of whom sympathized with the Jacobins and were ready to carry out their bidding. On August 9, Georges Danton and revolutionary journalists Camille Desmoulins and Jacques Hébert led an armed takeover of City Hall, establishing a new Revolutionary Municipal Government that openly called for the king’s dethronement. The commander of the National Guard, the Marquis de Mandat, was summoned to City Hall unaware of the coup. After being denounced by Danton, he was murdered by a surrounding mob.

The next day at five o’clock in the morning, the king made a review of the forces protecting the Tuileries. After the invasion on June 20, he managed to reinstate his fiercely loyal regiment of nine hundred highly trained Swiss Guards. They were supported by two thousand National Guardsman whose loyalties were now very much in question. Some had already deserted to join the growing crowd of demonstrators and turned their cannons menacingly toward the palace. Despite the queen’s protests, Louis XVI gathered his family and headed to the meeting hall of the Assembly, hoping they would be safe there. “What a lot of leaves!” noted the king as the family made its way across the courtyard. “They have begun to fall very early this year.”

“I come to prevent a great crime,” announced the king to the Assembly. “And I think, gentlemen, that I cannot be safer than in your midst.” The delegates assured the king they would make every effort to ensure the safety of his family. They then resumed their business, but when it was pointed out that rules forbid the Assembly from deliberating in the king’s presence, the royal family was moved to a very small adjacent room separated from the main hall by iron bars. Outside, a crowd of some twenty thousand armed sans-culottes and defectors from the National Guard advanced on the Tuileries. The massively outnumbered Swiss Guard were called to step aside, but refused, saying, “We shall all certainly rather die than abandon our posts without orders from the King.”

Amid the scuffling that followed as the crowds pushed forward, one of the Swiss Guards received a minor cut. At this, the entire Swiss Guard opened fire on the crowds in unison with their muskets and with grapeshot from a cannon. Their deadly precision killed two hundred and injured dozens more. As the protectors of the palace fell back toward the entrance, a belated note from the king arrived, ordering them not to fire upon the crowds. Dutifully, they immediately threw down their arms to surrender.

But the infuriated sans-culottes and National Guardsmen showed them no mercy, butchering the Swiss Guard on the front steps of the palace and then storming inside with cries of “Kill the traitors!” Inside, they slaughtered anyone they came across, including scores of palace servants and royal attendees, putting heads on pikes and tossing bodies out the windows. The Swiss Guards stationed inside the palace ran for their lives through the Tuileries gardens, but there was no escape. They were surrounded, slashed to death, and their bodies mutilated—limbs hacked off and severed genitals stuffed in the mouths of the dying or fed to dogs.

Amid the chaos, some of the most militant revolutionaries— freshly arrived soldiers from Brest—were cut down because their red uniforms were mistaken for those of the Swiss Guard. One royal servant in plain clothes who made it out of the palace alive was approached by soldiers from Marseille who had just finished a round of butchery. “Hello, citizen! Without arms!” said one of them, handing him a bloody sword. “Here, take this and help us to kill.” One witness noted seeing “some very young boys playing with human heads.” In all, more than five hundred Swiss Guard were slaughtered at the Tuileries. Another sixty were taken to City Hall and massacred there.

It had been the bloodiest day of the revolution to date. The remains of the Swiss Guards were collected in carts and dumped in lime pits. Across the city, royal emblems were torn down and burned, and homes of aristocrats were vandalized. At the far end of the Tuileries garden at the Place de Louis XV, a statue of Louis XVI’s grandfather on horseback was toppled by the crowds. It would be melted down to form cannons for the war effort. The square was subsequently renamed Place de la Révolution and, within two weeks, a new monument of sorts was erected there: the guillotine.

Fearing for their lives, the conservative and moderate delegates fled, leaving the Assembly without enough members present to hold a vote. To take the actions demanded by the sans-culottes, the remaining Jacobins formed an ad hoc Executive Council headed by Danton. The king was suspended from office, and the royal family incarcerated in a medieval fortress in Paris known as the Temple. An arrest warrant was also issued for Lafayette, who, having found his troops unwilling to march with him against the Jacobins in the capital, turned himself over to the Austrians with hopes of obtaining passage to the United States. Instead, he was arrested and thrown in a dank, vermin-infested prison in Austria for the next five years.

The Executive Council decreed the Assembly would be disbanded in September following elections—with universal male suffrage—for a new National Convention to form a new constitution that would establish France as a true republic with no vestiges of monarchy. At Danton’s insistence, the Council also formed Vigilance Committees to patrol the neighborhoods of Paris for any signs of counterrevolutionary activity. Throughout the latter half of August 1792, more than a thousand people were thrown in prison on the flimsiest pretenses, including hundreds of refractory priests and Marie Antoinette’s loyal friend, the princess of Lamballe, who was taken from the queen’s side at the Temple.

News arrived at the start of September that the combined Prussian and Austrian armies had invaded French soil and had captured the defensive fortresses at Longvy and Verdun on the road to Paris. As panic swept through the capital, Jacobin orators and The People’s Friend Marat viciously egged on the sans-culottes by spreading fear that the counterrevolutionaries held in the Paris prisons would be freed by the foreign invaders and would take part in the destruction of the city and its inhabitants. On September 2, coaches transporting twenty-four refractory priests to L’Abbaye prison were attacked by a mob. One man pulled a bloodied sword from the body of a priest and shouted at horrified passersby, “So, this frightens you, does it, you cowards? You must get used to the sight of death!”

Those who survived the maiming in the carriages attempted to run into the prison for safety, but were blocked by another mob waiting at the gate who butchered them with hatchets, knives, sabers, and saws. An ex-monk who had become an outspoken Jacobin now led a mob to the Carmelite convent where 150 priests were being held. They were each given brief summary trials and the vast majority sentenced to death on the spot. Those who hid themselves in the chapel or ran outside to hide in trees were chased down, bludgeoned, and stabbed to death.

The prison massacres continued for days and singled out more than just those rounded up in previous weeks. At Bicêtre, a prison hospital for the poor, 43 of the 162 killed there were under age 18. Forty prostitutes were raped and butchered at La Salpêtrière. At L’Abbaye it was the hero of the Bastille and leader of the Women’s March on Versailles, Stanislas Maillard, who acted as a self-appointed judge, moving from cell to cell with his henchmen, conducting trials with wildly arbitrary results. Those condemned were slaughtered on the spot, while those acquitted might be embraced and celebrated as fellow revolutionaries.

At the Conciegerie the butchered remains of 378 prisoners were piled in heaps on the street. A woman named Marie Gredeler, in prison on accusations of having mutilated her lover, was treated savagely. Her breasts were cut off, her feet spread apart and nailed into the ground, and a bonfire was set between her legs. Men would occasionally pause for meals between sessions of butchery, using dead bodies as tables. Witnesses described scenes of women sitting on benches and cheering on the murders; and women who helped load the corpses of prisoners onto carts were seen singing and laughing, some with severed ears pinned to their dresses.

The queen’s friend, the Princess of Lamballe, was stripped naked and raped. Her breasts were severed and her body mutilated. Her heart was cut from her chest, roasted over a fire, and eaten. One of her legs was stuffed into a cannon, which was then discharged. Her head was cleaned of any blood such that it became ghostly white before being stuck on a pike and then paraded in front of the window of the queen’s chamber at the Temple. In all, some 1,200 prisoners were massacred. Parisians generally seemed to consider the atrocities justified by the circumstances, as one explained to his wife who heard the screams of the victims: “This is a very terrible business. But they are our deadly enemies, and those who are delivering the country from them are saving your life and the lives of our dear children.”

Danton justified his orchestration of the events without having directly participated, noting, “It often happens, especially in time of revolution, that one has to applaud actions that one would not have wanted or dared to perform one’s self.” Weeks later, on September 20, fears of Paris being destroyed by foreigners were put to rest. Bolstered by thousands of fresh recruits fighting for the survival of Paris and the revolution, the French army was revitalized with cries of “Long live the nation!” and repelled the invading army of Austrians and Prussians, sending them into retreat at the Battle of Valmy. Having witnessed the upset of well-disciplined royal soldiers by hordes of citizen-soldiers, the poet Johann Goethe remarked to his fellow defeated countrymen, “Here today a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast that you were present at its birth.”

Opening Quote

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