Revolution! France – Chapter 10 – The Brick Chronicle

Amid high hopes of saving the nation from ruin, the Estates General convened in May 1789. Representatives from the clergy, nobility, and commoners had been supplied by their constituents with lists of suggestions and grievances to address. Among them was a nearly unanimous call for a written constitution, reforms in the Church, fair taxation, and an end to royal absolutism. According to custom, after the two privileged orders in their elegant dress took their favored seating in tiers to either side of the king, the Third Estate—dressed in black—was allowed in through a side door and seated at the back of the meeting hall. The proceedings opened with prayers and a sermon by the Bishop of Nancy, during which the king nodded off to sleep.

The next day, after a speech made by the king and his chancellor that mixed enthusiasm with warnings to the delegates against getting carried away with “dangerous innovations,” the royal party departed amid shouts of “long live the king!” Although tradition called for the three estates to deliberate separately and gave each estate a single vote, Abbé Sieyès demanded that all the delegates stay together as a single body and that votes be counted by head. “There cannot be one will as long as we permit three orders,” he argued. “At best, the three orders might agree. But they will never constitute one nation, one representation, and one common will.” Lafayette was quick to voice his support for the motion, but a majority of his fellow noblemen and clergy were not convinced.

For a month, the stalemate over voting procedures continued. “Our Estates do nothing,” complained one nobleman. “We gather at nine in the morning and leave at four in the afternoon, spending our time in useless gossip.” Then on June 4, the crown prince—the king’s seven- year-old son, Louis Joseph—succumbed to tuberculosis after months of failing health. The distraught king left Versailles to grieve with his family at a hunting lodge in the Marly Forest. When members of the Third Estate came to offer their condolences, the king indicated his wish not to be disturbed. Informed of their insistence on being admitted, the king asked, “Is there no father among them?”

On June 13, the archbishop of Nîmes came before the delegates of the Third Estate, pleading with them to break the deadlock over voting procedures for the sake of the poor. The well-fed and extravagantly dressed archbishop was rebuked by a delegate from Arras, the thirty-one-year-old lawyer Maximilien Robespierre: “Go and tell your colleagues that if they are so impatient to assist the suffering poor. . . let them forgo that luxury which surrounds them and that splendor that makes indigence blush. . . . Sell their fancy carriages, and convert all their superfluous wealth into food for the poor.”

The next day Abbé Sieyès proposed that since the Third Estate represents 96 percent of the population, they should simply proceed with attending to the nation’s business; the nobility and clergy would be invited to join them—any who refused would be presumed to have forfeited their status as representatives of the people. A majority agreed, and over the next few days, nineteen clergymen joined them. On June 17, the combined body dubbed themselves a “National Assembly,” which recognized no divisions between the social orders. They decreed that all existing taxes were illegal and only provisional until a new tax system could be approved.

The initial meetings of the National Assembly over the next two days were chaotic with no rules of procedure and dozens of delegates standing at once, attempting to command attention. A proposal that the assembly adopt the protocols of the British House of Commons was haughtily shot down as indicative of a pernicious Anglomania that had recently become so fashionable in so far as members of the court took to speaking with an English accent. Their deliberations were open to the public who sat in the galleries and voiced their approval or displeasure loudly and often with the occasional piece of rotten fruit thrown for added emphasis.

The majority of the clergy soon voted to join the National Assembly and was greeted with cheers of “Long live the good bishops! Long live the priests!” But the following day when they gathered to meet, the Assembly found their meeting hall locked and guarded by royal troops. Though Necker had urged the king to accept and begin working with the new legislative body, the queen and the king’s brother, the Count of Artois, convinced him to take a hardline stance and to reassert royal control over events. The clergy and commoners were thus barred from their meeting halls until the king’s planned speech before all the delegates, which freshly posted notices announced would occur on June 22.

A delegate from Paris, Dr. Joseph Guillotin, suggested that the National Assembly temporarily convene at the royal tennis courts nearby. Once they had all filed inside, Jean-Joseph Mounier of Grenoble proposed that all members of the assembly swear an oath “never to separate until we have formed a Constitution on solid foundations as our constituents asked us to.” The astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who had been voted president of the Assembly, stood atop a makeshift table with one hand over his heart and the other outstretched before him. The rest held out their arms in salute as well. They then took turns signing a document on which their oath had been written.

On the day of the king’s speech, Bailly and the rest of the delegates of the Third Estate stood knocking at the locked door of the great hall in the pouring rain. They were told they had arrived too early. Only after considerable continued knocking were they finally allowed inside to once again take their seats at the back of the hall. Louis XVI arrived in a fanfare of trumpets. He stood upon a dais and, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the National Assembly, ordered the members of the three estates to return to their separate deliberations. He also threatened that if they were to “abandon him” in his efforts for the good of the country, he would carry on without them and consider himself to be the lone representative of the people.

The king exited the building to stunned silence. Reminding themselves of their oath, the members of the National Assembly stayed inside the hall, intent to carry on their work. When a royal representative interrupted to remind them of the king’s order to disperse, Bailly announced, “The assembled nation cannot be given orders.” Another delegate, the infamously belligerent Honoré Mirabeau, went farther, saying, “We have heard the orders that the King has been advised to give. But you have no right to speak here. Go tell those who have sent you that we are here by the will of the people and that we will not be dispersed except at the point of bayonets.”

Informed of their defiance, the king is reported to have wearily replied, “Oh well, damn it, let them stay.” By June 27, most of the clergy and forty-seven nobles, including Lafayette and the king’s cousin, the Duke of Orleans, had joined the National Assembly. When news arrived from Paris that a mob of thirty thousand planned to besiege Versailles unless the king authorized all three estates to meet as one body, the king was finally prepared to take the conciliatory advice of Necker. So he implored the remaining clergy and nobles to join the deliberations of the National Assembly “to achieve my paternal goals.” That night, there was celebrating in the streets of Versailles with singing, dancing, and shouts of “Long live Necker!” and “Long live the king!”

Intended as a preamble to the as-yet-unwritten French Constitution, Lafayette worked with guidance from Thomas Jefferson on a “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” which abolished social class distinctions and established inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, the right to work, and religious freedom. It was presented to the National Assembly for consideration on July 10, prompting Jefferson to write to future president James Monroe: “I think it probable this country will, within two or three years, be in the enjoyment of a tolerably free constitution, and that without having cost them a drop of blood.”

Meanwhile, at the king’s beckoning, thousands of royal soldiers poured into Versailles and surrounded Paris, prompting widespread fear that they would soon act decisively against the Assembly and its supporters. A bread shortage in Paris added to the atmosphere of panic. On the night of July 12, a mob armed with makeshift weapons looted the St-Lazare Monastery, taking away fifty-three cartloads of wheat, as well as wine, beer, Gruyere cheeses, and a dried ram’s head. Such rioting went mostly unpunished, with many of the royal soldiers and French Guard sympathizing with their starving brethren. “French soldiers will never fire on the people,” said one Parisian, “but if they should, it is better to be shot than to starve.”

That same day, word also reached Paris that the Assembly-supporting minister of finance, Jacques Necker, had been exiled by the king to Brussels. Thousands of Parisians took to the streets and were whipped into a frenzy by spirited orators like the fiery twenty-six-year-old Camille Desmoulins, who stood atop a cafe table, shouting, “Citizens, you know that the Nation asked for Necker to be retained and he has been driven out! Could you be more insolently flouted? After such an act they will dare anything!” He then held a pistol aloft and put a hand over his heart. “To arms! To arms!” he cried. “Yes, it is I who call my brothers to freedom; I would rather die than submit to servitude.”

And so the Parisian mobs broke into the shops of gunsmiths, taking muskets, pistols, sabers, and knives. They first set upon the detested ring of customs posts that encircled the city and that drove up the prices of meat, wine, vegetables, and other commodities that entered the city and had been called “a monument of slavery and despotism.” The eighteen-mile wall and its fifty-five neoclassically designed tollhouses were the brainchild of the brilliant chemist Antoine Lavoisier, a member of the nobility who used funds from tax collection to drive his scientific research. By the morning of July 13, forty of the tollhouses were nothing more than rubble.

In an attempt to control a situation bordering on anarchy, leaders at the Paris City Hall established a citizens’ militia to keep order and defend the city. Lacking uniforms, its members wore red and blue cockades on their hats—the colors of Paris. Lacking weapons, they first sought arms from Mayor Jacques de Flesselles, who unhelpfully produced only three muskets from the city hall. On the morning of July 14, the militia and tens of thousands of civilians overran the royal armory in the cellars of the National Veteran’s Residence, distributing thirty- two thousand muskets among the people.

But muskets were useless without gunpowder or cartridges, and the city’s massive supplies of both were held within the medieval fortress prison in the center of Paris, known as the Bastille. In recent decades, most of the prisoners held there had been incarcerated using the king’s power to indefinitely imprison suspects without trial or any chance of defense, and as such, the Bastille was a symbol of abusive absolutism. When it was surrounded by Parisians on July 14, 1789, it was protected by a 114 royal soldiers under the command of Bernard- René de Launay.

Allowed inside, two negotiators from city hall demanded the surrender of the fortress and the release of its military supplies. De Launay conferred with his officers, who advised that it would be dishonorable to surrender without orders from Versailles. As these talks were taking place, however, the crowds outside grew increasingly restless, scrounging up and distributing what ammunition they could find. Some had climbed over the roofs of nearby shops and managed to cut the chains suspending the outer drawbridge, which suddenly came crashing down and crushed one man to death before hundreds streamed over it and into the inner courtyard.

After fruitless shouts of warning, the guardians of the Bastille opened fire with muskets and cannon, killing ninety-eight among the crowd and wounding seventy-three. Hearing that Parisians were being massacred by de Launay, mutinous members of the French Guard arrived with two cannons taken from the National Veteran’s Residence—one a silver cannon gifted to Louis XIV by the King of Siam. Finding them useless against the eight-foot-thick walls of the fortress, they aimed the cannons instead at the inner drawbridge. Just then a note was sent out a slit in the door from de Launay: “We have twenty thousand pounds of powder. We shall blow up the garrison and the whole neighborhood,” he threatened, unless the mob agreed to accept the orderly surrender of the fortress.

The crowd angrily rejected the note and prepared to renew their attack on the inner drawbridge. De Launay, convinced by his soldiers not to commit mass suicide, sent one of his men with the key to open the drawbridge. It had barely finished coming down before the soldier’s hand—with the key still in its grasp—was cut off by the raging mob. Rushing inside, the crowd disarmed the defenders and dragged them outside, de Launay being seized by one of the French Guard named Stanislas Maillard. An attempt was made to keep de Launay safe, but the furious crowd beat and spat at him. As his fate was being discussed, de Launay shouted, “Let me die!” and suddenly kicked a nearby pastry cook named Desnot square in the groin.

De Launay was instantly set upon with knives and bayonets. His fallen body was then riddled with bullets. Desnot was handed a sword, but instead went to work with his own knife, cutting through De Launay’s neck to sever his head from his body. Six other Bastille defenders were massacred as they were marched to city hall. The mayor, de Flesselles, who had failed to supply the crowd with arms the previous day, was shot as he came out of city hall. He, too, was swiftly decapitated, and the mob paraded through the city streets, cheering, laughing, and singing with the heads of de Launay and de Flesselles held aloft on the end of pikes.

Having spent the fateful day of July 14, 1789 hunting, Louis XVI had retired to bed early, only to be awoken that evening to the news of mass rioting in Paris and of the fall of the Bastille. “So, it is a full-blown revolt?” the still sleepy king asked his attendees. “No, Sire,” answered the king’s Grand Master of the Wardrobe, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. “It is a full-blown revolution.”

Opening Quote

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