Revolution! France – Chapter 11 – The Brick Chronicle

One day after the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI visited the National Assembly, arriving on foot—unattended, save for his two brothers—and devoid of any pomp. The king vowed to work with the Assembly to restore order and announced that his royal troops would be removed from Paris. A delegation from the Assembly carried this news to Paris, and at the city hall, amid great cheers, Sylvain Bailly was appointed as the new mayor of Paris, and Lafayette was made commander of the citizen’s militia. As a show of loyalty to their king, Lafayette added a band of the king’s royal color—white—to cockades of the citizen soldiers, producing the tricolour that became the symbol of the revolution and the nation.

With restoration of full royal power now appearing hopeless without the aid of foreign intervention, the hardline Count of Artois and two other of the king’s brothers fled the country on July 16. The next day, Louis XVI sent word that he would travel to Paris to appear before the people. Unsure if he would ever come back, he wrote out a last will and testament, kissed his wife and children goodbye, and rode off in an undecorated carriage. Greeted before thousands at the front steps of the Paris City Hall, the king was given the key to the city and handed a tricolor cockade, which he obligingly pinned to his hat. At this gesture, the crowds erupted in cheers and shouts of “Our King! Our father!” and “Long live the king!”

The king returned to his relieved family at Versailles, and Paris enjoyed a few days of relative calm. But with bread prices still at an all-time high, riots soon flared up again in the provinces and in Paris. Lafayette attempted to keep order with his militia while cafe orators and street corner agitators, like lawyer Georges Danton, incited crowds to violence. On July 22, the mob turned it’s ferocity on Necker’s replacement, Joseph Foullon. Rumored to have stated that Parisians without bread would have to eat hay, seventy-fouryear- old Foullon was pulled from his carriage and made to walk to city hall with a crown of thorns on his head and a bundle of hay on his back—with only vinegar laced with pepper to quench his thirst.

“Aroused by evil conspirators . . . the people are insane, drunk with power,” noted Lafayette. Having recently saved others from imminent mob injustice on six other occasions, Lafayette again raced to the scene of a tumult, this time to prevent the crowd from hanging Foullon. “You want to kill this man without a judgment,” he scolded them. “That is an injustice which dishonors you and me. . . . I demand respect for the law, without which there is no liberty, without which I would not have supported the revolution in the New World and without which I will not support the revolution here.” With that, Lafayette escorted Foullon inside the doors of city hall.

But minutes later the mob dragged Foullon back outside and hung him to death from a lamppost. They next seized Foullon’s son-in-law Bertier de Sauvigny as he attempted to flee Paris. He was brought to city hall and forced to watch in terror as Matthieu “The Head Cutter” Jourdan decapitated Foullon and planted his head on a pike. With the crowd’s encouragement, Jourdan then butchered Bertier into pieces and held his heart aloft. Both heads were then paraded through the streets, with one head occasionally pushed against the other amid shouts of “Kiss papa! Kiss papa!” The scene was observed by Thomas Jefferson’s new replacement as minister to Paris, the peg-legged Gouverneur Morris. “Gracious God,” he remarked, “what a people!”

In the following days, children in Paris imitated the jubilant events they had witnessed, catching and killing feral cats and then parading on the streets with the severed feline heads on the ends of sticks. Disgusted by the actions of the crowds, and without enough disciplined men to control the violence, Lafayette resigned his post as commander of the militia. The Paris municipal government, desperate for his continued help, convinced him to stay on by voting to combine his citizen militia with the French Guard to form a newly dubbed National Guard of fifty thousand men, with Lafayette as their general.

At the same time this new force was imposing order in Paris, a general panic was sweeping through the provinces. Rumors ran wild that foreign armies had landed troops on French soil and that the nobility was paying armed brigands to burn crops and pillage the countryside in a plot to starve the peasantry into submission. In province after province, bands of armed peasants attacked the châteaus of their lords, looting and burning feudal records. Many believed themselves to be acting with the king’s blessing against a nobility that was conspiring to thwart his wishes to free his people from the bonds of feudalism.

Hoping to demonstrate a commitment to equality that might quell the peasant insurrections, on August 4, 1789, two of the wealthiest nobles of the National Assembly stood before their fellow delegates and announced a revocation of their own noble privileges. Caught up in what one later described as “a moment of patriotic drunkenness,” a succession of bishops and archbishops, dukes, marquis, and counts followed suit, and in a session that ran until sunrise the next morning, the Assembly effectively abolished the age-old feudal system and removed the political barriers between the estates, making all Frenchmen equal citizens before the law.

Still, neither these reforms nor the Assembly’s debates over the Constitution throughout September was putting food in the mouths of the masses of poor during the continuing bread shortage. The anger of the crowds—especially of the women who were counted on to provide bread from the market for their families—intensified when, on October 2, Jean-Paul Marat’s radical newspaper The People’s Friend reported on a gluttonous banquet held at Versailles during which, in the presence of the king and queen, royal soldiers boasted of their loyalty to the crown by disdainfully trampling the tricolored cockade underfoot with shouts of “Down with the Assembly!”

On the morning of October 5, seven thousand Parisian women, fed up with their inability to secure bread, converged on city hall carrying cudgels, sticks, and knives. They disarmed the guards and threatened to sack the building. A detachment of Lafayette’s National Guard arrived, but the soldiers made it clear to their officers that they refused to fire on the women. The building anger of the crowd was successfully deflected by one of the “conquerors of the Bastille,” Stanislas Maillard, who convinced the women that their best hope was to appeal directly to the king for bread. Beating on a drum, he began a chant of “To Versailles!”

The women agreed to travel to Versailles, but first they ransacked city hall to procure hundreds of muskets, pikes, sabers, and several cannons. A number of men joined with the women—including Maillard, who marched at their head. Other rabble rousing men dressed themselves as women and followed along. During the six-hour march to Versailles in the rain, more and more peasant women came out to join the mob carrying pitchforks and scythes. As they journeyed, the ambitions of the women increased: they would demand that the king return to Paris with them and take up residence among his people to ensure the availability of food in the city. Feelings toward the queen were less sentimental, with some openly calling for her death.

Arriving at five o’clock in the afternoon, the mob of women barged into the meeting hall of the National Assembly. Unprotected by guards, the delegates had no choice but to allow the tired and bedraggled women inside, many of whom lay on the benches to rest. As the Assembly attempted to continue their work, some of the women actively disrupted the proceedings. “Who’s that talking down there?” heckled one. “Make the chatterbox shut up! That’s not the point. The point is, we want bread.” When the Bishop of Langres stood up and cried, “Order! Order!” he was answered with shouts of “We don’t give a fuck for order. We want bread.”

Delegate Maximilien Robespierre gave the women a warmer welcome than most. Sympathizing with their complaints, he duly called for an inquiry into the bread shortage, which managed to deflect some of the crowd’s anger away from the Assembly. The king, who had again spent the day hunting, dismissed his wife’s urging that they flee Versailles. He ordered his palace guards not to fire on the women even if provoked and sent word to the Assembly that he would welcome into the palace a small delegation of women accompanied by the president of the Assembly.

“Sire, we want bread,” explained a seventeen-year-old Parisian flowerseller who had been picked as one of six women to represent the thousands outside. In response, the king promised, “I will order all the bread in Versailles to be collected and given to you.” At this, the girl fainted and had to be revived with smelling salts. The king embraced the girl and gave further promises of additional grain to soon be sent to Paris. For a small contingent of the women outside, this was considered enough of a concession, and Maillard lead a procession back to Paris. But for most, the king’s words were not enough and defiant chanting began. “Bread! Bread! Meat at six sous the pound! No more talking,” shouted one. “We’ll cut the Queen’s pretty throat! We’ll tear her skin to bits for ribbons!”

Lafayette had wanted his National Guard to stay put in Paris, but he soon found his soldiers ready to mutiny against him unless he agreed to lead them to Versailles in support of the women. Only after demanding that his men swear an oath not to harm the royal family did Lafayette reluctantly agree. Thousands of guardsmen then made the trek to Versailles that evening. They were followed by hundreds of armed citizens, including the notorious Jourdan “The Head Cutter.” Arriving at midnight, Lafayette was allowed into the palace where he assured the king and queen that they would come to no harm. By two o’clock in the morning, all was quiet, and those in the palace went to bed.

The queen soon awoke, however, to terrifying shouts from within the palace. “Where is the whore? We’ll wring her neck! We’ll tear her heart out!” shouted one. “I’ll have her entrails!” cried another. “I’ll have her kidneys in a fricassee!” At dawn, a mob of armed women led by “The Head Cutter” had found their way into the palace through an unlocked gate. A palace guard fired at them, killing a cabinet-maker, before being overrun and decapitated with an axe. A second guard shouted for the queen to run to safety just before he, too, was knocked to the ground and butchered. Marie Antoinette fled halfdressed through a secret passage to the king’s chambers just as the mob broke down her bedroom door.

Lafayette managed to clear the invaders out of the palace with his National Guardsmen, but the crowds outside were newly agitated, with repeated calls for the king to come to Paris, for the “Austrian whore” to be murdered, and for Lafayette—now accused of being a royalist traitor to the people—to have his head stuck on a pike. In an attempt to mollify them, the king went out on a balcony. But the crowd then called for the queen. She appeared next to him with her eleven-year-old daughter and four-year-old son. “No children! No children!” shouted the crowd. So Marie Antoinette sent them back inside and stood facing the crowd as several muskets were aimed at her. After two minutes of silence, a grudging respect was formed among some of the women who shouted, “Long live the queen!”

“My friends, I will go to Paris with my wife and children,” announced the king. That afternoon, the royal family traveled by carriage amid a long parade of National Guardsmen, wagons full of flour and wheat, and hordes of women holding aloft loaves of bread impaled on pikes as well as the heads of the two palace guards. Their new home was to be the Tuileries Palace in the heart of the city, which had fallen into disrepair and had been unused since the reign of Louis XVI’s greatgrandfather. “It’s very ugly here, Mother,” noted the sleepy four-yearold prince Louis-Charles.

The Assembly also moved to Paris, now meeting in a former royal riding academy situated alongside the gardens of the Tuileries. The more liberal reformist members sat themselves to the left of the president, while the more conservative royalists sat to his right, thus establishing the Left and the Right as terms to express political leanings. With the plentiful harvest of 1789, the famine crisis abated and the Assembly turned its attention to the continuing fiscal crisis. All lands that had belonged to the Church and the nobles who had fled the country were nationalized and their value used to back bonds worth about four billion dollars in today’s currency.

During a debate over capital punishment, delegate Joseph Guillotin proposed that all criminal executions should be carried out by use of a machine invented by Dr. Antoine Louis. Beheading was considered the most merciful form of execution and had previously been a privilege reserved for condemned nobles. The traditional use of sword or axe for decapitation was often messy and inefficient, though, while a precise machine, it was said, could allow the criminal to feel nothing but “a gentle caress.” The Assembly approved the construction of this device that, much to the dismay of Guillotin himself, would forever bear his name.

For the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille, Lafayette organized a massive public ceremony and feast. Soldiers from National Guard units that had been formed across the country gathered in Paris and paraded through a triumphal arch onto the fields of the Champ de Mars. There, a mass was held and Lafayette lead the soldiers, the Assembly, the royal family, and hundreds of thousands of citizens in swearing loyalty to the nation, the law, and the king. Present at the event were Common Sense author Thomas Paine and a little known twenty-year-old soldier from Corsica named Napoleon Bonaparte. Revelry in Paris continued over the next few days with orchestras, clowns, acrobats, jugglers, and fireworks to entertain the crowd.

The spirit of unity and goodwill engendered by this week-long celebration was not to last. With the Church stripped of its lands and power to tax, the Assembly now arranged for it to be directly supported by the government. Priests and bishops were to become salaried employees of the state and elected by their constituents. All religious orders deemed “superfluous” to the public good, including monasteries and convents, were to be closed. Most divisively, on November 27, 1790, the Assembly passed a law requiring all members of the clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the state. A few of the most liberal clergymen in the Assembly volunteered to be the first to swear their allegiance to the state.

Effectively replacing the authority of the Pope with that of the state, the new law caused immediate controversy and a schism within the Church. Ninety percent of the nation’s bishops refused to take the oath, as did more than half the priests. Pope Pius VI condemned the actions of the Assembly as heretical. Many parishioners, especially in the countryside, rallied to the defense of local clergy who refused to take the oath. But others considered these “refractory priests” to be committing treason, and the sentiment of anti-clericalism grew stronger among revolutionaries. In Paris, effigies of the Pope were burned, convents were broken into, and nuns were forced to endure humiliating public spankings.

Considering themselves the guardians of the true spirit of the revolution, many of the most liberal members of the Assembly formed a political club in Paris known as the Jacobins—their name being derived from the monastic hall in which their meetings were held. Maximilien Robespierre was elected president of the club in the spring of 1790 and, within a year, Jacobin clubs had sprung up across the nation. As fears grew that foreign armies would soon arrive to put down the revolution, Robespierre urged the Jacobins to worry more about the enemies of the revolution already within the country, especially those masquerading as its friends.

His fears were not unfounded: hero of the people Honoré Mirabeau, who was elected president of the Assembly in early 1791, was secretly in the pocket of the king. For nearly a year, Mirabeau was paid handsomely to promote the king’s interests in the deliberations of the Assembly. But Mirabeau’s health was in severe decline—between sessions at the Assembly, he applied leeches to his eyes to combat a terrible eye infection. He likely suffered from what the French called “the Italian disease” and the Italians called “the French disease”—syphilis. As many as one hundred thousand mourners attended his funeral when he died on April 2, 1791, leaving the king without a strong ally in the Assembly.

Later that month, Louis XVI intended to celebrate Easter with his family at a château in Saint-Cloud, just outside Paris. But their attempt to leave the Tuileries by carriage was physically prevented by a mob which neither Lafayette nor Mayor Bailly could convince to give way. Realizing he had become a prisoner in his own palace, and at the mercy of Parisian radicals, the king decided to take desperate action. On the night of June 19, 1791, Louis XVI had his son dressed up as a girl and the rest of his family put in bourgeois outfits. Asked by his older sister what he thought they were about to do, the six-year-old prince replied, “I suppose to act in a play since we have got these funny clothes on.”

With the help of a few trusted friends, the royal family successfully snuck out of the palace disguised as the family and attendants of a visiting Russian noblewoman. Leaving Paris behind, they made for the border fortress at Montmedy, where loyalist troops assured their protection. From there, they could muster a counterrevolutionary army with the help of the queen’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. But after traveling 150 miles, while stopped to change out their wearied horses, the king was spotted by a local postmaster named Jean Baptiste Drouet, who recognized the ruler after comparing his face to that on a coin in his pocket.

Drouet quickly organized citizens to help him apprehend the royal family at the next town, Varennes. Hundreds of National Guardsmen converged on the town as well as two members of the Assembly, Jérôme Pétion and Antoine Barnave, who rode in the carriage with the king and queen on the humiliating trip back to Paris. A military procession—with Lafayette at its head—returned the royal family to the Tuileries as hordes of Parisians looked on in unearthly silence. Notices had been posted throughout the streets warning: “Whoever applauds the King shall be flogged. Whoever insults him shall be hanged.”

The people’s trust in Lafayette was badly damaged. He was widely blamed for the lax security that had allowed the king to escape. A pamphlet by Georges Danton accused him of having masterminded the king’s escape, and Jean-Paul Marat went further in The People’s Friend, calling for the heads of both Lafayette and Mayor Bailly. On orders from the Assembly, Lafayette put the royal family under constant military guard. After making the necessary arrangements, Lafayette asked the king if he had any orders. “It seems to me,” replied Louis, “that I am more subject to your orders than you are to mine.”

Opening Quote

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