Reign of Fear: Story of French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (Cantiniére Tales) (13 page)

The day would be July 12
th
.

We followed Georges and Camille
swiftly to Palais Royal. The garden area was full of irascible people from the most revolutionary faubourg, the St-Antoine. Men were mostly quiet, but the rowdy children, angry women and their steady murmur about the future filled our senses. Necker was gone, many stated, disbelieving, angrily, demanding a reason why, though there was none to speak for the king. I saw Georges, standing like an anointed king, about to mount the stage with flair and gusto and I got ready, though I had anticipated it to be Camille to speak out. Danton wore a long, dark coat, a high wig, a severe cravat, and tight culottes, his face screwed up in anger, as he was getting ready to rouse the people. There were hundreds of men and women around him, I saw many from the Cordeliers, but Camille, who was clearly nervous, pulled his sleeve. Georges hesitated, but then it was indeed Camille who got up in front of Café de Foy, one of the many coffee houses.

H
aving conquered his fear, he did not stammer, at least not much. People seemed to hold him in a high esteem, and he saw supporting emotions in their willing faces, heard the agreement in their voices, especially since the Cordeliers in the crowd were supporting his speech, at times loudly. The crowd was growing and Camille’s eyes sought mine, and I nodded. I did not hear much of what he said at first, and then his voice grew in power. I saw Danton grin, his arms crossed, his pistols prominently peaking under his open coat. Men were surrounding them, scruffy men, workers who had thrown their lot with Georges, serving him. Sans-culottes, men in short jackets. Dangerous and fanatical, they would obey anything Georges asked of them.

Camille harangued the crowds; his hands clawed the air. He told them how he had written a series of pamphlets, but these were never published. In these pamphlets, he had yearned, begged, sought for answers to their problems, to the problems of men forever
afraid and hungry. It was not the filth of a kingdom that was the answer. It was easy to see why. There were soldiers around Paris, indeed, in Paris. Soldiers of the king who will shoot them, if they so much as kvetch against the king. ‘Is that freedom?’ He screamed.

They answered: ‘no!’

Camille was twirling around to address the whole crowd. ‘King’s right, perhaps, to abuse all of us?’ Then Camille went quiet. There was energy around us, in need of release. He went silent. It was my turn. I stepped forward, and climbed to a lamppost, mother pushing me from behind. I put a hand on my mouth and yelled with a clear, shrill voice. ‘What then? What should we do? Lead us!’ Many turned to look at me, a child asking such a question, and they roared agreement, the ground shaking.

He hesitated, licked his lips, about to test his strength. ‘We are the same,’ he scream
ed. ‘All of us in the same boat, rocked by the king. I am a foolish journalist, that man is a skilled tailor. The woman there, a humble washerwoman, another, a linen maker and a mother. We all share one thing, yearning for fairness, a thing denied for so long! Let us adopt the free leaves from the trees as a common uniform, and follow me! For if the foreign soldiers would kill us? Imprison the rest? Rape you women? What do we do? We will shoot back! Indeed, we will shoot first!’ He pulled a gun and shot it in the air. The sound echoed around and people went silent. It was as if Paris was holding its breath, for that was the first step in something much more radical than Mirabeau had planned for. They were all quiet, but I saw the energy build in their faces, determination grow, begging for release, and it was almost as if one could touch the building anger. I screamed: ‘yes!’ Then a woman screamed agreement, another followed, and a hundred, then a thousand hands got up, striking the air. The screams and yells were tumultuous, rolling across the Palais, turning heads in the far streets and across the Seine, the voices for a change, vibrating in the air. I screamed with the rest.

‘To Hotel de Invalides!’ Danton screamed. ‘The veterans guard the weapons there! We take them! Then we go take the powder!’ The powder
was in Bastille and the Cordeliers were about to make a bid for power, even over Mirabeau and the king.

I sought mother’s
determined and scared eyes, and we nodded, both resolute in our choices. Bastille and father.

I felt sorry for the trees in the Palais, for t
he crowd adopted green leaves as a mark of unity, and so we surged through the city, gathering momentum. The soldiers disappeared or joined us, police pretended to be busy, the nobles ran like hares, and fat churchmen lifted their skirts as thousands of irascible men and women, armed with what they could find surged to get the muskets from the invalids guarding them. The guards had been ordered to break the weapons, but they did not and so some three thousand muskets were lifted from their care.

That evening, we sent the word around, and ri
oted our hearts out, but only a few men obeyed Georges and Camille, or their henchmen to march on to Bastille. Instead, they went for easier prey. Many surprised soldiers were killed in the tumultuous city center, and that night, Paris was ours. Imagine that Marie. You doing what you will, and nobody to stop you. This was the power Georges had talked about. Masses, power of the masses, but even then, I sensed it was a restless beast. Let it lose, and you were at its mercy, and there were things done in the dark night that would be heaped on the suffering shoulders of Georges.

Next day, 13
th
of July, many mutinous French Guards joined us, and people armed themselves from gun crafter shops, and the houses of the unhappy nobles. Not all the finest muskets were made in the great factories of Saint-Étienne, so the crowd found many acceptable weapons, and there were more shots in the center of the city. There were sharp and crude skirmishes between the loyal king’s men and our rabble, but the French and mercenary soldiers withdrew from the city.

Mother and I stayed with Georges, who was cursing the rabble for not obeying the orders. It was a revolution, a rise against the authorities, so the men following him were natural survivalists and did not do easily jump to commands. I think this was the first time Georges saw his revolution from a different aspect, and held some understanding for the choices of those in the National Assembly. Not everything could be subjected to anarchy. Danton, many of the Cordeliers struggled to get us moving for Bastille, but again, that
long day and tired night, most people did what they would. There were fires in the unfortunate city.

Mother and I had been running around with the crowd all the hours o
f the dark, looking for a musket. She wanted one, in case Georges managed to pull together a surge for the Bastille, and should it fall, and should we see father, we needed tools to teach him about his many mistakes, if he did not already understand the severity of his crimes towards his own family. Mother found one in a looted house of a noble family, the servant who had been wielding it in defense of the house dead. She grabbed it, along with the shot and powder and so we finally slept, a fitful sleep, only for few hours, and then we were raised. That day, we would do a great deed.

Danton and Camille had toiled all night to scrape up a thousand people willing to hear them. So, finally, they
led us for Bastille. It was 14
th
of July. I got lost from the mother, and rode on a nervous horse with some other children, and never had I been as excited, yet afraid, as we might meet with father and deal with him, one way or the other. The crowd finally marched on towards Bastille through chaotic streets clamoring with men and women. Few people were working; the sun was shining brightly, as if warming our way to the fort. Dogs barked, people laughed, happy and determined, some drunk. Officials and soldiers hid or joined us.

Then we saw it, the high, bleak walls, and brooding medieval towers, and the ugly drawbridge was retracted. The crowd shuffled towards it purposefully, even when we saw men with
dangerous muskets on the crenellations and the walls. There were fancy red coats to be seen, for the King’s Swiss Guard held the fort, not the invalids we were expecting. People screamed at them and spat at the direction of the fort. Danton and his like had done a good job, even if our unruly mob had given the fort time to be reinforced. The crowd wanted to tear it down, with bare hands if needed.

There were but a few prisoners inside, but the fort, where they stored the gunpowder, was the symbol of unconquerable power. Yet, impregnable or not, Marie, imagine the guardsmen faces as they witnessed the mob with nearly thousand heads screaming for them to open the gate.
Frenchmen and women, children were there, all angry. I think they did not know what to think, what to do. Bernard-René de Launay, an unimaginative officer, commanded the fort. He had immediately known there was trouble brewing when he heard of the theft of the muskets. He had been grateful for the Swiss, but in his heart, he had no wish to hold the fort if it cost Paris hundreds of lives. By ten in the morning, there was an uneasy silence, as Camille sent daring men to negotiate. We wanted the powder, but the negotiators also wanted the fort and De Launay would not have that. The mood got mordacious, the negotiations stalled.

I saw Georges walking around, offering drinks to the men of faubourg St-Antoine. They spoke
gravely, nodded, prepared, prayed and made small jokes and we saw this often in the future, when soldiers prepared for battle. I saw an ugly man with greasy hair following Georges around, scowling like a brute, a man I was to know later. Georges spotted me and grinned as he came over. ‘It will start soon. If and when you see your father, dear, keep him alive for me. Do not fail. I have men looking for him as well.’ I nodded though I was afraid.

I would fail him if I could and I hoped he would understand.

Soon, they were talking to other men and women, inciting them and so it was, that at half-past one in the afternoon, like a storm, the crowd surged towards the gate. We saw the Swiss Guard and the invalids rouse themselves in surprise, heard command words, and saw them shoot down. Cracks and screams filled the morning air. I saw men and women stagger, fall. I had not seen anything hit them, but then a tall officer on the wall aimed at a woman yelling crude insults, and her face splattered nastily, bits of bone and forehead flying in the air. The crowd was already angry, now it was mad with bloodlust. They shot back with what they had. One guard staggered around, throw his arms up, and fell back with a shriek, none others, but we were hurting, and I was afraid for mother was with the crowd. At half past three, we had lost nearly a hundred men and women, but the eight hundred who remained, led by Danton with a bullet hole in his dark jacket, stayed put, demanding the gate be opened, drawbridge lowered.

Things changed when the French Guards clambered up
ponderously. We turned to look at them, determined soldiers in their fine uniforms, the muskets slung over their shoulders, and we briefly worried that the cowardly king had finally mustered the will to act, but these rogue soldiers were with us, and they had brutish cannon with them. Swiftly the men in uniforms unlimbered the weapon and pointed it at the entrance, the crowd disappearing from the line of sight like ocean at low tide. Now, de Launay withered. His officers had told him to stand fast, but he blanched. If the crowd got through to the courtyard, he would have to commence a slaughter of horrible proportions. He was already sick and terrified with the death he had sowed. He contemplated on surrender, on blowing the powder up with the fort and the hapless defenders with it. He was a desperate man, about to fail his sad king and holy duty, yet also unable to mow down a thousand Parisians, unlike Napoleon in 1798, who had no qualms about such rash actions. The cannon started to shoot at the unfortunate gate. Such a sound I had never heard, and the shock of it put me on my rump, as I was standing near it. The soldiers grinned like devils, enjoying the unusual target practice.

I remember scanning the windows, holding my ears, wondering if I would see his face, fathers. I did not see mother in the crowd, but if she was there, she was likely doing the same. Soon, the gate was giving in, the hinges giving up as the balls screamed and hit the massive constructions with
sharp cracks and loud booms, but the drawbridge was still up. People were gathering wagons to push to the moat so we could scale it.

I was helping a wounded brewer, when I saw the drawbridge lowering itself, and so it was that someone inside joined our cause, and thus doomed de Launay and several guards
in to a painful death. The crowd rushed in, green leaves flashing from their belts and hats and they screamed in anger. I joined them, leaving the injured man, who was cursing in pain.

I grabbed a small pike torn from an iron fence, dropped by a child who had died with a bullet in his spine, and eyes wide I ran past the corpses and the wounded. Inside, I saw an officer being dragged down some stairs to the courtyard. I saw an invalid guardsman getting shot in his ear, begging for mercy, and some
raging women held a man down, cutting away his pants and apparently his privates, crudely. I felt nauseous, spat and gagged with a fouled mouth, and eyed some wild revolutionaries running up stairs to the fort. I followed them. They ransacked a formerly fine guard room, one man grabbing a bottle of something red and fermented, a woman opening drawers in a crude table, one man shrieked as he fell down stairs in his haste. The crowd, the voices, the chaos around made me feel at loss, the screams were atrocious. A red coated guard was dragged by, his eyes filled with terror. ‘Free the prisoners, kill the guards!’ the scream full of blood lust went up from the courtyard. I panicked. I had to find father.