The crowds were so great it was evening before they finally reached the Tuileries. As they stepped down from the carriage someone tried to attack the queen. The dauphin was snatched from her and whisked to safety by officials as others helped the queen into the palace. Louis-Charles was becoming increasingly terrified at the violence targeted directly at the royal family. “As soon as we arrived in Varennes we were sent back. Do you know why?” he asked his valet, François Hüe, as he struggled to make sense of it
all. He was not easily comforted and that night, once again, he was woken with violent nightmares of being eaten alive by wolves.
As the dauphin fell into a fitful sleep, “guards were placed over the whole family, with orders not to let them out of sight and to stay night and day in their chambers.” The next day the Assembly provisionally suspended Louis from his royal functions. The once-untouchable king and queen were now finally reduced to the powerless symbols of a vanishing world.
The king’s support collapsed after his abortive flight to Varennes. Those who had remained loyal to the monarchy now questioned the motives of a king who had tried to flee, exposing his people to the risk of civil war. Those who had opposed the monarchy had a tangible weapon: here was evidence that the king would betray his people. Imprisoned in the Tuileries, with little support in the Assembly or outside it, in September 1791, the king reluctantly signed the new constitution. The once-supreme Bourbon ruler was now, by law, no more than a figurehead, stripped of his powers.
Louis still clung to the hope that this would mark an end to the revolution and that France would settle down as a constitutional monarchy. Yet when he inaugurated the new Legislative Assembly in October, demands for still further change gathered momentum. Conflicts grew between the moderates and the extremists in the Assembly. The key battlegrounds were over the growing number of émigrés and the clergy. What measures should be taken to protect France from the émigrés who might be plotting counterrevolution? How could the clergy who had refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the constitution be brought into line?
The king found himself facing a crisis in November, when the Assembly introduced a punitive decree: any priest who had not signed the oath would lose his pension and could be driven from his parish. This was presented to the king for his approval under the new constitution. As crowds gathered menacingly outside the Tuileries demanding that he sign, Louis wrestled with his conscience. His only remaining power was a delaying veto. If he used this he would infuriate the Assembly and the Parisian people, but how could he approve such a measure when the constitution promised “freedom
to every man … to practice the religion of his choice?” The king vetoed the decree.
The news outraged deputies at the Assembly. The extremists, largely drawn from a political club known as the Jacobins, sought to limit the king’s power still further. Maximilien Robespierre was not a member of the Legislative Assembly, but was highly influential in the Jacobin Club and could exploit its powerful network throughout the country to influence opinion. Although he was not a good speaker, he was a skilled strategist, whose passionate appeals for
“patrie”
and “virtue” stirred political activists. “I will defend first and foremost the poor,” he declared, as he campaigned against the privileges of the nobility and the monarchy. He found support in other prominent republicans such as the barrister Georges Danton, leader of the extremist Cordeliers’ Club.
Those opposed to the monarchy could turn to militant journalists such as Camille Desmoulins and Jacques-René Hébert to whip up public opinion in their favor. Hébert was a zealot for the cause and, with killing cruelty, week after week in his journal,
Le Père Duchesne,
he stirred up loathing of the royal tyrants. They were dehumanized and turned into hate objects. The king, for so long the “royal cuckold” or “fat pig,” was now “the Royal Veto,” an animal “about five feet, five inches long … as timid as a mouse and as stupid as an ostrich … who eats, or rather, sloppily devours, anything one throws at him.” The “Female Royal Veto” was “a monster found in Vienna … lanky, hideous, frightful … who eats France’s money in the hope of one day devouring the French, one by one.” Marie-Thérèse was “designed like the spiders of the French Cape, to suck the blood of slaves.” As for “the delphinus … whose son is he?” The endless stream of vituperation soaked into the consciousness of Parisians. It became easy to see the royal family as the terrible Machiavellian enemy gorged from preying on innocent French people.
The queen, drawing on all the strength of her character, was indeed now playing a formidable, duplicitous role. Determined to save the throne, that autumn she charmed the moderates in the Assembly with her apparent
support for the constitution, while she was, in fact, in secret correspondence with foreign courts and her devoted Fersen. Count Fersen had escaped to Brussels where he joined the king’s brother, Provence, and was devastated to hear of the royal family’s recapture at Varennes. “Put your mind at rest; we are alive … . I exist,” the queen reassured him as she adapted to life closely surrounded by spies and enemies; just to see her own son, an army of guards would follow her. “My only hope,” she said, “is that my son at least can be happy … . When I am very sad, I take my little boy in my arms, I kiss him with all my heart and this consoles me for a time.”
While Marie-Antoinette was writing in code to her brother, the Emperor Leopold, asking him to support the French monarchy, Fersen went on a desperate diplomatic tour of European capitals. In February 1792, he risked his life in a daring mission to return to France in disguise to see the queen in the Tuileries. Despite their efforts, in March the Austrian Emperor Leopold II died suddenly, to be replaced by Marie-Antoinette’s nephew, Francis II. Marie-Antoinette could not be sure that Emperor Francis would intervene on her behalf and feared betrayal.
By spring 1792, the new powers in France were growing increasingly militaristic, convinced that neighboring countries would be forced to act against their own population’s possible political awakening. Rumors were rife of an immediate attack against France by an alliance of Austrians and Prussians, supported by émigré forces. Soon there were calls upon all patriots to defend their country as the warmongering verged on hysteria. In April, France declared war on Austria. Marie-Antoinette’s position became intolerable. Many people were convinced that
l’Autrichienne
who wished to “bathe in the blood of French people” was an enemy agent, betraying the nation. When a French campaign in the Netherlands went badly, fears were mounting that the Austrians and Prussians would march on Paris and restore the “royal tyrants.”
Despite the pressures of war the Assembly continued to persecute the clergy. Any priest still loyal to Rome denounced by more than twenty citizens was to be deported to the French colony of Guiana, a fate that
was certain death, since leprosy and malaria were endemic in the colony. This decree was sent to the king for his approval. After much heart searching and anguish, he again used his veto and refused to sign this decree.
The very next day, June 20, 1792, thousands of citizens, angered by the king’s use of his veto, gathered around the palace. “This armed procession began to file before our windows, and no idea can be formed of the insults they said to us,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. On their banners was written, TREMBLE TYRANT; THE PEOPLE HAVE RISEN, and we could also hear cries of “Down with the veto! And other horrors!” Thirteen-year-old Marie-Thérèse witnessed what happened next. “Suddenly we saw the populace forcing the gates of the courtyard and rushing to the staircase of the chateau. It was a horrible sight to see and impossible to describe—that of these people with fury in their faces, armed with pikes and sabers, and pell-mell with them women half unclothed, resembling furies.” In all the turmoil, Marie-Antoinette tried to follow the king but was prevented. “Save my son!” she cried out. Immediately someone carried Louis-Charles away and she was unable to follow. “Her courage almost deserted her, when at last, entering my brother’s room she could not find him,” wrote Marie-Thérèse.
Meanwhile, the crowd surged upstairs armed with muskets, sabers and pikes. Madame de Tourzel describes the ordeal. “The king, seeing that the doors were going to be forced open, wanted to go out to meet the factionists and try to control them with his presence.” There was no time. The doors to the king’s rooms were axed down in seconds and the crowd burst in shouting, “The Austrian, where is she? Her head! Her head!” Élisabeth stood valiantly by her brother, and Madame de Tourzel describes her great bravery as she was mistaken for the queen. “She said to those around her, these sublime words: ‘Don’t disabuse them. If they take me for the queen, there may be time to save her.’”
The revolutionaries turned on the king and demanded that he sign the decrees of the Assembly. For over two hours, Louis tried to reason with them. He pointed out that he had acted in accordance with the constitution and in all conscience, he believed his actions were right. At the insistence of the crowd, to prove his loyalty to the revolution, he wore a
bonnet rouge,
the symbol of liberty, and toasted the health of the nation. After some hours, it became clear that the king would not yield.
Meanwhile, Marie-Antoinette, finally reunited with both her son and daughter, was forced to flee from the dauphin’s rooms as they could hear doors to the antechambers being hacked down. Accompanied by a few loyal allies, the Princesse de Lamballe and Madame de Tourzel, they tried to escape to the king’s bedroom, without success. Clinging to her children, she took refuge in the Council Chamber. Trapped behind a table before the hostile crowds, they were protected by just a few guards. For two hours they endured taunts and jeers as the angry hordes paraded past, some bearing “symbols of the most unspeakable barbarity,” wrote Madame Campan. There was a model gallows, “to which a dirty doll was suspended bearing the words
‘Marie-Antoinette à la lanterne,’
” to represent her hanging. There were model guillotines and a “board to which a bullock’s heart was fastened,” labelled “Heart of Louis XVI.” The seven-year-old dauphin, who was “shrouded in an enormous red cap,” was crying.
After several hours, the mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, arrived and dispersed the mob, pretending “to be much astonished at the danger the king had faced,” observed Marie-Thérèse. Traumatized, the royal family was finally reunited. Louis-Charles was so shocked by the day’s events that his usual sunny personality was stunned into complete silence as he clung to his parents in great relief. As for Marie-Thérèse, the endless succession of traumatic ordeals was rapidly undermining her. Already by nature Madame Sérieuse, she was losing “all the joy of childhood,” observed Madame de Tourzel’s daughter, Pauline, and she would lapse into deep and gloomy silences like her father.
For the next few days, the king’s bravery caused a popular swing in his favor. Nevertheless, behind the scenes the political landscape was changing fast. Robespierre, voted vice-president of the Jacobin Club in July, with well-argued cold cunning, persuaded his followers that the royal family was the main obstacle to establish his democracy—along with the constitution and Legislative Assembly that recognized the role of the king. Together with radicals drawn from the Cordeliers’ Club such as George Danton, Camille
Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, and Jacques-René Hébert, they played on people’s terror of a foreign invasion. The king and queen in the Tuileries were portrayed as being at the scheming center of interests that wanted to destroy France. When the Prussians entered the war, promising vengeance if the king and queen were harmed, collusion seemed only too likely. While moderates like La Fayette left the capital, National Guardsmen from the provinces poured into Paris. The highlight came on July 30, when five hundred National Guardsmen from Marseilles, recruited for their radicalism by their local Jacobin club, arrived in Paris singing the rousing
Marseillaise.
The revolutionaries became known as
sans-culottes
—meaning literally “without breeches”—since they were dressed in working men’s clothes: baggy trousers,
carmagnole
jackets and hats. Whipped up into a frenzy of hatred by the militant journalism of Hébert, Desmoulins, and others, the
sans-culottes
shared a common interest in inciting an insurrection against the “despicable tyrant” and the “colossus of despotism” in the Tuileries.
Inside the palace, clinging onto the last semblance of royalty, the queen was only too aware of the dangers. “On all sides,” wrote Madame Campan, “were heard the most jubilant outcries of people in a state of delirium almost as frightful as the explosion of their rage.” The queen wrote to Fersen in early August, “Our chief concern is to escape the assassin’s knives and to fight off the plotters who surround the throne on the verge of collapse. The factions no longer bother to hide their plans about murdering the royal family … . They merely disagree about the method.”
Events came to a head during the night of August 10, when an Insurrectionary Commune was established at Hôtel de Ville, and began to give orders to the National Guard, in effect challenging the Legislative Assembly and creating a revolutionary government. Soon after midnight, bells rang out across Paris—the insistent sound a call to arms and a death toll for the French monarchy. The insurgents began to gather and soon the streets around the Tuileries Palace were bristling with at least twenty thousand armed citizens.
Inside the palace, they could hear the tocsin ring out and the ominous sounds of the impending attack. The king had summoned nine hundred
Swiss guards in addition to the nine hundred gendarmes and 2,500 National Guards on duty at the palace, but only the Swiss guards could be relied upon to remain loyal. No one slept, except the little dauphin whose “calm and peaceful slumber formed the most striking contrast with the agitation which reigned in every heart,” wrote the Marquise de Tourzel. The queen, true emperor’s daughter, wanted to stand her ground and fight to the last. The king, in helpless despair, could see no solution to the impasse. The Attorney General of the department of Paris, Pierre Roederer, arrived and informed them they had no choice but to flee before they were murdered. “Imagine the situation of my unhappy parents during that horrible night,” wrote Marie-Thérèse, “expecting only carnage and death.” Early in the morning the king tried to rally his troops. The queen heard in despair as the king, dishevelled and downtrodden, was greeted with hoots of derision and shouts of
“Vive la Nation!”
by some of the palace National Guards, many of whom were now fraternizing with the protesters. “Some artillery men,” reported Marie-Thérèse, “dared turn their cannon against their king … a thing not believable if I did not declare that I saw it with my own eyes!”