The young republic was indeed under threat. Following the death of Louis XVI, European monarchs had formed a coalition joining the Austrians and Prussians against France, including Britain, Spain, Russia, the Netherlands, and Sardinia. French armies were forced to retreat as Austrians overran Belgium, the French position collapsed in the Netherlands, and the Spanish
invaded to the south. Within France, in the Vendée, a Catholic region southwest of the Loire, forced conscription to the revolutionary army finally stirred a brutal royalist uprising. Counterrevolutionary centers spread rapidly throughout France, and growing food shortages and inflation prompted street riots in many provincial towns.
In Paris, revolutionary leaders were determined to preserve the gains of the revolution and establish ways of crushing opposition. “Be terrible to dispense the people from being so,” urged Georges Danton to the Convention. Danton, who had inspired the insurrection at the Tuileries, now instigated the creation of a special court, with powers to try political prisoners, notably anyone suspected of royalist sympathies. This Revolutionary Tribunal was created on March 10, 1793, and was soon to become a key instrument of the Terror. At the Convention, Robespierre urged that Marie-Antoinette be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal for “violations against the liberty and security of the State.” “The time has come,” he declared on March 27, “for patriots to rekindle their vigorous and immortal hatred of those who are called kings.”
A week later, on April 6, 1793, a special committee was created with Danton as its head: The Committee of Public Safety. This was charged with the power to raise new armies, organize food supplies and save the republic from its internal and external enemies. Any suspects were to be ruthlessly hunted out and cut down. Within a week, several prominent aristocrats were arrested, including the king’s cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, now known as Philippe Égalité. Robespierre then initiated an attack on the moderate republican leaders at the Convention—the Girondins. He blamed them for the treasonable defection of the French general Dumouriez—who had links with the Girondins—to Austria. In the prevailing atmosphere of betrayal and suspicion, there was no hiding place for any “traitors.”
The royal family soon faced further restrictions and humiliations. Late in the evening on April 20, they had just gone to bed when Jacques-René Hébert arrived with four other officials from the Commune. “We rose hastily,” said Marie-Thérèse. “They read us a decree of the Convention ordering that we be carefully searched, even the mattresses. My poor brother was
asleep; they pulled him roughly out of his bed, to search it; my mother held him, shivering with cold.” Although the guards searched for hours, until four in the morning, they found just a few last remaining treasures. “An address of a shop my mother always kept, a stick of sealing wax from my aunt, and from me a Sacred Heart of Jesus.” Marie-Thérèse thought they seemed “furious to find nothing but trifles.” Later they returned to remove a hat from Madame Élisabeth. She insisted that it was the king’s hat, but the municipals wanted to take it as “a suspicious object.” She begged to keep it “for the love of her brother.” It was no use. They carried away the hat.
The strain of their restricted life began to take its toll on Louis-Charles. “The want of air and exercise did him much harm,” observed his sister. “Also the sort of life the poor child lived, in the midst of tears and shocks, alarm and continual terrors at just eight years of age.” That spring he began to complain repeatedly of a pain in his side, which hurt him when he laughed and “suffocated him when he lay down.” By early May, he was suffering from bad headaches and attacks of fever and convulsions, not to mention a worm infestation. His mother anxiously demanded that he see his former royal physician, Dr. Brunier, but the Commune refused. As his condition deteriorated they did permit him see the prison doctor, a Dr. Thierry. Thierry was worried “and had the kindness to go and consult Brunier about my brother’s illness,” said Marie-Thérèse. Throughout May, Marie-Antoinette and Élisabeth nursed him night and day.
As Louis-Charles recovered in early June, there was a dramatic coup d’état against the moderate Girondins at the National Convention. Twenty-nine leading Girondists were arrested on June 2 and many were subsequently guillotined. With the fall of the Girondins, the Jacobins and Robespierre’s extremist Mountain party now dominated the Convention. In the prevailing atmosphere of fear and betrayal, where even well-intentioned leaders could find themselves facing the guillotine, no chances were going to be taken with the royal hostages. Commune officials had already interrogated guards at the Temple for details of any conspiracy. Under pressure from her husband, Madame Tison had repeatedly betrayed the queen. She had claimed that Marie-Antoinette continued a secret correspondence with royalists, and
denounced the royal doctor, Brunier, and the guards, Toulan and Lepître, who had been forced to leave. In late June, the Committee of Public Safety learned of yet another plot to rescue the boy king and his mother by force under the leadership of the royalist Baron Jean-Pierre de Batz. Batz’s plan was only foiled by the vigilance of Commissioner Antoine Simon, who was alerted to the plot and rushed back to the Temple in a frantic state to check the prisoners.
The Committee of Public Safety soon devised a cruel way of stepping up security. When Madame Tison heard of their pitiless plans, she was tortured with remorse at having betrayed the royal family and became distraught and confused. She repeatedly threw herself at the queen’s feet, raving hysterically and begging for pardon; gradually she lost her mind altogether. On July 1, it took eight men to take her forcibly from the Tower to the hospital at the Hôtel Dieu. A guard was placed over her, in case, in her incoherent ramblings, she revealed other secrets.
On the night of July 3 at ten o’clock, the royal family heard the dreaded sounds of a party of municipal officers approaching. The bolts flew back and officers came into Marie-Antoinette’s room, disturbing the peaceful scene; she was sewing by candlelight, her son was asleep in bed nearby, with a shawl wrapped over him to shield him from the light. One of the men read out the decree of the Commune: the “Son of Capet” was to be immediately separated from his mother and lodged in a more secure room in the Tower.
Marie-Antoinette was beside herself. Weak and emaciated as she was, she rose to defend her son with determined ferocity. “She was struck down by this cruel order,” wrote Marie-Thérèse, and pleaded forcefully with them to let him stay. Louis-Charles woke up, realized what was happening and “flung himself into my mother’s arms, imploring not to be taken from her.” The idea of parting with her young son and abandoning him to God knows what fate was utter agony for her. The officers became increasingly threatening, but “she would not give up her son,” wrote Marie-Thérèse, and blocked the guards from reaching him on the bed behind her. “They were absolutely determined to have him and threatened to employ violence and call up the guard.” Marie-Antoinette would not yield. “She told them they
would have to kill her before they could tear her child from her,” said Marie-Thérèse. Guards were summoned. “An hour passed in resistance on her part, in threats and insults from the municipals, in tears and efforts from all of us.”
“At last they threatened my mother so positively to kill him and us also that she had to yield for love of us,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. “We rose, my aunt and I, for my poor mother no longer had any strength. After we had dressed him, she took him and gave him into the hands of the municipals herself, bathing him with her tears and overwhelmed with a sense of foreboding that she would never see him again.” As for Louis-Charles, “the poor little boy kissed us all very tenderly and went away with the guards, crying his heart out.”
The guards pushed the boy along the corridor and down the spiral stairway into a room on the floor below. It was the king’s room. Louis-Charles had not been here since that tearful evening when he last saw his father, shortly before his execution. The two heavy security doors closed behind him; the bolts were drawn and the padlocks firmly secured. There was the sound of the guards’ footsteps growing fainter as they went away downstairs. He was locked up in the place that held such frightening memories for him, with no father and no mother, terrified of what might happen next. He cried hysterically, quite unable to stop, for two days.
Although Marie-Antoinette could not see him, she could hear his inconsolable sobbing in the room immediately below. For this to happen to her treasured little
chou d’amour
was more than she could bear. She was near collapse, beyond consolation, soaked in grief. She begged the guards incessantly to let her see him. “Why is he crying?” she asked. “What are they doing to him?” It was easy to imagine the worst.
When her sister-in-law exhorted her to try to find strength in her faith, Marie-Antoinette could not. “God himself has forsaken me,” she said to Élisabeth. “I no longer dare to pray.”
THE YOUNG “SANS-CULOTTE”
The little whelp must lose the recollection of his royalty … and his mother be chopped up like mincemeat …
—JACQUES-RENÉ HÉBERT
Forgive him, my dear sister. Think of his age and how easy it is to make a child say what one wishes, and even what he does not comprehend.
—MARIE-ANTOINETTE, OCTOBER 1793
W
alking down the steep stone steps to the floor below, escorted by six commissioners, the weeping eight-year-old boy was now a pawn in a fast-changing political landscape. He had been recognized as king by many countries, including England, Austria, Portugal, Russia, and the United States of America. Within France, aristocrats, members of the clergy, even some commoners, recognized the child prisoner as monarch. Consequently the child represented a real danger to leaders of the revolution who feared that proroyalists both in France and neighboring countries might rally around the boy king. They were haunted by comparisons with English history; Charles I, like Louis XVI, had been executed, yet his son was eventually restored to the throne. How could France stop history from repeating itself?
A revolution led by high ideals could not openly countenance the outright
murder
of a small boy. Some argued plainly that murdering the boy might stir up public opinion against the revolution. He was too young to be tried and executed like his father. There was also the genuine possibility that he could become a useful bargaining chip to the revolutionary government should France need to negotiate with its enemies. For the moment, Louis-Charles was best kept alive. Consequently, the aim of the Commune was to keep Louis-Charles in prison under close guard, but to “reeducate” him as a good little citizen or
sans-culotte.
He was to understand the evils of the autocratic royal regime that his family had inflicted on France, and to grow up sympathetic to the high ideals of the revolutionary government. Once fully reeducated he would no longer be a threat to the revolution but a committed republican—at least, this was the theory. The man selected for this great honor of serving the revolutionary cause as teacher and guardian to the “son of Capet” was waiting for him in the king’s former apartments below. It was none other than the shoemaker, Commissioner Antoine Simon.
In the dimly lit room, Louis-Charles saw an older man who could not present a more stark contrast to his previous governesses, the sensitive Gabrielle de Polignac or the disciplined and dignified Madame de Tourzel. Antoine Simon was fifty-seven years old, with “a square, robust build, tanned complexion and a coarse face, and with black hair coming down to his eyebrows and thick whiskers.” He was known for his rough and brutish demeanor; “he had a gruff, short way of talking and insolent gestures.” Ironically, the revolution had appointed an almost illiterate man as “tutor” who would later be described by Goret, one of his colleagues at the Temple, as “a poor wretch without education or instruction.”
For Antoine Simon, this prestigious appointment represented the high point in his working life. He had a string of failed enterprises behind him. Despite his early training as a master shoemaker, he had been unable to make a living at this trade and had tried running a cheap eating-house near the Seine, which, like almost anything he tackled, ended in disaster. A poor businessman, careless and lazy, he had soon run up debts and lived in abject poverty. He had turned once more to shoemaking, resoling shoes at home, where he lived in a single room with his wife. When she died they were so
short of money he had been forced to pawn his wife’s clothes to pay for her burial. Later, he had married again, a charwoman called Marie-Jeanne Aladame, who had the considerable attraction of a dowry of one thousand livres, which he soon squandered repaying his debts. Bitter and frustrated about his lack of business success, he increasingly raged at the social order which he saw as based on privilege and patronage to favor a rich elite at the expense of the poor.
Simon seized on the ideas of the revolution. It gave expression to all his deeply held prejudices against authority that he had nursed for so long, and provided him with a much-wanted opportunity to satisfy his ambitions. He rapidly digested all the revolutionary rhetoric and could impress others with his loyalty and commitment to the cause; his patriotic zeal even came to the attention of Robespierre. Simon was one of four commissioners selected to transfer the royal family from the Assembly to the Temple in August 1792. After this, he had been chosen to search the royal prisoners’ rooms and remove any writing materials, and later to help supervise general security arrangements at the Temple. His rapid elevation owed much to the patronage of Anaxagoras Chaumette, procurator of the Commune, and his deputy, Jacques-René Hébert. Both knew Simon well and recognized that he was a simple man whom they could easily manipulate and control, a man who would blindly follow their lead. Consequently, beyond Simon’s wildest expectations, in July 1793, he found himself appointed as tutor to the son of the former king. His wife soon joined him at the Temple. “I’ve got a grand position,” she told a friend proudly. “They’ll take me there in a carriage, and perhaps something better still.”
For the first few days, Simon could make no progress. The captive child sat on a chair “in the darkest corner of the room” and wept, “his eyes constantly turned toward the door … every time he heard the noise of the bolts and the grating of keys in the locks.” Nothing in Louis-Charles’s background had prepared him for his new situation. At Versailles, for the first four years of his life he had been accustomed to being treated with deference and respect as a royal prince and had been led to believe that one day he would inherit the throne as the king of all France. Even after the revolution,
in the Tuileries and later in the Tower, though aware that his family was in danger, and increasingly puzzled and confused by events, he had been shielded from the worst by his parents and always enjoyed his mother’s devoted attention. Now he shared a room with a brutish, illiterate man with a steely expression; “often he remained motionless and tears rolled down his cheeks.” Simon could scarcely get a word from him.
Since he was so visibly distressed, Simon did not dare take him outside for a walk on the battlements or in the garden where he might be seen. This fuelled speculation that the boy had indeed escaped. There were “sightings” all over France. Some claimed he had been abducted to a royal palace, perhaps Saint-Cloud, to be proclaimed king; others believed he had been kidnapped by leading members of the Commune who hoped to improve their own political standing. The rumors became so persistent that on July 6, Maximilien Robespierre was obliged to reassure members of the Convention that their royal hostage was indeed safely behind bars. The following day officials from the Committee of Public Safety went to check on the child for themselves.
They found the young boy in his room and immediately led him into the garden so he could be seen by the guards. Despite the obvious importance of the officials, Louis-Charles found the courage to protest at his treatment. “I want to know what law you are using that says I should be separated from my mother,” he demanded bravely. “Show me this law. I want to see it!” He was sharply reproved and told to “hold his tongue.” The deputation then went to see Marie-Antoinette, where she, in turn, complained “of the cruelty shown in taking her son from her.” The officials replied that he was being well attended. Marie-Antoinette persisted. “He has never been away from me … . I cannot believe that the convention will fail to see how legitimate are my complaints.” However, the deputation dismissed her concerns and left, satisfied that their pawn had not escaped. Orders were given by the Commune that each day Louis-Charles should exercise in the garden, not out of concern for his health, but to ensure that he was seen and help prevent further rumors.
Initially, Simon appears to have treated Louis-Charles reasonably well in
that he was fed, washed and his clothes were regularly cleaned. Temple records show he was allowed to play with a collection of toys, including a remarkable aviary retrieved from a royal storehouse, which was “made entirely of silver with molded, gilded garlands … chimes and a bird organ.” Best of all, every two weeks when clean linens arrived, he was allowed to play with the laundry woman’s daughter, a girl called Clouet.
Simon and his wife may well have tried to win the boy’s confidence before they embarked on their task of “effacing the stigma of royalty from his brow” and “shading it with a red cap instead of a crown.” Yet Simon was under no illusion that the aim of his captors at the Commune was to break the boy’s will, to brainwash him and force him to accept their authority and control. Anaxagoras Chaumette, the leader of the Commune, had declared, “I will make him lose the idea of his rank.” Although Jacques-René Hébert was Chaumette’s deputy, for many he was the real leader of the two, and he expressed their aims even more forcefully. Louis-Charles was nothing more than “a little monkey sired by an ape,” whose mother, “the Austrian tigress should be chopped up like mincemeat … . The little whelp must lose the recollection of his royalty.”
There is evidence that the leaders of the Commune gave their tacit approval for Simon to go much further. On July 3, 1793, Simon questioned his superiors quite bluntly about their aims. “Citizens, what have you decided about the wolf cub? He has been taught to be insolent but I shall know how to tame him. Hard luck if he dies because of it! I will not answer for that. After all, what do you want done with him? To deport him? To kill him? To poison him?” The unequivocal answer from the members of the Commune was, “We want to get rid of him!” Inspired by these men, in the secret, hidden environment of the Tower, a pattern of abuse began to develop, which, unchecked, grew worse and more terrible over time.
Through a narrow opening in the wall, by the toilet stairway—according to a secret note from Princess Élisabeth to Turgy—Marie-Antoinette now spent her days anxiously watching and waiting for a fleeting glimpse of her son. “The sole pleasure my mother had was to see him through that little
chink as he passed in the distance,” wrote her daughter. “She stayed there for hours, watching for the instant when she could see her child; it was her sole hope, her sole occupation.” In the days that followed his separation she could hear his distressed cries for her; she could only imagine what he was suffering. “My mother’s anguish was at its height when she learned that Simon, the shoemaker, whom she had seen as a municipal, was entrusted with the care of the unfortunate child,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. Although Marie-Antoinette repeatedly asked after him, she “rarely heard news of him” and had little idea of what might be going on in the rooms below.
Marie-Antoinette still could not quite bring herself to believe that her family would abandon her and her children. She had, after all, been the instrument of political initiative inspired by her mother to bring Austria and France closer together. However, to the Austrians, Marie-Antoinette had obviously become expendable. The king had been executed, which the Austrians deplored; but to negotiate with the abhorrent revolutionary government for the queen’s release was regarded by Austria and her allies as a tactical mistake. As she waited in the Tower, straining for any sight of her son through the crack, Marie-Antoinette was on her own.
Her fate seemed inextricably linked with events beyond her control. During the summer of 1793, the revolutionary government feared a ring of opposition tightening around Paris. To the west, there were royalist uprisings in Normandy, Brittany, and further down the coast in the Vendée. To the south, parts of Provence, the Rhône valley, and Lyon were in rebellion. The Austrian army was threatening Paris from the north, down the valley of the river Oise and the river Marne. On July 26 the important frontier stronghold of Valenciennes, north of Paris, fell into Austrian hands. Extreme threats called for extreme measures and the very next day, Maximilien Robespierre was elected by the National Convention to the Committee of Public Safety, empowered to crush the enemies of the revolution once and for all. Together with his allies, Saint-Just and Couthon, Robespierre now held the balance of power in this committee; the more “conciliatory” Danton had left earlier in the month. Robespierre believed in the power of a political system temporarily backed by terror. “The revolutionary government owes
the good citizens complete national protection,” he decreed. “It owes only death to the people’s enemies.” Saint-Just went even further: “The republic consists in the extermination of everything that opposes it.” Under the influence of the “Incorruptible,” as Robespierre became known, the Reign of Terror was about to begin.
The revolutionary government now lashed out at France’s royal past with a renewed fervor determined to whip up hatred of the royal tyrants. Three days after Robespierre joined the Committee of Public Safety, a decree was passed which ordered that “the tombs and mausoleums of the former kings in the church of Saint-Denis and elsewhere … be destroyed.” In the name of national justice,
sans-culottes
were instructed to storm the ancient tombs, now despised symbols of their royal past, on the anniversary of the insurrection at the Tuileries. Statues and ornaments were stolen, coffins were opened and looted for souvenirs—the shoulder blade of Hugues Capet, the beard of Henry IV—bodies were unceremoniously dumped in two large pits nearby. There were even reports of revolutionaries playing
boules,
using the ancient bones of kings as skittles. According to one account, the remains of kings, once revered for up to twelve centuries, were now no more than “common dust, scattered to the wind.”