Axel:
WAR AND DEATH
“D
ULCE ET DECORUM EST POR PATRIA MORI
”? Not in this case. As with most pivotal events of the Revolution, the origin of the war that broke out in the spring of 1792 lay not in such noble motives, but in partisan political disputes. In March of that year the Girondin party had succeeded the Constitutionalists as the leading faction in the Assembly; and they were hell-bent on plunging France into war in order to prove themselves indispensable to the nation. Ironically, the war was also championed by Marie Antoinette, who held to the delusional belief that the Austrian-Prussian coalition would liberate Paris in a matter of months. She did not even seem to realize the increased personal dangers the war would bring her: more than ever, she would now be looked on as the inimical
“Autrichienne,”
an enemy alien who incited increasingly hostile public sentiment. Her Austrian patriotism, in fact, did verge on treason when she revealed to me some French military plans she had overheard at a council meeting: “They plan to attack through Savoy and the Liège country and hope to gain something this way because the two flanks can not be protected,” she wrote me. “It is essential to take precautions on the Liège flank.” Not that the queen would look at this indiscretion as a treasonable act: in her view, the revolutionaries were as much of a threat to the French nation as they were to her personally.
Neither did Marie Antoinette realize that the war would make her personal life, and her communications with me, more difficult than ever. Eleanore Sullivan and Quentin Craufurd, who had provided our principal means of contact, had fled to Brussels after the declaration of war; before leaving, Craufurd had gone to pay his last respects to the queen, whom he found affable but sorrowful. “I have no illusions; there is no more happiness for me,” she said to him as they parted. She was fortunate that the Craufurds had a dependable housekeeper, a Madame Toscani, who had remained in Paris, and it was through her that the queen’s missives were now dispatched to me, smuggled out of the Tuileries.
Ever since the Varennes debacle the royal family had been obsessed by the possibility that they would be massacred. On June 19, 1792—just before the anniversary of Varennes—the king learned that the Paris mob was planning to invade the palace the next day. Certain that his end was near, he sent for his confessor. “I am through now with men,” he wrote that day in his diary. “I must turn to God…. I shall have courage.” He constantly reread the history of Charles I of England, who had been decapitated on grounds of incompetent rule. He had recently entered into a state of despondency so deep that on one occasion he did not utter a single word in ten days, not even to his family, except during the backgammon games he played with his sister, when he spoke the few words necessary to the game. Louis was right to be afraid. On June 20 a mob of some thirty thousand Parisians wearing the Jacobins’
“bonnets rouges
” burst into the Tuileries, screaming imprecations against “Monsieur and Madame Veto.” Bearing pikes and firearms, even cannon, the intruders flocked toward the center of the palace in search of the king. Just before the crowd had entered the palace, the monarchs had fled to different quarters. The king had gone upstairs to his study in the Oeil-de-Boeuf. The queen, her children, and a few of her ladies-in-waiting had sought refuge in a small secret passageway on the ground floor. The queen hid there, terrified, for over an hour, hearing nearby doors being
broken by hatchets, and men’s voices crying out for her blood. “They’re going to kill me,” she whispered to one of her women. She set out across a corridor for the Oeil-de-Boeuf, wanting to face death with the king. But a man she did not know—a royalist called the Chevalier de Rougeville, who would reenter her life later in dramatic circumstances—did not allow her to pass; he warned her that she would have to make her way through the mob to meet the king, which could be fatal to her. He persuaded her to accompany him to the Council Room, which the mob had not yet reached, and with the help of a few reliable grenadiers he moved a heavy table into a corner of the room.
Protected by a few men, and barricaded behind this table, the terrified queen and her children waited for the mob to reach them. Two hours passed before the invaders arrived. When they did, a citizen assuming the role of barker placed himself in front of the Council Room, urging the crowd to “come in and see the queen and the dauphin.” One of the mob’s leaders, Santerre, saw to it that order was maintained. And many citizens who had come to insult Marie Antoinette were won over by her courage and gentleness of bearing. One intruder shouted at her: “You are a vile woman!”
“Have I ever done you any harm?” the queen asked her.
“No, but you’re the cause of the French people’s unhappiness.”
“So you have doubtless been told, but you’ve been misled,” Marie Antoinette said. “I am the king’s wife and the dauphin’s mother. I am French…. I was happy when you loved me.”
“I can now see that I was wrong, and that you’re a good woman,” said the woman, bursting into tears.
Santerre pushed her away. “She’s drunk!” he said.
Upon orders from Pétion, who was currently the mayor of Paris, after eight hours the crowd finally dispersed. The palace was in shambles, doors smashed, floors covered by shattered glass and fragments of furniture.
After the June 20 invasion, Marie Antoinette, certain that she and her children would be killed upon the next such insurrection, did not sleep at night anymore; instead, she took short daytime naps when she was sure that either the king or her sister-in-law was awake and watching over her children.
“I still exist, but it’s by a miracle,” she wrote me shortly after the invasion of the Tuileries. “The 20th was a dreadful day. It’s no longer against me that they’re most bitter, but against my husband’s very life…. He showed a firmness and a strength that impressed me for the moment, but the dangers could arise again at any time…. Adieu, take care of yourself for our sakes.”
Throughout July of 1792 the queen’s missives to me took on an increasingly urgent, desperate tone as she worried about the advance of the allied troops. When would they reach Paris to save her and her family? “Tell them to hurry with the help they’ve promised for our deliverance,” she wrote. A few weeks later: “Tell Monsieur de Mercy that the lives of the king and queen are in the greatest peril and that the delay of so much as a day could cause incalculable harm…. The band of murderers is growing by the hour.”
Yet the insurrection of June 20 had not been the success the Jacobins had hoped for. A petition supporting Louis XVI was signed by some twenty thousand Paris citizens. The same citizens demanded Mayor Pétion’s arrest, and the whole of the province of Picardy voted to offer assistance to the king. But the monarch did not take advantage of this amicable popular mood. One of his aides, Bertrand de Moleville, suggested that he ride out openly from Paris with his guards to greet his citizens—public indignation over the June 20 riots would make such a trip safe. But Louis, with his usual caution and indecisiveness, demurred. Moleville also insisted that escape was the wisest action to take. “Oh, I don’t want to flee a second time,” the king answered. “It clearly put me in a bad position. I clearly saw that they wanted to kill me.” “I don’t know why they didn’t manage it,” he
added with his usual fatalism; “another day I shan’t escape them…. It doesn’t matter whether one is assassinated two months sooner or later.” When Moleville reminded the king that he should flee with his family to ensure their safety—the threats against the queen were growing increasingly severe—he replied that his family would not be increasingly endangered if he was killed. In those months Louis’s lethargy was compounded by many similarly mistaken judgments, and he could be surprisingly insensitive to his family’s fate.
B
ACK IN
B
RUSSELS
, I received accounts of the events of June 20 that made me shudder, and also heard rumors that the Jacobins planned to move the royal family out of Paris. At the end of July I wrote Marie Antoinette: “Your position torments me ceaselessly…. Above all try to not leave Paris. That’s the essential…. The Duke of Brunswick’s plan is to reach you there.” Brunswick was a gifted royalist general who commanded the Prussian and Austrian forces. (In an attempt to save herself and her children, the queen had persuaded me to compose the “Brunswick Manifesto,” a proclamation signed by the allied nations threatening reprisals against France’s revolutionary government if the royal family was harmed. I’m the first to admit that in retrospect this was a very bad strategy that increasingly estranged the royal family and their intimates from the rest of the nation.)
The queen replied to me: “Our position is dreadful but don’t worry too much. I have courage and something tells me we’ll soon be happy and safe. Only this idea sustains me…. Adieu. When shall we see each other again?”
A few days later: “Don’t torment yourself too much about me,” she wrote me in code, adding, in reference to Russia’s promise of aid: “Hasten, if you can, the process of intermediation for our deliverance.”
But there was no sign of Prussian, Russian, or Austrian troops: France
had declared war in mid-April, it was now the end of July, and there was still no military movement on the Prussian or Austrian frontiers. The Austrian nobility was far more interested in the coronation of Marie Antoinette’s nephew Francis I, which was being held that summer, than they were in the war. There was another reason for Austria’s hesitation to engage France. The Austrian high command feared that Prussia was currently too busy helping Russia carve up Poland, and wished to wait until Prussia could contribute more men and arms to the French venture.
Finally, in early August, Brunswick began to march toward France. And I suddenly grew apprehensive about a conflict that I’d initially desired. “The moment of crisis has finally come,” I wrote Marie Antoinette when Brunswick’s troops began their advance, “and my soul shudders at the thought. May God protect you all.”
At first, the allied armies marching into France met with little resistance. My earlier fears were allayed. I grew certain that Brunswick would reach Paris and rescue the royal family in a matter of weeks. How naive I was! So certain was I of a quick allied victory that I wrote the queen suggesting a few cabinet appointments upon Louis XVI’s return to full power. The war ministry should be given to La Galisonniere, I proposed, foreign affairs to Bombelle, etc. The queen, understandably, reacted with pique at my suggestions, making me realize how out of touch I was. She told me of the Marseillais’ arrival in Paris, of the collapse of the National Guard, of riots all over the city. “In the midst of so many dangers it is difficult to focus our attention on the choice of ministers,” she wrote me with some annoyance; “for the time being we must think about how to avoid daggers and try to struggle against the conspirators who surround a throne that is about to vanish. The rebels no longer conceal their plan to massacre the royal family.” As she was writing these words, Brunswick continued to score consecutive victories against the French revolutionary forces.
I should insert a few words here about the men designated as “rebels” by the queen: they were the Revolution’s two most influential leaders—Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien Robespierre—who would now dictate the royal family’s destiny.
Danton, a huge strapping fellow, born in 1759, trained as a lawyer, served as advocate to the royal councils before the Revolution, and opposed the Assembly’s decision to maintain Louis XVI on his throne after the Varennes debacle. One of the Jacobins’ most brilliant orators, this particular swine, known to love money and to be notably purchasable, instigated the decrees calling for the arrest of refractory priests, and initiated the movement demanding the king’s deposition.
Robespierre, another bloody lawyer, was elected deputy to the Third Estate from his native Pas-de-Calais region, and would eventually be elected president of the Jacobin Club. Referred to as “the Incorruptible” because of his allegedly strict moral conduct, he was suspected of having dictatorial ambitions, a charge that would turn out to be accurate. In the king’s forthcoming trial, he would intervene eleven times to demand Louis’s death without delay.
Marie Antoinette was right to have been pessimistic in the summer of 1792. Paris erupted again on August 10, and in a far more violent manner than it had six weeks earlier. As Parisians were apprised of Brunswick’s steadfast advance toward Paris, their emotions rose to the boiling point, and Danton capitalized on their anger. Controlling Paris’s ablest armed factions, he staged a coup d’état that simultaneously toppled the Assembly and the Municipality of Paris. Through Danton’s seizure of the Municipality, known henceforth as the Commune, the Parisian population became France’s rulers.
The insurrection that began during the dawn hours of August 10 made the uprising of the previous June 20 look like child’s play. All through the night the king and queen had heard the bells that for centuries had raised the alarm of invasion or fire—the same bells that two hundred
years earlier had presaged the massacre of Saint Bartholomew—booming at the Church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. They were followed by the tocsins of Saint-Antoine, of Saint-Jean and Saint-Gervaise, of Notre-Dame. And then, just before dawn, there began to be heard the bugle call with which the French mobilize their forces, the sullen fury of drums, the clattering of horses’ hooves upon the pavement. The king had not undressed that night, but had paced the floor, lying down from time to time for a brief nap. The queen had wandered from room to room. One hope remained: the king’s Swiss Guard was still loyal. And it was possible that the National Guard stationed at the Tuileries could be convinced to defend the palace. As for the Paris militia, it had, alas, succumbed to the revolutionaries: Danton had ordered their commander murdered, and the militia, from then on, took its orders from him.
Just before dawn the queen called for Madame Elisabeth, and they stood by a window from which they could see the sunrise. It was promising to be a bright, very hot day. The sun began to rise in a red mid-August sky.