The Days of the French Revolution

3 THE DAY OF THE MARKET-WOMEN 5–6 October 1789

The King had been out all day hunting. Returning tired, he went to bed early and was awakened by the news of the fall of the Bastille. ‘Is this a rebellion?’ he is said sleepily to have asked the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, the Grand Master of the Wardrobe. ‘No, Sire,’ the Duke replied emphatically, ‘it is a revolution.’

Within an hour the Duke was hurrying over to the National Assembly to tell the deputies that the King was coming to address them. The deputies greeted this announcement warmly, but their applause was cut short by Mirabeau who stood up to advise them, ‘Wait until the King has let us know what friendly overtures we may expect from him. Let our first greeting to him at this distressing moment be marked by a cold respect…The silence of the people is a lesson for kings.’

Mirabeau’s warning was justified. The King’s submission was, as Thomas Jefferson, the American Minister, described it, only a ‘surrender at discretion’. He did say that he had ordered the withdrawal of troops from Paris and Versailles, but, while denying that he planned any action against the National Assembly – to which he referred by that name – he undertook neither to dismiss Breteuil nor to recall Necker. All the same, grateful for his concession regarding the troops, the delegates respectfully escorted the King back to the palace and were followed by a cheering crowd. Even the Queen was applauded for a short time when she appeared on a balcony of the Cour de Marbre.

Soon afterwards a delegation of eighty-eight deputies left Versailles to convey the King’s reassurances about the troops to the people of Paris. They drove ‘in splendid weather in an atmosphere like that of a public festival’. ‘Our journey,’ wrote Bailly, ‘was one long triumph. At several places we came upon troops marching away from the capital, and crowds of people shouting, “Vive la Nation!” as our carriages drove past.’ In Paris, where most workshops were closed and groups of tense people had been gathered in the streets since dawn, the deputies were greeted with delight, their carriages were surrounded, they were handed flowers and cockades, hugged and kissed. ‘Every window was crammed,’ Bailly continued. ‘The crowds were immense; but everything was very orderly. On all sides the enthusiasm was open and sincere.’

At the Hôtel de Ville there were speeches full of compliments and mutual congratulations. Lafayette, who read out to the Assembly of Electors the speech which the King had just made in Versailles, said that His Majesty had been misled by his advisers, but now understood the true position. In replying for the Electors, Moreau de Saint-Méry, their second President, asked the Marquis to tell the King how much they appreciated his gesture and to assure him of their loyalty. As a demonstration of regard for their personal qualities and for the National Assembly which they represented, the Electors appointed Bailly Mayor of Paris and Lafayette commander of the citizens’ militia which was shortly to become the National Guard. The militiamen were authorized to wear cockades of red and blue, the colours of Paris, to which was added a band of white, the colour of the King, thus joining in the tricolour the old France with the new.

The pleasant atmosphere in the Hôtel de Ville was not matched for long, however, by the mood of the people outside. For, when it became known that although the King had agreed to withdraw the troops, he had made no promises about Breteuil or Necker, crowds gathered, loudly demanding a change of Ministers. Barricades were erected in the streets, new trenches were dug across them, the Electors were besieged in the Hôtel de Ville, passers-by were stopped by armed citizens who demanded proof of their identity. And when the deputies and Electors proceeded together for a service of thanksgiving in Notre Dame, conducted by the Archbishop of Paris, they were surrounded by people clamouring for further concessions by the King.

At Versailles, too, deputies dissatisfied with the King’s promises were now demanding more. Antoine Barnave, representing Dauphiné, supported by Mirabeau, pressed for the recall of Necker. So did the Marquis de Lally-Tollendal, one of the deputies for the Parisian nobility, who passionately declared, ‘Messieurs, as we have seen and heard, in the streets and squares, on the quais and in the markets, the cry is “Bring back Necker!”…The people’s request is an order. We must therefore demand the recall of M. Necker.’

By now the King had himself reluctantly concluded that this was, indeed, what he must do. On the morning of 16 July, at a council meeting attended by his Ministers, the Queen and the Comtes de Provence and Artois, he asked them all to consider whether or not it was still possible to resist. The Comte d’Artois strongly urged him to do so, but Marshal de Broglie, the War Minister, advised him that resistance would be impossible with the troops in their present mood. Well, then, the King asked, what were the possibilities of withdrawal to a less disaffected part of the country where the Estates General could be reconvened and protected by loyal troops? This idea, which had already been discussed, met with the approval of the Queen who urged them to withdraw the Court to Metz on the north-east frontier. But once again de Broglie objected: he could not trust the army to escort the royal family through a countryside on the verge of revolt.

The King, therefore, decided he had no alternative but to give way. He had a message sent to the National Assembly to inform them of his decision, and unwillingly prepared himself for the twelve-mile journey to Paris where the people were demanding his presence. He said his prayers, he made his will and, while the Comte d’Artois made haste to flee abroad with his wife and mistress, his sons and the Polignacs, he created the Comte de Provence Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom with full powers to act in his name while he was absent from Versailles.

Bailly, who had now returned to Versailles, rose very early the next morning to give himself time to prepare a speech of welcome before leaving at seven o’clock for Paris where, as Mayor of the city, he was to receive the King.

When I went out [Bailly recorded in his memoirs] I was met by all the coachmen who gave me a tree bedecked with flowers and ribbons…I had to allow them to fasten this tree to the front of my coach. All the coachmen accompanied me, letting off fireworks, although it was broad daylight, right to the end of the avenue…In the Place Louis XV, I left Mme Bailly and went on to the Hôtel de Ville in a hired coach. I arrived at ten o’clock and joined everyone there busily preparing to receive the King.

The King, accompanied by bodyguards, about thirty deputies and a vast crowd of workers and their wives, proceeded slowly up the Rue Saint-Honoré which was lined on either side with men and women, and even monks and friars, carrying guns, swords, lances, pikes, scythes and cudgels. They cried out, ‘Vive la Nation!’ ‘Vive Monsieur Lafayette ! Et les deputés ! Et les electeurs!’

Bailly said that there were shouts, too, of ‘Vive le Roi!’ But another witness, Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, a deputy from Gascony, recorded that there was ‘great difficulty in certain districts in restraining the indignation of citizens outraged by the measures that had provoked the insurrection’. And the Austrian Ambassador reported, ‘It is certain that during his journey there were very few cries of” Vive le Roi!”…whereas on all sides there were shouts of “Vive la Nation!”’ The British Ambassador, the Duke of Dorset, said that His Majesty was treated more like a captive than a King. He was led along like ‘a tame bear’.

On entering the Hôtel de Ville the King was offered the tricolour cockade which had already become the emblem of the revolution, the original green cockade having been discarded when it was realized that green was the colour of the Comte d’Artois. Bailly, who had been asked to make the presentation, ‘did not know quite how the King would take it, and whether there was not something improper about the suggestion’. The King, however, accepted the cockade without protest and fastened it to his hat. He then went up the staircase of the Hôtel de Ville. He had no guard with him now, but instead was surrounded by a number of citizens. They were ‘all holding swords and forming an arcade of blades over his head’.

In response to the speeches made to him in the great hall, the King endeavoured to frame suitable replies. But he had prepared nothing and could think of little to say appropriate to the occasion. After uttering a few disjointed sentences, he walked out on to the balcony where he was joyfully greeted by the crowds who, seeing the cockade in his hat, were now prepared to give him the wholehearted ovation they had previously reserved for the Electors and deputies. ‘Well done!’ they cried. ‘Well done! He now belongs to the Third Estate!’ And the Comte d’Estaing said to him excitedly, ‘Sire, with that cockade and the Third Estate you will conquer Europe!’

‘Applause and shouts of “Vive le Roi!” welcomed him on every side,’ said Bailly. ‘All eyes, filled with tears, were turned towards him. The people held out their hands to him. And when he was placed on the throne which had been prepared for him, a voice from the back of the assembly uttered the heartfelt cry: “Our King! Our father!” At this applause, the excitement, the shouts of “Vive le Roi!” redoubled.’

This happy mood continued in Paris for some days after the King had returned to Versailles. A new municipality or Commune was formed, while the National Assembly were granted fresh powers to accelerate reform and frame a constitution. Shops and theatres opened their doors again; men returned to work, encouraged by the Commune’s offer of six livres to all who produced a certificate of attendance from their employers. Yet it seemed to many of the poorer people all over the provinces that the Assembly had utterly failed to tackle or even to appreciate their problems. And, with bread still expensive and in short supply, with unemployment increasing in the wake of the bad harvest of 1788, riots erupted in numerous towns and villages. Millers and farmers suspected of hoarding grain were assaulted, walls and fences were pulled down, forests were devastated, stags and rabbits were slaughtered wholesale while gamekeepers hid in their cottages, fishponds were dredged, pigeons were shot in the courtyards of manor houses. In several places the deserted manor houses themselves were looted or burned down, and in others the owners were made to sign away their droits. At Agde the bishop was dragged from his house and forced to relinquish all rights to his mill; at Troyes the mayor was killed; and at Caen an army officer who had become involved in arguments about the wearing of medals bearing the head of Necker, was also murdered. At Rennes the royal garrison was prevailed upon to desert and at Marseilles it was disbanded by armed citizens. Forts and prisons were stormed, arsenals were seized, hotels de ville were invaded under the eyes of complaisant guards, customs duties were withheld, unpopular mayors were ousted from office and more amenable ones elected in their place, intendants fled. Gangs of beggars roamed intimidatingly through the streets and down the country lanes. A combination of brigands, hungry peasants and a middle-class intent upon the replacement of their authority for that of the royal government was producing an irresistible revolutionary power.

As the King’s intendants abandoned their offices and central authority collapsed, provincial towns established their own committees which agreed to respect the decrees of the National Assembly only when they coincided with the wishes of the local population. Attempts were made to put down the disturbances by raising companies of militia, but as most of those enrolled were in sympathy with the demonstrators, the disorders continued with angry crowds marching upon town halls crying for bread at prices they could afford, surrounding the homes of rich merchants and rentiers and, in some cases, pillaging them.

In the capital a deputy lamented that there was ‘no more army and no more police’, and Bailly admitted that ‘everybody knew how to command but nobody knew how to obey’. The lieutenant de maire of Saint Denis on the northern outskirts of Paris was chased through the streets by an angry crowd for contemptuously refusing to reduce the price of bread. Chased to the top of the church steeple, he was stabbed to death and decapitated. One of the Ministers in Breteuil’s reactionary government, Foullon de Doué, who was believed to have been speculating in the grain trade and plotting a counter-revolution, met an even more horrible fate. Accused of having said that the people should be made to eat hay if they were hungry, a collar of nettles was placed around his neck, a bunch of thistles was thrust into his hand and a fistful of hay was stuffed between his lips. He was then hanged on a nearby lampost. His son-in-law, Bertier de Sauvigny, the Intendant of Paris and the Île de France, was accused of similar abuses and murdered as well. His heart was torn out of his body and brandished at the windows of the Hôtel de Ville. Then his head was cut off and paraded with that of his father-in-law on a pikestaff through the streets and down the arcades of the Palais Royal, the one head being pushed against the other to cries of ‘Kiss papa! Kiss papa!’ Here Gouverneur Morris saw the ‘populace carrying about the mangled fragments with a savage joy’. ‘Gracious God,’ Morris thought. “What a people!’

There were strong protests against these murders, but they had their apologists, too. ‘Is this blood then so pure,’ asked Barnave defiantly in the National Assembly, ‘that one should so regret to spill it.’ Others cried that more heads would have to roll before justice for the people could be secured.

While the debates in the Assembly continued urgently but inconclusively, the wildest rumours, intensified by newspaper reports, were passed from mouth to mouth: the aristocrats were conspiring to suppress the National Assembly; the Queen had inspired a plot to blow it up; huge armies of hired brigands were on the march; foreign powers were preparing to invade the country to restore the King’s lost power; nobles were emigrating to enlist the help of mercenaries; the British fleet had been sighted off Brest; Polish troops had landed at Dunkirk; Spaniards were about to disembark at Bordeaux; Austrian soldiers had been seen on the march at Lyons.

Stories such as these, spreading through the country districts, led to waves of panic which were to become known as the Great Fear. As castles, manor houses, abbeys and tax and salt monopoly offices were invaded and sometimes set on fire, villagers fled in terror from their houses at reports of assassins paid to wreak revenge, and sought refuge in forests and church belfries. Fear led to further violence. Protesting that they were acting in the name of the King against aristocrats who were conspiring to thwart his wishes, the peasants grew ever more violent in their demonstrations against manorial dues, disregarding all authority. ‘There no longer exists either executive power, laws, magistrates or police,’ the Venetian Ambassador reported. ‘A horrible anarchy prevails.’

To the National Assembly the problem of restoring order seemed insuperable until the delegates from Brittany hit upon a clever tactical move by which certain of the liberal nobles were to offer to renounce some of those feudal privileges against which the peasants were so violently protesting. It was hoped that other nobles would then be persuaded to follow their example in a rising flood of emotional renunciations. These renunciations were to be provoked by the Duc d’Aiguillon, the greatest landowner in France, who was believed to have an annual income of 100,000 livres from his feudal rights alone. The debate was planned for the evening of Tuesday, 4 August.

It almost failed in its purpose: the Vicomte de Noailles, a young man who had fought in America with his brother-in-law, Lafayette, and who evidently had a mind to steal the thunder of those who were in the Breton plot, leapt to his feet before the Duc d’Aiguillon. His proposals for a programme of aristocratic self-denial were naturally not too well received, coming as they did from one who did not personally have much to lose. After the Duc d’Aiguillon’s speech, however, the mood the Bretons had been hoping for was created. One after the other, noblemen and prelates alike, stood up voluntarily to renounce rights and privileges in an atmosphere that became almost hysterical. Spurred on by the excited self-immolation of the earlier renunciants, spokesmen for parlements and privileged towns jumped up to offer further sacrifices in a stream of oblation so rapid that the Assembly’s clerks could not keep up with it and the Marquis de Lally-Tollendal, by now an exasperated conservative, passed a message to the President: ‘Suspend the session. They have all gone quite mad.’

But the session, which Mirabeau and Sieyés had both declined to attend, continued enthusiastically apace in what one witness described as ‘a contagion of sentimental feeling’ until two o’clock in the morning, deputies weeping and embracing one another, cheering each other’s selflessness or giving away, so one observer caustically commented, that which they did not own. ‘What a nation! What glory!’ declared Duquesnoy, a deputy from Bar-le-Duc, ‘What an honour to be French!’

With daylight however, came doubt and apprehension. There was talk of having to consult constituents for the endorsement of what one noble deputy termed the ‘annihilation of a whole property system’. There was a feeling that perhaps Mirabeau was right when he complained that it was just like Frenchmen to spend weeks squabbling over syllables and then within a single night to ‘overthrow the entire traditional order of the monarchy’. So, although the Assembly’s decree proudly announced that it had destroyed ‘in its entirety the feudal system’, the debates of the next few days severely modified the sacrifices which had been promised and ensured that, while ecclesiastical tithes were abolished, the most burdensome of the feudal dues were made subject to redemption, and, until they were redeemed, the peasants were bound by them, as they had been before.

Nor were the peasants much comforted by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen which, affirming that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights’, was adopted by the National Assembly later on that month. For, encouraged by disagreements within the Assembly, the King withheld his consent both to the Declaration and to the ratification of the decrees in which the sacrifices of the privileged orders had been formulated and published. ‘I will never consent to the spoliation of my clergy or my nobility,’ he assured the Archbishop of Arles. ‘And I will not sanction decrees which seek to despoil them.’ So, faced by the passive resistance of the King, the ‘patriots’ decided that force would have to be used again. The Revolution required another dramatic journée.

The form that the journée was to take was indicated in a conversation between Dussaulx, a member of the Paris Commune, and Augeard, an official of the Queen’s Household, as they walked past the Tuileries one day.

‘When the King is living there,’ Dussaulx said pointing at the old, neglected palace, ‘this business can be settled. It was a great mistake not to keep him in Paris when he came here on 17 July. The King’s place of residence should be in the capital.’

Augeard objected that the King could not be told where he must live. But Dussaulx maintained, ‘He can be forced when the good of the country is at stake. We will have to come to that.’

On 29 September the Flanders Regiment arrived at Versailles. It was customary, when a new regiment came into garrison there, for a banquet to be given in its honour by the Gardes du Corps. The King saw no reason to interfere with this tradition. So the usual banquet was held on I October in the Opera House where the boxes were filled with spectators from the Court. It turned out to be just the provocation for which the ‘patriots’ and the newspapers that supported them were waiting: several of the guests got drunk; there were rowdy demonstrations of loyalty to the throne; insults were showered upon the National Assembly; soldiers tore off their red and blue cockades. At the appearance of the King and Queen, who walked around the table, the band struck up one of Grétry’s popular royalist airs, while the ladies of the Court, who had for several weeks been provocatively wearing lilies pinned to their dresses, distributed cockades of pure white in honour of the Bourbon dynasty.

In Paris, where the bread queues had been growing ever longer, accounts of this ‘orgy’, suitably embellished with reports that the national cockade had been trampled disdainfully underfoot, were soon spread far and wide. Camille Desmoulins renewed the call for the King to be brought to Paris away from the corrupting influence of the Court. Other popular orators leaped upon the tables shouting for a march upon Versailles, many of them combining that call with demands for a reduction in the price of bread.

Bread was the people’s staple diet. Most workers, who consumed about three pounds a day, spent half their wages on it, as opposed to about fifteen per cent on vegetables, oil and wine, five per cent on fuel and one per cent on lighting. Skilled workers such as locksmiths and carpenters earned about fifty sous a day in 1789, masons about forty, labourers no more than twenty to thirty, so when the price of bread, normally about eight sous for a four-pound loaf rose above ten or twelve sous they had to face the prospect of hunger, and disturbances became commonplace. In August that year the price of bread was not unduly high at twelve sous for a large loaf, but a prolonged drought had resulted in millers being unable to grind corn, so there was an acute shortage and a consequent increase in outbreaks of violence: fighting erupted in bread queues where women were pushed aside by men, bakers were threatened with hanging and guards had to be posted in their shops. At Versailles a furious crowd attempted to murder a baker who started to sell bread at eighteen sous to those who could afford it, and stale loaves at a rather less exorbitant price to those who could not. In several other places women seized cartloads of grain, and on the morning of 5 October huge crowds of women gathered in the central markets and in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine shouting for bread, forcing the bell-ringer of the Sainte-Marguerite church to ring the tocsin and calling upon the citizens to take up arms to force the Government to help them. They were mostly poissardes, fishwives, working women, prostitutes and market stall-holders, but among them were several quite smartly dressed bourgeoises who appeared as angry as the rest. Together they marched towards the Place de Grève.

They arrived there at about half-past nine and stormed up the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. The guards were disarmed and their weapons handed to men who had now joined the demonstration and were encouraging the women in their demands. As some of them burst through the door leading to the bell tower to sound the tocsin, others invaded the main building, searching for arms and powder, tearing up documents and ledgers for good measure. Persuaded that their best hope was to petition the King, they then set off for Versailles under the not entirely willing leadership of that self-proclaimed hero of the taking of the Bastille, Stanislas Maillard, who evidently considered it undignified to command such motley female troops.

Further recruits were collected on the way, not all of them willing ones. A nurse, Jeanne Martin, the wife of a porter, claimed afterwards that she was forced to march by a group of about forty women who thrust a stick in her hand, threatening to beat her with it unless she accompanied them. She protested that she had not yet had any breakfast and had not a sou with her; but they shouted, ‘Come on, march, march! You won’t need anything.’ Another woman, Marie-Catherine-Victoire Sacleux, proprietor of a cleaning and dyeing shop which she had closed for the day ‘because of the public clamour’, made the excuse that she was urgently wanted at home and that, in any case, she was wearing the wrong kind of shoes, but she, too, was forced to go with the others and made to help drag along a cannon which had been brought from the Place de Grève.

Compelling or inviting numerous others to accompany them, the women who had invaded the Hôtel de Ville had soon mustered a force over 6,000 strong. Among them were several men-some of hem dressed as women–agents provocateurs in the pay of the Duc d’Orléans as well as other agitators intent upon ensuring that their female companions did not just demand bread but the acceptance of the Assembly’s decrees, the King’s return to Paris and the punishment of all who had insulted the national cockade. Tramping through the rain, some with muskets, others with pikes and swords, bludgeons, crowbars, pitchforks and scythes, they passed through Sèvres where they pillaged the shops, and at five o’clock in the afternoon were in sight of Versailles.

The King had been out hunting again. On his return he went immediately to a council of Ministers most of whom, with the notable exception of Necker, advised flight, though they did not know yet just what the women wanted. Louis was, as usual, hesitant. ‘A fugitive King,’ he murmured doubtfully, repeating the words several times. Eventually he adjourned the Council and went to consult the Queen who had spent the early afternoon in the gardens of the Trianon, which she was never to see again. She too urged him to escape while there was still time, but he could not bring himself to do so. And when, at half past five, the women stormed through the doors of the National Assembly, the King was still at Versailles. Two hours later the hall of the Assembly ‘remained full of women and men armed with scythes, sticks and pikes’, so Étienne Dumont, a friend of Mirabeau, reported. ‘The President was wasting his strength trying to keep order…Mirabeau raised his powerful voice and called for the withdrawal from the Chamber of all strangers. It needed all his popularity to achieve this. Gradually the crowd withdrew’. About ‘a hundred women and a number of young people’ remained in the gallery, however, and these shouted or kept silence at the orders of a ‘harridan who addressed the deputies with coarse familiarity: “Who’s that talking down there? Make the chatterbox shut up. That’s not the point. The point is, we want bread. Tell them to put our little mother Mirabeau up to speak. We want to hear him.” Then everyone shouted for “our little mother Mirabeau” (a form of affectionate expression employed by people of this class). But Mirabeau was not the man to waste his energy on occasions such as this. His popularity as he said himself, was not that of a demagogue.’

The president, Jean Joseph Mounier, had gone to consult the King leaving his chair to the Bishop of Langres who was quite incapable of controlling the rabble. ‘Order! Order!’ the bishop called as the women clambered on to the platform. ‘We don’t give a fuck for order,’ they shouted back at him. ‘We want bread.’ Several of them pushed their faces at him, demanding to be kissed. He obliged them with a sigh. Others threatened to play boule with the head of ‘that damned Abbé Maury’. A few, who had gone into assommoirs were now quite drunk, some of them vomiting over the benches. One of the prettiest sat down on the knee of her ‘little mother Mirabeau’ who seemed very happy to hold her.

Eventually the King agreed to see a deputation of women in the Salle de Conseil if Mounier would take them there.

M. Mounier appeared with twenty of these women at the palace gates all of which were closed and guarded [recorded the Marquis de Paroy in a letter to his wife]. I found myself by chance inside one of the gates and, recognizing the President of the Assembly, who was being crushed by the crowd, I told the officer of the guard who he was. M. Mounier told the officer the object of his mission. They let him in with six women, and I accompanied them to the King’s apartment where they were introduced. I noticed that two of them were quite well dressed and not at all of the class of person to which the others belonged, though they affected their language. They had come, they said, to ask for bread from the King.

The King walked into the room, looking rather nervous, to ask the women what they wanted. ‘Sire,’ replied one, a pretty girl who sold flowers at the Palais Royal, ‘we want bread.’

‘You know my heart,’ the King told her. ‘I will order all the bread in Versailles to be collected and given to you.’ At these words the girl fainted. Revived by smelling salts, she asked to be allowed to kiss the King’s hands. ‘She deserves better than that,’ His Majesty said and took her into his arms. Thrilled by their generous reception, the women whom Mounier had chosen as representatives came out again into the courtyard to find that the others who had marched with them were far from disposed to share their pleasure at the King’s generosity. The deputation had been duped, they were told; even if the King meant what he said, the Queen and the aristocrats at Court would soon see that he broke his promise. A few women began to chant again, as they had done on the march, ‘Bread! Bread! Meat at six sous the pound! No more talking…We’ll cut the Queen’s pretty throat! We’ll tear her skin to bits for ribbons!’ The six representatives were forced to go back and obtain a written declaration. Pacified by this, some of the women then returned to Paris with Stanislas Maillard.

The King now comforted himself with the thought that the trouble was over. He sent the Gardes du Corps and the Flanders Regiment, which had been ordered to march to the palace, back to their barracks. But soon after nine o’clock he learned that he must shortly expect other visitors at Versailles. For in Paris hundreds of men of the National Guard had converged upon the Hôtel de Ville demanding to be led to Versailles. Their commander, Lafayette, had been reluctant to take them there. He had sat on horseback by the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, attempting to pacify them. But they refused to listen to him, going so far, as he afterwards said, to threaten to hang him from the lampost on which Foullon de Doué had been murdered unless he agreed to their demands. So, at length, the Commune gave him instructions to march off with the Guard, ordering two delegates to accompany him and to ask the King to return to Paris.

Spattered with mud, Lafayette arrived at Versailles with these delegates, and some 20,000 National Guardsmen and other armed civilians, at about eleven o’clock. Advised once again to flee by his Ministers and the Queen, and this time also by Mounier, the King at first agreed to do so. But after some Ministers had already left the palace and were rattling along with their families in coaches on the road to Rambouillet, he changed his mind following a conversation with Necker: he would stay behind after all and see what Lafayette had to say. He greeted him courteously, accepted without demur the arrival of the National Guard, agreed to approve the Assembly’s decrees and the Declaration of Rights. He listened politely while the Commune’s delegates made their request for his return to Paris and, while he did not immediately commit himself to this, he seemed willing to consider it.

It was now two o’clock in the morning. The crisis appeared to be past. All was quiet. An officer, looking down into the courtyard from the Aile des Ministres, could see no movement. The women had gone away to find places of shelter from the still-pouring rain; many of them had taken off their skirts and petticoats to wring out the water, shocking an officer who complained that ‘the scenes which took place amongst them were anything but decent’.

Assured by Lafayette that he and his family would come to no harm, the King went to bed. So did the Queen who was suddenly awakened at dawn by the noise of trampling feet and by loud shouts on the staircase that led up to her apartments: ‘Death to the Austrian! Where is she? Where is the whore? We’ll wring her neck! We’ll tear her heart out! We’ll fry her liver and that won’t be the end of it.’ ‘I’ll have her thighs!’ cried one. ‘And I’ll have her entrails,’ called others. ‘I’ll have her kidneys in a fricassee!’

A gate leading into the Cour des Princes had been left unlocked. A horde of armed women had pushed it open and had poured into the courtyard led by Nicholas Jourdan, a savage-looking, bearded model from the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, whose arms were naked to the elbow and whose hands and blue overcoat were already smeared with blood. As the crowd had approached the palace one of the Gardes du Corps had opened fire from a window, hitting a young journeyman cabinet-maker who had fallen dead in the courtyard. Enraged by this, the crowd had rushed forward, and Jourdan, brandishing an axe, had attacked one of the other Guards and cut his head off. A second Guard had also been decapitated as Jourdan and the women had rushed across the Cour des Princes into the Cour Royale and, shouting for the ‘Austrian whore’, had started to mount the staircase.

An officer attempting to bar their way, the blood pouring down his face, called out ‘Save the Queen!’ through the anteroom door. ‘Save the Queen! They are going to kill her.’ As he was knocked down with the butt of a musket wielded with such force that the trigger penetrated his skull, the Queen, who had leapt out of bed, put on a shift and petticoat, picked up a pair of stockings and was about to put those on as well when two of her ladies dashed into her room and urged her not to trouble to dress but to make for the King’s apartments before the mob broke down the door. So, with her stockings in her hand and a cape round her shoulders, she and her ladies rushed through the Petits Cabinets, locking the doors behind them, towards the Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf. As they ran, the mob behind them battered down the bedroom door, poured into the room, and finding the bed empty, slashed at the sheets with their axes and swords.

The door leading into the King’s apartments was locked on the inside. The Queen and her ladies battered on it, screaming for help. At length it was opened by a frightened valet. The King was not there: at the sound of the tumult he had hurried off through a secret passage to the Queen’s room, and seeing that she had escaped, he had gone to fetch the Dauphin. He suddenly appeared with the boy in his arms.

By now Lafayette, who had gone to bed at the Hôtel de Noailles, had been roused from his sleep and had galloped over to the palace where the National Guard had succeeded in stopping the fighting and had cleared the mob out of the building. But the courtyards were still full of shouting demonstrators, firing their muskets in the air, parading the severed heads of the royal guards on pikestaffs and crying out, ‘Le Roi à Paris! Le Roi à Paris!’ According to the Marquis de Ferrières-Marsay, the Duc d’Orléans ‘was walking cheerfully about among them, in a grey frock-coat and a round hat with a riding whip in his hand. He smiled at some and talked in a carefree manner to others. All around him the air resounded with shouts of “Our father is with us! Long live King Orléans”…At the same time…men dressed as women were spreading word among the crowd that M. de Lafayette was a traitor and that they must get rid of him. One of the leaders…was advising a group of men and women who thronged round him and to whom he was handing money, “We want the heads of both the Queen and M. de La Fayette. That man is a traitor. He left Paris against his will and very late in the day.” At these words a man with a hideous face disguised as a woman displayed a kind of sickle and swore that he would be the one to cut off the bitch’s head…Troops of women and men armed with pikes and muskets were everywhere hunting the men of the Bodyguard…The barbarous horde manifested a savage pleasure, some of them bathing their hands in the blood [of the dead Guards] and wiping it over their faces, others dancing round the bodies…’ Everywhere there were calls for the King to go to Paris and threats to Lafayette.

Another less partisan informant, Elizabeth Girard, a ‘bourgeoise de Paris’, who later gave evidence before an official inquiry, confirmed that ‘all the people, without distinction, especially the journeymen locksmiths who were there in great numbers, were saying that they had lost a day’s wages, that if the King didn’t come to Paris, and if the Bodyguard were not killed, Lafayette’s head should be stuck on the end of a pike.’ And Claude Fournier, an officer of the National Guard and well-known agitator, claimed that he had called to the fishwives, using the kind of language that they would have used themselves, ‘Sacrées bitches, can’t you see that you are being buggered about by the King and Lafayette…The whole damned lot will have to be taken to Paris.’

Eventually Lafayette himself expressed the opinion that order could never be restored until the royal family showed themselves to the people. So the King went out on to the balcony. There were a few scattered cheers but these were almost drowned by shouts of ‘The Queen! The Queen!’

Marie Antoinette had recovered her composure. Her children’s governess said that she appeared, indeed, quite unmoved by her ordeal: ‘Her countenance was sad but calm.’ Wearing a dressing-gown of yellow and white stripes, her hair disordered, she came out on to the balcony, her four-year-old son on one side, her daughter, now eleven, on the other, holding their hands. ‘No children! No children!’ the crowd below shouted up at her. So she turned and bent down to help the children back through the window before facing the mob once again, her head erect, unflinching as several muskets were levelled at her. For two minutes she stood there as the mood of the women changed from hostility to grudging respect. Gradually, one after the other, the muskets were lowered. A few women even cried out ‘Vive la Reine!’ but these, so Jeanne Martin said, were silenced by ‘the common people…who hit them to make them quiet’. The Queen turned away and went back into the palace.

She did not conceal the fright she had had [theMarquis de Paroy told his wife]. She sighed wearily and, taking the little Dauphin into her arms again, she covered him with kisses and began to cry. This made us all cry, too. Then the Queen went back with the King into the inner cabinet room where I followed them. We were hoping that the danger had passed…But numerous shouts were still heard, ‘The King to Paris! The King to Paris! The King on the balcony!’…The shouts of the populace grew louder and louder. The King consulted with his Ministers for a few minutes. Then he came on to the balcony again, preceded by M. de La Fayette and followed by the Queen, who said, passing in front of me, ‘We are going to Paris.’ For a reply I raised my eyes to heaven.

‘My friends,’ the King announced from the balcony, his words greeted by repeated cheers, ‘I will go to Paris with my wife and children.’

That afternoon the King and Queen, their two children and the governess, climbed into the royal carriage with Monsieur and the King’s sister, Elisabeth. The carriage was surrounded by women waving banners and flags, branches bedecked with coloured ribbons and loaves of bread impaled on the points of bayonets. Several were drunk, some threatening to soak the Queen’s hands in the entrails of the Household Guards, others dancing in the mud, singing songs, jumping on to the backs of soldiers, knocking off their caps and bearskins and putting them on themselves, a few sitting astride the guns and horses of the National Guard, waiting for the disorderly procession to move off.

The National Guard led the way, escorting wagon-loads of wheat and flour. Then came a regiment of Grenadiers, followed by the disarmed Gardes du Corps and the Flanders Regiment. The royal carriage came next, Lafayette, riding beside it; and, rolling along through the mud behind it, trailed a line of carriages bearing a hundred deputies of the National Assembly who were now to transfer their debates from Versailles to Paris, where they were to meet for a fortnight in the great hall of the archdiocese, before moving to the Manège, a riding school near the Tuileries.

At the rear of the column, and on either side of the wagons of grain, marched the market-women, their decorated branches amidst the gleaming iron of pikes and musket barrels giving the impression, so one observer thought, of ‘a walking forest’. It was still raining, and the roads were ankle-deep in mud, yet they all seemed content, even cheerful. Occasionally they burst into song on the six-and-a-half-hour march, passed ribald jokes down the ragged ranks or danced along, holding out their aprons. They called out to the people who stood to watch them pass by that they were bringing back to Paris the baker, the baker’s wife and ‘le petit mitrorn’, the baker’s boy.

‘The Queen sat at the bottom of the coach with the Dauphin on her knees…while some of the blackguards in the rabble were firing their guns over her head,’ recorded the Comte d’Artois’s Scottish gardener, Thomas Blaikie. ‘As I stood by the coach one man fired over the Queen’s head. I told him to desist but he said he would continue.’

The King and Queen were driven to the Hôtel de Ville, where they were obliged to listen to several speeches, and then to the Tuileries. The comfortless, sparsely furnished rooms echoed to the sound of their footsteps. Half asleep the Dauphin murmured, ‘It’s very ugly here, mother.’