The Days of the French Revolution

4 THE DAYS OF THE FÉDÉRÉS AND THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 14–17 July 1790 and 19–26 June 1791

Once established in the Manège where the debates were less disorderly and rowdy than they had been at Versailles, the Assembly settled down to face the problems of reform. The radicals sat on the President’s left, the less numerous conservatives on his right, this disposition providing thereafter, in other countries as well as France, a useful addition to the terminology of politics. Between the Left and the Right there were not many less partisan voices to be heard, for many moderates, protesting against their colleagues’ attitude towards the violent intervention of the mob, decided to withdraw. Mounier, their leader, went home to Dauphiné and, having failed to rouse the people there to support the policies of the monarchiens, took refuge in Switzerland. Lally-Tollendal, unsuccessful on a similar mission, emigrated to England. Those monarchiens who remained in the Assembly, such as the Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre, no longer exercised much influence there, and many conservatives attended the debates irregularly, leaving their benches almost empty after five o’clock when they went away for their evening meal. So, unhampered by powerful conservative protest and encouraged by the excellent harvest of 1789 which, safely gathered in, silenced the disturbing shouts for bread, the reformists in the Assembly were able to push through a variety of measures which would formerly have met with the most steadfast opposition. The title of the King, who was now to rule under the law and not by divine right, was changed from King of France to King of the French; the parlements were declared to be henceforth in abeyance. In sweeping reforms of the judicial system, judges were to be elected by the people and paid by the state, local government was transformed following upon the creation of new provincial assemblies and the abolition of intendants, the landed estates of the Church were nationalized and were offered for sale in exchange for assignats–the celebrated bonds which were to become the currency of the Revolution. This last measure did provoke strong objections both within the Assembly and outside it. It was pointed out that the properties which were to be appropriated had not been given to the Church as a whole but to particular abbeys, colleges, parishes and hospitals for specific purposes; that the country would have to assume the extremely expensive responsibility for both charitable work and education; that it was economically inadvisable to break up large holdings into so great a number of smaller plots; that there would be a huge depreciation in their value, since the market was to be flooded with them at a time of such uncertainty. But the advocates of the measure were undeterred. ‘The assignats will soon be dispersed all over the country,’ argued one of the most persuasive of the radical clergy, Thomas Lindet, a curé soon to be rewarded with a bishopric, ‘and, in spite of himself, every man who holds them will become a defender of the Revolution.’ So, by a very small majority, the annexation of the estates of the Church was approved by the Assembly.

Although he approved of this particular enactment, Mirabeau rose again and again to condemn the flood of revolutionary measures which, before being debated in the Assembly, were often discussed at meetings of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution. This Society, which met at the convent of the Jacobins in the Rue Saint-Honoré and was to become famous as the Jacobin Club, was already profoundly influential. The more advanced Breton deputies had been among the first to join, and soon nearly all the deputies of the Left attended their meetings. In the formulation of radical opinion its influence spread all over France where the number of similar clubs in the provinces grew month by month until there were over four hundred of them.

Mirabeau came to some of the meetings in the Rue Saint-Honoré but he was concerned now to contain the Revolution rather than to promote it. ‘When you undertake to run a revolution,’ he said, ‘the difficulty is not to make it go; it is to hold it in check.’ Appalled by the rapidity of its progress, he used all his powers of persuasion and oratory to stem the tide – to release the King from virtual captivity, to reduce the increasing powers of the Assembly and above all to reverse the decree which forbade any deputy from becoming a Minister of the Crown. But, since it was well known that he longed to be a Minister himself, his condemnation of this last decree was naturally supposed to be dictated by self-interest. His great powers were recognized in the Assembly but his motives were suspect there; and, while his usefulness was acknowledged at the Tuileries, he was never fully trusted there either. It was accepted that he was a royalist at heart, but it was a matter of concern that he believed so strongly that the authority of the Crown should rest on the sovereignty of the people. The King, who abhorred Mirabeau’s reputation as an adulterer, nevertheless undertook to settle his enormous debts and to pay him a generous salary in addition to a very large capital sum if his efforts on the monarchy’s behalf proved successful. These sums were not entirely wasted: by persuasive advocacy in the Assembly, Mirabeau was able to prevent the erosion of certain of the King’s prerogatives and to ensure that he continued to enjoy his limited freedom of movement in spite of calls for his closer confinement. Yet Mirabeau’s championship of the monarchy was more frequently derided than respected, while his advice to the King and Queen, conveyed to the Tuileries in numerous secret messages, was rarely adopted. In the end, the King, disregarding Mirabeau’s urgent warnings, took a step which was to place him beyond the help of his most formidable adviser or, indeed, of anyone else.

The King was persuaded to take this step largely by the Assembly’s policies towards the Church. The most contentious of these policies had been drafted by one of the specialist committees to which the Assembly delegated certain of its proposed legislation. They were contained in a document misleadingly called the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and involved not only a considerable reduction in the number of bishoprics but also the popular election of both bishops and priests and the severance of those ties which had traditionally bound them to Rome.

In the hope of averting this schism, the clergy appealed to the Pope to authorize them to accept the Civil Constitution which was passed by the Assembly on 12 July 1790. The Pope hesitated before replying to their request. So the Assembly required them all to take an oath of loyalty to the new Constitution, its own clerical members being ordered to show their brethren a good example. Some of them, led by the radical Abbé Grégoire, did so; but most, including all the bishops who were present, declined to follow their example. Outside the Assembly about half of the lower clergy also refused to take the oath; and only seven bishops accepted it. The Church was thus split into two opposing camps, one aghast at the schism, the other inclined to support the Jansenist lawyer, Armand Gaston Camus, in his answer to the question, ‘What is the Pope?’ ‘The Pope is a bishop, the minister of Jesus Christ, just like any other, whose functions are circumscribed within the limits of the diocese of Rome. It is high time that the Church of France, which has always been jealous of her liberties, should be freed from this servitude.’

As the divisions deepened, the laity, too, took sides, friends and families quarrelling bitterly, peasants in many areas enthusiastically supporting the priests who refused the oath, condemning those who had taken it, and thereby giving popular support to the forces of counter-revolution. The Assembly endeavoured to pacify the unrest by giving pensions to priests opposed to the Civil Constitution and by allowing them to continue in their parishes until they were replaced. But the breach was not healed and remained a source of angry dispute until Napoleon’s Concordat with the Papacy in 1801.

Before the Civil Constitution of the Clergy caused such upheaval in France, attempts to raise the provinces against the Assembly in Paris had met with little success as Mounier and Lally-Tollendal had discovered. In some areas enthusiasm for the Revolution was not marked and there were occasional outbreaks of violence against it; but most people welcomed it, and in many districts towns and villages had come together in fraternal friendship, forming themselves into fédérations in commemoration and celebration of the country’s rebirth. In February 1790, in one typical, moving ceremony at Pontivy, delegates from Anjou and Brittany joined hands to swear that they were ‘neither Angevins nor Bretons, but citizens of one and the same community’. On the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille thousands of National Guardsmen and soldiers from all over France converged upon Paris for a splendid Fête de la Fédération. The celebrations centred upon the Champ de Mars, a large open space between the École Militaire and the Seine. It had been planned to dig out the earth from the centre and to pile it up around the sides to create a vast amphitheatre capable of containing tens of thousands of spectators. But, although twelve thousand workmen were employed on this ambitious undertaking, it was realized as the day of the festival approached that it would never be ready in time. So, ‘in an instant the whole population was transformed into labourers’. Priests and prostitutes, watchmakers and watermen, sempstresses, shopkeepers and soldiers, men and women of every age and class, marched to the site to the sound of drums and under banners of different colours emblazoned with patriotic emblems. Lafayette came to lend a hand. So did several ladies who, fainting after their unaccustomed exertions, were cheerfully pushed away in wheelbarrows by sturdy fishwives.

Rich people, poor people, well-dressed people, people in rags, old men, boys, comedians, clerks, actors, scholars, nuns, Carthusians grown old in solitude…exhibited to the astonished eye a scene full of life and bustle [recorded the Marquis de Ferrières]. There were songs and shouts of joy, the sound of drums and military instruments, the voices of labourers calling to each other…As the clock struck nine the groups separated, each citizen returned to his family and friends. They all marched off to the sound of drums, preceded by torches, singing from time to time the famous Ça ira [which had become a kind of theme song of the Revolution]…Meanwhile the fédérés were arriving from every part of the country. They were lodged in private houses where they were happily supplied with beds and sheets, wood and food, everything, in fact, that would help to make their stay in Paris agreeable.

At length the great day came…The fédérés set out from the site of the Bastille under the eighty-three banners of the departments of France…They were greeted on their way with the acclamations of an immense concourse of people who filled the streets, the quays and the windows of the houses on either side. A heavy rain was falling but it neither upset nor slackened the march. Dripping with sweat and rain, the fédérés danced farandoles, shouting ‘Long live our brothers, the Parisians!’ Wine, ham, fruit, sausages were let down from the windows for them, and they were loaded with blessings. The National Assembly joined the procession at the Place Louis XV…The rain continued to fall. No one seemed to notice it…M. de Lafayette, mounted on a superb horse, and surrounded by his aides-de-camp, gave orders and received the homage of the people and the fédérés…A man whom nobody knew, pushed through the crowd and advanced, holding a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other. ‘General,’ he said. ‘You are hot. Have a glass.’ Raising his bottle he filled a large glass and handed it to M. de Lafayette. The General took the glass, eyed the stranger for a moment and drank off the wine at a draught. The people applauded while M. de Lafayette, with a complacent smile, cast a benevolent and confiding look upon them…

Meanwhile more than three hundred thousand people, assembled since six in the morning, were sitting on turf seats in the Champ de Mars, drenched, bedraggled, sheltering under umbrellas; then, when the rain stopped, they adjusted their dresses as they waited, laughing and chatting, for the fédérés and the National Assembly to arrive.

At last the procession entered the Champ de Mars. The deputies took up their positions and the fédérés assembled under their respective banners while Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, the Bishop of Autun, attended by 300 priests in white surplices with tricolour scarves, prepared to say Mass at an altar in the middle of the amphitheatre. After Mass, the Bishop blessed the oriflamme and the eighty-three banners of the fédérés; then he led the singing of the Te Deum to the accompaniment of an orchestra of 1,200 musicians.

The staff of the Parisian National Guard, with Lafayette at their head, followed by representatives of the army, the navy and the fédérés, marched up to the altar to swear to be faithful to the nation, the law and the King. Cannon thundered, banners were waved, sabres glistened and the hundreds of musicians played their instruments more loudly than ever as the President of the National Assembly repeated the same oath and the deputies and spectators, answered with shouts of ‘I swear it!’

The King then stood up and declared in the sudden silence, ‘I, King of the French, swear to employ the power delegated to me in maintaining the constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by me.’ The Queen then, too, stood up; and, lifting the Dauphin in her arms, said, ‘Here is my son! He and I both join in those sentiments.’

Vociferous cheers greeted these remarks. Thousands of voices shouted, ‘Vive le Roi! Vive la Reine! Vive M. le Dauphin!’ The rain had stopped; the sun had come out.

The festivities continued the next day and the day after that. There were celebrations and parades in the Champ de Mars; there were reviews of the army and the National Guard; there were firework displays and banquets. A ball was held in the Halle au Blé, another on the site of the Bastille. Crowds of fédérés converged upon the Palais Royal, many of them equipped with a useful pamphlet entitled Lists of Emoluments for the ladies of the Palais Royal, and for the other regions of Paris, comprising names and addresses, which an enterprising publisher had brought out to help simple young men from the provinces in their dealings with such women as Madame Duperon and her four lady friends at 33, Palais Royal, who charged twenty-five livres, or with the less exotic Victorine who charged only six. In the Champs Elysées, beneath trees festooned with coloured lights, crowds of young people danced and sang, while sailors clambered up the masts greased with soap in attempts to win the prizes offered to those who could bring down the tricolour flags flying from their summits. ‘You should have heard the bursts of laughter which greeted those who were forced to relinquish the attempt, and the encouragement given to those who, more lucky or more adroit, appeared likely to reach the top,’ wrote one observer of this ‘charming and brilliant festival’. ‘A sentimental joy was diffused over every face and beamed in every eye. It reminded me of the happy pleasures of the Elysian fields of the ancients. The white dresses of the crowds of women strolling under the trees in those beautiful alleys served to heighten the illusion.’

The preparations for the festival and the festival itself had, indeed, provided a convincing display of national unity and given grounds for hope that the bitterness of the past would soon be forgotten.

In the spring and summer of 1791, however, this national unity was undermined by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. People came out into the streets in support of recalcitrant priests wearing royalist cockades, there were riots in several towns and violent disturbances in many villages from which curés who refused to take the oath were evicted.

The King had signed the Civil Constitution, on the advice of a majority of his Ministers, with evident reluctance. Soon afterwards he received a long-delayed letter from the Pope expressly declaring that if he lent his approval to it he would be leading his nation into schism. This was followed by another letter suspending all priests who accepted the Civil Constitution and firmly condemning the election of clergy by the people. The King thereupon replaced his confessor who had taken the oath by one who had not, and consulted a distinguished theologian, the Bishop of Clermont, as to whether he could now take communion from his parish priest who had also taken the forbidden oath.

Up till now the Paris which the King overlooked from his first-floor windows above the Seine had remained quite calm. The upheavals of the summer of 1789 had not been repeated. While outbreaks of violence and sporadic riots were troubling several provinces – particularly in the south where many regiments were so close to mutiny that Mirabeau thought it would be a good idea to disband the whole army and ‘enlist another on revolutionary principles’–the life of the capital had continued largely undisturbed. The cafés were crowded, the theatres played to full houses, the salons were as well attended as ever and rich aristocrats continued to walk the streets and patronize the fashionable shops. ‘We have had several delightful tea parties the last few days,’ one of these aristocrats wrote. ‘We are all amusing ourselves.’ To some the Revolution had become a kind of joke. Women wore Constitution jewellery and Liberty caps decorated with ribbons the colour of that vivid red known as Foullon’s blood; men took pinches of snuff from boxes elegantly enamelled with the tricolour. ‘Feudal’ became a popular word of playful denigration to be used of coffee-grinders that failed to work or watches that refused to keep time. There was a strange light-heartedness in the air. When Madame de Simiane was hit by an apple thrown from the upper gallery of the Théâtre Français, she sent it to her brother-in-law, Lafayette, with the comment, ‘Here, my dear General, is the first fruit of the Revolution that has so far come into my hands.’

In this atmosphere the King had begun to suppose that he might yet recover his lost authority. At the beginning of 1790 he had made a speech to the Assembly in which he had promised to educate his son in the new principles of constitutional monarchy, of freedom with justice, and had associated himself with those plans which the Assembly were carrying out ‘for the benefit of France’. He had been loudly cheered and escorted back to the Tuileries as a hero. More recently, and more than once, he had been vociferously cheered again as he had been during the celebrations of the Fête de la Fédération. ‘I am still King of the French,’ he said with some satisfaction.

When he had first arrived at the Tuileries he had seemed listless and despairing. Although it was not suggested to him that he must forego the pleasure of hunting, he had sulkily indicated that he had lost his zest for it. Followed everywhere by six National Guardsmen who were ordered by the Assembly never to lose track of him, he had grown fat and discontented. But as the months passed his spirits revived. The Queen, too, became less unpopular. She was still the victim of libels, accused of plotting to starve the poor, of sending money to Austria, of continuing to indulge a voracious sexual appetite with both men and women. Yet deputations of citizens came to wish her well, while she herself attempted to prove herself worthy of their regard by visiting hospitals and workshops.

Encouraged by the respect which the monarchy still commanded and by a growing feeling in the Assembly, except on the Left, that the Revolution had gone far enough and it was time to conciliate the King, the counter-revolutionaries now urged him to strike back, to turn to the army and to prepare for civil war. This was the advice of the Comte d’Artois given from the safety of exile in Savoy; this was the advice, too, of their sister Elisabeth. The King, however, could not face the prospect of civil war, clinging to his hope that there were now sufficient deputies in favour of compromise with the Court to ensure a return to the quiet pleasures of Versailles. This hope was shattered by the Pope’s firm stand against the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and by the King’s decision that, in loyalty to his faith and conscience, he must accept the view of Bishop Bonal that he could not receive Holy Communion from a ‘Constitutionnel’ priest.

The Pope’s unequivocal pronouncement against the Civil Constitution, made public in a brief, led to serious disturbances in Paris where the people’s anti-clericalism was fostered both by political clubs and by the theatres which, when not presenting plays celebrating civic virtue, put on others that displayed the horrors of the Inquisition, the tribulations and hypocrisy of monastic and convent life, and the greed and dissipation of real and fictional leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. Outside the theatres and in the gardens of the Palais Royal effigies of the Pope were set alight on bonfires, a severed head was tossed through the windows of the Papal Nuncio’s carriage, convents were broken into and nuns assaulted and revolutionary slogans were scrawled on church doors. A mob broke into the Church of St Sulpice, calling out for the head of the curé who had protested against the Civil Constitution and forcing the organist to play the tune of ‘Ça ira’, the words of which they sang with frightening intensity. The King was called upon to dismiss his new confessor and condemned in pamphlets as a traitor for having flouted the laws of the nation by receiving Communion from a priest whose allegiance was to the Pope rather than to the state.

In fact, the King had not yet committed this breach of the Civil Constitution, but he had made up his mind to do so, and at Easter he and his family prepared to leave the Tuileries for Holy Communion at Saint-Cloud. The gates of the palace, however, were shut against them by a shouting crowd that had intimidated the National Guardsmen on duty in the courtyard. Lafayette arrived on the scene. So did Bailly. But neither of them could persuade the mob to let the carriage pass. Nor could the King who put his head out of the window to ask for that freedom for himself which, he told them, he had given to the nation. His words were met by insults and by a rattling of fists on the carriage doors. For nearly two hours the uproar continued while the Queen, pale yet composed, comforted the weeping Dauphin and the King waited vainly for the crowds to disperse. Then he told the coachman to return to the palace.

In the Tuileries he was advised once again, as he had so often been in the past, to escape from Paris: once he had got away to the army on the frontier he would be able to persuade his brother-in-law, the Austrian Emperor, to take part in an armed congress if not actually to order an invasion of France; he would then be in a position to act as negotiator and the Assembly would be obliged to have him back on his own terms. He would also be free to worship as his conscience urged him to do. Slowly convinced by suggestions and propositions such as these, and by the Queen’s strong endorsement of them, the King came to the conclusion that he must make a dash for the frontier. After all, both the King of Spain and the Austrian Emperor had stressed that they could not help him until he and his family were in a place of safety. Once they were, the foreign powers would at least be given the opportunity of proving that they were not using the French royal family’s present confinement merely as an excuse for doing nothing as the Queen suspected. The time chosen for the dangerous attempt was the night of 19 June 1791.

Escape from the Tuileries was not to be easy. For weeks past it had been expected that an attempt would be made. When a rumour got about that the Comte de Provence had already gone abroad to join the Comte d’Artois, a mob surrounded the Luxembourg, demanding that he show himself if he were there, and forced him to drive about the streets in a carriage accompanied by market-women who cheekily kissed him and fondled him. His two maiden aunts, Adélaïde and Victoire, daughters of Louis XV, had succeeded in escaping across the frontier with passports for Rome. They had been held for a time in Burgundy before being allowed to proceed, and crowds had besieged the Tuileries calling for their recall and insisting that a deputation be admitted to the palace to ensure that they had not taken the Dauphin with them. Since then the palace had been patrolled by hundreds of National Guardsmen in addition to those who closely watched the movements of the King and Queen. Sentinels stood at each garden gate and at intervals along the river terrace; 600 sectionnaires watched all the approaches. Several of the palace servants were paid informers, and no one could enter or leave the apartments which had been allocated to the royal family without the production of a stamped pass. As well as being difficult, escape would be expensive; and Louis had little money of his own readily available, while the Queen could not sell her jewels without arousing suspicion. But fortunately there was a man in Paris with both the means and the inclination to help them, a man of courage and resource. This was Hans Axel, Count von Fersen.

Fersen, a tall, amusing, strikingly handsome man of thirty-six, was the son of the distinguished Swedish soldier and politician, Frederik Axel von Fersen. After a rigorous education in Sweden, Germany and Italy, he had entered the French military service and had served as aide-de-camp to General Rochambeau in America, being promoted colonel propriétaire of the Royal-Suédois regiment in 1785. Since then he had been appointed King Gustavus III’s special representative at the French Court. He had grown fond of the King and was devoted to the Queen, ‘an angel’, as he described her in a letter to his sister, a woman both brave and sensitive. He was, he added, doing all he could to console her in her misfortune. Needless to say, it was rumoured that they had become lovers. Perhaps they had. Certainly Fersen was very attractive to women and much attracted by them: he already had one devoted lover in Paris, Eleonora Sullivan, a voluptuous Italian woman, once a circus acrobat and courtesan, now the wife of an Anglo-American millionaire and the mistress of a Scottish one.

Fersen, as generous as he was debonair, offered to lend the King and Queen all the money he had; and if this sum, 600,000 livres, proved insufficient for their purposes, he undertook to borrow the rest. He also took it upon himself to provide a four-wheeled covered carriage which would be commodious enough to carry the two royal children and their aunt Elisabeth as well as the King and Queen; for Louis and Marie Antoinette were both determined that the family should not be parted. This carriage, a sumptuous berlin with dark green and yellow bodywork, paler yellow wheels and white velvet upholstery, ordered in the name of a friend of Fersen, Baroness von Korff, was kept in the courtyard of Fersen’s hotel so that it should become a familiar sight to the citizens of Paris. It was occasionally to be seen, drawn by six horses, driven as fast as it would go – which was disappointingly slowly – along the Vincennes road so that Fersen could test its reliability.

On the night of the escape from Paris the berlin was to be taken first to the courtyard of the house of Eleonora Sullivan’s rich Scottish lover, then to an agreed spot just beyond the customs post on the road outside the Porte Saint-Martin. Three of the King’s former bodyguard were to wait there with it, dressed in yellow liveries which Fersen had bought at a sale of the effects of an émigré prince. Fersen himself, dressed as a cabman, was to drive the royal family to the rendezvous in a hired carriage. Once he had got them, suitably disguised, into the carriage Fersen foresaw no difficulties. The berlin to which they would be transferred outside the Porte Saint-Martin would rattle off under cover of darkness through Châlons. Ponte de Sommeville, Saint-Ménéhould, Clermont, Varennes, Dun and Stenay towards the north-east frontier where troops of the Marquis de Bouillé, whose headquarters were at Metz, had been asked to provide an escort on the last stages of the journey. But the great difficulty would be in spiriting the family out of the palace.

The first problem arose when a woman who worked in the palace as a cleaner and who was known to spy for her lover, a convinced republican, decided to postpone the holiday which she had been due to take. The proposed flight would have to be put off until she had gone. The new date set was the night of Monday 20 June.

At ten o’clock that night the Queen woke her children, dressed the Dauphin in a girl’s frock and pulled a wide-brimmed bonnet down over his eyes. ‘He looked so beautiful,’ his sister recalled, ‘but was so sleepy that he could not stand and did not know what was happening. I asked him what he thought we were going to do, and he answered, “I suppose to act in a play since we have got these funny clothes on.”’ His mother then led him and his sister downstairs to rooms which had until recently been occupied by the King’s First Gentleman who had emigrated. Since his departure the door of these lodgings had been left unguarded. The Queen unlocked it. The children’s governess, the Duchesse de Tourzel, crept out with her two charges to find Fersen waiting for them, whip in hand, playing the part of a hackney-coachman to perfection, so the Duchess thought, whistling, gossiping with a passer-by, taking occasional pinches of snuff. When she and the children came out he hurried them away to the waiting carriage while the Queen went back into the palace and eventually to bed. Soon after eleven when all seemed quiet she got up again, put on a brown dress and a black hat with a heavy veil, and waited for the King to come to her bedroom where it had been arranged he would change into a brown suit and a dark green overcoat and cover his hair with a grey wig. Wearing similar clothes and such a wig, the Chevalier de Coigny, who looked rather like the King, had left the Tuileries for the past twelve nights at the same time each night. So it was hoped that when the King left on the night of the 20th he would be mistaken for the Chevalier. And so he was. He walked past a sentry who did not challenge him; and as Fersen emerged from the shadows to join him, he made for the line of carriages which was habitually drawn up in the courtyard for the use of those whose business detained them at the palace until late at night. He climbed into one of them with Fersen and found the children already inside. Soon afterwards the Queen, who had left the palace the same way as the children, joined him there.

The transfer took place safely beyond the Porte Saint-Martin; and before three o’clock next morning Baroness von Korff’s berlin had reached Bondy. Inside sat the Baroness’s two children (the Dauphin and his sister), their governess (the Queen), her steward (the King) and the Baroness herself (the Duchesse de Tourzel). Fersen wished them farewell at Bondy and galloped away to Belgium while the berlin, drawn by six fresh horses from the post-house, lumbered off for Claye and, through Meaux, towards Chaintrix and Châlons. ‘Lafayette must be feeling most embarrassed by now,’ the King remarked contentedly, looking at his watch.

Dawn came and there was no sign of any pursuit. ‘When we’ve passed Châlons,’ the King said, ‘we shall be safe. We shall then find the first detachment of troops and after that we shall have nothing to fear.’ Forty hussars under the young Duc de Choiseul had been sent out by the Marquis de Bouillé to meet them just beyond the town at the village of Pont de Sommeville. Once they got there they would be out of danger.

When the berlin clattered to a halt outside the post-house at Pont de Sommeville, however, there was no sign of the promised soldiers. Fersen had calculated its time of arrival as ‘Tuesday at 2.30 at the latest’. But there had been delays on the way: a wheel had struck the wall of a narrow bridge, the traces had snapped and the horses fallen, and even where the road surfaces were good it had proved impossible to drive the heavily loaded vehicle at more than about seven miles an hour. It was not, therefore, until six o’clock in the evening that the royal family reached Pont de Sommeville. By then the Duc de Choiseul had become alarmed by angry peasants who disbelieved his story that he was ‘in their village to escort pay for the army in the east’ and who supposed that he had come instead to enforce the collection of overdue rents on behalf of a local landowner. Threatened by these peasants who brandished pitchforks and pointed muskets at the faces of his men, Choiseul decided to withdraw from the village into a nearby forest where he became lost in the darkness.

So, when the horses had been changed at the post-house, the berlin had to move off again unescorted to Sainte-Ménéhould. Here the King had expected to find a detachment of dragoons, but again he was disappointed, for their commander, who had been constantly questioned by suspicious villagers throughout the afternoon, had received a message from Choiseul at Pont de Sommeville that there was no likelihood of the royal party arriving that day and had consequently allowed his men to dismount and to go for a drink in a wine shop. On the appearance of the berlin he walked up to it, saluted and told the King in a low voice that the plans had misfired and that he would have to stay out of His Majesty’s way for fear of increasing the suspicions of the villagers. The villagers, however, were by now quite sure as one of them said later, that ‘something very odd was going on’. They had not been convinced by the dragoon captain’s evasive excuses for his men’s presence in Sainte-Ménéhould, they had seen him salute the occupants of the new, expensive carriage and had watched him as he whispered his brief message through the window before walking hurriedly away. It was decided, therefore, to call out the National Guard and to disarm the dragoons while they were still dismounted. Thus it was that, as the berlin continued on its way through the outskirts of the town, the King looked behind in vain for the escort that he had been promised.

In Paris the flight of the royal family had been discovered early in the morning of 21 June when one of the King’s valets de chambre had woken in his truckle bed in the King’s room. He had detached from his arm the cord by which the King roused him if he needed him in the night; he had opened the shutters, removed his bed and the screen that shielded it from the King’s, opened the door for the Pages of the Bedchamber, and approached the drawn curtains of His Majesty’s bed. ‘Sire,’ he had announced, bowing respectfully, ‘it is seven o’clock.’ He then drew the curtains and discovered the bed to be empty.

The Queen’s bedroom and the children’s were also found to be deserted. And soon the tocsin was ringing and crowds of people from all over Paris were surging round the Tuileries, at first in a mood of indignant anger, so one observer considered, then in one of taunting contempt. They pushed through the gates on which was hung a sign reading ‘House to let’, telling a worried postman who was trying to deliver letters to mark them, ‘Gone away. Left no address’. They then streamed into the palace, examining the rooms with curiosity, insisting that the palace servants remove their livery but otherwise neither molesting anyone nor doing any damage. A cherry hawker sat with her basket on the eiderdown quilt of the Queen’s bed. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Today, it’s the nation’s turn to be comfortable.’

Awakened in his house in the Rue de Bourbon, Lafayette leaped out of bed, hurriedly put on his uniform and big cockaded hat and rushed off towards the Pont Royal, followed by an angry crowd accusing him of having connived at the King’s escape. On his way he met Bailly who, accompanied also by a shouting mob and dressed in a black overcoat with a tricolour ribbon across his shoulders, appeared ‘nearly overcome with anxiety’. They stopped to talk above the roar of the crowd. ‘Do you think,’ Lafayette asked, ‘that the King and his family will have to be arrested and brought back to Paris for the public good?’ Bailly thought that they would but wondered who could give the orders. The Assembly were not due to meet until nine o’clock and something would have to be done before then.

‘All right, I will take the responsibility upon myself,’ Lafayette said and immediately began to dictate an order to an aide-de-camp:

The King having been removed by the enemies of the Revolution, the bearer is instructed to impart the fact to all good citizens, who are commanded in the name of their endangered country to take him out of their hands and to bring him back to the keeping of the National Assembly. The latter is about to assemble, but in the meantime I take upon myself all the responsibility of this order. Paris, June 21,1791.

Lafayette signed the paper, adding beneath the date, ‘This order extends to all the royal family’, and soon horsemen were riding in all directions out of Paris to find them. One of the horsemen was Captain Bayon who took the road to Valenciennes. He galloped through Meaux and east for Châlons, but after six hours in the saddle he felt he must have a rest. So he reined in his horse at Chaintrix, sending a message on to Sainte-Ménéhould that every effort must be made to stop the royal family if they had taken that road to the frontier. When this message reached the post-house at Sainte-Ménéhould the suspicions of the young postmaster, Jean Baptiste Drouet, were confirmed. Drouet had thought that the governess of Baroness von Korff’s two children looked just like the Queen whom he had seen once or twice when he had been in the army and was ‘equally struck’ by the resemblance of the steward to the face of the King printed on an assignat he had in his pocket. He had said as much to his wife, but she had not wanted him to get into trouble and had advised him to keep quiet. Now, feeling convinced that the woman must be the Queen, he and a friend galloped off in pursuit of the berlin through the Forêt d’Argonne on the road to Verdun.

Ten miles east of Sainte-Ménéhould is the little town of Clermont en Argonne. Here the berlin had stopped once again to change horses, and Drouet’s postilions riding back from the post-house there to Sainte-Ménéhould had overheard a shout from the box of the berlin as it continued on its journey: ‘Take the road to Varennes!’ Passing Drouet on their way through the Forêt d’Argonne, the postilions told him what they had heard. So Drouet and his companion, who had been making for Metz by way of Verdun, turned north for Varennes. ‘We went by a side road through the woods,’ Drouet recorded, ‘and reached Varennes at the same time as the berlin which was drawn up beside the houses at the top of the town. It was then about half past eleven and the night was very dark. But in order not to be recognized or suspected, we took off our cross belts and as we passed the carriage at a walk, I said in a loud voice, trying to pass ourselves off as merchants bound for a nearby fair, “Good Lord! We’ll be very late getting to Grandpré. Perhaps we shan’t get there at all with these tired-out horses.”’

Having passed the berlin they rode flat out down the hill, through the cobbled streets and across the stone bridge to the house of the local procurateur, a grocer and chandler named Jean Baptiste Sauce. Coming out into the street with a lantern in his hand, Sauce called out the National Guard who took up their positions beside an archway that spanned the main street by the church. Soon the lamps of the berlin appeared in the darkness, and Sauce walked out into the middle of the street shouting, ‘Halt!’ The berlin came on despite the order and, as the National Guardsmen appeared from behind the arch, bayonets fixed to their muskets, Sauce cried out again, ‘Halt! Halt! One step more and we fire!’ The horses clattered to a halt.

Sauce went up to the carriage, knocked on the door and asked to see the occupants’ passport. The Duchesse de Tourzel passed it through the window. Sauce took it from her and went into a nearby inn to examine it in a better light than his lantern afforded. It was made out in the proper form for the Baroness von Korff and her party. Sauce began to think there must have been a mistake, but Drouet insisted. ‘I tell you the King and Queen are in that carriage. I’ve seen them. If you let them go you’ll be guilty of treason.’

So Sauce asked the travellers to alight. He led them into his small shop, a wooden building with bundles of candles and pots of brown sugar in the window, and took them up the narrow stairs to a bedroom where the two children lay down on the bed. The two ladies sat on rickety, straw-bottomed chairs, and the man who claimed to be the Baroness’s steward walked up and down restlessly as they waited for the arrival of a judge, Jacques Destez, who had lived at Versailles for a number of years and had often set eyes on the King. He came into the room at last, looked in astonishment at the figure in the green overcoat and immediately knelt before him. ‘Oh, Sire!’ he said.

‘Yes,’ the King answered in immediate acknowledgment of this identification. ‘I am, indeed, your King.’

Sauce was as impressed and overawed by their Majesties’ presence in his bedroom as was Destez. Having listened to the King’s explanations as to why he had left Paris, he told them respectfully that in the morning he would provide them with an escort to take them on their journey.

But before dawn Captain Bayon arrived, together with one of Lafayette’s aides-de-camp, Jean Louis Romeuf, who brought with him a decree from the Assembly confirming Lafayette’s order for the royal family’s return to the Tuileries. They were both embarrassed. Romeuf averted his glance when he saw the Queen. Bayon stammered when he addressed the King: ‘Sire, you know – all the people of Paris are, er…You will not go any further, Sire – the interests of the state…Sire…’

“Well, what is it you want?’ the King asked him brusquely.

‘Sire, a decree from the Assembly.’

‘Where is it?’

‘My companion has it.’

Romeuf held out the paper, looking at the floor. The King snatched it from him and, having read it, said, ‘There is no longer a King in France.’

He handed it to the Queen who also read it, then gave it back to him. He placed it on the bed where the children were still lying down. But the Queen suddenly seized it and flung it on to the floor with the angry comment, ‘I will not have my children contaminated.’

At these words the people standing in the threshold of the room began to murmur angrily ‘as though she had profaned the most sacred thing in the world’.

The King seemed to be in his usual quandary as to what ought to be done. He asked Bayon and Romeuf if they might not wait until ‘at least eleven o’clock, as though still hoping that de Bouillé’s troops might arrive. But then, as the crowds in the street outside shouted more loudly than ever, ‘They must go back! They must go back! To Paris! To Paris!’, he began to realize that he had no alternative but to obey the Assembly’s commands. The Duc de Choiseul, who had now ridden into the town with his hussars and had pushed his way into Sauce’s shop, quietly urged him to make a dash for the frontier with his family: there were fresh horses ready in the street below as well as the hussars. There were also, though, as the King well knew, hundreds of armed men there, and hundreds more National Guardsmen were still converging on Varennes from the neighbouring towns and villages. So, after breakfast, during which Madame Sauce suggested that he must be crazy to consider giving up all the money the nation paid him, it was decided that the royal family would have to return to Paris.

Before leaving, the King begged to be left alone for a few minutes with his family. When the others had gone he persuaded Sauce to go down to the carriage, to make an excuse for entering it and to bring back a box from a secret receptacle whose position he described to him, giving him the keys. On Sauce’s return he opened the box. Inside were papers which he and his wife and sister frantically tore into tiny pieces, heaping them up in a bowl while Sauce stood on guard at the door. No sooner had the King set them alight, however, than there was a loud knocking at the door. He hurriedly picked up the bowl and hurled both it and its contents out of the window. The people below chased the fluttering fragments but, although they later tried to fit the charred edges together, they could make nothing of the writing on them.

It was now half past seven in the morning. The royal family walked down the steps towards the carriage, on whose box the officers of the bodyguard had been sitting affecting imperturbability at the curses of the crowd who now let out repeated shouts of ‘Vive la Nation!’ The King and Queen climbed in followed by the children and the Duchesse de Tourzel, and Choiseul closed the door. ‘Don’t leave us,’ the Queen begged him, leaning out of the window; but the berlin jolted forward, and, as the mob surged after it, he was knocked to the ground.

The return journey to Paris was a dreadful ordeal. At Sainte-Ménéhould, the berlin, escorted now by a vast crowd of curious onlookers and by National Guards, some in uniform, others not, was halted while the mayor made a speech of admonition and rebuke. Later, an old quixotic nobleman, who rode up with the cross of St Louis on his breast to make the King an elaborate salute, was shot in the back as he rode away. The crowds increased, shouting insults and threats, spitting at the windows. Then near Pont à Binson, two members of the Assembly, Antoine Barnave and Jérôme Pétion, who had been sent out to meet the carriage, climbed into it, obliging the Queen to take the Dauphin on her knee. Pétion, soon to be Mayor of Paris, a good looking, though fat and vain and tiresomely garrulous man, afterwards gave a detailed account of the last stages of the journey. He described how anxious the Queen and Madame Elisabeth were to assure him that the King had had no intention of leaving the country, and how the King, whose linen was now very dirty, on several occasions offered him something to drink and poured it out for him, trying to make conversation. He began to talk about the English, their industry and keen commercial sense; but he uttered a few sentences only, then became embarrassed and blushed. Often ‘the difficulty he found in expressing himself made him shy’.

We stayed for twelve whole hours in the carriage [Pétion continued] without once getting out. What surprised me particularly was that neither the Queen nor Madame Elisabeth nor Madame de Tourzel showed any sign of wanting to get out. The Dauphin made water two or three times. The King himself unbuttoned his breeches and made him pee into a big silver cup. Once Barnave held the cup. It has been said that the coach contained an English convenience. Perhaps it did; but I saw no sign of one.

As the hours passed, Pétion began to flatter himself that Madame Elisabeth was physically attracted by him. Their eyes ‘met now and then with a kind of understanding’. He stretched out his arm and she placed hers over it. ‘Our arms were interlaced,’ he said, ‘and mine touched her armpit. I felt a hurried movement of her heart and a warmth passing through her clothes…I noticed a certain abandon in her attitude…and I believe that if we had been alone she would have fallen into my arms and given herself up to the promptings of nature.’

Once a fight broke out among the people surrounding the carriage, and men carrying bayonets could be seen staring angrily at the Queen through the windows. ‘Soon they started swearing at her. “Look at the bitch,” they shouted. “It’s no good her showing us her child. Everyone knows it isn’t his.” The Dauphin, frightened by the noise and the clank of arms, started to scream. The Queen soothed him, the tears pouring down her cheeks. Barnave and I spoke to the men, one of whom replied, “Don’t worry. No harm will be done. We can promise you that. But the post of honour belongs to us.” It turned out that the fight had been caused by a quarrel over precedence.’

So the journey continued in the insufferable heat. Clouds of dust rose from the wheels of the carriage and the clopping hooves of the horses, until at last, after five exhausting days of fruitless travelling, the royal family arrived back in Paris where the streets were lined with National Guards, their arms reversed as though for a funeral procession. The crowds were immense. Every window and roof in the Champs Elysées was filled with faces. People clambered on to gates and into the trees. But there was a strange silence broken only by shouts of ‘Vive la Nation!’ Hundreds of official notices had been pasted to the walls of Paris reading: ‘Whoever applauds the King shall be flogged. Whoever insults him shall be hanged.’ The carriage stopped outside the Tuileries. The doors opened. The King climbed out. Still there was silence. But, so Pétion said, ‘the Queen’s appearance was greeted with violent expressions of disapproval, though the children were received with good humour and even with endearments.’ They walked up the steps into the palace where a deputy approached the King and reprimanded him, like a schoolmaster speaking to a naughty pupil. ‘Well, that was a fine way to behave! That comes of having such bad advisers. Now see what a mess you’ve got yourself into.’ Then, as the man suddenly and unexpectedly burst into tears, the Marquis de Lafayette, having inspected the guards and ensured that there was no chance of further escape, came up to the King and asked formally for orders. ‘I seem,’ the King replied petulantly, ‘to be more at your orders than you are at mine.’