The Days of the French Revolution

5 THE DAYS OF THE TUILERIES 20 June and 10 August 1792

Before dying at the age of forty-two on 2 April 1791 in his house in the Chaussée d’Antin, the Comte de Mirabeau said sadly to Talleyrand, ‘I carry away with me the last shreds of the monarchy.’ After the flight of the royal family to Varennes and their enforced return to Paris, the French monarchy was, indeed, doomed. There were many deputies like Barnave who had been able to put his ideas to the Queen during their journey together back to the Tuileries, who still hoped that some sort of compromise with the Court was possible, who still believed that, although the Constituent Assembly had ordered Ministers to execute decrees without troubling to obtain the King’s signature, the monarchy should still have a place in the new Constitution which would soon at long last be ready for his approval. But the monarchiens, while still quite numerous in the Assembly, were losing ground outside it. Sieyès continued to assert his belief in the monarchy; so did Bailly. But these heroes of the Revolution’s early days, like several others, were now derided for their caution: the firebrands of 1789 were, in the words of Antoine de Rivarol, now coming forward as firemen. At the same time, ever sharper distinctions were being made between those who considered that the Revolution had gone far enough, who were content to observe that the prestige of the two once privileged orders was being usurped by the bourgeoisie, and those who were demanding the trial and punishment of the King, ‘liberty for all’, and further advances in the ‘emancipation of the people’. The differences between these new revolutionaries and their more moderate bourgeois opponents were highlighted by numerous disturbances during the late winter and spring of 1791. One of the earliest and most serious of these took place at the end of February when over a thousand workers from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, encouraged by members of the Cordeliers Club, marched upon the Château de Vincennes which was being converted into a prison for the reception, so it was alleged, of political prisoners. Accompanied by a battalion of the National Guard under the unwilling command of the brewer, Antoine Santerre – who had been forced to lead them as Lafayette had been compelled to lead the National Guard to Versailles seventeen months before – the ouvriers carried with them crowbars and pickaxes, which had been used in the demolition of the Bastille, and vigorously set about the demolition of the château. Their work was interrupted by Lafayette who arrived on the scene with a large force of troops and who loudly and sternly rebuked Santerre in front of the assembled company. More than sixty prisoners were taken and were carried off to the Conciergerie as the rest of the ouvriers hooted and jeered at their captors.

As the weeks passed the rift between the workers, many of whom were now unemployed, and the more well-to-do citizens was deepened both by the Cordeliers, who sought to enlist the ouvriers’ support for the advancement of revolutionary democracy, and by the readers and writers of such reactionary news-sheets and gossip-sheets as Le Babillard which constantly blamed the workers and unemployed for all the ills of France.

Citizens of every sort [Le Babillard declared in its issue of 6 July] are beginning to lose all patience with the workers. The National Guard, merchants, manufacturers, les bourgeois, les artisans alike all cry out against these people who are in the pay of sedition-mongers…One hears everywhere that they ought to be swept out of the way by a blast of cannon fire.

Less than a fortnight after the publication of this issue of Le Babillard, there was a violent clash between the opposing parties which became known as a massacre. It occurred on Sunday, 17 July.

On the afternoon of that day a huge crowd of people assembled on the Champ de Mars. They had come to sign a republican petition drawn up by the leaders of the Cordeliers Club, a popular club in the Rue Dauphine with a subscription of only two sous a month, whose members had sworn to protect the people against abuses of authority. The petition was laid out on an altar which had been erected for the recent celebration of the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. As the signatories filed past, many writing their names with evident difficulty, some unable to write at all, two men, one a hairdresser, the other an invalide with a wooden leg, were discovered under the steps leading up to the platform. It was later supposed that they had hidden there to peep up the women’s skirts, but at the time the cry went up that they intended to set fire to the altar of liberty, that they were spies for counter-revolutionaries. They were dragged out and hanged on the spot.

At the Hôtel de Ville, where reports were received of a potentially dangerous riot, it was decided that the time had come for a show of forceful authority. Martial law was declared; the National Guard were called out and, led by Bailly and Lafayette, marched off to the Champ de Mars behind a red flag. They were greeted by jeers, boos, catcalls, and, finally, by a volley of stones. Lafayette ordered a few shots to be fired in the air in retaliation. The crowd scattered for a few minutes but then drew together again to renew their shouting and stone-throwing. Lafayette called upon them to disperse, and when they showed no sign of being willing to do so, he gave the command, ‘Fire!’ In the ensuing volleys about fifty of the demonstrators were killed.

Order had been rapidly restored, but the split in the revolutionaries’ ranks was now wider than ever. Lafayette lost his popularity with the citizens of Paris overnight, and Bailly’s political career was ruined. Having been succeeded as Mayor of Paris by Jerome Petion, who was more acceptable to the sons-culottes, Bailly retired to write his memoirs in the provinces whence he was eventually to be dragged back to the capital for execution.

For the moment, however, the conservative revolutionaries had the upper hand and were determined to keep it. From the Hôtel de Ville and from the Assembly came a stream of orders authorizing the arrest of extremists including Camille Desmoulins and Santerre, both of whom went into hiding; newspapers that supported the sons-culottes were suppressed; martial law was kept in force. And the left-wing Jacobin Club, which had previously wielded such influence, almost disintegrated, most of its members seceding to form the more moderate Feuillant Club in protest against a petition to dethrone the King.

The members of the Feuillant Club were by far the largest of the political groups that made up the new Legislative Assembly which, elected on a restrictive middle-class franchise, met on I October 1791, soon after the long-awaited Constitution had at last been promulgated and been accepted and signed by the King. In this Assembly, from which all members of the Constituent Assembly were excluded, the clergy and nobility no longer had separate representation. A few nobles and clergy who held liberal views had been elected, but nearly all the deputies were middle class, many of them lawyers, as had been the case in the Third Estate in 1789. Yet, although the great majority of the Legislative Assembly held moderate opinions and were in favour of some sort of accommodation with the monarchy, the most gifted and rhetorically most powerful deputies were those who sat on their left, several of whom came from the Gironde and were therefore collectively to be known as Girondists. Prominent amongst these men, who were inclined to worship Rousseau and the Romans rather than God, were two lawyers from Bordeaux, Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud and Marguerite Élie Guadet. Closely associated with them was a lawyer from Normandy, Françgois Buzot, and the unashamedly ambitious, impulsive, imaginative and rather affected editor of the Patriote français, Jacques Pierre Brissot.

Vergniaud, the son of a merchant, was a quiet, withdrawn and scholarly man of thirty-eight who sat for much of the time in what appeared to be abstracted reverie, but when he did rise to speak, his oratory was so compelling that he was elected the Assembly’s President. Guadet, three years younger than Vergniaud, dark, thin, intense, with gleaming eyes and a sharp, sarcastic tongue, was an almost equally gifted orator. But overshadowing them both was Brissot.

Brissot, the son of an inn-keeper and the husband of a woman who had been a governess in the household of the Duc d’Orléans, was born at Chartres in 1754. His father, anxious that the boy should get on in the world, had ensured that he was given a good education which enabled him to enter a lawyer’s office in Paris where, with that customary desire of the bourgeois to appear to be more highly born than he was, he called himself Brissot de Warville. Abandoning the law for letters, he became a prolific writer of books, treatises and pamphlets as well as newspaper articles, contributing to the Mercureand the Courrier de l’Europe before becoming editor of the Patriote français. The views he expressed had frequently landed him in trouble with the Government, and for a time he had been incarcerated in the Bastille, the keys of which were presented to him after its capture by the Vainqueurs. He had spent some time in exile in London and, as an agent of an anti-slavery society, had visited Philadelphia whence he had returned with his Quaker-like appearance and manner much intensified. Since he had spent more time abroad than most of his colleagues, he was considered to have an expert knowledge of foreign affairs, a reputation which led to him being appointed to the diplomatic committee of the Legislative Assembly. He soon became the acknowledged leader of this committee and consequently one of the principal arbiters of the foreign policy of France. His fervent advocacy of war as a means of saving the Revolution had a profound influence on the events which were now to unfold.

Although the Feuillants were opposed to war, there was wide support for it not only among other members of the Legislative Assembly but also in the country at large. Both in the provinces, where the flight of the King to Varennes had led to renewed disturbances such as those which had characterized the Great Fear, and in Paris, where members of the Assembly had been booed and insulted after granting an amnesty for political prisoners, there was a growing feeling that the fissures in society were becoming so deep that all the ground that had been gained would be lost unless a violent assault were made upon the enemies of the Revolution beyond the nation’s frontiers.

To millions of peasants it seemed that the only real beneficiaries of the upheavals of 1789 were the middle classes. Several peasants had acquired sizeable parcels of land which had been thrown on to the market by the nationalization of the property of the Church, while many nobles, who had been compensated by the Assembly for the loss of their offices, had been enabled to extend their estates, but it was the wealthy bourgeoisie who had acquired by far the largest holdings. In fact, the expropriation of ecclesiastical property had tended to reinforce the class distinctions as reflected in land ownership rather than to break them down. At the same time the flight of many landowners abroad had done nothing to alleviate the peasants’ economic plight, since the émigré still made his demands upon them through his agents. ‘We thought,’ ran one of the numerous complaints addressed to the Assembly from country districts, ‘that, after the decrees suppressing the feudal regime had been passed, we should be as free in our property as in our persons. Two years’ experience has shown us that we are still slaves. We have no seigneur any more: he is at Coblenz. But he has left us his fermiers who badger and persecute us just as they did before the Revolution…Unless you come to our help we are ruined!’

In several parts of the country unrest was still fostered by popular support for priests who, having refused to take the oath required by the Assembly, were being driven from their parishes. There were renewed riots as armed crowds forced open churches whose doors had been shut against recalcitrant curés. Prompted by the Left, the Assembly passed a decree depriving non-juring priests of the pensions that had been granted them and expelling them from all places where disturbances had occurred.

To this decree the King applied the veto which the new Constitution had granted him and of which he had not yet been deprived. He also exercised his right of veto when the Assembly, harangued again by the Girondins, passed another decree sentencing to a traitor’s death and confiscating the property of all émigrés who had not returned to France by the end of the year.

Confronted by these vetoes the Girondins, believing that there would be large-scale desertions from the enemy ranks, called more loudly than ever for war against those who sheltered and armed the émigrés and who supported priests owing allegiance to the Pope rather than to the nation. Brissot, determined to force the King to give way to the Girondins’ demands and to declare himself openly on the side of the militant Revolution, declared that France urgently needed war ‘to purge her of the vices of despotism’. ‘Do you wish at one blow to destroy the aristocracy, the refractory priests, the malcontents?’ Brissot asked. ‘Then destroy Coblenz [where an émigré army was being formed]. The head of the nation will then be obliged to reign in accordance with the Constitution.’

The cry was taken up by all Brissot’s vociferous supporters, most of whom, as one of their colleagues admitted, were inclined to be intoxicated by their own words once they heard themselves applauded, frequently being carried away ‘far beyond the limits of their own feelings, and, as they left the Assembly, blushing for what they had said’. Maximin Isnard, a wealthy ship-owner who had been elected to the Legislative Assembly for the department of the Var, told his fellow-deputies that caution was ‘merely weakness. The bravest are the best and an excess of firmness is the safeguard of success. We must amputate the gangrened limb to save the rest of the body.’ Outside the Assembly a female voice advocated violence in even stronger terms: ‘Peace will set us back…We can be regenerated through blood alone’. This was the voice of Madame Roland.

Manon Roland was the intelligent, passionate daughter of a Parisian engraver. ‘Her face was not conventionally beautiful,’ wrote a man who came to know her well, ‘but she was extremely attractive…She had a graceful figure and beautifully shaped hands. One suspected that she was witty even before she began to speak; and no woman spoke with more purity, grace and elegance.’ Her own opinion of herself was equally high. ‘My complexion,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘is of a dazzling colour. My mouth is rather large but it would be impossible to find a smile more sweet or disarming. Though my hands are not small they are very elegant because of their long slender fingers which suggest cleverness and grace. My teeth are white and well positioned. I enjoy perfect health. Such are the treasures with which nature has blessed me.’ She might with truth have added that she was a thrifty, conscientious housekeeper and an excellent cook.

She had received little formal education but, being of a studious disposition, she had read a great deal ever since she had learned to read at all, and was extremely well informed. She was also opinionated, outspoken, snobbish, high-spirited and undiscerning, incapable of judging men, so fervently did she love and admire her friends and hate her enemies. At the age of twenty-seven she had married Jean-Marie Roland, an inspector of manufactures in Lyons, twenty years older than herself, a staid and righteous man, very conscious of his virtues, pedantic, energetic and ambitious. Manon was quite as ambitious as her husband for whom she wrote newspaper articles which appeared under his name. Having corresponded with Brissot, they came to Paris where they took cheap, fifth-floor rooms in the Hôtel Britannique. From here Roland walked out one day to join the Jacobin Club in the plain dark clothes he invariably wore, a black hat covering the sparse, neatly brushed hairs on his dome-shaped head. His wife sought out the company of the Girondins to whom she aired sentiments inspired by her study of Plutarch, Voltaire and Rousseau, and made vehement attacks upon the Queen whom she detested.

These attacks were echoed by two journalists of extraordinary vituperative power, Jacques René Hébert and Jean Paul Marat.

The abusive and often obscene language that Hébert used in his journal, Le Père Duchesne, was in marked contrast to his appearance and manner. He was a small, polite man, ‘fussy and effeminate’, always neatly dressed and carefully scented, the husband of a former nun. Born at Alençon where his father kept a goldsmith’s shop, he had come to Paris after the family had been ruined by a lawsuit and had lived for a time in dire poverty, writing plays which managements declined to present and having to work as a box-office assistant at the Variétés, until his gift for scurrilous and ribald invective brought him both a wide readership among the disaffected, who had a taste for such language, and a large following in the Cordeliers Club. He insulted the Queen, ‘the Austrian bitch’, her sister-in-law, ‘Big-arse Babet’, and the King, ‘Monsieur Veto, the drunken drip’, with persistent and coarsely imaginative contempt.

Marat’s targets, who were attacked with equal venom if less scabrously in his paper L’Ami du peuple, were more diverse. Indeed, suspecting almost everyone and constantly complaining, ‘Nous sommes trahis’, Marat attacked the Assembly, the Feuillants, the royal family, the Ministers and municipality with fine impartiality. ‘In order to ensure public tranquillity,’ he once declared, ‘two hundred thousand heads must be cut off.’ Dark and intense, with high cheek bones and wide-set, greenish-yellow eyes, Marat seemed incapable of keeping his body still. When he spoke he gestured constantly with his strong, thin arms; when he read his wide mouth twitched convulsively. He claimed that he slept only two hours a night, devoted a further hour to ‘eating, dressing and household affairs’ and spent the rest of his time working. He was forty-nine, thirteen years older than Hébert, ten years older than Desmoulins, older indeed than Brissot and Vergniaud and all the leading Girondins. Moreover, in his own opinion, he was not only more experienced than they were but also far more wise and honest. ‘When the Revolution came I immediately saw how the wind was blowing,’ he wrote. ‘And at last I began to breathe in the hope of seeing humanity avenged and myself installed in the place which I deserved.’

He came from Neuchâtel, but his father was Sardinian and his mother Swiss. He had studied medicine at Bordeaux and had become an expert on diseases of the eye, suffering himself from one which he managed to cure by his own treatment. He had practised as a doctor in London and Holland after leaving Paris and, following a visit to Scotland, had been recommended for an honorary degree at the University of St Andrews. Thereafter there is no reliable record of his activities, but he seems to have run heavily into debt and to have endeavoured to extricate himself from his difficulties by stealing some medals from a museum. On his return to France, vain, quarrelsome but undoubtedly ingenious, he had found himself again in demand as a fashionable physician whose writing-paper was adorned with an imaginary coat of arms. He had composed various scientific papers, on light, heat and electricity, which he had presented to the Académie des Sciences whose members, shocked by his contradictions of Newton, refused to admit him to their number, thus increasing the sense of persecution which haunted him and drove him to excess.

Abandoning medicine and science for politics on the eve of the Revolution, he became a prolific pamphleteer, attacking a variety of targets with more concern for wide-ranging insult than accurate aim. A visitor, Charles Barbaroux, once called upon him to find him busy writing. ‘He was in a hurry: the printer was calling for copy. You should have seen the casual way in which he composed his articles. Without knowing anything about some public man, he would ask the first person he met what he thought of him and write it down. “I’ll ruin the rascal,” he would say.’ In 1789 he founded the paper which, though he held the people as a whole in low esteem, he was to call L’ Ami du peuple. Being perpetually in trouble with authority, warrants were more than once issued for his arrest. He was imprisoned for a time towards the end of 1789, but on a later occasion escaped by fleeing to London. After the day of the Champ du Mars his presses were seized and, accompanied by his kindly and devoted mistress, the former laundress, Simone Évrard, he went into hiding in the cellars and sewers of Paris where he contracted that painful and unpleasant skin disease known as prurigo. At the end of 1791 he again escaped to London, returning in April the following year to castigate the policies of the Girondins in the pages of the revived L’Ami du peuple and to denounce their call for war as being inspired not so much by anxiety for the future of the Revolution as for their own. He had taken to wearing ostentatiously grubby clothes with open shirts revealing a yellowish neck, and a red bandana soaked in cheap vinegar around his forehead and his greasy, matted hair to alleviate his headaches. On occasions the smell that emanated from him was nauseous. Men would recoil from him, sickened as much by his physical presence, by the ‘open sores, often running, that pitted his terrible countenance’, as by the ferocity of his political opinions. But no one doubted his courage or his importance as a propagandist of the Left.

Marat’s suspicions of the ‘propagandistes de guerre’ were shared by certain members of the Jacobin Club, one of whom declared, ‘We should be betrayed, thus defeated. Or else, were we to be the victors, the triumphant general would become the enemy of the people.’ These were not popular views, though. The Feuillants still feared war, but what influence the Feuillants had once enjoyed had now been largely dissipated and most of their leaders had been dispersed. Barnave had retired to Grenoble whence, like Bailly, he was to be brought back for execution. The revolutionary careers of his closest associates were also virtually over: Adrien Duport was soon to be arrested and to die in exile in Switzerland; Alexandre de Lameth left to join the army; so did his brother, Théodore.

Thus the cries for war became more insistent. The respected and profoundly boring mathematician and philosopher, the Marquis de Condorcet, who sat in the Assembly as one of the deputies for Paris and who, while aligning himself with no political group, had already spoken in favour of a republic, now lent his great influence to the war party. So did the King’s War Minister, the Comte de Narbonne, the only one of his Ministers who enjoyed any respect in the Assembly. And so did the Queen who had long since come to the view that the Constitution which the King had been required to accept was ‘monstrous’ and that their ‘only source of help [lay] with the foreign powers’. ‘At whatever price,’ she told the Austrian Ambassador, ‘they must come to our aid.’ ‘It is for the Emperor to put an end to the disturbances of the French Revolution,’ she added in a letter to her brother Leopold who had succeeded to the Austrian throne on the death of Joseph II. ‘Compromise has become impossible. Everything has been overturned by force and force alone can repair the damage.’

The King was, predictably, in two minds. His brothers, both of whom were now in exile, had told him that he must not accept the Constitution; that if he did so they would take it that he had been forced to do so and that they were, therefore, no longer bound by his commands. They strongly advocated war and, like their sister Elisabeth, urged Austria to invade France. For the moment the Emperor Leopold hung back from taking such a step. By the Declaration of Pillnitz of August 1791 he and the King of Prussia had announced that they regarded the situation of King Louis XVI as ‘an object of interest to all the sovereigns of Europe’, and that they were willing to restore a monarchical system in France. The Declaration was, however, nullified by the proviso that the intervention would not take place without the cooperation of the other powers; and, while some might have agreed to this, others, including Britain, would not.

The King’s indecision was brought to an end in March 1792. In that month, which saw the death of the Emperor Leopold and the accession of his son, the young, impetuous and adventurous Francis II, the King dismissed Narbonne who had been intriguing against His Majesty’s favourite Minister, de Molleville. The dismissal of Narbonne caused uproar in the Assembly where Vergniaud rose to condemn it on behalf of the Girondins and to threaten the Court at the Tuileries in the most violent terms. ‘Terror and dread have often sallied forth from that place,’ he cried. ‘Let them today enter it in the name of the law. Let all those who now live there know that the King alone is inviolable, that the law will, without distinction of persons, overtake all the guilty sheltered there, and that there is not a single head which, once convicted of crime, can escape its blade.’

Overawed by such assaults as these, the King’s Ministers resigned. The Girondins in the Assembly could not replace them as the provision in the Constitution that none of its members could serve in the Government was still in force. So men closely involved with the Girondins were chosen instead. Jean Roland became Minister of the Interior and moved from his shabby rooms in the Hôtel Brittanique to the palatial hôtel particulier of Calonne where his wife presided over an increasingly influential salon. And Charles François Dumouriez, a brave, vain, pushing and dashing lieutenant-general, and in Madame Roland’s opinion ‘a very witty rake’, who had successively attached himself to whichever political party seemed most likely to advance his career, became Minister for Foreign Affairs. A few weeks later the King felt compelled to give way to the demands for war which were now almost universal. He appeared before the Assembly looking tired and abstracted. Necker’s daughter, Madame de Staël, described the scene in her memoirs:

I was present at the sitting in which Louis was forced to a measure which was painful to him for many reasons. His features were not expressive of his thoughts…a combination of resignation and dignity suppressed every sign of his true feelings. On entering the Assembly he looked to the right and left with that sort of vacant curiosity which is not unusual with persons who are so short-sighted that their eyes appear to be of no use to them. He proposed war in the same tone of voice that he might have used in proposing the least important decree imaginable.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you have just heard the result of the negotiations in which I have been engaged with the Court of Vienna. The conclusions of the report have been unanimously approved by my Council. I have adopted them myself. They are conformable with the wish the National Assembly has several times expressed and with the sentiments communicated to me by a great number of citizens in different parts of the Kingdom. All would rather have war than see the dignity of the French people insulted any longer…Having done my best to maintain peace, as I was in duty bound to do, I have now come – in conformity with the terms of the constitution – to propose war to the National Assembly.’

The proposal was loudly applauded. There were shouts of ‘Vive le Roi!’ from all sides. And soon France was at war with Prussia as well as with Austria.

The French army, with a strength of less than 140,000, was in no fit state to fight the combined forces of these enemies. Over 3,000 officers had left their regiments since a new oath of loyalty, omitting the King’s name, had been required of them after the flight of the royal family to Varennes. Many of those that remained exercised little authority over their men. Mutinies were common, equipment defective, ammunition in short supply. The troops and insubordinate volunteers marched towards the enemy in their wooden sabots and blue jackets without enthusiasm or confidence, and were soon retreating in confusion, throwing away their arms, and crying out, ‘We are betrayed! Sauve qui peut!’ General Théobald Dillon, an officer of Irish descent, whose corps had advanced on Tournai, was murdered during the precipitate withdrawal to Lille; General Rochambeau offered to hand in his resignation; the Duc de Biron was reported to have had to rescind an order for a bayonet charge when his men voted against it; the Marquis de Lafayette, refusing to comply with the ill-considered plans of Dumouriez, eventually returned to Paris in the hope of restoring order by a coup d’état.

The disastrous beginning of the war had led to the most violent demonstrations in the capital: rumours of counter-revolution were rife, the King and Queen were accused of conspiring with the enemy and an ‘Austrian Committee’ at the Tuileries was supposed to be betraying military intelligence to Vienna. The Legislative Assembly, concerned by these rumours and disturbances and by repeated reports from the provinces that recalcitrant priests were stirring up trouble amongst their parishioners, passed a series of decrees directed against the forces of counter-revolution: refractory priests denounced by twenty citizens were to be deported to Guiana; priests responsible for fomenting disturbances were to be deported on the denunciation of a single citizen; the King’s 6,000-strong Household Guard, which had been authorized by the Constitution, was dismissed; and 20,000 National Guardsmen from the provinces were summoned to a camp just outside Paris.

The King accepted the decree disbanding the Household Guard, but he vetoed both those concerning recalcitrant priests and that authorizing the formation of the fédérés camp near Paris. And in protest against these vetoes, Jean Roland, urged on by his wife who had become the guiding force of the ministry, publicly condemned the King’s action, reading out the sharply worded condemnation in His Majesty’s presence and reminding him that he would have to choose between the Revolution and its opponents. The King, already exasperated by the rudeness of Roland who insisted on appearing at Court with laces in his shoes instead of the prescribed buckles, responded by dismissing most of his Ministers and replacing them with more amenable Feuillants.

Feelings in Paris now rose higher than ever and divisions between and within the political parties grew more and more deep. On the Right there were those who considered that royal authority should be restored even if this meant the defeat of the French army; yet there were also those who, like the Marquis de Ferrières, could ‘never condone the introduction of a foreign army in France’ and who were seized ‘by a feeling of horror for those who could contemplate such a crime’. On the Left the arguments and quarrels between factions were quite as bitter: Girondins angrily accusing those members of the Jacobin Club who had condemned the war of being agents of counter-revolution; Jacobins with even greater vehemence accusing Girondins of being in the pay of the Court; Marat bringing down fire and brimstone on both their houses and urging soldiers to massacre their officers.

While Jacobins, Girondins and Feuillants squabbled fiercely with each other and among themselves, and journalists, supporting one faction or another or condemning them all, became ever more intemperate, popular leaders of the sans-culottes decided upon independent action. They urged the assemblies of the forty-eight sections into which Paris had now been divided for administrative purposes to admit ‘passive’ citizens – that is to say those who did not have votes – as well as ‘active’ ones – those who paid a minimum of three days’ wages in direct taxation – into their meetings, to distribute pikes to citizens who did not have the right to carry firearms (a privilege still reserved to the National Guard) and to join together in another demonstration against the Court.

The day chosen for this demonstration was 20 June 1792, the third anniversary of the Tennis-Court Oath when, as part of the celebrations, a tree symbolizing Liberty was to be planted in the Tuileries gardens. It had originally been planned that the tree should be carried by an unarmed deputation, but the leaders of the sans-culottes and the radical sections were determined that the peaceful celebrations must be transformed into a violent popular uprising. They met to discuss means of making it so. Among them were Antoine Santerre, the brewer; Louis Legendre, one of the founders of the Cordeliers Club, an ill-educated butcher who had an enormously powerful voice and was extremely proud of his ‘explosions of feeling’; Claude Lazowski, a factory inspector; and Rossignol, a jeweller’s assistant. They decided that as many people as could be assembled in the eastern faubourgs of the city, women as well as men, should march upon the Hôtel de Ville and then to the Assembly with petitions against the royal veto and the dismissal of Roland and his colleagues. They should then make their way to the Tuileries. There should be no difficulty in collecting a good crowd, they thought, as the citizens of Paris had economic as well as political grievances: inflation was soaring and the price of certain foods had increased so enormously that there had been riots in several sections. Grocers’ shops had been invaded by angry women demanding sugar at twenty-five sous a pound, instead of the three livres they were being asked to pay.

Early on the morning of the appointed day about 8,000 people, National Guardsmen, shopkeepers, artisans, market porters, working women and their children, began their march. Armed with muskets, pikes, pitchforks and scythes, sharp pieces of iron fastened to the end of stout bludgeons, they swarmed towards the Assembly. When information reached the Manège that there were as many as 8,000 of them, one of the deputies stood up to exclaim, ‘Eight thousand! And we are only seven hundred and forty-five. We must adjourn immediately.’

As cries of ‘Order! Order!’ echoed round the hall, and a deputy of the Right leaped up to remind the Assembly that while there might well be 8,000 citizens on the march in Paris there were a further 24,000,000 Frenchmen to be considered elsewhere, a group of leading demonstrators bearing a petition burst through the doors. The deputies rose to their feet in indignation as the President put on his hat and required them to wait outside. To the deputies’ apparent surprise, the petitioners then withdrew; whereupon the mollified Assembly consented to admit them again and to allow the thousands of demonstrators to march peacefully through the hall.

In they came, therefore, led by men carrying huge tables upon which had been pinned the Declaration of Rights and around which danced women and children singing the Ça ira. To cheers from the public galleries, they marched across the floor waving flags, shouting slogans, displaying banners inscribed with such watchwords as ‘The Constitution or death,’ brandishing ragged trousers to cries of ‘Vivent les sans-culottes!’ and a calf’s heart fixed to a pike with the inscription, ‘The heart of an aristocrat’. For three hours the demonstration continued, while the deputies both of Right and Left sat in subdued and anxious silence. As the last of the citizens marched out of the hall, Santerre presented the deputies with a flag, then went off to the Tuileries where a vast crowd had assembled in the courtyards, shouting ‘Sanction the decrees! Down with the veto! Down with the priests!’ ‘Rappel des ministres patriots! Tremblez tyrans! Voici les sans-culottes!’

It was now about four o’clock in the afternoon. There were large numbers of troops on duty but they made no move to disperse the demonstrators who, finding the Porte Royale, a side entrance to the palace, unlocked, pushed it open, mounted the stairs, dragging up a cannon with them and hacking down doors with hatchets. They discovered the King in an anteroom whose door they smashed down with their pikes.

For some time past he had been in a state of utter despondency.

For ten days together [recorded the Queen’s maid, Madame Campan] he did not utter a word even to his family, except at a game of backgammon which he played with Madame Elisabeth after dinner when he merely pronounced the words which are necessary to play that game. The Queen roused him from this state, so ruinous in a crisis, by throwing herself at his feet, and sometimes by employing images calculated to terrify him, at others expressions of her affection for him. She also urged him to remember what he owed to his family, and went so far as to say that if they must perish at least let them do so with honour and not wait to be strangled to death on the floor of their own apartment.

When the demonstrators rushed in upon him, however, he had recovered from his morose and silent depression and showed himself to the armed intruders with remarkable composure. ‘Here I am,’ he said, standing still in front of them. Madame Elisabeth was with him, her arms thrown round his shoulders as though pleading for protection. But the Queen, for whom his sister was at first mistaken, had been taken away with the children to the Council Room by a courtier who barricaded them in with furniture.

The King was persuaded to move to another, larger room to listen while a petition, which Legendre had brought with him, was read in his presence. He was asked to stand on a bench; several other benches and a table were set before him, while guards and attendants hurried into the room to stand on either side of him. The demonstrators crowded in front of him, shouting in unison with the people in the courts below, ‘No aristocrats! No veto! No priests!’

With his booming voice Legendre quietened them by reading the petition, each sentence of which was punctuated by shouts of agreement from his companions and by cries of ‘Long live the Nation! Vive la Nation!’

‘Yes, vive la Nation!’ said the King when Legendre had finished. ‘The nation has no better friend than me.’

‘Prove it then!’ someone shouted, proferring a red cap on the end of a pike. ‘Put this on.’

The King seemed embarrassed rather than intimidated. He took the cap which had recently been introduced by the Girondins as an emblem of revolutionary fervour, and tried to put it on, but it was too small and fell off. A man picked it up, stretched it over his knee, and handed it back to the King who managed to get it over the back of his head. Another man now thrust a bottle of wine at him, asking him to toast his visitors.

‘People of Paris,’ the King said, obediently taking the bottle and putting the neck to his lips, though someone warned him it might be poisoned. ‘I drink to your health and to that of the French nation.’

He would not, however, withdraw his veto of the Assembly’s decrees, and he was still standing firm in his refusal when a delegation of deputies arrived, followed some time later by the Mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, who made the improbable excuse that he had only just heard of the royal family’s plight. Finding that the King’s friendly but determined manner had earned the respect of many people in the room, Pétion advised the demonstrators to leave ‘for fear lest enemies of the nation’ might question their ‘respectable intentions’. So the crowd slowly filed out of the room; and when they had all gone the King fell down into a chair looking exhausted, the red cap still on his head until, suddenly becoming aware of it, he snatched it off and threw it on to the floor.

His behaviour that day brought about an immediate reaction in favour of the monarchy. Numerous resolutions came in from the provinces, denouncing the insult to the royal family, and in Paris a petition protesting against the demonstration at the Tuileries was signed by over 20,000 people. Pétion was suspended for a time from his functions. So was Louis Manuel, the former tutor of a banker’s son who was now a leading member of the Paris Commune. Hundreds of young men from the western sections volunteered for guard duty at the Tuileries, while royalist members of the National Guard attacked anyone suspected of republican tendencies whom they came upon walking in the Tuileries gardens. And when Lafayette made a speech condemning the events of 20 June in the Assembly he was loudly applauded, and not only by the Feuillants.

But the reaction was short-lived. The court did not take proper advantage of it, the Queen, in particular, being wary of accepting help from those whom she considered untrustworthy or dislikeable. ‘She was more intent upon appearing to advantage in the midst of the peril,’ Lafayette later remarked with some bitterness, ‘than in averting it. As for my relations with the King, he always gave me his esteem, but never his confidence.’ ‘Better to perish,’ the Queen herself said, ‘than to be saved by M. de Lafayette.’ Agreeing in their turn to anathematize Lafayette as a ‘scoundrel, a traitor, an enemy of the nation’, the Left temporarily buried their differences in face of the common enemy. By 13 July Pétion had been restored as Mayor; Manuel was also back in office, and the Legislative Assembly, as concerned by the threats of the Austrians as by the activities of the sans-culottes, declared ‘La patrie en danger’. A state of emergency was proclaimed, and all Frenchmen capable of bearing arms were called up for national service. The King was forced to agree to the establishment of a military camp at Soissons and to the fédérés being allowed to pass through Paris in order to attend the now customary celebrations on 14 July.

In the provinces, local authorities which had been authorizing the disarming of suspects ever since the military disasters had seemed to presage an Austrian invasion, extended their campaign against refractory priests, disregarding the royal veto by ordering arrests, and in some places appearing to condone murders. In Paris also the Revolution was evidently approaching a crisis as the war news worsened. In several streets and squares platforms draped with tricolours were erected to serve as places of recruitment for men answering the call to arms. And, as the alarm guns thundered from the Pont Neuf and the Arsenal, municipal officials, wearing tricolour sashes over their shoulders and escorted by troops of cavalry, marched from street to street and square to square to spread abroad the Assembly’s proclamation, ‘La patrie en danger’.

The celebration of 14 July that year was a sadly different affair from that of 1790. In the Champ de Mars eighty-three tents had been erected representing the eighty-three departments of France, and beside each was a poplar from which fluttered a tricolour. In the centre of the circle described by these tents was a large marquee in which the Assembly and the King were to gather; another large marquee had been put up for the administrative bodies of Paris. The area resembled a military encampment rather than the scene of a festival. On one side was a memorial to those many French soldiers who had died in the recent fighting; on the other, a tall tree, called the Tree of Feudalism, was bedecked with titles of nobility, escutcheons, armorial bearings, crowns, blue ribbons, cardinals’ caps, St Peter’s Keys and other symbols of aristocracy, royalty and the papacy, to which the King was to be asked to set fire.

The King, with his sister, wife and children, stood on a balcony to watch the parade of soldiers and fédérés pass by. He looked quite calm but his wife seemed almost in tears and had, so one observer thought, already been weeping. As the royal family waited, a huge crowd of people pushed their way into the Champ de Mars beneath them, shouting ‘Pétion for ever!’ They were followed by columns of fédérés marching along casually, arm in arm; by a group of men bearing a model of the Bastille; by the operators of a printing press which was put down from time to time so that sheets of patriotic songs could be produced and distributed to the bystanders; by the National Guard and regiments of the line; and finally by the members of the Assembly.

When the procession had passed beneath him, the King went forward as required to the ‘altar of the nation’–a truncated column placed at the top of the tiers of seats which had been constructed for the first festival – where he was expected to swear an oath of loyalty. Although surrounded by troops he had difficulty in making his way through the dense crowds of people; and the Queen, watching his progress with the aid of a glass, was frightened that he would be crushed to death or assassinated. She had had a thickly padded undergarment made for him which she hoped would resist the first thrust of a dagger, but she had not expected these suffocating crowds of people. She saw him stumble on a step by the altar and screamed as the confusion around him increased.

He took the oath, and was then escorted to the Tree of Feudalism which he was required to burn down. He protested at this indignity, and ordered the soldiers of his escort to take him away to the École Militaire. They marched off shouting ‘Vive le Roi!’ A few voices in the crowds took up the cry and an occasional murmur of sympathy could be heard, but most spectators watched him in silence. To Madame de Staël he looked like a martyr. To others, he was a strangely pitiable figure who seemed, contrasted with the appearance of the people around him, to belong to another age, with his clothes ‘embroidered in the ancient Court fashion’ and his carefully dressed and powdered hair. He disappeared from view and was thereafter rarely glimpsed by the people until the day of his death.

As the King resumed his sad life at the Tuileries, the news from the front grew more alarming and demands for more decisive measures to meet the crisis became insistent. The Commune had already decreed that all citizens who possessed pikes should be enlisted as National Guardsmen, and soon the Assembly felt obliged to permit their general distribution. Gradually the distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens was being lost, the National Guard becoming less a bourgeois body than a force of the sans-culottes.

Towards the end of the month it became known in Paris that a manifesto, drafted by Count Fersen helped by an émigré, the Marquis de Limon, and signed at Coblentz by the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the enemy army, had threatened Paris with ‘total destruction’ if the royal family were not respected and protected, or if the Tuileries were again invaded. The manifesto had also declared that any National Guard who resisted the Austro-Prussian advance would be treated as an irregular, shot out of hand and have his home demolished. It was the provocation for which the King’s enemies had been waiting. The fédérés, who had refused to leave Paris for Soissons after 14 July until some decisive action had been taken, and who had been entertained while they remained by various of the city sections, marched about the city shouting, ‘Citizens to arms!’ A contingent of five hundred of them from Marseilles, who had put down a royalist insurrection in Aries, sang as they marched through the streets the stirring words of a song which had been written at Strasbourg for the Army of the Rhine by Rouget de Lisle, an officer of engineers. These fédérés from Marseilles-patriotic heroes, in the opinion of some citizens, to others, like the French Guards officer, General Thiébault, ‘an infernal gang of assassins’–‘sing this song with the greatest fervour’, reported the Chronique de Paris, ‘and the passage where, waving their hats and brandishing their swords, they all sing together “Aux armes, citoyens” is truly thrilling…They often sing at the Palais Royal – sometimes in the theatre between two plays.’

The Assembly, hesitant and still for the most part innately conservative, was losing control of Paris to these fédérés and to the radical city sections, nearly all of which had now admitted ‘passive’ citizens to their committees and had enrolled volunteers for the defence of Paris. The section known as Bon Conseil which had enrolled 300 men – two thirds of them artisans and most of the rest, apart from two surgeons’ apprentices and two architects, shopkeepers and clerks – voted at a crowded meeting no longer to recognize the King and to march on the Assembly and thence on the Tuileries on Sunday, 5 August. The section Quinze-Vingts also voted for an armed march on the Assembly and the Tuileries on the 5th and asked all the other sections of Paris to come with them. By no means averse to such a march but anxious not to be found on the wrong side on Monday morning, Pétion persuaded the Quinze-Vingts to delay it until the 10th so as to give the Assembly time to dethrone the King themselves.

The Quince-Vingts and the other sections agreed to wait; but on 6 August a vast crowd of fédérés and sectionnaires gathered in the Champ de Mars to demand the King’s abdication. And since the Assembly still took no action, the sections, organized by the Jacobins, decided to act independently in accordance with their previous threats.

On the night of 9 August their delegates arrived at the Hôtel de Ville, announced that the Commune was summarily disbanded and replaced it with an Insurrectionary Commune of their own in which there were twice as many artisans as lawyers. Protests were answered with the claim, ‘When the people place themselves in a state of insurrection, they withdraw all power from other authorities and assume it themselves.’ The royalist commander of the National Guard, Mandat de Grancy, was arrested, executed and replaced by Antoine Santerre, while plans were laid to keep Pétion a prisoner in his own room in case he should take it upon himself to interfere. Early the next day, a day of almost tropical heat, the march of some 20,000 armed people on the Tuileries began.

The main defenders of the palace were 900 Swiss Guards whose ammunition was severely limited. They were supported by about 2,000 National Guardsmen but these were suspected to be in sympathy with the marching citizens rather than the King to whom it was suggested that, if he went out to show himself to the National Guard, they might feel more inclined to protect him. He took the advice and went down into the courts. He had refused to put on the padded waistcoat which he had worn on 14 July, maintaining that, while such protection was acceptable against the dagger of an assassin, there was ‘something cowardly’ in wearing it when reviewing men who might be required to fight in his defence. As he appeared, untidily dressed in a purple suit, a sword at his side, his hair powdered on one side only, there were some shouts of ‘Vive le Roi!’ but these were not so loud as cries of ‘Down with the veto!’ ‘I can see him now as he passed along our front,’ a National Guardsman wrote. ‘He was silent and careworn and, with his swaying walk, he seemed to say to us, “All is lost.”’ An officer by his side advised him not to proceed with the review of the men drawn up in the courts and gardens, but to go over instead towards the battalion posted on the Pont Tournant. He agreed to do so, but while walking past the terrace of the Feuillants, which was crowded with people shouting insults and abuse, he was mortified to see this battalion followed by another move off with the evident intention of joining the demonstrators in the Place du Carrousel. Already several of the gunners had turned their cannon round to face towards the palace and had had to be disarmed; and, confronted by this further desertion, the King seemed to lose the last vestiges of hope. Mme Campan was watching him from a window of the palace. She saw ‘some of the gunners quit their posts, go up to the King and thrust their fists in his face. He went as pale as a corpse…The Queen later told me that the King had shown no energy, that this sort of review had done more harm than good.’

From inside the palace the shouts from the direction of the Place du Carrousel could now be heard quite clearly. The marching citizens, who were accompanied by about 400 Marseillaise and smaller numbers of fédérés from other provincial cities, were far from being ‘la dernière plèbe’ of Hippolyte Taine’s description. From the casualty lists it appears that they came from nearly all the sections of Paris and, while there were few professional men – a surgeon, an architect and a drawing-master are mentioned – many of them seem to have been shopkeepers, small traders, manufacturers and master craftsmen. Far less than half were wage-earners. There were musicians, journeymen cabinet-makers and journeymen goldsmiths, domestic servants, clerks, jewellers, water-carriers, master glaziers and master locksmiths, gauze-workers and carters.

As they marched towards the Tuileries, Lucille Desmoulins anxiously waited for news in her lodging-house. She had spent an almost sleepless night listening apprehensively to the sound of the tocsin, her beloved husband’s head resting for a time on her shoulder.

We got up [she recorded, remembering every detail of the events of that day]. We had breakfast. Camille went off assuring me that he would not expose himself. Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock passed without our hearing a word. We picked up some of yesterday’s papers, sat on the sofa in the drawing-room and tried to read…I thought I heard the sound of cannon-fire…Jeanette, Camille’s cook, was bleating like a goat. We heard shouting and weeping in the street. We thought Paris would be running with blood…People were crying, ‘To arms!’

At the approach of the marching citizens, the King sent an urgent message to the Assembly asking them to send a delegation to the Tuileries for his protection. This request elicited no response but, soon after it had been sent, Pierre Roederer, the procureur général syndic of the Department of Paris, a body strongly opposed to the Jacobins, arrived at the palace in the hope, shared by the Girondins, that bloodshed might be averted and the Legislative Assembly afforded some chance of regaining control of the situation if the royal family were persuaded to throw themselves upon the protection of the deputies. Roederer was shown up to the room where the King and Queen and several Ministers were anxiously discussing their predicament. Roederer told them that the National Guard at the gates were talking cheerfully to the people who had already begun to pour into the courtyard and he urged the royal family to hurry over to the Assembly.

The Queen strongly opposed such a move. It would be disgraceful, she said, to seek the protection of men who had behaved so badly towards them; she would rather be nailed to the walls of the palace. ‘Madame,’ Roederer answered her, ‘you endanger the lives of your husband and children. Think of the responsibility which you take upon yourself.’ The argument grew more and more vehement as the King turned indecisively first to his wife, then to the others who urged him to leave. At last he made up his mind to go. ‘Marchons,’ he said, raising his hand as though to silence the disputants.

He then walked round the circle formed by the members of the Court [Roederer recorded]. I did not notice that he spoke to anyone in particular; I just heard him say, ‘I am going to the National Assembly.’ Two files of guards arrived and we walked out of the Palace through one apartment after another. When we were going through the Oeil-de-boeuf the King removed the head-dress of the National Guardsman who was marching on his right, and put his own hat, which had a white feather in it, on the man’s head in its place. The man looked surprised, then, after a moment’s hesitation, took the hat off his head and put it under his arm.

When we reached the colonnade at the bottom of the great staircase the King asked, ‘What is going to happen to all the people we have left behind?’ ‘Sire,’ I replied. ‘The demonstrators from the faubourgs will soon be here…Our numbers are not sufficient. There is no one with the authority to resist even the crowds in the Place du Carrousel.’

When we were under the tree opposite the cafe on the terrace of the Feuillants, we walked through the leaves which had fallen in the night and had been swept up by the gardener into heaps. We sank up to our knees in them. ‘What a lot of leaves!’ said the King. ‘They have begun to fall very early this year.’ Manuel had written in a newspaper that the King would not last beyond the fall of the leaves. One of my colleagues told me that the Dauphin amused himself by kicking up the leaves on to the legs of the person in front of him.

As they crossed the garden numerous gentlemen of the court ran out after them, followed by palace servants. Roederer tried to prevent them, begging them to realize that their presence would not only annoy the Assembly but would excite the rage of the populace; that they might even cause the King and Queen to be murdered. Only a few paid heed to him; the rest came on, getting as close as they could to the Swiss bodyguard, increasing the press and confusion of people now surging around the royal family. So dense did the throng become, indeed, that a soldier had to pick the Dauphin up and carry him over his head, and at the sight of what she took to be the child’s kidnapping the Queen, who could not reach him, shrieked in terror.

When they arrived at the gate which opened on to the passage leading up to the Assembly, a National Guardsman came up to the King and said to him in a strong Provençal accent, ‘Don’t be afraid, Sir. We are all decent people but we just don’t want to be betrayed any more. Be a good citizen, Sir, and get rid of those Holy Joes you keep in the Palace. Don’t forget. It’s high time to do as I say.’ The King, so Roederer commented, replied good-naturedly.

The doors of the Assembly were opened and the royal family walked inside. ‘I come,’ the King said to them, ‘to prevent a great crime, and I think, gentlemen, that I cannot be safer than in your midst.’ Vergniaud replied that he could rely on the protection of the National Assembly who had sworn to die in defence of the properly constituted authorities. The King then sat down beside the President; but, following the objections of François Chabot, a former friar who was one of the leaders of the Cordeliers Club, that his presence there would affect the freedom of debate, he and his family–‘their heads lowered like whipped dogs’, according to a deputy from the Aude – were removed to the shorthand-writers’ box, a small room scarcely ten feet square beneath the gallery and separated from the main hall of the Manège by an iron railing. This railing was removed so that they could more easily take shelter in the midst of the Assembly, should it be necessary for them to do so, the King himself pulling out several bars. They had not been in the box long when the sound of musketry and cannon fire could be heard from the direction of the palace and a few stray balls flew through the open windows of the hall. ‘I assure you,’ shouted the King, ‘that I have ordered the Swiss to be forbidden to fire.’ The sounds of firing grew louder, however, and a delegation of twenty deputies was sent to try to stop the fighting. No sooner had they left on their vain mission than a band of armed citizens began battering on the doors of the hall, demanding admittance. ‘We are stormed!’ shouted one deputy as others rushed to hold the door; and the President, making the gesture which custom required of him on such occasions, put on his hat.

The door was soon forced and a crowd of sans-culottes stormed into the hall, demanding that the deputies ‘swear in the nation’s name to maintain liberty and equality’ with all their power or to die at their posts.

No one answered at first [reported one deputy, Michel Azéma, to friends in Carcassonne]. Then all the deputies…shouted…unanimously and simultaneously, ‘I do swear!’…The roll was called at once, and on the rostrum each in turn pronounced the…charming oath…indicated by the sans-culottes…Meanwhile, fierce fighting was going on at the Tuileries.

Here the fédérés from Marseilles and Finistère, at the head of the long column of demonstrators, had advanced towards the palace steps, calling out friendly greetings.

Every effort was made to persuade the Swiss to leave their position and join us [reported Pierre-François Desbouillons, a clerk from Brest who commanded the Finistère fédérés]. No one intended to do anything other than disarm them. But they steadfastly refused to give way to our urgent pleas to come over to our side. One of them decided to come over by himself to talk to the National Guard and was descending the steps when men who were no doubt paid to start the conflict tried to stab him. He rejoined his comrades at once. Everyone was still conferring. A musket shot had been fired but this had not yet started the fighting. The Swiss commanders persisted in saying they could not leave their posts without an order from the King. ‘Then you all want to die,’ someone said to them. ‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘we shall all certainly die rather than abandon our posts without orders from me King.’

The area around the bottom of the steps was now filled with citizens, most of whom were armed only with sabres. In the milling about one of the Swiss commanders was slightly cut; and this immediately resulted in the citizens being fired on.

Crying out, ‘Trahison! Trahison!’ the citizens and fédérés fled in confusion while the Swiss came down the steps in good order, discharging their muskets, then running towards the cannon which had been negligently left in the courtyard and opening fire with shot. At this moment the King’s order not to fire reached them. They immediately abandoned the guns and marched off in the direction of the terrace of the Feuillants. Other companies of the Swiss were still in the palace, however. The King’s order did not reach them; and they were still there when the Marseillais, together with some Breton fédérés, rallied and renewed the attack, repeating their shouts of ‘Trahison! Trahison! Mort aux traîtres!’ Wild with fury, they dashed across the courtyard under heavy fire, reached the steps and, followed by crowds of sans-culottes, streamed into the palace. The Swiss, having almost exhausted their ammunition, surrendered, throwing down their arms, but they were shown no mercy. The mob poured into the palace, cutting down everyone they found, ushers, pages, doorkeepers, cooks, maidservants as well as soldiers, and the Dauphin’s sub-governor. They threw the bodies out of the windows, impaled heads on pikes, looted the rooms, smashed furniture and windows, pocketed jewellery and ornaments and scattered papers over the floors. Fugitives who tried to escape were struck down as they ran across the garden and hacked down under the trees and beside the fountains. Some clambered up the monuments but were prodded down with pikes and bayonets by the assailants who, forbearing to fire for fear lest they injure the marble, stabbed them as they fell at their feet. One witness saw ‘some very young boys playing with human heads’; another heard ‘an honest artisan’ remark, ‘Ah, Monsieur. Providence has been very good to me. I killed three of the Swiss with my own hands.’

I ran from place to place [recorded one of the royal servants], and finding the apartments and staircases already strewed with dead bodies, I took the resolution of jumping from one of the windows in the Queen’s room on to the terrace…I got to my feet and ran away to the Dauphin’s garden gate where some Marseillais, who had just butchered several of the Swiss, were stripping them. One of them came up to me with a bloody sword in his hand, saying, ‘Hello, citizen! Without arms! Here take this and help us to kill.’ But luckily another Marseillais seized it and, being dressed in a plain coat, I managed to make my escape. Some of the Swiss who were pursued took refuge in an adjoining stable. I concealed myself in the same place. They were soon cut to pieces close to me. On hearing their cries the master of the house ran up and [he took me back to his house with him]…Presently a body of armed men came in to see if any of the Swiss were hiding there. After a fruitless search these men, their hands red with blood, stopped and calmly related to each other accounts of the murders which they had committed. I remained in the house until four o’clock in the afternoon, having before my eyes a view of all the horrors that were being perpetrated. Some of the men were still continuing the slaughter; others were cutting off the heads of those already slain; while the women, lost to all sense of shame, were committing the most indecent mutilations on the dead bodies from which they tore pieces of flesh and carried them off in triumph. Towards evening I took the road to Versailles and crossed the Pont Louis Seize which was covered with the naked carcasses of men already in a state of putrefaction from the intense heat of the weather.

Over 500 of the Swiss guards had been slaughtered in the grounds of the palace or on its steps, and a further sixty who were escorted under guard to the Insurrectionary Commune at the Hôtel de Ville were massacred when they got there. Of the besiegers about ninety fédérés and almost 300 citizens from the sections, three of them women, had also been killed.

At the Manège the King and the royal family were still in the shorthand-writers’ box listening to the agitated debate of those few deputies who had been courageous enough to be present that day. At nightfall they were all escorted to a convent where they were given beds. In the morning they were taken back to the box where all that day and the next they listened to the continuing debates of the Assembly which, ‘under the orders of the galleries’, as one contemporary put it, ‘feeling the eyes of the Insurrectionary Committee always upon them’, voted for the suspension of the King from his functions, the establishment of a provisional council of six Ministers, the imposition of all the decrees upon which the royal veto had been imposed, the summoning of a National Convention which was to be elected on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, and the imprisonment of the King. The deputies at first decided that he should be held in the Luxembourg, the house from which the Comte de Provence had fled in June the year before, but it was later decreed, at the insistence of the Insurrectionary Commune, that he should be confined in the Temple which had formerly been occupied by the Comte d’Artois and which could be more securely guarded.

The atmosphere in Paris was now suddenly transformed as ambassadors were withdrawn by their governments, the salons closed their doors, and aristocrats, who, though stripped of their titles, had previously been left in peace provided they were not suspected of being counter-revolutionaries, thought it as well to leave their houses and go into hiding. Some tried to escape from Paris but found the gates shut and carriage-horses commandeered by the Insurrectionary Commune for the army. Several were arrested and, with their families and various conservative deputies, were thrown into prison where they waited apprehensively for the next stage in the Revolution’s development. And in prison they heard with alarm that, while five of the six Ministers appointed to the provincial government were Girondins, the Ministry of Justice had gone to an ugly, sensual lawyer of commanding personality who was more powerful than any of them, Georges Jacques Danton.