Lafayette (48 page)

“No, Sire,” Liancourt replied, “It is a full-blown revolution.”
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At eleven o’clock in the morning, July 15, 1789, the king entered the National Assembly and addressed them for the first time as “Members of the National Assembly”—in effect, tacitly recognizing their authority and ending thirteen centuries of absolute monarchic rule in France. He asked their help in restoring order in Paris, pledging, in turn, that he would henceforth maintain “free and direct communication” with the Assembly. To avoid further provocation, he ordered his troops to stand down, and he agreed to abolish corvée road-labor, to abolish torture, to reform the criminal code, and to give the Assembly power over taxation and government spending. He called on them to meet regularly as a legislature akin to the British Parliament, with rights to enact legislation, with the consent of the king.

The assembly responded with thunderous applause, and, as they escorted him back to the palace cheering
“Vive le roi!”
, a crowd fell in behind to join in acclaiming their king’s wisdom and grace. They refused to leave until the king and queen and their three children appeared on a balcony to acknowledge their cheers. By early afternoon a train of forty carriages, with Lafayette
and Bailly in the lead, raced off to Paris with the news of the king’s concessions. Couriers had galloped ahead, and huge crowds gathered along the way to cheer as Lafayette and the others drove by. The city’s electors escorted them to the City Hall, where Bailly read the king’s concession speech. The electors declared Paris an autonomous commune and voted Lafayette commanding general and military leader of the new government. Elated by the prospects of organizing and commanding an American-style citizen’s militia, he drew his sword, the symbol of his knighthood and fealty to the king, and, to thunderous cheers, raised it high in fealty to
La Nation!

“Vive le Roi; vive la Nation!”
he cried.

“Vive le Roi! Vive la Nation!”
they echoed, before beginning a singsong chant, “La-fa-yette, La-fa-yette, La-fa-yette . . .” One elector crowned the Houdon bust of Lafayette with a laurel wreath, then held it high above his head and marched it around the room to the rhythms of “La-fa-yette, La-fa-yette.”
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When the chorus moderated, an elector called out Bailly’s name and moved to name him civil leader of the new government. The electors roared their approval, conferring on him the title of “mayor of Paris,” which they believed more republican than “provost of merchants”—and somewhat less likely to cost him his head. After the cheering subsided, the entire throng strode across the river to Nôtre-Dame Cathedral for a Te Deum.

News of the Paris uprising set off similar revolts throughout the provinces, where hungry peasants joined with the bourgeoisie to replace old authorities with new assemblies of electors, who pledged to reduce the price of bread. Mobs in Lille, Rouen, Cherbourg, Dijon, and Rennes mimicked Paris, with regular army troops deserting to join their civilian countrymen in seizing power, razing prisons and châteaux, and burning manorial registers that validated the identities of the local nobility and the properties they owned. Behind them, they left a trail of rubble and smoldering ruins where the centuries-old heritage of the French nation had stood. There were few exceptions to the reign of destruction. In Lyon, royalists resisted and took control of city government in the name of the king, and in Toulouse, a curious mix of royalists and revolutionaries took joint command. In Aix-en-Provence, a military junta seized power.

In Paris, Lafayette prepared to return to Versailles to resume his work in the Assembly, but the electors pleaded with him to remain to assume his duties as military leader and restore order. “Only I seem to be able to control the behavior of the people,” he wrote to a friend. “A mob of forty thousand people gather, the ferment builds to a peak until I appear on the scene, and, with a word from me, they disperse.”
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The following morning, he carefully pulled together all the symbols of power he could find. He sent a servant to fetch a tall, stately white horse at
the military academy, while he squeezed into his frayed French general’s uniform and nine-year-old George-Washington helped him attach his sheathed sword and other military trappings. As a mounted troop waited in the courtyard, Anastasie, Virginie, and George kissed him good-bye; then Adrienne gave her husband a long embrace before saying adieu and watching him step into the courtyard to mount the great white horse.

“Not once in those days,” Virginie wrote, “did she see him leave the house without the feeling that she might be saying her adieux to him for the last time.”
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As Lafayette trotted along the river Seine and approached the city hall, a huge crowd filled the square in front and blocked his way. What, he demanded, was going on? “Nothing,” cried an onlooker, “only an abbé they’re about to hang.” Infuriated, Lafayette drove his huge white horse—appropriately named Jean Leblanc
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—into the sea of people, parting it as Moses had parted the Sea of Reeds, until he reached the hapless priest and led him into the safety of the city hall. Throughout the day, he ran out onto the steps of the city hall to demand release of innocent men the mob was about to hang or butcher. The ugly, street-corner agitator Danton resurfaced as a self-appointed captain in the bourgeois guard and dragged a terrified man before the crowd to execute, claiming he was the assistant governor of the Bastille. Apprised of the imminent hanging, Lafayette raced out and identified the man as a city councilman—an elector—whom the council had appointed temporary governor of the Bastille. He demanded his release, ordered Danton to return the elector’s sword, and escorted him up the steps into city hall. The red-faced Danton would never forgive Lafayette for the public humiliation.

“I have already saved the lives of six people about to be hanged in different sections of the city,” Lafayette wrote. “The people are insane, drunk with power; they will not listen to me forever. As I write . . . eighty thousand people have surrounded the Hôtel de Ville and cry out that we are lying to them, that the troops are not withdrawing, that the king must come. . . . The minute I am gone, they lose their minds. My situation is unlike anyone else’s. I reign in Paris, but I reign over an angry population aroused by evil conspirators.”
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The Day After the Paris mob stormed the Bastille, Lafayette took nominal command of the Bourgeois Guard—a French equivalent to America’s citizen’s militias. Unlike Americans, who returned in peace to their fields and families, the citizen-militiamen of France roamed the streets in drunken, disorganized bands, looting shops and homes and assaulting anyone who displeased them, for whatever reason. Most had nowhere to go—France had no frontier wilderness for the landless to settle, plant, or hunt, to sustain themselves and their families. The king, the aristocracy, and the clergy owned all French lands, forests, and streams, and none but they could hunt, fish, or even set foot on their properties without permission.

As Lafayette administered the oath of allegiance to his new “army,” he recognized that “I may seem to be their chief but I am far from being their master.”
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He established a semblance of administrative control by renaming it the National Guard of Paris and appointing a hierarchy of officers in each district to clear the streets of brigands, vagrants, and homeless, to restore the normal flow of traffic, and to encourage business to return to normal. To quash rumors that the aristocracy planned to starve Paris into submission, he ordered military convoys to escort shipments of flour duty-free into the city’s poorest neighborhoods. To end disorders in and around the Bastille, he ordered it razed, to remove an irritating symbol of royal oppression from the streetscape. As wreckers began demolition, he salvaged a key to the main gate of what he called the “fortress of despotism,”
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to send to George Washington.

On July 17, only three days after the fall of the Bastille, King Louis XVI sought to reestablish a semblance of royal authority in Paris by going to the city to reconcile himself with Lafayette and Bailly—and the constitutionalists
who had seized the reins of city government. They, at least, did not seek his head. Recognizing the city’s semiautonomous status, the king left his personal guard—the legendary Black Musketeers to which Lafayette had once belonged—at the city gates, and his carriage entered without a military escort. About four hundred deputies from the National Assembly at Versailles, however, had come with the king to show their support and descended from their own carriages to form a line of march on each flank of the king’s carriage. Lafayette was there to receive and reassure him “with a few respectful words.” Bailly gave Louis the keys to the city: “These are the same that were presented to Henry IV,”
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the astronomer-mayor told the king. “This is the most beautiful day of the monarchy. It is the occasion of an eternal alliance of monarch and people.”
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A small troop of elite militia led the way through the city, with Lafayette behind them, his sword drawn, in front of the royal carriage on his great white horse, Jean Leblanc. About 100,000 motley-looking members of the new National Guard of Paris lined the route, according to Jefferson, two and three deep, “armed with guns, pistols, swords, pikes, pruning hooks, scythes, and whatever they could lay hold of.”
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An hour later the procession arrived at city hall, and, in a ceremony fraught with symbolism, Lafayette watched Bailly, the commoner mayor, stand
above the king
on the city hall step, and reach down to hand the monarch a red and blue revolutionary cockade—“the distinctive mark of Frenchmen.”
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The king accepted the humiliating symbol of rebellion, removed his hat before the commoner mayor, and pinned the insignia to its brim. To the cries of
“Vive le roi!”
he then followed Bailly up the steps of city hall, beneath an “arch of steel” formed by the swords of the city’s assemblymen. Once in the Grande Salle, the king issued a timid declaration affirming the city’s status as a self-governing commune, with Bailly as mayor and Lafayette as commanding general. As he left, the frightened king took his old friend Lafayette aside and, as a gesture of reconciliation, said, “I have been looking for you to tell you that I confirm your nomination to the post of commandant general of the Paris Guard.”
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That night, the king’s youngest brother, the comte d’Artois, fled the country with six other princes of the blood and six of the king’s ministers.

Although Lafayette restored order in the center of the city, anarchy gripped the rest of Paris. Thousands of brigands, vagabonds, army deserters, and other lawless elements pinned the red and blue cockades of the revolution on themselves and masqueraded as militiamen. Mob disorder flowed in and out of alleyways and streets, advancing and receding unpredictably like a giant amoeba, its jellylike mass oozing in one direction before contracting and reemerging, unpredictably, on a new course. Gouverneur Morris bore witness to its grisly appearance outside his club in the Palais Royal: “After dinner . . . under the arcade of the Palais Royal waiting for my carriage . . . the Head and Body of Mr. de Foulon are introduced in Triumph. The Head on a Pike, the Body dragged naked on the Earth. After, this horrible exhibition is carried thro the different streets. His crime is to have accepted a place in the ministry. This mutilated form of an old man of seventy-five is shewn to Bertier, his son in law, the intendant [comptroller] of Paris, and afterwards he also is put to death and cut to pieces, the populace carrying about the mangled fragments with a savage joy. Gracious God, what a People!”
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