Lafayette (52 page)

It was 9:30 at night when Lafayette bade the king and queen goodnight at the Tuileries Palace and left for home on the rue de Bourbon. Although it was only a short ride across the Seine, he had journeyed across a lifetime of history in the few days since he had last seen Adrienne and the children. The centuries-old Bourbon monarchy had all but disintegrated, along with Lafayette’s fantasy of a constitutional monarchy in France. Louis XVI and his queen were, in effect, prisoners in the Tuileries Palace, with Lafayette their chief jailer, and little more than a prisoner himself. Troops ringed the palace, ostensibly to protect the royal family from the mob; in reality, they were there to prevent the royal family’s escape to Austrian territory, where Emperor Joseph II awaited the safe arrival of his sister Marie-Antoinette and her husband to send his powerful army into France and crush the revolution.

On October 10, the National Assembly ended Louis XVI’s reign as King of France and Navarre and redesignated him King of the French;
La Nation
— the ethereal, undefined “popular will”—was supreme, with the king a mere executive—the “first functionary” of government. Like the king, the Assembly abandoned Versailles and reconvened in Paris, in what had been the king’s manège, a huge indoor riding arena and stable by the Tuileries Gardens across the royal riding path from the Noailles mansion.
¹

With riots still breaking out unpredictably in some Paris neighborhoods, the Assembly imposed martial law and reaffirmed Lafayette’s dictatorial powers to crush any remnants of disorder by hanging anyone who provoked sedition or rebellion—in word or deed. His new powers did not come a moment too soon. “There has been hanged a baker this morning by the populace,” Morris reported, “and all Paris is under arms. The poor baker was beheaded
according to custom and carried in triumph thro the streets. He had been all night at work for the purpose of supplying the greatest possible quantity of bread this morning. His wife is said to have died with horror when they presented her husband’s head stuck on a pole. Surely it is not in the usual order of divine providence to leave such abominations unpunished. Paris is perhaps as wicked a spot as exists. Incest, murder, bestiality, fraud, rapine, oppression, baseness, cruelty; and yet this is the city which has stepped forward in the sacred cause of liberty. The pressure of incumbent despotism removed, every bad passion exerts its peculiar energy. How the conflict will terminate, heaven knows. Badly I fear, that is to say in slavery.”
²

Lafayette was as appalled as Morris at the baker’s beheading. “All is lost,” he warned his officers, “if the service [the Guard] continues to conduct itself in this way. We are the only soldiers of the revolution, the only defenders of the royal family, the national assembly and the national treasure. All of France, all of Europe have their eyes on us. Any attack on these sacred institutions can dishonor us forever. . . . I ask you, therefore, Gentlemen, in the name of our country, that you bind your citizen troops closer to me than ever by asking them to swear to sacrifice all personal interests to duty.”
³
Still the master of symbolism, he painted routine police service as a holy crusade and, within days of his plea, his men had identified, tried, and hanged two leaders of the mob that decapitated the baker.

Lafayette used his powers under martial law to attack the causes of the insurrection: he ordered troops to empty all granaries in the nearby countryside and establish a free flow of grain and firewood into Paris. As its belly filled with food and wine, as fires warmed its hovels, the beast that was Paris settled into an uneasy slumber, confident that Lafayette would see to its future needs.

When the National Assembly met to write a constitution and establish a new government, Lafayette emerged as the logical choice for Assembly president, but he rejected the suggestion. Although he retained his Assembly seat, policing the city left him little time to fill its responsibilities, let alone those of the presidency. “All I want for the nation is liberty, order and a good constitution,” he explained. “I believe that is what the nation wants as well, and I hope we will reach our goal. . . . My present job is to ensure public tranquillity, and, in my role as a member of the National Assembly, to help strengthen our liberties and to protect the king and queen from all the conspiracies against them.”
⁴

His absence, however, created a devastating leadership vacuum in an assemblage with no experience in sacrificing personal interests for the greater good. Morris explained the Assembly to Washington: “One large half of the time is spent hallowing and bawling. . . . Such as intend to hold forth write their names on a tablet . . . and are heard in the order that their
names are written down, if the others will hear them, which very often they refuse to do but keep up a continual uproar till the orator leaves the pulpit. . . . Our friend La Fayette has given in to measures as to the Constitution which he does not heartily approve, and he heartily approves many things which experience will demonstrate to be injurious. He left America, you know, when his education was but half-finished. What he learnt there he knows well, but he did not learn to be a government maker.”
⁵

By the end of the year, Lafayette’s failure to assume Assembly leadership allowed his opponents to warp the democratic structure he and Jefferson had fashioned in their Declaration of the Rights of Man. Like the two orders that had preceded it to power, the Third Estate promoted its own interests, replacing royal despotism with parliamentary despotism. Although Lafayette tried to remain optimistic, a tint of anxiety shaded his New Year’s greeting to Washington in January 1790:

My dear general,

How often I miss your wise counsels and friendly support. We have advanced the revolution without running the ship of state onto the reefs of the aristocracy and the factions. In the midst of ceaseless opposition by partisans of the past and ambitious men, we are marching forward towards a reasonable conclusion. Although what used to exist has been destroyed, a new political structure is rising in its place; without being perfect, it is enough to assure liberty. The result will, I hope, be a happy one for my country and for humanity. We can see the seeds of liberty in other parts of Europe; I shall encourage their development by every means in my power.

Adieu, my dear general; please send my tender respects to Mrs. Washington; remember me to Hamilton, Harrison, Knox and all our friends.
⁶

Adrienne could not conceal her pride over her husband’s towering presence in French affairs. “Monsieur,” she wrote to Washington, “In the midst of the agitations of our revolution, I never cease to share in Monsieur de Lafayette’s happiness at having followed in your footsteps, in having found in your example and your lessons a means of serving his country, and in picturing the satisfaction with which you will learn of his success.”
⁷

Though pleased by Adrienne’s optimism, Washington was less sanguine about the French Revolution. “The revolution which has been effected in France,” he wrote to Morris, “is of too great a magnitude to be effected in so short a space, and with the loss of so little blood. . . . The licentiousness of the people on the one hand, and sanguinary punishments on the other, will . . . contribute not a little to the overthrow of their object.”
⁸

Morris agreed: “The King is in effect a prisoner at Paris and obeys entirely the National Assembly, this Assembly may be divided into three parts. One called the Aristocrats. . . . Another has no name, but which consists of
all sorts of people, really friends to a good free government. The third is composed of what are called here the
Enragés
, that is the Madmen. These are the most numerous. . . . They have already unhinged every thing.”
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Without Lafayette to lead them, the “friends to a good free government” in the Assembly fell silent, and by early 1790 the “madmen,” led by Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, systematically destroyed all hopes for republican government by abandoning its mission to write a constitution and usurping the powers of a supreme governing council—a politburo that revoked the king’s authority, abolished provincial assemblies, abolished the Roman Catholic Church, outlawed dissent as treasonous, and ruthlessly punished all opposition to its decrees. To ensure political control over the nation, it established a new, centrally controlled, pyramidal administrative system that fractured France into 83 departments, successively subdivided into 547 districts, 4,732 cantons and 43,360 communes, each with a federal prosecutor—a commissar—as watchdog over local officials and responsible only to the Assembly in Paris.

The Assembly nationalized the lands of king, church, and émigré noblemen who had left the country, and it eliminated private property rights, granting everyone the right to hunt, fish, and trespass on anyone else’s lands. It chopped the feudal properties it seized into relatively small, individual freeholds to sell at auction—ostensibly to redistribute to peasants, workers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers and to give them the right to vote that came with property ownership. By
auctioning
the land, however, Assembly madmen—Robespierre, Danton, and company—prevented the very redistribution it claimed to favor. Eighty percent of the French population could not afford bids high enough to buy any land at auction; successful bidders were usually members of the assembly, their families, and friends. The American Congress, in contrast, “opened the fertile plains of the Ohio to the poor, the needy & the oppressed of the Earth,” Washington wrote to Lafayette. “Any one therefore who is heavy laden or who wants to cultivate may repair thither & abound.”
¹⁰

In abolishing Roman Catholicism, the French Assembly stripped the pope of all authority in France and created a new state church, with clerics mere civil servants, salaried by the state and elected by the people in each parish. To assume office, clerics had to swear allegiance to
La Nation;
refusal was tantamount to treason, subject to loss of pension, eviction from their homes, and up to two years’ imprisonment. The Assembly banned ecclesiastical dress outside church.

To reduce the staggering national debt, the Assembly seized religious artifacts in church and cathedral treasuries and melted them into gold and silver bullion, destroying centuries of religious artworks. It then floated 400 million livres (about $4 billion in today’s currency) of hybrid bonds called
assignats
, backed by the value of nationalized church and royal lands that the government would sell at auction whenever it needed to redeem the bonds.
¹¹

The French National Assembly’s actions provoked immediate, widespread class warfare that would grow to unimaginable savagery over the next two years. Workers surged through city streets and alleyways, stripping every unguarded mansion of its treasures; outside the cities, peasant mobs burned and looted stately homes and castles, destroying centuries of great French art. Only the kindliest, most beloved landowners, like Lafayette’s aunt Charlotte at Chavaniac, were spared the horrors, humiliations, and flames of the mobs’ torches. The class war spread to the military, where rank-and-file soldiers— mostly commoners ineligible for promotion into officers’ ranks—assaulted their aristocrat officers. Thousands of French officers fled to Spain, Germany—anywhere—to escape the agony of execution by their men—often disembowelment by bayonet thrusts.

Adding to the savagery of class warfare were the brutalities of religious conflict. The schism in the French Catholic church cut across class lines. Eighty of the eighty-eight bishops in France and more than half the priests— some twenty thousand—refused to take secular vows to the constitution, as did one hundred fifty of the two hundred fifty clerics in the National Assembly. The creation of a French national church effectively created two French churches—an illegal, underground church led by devout Roman Catholic
refusés
and a revolutionary Gallican church of
jureurs
, or secular “swearers” to the constitution. Parishioners split accordingly—often into armed camps in the same village or neighboring communities. Bands of
refusés
assaulted
jureurs
as religious heretics;
jureurs
attacked
refusés
for political heresy and treason.

Pope Pius VI and the College of Cardinals condemned the assembly’s actions and rejected the new Gallican church. Within weeks, thousands of royalists and devout Catholics took up arms against Gallican revolutionaries in southern France. Leaflets decried revolutionaries for spiriting the French to the gates of Hell. In Nîmes, Catholic antirevolutionaries massacred Protestants, and revolutionaries in the nearby papal enclave of Avignon attacked Roman Catholics and sacked churches. The religious civil war spread into every household, provoking flight by some, defiance by others, and terror in all. The Lafayette home was no different: shortly after the first communion of Lafayette’s younger daughter, Virginie, her grandfather the duc d’Ayen packed up as many of his things as he could carry from the sumptuous Hôtel de Noailles in Paris and fled to Lausanne, Switzerland. Adrienne’s sister Pauline and her husband and family fled to exile in England.