Lafayette (55 page)

On Easter Sunday in the spring of 1791, the royal family sought to leave the Tuileries Palace to celebrate mass in their little château retreat in Saint-Cloud, a forest southwest of Paris. Suspicious that the family might flee to the Austrians, the Paris National Guard prevented their carriage from leaving the Tuileries Palace gates. Sent for by the king, Lafayette dashed into the palace enclave on Jean Leblanc and ordered his troops to let the king’s
family pass. They refused. A mob formed and threatened to storm the palace. Lafayette relented, and escorted the royal family back into their palace prison. Two days later, he resigned his command, leaving a terrified king fearing for his life and that of his family—and Washington fearing for Lafayette’s life: “I received your letter, my dear Marquis, and I thank you for its details, but I must tell you that I have often predicted, with much anxiety, the dangers you face. . . . Your letters are far from comforting for an old friend. But I understand that for someone whose love of country engages him in dangerous enterprises and is guided by pure and just motives such as yours, preservation of life is of secondary consideration.” Washington had just returned from a three-month tour of the American south, where he noted the “flourishing” industry and economy and what he called “the happy disposition of the people”:

The attachment of all classes of citizens to the government seems a happy presage . . . for their future. . . . While wars and civil discord are raging in almost all the nations of Europe, peace and tranquillity reign among us. This contrast between the United States and Europe is too striking not to be noticed by even the most superficial observer. . . . But we do not wish to remain the only people tasting the sweetness of good government founded on equality. We earnestly wish that your country will find calm and happiness and that all Europe will be delivered of its commotions and uneasiness.

Your friends in America often show, by their anxiety for your safety, how much they care for you. Knox, Jay, Hamilton and Jefferson send their affectionate greetings to you, but none of them with greater sincerity and attachment than your affectionate servant. . . .

G. Washington.
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Within hours of Lafayette’s resignation, commanders of each of his battalions all but overran his home to plead with him—many on bended knees—to resume his command. Mayor Bailly arrived to second their requests. Adrienne received them politely but, in embarrassed tones, said there was little she could do to change the general’s mind. In truth, she was “overflowing with joy at the thought of my father’s returning to private life,” daughter Virginie recalled. “Her joy lasted only four days.” After insisting that they sign oaths to obey the law, he rescinded his resignation and led a delegation of officers to the palace to apologize to the king, while Adrienne “resumed her painful pursuit of worrying about my father’s safety.”
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Lafayette purged the Guard of militiamen and officers who refused to sign the oath, but in doing so he only weakened his own force while the dissenters joined the growing army of Jacobins. In mid-May, the Assembly created a special “High Court” to judge crimes against the state, and, a month
later, the Jacobin leader, Robespierre, won election as chief public prosecutor. With the Jacobin noose tightening around the government and Lafayette evidently powerless to protect the royal family from mobs, King Louis and his brother the comte de Provence decided to flee Paris with the royal family. A corps of French regulars loyal to the king awaited at Metz, under the command of the marquis de Bouillé, Lafayette’s cousin who had crushed the troop rebellion in Nancy. Just across the border in the Netherlands, the Austrian army of Marie-Antoinette’s brother, Emperor Joseph II, offered further protection.

Rumors that the royal family intended to flee had circulated for months, but Lafayette had obtained—and had accepted—the king’s word that he would remain in Paris. At midnight on June 20, two identical carriages rolled into the courtyard of the Tuileries Palace. The king and queen, their three children, and the king’s sister slipped quietly into one, while the king’s brother the comte de Provence and his wife climbed into the other. The two vehicles rolled out the gates and sped off in different directions—one to the northeast, toward Metz; the other almost due north toward Mons, in Belgium. It was after five o’clock the next morning before their absence was discovered and an aide aroused Lafayette. Distraught by the king’s deception, he dispatched National Guardsmen in every direction to catch the king’s carriage, then went to the National Assembly to explain the king’s disappearance as best he could before rejoining the search for the royal carriages. Crowds on every street screamed at him angrily, with cries of “Traitor” replacing the accustomed
vivats
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Danton showered Paris streets with leaflets accusing Lafayette of planning the king’s escape. Then he strode to the well of the National Assembly, pointed an accusatory finger at Lafayette’s empty seat, and thundered:

And you, Monsieur Lafayette; you who recently guaranteed the person of the king in this assembly on pain of losing your head, are you here to pay your debt? You swore that the king would not leave. Either you sold out your country or you are stupid for having made a promise for a person whom you could not trust. Even in the most favorable circumstance, you have shown yourself incapable of leading us. I want to believe that you are only guilty of honest errors. But if it is true that the liberty of this nation depends on but one man, it deserves to be enslaved. France can be free without you. Your power weighs heavily on all eighty-three departments. Your reputation flies from one pole to the other. Do you really want to be great? Become a simple citizen again and stop helping the French people.
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The Cordeliers distributed thousands of copies of Danton’s speech across France. Not to be outdone, Marat demanded Lafayette’s and Bailly’s heads, and the National Guard broke up a mob marching toward Lafayette’s home,
led by a man with a pike, intent on gratifying Marat’s demand. On the evening of June 22, the comte de Provence crossed the border safely into Belgium and the protection of the Austrian army, but his brother the king was less fortunate. The French National Guard caught the royal family’s carriage in Varennes, more than 150 miles northeast of Paris and less than 70 miles from safety and salvation at Metz. Three days later, Lafayette and the National Guard led the royal carriage back into Paris through a howling mob surrounding the Tuileries Palace, demanding royal heads to adorn their pikes—along with that of Lafayette. After settling into his apartment, the king admitted Lafayette, who still believed stubbornly that his countrymen were as capable as Americans of governing themselves under a constitution.

“Sire,” he told the king, “your majesty knows my loyalty to the crown; but I must tell you that if the crown separates itself from the people, I will remain at the side of the people.” He then read the king the National Assembly decrees, placing the king, the queen, and the rest of the royal family under twenty-four-hour guard and delivering the terrified little six-year-old dauphin to “a special military guard under direct orders of the Commanding General and a guardian to be named by the National Assembly.” The Assembly ordered all who had accompanied the royal family arrested for questioning. After reading the decrees, Lafayette asked whether the king had any orders before he left. “It seems to me,” Louis XVI replied to his old friend, “that I am more subject to your orders than you are to mine.”
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The king, however, had totally misjudged his own situation and that of Lafayette. If the king was, as he believed, a prisoner of Lafayette, Lafayette, in turn, was now a prisoner of the mob. Indeed, the capture of the royal family in Varennes effectively ended Lafayette’s chances to introduce American-style democracy and individual liberty in France. The age of knighthood and chivalry he had sought to prolong faded into the pages of history and fiction, along with his importance and influence on the world stage. At the age of thirty-four, he was obsolete and descending inexorably toward tragic oblivion in his native land. The “madmen” took control of French streets and filled them with hysterical rioters demanding whatever they were told to demand—not even knowing the meaning of the words and phrases they chanted. Desmoulins demanded the establishment of a popular republic; Danton a regency under Philippe Egalité. The ugly dwarf Marat sought a dictatorship—his own—and a crowd of equally misshapen idolaters shrieked their approval. Robespierre agreed, but wanted the job himself and sniffed about indecisively to determine the direction of the political winds before setting his own course. And as rioters slaughtered each other in the streets, Lafayette continued his futile pleas for the constitutional rule of law, which the vast majority of Frenchmen neither wanted nor understood.

“How I wish I could travel to your side of the Atlantic,” he wrote plaintively to Washington, “but we are not in a state of peace that would allow my absence. The émigrés hover over our frontiers, intriguing with every despotic government; our armies are made up of aristocratic officers and undisciplined soldiers; the license of the multitude is not easily repressed; the capital [city], which sets the standard for the nation is tossed about by the different parties. The assembly is exhausted. . . . I continue to face attack by factions and conspiracies—you can see that the effect of my resignation was to restore the strength of law a bit. If I only received adequate support for the suppression of license, the people would soon learn the meaning of the word liberty.”
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Lafayette’s letter so frightened Washington that he replied immediately, canceling presidential appointments to pen four pages urging caution on “the adopted son” he so dearly cherished: “The deep interest I take in all your affairs is causing me continual anxiety for your safety. . . . I hope deeply that the affairs of your nation will soon permit you to retire from the excessive tribulations to which you have lately been exposed.”
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As anxious as Washington was for Lafayette’s safety, Marie-Antoinette’s brother, the Austrian emperor, was even more anxious for the safety of his sister, and he issued the so-called Padua Circular calling for joint action by Europe’s monarchies to “vindicate the liberty and honor of the most Christian King and his family and to limit the dangerous extremes of the French revolution.”
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Robespierre pounced on the Padua Circular as an opportunity to seize power. He issued an address to the French people and bullyragged the National Assembly to call 100,000 volunteers to man the frontiers with Germany against an Austrian invasion.

On the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, Robespierre’s Jacobins ordered their followers to the Champs de Mars to sign a petition at the Nation’s Altar to overthrow the king and declare France a republic. They found two derelicts sleeping under the Altar, assumed they were spies, and chopped off their heads. After implanting their trophies on pikes, part of the crowd began marching off toward the Bastille, singing “Ça ira.” Lafayette rode into the arena on his white horse with the remnants of his National Guard to restore order. A year earlier, his entrance had evoked cheers; now it provoked nothing but eerie silence and sullen looks.

A shot rang out.

Guardsmen charged into the mob and seized the would-be assassin. Mayor Bailly trotted into the arena with more troops and proclaimed martial law. The mob responded with a hail of stones and another shot that felled a dragoon. The troops returned fire and sent the Jacobins toppling to the ground—men, women, and children; one hundred fell dead and at least
as many wounded. As terrified survivors scattered, two Jacobins hiding behind the arena gates assassinated a pair of soldiers trotting past. Another group of Jacobins set out for the rue de Bourbon to assault Lafayette’s home.

“Kill his wife and take him her head!” the rioters chanted as they surged through the gates. Inside, the Lafayette children cowered. “I remember the horrible shouts we heard,” Virginie wrote afterwards. She was nine at the time. “I remember the terror of everyone in the house; but above all the terrifying shouts and cries. And I remember my mother’s reassuring voice. . . . She took us in her arms to comfort us, then, in the face of imminent danger, she calmly took the steps needed to protect us. She doubled the guard and ordered them into the courtyard to battle the mob at the front of the house. Some of the rioters were already climbing over the garden wall on the side of the house, however. Fortunately, a cavalry troop happened by and dispersed them. . . . It is impossible to describe my mother’s anxiety for my father while he remained at the Champ de Mars, exposed to the rage of the furious multitude.”
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The slaughter on the Champ de Mars and the subsequent declaration of martial law sent Jacobin and Cordelier leaders fleeing to avoid arrest: Desmoulins and Robespierre went into hiding; Danton fled to London. Marat went underground. Without demagogues to lead it, the Paris mob dispersed into small gangs that did little but roam the streets and parks of the city aimlessly, bullying anyone who accidentally walked into their midst and could afford the ransom for safe passage. Lafayette returned to his seat in the Assembly, where, in the absence of delaying tactics by radicals, a majority approved a finished constitution by the end of summer. It was a patchwork of provisions that promised everything to everyone but guaranteed nothing to anyone—a formula for oligarchy and anarchy. On September 13, 1791, the king went through the formality of approving the document, and at the end of September, the Constitutional Assembly adjourned for the last time— but not before granting amnesty to all rioters imprisoned in the three years since the Assembly of Notables had met. The amnesty released the Jacobin mob onto the streets to await its next call to action.

On October 1, 1791, the first elected legislature under the French constitution—a caricature of America’s First Congress—met for its initial session, and, for one brief moment, Lafayette’s dream of constitutional rule in France seemed close to reality. A week later, Lafayette fulfilled his pledge to return to private life—as Washington had done after the American Revolution. He resigned from the National Guard, turned command of the military to the civilian mayor, and bade his troops farewell. They, in turn, presented him with a sword forged from the locks of the Bastille. “You may be sure,” Mayor Bailly declared, “that we shall never forget the hero of Two Worlds.”