Lafayette (57 page)

On June 20, Robespierre led a Jacobin mob into the Assembly. As terror-stricken moderates sat silently, the thugs marched about the hall for three long hours, crying, “The people have awakened. Blood will flow on the Tree of Liberty and make it flower.”
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At a signal from Robespierre, they left as suddenly as they had entered and streamed across the Tuileries Gardens into the royal palace. The National Guard had fled, and, as he had at Versailles, the king ordered his guards not to fire on the people—“his children,” he called them naively. The mob surged into the palace and found the king alone and unguarded—“humbled to the level of a beggar’s pity, without resources, without authority, without a friend,”
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as Morris had once described him. A group of toughs milled about him menacingly as others hopped down the cellar stairs to pillage the wine stores. Some returned with wine, sat him down, and spent the next few hours drinking, smoking, and mocking the king. A quartet of toughs found Queen Marie-Antoinette and the king’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, and forced them to sit beside the king. As the grimacing thugs blew smoke defiantly into the faces of the helpless royal trio, others forcibly slipped the red bonnet of the revolution onto the king’s head and made him drink wine, clink glasses with them, and repeatedly toast
La Nation
until he all but passed out and slumped silently in his chair, ready for death.

When Lafayette learned of the mob’s outrages, he concluded that the enemies within were a greater threat to the nation than foreign armies; he rode into Paris at top speed and, in full uniform, strode onto the floor of the Assembly, apparently ready to proclaim military rule:

Gentlemen, it is as a citizen that I have the honor of speaking to you; but the opinion I shall express is that of all Frenchmen who love their country, their liberty, their tranquillity and the laws of the land. . . . It is time to guaranty the Constitution against attempts to undermine it and to assure the independence and dignity of the National Assembly and the king; it is time to crush the hopes of evil citizens . . . who seek to plunge the people of this nation into shameful, intolerable slavery.

I beg the National Assembly, first, to find and punish the leaders and instigators of the violence of June 20 for treason; second, to destroy the sect that is threatening the sovereignty of this nation and is tyrannizing its citizens—and has left no doubt in its public statements of its responsibility for these atrocities; third and last, I beg of you, in my own name and those of all honest people in the kingdom, to take effective measures to ensure respect for all constitutional authorities, particularly your own and that of the king—and thus give the army the assurance of protection against internal attacks on the Constitution while its brave soldiers shed their blood to defend our borders.
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Lafayette’s blunt words left the Assembly members “gaping,” according to Gouverneur Morris. Without waiting for replies, Lafayette marched out of
the hall and across the Tuileries Gardens to the palace to commiserate with the royal family. Marie-Antoinette’s cold eyes reiterated her old disdain, but the king and his sister, Madame Elizabeth, all but wept as he once again pledged his friendship and personal protection. Lafayette then rode home across the Pont du Carousel to the rue de Bourbon for what would be his last night in his “American” home. Loyal guardsmen had surrounded it to protect it against looters, and a skeleton staff had maintained the interior, but only ghostly echoes resounded within; his wife and children remained in Chavaniac and most of his friends and relatives were in exile.

The next day, Lafayette went to a reception at the palace, where Morris, the American ambassador, awaited him. Morris had heard from Caty Greene, who, in Lafayette’s absence, feared for her son’s safety and asked that sixteen-year-old George Washington Greene return home to America immediately. Morris and Lafayette renewed their debate over the French constitution, which the American called “that wretched piece of paper. I tell him . . . that I presume that he has lived long enough in the present style to see that a popular government is good for nothing in France.”
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Lafayette, however, insisted that two-thirds of the Assembly “despised the Jacobins, and even the Jacobin minority included some deputies who voted with them because of fear.”
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Lafayette said he would use the citizen militia he had once commanded—the Paris National Guard—to reimpose constitutional rule. Learning that the king was to review the guard the following day, he would accompany the king and, after the review, address the men, rekindle their loyalty, and lead them on an assault of Jacobin headquarters. The king agreed enthusiastically, but, before dawn the next morning, the Jacobin mayor learned of the plan and, as commander of the guard, canceled the review.

In another of his incredible failures to seize the reins of government, Lafayette decided against trying to rally the guard and rode back to the frontier to bring his regular army troops back to Paris. In doing so however, he ceded control of Paris to the Jacobins and left the Assembly and the royal family defenseless. Robespierre proclaimed Lafayette a traitor at a Jacobin rally near the Palais Royal and demanded his execution. As a horrified Morris looked on from the entrance of his club, the mob responded by burning Lafayette’s effigy. “I verily believe,” he wrote to Jefferson, “that if Mr. de La Fayette were to appear just now in Paris unattended by his army he would be torn to pieces. Thank God we have no [rabble] in America and I hope the education and manners will long prevent that evil.”
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Fearing for the French king’s safety, the duke of Brunswick, who commanded the coalition of Prussian, Austrian, and French émigré armies, warned he would raze Paris and exact “an exemplary and never to be forgotten vengeance” on its people if the Jacobins mistreated the royal family.
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Jacobins in the Assembly responded with a call for military volunteers: “Citizens!
The Fatherland is in danger!”
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As panic spread through the streets, men of all ages rushed to enlist. A ragtag force of 600 guardsmen arrived from Marseilles, singing a stirring anthem originally written for the Army of the North but renamed “La Marseillaise” and reworded with a sadistic call to soak the people’s standards in their enemies’ blood. For the next month, the drunken Marseilles guardsmen raged through the streets of Paris, chanting their anthem, brutalizing bystanders, and waving flags soaked in the blood of their victims.

On August 10, Robespierre’s Jacobins demanded the king’s abdication and sent thousands of insurrectionists to the Tuileries Palace, where they broke through gates and slaughtered the king’s guards. As he had done before, the king had ordered them not to fire on the people, and, for their loyalty, they suffered unimaginable butchery, as the mob disemboweled them, one by one, and planted their heads on pikes to parade through the palace, until six hundred guards and two hundred servants lay butchered. The horror-stricken royal family fled across the gardens to the National Assembly and asked for its protection. Members of the mob followed the royals into the Assembly hall, waving their grisly trophies in the faces of terrified deputies.

To save themselves from massacre, Assembly members suspended the king’s royal powers and ordered him and his family placed under house arrest in the Palais de Luxembourg, once the home of Henry IV’s queen, Marie de Médicis—and of Lafayette and his mother when he first came to Paris as a boy. Yielding to Jacobin threats, the Assembly suspended the constitution and created a new all-powerful “executive council,” headed by Danton as minister of justice. It then voted to dissolve itself and ordered new elections, with universal suffrage, to select a permanent “Convention” with absolute powers to govern France indefinitely as a people’s dictatorship.

The removal of Louis XVI from the throne automatically severed diplomatic relations with all foreign nations. Their ties were to him; like other monarchs who ruled by divine right, he had been the state—
“L’état c’est moi.”
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His removal ended the missions of foreign ambassadors accredited to him and the missions of his ambassadors abroad. Between August 13 and 17, England, the Netherlands, Denmark, Prussia, Poland, Russia, the Swiss Confederation, and Spain—where the king’s cousin Charles IV ruled—severed relations with France, setting the stage for a world war that would last eighteen years.

On August 13, Danton ordered the royal family transferred from the Palais du Luxembourg to a grim prison in the
donjon
of the Temple—the huge twelfth-century fortification of the Knights Templar.
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The next day, he ordered Lafayette’s arrest. Lafayette ordered his troops to assemble and prepare to march against the Paris revolutionaries and free the king. Once again, he acted too late: Jacobins had infiltrated his forces, and, when he ordered his assembled troops to repeat their oath to the Constitution, two battalions refused. He ordered their arrest, but, to his dismay, not a soldier or an officer responded.

Facing mass mutiny, Lafayette saw but two courses of action open to him. He could return to Paris to face certain—and useless—execution on the guillotine. Prosecutor Robespierre had accused “Motier-La Fayette, heretofore general of the Army of the North, of rebellion against the law, of conspiracy against liberty and of treason against the nation.”
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Trial was not an option for treason—only summary application of Dr. Guillotin’s unforgiving blade. His other option was flight. He could forsake his native land, which had rejected the Rights of Man, and settle in a land that embraced those rights—his adopted land: America. “What safety is there,” he pondered, “in a country where Robespierre is a sage, Danton an honest man, and Marat a God?”
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He wrote to Adrienne:

Whatever fate may hold in store for me, my sweetheart, you know my soul too well not to know the agony I suffered in leaving the land to which I have dedicated my life—a land that might have been free and was worthy
to be so if selfish interests had not corrupted the public interest. . . . Outlawed in my own land for having served her with courage, I have been forced to flee into enemy territory from France, which I had defended with so much love. To the very last minute, I fought for the Constitution I swore to uphold. . . . I became the object of attacks from every direction until it became demonstrably clear that . . . I was to die for no justifiable purpose. . . . I shall go to England, where I want my entire family to join me. I hope my aunt can make the journey as well. . . . I make no excuses for having brought ruin to my family—either to the children or to you; but no one among you would have wanted me to owe my fortune to conduct contrary to my conscience. Come join me in England; let us resettle in America, where we will find the liberty that no longer exists in France; and my tender love will find ways to console you for the happiness you may lose. Adieu, my sweetheart.
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On the evening of August 19, Lafayette led fifty-three officers and men on horseback through the rain across the frontier into Austrian-occupied Belgium—among them the ever-loyal La Colombe, who had sailed with him aboard the
Victoire
to South Carolina in 1777 and fought with him from Brandywine to Yorktown. With him, too, was a trusted military aide, Jean-Xavier Bureaux de Pusy, and Général le comte César de La Tour-Maubourg, his fellow Auvergnat from Le Puy and Fayettiste political ally in the National Assembly.

Lafayette’s flight provoked consternation among Paris Jacobins, who smashed their way into the Hôtel de Ville, shattered the Houdon busts of Lafayette and Bailly, and ripped out the bas-relief with Lafayette’s profile from the outer wall of the building. A Jacobin deputy in the Convention demanded that Lafayette’s house on the rue de Bourbon be leveled, and Robespierre ordered Adrienne and the Lafayette children in Chavaniac seized as hostages until the Austrians returned Lafayette to French authorities and the guillotine. Morris reported to Secretary of State Jefferson: “He and his friends had nothing to hope for . . . his circle is compleated. He has spent his fortune on a Revolution and is now crush’d by the wheel he put in motion. He lasted longer than I expected.”
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Calling Lafayette “the most hated man in Europe,” he explained that European monarchs reviled Lafayette as much as Robespierre’s Jacobins—the first, for starting the revolution and threatening their God-given absolute powers; the second for demanding constitutional restrictions on the absolute powers they had usurped.

The Austrians escorted Lafayette and his companions to Nivelle, just south of Brussels, where Lafayette requested passports to proceed to England; the Austrians refused, addressing him in mocking tones as “Citizen Motier.” Lafayette immediately wrote to the duke of Saxe-Teschen, the uncle of the
Austrian emperor, demanding a reason for his detention—and he wrote to William Short, who had been appointed American ambassador to Holland after Morris took over the Paris embassy: