To the scaffold (40 page)

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed by the Assembly on July 12 and signed by a reluctant Louis ten days later, was the most audaciously radical legislation yet proposed by the deputies. It abolished the old episcopal sees and reduced the income of the Bishops—which in many cases was enormous—to a modest twelve thousand livres a year. Henceforth each of the eighty-four departements was to be a diocese, with its Bishop elected by the departmental assembly. Priests too were to be elected, by the assemblies of the districts in which they were to serve, and were to receive small stipends from the state. Broadly speaking, the Assembly's purpose in formulating the Civil Constitution was to eliminate abuses: the domination of the episcopate by the great aristocratic families, the wealth and extravagance of many higher clergy, the ignorance, immorality or venality of unworthy priests. The deputies argued that the Church, far from being a haven of spirituality, was a shamefully worldly institution whose wealth, stolen from parishioners, would be put to better use to serve the nation.

But to many of the French, the new law was nothing short of an attack on religion itself. Nine out of ten French men and women were Catholics, most of them devout, traditional believers untouched by the anticlericalism and skepticism of the Enlightenment. They went to Mass, said their prayers, attended to their devotions undisturbed by changes in government, and were outraged when the government presumed to make fundamental alterations in their religious lives. To turn the clergy into political servants was to make no allowance for conscience or piety—not to mention holiness. And it ignored the supremacy of the Pope, the spiritual leader of all Christendom, including revolutionary France.

The Civil Constitution alienated many who had eagerly espoused the principles of the revolution, and gave the counterrevolutionaries a strong new ideological weapon: from now on they could claim to be the champions of the Church as well as the monarchy, defenders of God and the faith against the godless revolutionaries.

The most tireless champion of the old order was Artois. Now in exile at Turin, surrounded by a growing number of fellow-exiles pledged to overthrow the revolutionaries, he was determined to take action, just as soon as he got the cooperation and

backing of the other European sovereigns. He was encouraged rather than dismayed by an abortive rising in Languedoc by opponents of the revolution in May and June; he saw in it a portent of things to come, not a defeat. Even Louis's refusal to cooperate with him did not deter Artois, who busied himself traveling to the various European courts, meeting with his fellow exiles and sending out ciphered messages. (The messages were often hard to make out. "I have at last deciphered your letter, my dear brother," Antoinette wrote Artois in response to one such communication, "and it was not without difficulty. There were many mistakes.") He had never been more self-important, filled with a sense of mission, "always talking, never listening, being sure of everything," as Fersen wrote. By his side, his chief deputy, was Calonne, the former Finance Minister—and opponent of the Queen. And as the months passed, many others gathered around the Prince, to form what he hoped would become a powerful counter-revolutionary force.

Artois and his colleagues were anything but a comfort to Antoinette. She had little respect for her brother-in-law's abilities, she worried that he was making an already grave situation much more dangerous. Madame Campan believed that the Queen was fearful of Calonne, and dubious about the outcome of a counterrevolution led from abroad. "If the emigrants succeed," she told Campan, "they will give the law for a long time; it will be impossible to refuse them anything; to owe the crown to them would be contracting too great an obligation. "^ Yet she did not dare disown Artois and his efforts completely. He might become useful, and besides that, he had a spy within the bosom of the royal family: Princess Elisabeth.

The King's younger sister had become a source of friction. Opinionated, strong-willed, with a wry intelligence that made her skeptical of other people's motives, Elisabeth had become something of a thorn in Antoinette's side. She had no life of her own; Louis had neglected her welfare, failing to arrange a marriage for her. She had been a difficult child, "a little savage," according to Antoinette. The blunt, rude, untamed child had grown into a prickly woman, "neither pretty nor ugly," Antoinette's brother Joseph thought, who knew her own mind and spoke it frequently. She and Antoinette had always been friends, but now they clashed over politics. Elisabeth wanted her timid, inert brother

Louis to take bold action against the Assembly and the Parisians, Louis wanted to be left alone. Antoinette was the decision-maker, and Elisabeth tried to work on her, insisting that she cooperate with Artois, criticizing her for compromising her position in dealing with Mirabeau and Lafayette, urging her to stop temporizing and act the heroine. The two women remained fond of one another, but the sisterly bickering was an irritant to the already beleaguered Antoinette.

What Antoinette needed, she told Mercy, was not advice but money—lots of money. The Assembly had granted the King and Queen nearly thirty million livres to run their household (financed, like all other government obligations, by the sale of Church lands), but this was not enough, especially since Antoinette continued to order new gowns in abundance and new and costly furniture for the Tuileries. She needed money from abroad, secret funds she could draw on to pay for the escape she now saw as inevitable. ("We must fly," she had told Madame Campan a few months earlier. "Who knows how far the factions may go? The danger increases every day."^) Mirabeau had not been able to do much to help the monarchy. His most recent suggestion was that Louis fight the most radical of the revolutionaries with their own weapons, becoming a politician himself and organizing a party. Once he had this party behind him, he could leave Paris and set up a base of operations in some more congenial town. Of course, Mirabeau conceded, this might lead to civil war—which made Louis cringe. Mirabeau's counsel made the Queen angry. His plan, she told Mercy, was "mad from start to finish." "The monarchy is finished," she confided in another letter. And in another, "I fear having been very wrong about the route which we should have followed."^

There was no doubt in her mind any longer. Emigration was the only viable course of action—even though it would mean rejoining Artois and his coterie. Antoinette told Madame Campan about one scheme to escape from St.-Cloud, where there were fewer guards and their surveillance was lighter. Louis would leave the palace with only an aide-de-camp of Lafayette's in attendance, plus his usual group of equerries and pages. Antoinette and her son would do the same, also escorted by only two of Lafayette's men, along with Madame de Tourzel. Elisabeth would get away on her own, or with the Princess Royal. They would leave at

about four in the afternoon, as they often did, and would not be missed until eight or nine, when the long summer twilight closed in. Meanwhile "some persons, who could be fully relied on," would be waiting for them in a wood four leagues from St.-Cloud, with a large traveling coach, or berlin, and a smaller carriage for the attendants. Lafayette's men would be bribed or rendered helpless, the royals would climb into the berlin and be off.

Hours later, there would be panic at the palace, the royal apartments would be searched, and a letter from the King found—a letter to the Assembly, in which he announced his departure and gave his reasons for leaving. It would take another hour for the letter to be sent to Paris. And by that time the berlin and the smaller carriage would have six or seven hours' head start on any pursuers.^

Antoinette did not formulate this plan, but she approved of it, and no doubt urged Louis to carry it out. She failed. Louis would not budge. He was adamant, blunt and obscene. "Go fuck yourself!" he shouted to Lafayette when the latter tried to talk to him seriously and slammed the door on him. "The first bastard that talks to me about a plot or about emigration . . ."he yelled, finishing the sentence with a garbled obscenity. He was miserable, trapped in the Tuileries by the revolutionaries, trapped in inactivity by his own inertia and by his nearly phobic squeamishness about avoiding bloodshed. His wife nagged him, his advisers and well-wishers, his brothers and sister would not leave him alone. He knew, as he told Madame de Tourzel, that there were "French hearts which would have risked their lives a thousand times for the preservation of their sovereign." But when these champions approached him, they kept insisting that he do their bidding, or take violent action. And he couldn't. It was as simple as that. As Antoinette sadly concluded in a letter to Artois, "he sees his position differently from what it is."^

By the closing months of 1790, despite Louis's obstinacy, emigration had become a foregone conclusion. Antoinette had begun to plan and prepare for it in earnest, giving a great deal of attention to comfort and convenience and far too little attention to the dangers and difficulties of the journey. More than a year earlier she had ordered a huge necessaire —a sort of traveling armoire—to have on hand "in case of precipitate flight." Into this heavy, bulky piece of furniture were now packed all the indispensable accoutre-

ments of domestic life, toilet articles, cups, bowls, utensils, mirrors, boot-scrapers and toothpicks, billiard cues and gilded chamber pots. The necessaire was to be sent on ahead, once final plans were made, to await the family at their intended destination. Clothing would have to be sent on ahead as well, and Antoinette wanted complete new wardrobes for herself and her children. But there was a problem: one of the wardrobe women. Mile. Rocherette, was a staunch revolutionary, and if she received orders to provide so much new clothing all at once, her suspicions would be aroused. Then too there was constant scrutiny from the Assembly, and their informers, and from Lafayette's men. So Antoinette appointed Madame Campan to be in charge of ordering the items of clothing, with as much secrecy as she could manage. Throughout January and February of 1791 the bedchamber woman slipped out of the palace, on her own, "almost in disguise" as she said, to visit dressmakers and seamstresses—being careful not to order too many things from any one of them, or to reveal any hint of whom the garments were intended for. She bought chemises and gowns, combing cloths and wrappers, gloves and slippers and quantities of lace. Antoinette had lost a good deal of weight, her dimensions had changed. The clothes ordered in 1791 would never have fit the buxom matron she had been only a year or two earlier. The children too had changed, of course. Ther^se was now a young lady of twelve, and the dauphin a sturdy five-year-old. Madame Campan had one of her sisters make the children's clothes, pretending that they were for her own relatives and sending the trunk containing them to her aunt in Arras; the aunt was instructed to take the trunk to Brussels and wait there with it for further instructions.^ Beyond the well stocked nicessaire and the new clothes the royal family would need a traveling carriage— and here Antoinette's predilection to satisfy comfort over practicality was a serious miscalculation. She chose not the swiftest but the most spacious conveyance, the berlin, a vehicle like the one in which she had traveled from Vienna to Paris as a young bride. She ordered a berlin of exceptional size, practically "a small traveling house," according to a contemporary. It was ingeniously fitted out with a sort of larder, which could be stocked with all kinds of provisions, a cooking stove for heating meat or soup, even a dining table that could be raised up out of the floor. The seat cushions were removable; underneath were commodes. Only beds

were lacking to make the carriage a second home. Encumbered with the royal family, their servants, several soldiers riding on the outside as bodyguards, plus all their baggage, food and other necessities, the berlin would be a heavy load even for six strong horses. And the horses would have to be changed every fifteen miles—a drawback, as horses were in short supply on all the roads. But this inconvenience was apparently not considered, or at least not seriously enough.^

Apart from the choice of vehicle, every other detail of the traveling arrangements was left to Fersen. He discovered that a Russian noblewoman, the Baroness de Korff, had recently made the trip from Paris to the frontier safely with her children and sister and several servants—a relatively rare feat, given the activities of the revolutionary "committees of search" and the exhaustive scrutiny of passports and other documents by village authorities. It occurred to Fersen that the royal family could use the Baroness's papers, or others just like them, and could disguise themselves as various members of the Baroness's traveling party. Madame de Tourzel could play the part of the Baroness, Lx)uis could be her majordomo, Antoinette her children's governess. With the dauphin disguised as a girl, the two royal children could impersonate the Baroness's two daughters, and Princess Elisabeth her sister. The Russian ambassador, Simolin, offered to help Fersen arrange the deception and it was he who obtained the necessary documents from the French Foreign Minister Montmorin.

For protection once they neared the border the royal emigrants would need to rely on the army, and with mutinies commonplace this was likely to be problematic. Louis and Antoinette both felt that they could rely on the Marquis de Bouille, a monarchist general who had managed to subdue the rebellion at Nancy. Antoinette wrote to Bouille urging him to keep his troops in readiness at the frontier, but Bouille told her in confidence that he could not be certain of his men; they were all "gangrened with the revolutionary spirit," he said, and might not remain loyal if they were called upon to protect the fleeing King.

Still, they would have to do. The situation was becoming worse by the day. Antoinette told the Spanish ambassador, whose help she sought, that her husband had no allies left. The European sovereigns, though concerned by the increasing political power of the republicans in the Assembly, were nonetheless grati-