When the King Took Flight (16 page)

For months rumors of plots to kidnap the king had been circulating
in Paris. One of the deputies had reported such a threat as early as
January, and similar reports were published in newspapers in February and throughout the spring. Although the details of the conspiracies were generally quite vague, the assumption was usually
that someone else-a foreign power, the "aristocrats," perhaps even
the queen-would forcibly abduct the monarch against his will.)6
On the eve of the flight, the radical journalist Stanislas Freron reported rumors circulating through the city that Marie-Antoinette
and the king's sister, Elizabeth, had actually attempted such an escape. Marat published a vaguer rendition of the story, colored by
his standard prophecies of doom. Following accusations by one of
the queen's servants, Lafayette and his lieutenants had increased the
guard on the royal palace. Yet there had been so many rumors in
the city over the previous months, none of which had materialized,
that no one took the new denunciation very seriously."

In any case, servants in the Tuileries were stunned at seven in the
morning on June 21, when they pulled aside the king's curtain and
found his bed empty. At first they hoped the monarch had simply
gone to the queen's room, but when they found that her bed had not
been slept in and that the royal children and Madame Elizabeth
were also missing, pandemonium swept through the palace. Many
of the servants quickly changed into street clothes and fled for their
lives, fearing they would be accused of complicity." By the time
Lafayette and Bailly arrived, tipped off by yet another rumor that
they had initially refused to believe, the news had spread outside
the Tuileries and was coursing through the streets with amazing
speed.'9 One Parisian remembered the experience: "I heard a roar
approaching, similar to the sound made by waves in an approaching
storm. It came closer, it grew louder, and it passed by with ever
greater force." The young magistrate Felix Faulcon, deputy from
Poitiers, was writing in his room when he noticed shouting in the
streets and in the house next door and then caught the words
that the king was gone. Another deputy, the lawyer and historian Antoine Thibaudeau, was awakened by a cannon firing warning
shots near the Seine. Soon everyone was at his window, calling for
news from houses across the street or from the people below. Between eight and nine, as the news spread, church bells began ringing in every parish in the city. As the ominous drum roll of the call
to arms started up, men rushed through the streets, still fastening
their uniforms, to join their national guard formations.20

Many people hurried to the Tuileries to see for themselves, and
by half past eight a huge crowd had burst through the gates and
climbed the stairs to the royal chambers, intimidating and shouting
insults against guards and servants who had not already slipped
away. The soldier assigned to the king's sister was pushed against
the wall and threatened, until the crowds were shown a newly discovered secret door built into the bookcase. There were reports of
the people destroying portraits of the royal family and a certain
amount of furniture in the queen's room. But for the most part,
people simply gawked and talked to one another. When municipal
officials arrived, urging the need to seal off the premises to preserve
evidence, the crowds readily departed.21 Elsewhere hostile groups
of people surrounded Bailly and Lafayette, initially held responsible
for the flight, as the two tried to make their way to the city hall. But
the imperturbable general stood his ground and led the mayor to
safety, accompanied by only a few guards. The duke d'Aumont,
commander of the Tuileries guards during the night, was not so
fortunate. Cornered by a large crowd, he was beaten and his clothes
badly torn before he was rescued by a unit of the militia. In other
sections of the city, rumors spread that the prisons housed dangerous counterrevolutionaries who might soon break out and attack
the people, and municipal forces had to be rushed in to prevent a
potential massacre.22

Yet on the whole, after the first shock and excitement, the city remained calm, and almost all observers commented on the relatively mild reaction. "There is complete tranquillity here," wrote
the Spanish ambassador, "as well as a kind of stupor, as though
everyone has been struck with apoplexy." "Never," observed the roaming reporter of the newspaper Le babillard (The Chatterer),
"has Paris been both so touched with emotion and so calm. The
common people, in particular, have remained orderly." The young
German writer Konrad-Engelbert Oelsner wondered at the atmosphere of determined and almost jovial optimism reigning in the
streets: "There was much movement and curiosity, but nowhere destruction or disorder. The indignation manifested itself less in bitterness than in amusing pleasantries. People questioned each other, spoke to those they had never seen before, discussed, joked. An extraordinary event, affecting the whole community, had wrenched a
million people from their daily affairs; torn them from their petty
cares, bringing them closer to one another."23 In the short term, the
open reality of conspiracy turned out to be far less disruptive than
the previous rumors and fears of conspiracy.

[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

People Rushing to the Tuileries after Learning of the Kings Departure. Citizens and national guardsmen cross the Pont-Neuf and head down the quay
toward the Louvre on the morning of June 21. The towers of Saint-Germain-
l'Auxerois are visible on the right.

Clearly, one of the keys to the popular restraint was the immediate and vigorous action taken by the municipal authorities. Hastily
convened by Bailly at ten that morning, the city council was to remain in session around the clock for the next six days.z" The councilors quickly established liaisons with the National Assembly, from
which designated officials shuttled back and forth almost hourly.
They also attempted to work closely with the neighborhood section
committees, each of which was invited to maintain two representatives in the city hall to assure communication with the local bodies.
In this way, the new laws decreed by the Assembly to meet the crisis
were rapidly proclaimed to the sound of trumpets on street corners
throughout the city. In addition, Bailly and the city councilors
quickly investigated even the most far-fetched accusations-reports
of impending jail breakouts or of "enemies" planning to bombard
the city from the surrounding hills. They thus succeeded in disarming fears as soon as they arose."

Even before they had been contacted by the mayor, most of the
sections had swung into action. As chance would have it, many
were meeting that morning for the election of the new legislature.
When word of the emergency reached them, they immediately declared themselves to be in permanent session and mobilized the national guard units in their neighborhoods. For the first time, more
humble "passive citizens"-those too poor to qualify for voting
rights-were widely welcomed into the units. Some of these inhabitants seized arms for themselves by breaking into government magazines. A few sections went further, claiming complete control over
the local militias and denying the authority of Lafayette, whom
many suspected of involvement in the king's disappearance. The
general and the city leaders had long been suspicious of the radicalism of the sections, and for the time being they were able to reassert their control over all guard units and thwart the creation of independent paramilitary groups. But in the midst of the national crisis,
the municipality tolerated the permanent sessions of the sections
and acquiesced to their claims as de facto administrative units.
These were significant precedents. Within a year after Varennes the
sections would evolve into the principal institutional base of the
armed "sans-culottes" radicals, a primary force in the overthrow of
the king and in the ascendancy of the Terror in Paris.26

Equally significant for the future of the Revolution was the dramatic change in attitudes toward the king. Throughout the first two
years of the Revolution, Louis had retained a remarkably positive
image among the great majority of Parisians of every political persuasion. When the king's elderly aunts emigrated to Rome in February, a female contingent of the Fraternal Society of Les Halles
wrote to the monarch: "We love you as our good father, and we
want to tell you how sad we are that your family is abandoning
you." A month later, when Louis had recovered from a severe cold
and sore throat, there was an extraordinary outpouring of affection
and goodwill everywhere in Paris, a general rejoicing marked by a
thanksgiving service in the cathedral of Notre Dame, a series of
cannon salutes, and a special illumination of the city throughout
the night. The most serious source of antagonism before June 21
had been the king's refusal to hear mass from the "constitutional"
clergy. This was the single most important grievance motivating the
events of April 18, and since that time there had been a distinct
cooling toward Louis in the radical press. Yet the king seemed rapidly to admit his error and to mend his ways (in fact, as we know, to
help screen his plans for escape). Most Parisians were ready to invoke the time-tested formula of the "good king badly advised," and
to attribute his "mistakes" to the influence of the aristocrats or the
queen.27

But everything was transformed by the king's flight. It was not
only Louis' departure that stunned the Parisians, but also his letter
renouncing much of the Revolution and declaring that his previous
acquiescence to the new laws had been coerced. Oelsner was struck
by the number of people he saw reading and discussing copies of the king's letter in the street. Here, in his own hand-written note,
the monarch made it clear that the flight had been entirely his own
idea and not the work of his advisers. It now seemed obvious that
Louis had lied to the French. His solemn oath pronounced just one
year earlier-an oath sworn before God and the nation to uphold
the constitution-had been insincere.28

Indeed, after June 21 it was difficult to find a single newspaperaside from those of the most reactionary royalists-with anything
positive to say about the monarch. The Chronique de Paris wrote of
the king's "perfidious treachery," of his "atrocious and black dissimulation" in plotting his departure. The generally moderate Journal de Perlet played on the contrast between the king's previous
statements and his new manifesto. "How," the editor asked, "could
one ever again have confidence in anything the king might say?"29
The harshness of the reaction, the veritable flood of scorn, revulsion, and disgust toward the monarch, impressed all contemporary
observers. Some reports even commented on the cowardly manner
in which the monarch had deserted his ministers and his royalist supporters to the wrath of the crowds. In a deluge of articles
and pamphlets-over a hundred published during the next three
weeks-he was variously labeled a "traitor," a "liar," a "coward,"
or simply "Louis the False." "Try to think of the most degrading
expressions you could possibly use," wrote the Paris scholar and
bookseller Nicolas Ruault, "and you will still underestimate what is
actually said." "There are no epithets of shame," concurred Swiss
writer Etienne Dumont, "which have not been repeated unsparingly
and with cold-blooded scorn."30

The Parisian radicals, already obsessively sensitive to plots and
conspiracies, felt especially perturbed, even humiliated. How could
they have been so blind, lulled to sleep and oblivious to this, the
greatest conspiracy of all? "We relied on the king's fine words, his
honeyed speeches," protested Jacques-Pierre Brissot, an ambitious
journalist and Parisian political figure. "We were lulled to sleep. It
seemed a crime even to doubt the king's promises. So now this 'patriot' king has fled ... and is unmasked." There were endless refer ences to the king as a "parjure," one who is faithless to his oaths.
William Short found everyone in Paris referring to him as such:
"Louis the Traitor, Louis the Faithless." "He has fled," wrote the
Chronique de Paris, "despite all of his faithless promises. He even
chose the moment of his flight to correspond [almost] with the anniversary of the Federation oath taken before heaven and earth and
in the presence of the nation, a nation that had forgiven him for his
earlier mistakes." The Cordeliers published a paraphrase of a passage from Brutus, a popular play by Voltaire:

[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

The Family of Pigs Brought Back to the Stable. Another version of the return
to the Tuileries palace-just visible on the far right. The transmogrified royal
family is pulled along in a toy wagon.

There was no clearer evidence of the depths of the popular outrage than the change in the representation of the king. Before Varennes, simple engraved portraits of Louis had been affixed to
walls in almost every home and shop in Paris. But now, almost
overnight, they were removed, and large numbers were said to
have been thrown ostentatiously into the gutters.32 Indeed, there
was a striking reformulation of the images used to portray the king.
Above all, he was pictured as an animal, and especially as a pig. It
was an obvious allusion to his reputation for overeating-a trait
once viewed as almost endearing but now depicted as disgusting.
For weeks thereafter the "pig-king" appeared everywhere in newspapers and brochures, in posters and engravings. Often there were
whole families of pigs: a pig-queen and various other pig-members
of the royal family in company with the porcine Louis. Someone
even attached a sign to the wall of the Tuileries palace shortly after
the flight: "A large pig has escaped from the premises," it read.
"Anyone finding him is urged to return him to his pen. A minor reward will be offered."33