When the King Took Flight

Timothy Tackett

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780674257023
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

On a June night in 1791, King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette fled Paris in disguise, hoping to escape the mounting turmoil of the French Revolution. They were arrested by a small group of citizens a few miles from the Belgian border and forced to return to Paris. Two years later they would both die at the guillotine. It is this extraordinary story, and the events leading up to and away from it, that Tackett recounts in gripping novelistic style.The king's flight opens a window to the whole of French society during the Revolution. Each dramatic chapter spotlights a different segment of the population, from the king and queen as they plotted and executed their flight, to the people of Varennes who apprehended the royal family, to the radicals of Paris who urged an end to monarchy, to the leaders of the National Assembly struggling to control a spiraling crisis, to the ordinary citizens stunned by their king's desertion. Tackett shows how Louis's flight reshaped popular attitudes toward kingship, intensified fears of invasion and conspiracy, and helped pave the way for the Reign of Terror.Tackett brings to life an array of unique characters as they struggle to confront the monumental transformations set in motion in 1789. In so doing, he offers an important new interpretation of the Revolution. By emphasizing the unpredictable and contingent character of this story, he underscores the power of a single event to change irrevocably the course of the French Revolution, and consequently the history of the world.

CHAPTER 1

Sire, You May Not Pass

IT WAS NOT a particularly distinctive town. Astride the small river Aire, between two ridges of the Argonne Forest in northeastern France, it was a minor community where some fifteen hundred souls pursued their works and days as shopkeepers or artisans or farmers in the wheat fields and orchards of the surrounding countryside. Like so many other small municipalities scattered across the kingdom, it was a backwater.¹ The one road of any importance entered Varennes from the south and squeezed through an archway under the chateau chapel before curving down through the town and crossing the river on a narrow wooden bridge. North from the town a road led on toward the fortresses of Sedan and Montmédy some thirty or forty miles away, on the border of what is today Belgium but was then a part of the Austrian empire. Yet the roadbed was rough and poorly maintained and frequented primarily by local peasants and military personnel. For a great many residents the town of Varennes must have seemed a commercial and cultural dead end, where relatively little ever happened.

But on the night of June 21, 1791, something quite extraordinary did happen.² At eleven o’clock most of the inhabitants lay fast asleep, and with the moon not yet risen the town was very dark and very quiet. The only lights still visible were in a small inn called the Golden Arm, on the main street of the old quarter just below the archway. Here a number of young men were still drinking and chatting. There were a couple of out-of-town visitors spending the night in upstairs rooms; a group of German-speaking cavalrymen recently arrived in town and billeted in a nearby convent; and four local friends, all members of the volunteer national guard company of grenadiers. Among the latter were the innkeeper himself, Jean Le Blanc, Le Blanc’s younger brother Paul, the schoolteacher’s son Joseph Ponsin, and Justin George, son of the mayor. George’s father was currently away in Paris, sitting as a deputy to the National Assembly, and the four men may well have been discussing the latest news of the Revolution. Very likely they were also questioning the Germans, trying to determine why they were in town and why there had recently been so many troop movements in the region.

At this moment two strangers rushed into the inn. The speaker for the two, an exceptionally tall and self-confident man who called himself Drouet, immediately asked the innkeeper and his friends if they were good patriots. When they assured him that they were, he told them an amazing story. He was manager of the relay stables in Sainte-Menehould, a small town about thirty kilometers to the southwest, and a few hours before he had seen the king and queen of France and the whole royal family traveling in two carriages, changing horses at his relay. After consulting with the town leaders, he and his friend Guillaume, both former cavalrymen, had pursued the royal party on horseback, and they had just passed them parked by the side of the road at the top of Varennes a few hundred paces away. He was sure that it was the monarch and that he was heading for the Austrian frontier. For the sake of the nation and the Revolution, he said, the king and his family must be stopped.

Such a tale might well have met with disbelief. But these were very special times, and Drouet’s intensity and self-assurance carried conviction and stirred the men to action. The Le Blanc brothers rushed to awaken several other members of the national guard and a couple of town councilmen who lived nearby and then went home to fetch their muskets. At the same time Drouet and Guillaume and some of the others hurried down to the river and blocked the bridge with a wagon loaded with furniture.

The first council member to arrive on the scene was Jean-Baptiste Sauce, the town manager, or procureur, who had taken over the day-to-day operations of the municipal government while mayor George was away in Paris. A grocer and candlemaker by profession, he was thirty-six years old, tall, somewhat stoop-shouldered, and balding. Although he had only a limited education and wrote awkwardly with an improvised phonetic spelling, he was a dedicated patriot and carried himself with a quiet distinction that had won the respect of the townspeople. Flabbergasted by Le Blanc’s wake-up call, he nevertheless dressed as best he could, grabbed a lantern, and sent his two sons to rouse the rest of the town with the traditional cry of “fire, fire!” By about twenty minutes past eleven Sauce, George, Ponsin, the Le Blanc brothers, and the two men from Sainte-Menehould had assembled with perhaps a half-dozen others in the street near the inn. Just then the two carriages described by Drouet, accompanied by two riders on horseback, clattered under the archway.

While some of the guardsmen held torches, others raised their muskets and forced the drivers to stop and get down. Sauce approached the first carriage, a two-horse cabriolet, and found in it two startled and trembling women who told him that their identity papers were being carried by those traveling behind them. The grocer then moved to the second, much larger carriage, pulled by six horses and heaped high with baggage. He held his lantern to the window and cautiously peered in. The carriage seemed to contain six people. There were two children—he could not tell at first if they were boys or girls; three women in middle-class dress, one about twenty and rather pretty, and two others somewhat older and distinguished in bearing; and a heavyset man with a large nose and a double chin, dressed in the clothes of a merchant or a legal agent. Sauce had never before laid eyes on the king, but he felt there might be a resemblance to the royal portraits he had seen.

Despite their protests, he took the travelers’ passport into the inn for a closer look. As several city officials gathered around, he read the papers of a Russian baroness, Madame de Korff, and her suite, bound for Frankfurt, signed by the foreign minister and by “Louis,” the king himself. Although the document was somewhat vague about the number of people traveling, and although Varennes hardly seemed on the most direct road from Paris to Germany, the papers appeared to be in order, and Sauce and his colleagues were inclined to let them pass. But Drouet, who had already invested a great deal of his time and his honor, was adamant. He knew he had recognized the king. He had also seen a noble cavalry captain in Sainte-Menehould salute the carriage and take orders as though he were obeying a commanding officer. If the officials were to let the royal family escape to foreign territory, they would be accomplices to treason. In addition, Drouet asserted, the passport was not valid, since it had not been cosigned by the president of the National Assembly. In fact the president’s signature was not legally required, but no one knew this for certain, and in the end the town fathers decided to play for time.

Jean-Baptiste Drouet.

Jean-Baptiste Sauce.

The occupants of the carriage were told that it was too late for their documents to be properly examined, that in any case the road ahead was in poor condition and dangerous at night, and that it was better to wait for daylight. Despite their angry objections, the party of eight travelers and three other men in yellow uniforms who accompanied them were forced to descend and were offered hospitality in the grocer’s home. They were led several paces down the cobblestone street from the inn to Sauce’s store and then crowded up a wooden stairway and into his small two-room apartment. At first the group studiously stuck to their story. One of the older women announced herself to be the baroness de Korff, insisting that they were in a great hurry and must be allowed to leave for Germany. But still intrigued by the man’s resemblance to the king, Sauce remembered that a local judge, Jacques Destez, had married a woman from Versailles and that he had seen the royal family on several occasions. He went up the street to the magistrate’s house, woke him, and led him back to his home. Destez had scarcely entered the upstairs quarters when he fell on one knee, bowing and trembling with emotion. “Ah! Your Highness!” he said.

It was the stuff of fairy tales: the king of France, Louis XVI, here in their town, in the storekeeper’s bedroom. There, too, were the queen, Marie-Antoinette, their twelve-year-old daughter and five-year-old son—the dauphin, heir to the throne—the king’s sister, Elizabeth, and the children’s aristocratic governess, Madame de Tourzel. Everyone stood in wonder. Sauce’s elderly mother came in soon afterward and fell to her knees sobbing, never having imagined that she might one day see the king and the little crown prince. Realizing that his incognito was broken, Louis XVI now spoke to them. “Yes, I am your king,” he said. “I have come to live among you, my faithful children, whom I will never abandon.”³ And then he did a remarkable thing. He took the members of the municipal council in his arms, one by one, and embraced them. And he appealed to them and told them his story. He had been forced to flee his palace in Paris. A few fanatical revolutionaries, the Jacobins, had taken over the city. Worse, these agitators had repeatedly put the life of his whole family in danger. In fact, he now told them, he had no intention of fleeing to Germany, but only of traveling to the citadel of Montmédy near the frontier. There, far from the mobs of Paris, he could retake control of his kingdom and end the chaos and anarchy that, he said, were increasingly rampant. “After having been forced to live in the capital in the midst of daggers and bayonets, I have journeyed into the country to seek the same freedom and tranquility which you yourselves enjoy. If I remain in Paris, both I and my family will die.”⁴ The townspeople must prepare his horses and allow him to complete his journey.

And overcome by the emotion of the moment, awed and overwhelmed by the religious mystique of the monarchy and the aura of the king there in their presence, the town leaders agreed to help. If necessary, they said, they would accompany him themselves to Montmédy. As soon as dawn came, they would organize members of their own national guard and escort him. Their heads still swimming, they returned to the town hall to make arrangements. How could they not obey a command from Louis XVI himself, from the successor of a line who had ruled France for more than eight hundred years?

Yet after they had left the presence of the king, after they had talked to others and had come to realize the implications of the situation in which they found themselves, they began to have second thoughts.

The Third Summer of the Revolution

For the people of Varennes were no longer the same as they had been just two years earlier. Over the previous months, the town had been swept up in an extraordinary series of developments that had touched every corner of the kingdom and irrevocably changed the way in which the inhabitants viewed themselves and their place in the world. In March 1789, following a complex conjunction of events over which they had no influence whatsoever, all townsmen over twenty-four years of age who paid any taxes—the overwhelming majority—had been invited to participate in a national election, a process that would designate deputies to the representative assembly of the Estates General, which had not met for 175 years.⁵ Varennes had been the site of both a municipal election and a secondary regional election leading to the choice of their own mayor, a former lawyer, first as an alternate deputy and then as a deputy in full standing. Perhaps equally important, the electoral assemblies in March had been asked to draw up statements of grievances that the citizens wished to bring before the king. Although the grievance list of the people of Varennes has been lost, it probably was not unlike the one preserved for the small town of Montfaucon, only six miles away.⁶ As in communities all over France, the citizens began with a passage of extravagant praise for King Louis, who had convoked the elections. Then, scattered among demands for changes in a miscellany of local institutions, they asked that many burdensome taxes be lowered or suppressed; that all citizens, including nobles and clergymen, pay taxes in equal proportion to their revenues; that administrative authority be decentralized and shared with local provincial assemblies; and that more money be spent for the education of children. But whatever the specific demands made, the very act by which the citizens in Varennes and throughout the kingdom had systematically reflected on their lives and debated the institutions and practices that might best be changed or improved or abolished altogether had been a revolutionary event in itself. It had enormously raised expectations for a general transformation of a whole range of political, economic, social, and ecclesiastical institutions.

In the following weeks and months, the people of Varennes had watched in amazement as the Estates General they had helped to elect converted itself into a National “Constituent” Assembly. The new Assembly not only set to work drawing up France’s first constitution, but engineered a wholesale transformation of French political and social structures that went far beyond anything most of them had requested in their grievance lists. At the beginning of August 1789, the news of the fall of the Bastille in Paris and the victory over an apparent plot to overthrow the Revolution had led to a great townwide celebration.⁷ There were cannon salvos, festive bonfires, a public ball in the town square, even a distribution of bread to the poor—as might have occurred during a major religious festival. There was also a rare “illumination” of the town, in which every household was expected to place candles or lanterns in its windows at night. For a society unaccustomed to public lighting, such a display of concentrated candlepower would have made for a stunning spectacle indeed.

But it was not only a question of cheering from afar. Soon the citizens of Varennes had been asked to elect their own municipal and regional governments and to participate directly in the day-to-day implementation of the new laws. They entered into regular communication with the National Assembly, seeking advice and information, corresponding with their deputies, sending off a “lob-biest,” and sometimes even offering their own suggestions for the drafting of the constitution. After centuries of domination by others—by nobles and churchmen and royal administrators—in everything but their most immediate family and local concerns, they had now been invited, indeed compelled, to participate in their own government, their own destiny. Such a process had imparted an exhilarating sentiment of involvement and local initiative. It had also instilled a new feeling of national identity, French identity, replacing the narrow world of the Aire Valley and the Argonne Forest, which had previously served as the inhabitants’ principal points of reference. The great movement of the Enlightenment, the surge of intellectual emancipation and reevaluation that had blossomed among the cultural elites of the major cities of eighteenth-century Europe, had been very distant indeed for the people of Varennes. Perhaps it was only with the institutional transformations of the Revolution itself that Immanuel Kant’s “motto of the Enlightenment,” sapere aude—dare to know and to understand for oneself— came to have any real meaning for the great mass of small townspeople and villagers of provincial France. It is only in the light of this accrued sense of self-confidence and of identity with the nation as a whole that we can understand the actions of men like Drouet and Sauce and the various municipal leaders throughout the region during the crisis of June 21–22.

But two other institutional creations also played an important role in forming the Revolutionary psychology of the people of Varennes in the summer of 1791. In August 1789, confronted by the threat of anarchy and of possible counterrevolution after the collapse of the Old Regime, the town had formed its first citizens’ militia.⁸ Two companies of a local “national guard” were formed, the “chasseurs” and the “grenadiers,” each with its distinctive uniforms, flags, and drummers, commanded by officers elected by the members themselves. One can scarcely exaggerate the feelings of pride with which the men of Varennes, some three hundred strong, aged sixteen to fifty, practiced marching through the streets and around the town square, accompanied by an improvised corps of local musicians. At first they carried only a few real weapons, hunting muskets or antique guns preserved by their families. But decked out in their new uniforms, the bright green of the chasseurs and the royal blue and white of the grenadiers, they felt an extraordinary sense of purpose and importance.⁹ The status of un...