Lafayette (50 page)

At the end of his exhausting day as military commander of Paris, Lafayette returned home to the rue de Bourbon, hoping always to spend a quiet evening with his wife and children, but invariably faced by a gauntlet of political allies or American friends in the entrance hall. “My father’s table was open to all,” said Virginie. “My mother charmed all her guests with her hospitality, but deep in her heart she was suffering. She saw my father at the head of a revolution whose outcome no one could foretell. No one was more terrified than she by the dangers facing those she loved; but she rose above herself and her fears and, with my father, remained devoted to fighting evil.”
²⁰

To reduce risks to his family, Lafayette often held discussions on the new constitution in the safety of the American legation at Jefferson’s house, often debating from four o’clock in the afternoon until ten at night. Jefferson called the discussions “truly worthy of being placed in parallel with the finest dialogues of antiquity . . . by Xenophon, by Plato and Cicero.” Although Jefferson was reluctant to participate at times, Lafayette assured him he would be “useful in moderating the warmer spirits and promoting a wholesome and practical reformation.”
²¹
Gouverneur Morris also received “requests to throw some thoughts together respecting the constitution.”
²²

On August 26, the National Assembly approved Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, or bill of rights, but not before Mirabeau and Abbé Sieyès had expanded it from nine to seventeen provisions and eroded Lafayette’s foundation for liberty into a foundation for both license and dictatorship. Gone were Lafayette’s definitions of individual responsibility, along with his provisions for universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, gender equality, and free trade. Added to the original proposal were unrestricted freedoms of religion and the press, along with a universal right to resist “oppression,” which the document left to each individual to define. Despite the changes, the document reinforced Lafayette’s ill-conceived belief that the French revolution had ended and that his nation was on a firm course toward establishing republican government under a constitutional monarchy.

The Assembly’s progress on constitutional issues, however, did nothing to address the national economic collapse, and the beast that was the Paris
mob refused to lie still and wait. Camille Desmoulins, a failed lawyer who loved cafés more than courtrooms, habitually harangued the crowd in the gardens of the Palais Royal. Secretly financed by the duc d’Orléans, Desmoulins spouted slander against the king, the king’s ministers, the National Assembly—indeed, anyone or anything that came into his besotted mind. “We don’t take him seriously,” Robespierre said of Desmoulins, who had been a classmate in high school. “He has too much imagination to have any common sense.”
²³
Common sense or not, Desmoulins grew as addicted as Danton to the orgiastic pleasure of seducing the great beast of the mob with outrageous oratory that sent it heaving and snapping at each provocative phrase the orator tossed to it like a scrap of meat. The more outrageous, the more the beast heaved and snapped—and the more he thrilled at his power. In a fierce attack on the National Assembly, he charged that a “suspensive veto” would give the king power to “suspend” opponents from the gallows.
²⁴
The crowd erupted in fury, but Lafayette rushed to the scene with the Paris National Guard to quell the disturbance before it could issue onto nearby streets. Desmoulins stirred the crowd the following night with an attack on the constitution; again Lafayette’s guardsmen struck quickly and sent the mob scrambling home.

In the days that followed, central Paris remained relatively calm, but two areas on the city’s periphery festered with misery and discontent— Montmartre, to the north, where twenty thousand emaciated, unemployed peasants had migrated from the drought-stricken countryside to seek nonexistent manufacturing jobs they assumed the city could offer. The second social sore stretched across the eastern industrial suburb of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where hunger and despair gripped fifty thousand unemployed workers and other “heroes of the Bastille.” With the drought extending into its third year, millers had little wheat to make flour, and bread prices climbed 60 percent. The Paris assembly decreed free trade in grain and subsidized purchases for the poor, but there simply was not enough bread to feed everyone.

“Paris is in danger of hourly insurrection for the want of bread,” Jefferson warned, in a report to Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay. “The patience of . . . people . . . is worn thread-bare . . . civil war is much talked of and expected.”
²⁵
It was Jefferson’s last report from Paris. After an emotional farewell dinner with Lafayette, he left for the United States to join George Washington’s administration as first United States secretary of state.

Far from producing poetic paeans to liberty, freedom of the press flushed the filth of malcontents such as Mirabeau, Desmoulins, Robespierre, and Danton onto the streets of Paris. In the midst of bread shortages, they released a flood of leaflets and pamphlets to inflame public passions with accounts of the royal family—and the National Assembly—basking in luxury at Versailles
while Parisians starved. They demanded that the king and the National Assembly move into Paris to share the city’s misery. In mid-September, an even more venomous tongue spewed poison into the propaganda stream. Jean-Paul Marat was a foul, ill-kempt, Swiss dwarf
²⁶
who had failed as a physician and turned to scientific research that earned him nothing but public ridicule from Voltaire and other philosophes and scientists. Paranoid fantasies followed and metamorphosed into a psychotic fascination with killing that got him arrested for inciting murder.

“This fanatic filled me with disgust when I saw him the first time,” wrote René Levasseur, a Jacobin member of the National Assembly. “He reminded me of a hideous insect. His clothes were sloppy, his face discolored . . . his eyes yellowed, his skin scaly with eczema; his lower lip swollen, as if filled with venom ready to spit. . . . He was a bitter man who tolerated no opposition; he believed he was a misunderstood genius.”
²⁷

The promise of unfettered freedom of the press emboldened the “hideous insect” to publish a daily leaflet,
L’Ami du Peuple
—The Friend of the People. “Weary of the persecution I suffered for so long at the hands of the Academy of Sciences,” Marat ranted in an editorial, “I embrace with ardor the opportunity of punishing my oppressors and achieving my rightful position in life. . . . A year ago, five or six hundred heads would have been enough to render you free and happy,” he told his readers. “Today, it will take ten thousand. In a few months, you will produce a miracle and chop off one hundred thousand heads.”
²⁸

Increasingly repelled by the orators in the gardens of the Palais Royal by his club, Morris mocked them. “These are the modern Athenians,” Morris said of the French. “Alone learned, alone wise, alone polite, and the rest of Mankind Barbarians.”
²⁹

As the hunger worsened in Paris, the fiery words of Marat and other propagandists reignited the insurrection that Lafayette had quelled. District after district declared itself independent; Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre were everywhere, like hydras’ heads, appearing before crowds to cry,
“Aux armes!”
—“To arms.” Lafayette and his troops raced from district to district to the point of exhaustion, dispersing crowds, breaking up riots, pursuing agitators. Events controlled his every waking minute; the most powerful man in France was, in effect, powerless. “This man is very much below the business he has undertaken,” Morris noted in despair, “and if the sea runs high he will be unable to hold the helm.”
³⁰

On October 1, a regiment of Black Musketeers, summoned from Flanders by the queen to protect the royal family, trotted through the gates of the palace in Versailles. At the queen’s lavish welcoming banquet that evening, officers tore off their revolutionary tricolor cockades, trampled them underfoot, and, after pinning on the white cockade of the Bourbon kings,
fell to their knees with religious fervor to pay homage to Marie-Antoinette. The following day, the king, bolstered by the presence of loyal troops, rejected the Declaration of the Rights of Man in adamant tones that reflected his wife’s scorn for republicanism as much as his own. On October 4, news of the queen’s banquet and the king’s veto sparked rioting across Paris; at the Palais Royal, Danton and Desmoulins competed with each other for the crowd’s attention, each screaming invectives to avenge the insult to the cockade and the French people. The next morning, Marat’s
L’Ami du Peuple
called for insurrection, and, after finding bakeries empty, without a crumb for their children, thousands of mothers from the famine-stricken industrial suburb of Faubourg Saint-Antoine marched to city hall to demand help from Lafayette and Bailly.

It was not yet eight o’clock and city hall was still closed. As the women waited for Lafayette and Bailly, the huge bell in the city hall spire rang out suddenly, mysteriously. Usually reserved for emergencies, the tocsin echoed menacingly across the rooftops. Gangs of men armed with pikes streamed from nearby streets into the plaza and smashed their way into the Hôtel de Ville to loot its gilded halls, while the mass of women set off in two great columns toward Versailles, to demand redress from the National Assembly and raid the palace bakery. “Let’s fetch the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s apprentice,” they chanted (or so tradition has it), referring to the king, the queen, and the four-year-old dauphin—the crown prince. The citizen soldiers of Lafayette’s National Guard, many of them husbands and sons of the protesters, joined the march to protect the women from assault by the king’s troops at Versailles. Thousands more civilians joined as the throng moved up the Champs Elysées and streamed out of Paris, with guns, pikes, scythes, and other curious weapons—and at least three National Guard cannons.

“This liberty is the Devil when we know not what to do with it,” Morris commented, saying the French were not adapted to the enjoyment of freedom.
³¹

When Lafayette finally appeared at city hall, a group of grenadiers from six of his most elite companies awaited and demanded that he lead them to Versailles to “wipe out the Bodyguard and the Flanders regiment that trampled on the National cockade. . . .
Mon général
, the king is tricking us all, including you,” a grenadier lieutenant pleaded. “We must remove him; his son will be king; you will be regent; all will be well. . . . General, we must go to Versailles. All the people want us to.”
³²