When the King Took Flight (4 page)

In the spring and summer of 1790 the guardsmen from Varennes
had joined with their fellows from throughout the region to march
in a series of unity or "federation" celebrations.1° One of these
events, on July i, 1790, brought some three thousand guardsmen to
Varennes itself, where they socialized, paraded, and swore oaths of
allegiance to the nation. Two weeks later, on the first anniversary of
the fall of the Bastille, Justin George, Etienne Radet, and several
other Varennes guardsmen had marched all the way to Paris to participate in the great national Federation Festival on the Champ de
Mars parade grounds to the west of the capital, at the site of today's
Eiffel Tower. There they had seen Louis XVI-only from a great
distance no doubt-taking his own oath to the constitution. One
can well imagine that they recalled this scene when the same king
appeared in their town one year later, fleeing the very constitution
he had sworn to defend.

A second institution of considerable importance in the new Revolutionary ethos, not only for Varennes but for other towns
throughout France, was the local popular society or "club." Perhaps
under the influence of his deputy father, Justin George had helped
establish a local chapter of the Friends of the Constitution on
March 25, 1791. With an initial membership of forty-four, the club
was one of the first such associations in the new administrative department of Meuse to which Varennes had been attached." It soon
affiliated itself directly with the "Jacobins" of Paris, the popular
name for the mother society of the Friends of the Constitution.
The club's ostensible purpose was to support and propagate the decrees passed by the National Assembly. But in Varennes, as in much
of the kingdom, the Jacobins rapidly revealed a special calling as
watchdogs for the Revolution against all its known or suspected enemies.

In the months preceding the June crisis, the club had focused particular scrutiny on the local clergy. A year earlier the National
Assembly had passed a sweeping reorganization of the Catholic
church known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and at the
beginning of 1791 the representatives had required all priests with
cure of souls to take a formal oath of allegiance to the constitution
in general and to the clerical transformations in particular. In April
the parish priest of Varennes, the abbe Methains, was formally removed from his functions by regional Revolutionary officials after
he had refused to swear such an oath. Adamant that the state had no
authority to remove him, the abbe had attempted to celebrate mass
on Good Friday, and the Jacobins and the national guard had entered the church and ousted him by force. While there is no evidence that the leaders of Varennes were particularly anticlerical or
antireligious, they were clearly disturbed that a man who refused to
adhere to the constitution should be allowed to teach local children
and control the confessional. The refusal of nearly half the parish
priests in the surrounding district to take the prescribed oath helped
to intensify suspicions that concerted counterrevolutionary plots
were afoot in their region.'

Indeed, almost from the beginning of the Revolution, the nearmillenarian optimism engendered by the events in Paris had been
mixed with fear and anxiety. From the perspective of the twentyfirst century, we sometimes forget how frightening and unsettling
the first experience in democracy must have seemed, even to those
who fervently supported it. It was difficult to believe that the great
aristocrats and clerics of the former regime were not manipulating
events and that they might not still attempt to seize power once
again or seek revenge for all they had lost. In fact three waves of
near-panic apprehension had swept through Varennes before June
1791, all related to the fear of imagined enemies, perhaps in the pay
of the former privileged classes. In August 1789 townspeople had
been terrified by news that a band of brigands was approaching
from the north. Even though the brigands in question never materialized, the defensive reaction that ensued had been fundamental in the formation of the town's first national guard units. Just one year
later rumors spread wildly that Austrian imperial troops had invaded, and some five hundred guardsmen from the surrounding villages converged on Varennes to assist in its defense. A third surge
of fear occurred in February 1791, with the rumor of yet another
troop of brigands arriving from across the northern frontier. Although the alarm again proved unfounded, the town's desperate appeals for help had led the departmental administration to send substantial supplies of guns and ammunition, and even four small
cannons, for the defense of Varennes.13 The successive periods of
panic had provided a series of practice mobilizations that would
serve the local citizens well when a real danger materialized. Perhaps more important, the Varennes city hall now had one of the
largest stockpiles of arms of any community in the region, arms in
readiness when the crisis of June 21 arrived.

Beyond the fears of encroaching brigands or Austrians, a much
more visible threat was posed by the large number of royal troops
garrisoned in Varennes and in nearby towns, many of them mercenaries from Germany or Switzerland. Relations between civilians
and soldiers had always been tense, even in the best of times. Local
inhabitants were often expected to feed and house the soldiers at
their own expense, and young military men were notoriously unruly, given to carousing and flirting with local women. The billeting
of troops in individual villages had also been used on occasion
to coerce communities into paying overdue taxes. Since October
1789 the municipal government had protested the placement of a
detachment of German-speaking cavalry in Varennes.'4 These had
been removed the following February, but six months later General
Bouille, the regional commander, had sent in some six hundred infantry troops. These troops had only recently been involved in
the brutal repression of a protest movement of common soldiers
against their aristocratic officers in the nearby city of Nancy, a protest with which many civilian patriots had openly sympathized. The
appearance of these soldiers in Varennes had led to enormous tensions. The situation was defused only after municipal leaders found a way of housing the troops at the edge of town in an abandoned
Franciscan convent.

The infantry troops had been removed in February 1791. But in
early June General Bouille announced he was sending yet another
contingent of sixty German-speaking hussars. We now know that
this action was part of the general movement of troops intended to
protect the king's escape, a conspiracy in which Bouille was intimately involved. Although this small detachment, again housed in
the convent, caused relatively little immediate concern to the people
of Varennes, many citizens had watched with growing skepticism as
numerous couriers and wagons of military materiel passed through
town and as they heard word of soldiers on the march throughout
the region. Indeed, officials in the department of Meuse were mystified and intensely concerned by such movements in a period of
peace: "marching and countermarching of infantry and cavalry,
arriving one day, departing the next, advancing, retreating, and
changing their quarters without any apparent necessity or utility.""
On June 20 forty of Varennes' hussars set off to the west, supposedly to receive a "treasure" or strong box of money from Paris to
pay the troops. The next day General Bouille's youngest son and
another officer arrived to spend the night at the Grand Monarch
Inn, just east of the river, claiming they had come to prepare for the
arrival of the general himself on an unexplained visit.

It is unclear how widespread local fears may have been. Sauce
himself wrote a letter early in the day on June 21, welcoming the
arrival of the hussars as a sign of his town's significance. He had
spoken to the commander and had been assured that war was unlikely. But other citizens in Varennes, especially members of the
Jacobin club, were far more mistrustful. A growing anti-aristocratic
bias had made the noble officers who commanded the troops objects
of general suspicion. One unknown club member wrote a series of
letters to the department administrators in Bar-le-Duc on the very
eve of the June 21 crisis. He detailed all the military activity in the
town, extraordinary in a time of peace. He also described the visit
of a certain Francois de Goguelat-another of the principal con spirators organizing the king's flight-who had interviewed Sauce
about the national guard and the political views of the municipal
leaders. In a wildly suspicious comment-which was only too close
to the mark-he even speculated that the mysterious "treasure" the
military was talking about might be the king himself, soon to be abducted from Paris by unspecified evildoers."

It is not impossible that these various rumors and fears about the
army were being discussed by George and his friends at the Golden
Arm on the very evening of Drouet's appearance. In any case, the
small, undistinctive town of Varennes, on the fringe of northeastern
France, was far better prepared-institutionally, militarily, and psychologically-to meet the crisis of June 21 than any of the conspirators of the king's flight might have imagined.

In the early morning of June 22, even as the town fathers debated
what to do with the king of France who had arrived in their midst,
the whole of Varennes had begun mobilizing. The exact chronology
of that night is somewhat uncertain. Everyone noted the confusion,
the rushing about, the numerous events happening at once. But it
was hardly a moment for taking notes, and the account of the
night's activities must be based on the sometimes discordant memories of the individuals present, written several days, even several
months or years later. In any case, soon after Sauce's two sons had
run through the town crying "fire!" someone had apparently begun
ringing the bells in the parish church across the river. The church
bells spoke a whole language of their own, with different rhythms
or timbres calling people to mass or announcing a wedding or lamenting a death. But the rapid, repetitive tintinnabulation of the
tocsin, as it was called, could only mean danger and emergency,
and soon everyone was out in the streets asking what was wrong.
Within minutes the national guard commanders had roused their
drummers, who began beating the equally pressing cadences of the
"call to arms," and, dressing as they went, men rushed to the center of town with their own muskets or to the town hall, where guns
were distributed.

Once they learned of the king's arrival, their curiosity and
amazement were matched by anxiety. Suddenly the meaning of all
the troop movements and the talk of treasures became clear. Those
who had not experienced the magic of the monarch's immediate
presence were quick to see the danger of reprisal against those who
would halt the king's flight and the imminent possibility of attack
from the soldiers known to have been moved into the region. Fortunately, the most immediate danger, the German cavalrymen still
quartered in Varennes itself, never posed a threat. Most seemed either asleep or well into their cups at the inn and watching harmlessly. But someone had seen their commander mount, ford the
river, and flee northward, soon followed by the younger Bouille and
his companion. Everyone knew that the officers would inform the
general himself and that they might soon find Bouille's whole army
on their backs." The guard commanders sent detachments of men
to the key entries of the town to set up barricades with wagons or
logs or plows or whatever they found at their disposal. They also
sent out couriers with desperate appeals for help from the surrounding villages.

Their worst fears seemed to materialize about one in the morning, when a group of forty hussars, followed soon afterward by a
handful of dragoons, appeared at the southern entrance of Varennes. The commanders of the hussars, whom townsmen soon
learned to be Goguelat and the duke de Choiseul, spoke to the
cavalry in German, and the latter responded with surprise, "Der
Konig! die Konigin!" They then charged over the barricade, swinging the flat sides of their sabers to push the guardsmen out of the
way, and rode into the center of town, ultimately positioning themselves in battle formation in front of Sauce's house.18 The moments
that followed were tense and uncertain, causing "the most fearful
agitation" for everyone. The hussars, high on horseback with their
plumed helmets, pistols, and sabers, were invariably intimidating to
the population. Sauce came out and gave a brave patriotic speech in front of his grocery, protesting that he knew the cavalrymen "were
too worthy as citizens and too brave as soldiers ever to participate
in an operation which could only lead to bloodshed."" But no
one knew how much French the soldiers understood, and the faceoff between guardsmen and cavalry continued. Finally, first one
and then two other officers asked to speak with the king. When
Goguelat returned sometime later and seemed to be organizing a
breakout, the guardsmen had prepared their defense. They had maneuvered their four small cannons into position on the street above
and below the hussars and shouted for all house owners to open
their doors, allowing citizens still in the street to escape and leaving
the cavalry alone in a firing field. Seeing the danger, Goguelat himself charged at the guardsmen, ordering them to turn their cannons
aside. But one of the citizen militiamen fired his pistol, shooting the
baron off his horse. As the baron was carried wounded into the
Golden Arm, followed closely by the guardsman who had just
shot him-apologizing and almost in tears-other men and women
went to work on the officerless cavalry. After more tense moments
and offers of free drink, the Germans were persuaded to dismount,
and soon they were embracing the townspeople and vowing obedience to the local guard commanders.20