When the King Took Flight (6 page)

Yet beyond their effect on the inhabitants of Varennes, the events
of that night would prove a turning point in the history of the Revolution and of the French monarchy, with an enormous immediate
impact on Paris, on the National Assembly, and indeed on the
whole of France and of Europe. It is to this broader context of the
flight to Varennes, how it came about and how it affected the lives
of various social and political groups throughout the kingdom, that
we turn in the following chapters.

AT THE CENTER of the drama was king Louis himself, fifth monarch in the Bourbon line, thirty-six years old at the time of Varennes. He was a curious, enigmatic man, in many respects quite
unlike any of the kings of his family who preceded or followed
him. Even those contemporaries who knew him well found him
difficult to assess, uncommunicative, unpredictable. Whether from
timidity and uncertainty or from political strategy, he spoke very
little, remaining silent and somewhat inscrutable.

By all accounts he had been a diffident, taciturn child, lacking in
self-esteem and never really comfortable in the world of parade and
flattery and wit that were the essence of court life at the palace of
Versailles, the great royal residence about fifteen miles southwest of
Paris. He had been the second of four boys born to the son of the
previous king, Louis XV, and he invariably came out last in comparisons with his brothers. Contemporaries mistook his shyness and
sluggish manner for a lack of intelligence, and this negative image
was reinforced by his physical appearance. Although he had the
blue eyes and blond hair of his German mother, he inherited a tendency toward corpulence from his father-a trait compounded over
time by a passionate love of food and drink. Even as a young man
he seemed little concerned with his personal appearance, and he
walked slowly in an awkward, tottering gait that seemed the very antithesis of courtly grace. The description of Madame de Campan,
one of the queen's ladies in waiting, was not untypical: "His step
was heavy and without noble bearing. He quite neglected his
clothes, and despite the daily efforts of his hairdresser, his hair was
promptly in disorder from the utter carelessness of his manner."'

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

Louis XVI at the End of the Old Regime. Heavyset, with his double chin,
stooped posture, and somewhat sleepy look, Louis appeared the very opposite
of the elegant Versailles courtier.

Contemporaries were also nonplussed by his fascination with
physical activities like locksmithing and masonry, hobbies that
"shocked the common prejudices as to the proper pastimes for a
monarch"-as even his locksmith instructor was reported to have
told him.' The one such practice that fully matched both general expectations and the image of his royal predecessors was his passion
for hunting. As an adolescent, he went out almost daily, roaming
the several great royal forests surrounding Paris and learning by
heart every alley and byway. As king, he was prepared to cancel a
meeting with foreign ambassadors, even in time of war, whenever a
fine day for the hunt presented itself.' And he maintained a precise
journal of every expedition, listing each stag, boar, rabbit, and
swallow shot or run down by his dogs, in an animal hecatomb of
nearly 200,000 "pieces" spanning fourteen years.'

Yet despite the snide remarks of courtiers and ambassadors and
despite his own misgivings, Louis was not unintelligent. Considerable care had been taken with his education, especially after the
deaths of his father and older brother made him the dauphin, the direct heir to the throne. He applied himself methodically, perhaps
even taking refuge in his studies from the demands of a court for
which he had so little natural grace and predilection. And his accomplishments were not unimpressive. Eventually he learned English, German, and Italian. With an excellent memory for detail, he
excelled in astronomy, geography, and history, and with the help of
his tutor he undertook a translation of the English historian Gibbon. He read all his life, occasionally commenting on the newspapers he had perused, even purchasing a copy of Diderot's celebrated Encyclopedia in 1777. He also adored maps, knew French
geography exceptionally well, and sometimes plotted out the trips
he hoped one day to make through his kingdom.' Indeed, he had an almost obsessive fascination with facts and figures, as demonstrated
by his immense hunting logs and by the endless lists and summary
tables drawn up with all the precision of an accountant or a Benedictine monk: of the names and careers over time of all the palace
servants and the keepers of his hounds; of the names and descriptions of every horse he had ridden since age eleven (a total of 128);
of the animals sighted in the various royal parks; and of every detail in his daily household budget. He maintained a personal diary
as well, but this, too, was essentially a factual recapitulation of activities, in which hunting again took pride of place. Nowhere were
there any indications of personal sentiments or ideas.'

Perhaps more than any of his Bourbon predecessors, Louis also
received careful instruction in what his tutors conceived to be the
duties and obligations of kingship, instructions that while still a boy
he dutifully copied down as a kind of royal catechism.' There can
be no doubt that he was deeply influenced by his religious training,
and that he took Christian piety and morality as seriously as any
French monarch of the early modern period. His tutor had him
vow "to imprint the precepts of my religion deeply into my heart,"
and throughout his life he attended mass daily and performed his
"Easter duties" year after year, as carefully noted in his diary. His
divine right to rule was clear and unquestioned: "I know that I owe
it to God for having chosen me to reign," he wrote on the first page
of his "catechism." And it was probably from the lessons of his tutors and from his sense of Christian duty and paternalism that he
acquired a firm belief in a king's responsibility to his people. "My
people should know that my first care and desire will be to relieve
and improve their condition ... The charity of the prince must be
modeled on the charity of God," a sentiment he reiterated both before and during the Revolution.' At the same time, he seemed to
feel a psychological need to be appreciated by his people and to receive their adulation for his efforts on their behalf. He was particularly affected by the popular reception he received at the time of
his coronation in Reims in 1775-one year after his ascension to
the throne-and he described his 1786 trip from Paris to the port city of Cherbourg, a paradelike carriage ride among the cheering
masses, as one of the happiest moments of his reign. To the end of
his life, he felt deeply pained if crowds failed to shout the traditional "Long live the king!" or if they did so with insufficient
vigor.'

If he had picked up from his tutors and from his own readings
the Enlightenment emphasis on "utility" and the "general will," it
was clear that he understood such concepts in distinctly paternalistic terms. The king must consider the "general will" in making his
decisions, but it was the monarch's will that was the final arbiter, the
very "substance of the law."" And coexisting with his belief in the
king's responsibility for the welfare of the people, he retained a
keen sense of a hierarchical, aristocratic society of status and caste
that was far removed from the ethos of the Enlightenment. He was
clearly possessed of the same dual vision, the contradictory goalsof popular welfare on the one hand, and the maintenance of privilege and royal authority on the other-that bedeviled a whole generation if monarchs in the late eighteenth century, monarchs sometimes referred to as "enlightened despots." The intrinsic difficulties
of this divided objective were compounded by Louis' personality,
by a lack of self-confidence that seemed even to increase as time
went on. Torn both by a pathological uncertainty of his own judgment and by disagreements among his advisers-toward reform on
the one hand, and the preservation of authority and tradition on the
other-he frequently found decisionmaking an excruciating process. According to Madame de Tourzel, his children's governess,
who would accompany him to Varennes, he had "an exaggerated
lack of self-confidence, always persuaded that others understood
things better than he." "His heart," wrote Madame de Campan after
his death, "led him to see the truth, but his principles, his prejudices,
his fears, the clamoring demands of the privileged and the pious, intimidated him and brought him to abandon the ideas that his love
for his people had led him initially to adopt.""

His sense of identity had been further complicated in 1770, when
state policy and the international system of alliances found him a
wife and a future queen. Marie-Antoinette was the second youngest of Austrian archduchess Maria-Theresa's sixteen children, and a
year younger than Louis himself. Graceful and attractive if not
beautiful, with her blond hair, her aquiline Hapsburg nose, and her
thick lower lip, she had received only the rudiments of an education. She spoke French well enough, with a slight German accent,
but she long had difficulty writing correctly and knew next to nothing of history, geography, or literature. The tutor sent to Vienna to
prepare the fourteen-year-old girl for her future role as French
princess described her as intelligent but extremely willful and with a
short attention span for anything that smacked of study or serious
conversation. One could scarcely conceive of a more complete mismatch: the heavy, introverted, insecure Louis and the elegant, vivacious, self-assured young princess." The potential for discord was
compounded by the sexual dysfunction that plagued the couple for
the first seven years of their marriage, a genital malformation making it painful and nearly impossible for Louis to consummate his
union. As time went by without a pregnancy, and as word leaked
out that Marie found her husband boring and physically repulsive,
tongues began wagging about the queen's reputed dalliances and
Louis' lack of male competence. It was a humiliation that could
have only further lowered the self-esteem of a man whose royal
predecessors had been celebrated for their sexual prowess.13

The near-disastrous marriage took a turn for the better in 1777,
three years after Louis had ascended to the throne, when Joseph II,
the Austrian emperor and Marie's oldest brother, traveled to Versailles in an effort to patch things up. The king was persuaded to
undergo a small operation to facilitate his conjugal performance. At
the same time the young queen was berated by her brother into accepting her responsibilities as a wife and mother for the sake of her
family's international strategies.' The success of Joseph's marriage
counseling was impressive indeed: five pregnancies ensued over the
next eight years, with a daughter and two sons surviving infancy.
When his first child was born, Louis was overwhelmed with joy and
with gratitude to his wife, and he proudly announced at court that
he was hard at work conceiving more progeny.''

Especially after Louis began to sire heirs, always an important concern for the French population, the king acquired remarkably
high favor in public opinion. Following their disillusionment with
the reign of the previous monarch, Louis XV-with his endless
mistresses and his broad failures in international affairs-many
people seemed to seize on the young king, widely praised for his
perceived sincerity and his hardworking application to duty, his
faithfulness to his wife, and even his religious piety. His very bonhomie, his unpretentiousness, his distance from the court, his absence of concern for his physical appearance-all seemed to endear
him to the public. The gossip pages of theMemoires secrets described
him in 1778: "No one could be more natural and amiable than Louis
XVI." And there were stories of his kindness and familiarity with
the palace servants, and of his return from the hunt "neither shaven
nor powdered, his clothes in disarray."" This strongly positive popular image would persist and even intensify into the early years of
the Revolution.