When the King Took Flight (8 page)

But Mirabeau died suddenly in April 1791, and long before that
the queen, if not the king, had entirely lost confidence in him." As
the months passed, moreover, and as the situation became ever
more complex and uncertain, Louis increasingly fell back on his
wife for advice and guidance. And it is doubtful whether Marie ever
seriously considered a compromise with the evil that was Revolution. Throughout most of the period she had complained in letters
to her brothers in Vienna and to her Austrian confidant MercyArgenteuil that she considered herself and her family the captives
of a "rebellious mob"-or of unruly "vassals," as she sometimes
said, using the medieval phrase. She was beside herself with fury at
the audacity of such people, at their pretensions to equality with
the nobility and even the royalty. "These monsters," she wrote to
Mercy in June 1790, "are becoming more insolent by the day. I am
in utter despair." The words monsters and monstrous recurred con tinually in her descriptions of the Revolutionaries. When the Spanish ambassador spoke to her in January 1791, he felt that he "stood
in the presence of a woman at the extreme limits of her endurance."
"Louis," she had told him, trembling with emotion, "will fail in his
obligations to himself, to his subjects, and to all of Europe, if he
does not cast out the evil that besets us, no matter what the price."32
Under the influence of his queen and in his own fumbling and selfdeceptive manner, Louis was increasingly playing a double game, a
game that would be not only exceptionally dangerous for the king
but catastrophic for the Revolution and for France.

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

Louis XVI Taking His Oath to the Constitution at the Champ de Mars, July 14,
tygo. The king appears at the top of the steps (far right), facing Lafayette and
surrounded by the president of the National Assembly, Mayor Bailly, and the
queen holding the dauphin. Among the deputies (seated below at right) are
Barnave (pointing), Alexandre Lameth and Duport (to Barnave's right), and
Robespierre sitting next to Petion (eleventh and twelfth to Barnave's right).

We will probably never know for certain how and when Louis made
the momentous decision to take flight from Paris. The night he
actually escaped from the palace he left behind on his desk a declaration written in his own hand containing a whole litany of grievances, justifying his decision to flee the capital and to cease cooperating with the Revolutionary leaders. He complained bitterly of all
the royal powers that had been stripped from the throne by the National Assembly: direct control over the army, over diplomacy, over
provincial administrators; the right to issue pardons; and indeed the
power to reject outright any law of which he disapproved. He was
angry with the Assembly's drastic reduction of his personal revenues, reductions that greatly reduced his lifestyle and diminished,
he felt, the prestige of the monarchy. He was also rankled by slights
to his honor, as when he had been forced to sit next to the president of the Assembly during the Federation ceremonies and had
been separated from his family. And then there was the Assembly's
sweeping reorganization of the French Catholic church and the
subsequent requirement that clergymen take an oath of allegiance
to the constitution, measures that he felt he had been compelled to
accept. The latter decrees, in particular, tore at the conscience of
the pious and orthodox monarch-especially after they were formally condemned by the pope in the spring of 1791.33

For a Bourbon king, heir to an absolute monarchy tightly linked
to Catholic orthodoxy and a millennium-long tradition of rule,
these were no doubt all good reasons. Whether they were the real
reasons pushing the king to flight is not certain. In fact many of the
laws that Louis opposed had been decreed more than a year before
the escape plan began to take shape. Since at least July 1789, and on
numerous occasions thereafter, courtiers and ministers and eventually the queen herself had encouraged Louis to retire to a safe distance from the dangerous crowds of the capital and to surround
himself with loyal troops. But Louis had always declined such
schemes. During the October Days, he had rejected Saint-Priest's
carefully organized evacuation to Rambouillet, some twenty miles
to the west of Versailles. So, too, in the spring of 1790, while he and
his family were in Saint-Cloud, he had refused proposals of escape
to Compiegne or elsewhere 34 In part, it was the old problem of
making up his mind. Yet he also seems to have worried about the
consequences of flight for the other members of his family. His
youngest brother, the count of Artois, had gone into exile shortly
after the fall of the Bastille, and his two elderly aunts, the daughters of Louis XV, had managed to leave on a "pilgrimage" to Rome
in early 1'791. But his sister, Elizabeth, and his brother the count
of Provence-the future Louis XVIII-remained in Paris. In any
case, two dramatic and violent events in early 1791, both directly affecting the king and his family in the Tuileries palace, seem to have
been critical in steeling Louis' resolution to attempt an escape.

The complex and often confusing events of February 28 were
sparked by a popular attack on the great royal prison of Vincennes,
to the east of the capital, rumored to have become a new Bastille
where patriots were secretly imprisoned. When General Lafayette
led a large contingent of national guardsmen to halt the riot, new
rumors spread that the king had now been left unprotected and that
his life was in danger. With threats of violence rising rapidly, some
three hundred fanatical young nobles living in Paris, many of them
members of the now disbanded royal bodyguard or of the conservative Monarchy Club, rushed to the Tuileries to protect their king. Once inside they began baiting and insulting the patriot guards
whom they found in the palace. Fearing a bloody confrontation, the
king stepped in and asked his "defenders" to lay down their arms
and leave peacefully. But as soon as they had complied, many were
roughed up and arrested by the angry guardsmen. The king was
outraged by what he felt was the betrayal of a mutual agreement
and an affront to his honor. "My faithful servants," as he would
write on the eve of his flight, "had been violently dragged from the
palace," and he himself had been forced to "drain his cup to the last
dregs."35

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

Brawl in the Tuileries palace, February 28, /79/. In this patriot depiction, Louis
XVI is shown speaking with Lafayette (background left) and approving the
order to the national guard to disarm the counterrevolutionary nobles who
had come to protect the king. In reality, Louis was deeply angered by the
manner in which his defenders were treated.

Even more threatening to the king and his family were the events
of April 18, 1791. It had all begun with the royal family's plan to
return to the chateau of Saint-Cloud to celebrate the Easter festivities. Huge crowds formed outside the eastern gates of the Tuileries
to prevent his departure, crowds that soon received support from
many of the national guardsmen who were supposed to help clear
the way. The people rightly assumed that the king was leaving to
avoid Easter services with the pro-Revolutionary "constitutional"
clergy, and they refused to disband, and the guard refused to obey,
despite the pleas of Lafayette himself. In the process, several of the
king's servants and courtiers were seized and threatened with hanging, and for the first time the king heard himself directly mocked
and even threatened with being deposed. Once again Louis was beside himself with frustration and anger. "It is amazing," he was reported to remark, "that after having given freedom to the nation, I
myself am deprived of all freedom." In the end, the family was
forced to descend from the coach and walk back into the palace,
thus "compelled to return to their prison." Several close observers
felt that the events of April 18, in particular, were crucial in convincing the king of the imminent danger to his family and of the
necessity of flight. He would allude directly to the incident when he
explained his departure to the grocer Sauce in Varennes and later to
the National Assembly.36

But the two violent events at the palace of that late winter and
early spring had another effect. After February 28, the national
guard was given orders to forbid the entry of nobles into the
Tuileries, whatever their traditional honorific titles, unless they had
specific personal or administrative reasons for consulting the king.
April 18 saw the imposition of even tighter restrictions, banishing
most of the king's closest noble confidants, as well as the family's
retinue of bishops and other clergymen, all of whom had refused
the oath of allegiance. Although Louis and Marie had never been as
tightly linked to court ceremonial as their predecessors, the trials
of the Revolution had pushed them closer than ever before to the
support and company of their aristocratic followers. And now, sud denly, the palace seemed a very empty place. Where once the
"great" of the kingdom, men and women, had surrounded the two
monarchs and basked in their presence, now there were only the
Revolutionary guards and the teams of simple servants scurrying
about their duties. To the royal couple, the dismantling of the court
in the spring of 1791 seemed an especially cruel and unnecessary
blow, conceived primarily, as they believed, to humiliate and isolate
them, "denying His Majesty the gentle consolation of being surrounded by those who were devoted to him." "Not content with
holding the monarch captive," wrote the noble deputy Irland de
Bazoges, "they now want to banish from his presence those very individuals whose continuing devotion might bring him some comfort." Indeed, in the declaration left at the time of his departure,
Louis would complain specifically of being stripped of "almost all
his principal palace dignitaries."37

Whether these violent events pushed the king to a final decision
to flee or merely reinforced a previous determination, by the middle
of April I791 there seems to have been no turning back. "It is now
all the more evident to the king," wrote Axel von Fersen on April
18, "that it is time to act and to act with all due haste."38

The plan used by the royal couple in June 1791 had been conceived
some nine months earlier by the bishop of Pamiers and the baron de
Breteuil, the king's conservative ex-minister now living in exile in
Switzerland. The proposal was different from earlier versions in
that the goal was not just to move the king to a safe distance away
from Paris-to Rambouillet or Rouen, for example-but to ensure
his escape all the way to a frontier, where he could receive support
or at least the threat of support from foreign troops. The basic assumption was that once he had distanced himself from the capital, from the Paris Jacobins, and from the radicals of the National
Assembly, the king would find a massive popular following. Surrounded by his loyal soldiers and backed by the foreign deterrent so the idea went-other Frenchmen from around the country
would rally to his support. In this new position of strength the
monarch would be able to renegotiate the entire constitution and
bring the Revolution to an end 39

By late October 1790 the king had agreed to consider such a
scheme, at least as a contingency plan, and the conspirators set
about devising detailed arrangements. From the beginning, the
marquis de Bouille-general of the army of northeastern France,
headquartered in Metz-was given full charge of preparing the
king's reception at the frontier. The actual escape from Paris and
the overland journey were to be planned by the queen and, above
all, by von Fersen. The long relationship between Marie and her
Swedish companion now acquired a new dimension, and the plot
that the two organized would be as sophisticated and deceptive as
anything spawned during the entire Revolution.

Night after night, through the winter and spring of 1791-even
before the king had definitively accepted the idea-Fersen and Marie met secretly in the palace to assemble a plan for what was surely
the single most daunting element of the entire undertaking: the escape from the Tuileries and from the great, teeming, and suspicious
capital itself. Although Louis was also consulted on key decisions
and undoubtedly maintained a kind of veto power, on this as on so
many other issues he now increasingly delegated his authority to
the queen. In the process, and in the midst of such extraordinary
circumstances, Fersen became a kind of de facto prime minister for
the royal household. Several evenings a week, he arrived at the palace, disguised in a commoner's dress with a frock coat and the
round-brimmed hat worn by some elements of the popular classes.
His account of his relationship to the royal family was probably not
exaggerated: "Without me," he wrote to the baron Taube, his closest friend in Sweden, "their escape would be impossible. I alone
have their confidence. There is no one else whose discretion they
can count on to carry out such plans.""

From the beginning it was clear to Fersen that the success of the
project would depend on foreign support. The king's personal bud get was limited, and he would need substantial amounts of money
to pay mercenary troops and to maintain his family's requisite lifestyle until the situation could be "normalized." The plan also called
for Austrian troops to be massed at the border "in large enough
numbers to serve as a rallying point for all those well-intentioned
parties, dissatisfied with events, who will come to join us."41 But the
long negotiations with foreign regimes, pursued primarily by the
queen, proved enormously frustrating. Many of the neighboring
monarchs, though sympathetic to the plight of the royal family,
were wary of committing themselves unless the other great powers
agreed as well. The queen was particularly disappointed by the caution of her own brother Leopold, who had become emperor of
Austria after Joseph's death in 1790. It was only in early June 1791
that Leopold directly promised full support of money and troops.
But even then the emperor specified that assistance could be provided only after the king had escaped and was in a position to act independently. Such a position added another powerful incentive for
flight, but it made advance planning all the more difficult."