The Fall of the French Monarchy by Munro Price

Author:Munro Price [Price, Munro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447211693
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Chapter Ten

THE KING AND THE CONSTITUTION

THE ROYAL FAMILY immediately felt the consequences of their failed escape. On 25 June, the day they returned to Paris, the king was suspended from his functions. At the Tuileries, extraordinary precautions were taken to ensure that escape would henceforth be impossible, and the palace became a prison. Its courtyards were filled with troops, a virtual army camp was established in its gardens, and sentries were posted on the roof. Inside, the surveillance was even more oppressive. The queen bore the brunt of this; two guards were posted in her bedroom with orders not to let her out of their sight day or night. For several days, she was forced to to go to bed, get up in the morning, dress and undress in front of them. One might Marie Antoinette was unable to sleep, lit her bedside lamp and began to read. The guard on duty, noticing this, poked his head through the bed-curtains and said familiarly: ‘You can’t sleep? Let’s have a chat. That’ll do you more good than reading.’ The queen tactfully persuaded him that she preferred to get on with her book.1

The flight to Varennes changed the political situation dramatically. Even before the royal family had returned to Paris, on 24 June, the most radical political club, the Cordeliers, had delivered a petition to the Assembly calling for the king’s deposition. The next few weeks saw, for the first time, the emergence of republicanism as a serious political force. The gap between moderates and the Left was now clear, and the revolutionary front was split as never before.

The catalyst of this radical surge was the assembly’s proclamation, contrary to all appearances, that the royal family had not in fact fled, but had been kidnapped by counter-revolutionaries. This absurd fiction was dictated by the determination of the moderate deputies, still in the majority, to retain the constitutional monarchy despite the embarrassment of Varennes. Ironically, they were aided in this by Bouillé who, in a chivalrous attempt to protect his royal master, wrote to the Assembly from Luxembourg on 26 June taking upon himself the whole responsibility for the flight. This exculpation of the king, however, infuriated the Left. On 15 July, the day the Assembly published its decree attributing sole blame for the escape to Bouillé, there was a tumultuous meeting at the Jacobin Club. The hall was invaded by a crowd of 4,000, who forced the publication of a petition that Louis XVI should be deemed to have abdicated, and should not be replaced unless a majority of the people wished it. In essence, this was a call for a republic.

The immediate result of this upheaval was, temporarily, to destroy the Jacobin Club. Almost all the deputies who had previously belonged to it, headed by Barnave, seceded the very next day and founded a rival club based at another former convent, that of the Feuillants. They were headed by Barnave and his allies Duport and the Lameth brothers, and were swiftly joined by La Fayette.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.