The French Revolution by Andress David;

Author:Andress, David; [Andress, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2019-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Caustic satire on the runaway king as a pig: ‘I’ve ruined myself to fatten him up, and I don’t know what to do with him any more.’

Library of Congress

A Lesueur image, dramatically depicting the royal family pleading with their captors to let them continue their journey. (Musée Carnavalet).

Musée Carnavalet / Bridgeman Images

The king abandoned further pretence, declaring, ‘Yes, I am your king, I have come to live among you, my faithful children, whom I will never abandon,’ and took the astonishing step of embracing each councilman in turn, before asking for their aid in continuing his journey. Temporarily dazzled, they agreed, before changing their minds and returning to tell the king he could not proceed, that ‘he was adored by his people… but that his residence was in Paris… and that the constitution depended on his return’. A local story had it that one man, the old woodcutter Géraudel, was more blunt in the face of royal protestations: ‘Sire, we’re not sure we can trust you.’30 As day dawned on 22 June, thousands of Frenchmen, armed with everything from regulation muskets to pitchforks, formed a mass that demonstrated clearly that, without any personal hostility to the king, they would not let him pass.

While the people of Varennes had decided spontaneously that the king could not be making his way of his own free will on an innocent country excursion, back in Paris the National Assembly scrambled for a logic that would allow them to control the situation. This was obviously a counter-revolutionary plot, but of whose making? Radicals were already shouting about the marquis de Lafayette’s National Guard and its failure to guard the palace. The deputies knew they had to order the detention of the king, or see their constitutional monarchy collapse into rubble, fire and blood.

They declared, from almost the first moments of the flight’s discovery, that Louis had been kidnapped, and needed to be rescued. In so doing, they overlooked a declaration in his own hand, left behind in the Tuileries, that abjured all the revolutionary acts he had been forced to acquiesce in, and rejected the whole course of events since June 1789. But the alternative was to declare themselves at war with the king they had always insisted remained the moving spirit and capstone of their efforts.

When word of the king’s presence at Varennes reached Paris, the Assembly immediately despatched a party of deputies to accompany his return. Such was the throng of citizens, from town and country alike, that surrounded the coach along the road back to Paris that it progressed at little more than walking pace, giving the royal couple a full taste of the alarm they had provoked, and the patriotic rhetoric of speeches they were forced to listen to at every stop.

That alarm had of course spread nationwide, in a surging wave as news of the flight, the recapture and the progress back to Paris succeeded each other. It touched off something very close to a full-scale invasion panic, with mobilizations

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