The Age of Napoleon Read online

  III. ENTER MARAT: 1789

  The capture of the Bastille was not merely a symbolic act and a blow against absolutism; it saved the Assembly from subordination to the King’s army at Versailles, and it saved the new government of Paris from domination by the environing troops. Quite unintentionally it preserved the bourgeois Revolution; but it gave the people of the capital arms and ammunition, permitting further developments of proletarian power.

  It gave fresh courage and more readers to the journals that further excited the Parisians. The Gazette de France, the Mercure de France, and the Journal de Paris were old established newspapers, and kept an even keel; now appeared Loustalot’s Les Révolutions de Paris (July 17, 1789), Brissot’s Le Patriote français (July 28), Marat’s L’Ami du peuple (September 12), Desmoulins’ Révolutions de France (November 28) … Add to these a dozen pamphlets born each day, rioting in the freedom of the press, raising new idols, shattering old reputations. We can imagine their contents by noting the descent of the word libel from their name libelles—little books.

  Jean-Paul Marat was the most radical, reckless, ruthless, and powerful of the new scribes. Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, May 24, 1743, of a Swiss mother and a Sardinian father, he never ceased to worship another native expatriate—Rousseau. He studied medicine in Bordeaux and Paris, and practiced it with moderate success in London (1765–77). The stories that were later told of the crimes and absurdities he committed there were probably concoctions by his enemies in the journalistic license of the times.20 He received an honorary degree from the University of St. Andrews—which, however, as Johnson put it, was “growing richer by degrees.”21 Marat wrote in English and published in London (1774) The Chains of Slavery, a fiery denunciation of European governments as conspiracies of kings, lords, and clergy to hoodwink the people and keep them in subjection. He returned to France in 1777, served as veterinarian in the stables of the Comte d’Artois, and rose to be physician to the Count’s Garde du Corps. He earned some reputation as a lung and eye specialist. He published treatises on electricity, light, optics, and fire; some of these were translated into German; Marat thought they entitled him to membership in the Académie des Sciences, but his attack on Newton made him suspect to the Academicians.

  He was a man of intense pride, hampered by a succession of ailments that made him irritable to the point of violent passion. His skin erupted with an unmanageable dermatitis, from which he found temporary relief by sitting and writing in a warm bath.22 His head was too massive for his five feet of height, and one eye was higher than the other; understandably he courted solitude. Doctors bled him frequently to ease his pains; in quieter intervals he bled others. He worked with the intensity of a consuming ambition. “I allot only two of the twenty-four hours to sleep…. I have not had fifteen minutes’ play in over three years.”23 In 1793, perhaps from too much indoor life, his lungs became affected, and he felt, unknown to Charlotte Corday, that he had not long to live.

  His character suffered from his ailments. His compensatory vanity, his fits of temper, his delusions of grandeur, his furious denunciations of Necker, Lafayette, and Lavoisier, his mad calls for mob violence, overlaid a fund of courage, industry, and dedication. The success of his journal was due not merely to the exciting exaggerations of his style but still more to his fervent, unremitting, unbribable support of the voteless proletaires.

  Nevertheless he did not overrate the intelligence of the people. He saw chaos rising, and added to it; but, at least for the time being, he counseled not democracy but a dictatorship subject to recall, revolt, or assassination, as in Rome’s republican days. He suggested that he himself would make a good dictator.24 At times he thought that the government should be managed by men of property, as having the largest stake in the public weal.25 He viewed the concentration of wealth as natural, but he proposed to offset it by preaching the immorality of luxury and the divine right of hunger and need. “Nothing superfluous can belong to us legitimately as long as others lack necessities…. Most ecclesiastical wealth should be distributed among the poor, and free public schools should be established everywhere.”26 “Society owes to those among its members who have no property, and whose labor scarcely suffices for their support, an assured subsistence, the wherewithal to feed, lodge, and clothe themselves suitably, provision for attendance in sickness and old age, and for bringing up children. Those who wallow in wealth must supply the wants of those who lack the necessaries of life”; otherwise the poor have the right to take by force whatever they need.27

  Most members of the successive assemblies distrusted and feared Marat, but the sansculottes among whom he lived forgave his faults for his philosophy, and risked themselves to hide him when he was sought by the police. He must have had some lovable qualities, for his common-law wife stayed with him devotedly to his end.

  IV. RENUNCIATION: AUGUST 4–5, 1789

  “This country,” wrote Gouverneur Morris from France on July 31, 1789, “is at present as near to anarchy as society can approach without dissolution.”28 Merchants controlling the market turned shortages of grain to their profit by raising the price; barges carrying food to the towns were attacked and pillaged en route; disorder and insecurity disrupted transportation. Paris was running riot with criminals. The countryside was so subject to marauding robbers that in several provinces the peasants armed themselves in their “Great Fear” of these lawless hordes; in six months 400,000 guns were acquired by the alarmed citizens. When the Great Fear subsided, the peasants decided to use their weapons against tax collectors, monopolists, and feudal lords. Armed with muskets, pitchforks, and scythes, they attacked the châteaux, demanded to be shown the charters or title deeds that allegedly sanctioned the seignorial rights and dues; if shown them, they burned them; if resisted, they burned the château; in several instances the owner was killed on the spot. This procedure, beginning in July, 1789, spread till it reached every part of France. In some places the insurgents carried placards claiming that the King had delegated to them full powers in their districts.29 Often the destruction was indiscriminate in its fury; so the peasants on the lands of the Abbey of Murbach burned its library, carried off its plate and linen, uncorked its wine casks, drank what they could, and let the remainder flow down the drain. In eight communes the inhabitants invaded the monasteries, carried off the title deeds, and explained to the monks that the clergy were now subject to the people. “In Franche-Comté,” said a report to the National Assembly, “nearly forty châteaux and seignorial mansions have been pillaged or burned; in Langres three out of five; in the Dauphiné twenty-seven; in the Viennois district all the monasteries; … countless assassinations of lords or rich bourgeois.”30 Town officials who tried to stop these “Jacqueries” were deposed; some were beheaded. Aristocrats abandoned their homes and sought safety elsewhere, but almost everywhere they encountered the same “spontaneous anarchy.” A second wave of emigration began.

  On the night of August 4, 1789, a deputy reported to the Assembly at Versailles: “Letters from all the provinces indicate that property of all kinds is a prey to the most criminal violence; on all sides châteaux are being burned, convents destroyed, and farms abandoned to pillage. The taxes, the feudal dues are extinct, the laws are without force, and the magistrates without authority.”31 The remaining nobles perceived that the revolution, which they had hoped to confine to Paris and to quiet with minor concessions, was now national, and that feudal dues could no longer be maintained. The Vicomte de Noailles proposed that “all feudal dues shall be redeemable … for a money payment or commuted at a fair valuation…. Seignorial corvées, serfdom, and other forms of personal servitude shall be abolished without compensation”; and, ending class exemptions, “taxes shall be paid by every individual in the kingdom in proportion to his income.”

  Noailles was poor, and would suffer quite tolerably by these measures, but the Duc d’Aiguillon, among the richest of the barons, seconded the proposal, and made a startling admission: “The people are at
last trying to cast off a yoke which has weighed upon them for many centuries past; and we must confess that—though this insurrection must be condemned … an excuse can be found for it in the vexations of which the people have been the victims.”32 This avowal moved the liberal nobles to enthusiastic support; they crowded one another in coming forward to relinquish their questioned privileges; and after hours of enthusiastic surrender, at two o’clock on the morning of August 5, the Assembly proclaimed the emancipation of the peasantry. Some cautious clauses were later added, requiring the peasants to pay, in periodic installments, a fee in redemption of certain dues; but resistance to these payments made their collection impracticable, and effected the real end of the feudal system. The signature of the King to the “great renunciation” was invited by Article XVI, which proclaimed him, thereby, the “Restorer of French Liberty.”33

  The wave of humanitarian sentiment lasted long enough to produce an other historic document—a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 27, 1789). It was proposed by Lafayette, who was still warm with the impressions left upon him by the Declaration of Independence and the bills of rights proclaimed by several of the American states. The younger nobles in the Assembly could support the notion of equality because they had suffered from the hereditary privileges of the oldest son, and some, like Mirabeau, had borne arbitrary imprisonment. The bourgeois delegates resented aristocratic exclusiveness in society, and the noble monopoly of the higher posts in civil or military service. Almost all the delegates had read Rousseau on the general will, and accepted the doctrine of the philosopher that basic rights belonged to every human being by natural law. So there was little resistance to prefacing the new constitution with a declaration that seemed to complete the revolution. Some articles can bear repetition:

  Article 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights….

  Article 2. The aim of all political association is the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression….

  Article 4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can be determined only by law….

  Article 6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its formation…. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities….

  Article 7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases, and according to the forms, prescribed by law….

  Article 9. As all persons are held innocent until they have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner’s person shall be severely repressed by law.

  Article 10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.

  Article 11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law….

  Article 17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.34

  Even in this affirmation of democratic ideals some imperfections remained. Slavery was allowed to continue in the French Caribbean colonies until the Convention abolished it in 1794. The new constitution restricted the ballot, and eligibility to public office, to payers of a specified minimum of taxes. Civil rights were still withheld from actors, Protestants, and Jews. Louis XVI withheld his agreement to the declaration on the ground that it would stir up further unrest and disorder. It remained for the Parisian populace to force his consent.

  V. TO VERSAILLES: OCTOBER 5, 1789

  All through August and September there were riots in Paris. Bread was running short again; housewives fought for it at the bakeries. In one of these riots a baker and a municipal officer were slain by the angry populace. Marat called for a march upon the Assembly and the royal palace at Versailles:

  When public safety is in peril the people must take power out of the hands of those to whom it is entrusted…. Put that Austrian woman [the Queen] and her brother-in-law [Artois] in prison…. Seize the ministers and their clerks and put them in irons…. Make sure of the mayor [poor, amiable, stargazing Bailly] and his lieutenants; keep the general [Lafayette] in sight, and arrest his staff…. The heir to the throne has no right to a dinner while you want bread. Organize bodies of armed men. March to the National Assembly and demand food at once…. Demand that the nation’s poor have a future secured to them out of the national contribution. If you are refused join the army, take the land, as well as the gold, which the rascals who want to force you to come to terms by hunger have buried, and share it among you. Off with the heads of the ministers and their underlings. Now is the time!35

  Frightened by the journals and disorder in Paris, and by mass demonstrations in Versailles, Louis reverted to the advice of his ministers—that soldiers yet untouched by revolutionary ideas should be brought in to protect him, his family, and the court. Late in September he sent to Douai for the Flanders Regiment. It came, and on October 1 the King’s Garde du Corps welcomed it with a banquet in the opera house of the palace. When Louis and Marie Antoinette appeared, the troops, half drunk with wine and visible majesty, burst into wild applause. Soon they replaced the national tricolor emblems on their uniforms with cockades of the Queen’s colors—white and black; one report said that the discarded colors, now dear to the Revolution, were later trodden under dancing feet.36 (Mme. Campan, first lady of the chamber to the Queen, and an eyewitness, denied this detail.37)

  The story was enlarged as it traveled to Paris, and was accentuated by a report that an army was gathering near Metz with intent to march to Versailles and disperse the Assembly. Mirabeau and other deputies denounced this new military threat. Marat, Loustalot, and other journalists demanded that the people should compel both the royal family and the Assembly to move to Paris, where they could be under the watchful eye of the populace. On October 5 the market women of the city, who knew the food shortage at first hand, took the lead in forming a brigade to march on Versailles, ten miles away. As they proceeded they called upon men and women to join them; thousands did. It was not a tragic or somber procession; a lusty French humor seasoned it; “We will bring back the baker and the baker’s wife,” they cried, “and we shall have the pleasure of hearing Mirabeau.”38

  Arrived at Versailles under a heavy rain, they gathered in haphazard array, eight thousand strong, before the high gates and iron paling of the royal palace, and demanded access to the King. A delegation went to the Assembly and insisted that the deputies should find bread for the crowd. Mounier, then presiding, went with one of the delegation, pretty Louison Chabry, to see Louis. She was so choked with emotion on seeing him that she could only cry, “Pain,” and fell in a swoon. When she recovered Louis promised her to find bread for the wet and hungry multitude. On departing, she sought to kiss his hand, but he embraced her like a father. Meanwhile many attractive Parisiennes mingled with Flemish troops, and convinced them that gentlemen do not fire upon unarmed women; several soldiers took the famished sirens into their barracks and gave them food and warmth. At eleven o’clock that night Lafayette arrived with fifteen thousand of the National Guard. He was received by the King, and pledged him protection, but he joined Necker in advising him to accept the people’s demand that he and the Queen should come to live in Paris. Then, exhausted, he retired to t
he Hôtel de Noailles.

  Early on the morning of October 6 the weary, angry crowd poured through a chance opening of the gate into the courtyard of the palace, and some armed men forced their way up the stairs to the apartment where the Queen was asleep. In her petticoat, and with the Dauphin in her arms, she fled to the King’s room. Palace guards resisted the invasion, and three of them were killed. Lafayette, tardy but helpful, quieted the tumult with assurances of accord. The King went out on the balcony, and promised to move to Paris. The crowd cried, “Vive le Roi!” but demanded that the Queen show herself. She did, and stood her ground when a man in the gathering aimed his musket at her; his weapon was beaten down by those near him. Lafayette joined Marie Antoinette and kissed her hand in sign of loyalty; the softened rebels vowed to love the Queen if she would come and live in the capital.

  As noon approached, a procession formed without precedent in history: in front the National Guard and the royal Garde du Corps; then a coach bearing the King, his sister Madame Élisabeth, the Queen, and her two children; then a long line of carts carrying sacks of flour; then the triumphant Parisians, some women perched on cannon, some men holding aloft on spikes the heads of slain palace guards; at Sèvres they stopped to have these heads powdered and curled.39 The Queen doubted she would reach Paris alive, but that night she and the rest of the royal family slept in hastily prepared beds in the Tuileries, where French kings had slept before the Fronde rebellion had made the capital hateful to Louis XIV. A few days later the Assembly followed, and was housed in the theater of the same palace.