4

Representing the Nation at Versailles

WITH A POPULATION of about 55,000, Versailles was nearly three times the size of Arras, and almost one tenth the size of Paris. By eighteenth-century standards, it was a modern European city, with a carefully planned symmetrical grid of streets, avenues and monuments (which was later borrowed as a model for Washington DC).¹ When he visited Versailles on his travels in 1789, Arthur Young noted that ‘this town is absolutely fed by the palace’.² He had heard stories of the grandeur of what had been France’s unofficial capital since the Sun King Louis XIV moved there with his court in 1682. Versailles was only about ten miles south-west of Paris, but it was at a higher altitude and surrounded by attractive wooded hills, very convenient for royal hunting parties. Young, however, was unimpressed:

The palace of Versailles, one of the objects of which report had given me the greatest expectation, is not in the least striking. I view it without emotion; the impression it makes is nothing. What can compensate the want of unity? From whatever point viewed, it appears an assemblage of buildings; a splendid quarter of a town, but not a fine edifice … The great gallery is the finest room I have seen; the other apartments are nothing; but the pictures and statues are well known to be a capital collection.³

Later Young rambled through the gardens and by the Grand Canal ‘with absolute astonishment at the exaggerations of writers and travellers’ – he found no beauty anywhere. An earlier visitor was even harsher:

The unpleasant odours in the park, gardens, even the château, make one’s gorge rise. The communicating passages, courtyards, buildings in the wings, corridors, are full of urine and faeces; a pork butcher actually sticks and roasts his pigs at the bottom of the ministers’ wing every morning; the avenue Saint-Cloud is covered with stagnant water and dead cats.⁴

The stench must have reached the royal apartments where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were living with their young family. And it can only have got worse with the arrival of well over a thousand delegates to the Estates General, plus friends and spectators, all swelling the population of Versailles and further straining its sanitation.

Like Louis XVI’s coronation in 1775, but even more so, the meeting of the Estates General was a spectacular re-enactment of the history, tradition and pageantry of France. On Monday 4 May 1789, the deputies of all three Estates first assembled in Versailles’ neo-classical Church of Notre-Dame for the roll-call of the bailliages. There were 302 Clergy, 289 Nobility, and 576 Third Estate: 1,167 deputies in total (this number rose by 35 when the Third Estate deputies from Paris, delayed by complex elections, arrived a month later).⁵ The chancel was covered in ceremonial drapes and there was a throne to the right of the choir screen, awaiting the entrance of the king, who was distracted because his eldest son was ill (and had just weeks to live). Louis XVI finally appeared at ten o’clock, wearing his coronation robes and heralded by trumpets, fifes and tambours. The Third Estate was expected to kneel in his presence, as it had in 1614, but it refused to do so. He took his seat and the high-ranking officers of the realm took theirs below him on velvet benches embroidered with fleurs-de-lis. The queen and other ladies of the court sat opposite, to the left of the choir screen, beautifully attired and sparkling with jewels. Two by two, the deputies approached the king, candle in hand, bowing to him, and then to his queen. Outside, the king’s Swiss Guard lined the short route from Notre-Dame to the Church of Saint-Louis, where the Estates would reassemble for Mass. Processing with the Eucharist, they moved past buildings hung with tapestries, watched by an adoring crowd, sometimes respectfully silent, sometimes applauding and shouting, ‘Long live the king!’ First came the Clergy wearing cassocks and square bonnets, then the Nobility in garments of black silk and gold brocade with magnificent hats plumed à la Henri IV, and finally the Third Estate – far less resplendent – in black coats and batiste cravats. Preparing for the ceremony, one liberal-minded noble from Saumur, the Marquis de Ferrières, wrote to his wife, ‘My crimson vest will be superb; I still need the trimming for the garment and for the coat. But the hat is expensive. The cheapest one cost 180 livres.’⁶ On the day he was surprised to find himself spiritually moved far beyond such mundane concerns:

Soon I ceased to see the spectacle that I had before my eyes; thoughts that were more intoxicating and yet at the same time melancholy offered themselves to my spirit. France, my fatherland [patrie], revealed itself in all its splendour. And I asked myself, what muddled minds, what ambitious, vile men, for their own interests, are trying to break-up this whole, so great, so respectable, and dissipate this glory like insubstantial smoke dispersed on the wind? Love for my country has made itself very powerfully felt in my heart. I was not previously aware just how far the mutual ties extend which unite us all to this soil, to the men who are our brothers, but I understood it in that instance.⁷

Somewhere in this procession was Robespierre, walking with seven other Third Estate deputies from Arras. They were only just in time, having left Arras late and struggled to find accommodation in crowded Versailles, until they were lucky at the Fox (Hôtellerie du Renard) in the rue Sainte-Elisabeth.

From a window overlooking the main street of Versailles, Necker’s grown-up daughter, Mme de Staël, was watching the procession. She could see her father, the king’s chief minister, walking stiffly past. She could see the king and queen gloriously attired. But her attention was caught by one of the deputies of the Third Estate – the Comte de Mirabeau, a nobleman who had been elected to the Third Estate. Mirabeau was hard to miss. When he arrived in Versailles, aged forty, he was accompanied by a varied and outrageous reputation. He had been many things under the Old Regime: a man of letters, a journalist, an infamous son of a respectable father, a rivetingly ugly seducer of women, a pornographer, a prisoner alongside the Marquis de Sade, and an accomplished orator. Condemning him to death in his absence for seduction and abduction, the Parlement of Besançon had gone so far as to behead a paper effigy of him. Mirabeau had been rejected as a representative of the Nobility, so had appealed to the Third Estate, who elected him in both Aix and Marseille. Looking down on him Mme de Staël reflected:

You could not but look at this man, when once you had noticed him: his immense black head of hair distinguished him among them all; you would have said his force depended on it, like that of Samson: his face borrowed new expression from its very ugliness; his whole person gave you the idea of an irregular power, but a power such as you would figure in a Tribune of the People.⁸

Robespierre – whom next to no one had heard of, and who never stood out in a crowd – went unnoticed.

The following day was the official opening of the Estates General in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, a hall specially constructed on the grounds of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs, which housed the administrative office responsible for arranging royal festivities in Versailles. The new hall was spacious and provided abundant spectator seating (three of the four walls supported public galleries). Under the interested gaze of the excited audience, one old man arrived in his farming clothes, ostentatiously rejecting the austere black costume of the Third Estate. His fellow deputies, already restless amid the noble and clerical pomp and ceremony, applauded loudly. Necker, still the popular idol on whom the hopes of Paris were resting, read his opening address. It was a very disappointing speech, conservative in idiom and content. One contemporary described it as the issue of ‘a mind intoxicated with vanity, displaying an incapacity or unwillingness to explain or illustrate: a composition, indecent, unmanly, out of place, betraying a narrow understanding and a timorous heart’.⁹ At the end of Necker’s long boring speech, the king ceremoniously raised and replaced his hat. The nobles did the same. So did some of the Third Estate, but then, one after another, they took their hats off again – an impromptu expression of belligerence. Confused by this unscripted development, the king removed his own hat again. The queen leant over to ask him what he was doing and there was an unscheduled pause in the proceedings during which the nobles started hesitantly uncovering their heads as well.

Subtle signs of intransigence turned rapidly into open defiance. On 6 May the Third Estate refused to take a roll-call of its deputies or to verify their representative credentials separately from the Clergy and Nobility. The concern was that separate verification would lead to separate voting by order. Instead, the Third Estate demanded a joint assembly with the other two Estates, where votes would be counted by head, and it would stand a chance of outvoting the Nobility and Clergy. Among the delegates to the Third Estate were many close students of the recent debate over how the Estates General should be organised, which Louis XVI had publicly welcomed a year ago and was now sorely regretting.

The Nobility and Clergy went off to their separate assemblies, in nearby halls built for the purpose, but the Third Estate remained in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs. All the Third Estate had to do to maintain the impasse arising from its refusal to verify its representative credentials was nothing, which was just as well considering the chaos in which it found itself. Friends, relations, journalists and other members of the public spilling over from the spectator galleries filled the seats vacated by nobles and clergymen. From the big central table no one could make a speech without turning his back on half the deputies. Eventually, practically minded Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin – a Parisian physician and philanthropist – resolved the problem by rearranging the seats in a semicircle. But even so, it was hard to follow the disorderly debates echoing around the high vaulted hall, competing with chatter from journalists and members of the public mingling with the delegates.

In these unpromising circumstances, Robespierre – Robes-pierre, Robesse-pierre, Robertz-Pierre, Rabesse-Pierre, Robests-piesse, Robespienne: the journalists found it hard to catch his name and even harder to spell it – made his first contribution. To one acquaintance he confided that he was as shy as a child, shaking with fear as he approached the table: ‘He told me that he was prey to the most childish timidity, that he never approached the tribune without trembling, and that when he began to speak, his faculties were entirely absorbed by fear.’¹⁰ The hall went dark before him and he could see or hear nothing as he raised his voice. But to Buissart, back in Arras, Robespierre wrote in proud, confident tones, explaining how only bad luck had come between his first intervention and lasting glory. He spoke about the Third Estate’s urgent need to decide how to proceed in its impasse with the other two orders. One possibility was to nominate and dispatch negotiators to the other assemblies; another was to stay put but invite the Nobility and Clergy to return and reunite with the Third Estate. Robespierre had a third idea, unoriginal but politically powerful: divide and rule. He suggested inviting only the Clergy to return in the first instance. Afterwards the Nobility would be isolated and under more pressure to join the rest of the nation. Because he outlined this plan at a comparatively late stage in the debate, delayed perhaps by his nerves, or merely by the number of other speakers ahead of him, it was not voted on. Afterwards, Robespierre criticised the voting procedures, but took comfort in the fact that many delegates came up to him, commenting favourably on his plan and claiming they would have voted for it if only they had been allowed to.

During these early days, as Robespierre developed his fledgling reputation, he was invited to dine with Necker. A few years earlier he had called Necker ‘… a great man who seems to have been shown to the people merely for them to glimpse the full extent of the happiness they might enjoy, whose elevation was a triumph for genius, virtue and the nation’.¹¹ Allegedly, this was one of the occasions when Robespierre had to borrow smarter clothes than he owned. Necker’s wife regularly held supper parties for friends of her husband and admirers of her glamorous daughter Mme de Staël, and took to inviting along some of the deputies newly arrived in Versailles. Mme de Staël would have been an imposing figure for anyone encountering her for the first time – she was married to the Swedish ambassador Baron de Staël-Holstein, accustomed to being at court, attractive, flirtatious, intellectual and extremely well connected. Robespierre did not make a favourable impression on her. Later she recalled her first meeting with the Incorruptible: ‘His features were mean, his complexion pale, his veins a greenish hue.’¹² She also noted the radicalism of his democratic views. Considering the differences in their circumstances, it would have been peculiar if Robespierre had seemed anything other than common and unappealing to Mme de Staël. According to one of her gossipy friends, she ‘surrendered without the slightest struggle to any man who showed himself more aware of the beauty of her embrace than the charms of her mind. Yet you would be wrong to conclude that I considered her shameless, for she did insist on a certain delicacy of feeling and has shown herself capable of passions that were very deep and devoted while they lasted.’¹³Provincial, puritanical, inexperienced Robespierre was worlds away from Mme de Staël’s sophisticated way of life, as was immediately obvious when he sat down at her parents’ table.

For a brief period during his transition from provincial to national politics, Robespierre identified strongly with his fellow delegates from Arras, for whom he had become unofficial spokesman. Boasting to Buissart, he claimed that their group was already distinguished for their patriotism and their close rapport with the forty-four deputies from Brittany with whom they formed a progressive faction, radical and (according to Robespierre) ready to die for their country. The concept of patriotism had a long history in France and had been used in the preambles to royal edicts since the end of the seventeenth century.¹⁴ Involvement in America’s struggle for freedom transformed French notions of patriotism in the 1770s into a secular ideology opposed to despotic government – although the crippling cost of these wars somewhat tarnished the glamour of the idea.¹⁵ By 1789 a new version of patriotism was taking root in the wake of the recent nationwide elections, and fervent public interest in what the Estates General would achieve – the concept now became a label for Third Estate aspirations.¹⁶ Robespierre’s own understanding of patriotism was also influenced by Rousseau’s definition: ‘There can be no patriotism without liberty; no liberty without virtue; no virtue without citizens. Create citizens and you have everything you need; without them you have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the state downwards.’¹⁷

If not all the Third Estate deputies were as committed to liberty and virtue as Robespierre, he nevertheless deemed most of them enlightened and well intentioned. There were exceptions, of course. In particular, he singled out Pierre-Victor Malouet, a deputy from the bailliage of Riom in Auvergne, as ‘the most suspect, the most odious of all the patriots’.¹⁸ Here was a dangerous intriguer, a notorious conservative intent on promoting the aristocratic faction in the midst of the Third Estate. In his letter to Buissart, Robespierre relates an occasion on which Malouet proposed an insidious motion ‘worthy of his servile soul’ and the other deputies from Auvergne disassociated themselves, protesting that he represented only Riom, not their whole province. Interestingly, Robespierre does not say what the motion was, only that it went down very badly.

He went on to summarise for Buissart his observations on the workings of the assembly – how and why speeches succeed or fail, the ways in which reputations can be made or lost. He was particularly interested in Guy-Jean-Baptiste Target, the leading Breton deputy, who arrived in Versailles with an established reputation and was prominent in the assembly from the start. Listening closely to his every word, Robespierre noticed that the points he made were ordinary, nothing but a summary of prevailing opinion deliveredwith great emphasis and eloquence, yet this was enough to win great applause. With a touch of glee Robespierre described Target as already ‘hors de combat’ despite his promising start. One of Target’s motions had been so ridiculous the whole assembly immediately rejected it; Robespierre suspected him of having ‘versatile principles’ and doubted his representative credentials. On the most famous man in the Third Estate assembly, the great Comte de Mirabeau, Robespierre’s verdict was startling: ‘Mirabeau is nothing.’ He thought Mirabeau’s dissolute moral character made it impossible to trust him – or ought to. These opinions about Target and Mirabeau were eccentric. In the short term, Robespierre could not have been more wrong: both men were to play prominent parts in the politics of the Third Estate over the coming weeks. But in the long term he proved to be right: neither was to put their stamp on the Revolution as he would. Robespierre would certainly have explained this difference in terms of moral character and firmness of principle – the strength of his own and the weakness of theirs – but this too would have been somewhat eccentric.

Around the time of Robespierre’s election, the local newspaper in Arras had run a satirical article describing the characters of each of the city’s deputies as though they were horses entered in a race. The entry for the horse Robespierre was longer and more detailed than the others: ‘impetuous, intolerant of bit and stick, vicious, only dares to bite from behind, fears the whip. Its inclusion was a surprise but it is said to be destined to provide a comic turn after the brilliant performances of Mirabeau, Bergasse, Malouet etc. whose actions it has been trained to mimic in a ridiculous fashion.’¹⁹ The article meant to be cruelly amusing and it certainly underestimated Robespierre’s talent for politics, even if the full significance of his election would only become apparent years later. What it very accurately predicted, though, was his determination to transform himself into a successful politician. He knew he had much to learn from the delegates who arrived in Versailles with political experience and he set about studying diligently the techniques by which they influenced the assembly.

The radical faction of deputies, to which Robespierre was so proud of belonging, started meeting to agree on objectives and to coordinate strategies. After each meeting of the Third Estate deputies, this faction, known informally as the Breton Club, would repair to the nearby Café Amaury, to discuss the implications of what had happened.²⁰ Here, over the weeks to come, Robespierre, the deputies from Brittany and other radicals distanced themselves from the constitutional ideas of the royalists among the deputies to the Third Estate, like Malouet and the Grenoble patriot Jean-Joseph Mounier (another of the small number to come to Versailles with an established reputation). The Breton Club’s objectives were to obtain voting by head and not by order, the destruction of privileges like the tax exemptions that favoured the Clergy and Nobility and harmed the Third Estate, and the creation of a nationwide network of patriots. During these early days, there were many future enemies drinking coffee together in the Café Amaury, united in their hopes for the Third Estate. As well as making contacts and developing a taste for club politics, Robespierre was also mixing with a more diverse set than he had encountered before. His fellow deputies from Arras watched as he grew in confidence and became gradually less withdrawn.

Incipient factionalism, provincialism, chaos, confused ideas and political uncertainty were escalating in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs when the deputies from Paris, who had been delayed by an electoral process even more complicated than the rest of France’s, at last reached Versailles on 3 June – a whole month late. Paris was always a case apart. When asked by the king to codify procedures for electing deputies to the Estates General, Necker had produced special guidelines for the capital. However, the sixty Parisian districts disregarded these guidelines and took the radical step of establishing their own electoral college to choose deputies for the Third Estate. One of the candidates for election was the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, who felt revived and exhilarated by the city’s new political climate: ‘I thought I could breathe fresh air. It was truly a phenomenon to be something in the political order and by virtue alone of one’s capacity as a citizen.’²¹ Bailly was born in Paris in 1736, so was already over fifty when the Revolution began. A member of the French Academy of Sciences, known for his research into the planet Jupiter, he interrupted his studies to preside over the new electoral college and was elected as a deputy to Versailles. No sooner had he arrived than he was chosen as President of the assembly of the Third Estate. The late-arriving deputies brought with them new vigour, the expectations of all Paris, and the brilliant analytical mind of the abbé Sieyès, who had chosen to stand for election not as a clergyman, but as a member of the Third Estate.

Though he lacked a religious vocation, Sieyès had spent ten years in a seminary, consoling himself with scientific and philosophical study. He was finally ordained a priest in 1773, two years before Louis XVI’s coronation. Sieyès had a sharp, intelligent face that reminded some people of portraits of Erasmus – he was a genius at the theory of politics: the nature and principles of representative government became his lifelong preoccupation. According to one contemporary, he was far from modest: ‘Politics is a science which I think I have mastered,’ Sieyès allegedly confided to a friend.²² Early in 1789 he published the clearest of all the statements of the Third Estate’s predicament, beginning famously with three questions and answers: What has the Third Estate been until now? Nothing. What should it be? Everything. What does it aim to become? Something. With devastating rhetoric and lucid reasoning he argued that the Third Estate simply was the nation. As such it had the inalienable right to provide France with a new system of fundamental rules and principles through which the country would be governed. From this point, the Third Estate deputies explicitly believed what many had hoped before arriving in Versailles: that they had been elected to endow France with a written constitution which would transform the old absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy. Sieyès insisted that anything or anyone that kept apart from the Third Estate was parasitical, a canker in the body of the people that required excision. In this way he provided the theoretical basis for the Third Estate to seize the initiative from the Clergy and Nobility and remake the nation in its own image.

Though others shared some of Sieyès’ ideas, no one else expressed them with such coherent vehemence. His was ‘the explosion of a talent, which long concealed, at length appears in all its splendour, arrests attention and extorts applause’, as Mirabeau put it.²³Yet when Sieyès arrived in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs he experienced the problems often characteristic of intellectuals in politics – wry, brusque, conceptually elaborate, infuriatingly inaudible, it was hard for him to project the distinctive clarity of his vision into the noisy and diffuse debates going on around him. ‘His voice is thin, his gesture insignificant, his expression slow, his conception difficult, his method unintelligible; he is incapable of ardent and animated language, and he prefers correctness of form to energy of diction,’ a contemporary remarked.²⁴ Despite all this, Sieyès had an early, epoch-defining success on 10 June when he persuaded the Third Estate that the time had come to ‘cut the cable’ and assume the whole power and identity of the nation. Delegates of the Nobility and Clergy were to have one last chance to join the Third Estate – and if they refused, the new National Assembly would simply leave them behind.

Robespierre had played a part in moving the assembly toward Sieyès’ position. Three days after the exhilarating arrival of the Paris delegates, no longer feeling like a nervous child, he had burst into a passionate denunciation of the clergy. The Archbishop of Nîmes had come to the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs to plead with the Third Estate to break its deadlock with the other two orders for the sake of the poor and destitute who were suffering from hunger while the Estates General remained in deadlock achieving nothing. The archbishop stood before the Third Estate hoping to shame them into cooperation, well fed, richly attired and condescending. Robespierre lost his temper. He had seen how the wealthy clergy in Arras lived. He owed the Abbot of Saint-Vaast his scholarship to Louis-le-Grand. As a schoolboy he had had to borrow clothes good enough to appear before the archbishop in Arras. Much of his early legal practice had come through the ecclesiastical court. He knew and was indebted to the worldly power of the Church in France. ‘Sell your coaches, give up your horses,’ he demanded, reminding the assembly of the early Church’s austerity and the principles of Christian humility.

Go and tell your colleagues that if they are so impatient to assist the suffering poor, they had better come hither and join the friends of the people. Tell them no longer to embarrass our proceedings with affected delays: tell them no longer to endeavour by unworthy means to make us swerve from the resolutions we have taken; but as ministers of religion – as worthy imitators of their masters – let them forego that luxury which surrounds them, and that splendour which makes indigence blush – let them resume the modesty of their origin – discharge the proud lackeys by whom they are attended – sell their superb equipages, and convert all their superfluous wealth into food for the poor.²⁵

The Assembly was stunned. There was no applause, but a confused murmur, which was much more flattering. The question passing along the benches and round the echoing hall was, ‘Who is that?’ Sitting up and taking notice, some of Robespierre’s fellow deputies began to predict a prominent career for him: ‘This young man has not yet practised, he is too wordy, and does not know when to stop; but he has a store of eloquence and bitterness which will not leave him in the crowd.’²⁶

Following the advice of the abbé Sieyès, the Third Estate issued its final invitation to the other two orders, received no response, and proceeded to the long-postponed roll-call of its deputies, which was the formal beginning of its work. There was tremendous excitement on 13 June when three parish priests from Poitou defected from the Clergy and joined the Third Estate. Sixteen more clergy followed suit over the next few days. On 17 June, after a week of verifying the credentials of its deputies, the Third Estate changed its name and declared itself the National Assembly. There was no turning back now – no more possible negotiation or rapprochement with the other two orders – the Revolution had arrived. Louis XVI was no longer absolute sovereign of France answerable only to God in the exercise of his power. Instead, he confronted a National Assembly asserting the principle of popular sovereignty. More than this, Target (still a leading radical despite Robespierre’s low opinion) proposed that all existing taxes be declared illegal and only sanctioned provisionally until a completely new system could be instituted. This meant that if the National Assembly was dissolved prematurely, taxation would come to an end. The Revolution was holding the king to ransom.

Louis XVI consulted Necker, and Necker advised conciliation, unlike the queen, who thought the time for firmness long overdue and was secretly encouraging the convergence of the king’s army on Paris. Necker suggested a Royal Session – a public consultation between the king and the deputies of all three orders – at which Louis XVI would reassert his authority, sweetened by lots of concessions to the Third Estate. He drafted some speeches to this effect for Louis XVI, but Marie Antoinette modified them behind his back.

Early on Saturday 20 June, deputies arrived at the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs expecting to welcome the rest of the Clergy, who had finally voted as a body to join the Third Estate. They found themselves locked out. Soldiers guarded the bolted doors to their hall and posters everywhere announced a forthcoming Royal Session of which no one had previously heard. Dr Guillotin, practical as ever, suggested that the angry crowd of deputies reassemble in a nearby indoor tennis court belonging to a friend of his. They did so, then swore a passionate oath never to disband until ‘the constitution of the Realm and public regeneration are established and assured’, however long, however difficult that might be. The revolutionary painter Jacques-Louis David commemorated the scene on an unfinished canvas. David was the same age as the abbé Sieyès, born in 1748. He had already caused a sensation in the Paris salon with his depiction of classical republican virtue and patriotism, The Oath of the Horatii (1785) and his Death of Socrates (1787). He pictured the impassioned deputies in the tennis court, crowding around their president Jean Sylvain Bailly, raising their right arms, holding their hats high, standing on chairs to swear the revolutionary oath as a welcome summer breeze swept through their impromptu meeting place. Among those prominent in the foreground are an enormous Mirabeau, a refined-looking abbé Sieyès, and Robespierre along with them, clasping both hands to his breast, pledging twice over a heart beating passionately for liberty.

Louis XVI’s Royal Session went ahead on 23 June, a day later than the posters had promised.²⁷ Necker was absent. Aware of the king’s intentions, he had advised strongly against any attempt to dissolve the National Assembly, and was, once again, ignored. All the political and fiscal concessions that the court and government could think of were overshadowed by the king’s uncompromising declaration that the divisions between his realm’s three orders must remain. At the end of his speech, he ordered the deputies to return to their separate assemblies. The Clergy and Nobility obeyed, some of them smirking with pleasure at what looked like the demise of the National Assembly. But Mirabeau leapt to his feet and declared: ‘We are here by the power of the people, and we will not leave except by the force of bayonets.’²⁸ This signalled a rapturous renewal of the Tennis Court Oath. Meanwhile, the king was informed of Necker’s resignation. The Third Estate’s truculence seemed temporarily less important, and for the rest of the day Louis XVI’s priority was to get Necker to withdraw his resignation. He did, but it was too late: Paris had exploded in disgust. Necker, whose portrait had been paraded by a jubilant crowd after the fall of Lamoignon in 1788, once again inspired the people, but this time they wanted and demanded the National Assembly, which he viewed only as an inconvenient compromise in the circumstances. Fireworks lit the sky over Versailles and Paris after a tearful Louis XVI finally gave in and ordered the Nobility and Clergy to join the Third Estate on 27 June. Given Mirabeau’s prominent role, it is not surprising that Robespierre, in his next letter to Buissart (dated 23 July), entirely revised his opinion – he no longer saw Mirabeau as dissolute and negligible, but as the charismatic unofficial leader of the National Assembly. ‘The present Revolution’, his letter began, ‘has produced greater events in a few days than the whole previous history of mankind.’²⁹

*

Despite the king’s climbdown, the royal troops now assembling in and around Paris – which included some regiments of foreign soldiers more likely to fire on French civilians if necessary – were making the newly triumphant deputies very nervous. By early July there were more than enough to quell an uprising in the capital. Mirabeau drew up a petition of protest and Robespierre was one of the deputies who presented it in person to the king. The petition, he assured Buissart, was ‘sublime, full of majesty, truth and energy’. It had no effect whatever. The ominous military build-up continued, and on 11 July, despite his popularity and public standing in recent weeks, Necker was dismissed and sent into exile because many in Louis XVI’s court blamed him for the Revolution. At this Paris, predictably, rioted. Robespierre’s friend from school, Camille Desmoulins – at twenty-six an attractively boyish man always known by his first name – addressed the crowd in the Palais-Royal gardens, where the Café de Foy had become a centre of political discussion to rival the National Assembly. ‘Citizens,’ cried Camille, ‘you know that the Nation had asked for Necker to be retained, and he has been driven out! Could you be more insolently flouted? After such an act they will dare anything.’ Standing on a table, cheered, applauded, Camille raged against the monarchy, comparing himself to Otyrhades, a warrior of the ancient world who wrote, ‘Sparta has triumphed’ in his own blood on a captured standard: ‘I too would write in my own blood “France is free!”’³⁰

Later, in his letter to Buissart, Robespierre described the mounting fear in the National Assembly as it went into permanent session for three days and nights, ready to respond immediately to events as they unfolded.³¹ He told of a patriotic army of 300,000 rising, as if by magic, from the streets of Paris, including every class of citizen, French and Swiss Guards and other soldiers going over to the people’s side. He marvelled at the speed with which, on 14 July, this people’s army took the Bastille, the chief fortress in the ‘tax-farmers” customs wall around Paris – a symbol of oppression before the Revolution, an iconoclastic triumph ever since its fall. Under the Old Regime most of the Bastille’s prisoners had been snatched from freedom by lettres de cachet and detained indefinitely inside the imposing fortress with its eight round towers and walls five foot thick. There had also been a recent vogue for anti-Bastille literature – lurid accounts of life inside by exprisoners – that had further secured it as a place of horror in popular imagination.³²However, by 14 July 1789 there were very few prisoners left inside: a mere seven. The most famous of all the Bastille’s prisoners, the Marquis de Sade, had been transferred elsewhere on 5 July after adapting his slop and urine funnel into a megaphone for haranguing passers-by with sensational revolutionary bulletins: massacre was imminent inside the prison; its governor, de Launay, was butchering the inmates; the people must storm the walls before it was too late. But despite such colourful incitements, the infamous fortress had to wait its turn while first the people attacked the tollgates, the city wall that impeded free trade, the Abbey of Saint-Lazare where firearms were stockpiled, and the Invalides for its cannon and other weapons.

The siege of the Bastille did not begin until early in the morning of 14 July and it was all over by early evening. It involved only about 900 citizens, many of them tradesmen – joiners, carpenters, cobblers and so forth – from the Saint-Antoine district of Paris that lay outside the city wall. Ranged against these patriots were apprehensive prison officers, regular prison guards, and some reinforcements from the Swiss Salis-Samade regiment that had arrived on 7 July. Lieutenant Deflue was in charge of these reinforcements and for a whole week he observed Governor de Launay’s preparations for defending the Bastille with surprise and dismay:

I could see clearly, from his perpetual uneasiness and irresolution, that if we were attacked we should be very badly led. He was so terrified that at night he mistook the shadows of trees and other objects around him for enemies, and on this account we had to be on the alert all night. The staff officers, the lieutenant du roi, the regimental adjutant and I myself often argued with him, on the one hand to reassure him about the weakness of the garrison, of which he complained constantly, and on the other to induce him not to bother about insignificant details while neglecting important matters. He would listen to us, and seem to agree with our advice; then he would do just the reverse, then a minute later he would change his mind; in a word, his whole behaviour gave proof of the utmost irresolution.³³

On the day of the attack, the two sides at first negotiated for control of the fortress. Fighting broke out in the afternoon, but the morale of those inside was low. Their leader was hopelessly indecisive, they had neither the food nor the water supply to survive a real siege, the moat between them and their attackers was dry, and anyway many of the guards really sympathised with the assailants. Soon after five o’clock they had taken the Bastille.

The people promptly punished Governor de Launay for having fired the Bastille cannon at ‘those deputed by the inhabitants of Paris to seize the firearms and gunpowder that menaced them’. They also punished the city’s chief magistrate, de Flesselles, prévôt des marchands, who was widely suspected of conspiring with the court against the people and attempting to hide the city’s ammunition stores. Governor de Launay died in the street from multiple stab and shot wounds, and de Flesselles was murdered on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. The ‘livid and bloody’ severed heads of both men were carried through Paris on pikes for twenty-four hours and only thrown into the river Seine on 15 July.³⁴ In his account, Robespierre seems entirely comfortable describing their fate as the people’s unmediated justice. He comments enthusiastically that ‘the terror inspired by this national army, ready to present itself in Versailles, determined the Revolution’.³⁵ His sanctioning of mob violence is made explicit in the postscript of his letter to Buissart: ‘M. Foulon was hanged yesterday by the people’s decree.’ Joseph François Foulon was one of the ministers chosen by Louis XVI to replace Necker. Allegedly he had claimed that ‘the country would be best governed where the common people should be compelled to feed upon grass’ and had boasted that when he was minister ‘he would make the people of France live upon hay’.³⁶ He was lynched by the Parisian mob, then his head was severed and paraded, the mouth stuffed with grass because people blamed him for the famine now sweeping the country, even though it had been predicted long before he came to power.

Robespierre’s calm assessment of these deaths at the hands of the mob was not unusual among the deputies in the National Assembly, still in Versailles days after the revolutionary initiative had moved to Paris. Barnave, a deputy from Grenoble and a future enemy of Robespierre’s, quipped: ‘What, then, is their blood so pure?’³⁷ Against this, Robespierre’s understanding of revolutionary violence, justice and terror looks sophisticated. In his account, Governor de Launay, de Flesselles, Foulon and others were lynched by the will of the people; the status of their blood, whatever Barnave meant by this, was irrelevant. From now on the will of the people was to be everything.

When the National Assembly learnt of the day’s events on the evening of 14 July, they expected Louis XVI to recall Necker. This he failed to do, despite expressing regret for the bloodshed in Paris, and beginning to withdraw his troops from the city centre. The next morning Mirabeau had just finished a brilliant speech on the threat of foreign invasion when Louis XVI himself arrived at the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, unexpectedly on foot, accompanied only by his two brothers the Comtes de Provence and Artois. There was still no mention of recalling Necker, though the removal of troops from Paris was enough cause for celebration. Robespierre tells of the king returning to his palace amid ‘demonstrations of enthusiasm and intoxication that are unimaginable’.³⁸ Then, on the evening of 16 July, the Comte d’Artois and other members of the court suddenly fled the country. The following day Louis XVI and his family visited Paris: the Parisians wanted him back in their city. The king was not yet a prisoner, but he was in a plain coach drawn by six black horses, at the mercy of the National Assembly, and flanked by a hundred of its delegates, walking solemnly with a slightly funereal air. One of the hundred was Robespierre, who later evoked this journey to the Hôtel de Ville for Buissart. ‘It is’, he wrote, ‘impossible to imagine a spectacle so august and so profound, and even more impossible to convey the impressions it made on a responsive spirit.’³⁹‘Imagine for yourself’, he continued, ‘a king, whose name only yesterday made the entire capital and nation tremble, who hears for the first time cries of “Long live the Nation! Long live Liberty”.’ As he processed to Paris, Louis XVI could see his own soldiers amid the newly formed citizen militia lining the route. Just weeks ago the crowd’s cry was ‘Long live the king’ as he arrived to open the Estates General. Now the nation with its claim to liberty had displaced him.

Paris was jubilant with joyous citizens, hanging from buildings and trees, women leaning out of high windows, all welcoming, applauding and delighting in the procession. Robespierre called it a national festival. His responses were deeply emotional – his heart and imagination engaged. He noticed with particular pleasure some monks who had pinned on their cassocks the new patriotic cockade – a red and blue rosette, the twin colours of Paris. (In the Café du Foy, the incendiary Camille Desmoulins attached a different significance to these colours: red for the blood shed for freedom and blue for the celestial constitution that would enshrine it.) Passing churches on the way, Robespierre saw robed and surpliced clergy competing with the crowd in their displays of patriotic gratitude. There were even cockades attached to stoles, and this, he promised Buissart, was fact not fiction. Why was he so thrilled by these signs that the clergy endorsed the Revolution? Perhaps because he had not expected it and was pleasantly surprised; or simply because what the clergy thought or felt still mattered a great deal to him.

Robespierre already knew the astronomer Bailly as the president of the National Assembly, but now he watched him take on a new role as the recently elected mayor of revolutionary Paris, welcoming Louis XVI. Bailly had been elected by the capital’s electoral college, originally established to choose deputies to the Third Estate, but now in permanent session in the Hôtel de Ville and the de facto municipal government. In his memoirs Bailly wrote:

I rose very early, intending to leave for Paris at seven o’clock, and before that to prepare what I was to say to the King on receiving him at the gates of Paris. I was sorry to leave Versailles; I had been happy there in an Assembly whose temper was excellent, and which was worthy of the great functions that it was called upon to fulfil. I had seen great things done, and had had some share in them. I was leaving all these memories behind: that day, my happiness was over. I have known splendid days since then and moments of satisfaction, but I have not been happy.

I had sent for a carriage. I was kept waiting to leave; I could not conceive why. When I went out, I was met by all the court coachmen, who offered me a tree loaded with flowers and ribbons … I had to allow them to fasten this tree to the front of my coach; all the coachmen accompanied me, letting off fireworks although it was broad daylight … Finally I left them at the end of the avenue, much touched by their friendly pageantry, and much relieved to be able to go on my way freely after being somewhat delayed. I incurred much praise in the newspapers for the simplicity with which, though chief official of the capital, I arrived in Paris in one of those carriages vulgarly known as ‘chamber-pots’.⁴⁰

Bailly met the king at the city gates and presented him with the historic keys to Paris. Then the procession moved on to the Hôtel de Ville. There on the steps recently stained with the blood of de Flesselles, Bailly welcomed the king again, together with General Lafayette, veteran of the American Revolutionary wars and commander of the new people’s army, now named the National Guard. Lafayette was tall and thin. He had a long nose and reddish hair. His background was aristocratic, but at nineteen he had abandoned his comfortable life in France to fight for freedom in America. Here he impressed George Washington, who remarked: ‘I do most devoutly wish that we had not a single foreigner among us, except the Marquis de Lafayette.’⁴¹ Back in France and a popular hero, Lafayette was poised to apply his experience of revolution on home soil. He adapted the red and blue cockade for the uniforms of his National Guards by adding white, the colour of the Bourbon monarchy. Outside the Hôtel de Ville, Bailly presented Louis XVI with one of these cockades: ‘I did not know quite how the King would take this, and whether there was not something improper about such a suggestion; however, I felt that I was bound to present the cockade, and that the king was bound to accept it.’⁴² This he did, and gamely pinned it on his hat, despite the arch disapproval of his queen who said: ‘I did not think I had married a commoner.’ Robespierre records scenes of great joy and tenderness, shouts of ‘Long live the king and the nation!’ but nothing could disguise the fact that the terms on which Louis XVI held power had changed dramatically in a matter of weeks. He returned afterwards to his court in Versailles, but his visit to Paris was testament to the capital’s ascendancy over the Revolution.

One of the first things the deputies did after arriving in Paris was to go on a guided tour of the Bastille. Mirabeau led them, mindful of his own days of internment for immorality inside the prison of Vincennes, when ‘the voice of his despair reverberated from dead stone walls’.⁴³ As the crowd in the rue Saint-Antoine parted to let the triumphal procession through, people threw flowers and poems in its path. Books and manuscripts that had been found in the Bastille were piled into Mirabeau’s carriage. Inside, he asked to see the dungeons. His servant, prevented from accompanying him, sobbed hysterically at the entrance to the dungeon, fearing an attack on the leader of the commons in that dank and sombre place.⁴⁴ But Mirabeau went on boldly, moving slowly through the underground cells, knocking on the walls to check for secret underground passages from which enemies of the Revolution might suddenly burst forth. Then he came blinking into the light, climbed one of the towers, lifted a pickaxe and brought it down on the battlements. Robespierre remarked on how delightful the Bastille seemed now in the hands of the people and under demolition: ‘I could not tear myself away from the place; the sight of it produced such feelings of pleasure and ideas of liberty in all good citizens.’⁴⁵

As Robespierre stood rooted to the spot, his gaze fixed on abstract ideas, the triumph of liberty and the demise of oppression, others around him saw commercial opportunities in the Bastille’s rubble. The stonemason Pierre-François Palloy had been among the nine hundred who originally stormed the fortress, fighting alongside carpenters and other tradesmen, many from the faubourg Saint-Antoine, where there had been violent riots over bread earlier in the year. After the fall of the Bastille, Palloy and four more construction specialists were put in charge of demolition. Very soon the ground was strewn with debris that would be recycled as Bastille memorabilia; inkwells, paperweights, commemorative daggers and decorative models of the prison carved from its own stone were to prove popular and lucrative over the coming years. Spectators came to gawp at chains and manacles, to touch instruments of torture and lock themselves in dank cells where their fellow citizens, plagued by rats, had rotted to death. Robespierre was above all that. He was not much interested in money, nor, as far as we can tell, in sex. He was not commercially minded, not a connoisseur of thrills. He did not, like Mirabeau, have personal memories of imprisonment to lay to rest, or fears – no matter how outlandish – about the threat the Bastille might still pose. To him the captured fortress was simply a vast monolith on to which his ideas could be projected. Just as when he first stood up to speak in Versailles, the assembly went blank before him, so standing at the Bastille he saw only what was already in his mind. The picks and shovels fell silent, the workers’ banter, the gawping crowd disappeared. The glorious figure of liberty appeared to him on the crumbling ramparts, and Robespierre stood there hypnotised.

All spring and early summer hope helped fill empty stomachs as people throughout France waited on news from Versailles. But after the Bastille fell there was precious little calm left. Angry mobs marauded through the towns and countryside looking for food or work, only precariously restrained by detachments of the newly formed citizen militia, or National Guard.⁴⁶ This volunteer force of amateur soldiers that started in Paris after the fall of the Bastille was now being imitated throughout France. The purpose of the National Guard was to contain spontaneous mob violence of the kind that had killed de Flesselles and de Launay – it was, from the beginning, a pro-revolutionary but peace-keeping association of civic-minded people – and for this reason membership was generally restricted to tax-paying citizens who were eligible to vote. Lafayette reduced the number of Parisian National Guards to 24,000 and stipulated that they must buy their own uniforms (which necessarily excluded the poor from joining). He also integrated into the Guard 6,000 professional soldiers.⁴⁷ But outside Paris he had less control. Following the Parisian example, the citizens in Versailles and other cities organised their own National Guard. ‘We hope all France will adopt this essential institution,’ comments Robespierre in a letter to Buissart, before urging him to promote it in Arras.⁴⁸

Since the new battalions of National Guards, springing up all over France in a piecemeal, spontaneous and chaotic fashion, had suddenly become the main instrument of law and order in a nation succumbing to revolution, Lally-Tollendal (a conservatively minded member of the National Assembly) suggested excluding from it anyone likely to be reckless, anyone with nothing to lose, anyone too poor to have an interest in avoiding anarchy. Robespierre at once objected. ‘It is necessary to love order, but not to harm liberty,’ he began. Insurrection, he argued, had saved Paris and the nation from despotism. To his mind it was wrong – or perhaps just too early – to condemn insurrection or distinguish it sharply from patriotism. There had been deaths, he admitted, a few heads had been lost, but they were guilty heads, so no reason to reproach the insurgent mob. Whatever he had understood liberty to be in the past – an idea, a legal concept, a beleaguered individual right more often breached than observed – it was now linked inextricably with the Revolution. He saw that insurgency was useful to the Revolution, so defended it in the name of liberty.

The right to privacy, on the other hand, was not particularly useful to the Revolution – might indeed be downright dangerous where its enemies were concerned. And Robespierre had no qualms about overriding the right to privacy when Bailly forwarded from Paris to the National Assembly a packet of sealed letters addressed to the Comte d’Artois, who had recently fled abroad. These letters had been dramatically snatched from the French Ambassador to Geneva in the middle of the night and probably contained details of a counter-revolutionary plot. The scrupulous National Assembly stood about discussing whether it was or was not permissible to open them. Robespierre was incredulous; to him it was obvious that the Revolution must come first – in circumstances where national liberty was at stake, crime itself could ‘become an action worthy of praise’. Similarly, he agreed with other radicals in the Assembly, just days after the crowd had murdered Foulon outside the Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, that extraordinary courts to try crimes against the state were now needed; what was wrong in a time of peace and stability might be justified during a revolution. Robespierre grasped early, rapidly, intuitively the contrast between ends and means that was destined to blight the Revolution, cause tens of thousands of deaths and haunt the consciences of the survivors. His response was passionate and political. He was vehemently committed to the Revolution and anything it entailed. In short, he behaved like someone with nothing whatever to lose outside the Revolution itself – the kind of person more conservative members of the Assembly thought unsuited to the citizen militia, let alone positions of power.

As unrest spread through France and pillaging increased in the provinces, the Assembly launched into lengthy theoretical discussions about the new constitution which would not have been out of place in the Sorbonne. At the top of the agenda was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which was to head the constitution and serve as both the death certificate of the Old Regime and the birth certificate of the new. ‘I well remember the long debate on the subject, which lasted many weeks, as a period of mortal ennui,’ wrote one witness. ‘There were silly disputes about words, much metaphysical jumbling, and dreadfully tedious prosing.’⁴⁹ Even before 1789, many in France had watched the revolution in America with intense interest, and the deputies were well aware of the bills of rights preceding many of the constitutions adopted by the American states between 1776 and 1783, as possible models for the French.⁵⁰ Thomas Jefferson was in Paris and a good friend of General Lafayette; Benjamin Franklin was still alive and corresponding with his many friends in France; opportunities for personal and intellectual exchanges between the two countries were increasing all the time. But when, after long discussion, the National Assembly settled on a draft for the French Declaration of Rights, it differed considerably from the American – it was more condensed, more abstract and more suited to France’s peculiar circumstances. It morally condemned the Old Regime and its vestiges of feudalism, and laid the ethical foundations for France’s new constitution. ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,’ it asserted, repudiating legal and hereditary differences of rank or order.⁵¹ In the vision of the future embodied in the declaration, social distinctions could only be justified if they were useful; France must become a meritocracy; sovereignty belonged to the nation; and the law would express the general will. There was also a hint of an international crusading mission, since the declaration proclaimed the universal rights of all men, not just Frenchmen. However, by the time Mirabeau presented the projected declaration to the Assembly, he had become sceptical about it: ‘I can safely predict’, he said, ‘that any Declaration of Rights ahead of the constitution will prove but the almanac of a single year!’⁵²

On 4 August, in the absence of both Mirabeau and the abbé Sieyès, the Assembly abruptly decided to intervene to halt the widespread discontent that had been growing during the weeks since the fall of the Bastille. Hoping to reassure the people that, contrary to appearances, they really were going to benefit from the Revolution, the Assembly decided to abolish formally the remaining traces of feudalism in France. As they went into extraordinary session, a spirit of abandon took over. All day and all night, deputies weeping tears of joy renounced the offending features of the Old Regime, demolishing it piece by piece, like the Bastille. When he heard about it, Mirabeau reflected, ‘The assembly resembled a dying man who had made his will in a hurry; or, to speak more plainly, each member gave away what did not belong to him, and prided himself upon his generosity at the expense of others.’⁵³ The payment of church tithes was stopped; seignorial relations between landlords and tenants ended; manorial forms of income and property were no more; differences in the taxes and legal penalties applied to nobles and commoners disappeared; the special exemptions and liberties of particular provinces were abolished; hunting rights and game laws favourable to landlords were dissolved. There was to be no more confusion between public authority and private position, no more purchasing of public offices; the trade guilds would be radically reformed and the parlements abolished. Rarely has so much legislative work been accomplished in such a short space of time. Yet, in the sober light of morning, Mirabeau and Sieyès were dismayed. ‘This is just the character of our Frenchmen, they are three months disputing about syllables, and in a single night they overturn the whole venerable edifice of the monarchy,’ complained Mirabeau.⁵⁴ For his part, Sieyès was most annoyed by the abrupt abolition of church tithes, which, as he saw it, would simply further enrich private landowners at the expense of the Church. The two disgruntled men went for a walk together, complaining that the Assembly had failed to act in accordance with their wishes or advice. ‘My dear Abbé,’ said Mirabeau to Sieyès, ‘you have let loose the bull and you now complain that he gores you!’⁵⁵

It took weeks for the Assembly to work out the finer details of all its destructive decrees. Robespierre did not play a prominent part in these debates. He intervened to insist that executive officers should be held accountable if they abused the power entrusted to them.⁵⁶ He championed freedom of conscience when members of the clergy tried to limit provisions for religious freedom in the new Declaration of Rights.⁵⁷ And, inspired by American examples, he argued for unlimited freedom of the press.⁵⁸ He envisaged government through legislative and executive powers, carefully separated from one another, both strictly responsible to the sovereign people, and both financed through equitably distributed taxes. In the moderate newspaper the Courier français, he was commended as someone who often made very positive contributions to these discussions, without getting worked up or overheated.⁵⁹ Clear, precise and calm as he was, however, there was little to distinguish him from other radicals in the National Assembly, patiently fighting their more conservative colleagues over the Declaration of Rights and the new constitution, line by line, article by article, day after day.

On 4 October, Paris awoke to find no bread in its bakeries. To add insult to injury, the newspapers were full of inflammatory reports of revelry at Versailles the night before. The papers claimed that there had been a raucous and unpatriotic banquet for the Flanders regiment which had recently arrived in Versailles to reinforce the royal bodyguard. Allegedly, the national cockade had been trampled beneath the aristocracy’s well-shod and contemptuous feet. One witness, Mme de la Tour du Pin, remembered the event very differently. She noticed Marie Antoinette’s nervous anxiety when a Swiss officer asked permission to carry the five-year-old Dauphin, like a trophy, around the crowded hall. The ashen-faced queen was visibly relieved when her child was returned to her arms – she was still mourning the death of his elder brother and was understandably fearful in such uncertain times.⁶⁰ Nevertheless, on the morning of 4 October, hungry and outraged, Paris rioted. A baker was murdered by the mob and General Lafayette and his cockade-wearing National Guard struggled to keep order. The next day a mob of about seven thousand women set off from the Hôtel de Ville for Versailles through driving rain, led by a man named Stanislas Maillard, who bore the unofficial title ‘Captain of the Bastille Volunteers’. They reached their destination in the evening and it was Robespierre who received them: 5 October was crucial to his revolutionary career.

A delegation of twelve of the women plus Maillard, all drenched and mud-splattered from their long walk, entered the National Assembly, demanded food for Paris and insisted that the king’s bodyguard be forced to adopt the patriotic tricolour cockade. The rest of the mob waited hungry and restless outside. Robespierre, standing neat and composed at the tribune, answered the delegation by ordering an inquiry into the food shortages that menaced Paris. He supported Maillard’s complaint against one particular miller who played the market by refusing for weeks to grind his flour, despite having been paid 200 livres for it. In this way, he made common cause with the poor, echoing their customary fear that there was a plot against them – that their hunger and suffering were no accident, but instead the result of a deliberate and despicable conspiracy.⁶¹ The prospect of an inquiry did nothing to calm the expectant mob, though it did deflect their anger from the National Assembly. The ensuing night was uncomfortable and full of fear; Versailles was already crammed with people and there was nowhere for the women to sleep. Some bedded down on benches in the National Assembly; pistol shots rang out in the darkness. Inside the palace the court was in panic, barricaded behind doors that there had been no reason to close for decades. Some of the Parisian women found, or were shown, a small door opening on to a secret staircase into the palace, and as they emerged into the royal precincts surprised bodyguards fired on them. More enraged and frightened than ever, the destitute women then ram-paged through the palace, eating any food they could lay their hands on. Eventually, after midnight, General Lafayette and 20,000 National Guardsmen arrived in Versailles, soaking wet from the continuing rain.

General Lafayette said to the king, ‘Sire, I thought it better to come here and die at the feet of your Majesty than to die uselessly on the Place de Grève’ – which was histrionic, but honourable.⁶² Then he explained that the people were demanding bread and the National Guard wanted to replace the royal bodyguards. The king, who had been hesitating all night over the best course of action to take, frantically eliciting opinions from everyone he could find to ask, and repeating all the while, ‘I do not want to compromise anyone’, gave in immediately on the replacement of his bodyguard.⁶³ The next day, after a mob had nearly broken into the queen’s apartments, the royal family agreed to return to Paris for good. They found themselves accompanied by an unruly procession of some 60,000 people, many chanting triumphantly that they were bringing the baker, the baker’s wife and their boy back to the capital. As a gesture of goodwill, the king had ordered sacks of flour to be transported from Versailles to Paris. Yet on the journey he heard himself derided as a baker and could see, outside the carriage windows, the severed heads of murdered palace guards ghoulishly bobbing alongside on pikes.

‘Men had captured the Bastille,’ wrote the historian Jules Michelet, ‘but it was women who captured the king.’⁶⁴ Entering Paris, the royal family were prisoners in all but name. On the morning of 7 October, they tried to settle into their new accommodation – the dusty Tuileries palace on the right bank of the Seine that had been disused since the Sun King Louis XIV abandoned Paris for Versailles – while Jean Paul Marat’s daily paper, L’Ami du Peuple (The People’s Friend), gleefully celebrated their arrival:

The King, Queen, the Dauphin etc. arrived in the capital at about seven o’clock last night. It is indeed a festival for the good Parisians to possess their King. His presence will promptly change the face of things: the poor people will no longer die of hunger; but this benefit will soon vanish like a dream if we do not fix the Royal family in our midst until the complete consecration of the Constitution. The ‘People’s Friend’ shares in the joy of his dear fellow-citizens, but he will not give himself over to sleep.⁶⁵

Marat, a physician and scientist admired by Benjamin Franklin, had begun writing revolutionary pamphlets in 1788. His Offrande à la patrie (Offering to the Fatherland) had some points in common with the abbé Sieyès’ more famous Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? (What is the Third Estate?), arguing for the rights of the nation. Marat, like Sieyès, had a deep knowledge of eighteenth-century political thought, but he soon switched to more direct ways of communicating with the public. He stood on street corners reading aloud from Rousseau’s Social Contract, and he issued his daily paper under the motto ‘Truth or Death’. He preached insurrection to all who listened and helped instigate the women’s march to Versailles. Indeed, he went with them on 5 October, but had to rush straight back to Paris to keep up his running commentary on revolutionary events. ‘Marat flies to Versailles and returns like lightning, making as much noise as the four trumpets of the last judgement summoning the dead to rise,’ commented Camille Desmoulins, in his own newspaper, Révolutions de France et de Brabant (Revolutions of France and Brabant).⁶⁶ For his pains, Marat was arrested by the Parisian police on 8 October and imprisoned for about a month. Afterwards he resumed his provocative journalism, giving voice to ‘the wrath of the people’ and evading arrest by hiding in the cellars and sewers of Paris, where he caught a disfiguring skin disease. The ‘People’s Friend’, racked by migraines, his head wrapped in a vinegar-soaked handkerchief, his body covered with open sores, worked relentlessly to ensure that the ordinary people of Paris played their part in the Revolution. If Marat wanted to keep the king in the Tuileries palace until the new constitution came into effect, he seemed to believe he could bring this about by shouting, as loudly as possible, day in, day out, into the ears of the Parisian mob.

The National Assembly did not immediately follow the king to Paris; it stayed behind to debate the new constitution, and only closed its sessions at Versailles on 15 October. Buoyant with success, Robespierre was very active in these debates. By now he had made a name for himself – one that most journalists recognised and could even spell. He insisted, against Mirabeau, that the king’s list of state-funded employees should be subject to annual approval, not permanently granted by the treasury.⁶⁷ He argued vehemently that all those still imprisoned by the Old Regime’s notoriouslettres de cachet should be unconditionally released. The case of the ex-soldier Dupond, whom he once defended in Arras, may have been in his mind, but this stance also fitted his growing reputation for radicalism, his passion for the application of clear, uncompromising principles, and the sublime emotions he had found stirring in his heart as he stood amid the rubble of the Bastille.

With characteristic seriousness, Robespierre entered into discussions about the form in which the National Assembly’s decisions should be published. It was not appropriate for these to read like old-style royal proclamations, especially since the parlements, once responsible for registering the king’s edicts, had now been abolished. He suggested an alternative formulation that was somewhat ponderous and prolix: ‘Louis, by the Grace of God, and by the Will of the Nation, King of the French: to all citizens of the French Empire: People, here is the law which your representatives have made, and to which I have affixed the royal seal.’⁶⁸ According to the newspaper reports, Robespierre read this out to the boisterous and disorderly Assembly in such a pious and earnest tone of voice that someone called out, ‘Gentlemen, this formula is of no use; we want no psalm-singing here!’ and he was laughed off the podium. He was sensitive and extremely easy to wound or offend, and still rather gauche: a self-respecting, painfully self-conscious provincial with a heavy Artois accent who had thrown himself into the Revolution as he might, in different circumstances, have thrown himself into an important love affair: reckless, unreserved, completely devoid of ironic distance from the events on which he was staking his life. To be laughed at in such circumstances can only have stung him deeply.

After closing its sessions at Versailles, the National Assembly reconvened in the Archbishop’s Palace in Paris on 19 October. Located on the Isle of Saint-Louis in the river Seine at the heart of the city, very close to where the old parlement had met, the palace was never a suitable venue, and when a gallery collapsed in mid-session, injuring members of the public and a number of deputies,’ the Assembly had to move again. This time it convened in the Manège, a long, narrow building originally designed as Louis XV’s riding school, prominently situated on the right bank of the river Seine between the Tuileries garden and the Feuillants monastery. Here too there were problems: overcrowding, bad acoustics and inconveniently small public galleries. At Versailles there had been room for around three thousand spectators, but now there were just two galleries, one at either end of the Manège, with only a hundred seats each. There was a third gallery halfway down the hall, but admission to this was by ticket only. Soon an avid traffic in these tickets developed, along with a new practice of strategically positioning ‘claques’ of people in the gallery to hiss, applaud or throw missiles at the speakers.

It was amidst this chaos that Robespierre resumed his struggle to make something of himself and the Revolution – projects that had already converged in his mind. His new lodgings at number 30 rue Saintonge, in the Marais quarter, were comparatively cheap and tranquil. Living some distance from the city centre, however, he had to travel two miles to reach the Assembly, by foot or carriage, through congested streets. An acquaintance remembered being stuck in traffic with him one morning en route to the Manège: ‘our cab stopped at the corner of the rue Gréneta owing to a crowd which was hurrying to the rue St Denis. He was impatient so I got out to see what was stopping us. I came back and told him, “It is a deputation which is going to present the Assembly with a model of the Bastille made from one of its stones.” “Pay”, he said “and let us get down and go on foot. A Bastille, all the Bastilles in the world will not hinder me from going to my post.”’⁶⁹