‘The Suicide of France’

LOUIS XVI (1774–1793)

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‘I should like to be known as “Louis the Serious” ’

No king has been more unfortunate than Louis XVI. Yet had he reigned happily and prosperously, he would probably have been regarded as the dullest and most commonplace monarch in all French history. As it was, his tragic destiny showed him to be in some ways one of the noblest, if not one of the wisest, men who has ever tried to rule France.

Louis’s personality is inextricably involved with the French Revolution. As it approaches, there is a steadily increasing note of drama in his story; at the end, the constantly changing attitude of his subjects towards him is terrifying. Unfortunately, in a book of this size one can only offer a brief and superficial account of the Revolution. Perhaps this is not altogether a handicap, for Louis as a human being is so often lost sight of amid the cataclysm; most studies concentrate on the perplexed, doomed ruler of 1789–93 and tend to neglect the odd young King of the 1770s and 1780s.

Louis XVI was born at Versailles on 27 August 1754, the third son of the Dauphin Louis and Marie Joséphine of Saxony, christened Louis-Auguste and created Duc de Berry. His childhood was no less overshadowed by death than that of Louis XV. His eldest brother, the Duc d’Aquitaine, died long before Louis-Auguste was born and the second, the Duc de Bourgogne, died in 1761; his father died in 1765 and his mother in 1768; by the time he was fourteen he was an orphan. Unfortunately, unlike his grandfather, there was no Mme de Ventadour to take the place of his mother, while the old King although fond of him—Louis-Auguste called him ‘Papa Roi’—seems to have kept his distance.

His earliest memories were of his precociously brilliant elder brother boasting how he would conquer England, and then dying painfully at ten of lymphatic glanditis—scrofula, the King’s Evil itself. Louis-Auguste himself fell ill with the same tuberculosis at the age of seven, and, like Henri IV, was sent to the country where he acquired his iron health. His governor was M de Vauguyon, a pedantic Breton Duke whose piety had impressed his father; Louis-Auguste was rather frightened of him. The boy was oddly inarticulate and unselfconfident. His younger brothers, the sly and clever Provence and the handsome, lively Artois, made him feel inferior; he once said ‘I love no one because no one loves me’. His usual companions were grooms and stable-boys. His aunts felt sorry for the lonely, gloomy child, particularly Adelaide who used to say, ‘My poor Berry, you must make yourself at home with me—make a noise, shout, break things—but do something!’

Vauguyon instilled an almost excessive piety into him. Louis-Auguste was good at his Latin, learnt to speak German, and memorized much history even if he had small power of analysing it. Geography was the chief joy of his studies—he drew maps to perfection. He also read English with surprising ease, especially English history. With his tutor’s help he translated Walpole’s essay on Richard III. The Civil War fascinated him—he said that had he been Charles I he would never have made war on his people. When he was ten Louis-Auguste wrote a book of reflections on his conversations with his tutor. There is a pathetic and revealing entry; ‘My greatest fault is my sluggishness of mind which makes all mental effort tiresome and painful for me; I am determined to overcome this fault …’ He was terrified when his father died; not only was he deeply upset but he dreaded his future responsibilities. In the two years left to her, his mother did her best to give him some confidence. A lady asked the earnest boy by what name he would like to go down to history: ‘I should like to be known as “Louis the Serious”,’ was the touching reply.

The new Dauphin had his own printing press and produced a small book of Fénélon’s political and moral maxims, much to Louis XV’s irritation—he found the selection dangerously liberal and ordered his grandson to stop printing. However, Louis-Auguste had other pleasures—he was good with all tools and particularly interested in locks and machinery. Predictably, he loved hunting and was a crack shot, shooting until his face was black with powder.

When he married Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin was a fat, clumsy youth—he had a pot belly by the time he was twenty—whose countenance, according to the Austrian ambassador, gave promise of ‘only a very limited intelligence, little comeliness and no sensitivity’. The Neapolitan Ambassador thought he ‘looked as if he had been brought up in the woods’. He could not dance, in an age when social accomplishments were everything. But Louis-Auguste’s appearance was deceptive. When, during his wedding celebrations, a stampede caused by exploding fireworks killed hundreds in the Place Louis XV (now the Place de la Concorde) he sent his entire monthly allowance to the Lieutenant of Police, writing to the Lieutenant: ‘I have learnt of the misfortune which happened in Paris because of me and am deeply distressed. I have just received the sum which the King gives me each month for personal expenses; I have nothing else but send it to you. Help those most in need. I have, Monsieur, much esteem for you.’

Indeed, in some ways the new monarch was a caricature of those much lamented paragons, his father the Dauphin and his great-grandfather the Duc de Bourgogne; he was certainly like them in being fat, pious and lethargic; and there was even a closer resemblance to that prototype of all fat Bourbons, the Grand Dauphin. Yet underneath the slack podgy face, the bone structure was surprisingly handsome; it appears in the profile on some early portrait medallions and in occasional drawings. The nose was unmistakably the great eagle’s beak of the Bourbons, the short-sighted eyes—he used a lorgnette—large, mournful and kindly. He had an unusually pleasing voice. Eventually, despite obesity and shyness, contemporaries would recognize a most regal dignity in Louis XVI. If he thought slowly and was slow to make up his mind, he was none the less intelligent enough in his own way, but he did not care to talk about his interests. His worst fault was that terrible lack of self-confidence.

He was unfortunate in not having a wife who understood him, as Marie Joséphine had understood his father. At his wedding his grandfather had commented, characteristically, ‘Marriages are never happy, but occasionally they are pleasant; let us hope that this one will be so.’ Maria Antonia—Marie Antoinette—was one year younger than her husband and they had not a single taste in common. Despite the influence of that wonderful and delightful woman, her mother the Empress Maria Theresa, she had grown up shallow and superficial; a French tutor said that trying to teach her was almost impossible—‘she could only apply herself to what amused her.’ She was essentially Germanic (even though French was her first language and her father had once been Duke of Lorraine) possessing all the German vices and virtues, and being a bouncing, sentimental girl, who rode astride, noisy and aggressive, very like the heroine of a Mozart opera or a Viennese operetta. (As a child she had played harpsichord duets with Mozart.) An ash-blonde, ‘a head taller than all her ladies’, she had a high, slightly bulging forehead, the jutting, unsightly Habsburg lower lip, and big blue eyes. None the less, it was generally conceded that Marie Antoinette, if not exactly pretty, was sublimely attractive. Her complexion was exquisite, her skin translucent. Not only was she elegant in her every movement, but she had a noble, queenly air; a man who knew her said, ‘One would have offered her a throne without thinking, in the way one would offer any other woman a chair.’ At first the French adored her but, quite soon after Louis’s accession, the mood changed and many began to hate her. She was a kindly, warm-hearted person, cheerful and impetuous, but she was also tactless and arrogant. It may well have been her Germanic qualities which awoke aversion among Frenchmen.

The new Queen’s character must have suffered from her physical relations—or the lack of them—with her husband. It is generally accepted that Louis suffered from phimosis—an irretractable foreskin—which made it impossible for him to accomplish the sexual act. He was so shy that it is likely that his wife attributed his lack of desire to sheer disinclination. To some extent she took refuge in pornography, reading erotic novels.

Every mistake which the poor girl made was immediately reported to Vienna by the Imperial ambassador, Count Florimond de Mercy. This suave and cynical Lorrainer wrote with gloomy relish, but he was not a liar, as has recently been suggested. Both Maria Theresa and Joseph II were far too discerning to retain a dishonest ambassador for twenty years in the world’s most important capital.

At first the new King and his Queen were wildly popular. He declared solemnly, ‘I want to be loved.’ He announced that he would forgo his joyeux avènement, a heavy tax which each monarch traditionally levied on his accession; similarly, Marie Antoinette relinquished her Ceinture de Reine—the ‘Queen’s Girdle’ tax which in times past had always accompanied the ‘joyful event’. She wrote to her mother how much she was touched by the demonstrative affection of the people in the streets. Porcelain medallions were made at Sèvres, bearing the optimistic legend Louis le Populaire. In June 1775 Louis was crowned and anointed at Rheims Cathedral by the Archbishop-Duke, who was assisted by nine archbishops and twenty other prelates. The service was so moving that Marie Antoinette was reduced to tears. But when the crown was placed reverently on his head the King complained that it hurt him—not a good omen. Next day he pardoned all the inmates of Rheims prison, after first touching for the Evil. Yet, despite his deep religious faith, Louis lacked the confidence of his grandfather in his authority, in his Divine Right.

Louis XVI, by Duplessis

Marie Antoinette and her children, by Mme Vigée-Lebrun

Louis’s next step was even more popular than his relinquishment of the joyeux avènement. He recalled the aged Maurepas and sacked the Triumvirat. Maurepas was on the list of reliable men bequeathed to him by his father the Dauphin, and was furthermore recommended by Mme Adelaide as not being a Jansenist (like the far more capable Machault); the young King felt safe with old men. Maurepas, seventy-three years old but still vain and foppish, was intoxicated by the prospect of returning to Versailles and power, and his sole aim was to win applause. Accordingly, he supported Maupeou’s replacement as Chancellor by Miromesnil, who ended the Maupeou courts and brought back the Parlements.

The King was none the less determined to be a reformer. He never forgot the advice given to him by his father on his deathbed. The Dauphin had told the clumsy, terrified boy that two strong reigns in succession were necessary, ‘one to root out the evils and the next to prevent their recurrence’. In fact, this fat, slow, gentle creature, infinitely well-intentioned, never had the slightest chance of success. Looking back, Barnave (a prominent figure during the Revolution) said that even in 1774 the Crown’s only hope of survival had been to become either a constitutional monarchy or else a military dictatorship. Louis possessed neither the imagination nor the character to bring about the former, while he was hardly equipped to be a French Frederick the Great.

None the less, Louis did his best. To the delight of the intellectuals, he appointed as Controller-General the Baron Turgot de l’Aulne, a brilliant but charmless Philosophe in his forties, whose views were well known from his writings. He was a former Intendantof Limoges where his land register and new system of tax assessment—and tax collection—had made him thoroughly unpopular. The King nursed great hopes of this paragon. Maurepas had slyly filled Louis with horror at Terray’s exactions, implying that M Turgot would dispell the people’s discontent. Turgot himself possessed no such illusions; he wrote to the King, whom he naively cast in the rôle of Enlightened Despot, ‘I shall be feared and hated by most of the court and by everyone who sells or seeks for pensions.’ The new Controller-General was a difficult man, ill equipped to please. He announced that he intended to economize on expenditure, to do without borrowing more money. A French precursor of Adam Smith and Free Trade, who believed in a ‘natural wage scale’ andlaisser faire, Turgot at once abandoned Terray’s policy of attempting to regulate the grain and wine trades, abolishing many internal customs dues. He began to cut the tax-farmers’ profits and investigated ways of making the fiscal system reasonably efficient. He even managed to persuade Louis to slash pensions. All these new measures were explained to the people during Mass on Sundays in every parish church in France. Unfortunately most courtiers were not interested in reform—they depended on pensions for their own expensive existence.

A much more popular new minister was Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, whom Louis put in charge of foreign affairs. In his mid-fifties, Vergennes was an experienced diplomat, a former ambassador to Sweden and Turkey, and very unlike Turgot—beautifully dressed, impassive-faced and with all the amiable and excessively reassuring manners of his kind. Like Choiseul before him, he hated England, but unlike Choiseul he also had little love for Austria. However, like the King, Vergennes loathed the idea of war and always hoped for peace, though his judgement was erratic. The future President of the United States of America, Mr Thomas Jefferson, when US ambassador to France, considered M de Vergennes a stimulating person ‘to do business with’, but incapable of understanding American institutions. ‘It is impossible to have a clearer, better organized head, but age has chilled his heart.’

Perhaps the most interesting appointment was Malesherbes, also in his fifties, who was made minister in charge of the royal household, much to the Queen’s irritation. This amiable and distinguished Parlementaire was a former President of the Cour des Aideswho had defended the Parlement against Louis XV; he was also a celebrated liberal and friend to the Philosophes, the man whose tolerance as official censor had made possible the publication of the Encyclopédie. He was a character of Johnsonian proportions; a jolly, untidy figure in an old, snuff-stained brown suit, his wig askew, perpetually sucking a pipe and gesturing with a thick stick, whose hobbies were literature and botany. A keen reformer, Malesherbes would have liked France to have been given a constitution on the English model, although—as he would one day prove with his life—he was a most faithful servant of the Crown. His popularity made him a valuable ally for Turgot.

Within a year, largely through sacking useless officials, the Controller-General had reduced government expenditure by 66,200,000 livres (well over two and a half million pounds in contemporary English money). Unfortunately, his abandonment of controls on the grain trade sent wheat prices soaring and there were bread riots, even in Paris, popularly known as ‘The Flour War’. As he had predicted, he outraged the privileged classes, including the clergy, and the party of religion at court soon turned the Queen against him; she did her best to discredit the Controller-General with the King. None the less, Turgot clung grimly to office, and Louis continued to support him, though more and more doubtfully. In 1776 the Controller-General introduced his famous Six Edicts—his programme for reform. The opposition took particular exception to the proposed abolition of thecorvée (the peasants’ duty work on the roads) and its replacement by a road tax on local landowners. Louis, rather surprisingly, forced the Parlement to register the edicts with the lit de justice.

But by now Marie Antoinette was really angry. Turgot had insisted on recalling one of her protégés from London—the Duc de Guisnes (of Mozart’s Guisnes Concerto)—where he was ambassador, on the grounds of incompetence. Turgot’s position was weakened still further when Malesherbes resigned. He then terrified the King with a scheme for a national assembly, following it with an extraordinarily tactless letter—‘Never forget Sire, that weakness put Charles I’s head on the block.’ He was dismissed in May 1776, after being Controller-General for only twenty months. Many historians believe that Turgot’s dismissal marked the final doom of the old monarchy.

Louis, in his dealings with Turgot, had eventually shown all his own worst qualities—a fear of unpopularity, and a slowness of thought which invariably grew into irresolution. Added to this was his pathological terror of being dominated by any one minister. Yet the King was thoroughly honest and kind-hearted, and still hoped to make his people love him by good government. In the twentieth century he would have been an excellent constitutional monarch.

None the less, whatever his vices or virtues, Louis XVI was undeniably an oddity. He indulged in orgies of gluttony, frequently preparing the meals himself and then gorging and swilling until he was carried almost insensible to his bed, emitting ‘un bruit très suspect’. Certain disloyal courtiers called him ‘the fat pig’, while the naturalist Buffon, who saw him dining with his accustomed enthusiasm, was put in mind of a big monkey feeding at the zoo. One of the royal breakfasts consisted of four chops, a plump chicken, a thick slice of ham and six baked eggs, washed down by a bottle and a half of champagne; the same day he ate a gargantuan dinner. Indeed, the Austrian ambassador reported that the King’s return from hunting was followed by meals so enormous ‘that they deprive him of reason’. Plump even as a youth, he became inordinately fat (though in part this may have been due to glandular trouble.) Probably because of his hunting, his health did not suffer, apart from the occasional hangover, and he was famous for his strength; he could pick up a page standing on a heavy shovel and carry him round the room. The worst effects of the monarch’s gorging were his primitive humour (consisting of the simplest practical jokes), a tendency to foul language and an almost Bohemian slovenliness; the Swedish King, the elegant Gustav III, was received by Louis with hair uncombed and wearing a dressing-gown and odd shoes. It is only fair to add that he fasted rigorously throughout Lent.

Like so many of his dynasty, Louis XVI was never so happy as when working with tools. He enjoyed making clocks and locks; a smithy with two forges was attached to his library and a locksmith was in permanent attendance; he made a metal table which he gave to Vergennes. Mme de Campans says that the King’s hands were often filthy—on at least one occasion the Queen screamed at him for being so dirty (though he took daily baths). He had a telescope room at Versailles, equipped with the most modern instruments through which he scanned his visitors, together with model warships and even small James Watt steam engines. Masonry was another relaxation and he built several walls with his own hands. Nor did he disdain chopping wood. Sometimes he was almost frivolous, indulging in backgammon or going to the play—Molière was a particular favourite.

However, unlike almost all Bourbons, Louis XVI had small interest in patronizing the arts. Nor was he a builder. He was equally untypical in his intellectual curiosity. His library was filled with works in Latin, German and English (he began a translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was later incorporated by Guizot into his own translation). He read Shakespeare, Fielding and Defoe—notably Robinson Crusoe—and glanced at most of the leading European newspapers and the EnglishAnnual Register—he was acquainted with all the more famous debates in the English Parliament. The King also owned many books on travel, science and geography and, in particular, history—especially naval and English. In fact he was very much a man of the Enlightenment. Unfortunately, he far preferred reading in his library to government business.

No wife could have been less suited to him than Queen Marie Antoinette. She had no intellectual interests whatsoever and her taste was inferior even to that of Mme du Barry (who had been sent to a convent for a dreadful, but mercifully brief, period of penance). Apart from ordering some good furniture from Riesener and Jacob, the Queen’s one essay in patronage was to make Paris learn to like the music of her old music-master, Gluck—and his Iphigénie in particular. Her chief joys were having her hair fantastically styled by her beloved coiffeur, Léonard, ordering extravagant if deceptively simple clothes from the great dressmaker Rose Bertin, and playing at being a dairymaid at her ‘hamlet’ next to the Petit Trianon (known as her ‘Little Vienna’), where she kept cows and goats with ribbons round their necks, milking them daily. She was also a compulsive gambler, playing all night and every night. Desperately frustrated, she found a certain relief in emotional friendships with young favourites like the delightful Princesse de Lamballe, a honey-blonde widow of eighteen, whom Mme de Campan described as ‘looking like spring peeping out from beneath sable and ermine’; and the beautiful but greedy Comtesse de Polignac, with whom Marie Antoinette was eternally arm-in-arm, and whose relations all sponged on her. There were undoubtedly sapphic undertones to these friendships. Soon the Queen’s allowance had to be doubled—partly because of vast sums lost at the gaming table or spent on diamonds, partly for pensions for her friends.

Marie Antoinette also flirted much too much, with men like the middle-aged roué, Baron de Besenval, who commanded the Swiss Guards, and the impertinent but amusing Duc de Lauzun, whom eventually she had to snub. Her profligate young brother-in-law, Charles of Artois, presided over her gay supper parties at the Petit Trianon and took her racing; there were rumours that Artois was her lover, and he was undoubtedly too familiar—he was actually seen to pinch her. (Their friendship cooled after her children were born, an indication that it was innocent, if indiscreet.) There were also rumours that she slept with the Duc de Coigny, the Swedish Count Fersen (Colonel of the Royal Swedish Regiment) and the Franco-Irishman, Count Edouard Dillon; these slanders were largely circulated by the Duc de Chartres (later Orléans) who bragged vilely that he had had to rebuff the Queen’s advances. Then there were stories that her bedroom was hung with diamond-studded tapestries, lit by a thousand candles, and had a bed with black satin sheets. Indeed, the poor woman was accused in countless filthy pamphlets of every known vice, including both Lesbian revels and Messalina-like orgies.

Within a few years Marie Antoinette was detested by almost all sections of society, who referred to her as ‘The Austrian’ and expressed deep pity for the King. She had made herself thoroughly unpopular with the nobility by her rudeness, her breezy simplifying of etiquette, and her favouritism and prejudice—throughout the reign she attacked her husband’s ministers for the most frivolous reasons. Nor did her jokes about Louis, whom she spoke of as ‘that poor fellow’, endear her; referring to his blacksmith’s forge, she once wrote that she had no desire ‘to play Venus to his Vulcan’. The alarmed Austrian ambassador reported to Vienna as early as 1776 that, ‘Each day fewer and fewer people come to Versailles and the situation will go from bad to worse if the Queen cannot make up her mind to conduct her court in a more sober and orderly fashion.’ Maria Theresa sent dreadful letters to her daughter. The Empress told ‘Madame my dear daughter’ that she was behaving like a Pompadour or a du Barry rather than a Queen, and that the news of her amusements and ridiculously affected hair-styles—‘like an actress’—made her mother tremble. Marie Antoinette’s lack of respect for the King was shocking. Furthermore, ‘It is rumoured that you do not pay your country’s noblemen the respect due to them and don’t even talk to them, but chatter instead with your young ladies and play all sorts of silly games.’

In 1777 the Queen’s brother, the Emperor Joseph II—a Viennese of the dour sort—visited France incognito to see just how bad things were. His considered view of his brother-in-law after meeting him was that Louis was ‘a little weak but no fool’, though curiously apathetic in mind and body. As for his sister, whom he reduced to tears, Joseph wrote grimly that she thought only of her pleasures and ‘fulfills neither the duties of a wife or a Queen’. It was all to no avail, and Marie Antoinette remained one of the monarchy’s greatest liabilities.

Nor were the rest of the Royal Family exactly an asset. Even ‘Mesdames Tantes’ were unpopular because of their bigotry. Horace Walpole saw them, and was as catty as only his sort of Englishman can be: ‘The Four Mesdames, who are clumsy, plump old wenches with a bad likeness to their father, stand in a bedchamber in a row, with black cloaks and knitting bags, looking good humoured, not knowing what to say, and wriggling as if they wanted to make water.’

Monsieur (Provence) was sensible enough, but he was unattractive in appearance and had an icily cold manner. Artois was worst of all, disastrously fond of wine, women and song, and gambling too—his debts were astronomical, twenty-one million livres by 1781, much to the fury of the taxpayers. Strikingly handsome, charming when he felt like it, he was often drunk and violently rude. One of his boon companions was the awful Chartres.

Philippe, Duc d’Orléans (known as Duc de Chartres until he became Orléans on his father’s death in 1785) was considered a member of the Royal Family, though privately he saw himself as head of a rival dynasty, rather than a junior Prince of the Blood. Like so many of his line, the Duke was a byword for debauchery. Although smaller and older—he had been born in 1747—and beautifully dressed, he resembled King Louis in appearance, but his face was blotched purple from hard drinking and ravaged by the pox. He led a life of the utmost futility, drinking, whoring and gambling, proud of his skill at card tricks and throwing dice—on one occasion he is said to have offered to run stark naked through Paris for a bet. Like some of Balzac’s villains, Orléans combined avarice with debauchery. When his losses at the gaming-table grew out of hand, he more than recouped them by building three arcades of shops round the gardens of the Palais Royal, which he turned into a public pleasure park; the arcades were soon filled with cafés, restaurants, hairdressers and jewellers’ shops, and also casinos and smart brothels. He was already enormously rich, and the venture made him King of Paris, with the Palais Royal for his Versailles. The debauched little Duke hated his cousins, but was too ineffectual to do them much damage.

In 1776 Jacques Necker, a brilliant Swiss banker and writer on economics, was appointed ‘Director of Finances’. (In practice he was Controller-General in everything but name, but it was considered unfitting that so prestigious a title should be given to a foreigner and Protestant.) A self-made man who had bought a French title, Necker was a plump, pot-bellied, yellow-faced bourgeois with awkward, oily manners, but extremely vain and socially ambitious. Through his wife’s somewhat louche salon and his promiscuous blue-stocking daughter (the future Mme de Staël), he had made many useful friends whom he had no wish to upset by introducing new taxes. Although as a Philosophe Necker introduced a number of minor reforms—he abolished 2,000 minor court posts—he was hardly another Turgot. In any case, the country’s finances were soon completely out of control because of French intervention in the American Revolution; as Turgot had predicted, France was ruined from the moment the first shot was fired. Without war, Necker might have preserved some semblance of solvency—as it was, faced by impossible demands for money, all he did was borrow long-term loans at ruinous interest and then produce a reassuring booklet on the national finances, the Compte rendu au Roi; in fact, the Compte rendu was a massive cooking of the books.

From the very beginning, the French had shown remarkable sympathy for the Americans in their Revolution. No doubt some of this enthusiasm was a legacy from the Seven Years War, a determination to be revenged for the humiliations which England had inflicted on France. However, Frenchmen of the period undoubtedly felt genuine admiration for the colonists. Lord Stormont, the English ambassador, reported sardonically of the Parisians that, ‘Our Wits, Philosophers and Coffee House Politicians … are all to a Man warm Americans, affecting to consider them as a brave People struggling for its Natural Rights and endeavouring to rescue those Rights out of the Hands of violent and wanton Oppression.’ Indeed, the Declaration of Independence reflected all the most hallowed ideals of the French Enlightenment, and there was a popular clamour to join in and help these colonial heroes against the traditional enemy.

One person who definitely did not want war was the King. Although he understood little about finance, he must have shuddered at Turgot’s warning. Louis hated bloodshed, and had small inclination to encourage rebellion against a fellow monarch; if he ever read it, he would certainly have agreed with a contemporary English pamphlet which cautioned him that the same spirit which had begun the American Revolution might well be preparing a revolution in France. However, the Americans were brilliantly successful in fanning the enthusiasm which so many Frenchmen felt for their cause; their ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, with his quaint (and carefully contrived) charm and his reputation as a scientist and man of letters, conquered both Versailles and Paris; he was popularly known as l’ambassadeur électrique. Only Louis disliked him. In addition, the Americans had the writer Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais on their side; the future author of Le Mariage de Figaro pestered Vergennes ceaselessly. Eventually that cautious diplomat, too clever by half, was persuaded that an American victory would win back for France and Spain everything which they had lost during the Seven Years War. Maurepas and most of the other ministers agreed with him. Louis, always irresolute, gave way reluctantly; many years afterwards he told M de Molleville, his naval secretary, ‘I never think of the American affair without regret—I was young then and advantage was taken of my youth, but now we have to suffer the consequences.’

Vergennes led the King by easy steps. First he obtained his permission to send a secret agent to Philadelphia, the pleasantly named Chevalier de Bonvouloir, to make contact with the revolutionary government. He then persuaded Louis to supply the rebels secretly with money, arms and uniforms, avoiding open war. The English raged but the French government blandly insisted that if any French supplies were reaching the colonists, it could only be the work of smugglers. The aid amounted to millions of pounds. In February 1778 France recognized the United States, signing a treaty of friendship and commerce, together with a secret treaty of military alliance. England at once declared war on France. Next year Spain joined in, on the side of France.

Many French volunteers had been fighting in America before 8,000 royal troops, including the Marquis de Lafayette, a red-haired, chinless wonder of nineteen, landed in 1780 to save the Revolution. Louis followed their campaigns with the keenest enthusiasm, poring over maps. At sea, Choiseul’s new navy proved its worth under men like Estaing and Rochambeau, destroying the legend that Britannia rules the waves. The Comte de Grasse prevented reinforcements reaching General Cornwallis at Yorktown, forcing him to surrender with 7,000 men, a feat which made ultimate American victory certain, while the fat old Bailli de Suffren (who had learnt his seamanship with the Knights of Malta) terrorized the English navy in the Indian Ocean, winning four shattering victories in 1782 alone. Nearer home, the Duc de Crillon captured Minorca again, though the English just managed to hold Gibraltar against a furiously determined siege by the French and the Spaniards. However, a massive invasion of England had to be called off because the crews were found to be scurvy-ridden.

Throughout the war, Necker, horrified at the expense, had been trying to make peace behind Vergennes’s back, but George III’s government refused to do so until France stopped helping the rebels. Most ungratefully, the Americans cynically concluded a separate peace with the English at the end of 1782, obtaining complete independence. None the less, the Treaty of Versailles which France signed with England on 3 September 1783 was ample revenge for the Seven Years War. In the West Indies she regained St Lucia and Tobago, in India most of her trading posts (including Pondicherry), and in Africa Senegal, besides many valuable trading concessions. England was humiliated, losing colonies of far greater worth than any which had been taken from France after the previous war. It was the last great triumph of the French monarchy.

France’s prestige, at its highest for many years, was reflected in diplomacy during the remainder of the 1780s. Already she had prevented war breaking out between Prussia and Austria over Bavaria (in 1779) by tactful mediation. By subsidizing Gustav III, she was able to use Sweden as an instrument for exercising at least some small restraint on Prussian ambitions. In 1786 France signed a commercial treaty with England which lowered tariff walls, while the following year a treaty with Russia opened up hitherto unknown areas of trade. Culturally, the entire Western world was still in thrall to Francomania.

At home, Ernest Semichon claims that during Louis XVI’s reign ‘nearly every political, religious and judicial problem was investigated and in many cases solved’. If exaggerated, this claim is still not entirely without substance. Even Tocqueville admits that, ‘During his entire reign Louis XVI was always talking about reform, and there were few institutions whose destruction he did not contemplate before the Revolution broke out and made an end of them.’ He tried to improve conditions in prisons and hospitals, and ordered free treatment for sufferers from venereal disease. He abolished the death penalty for desertion. It was the King, not Necker, who was responsible for abolishing the ‘Preparatory Question’ (torture by water or the boot to extract a confession after arrest) in 1780, but the Parlements prevented him from abolishing torture before execution. Louis also put an end to serfdom on Crown lands, though it was retained on the estates of the clergy and nobility. As will be seen, he envisaged legal reforms which would have swept away the Parlements.

New canals were dug between the greatest French rivers, while the naval harbour at Cherbourg was protected by an impressive sea wall. A Royal Society of Medicine was founded, together with a Veterinary College and a School of Mines, and the Academy of Sciences was expanded to include agriculture, biology, mechanical sciences and mineralogy. An institution for deaf mutes was established and also an institution for the blind. The world of European science was dominated by such Frenchmen as Lavoisier—‘the father of modern chemistry’—and the agriculturalist Parmentier, who, with the King’s encouragement, popularized the potato. Most dramatic of all, the brothers Montgolfier were making their first ascents in hot air balloons. It was not only for reasons of sycophancy that statues of Louis were erected all over the country with inscriptions like ‘Servitude abolished’, ‘The Navy restored’, and ‘Commerce protected’. If it had not been for ‘the unfortunate reality of the deficit’, as he described the monetary crisis, Louis XVI might have bumbled happily on for the rest of his natural life.

It was a bad time for anyone to be poor. About 1778 France entered into a long depression, both agricultural and industrial. The rural economy, which was in any case backward enough, was severely damaged by a steep decline in grain prices and an even more catastrophic drop in the price of wine; as a result peasants could not make a living from their produce. The repercussions affected the hitherto advancing economy of the towns, where production fell disastrously in such industries as the cloth trade, and many workers were laid off. There was poverty and unemployment throughout the entire country, in painful contrast to the comparative affluence of Louis XV’s reign. All classes found themselves short of money. Unfortunately, the recession coincided with a crisis in the national finances.

Tocqueville was perfectly correct in claiming that ‘France was ruined before she ceased to be victorious’. It has been calculated that the American War may have cost the French government as much as 2,000,000,000 livres (well over £ 80 million). When Necker was dismissed in 1781, he had only avoided state bankruptcy by massive borrowing, and during his last year of office, the annual deficit—the gap between revenue and expenditure—was at least 50 million livres (more than £ 2 million), quite apart from the hundreds of million livres of national debt. But the wily banker had concealed the full horror of the situation by his Compte rendu.

Necker was dismissed largely because old Maurepas had grown jealous of him, and had made the aristocratic party fearful of the half-hearted reforms which the Director of Finances had been trying to introduce. The opposition was led by the Duc d’Orléans, his son Chartres, Monsieur (the Comte de Provence) and the Comte Artois; characteristically, the latter called Necker ‘a fornicating foreign bastard’. As soon as the Director had gone, a number of reactionary measures were brought in—four proofs of nobility (ie to show that all four grandparents had been noble) now became necessary for any candidate for a commission in the army. None the less, Louis insisted that bourgeois sailors should have the chance of becoming naval officers.

Despite Louis’s good intentions, to survive a minister had to keep both the Queen and all the Princes on his side. Maurepas (who died at the end of 1781) understood this very well and would go to almost any lengths to ensure their support. During Marie Antoinette’s first pregnancy, when she was unable to go to a ball and a torchlight charade was staged by the court to divert her, the venerable and all but octogenarian minister—who had been famed even as a young man for his impotence—appeared in pink silk as Cupid.

For Louis, the 1780s were probably the happiest years of his life. In 1777 he had at last consented to the very minor operation which made it possible for him to have normal relations with his wife. On 30 August of that year, Marie Antoinette wrote to her mother, ‘I am so deeply happy … my marriage was perfectly consummated a week ago.’ (The tone of her letter indicates that much of her objectional behaviour hitherto may well have been due to frustration.) Ingenuously, the King told Mesdames Tantes that the physical pleasure was even greater than he had anticipated. Nevertheless, he still did not sleep with the Queen as much as she would have liked, despite her ‘tormenting him to come more often’, and Maria Theresa remained sceptical about any hopes of a pregnancy. However, in December 1778 Marie Antoinette at last gave birth to a child, the Princess Marie Thérèse—Madame Royale. (This grave little girl was later known as Mousseline la sérieuse, on account of her old-fashioned expression.)

Louis was overjoyed, as indeed was the entire country; when the Queen went to Nôtre Dame for her churching, she was cheered by the crowd. An exception to the general rejoicing was Monsieur who, at the christening, asked sourly who was the father. On 21 October 1781 Marie Antoinette had a second child, the Dauphin Louis-Joseph; the King was so overcome that he wept and stammered. Again gossips, led by Monsieur, said that the real father was Artois. It was a delicate creature, tormented by rickets and bone tuberculosis, whose health gave cause for alarm from the very beginning. But another son was born in 1785, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie—the future Louis XVII. There was also a fourth child, the Princess Sophie Béatrice, who did not reach her second year. Now that she had children the Queen led a much quieter life. Despite occasional squabbles, she and the King had always been good friends, and now fell genuinely in love with each other. She too grew fatter, with a bust measurement of forty-four inches (according to her dressmaker’s order book).

Louis was extremely popular, especially with those who came into contact with him. Artois’s Scots gardener, Thomas Blaikie, obviously liked what he saw; ‘The King was dressed almost like a country farmer, a good rough stout man about twenty-five.’ At thirty he was even fatter, as a consequence of hunting a little less and of reading rather more while continuing to indulge his extraordinary appetite. But the French have never blamed anyone for enjoying their food. When he visited the new naval base at Cherbourg in 1785, although the expense of the trip was sharply criticized in Paris, the King had a personal triumph; peasants lined the roads to cheer him as he passed. Louis was noticeably moved, kissing the girls and shouting back, ‘Vive mon bon peuple!’ when the crowd cried ‘Vive le Roi!’ Indeed most Frenchmen still felt an extraordinary reverence for the King—what the normally unsentimental Tocqueville defines as ‘both the natural love of children for their father and the awe properly due to God alone’. Foreigners were astonished by the passionate interest which the French took in the person of their sovereign. The Scot John Moore, who visited France in 1779, noted that Louis’s slightest illness alarmed the entire country: ‘Did he cough?—Yes, by Gad! And strongly—I am in despair.’ This reverence continued right up to the Revolution. His subjects did not blame the deficit and the hard times on the King—it was all the fault of his advisers and that ‘Austrian bitch’ of a wife.

Many years later, the Comte de Hézecques, a royal page from 1786–92, gave a fascinating portrait of the King he had served. ‘When seated on the throne Louis XVI looked well enough, but it has to be confessed that he walked with an unpleasant waddle … He dressed very plainly in grey or brown coats, with a steel or silver sword, though on Sundays and feast days he wore white velvet.’ Hézecques adds, ‘I spent nearly six years at court and I never once saw the King act rudely, even in the slightest way to any one of all his servants.’ He also emphasizes that Louis had no favourites.

The basic ritual of Louis XIV’s court was still observed, with Lever and Coucher, daily Mass and dining in public. Everything that the King ate, even in private or between meals, was tasted by an ‘Officer of the Goblet’ for fear of poison. Hézecques tells us that though only very ancient noblemen bowed to the State Bed when Louis was not in it, even the youngest and most modern courtiers backed to the wall when he approached, shuffling their feet in the hope of attracting their sovereign’s attention. Even those on intimate terms could only address him in the third person: ‘Has the King had good sport today?’ ‘Has the King caught a cold?’

Yet fewer and fewer people bothered to go to court. This was largely the fault of the Queen, who had no use for anybody outside her own set. The Duc de Lévis remembered that, ‘Except for a few favourites, chosen by caprice or intrigue, everyone was shut out; rank, service, interest, high birth, were no longer sufficient to procure admission to the royal family’s circle.’ In consequence many noblemen began to consider presentation at court a waste of time. The Duke tells us that Versailles became ‘no more than a little provincial town which one visited reluctantly and left as quickly as possible’. Even so, the pomp and ceremony remained as splendid as ever—Châteaubriand says that those who did not know Versailles before 1789 have no conception of true magnificence.

According to the Comte de Ségur, by the 1780s, ‘from one end of the kingdom to the other, opposition had become a point of honour.’ Opposition meant different things to different people, even if the vast majority of educated Frenchmen subscribed to the Enlightenment and considered theAncien Régime ruinously inadequate. Noblemen envied the power which the English ruling class had gained after their ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and, for all their love of Rousseau, had little taste for equality. Unfortunately for them, égalité was to be one of the French Revolution’s great slogans; by Louis XVI’s reign the sharp difference which once existed between the classes had been eroded; many an haut bourgeois was infinitely richer and more polished than some titled country booby squire, but the law denied him the status, privileges and opportunities which belonged to nobility alone. There was also the psychological factor, that artificial gap between noble and bourgeois, which gave rise to deep resentment. At the same time, because of the aristocratic counter-revolution, social mobility was far less in the later eighteenth century than it had been during its early years.

The dissatisfied bourgeois—businessmen, doctors, architects, lesser lawyers, minor civil servants and all the other professional people—had small concern for the miserable lot of the peasants. Throughout the countryside, hatred of the nobility was growing. Because of the economic depression, landowners were increasingly short of money in the 1780s and resorted to what has been called ‘the seignorial reaction’; not only were long-forgotten feudal dues exacted once again and the corvée extended, but common land was expropriated. Lawyers busily disinterred old title deeds and terrorized peasants with their documents. In consequence there was a vast increase in the already large numbers of indigent rural poor, while bad harvests drove even the most stolid peasant into a fury of resentment at the lord of the manor’s greed.

Yet, despite all Michelet’s horror-stories about the Bastille, the government was far from harsh. Someone asked the nonagenarian Duc de Richelieu—he did not die until 1788—if life had changed. The Duke replied that under Louis XIV people had not dared to even speak, that under Louis XV they had whispered, and that now they spoke out loud. As Tocqueville points out, Beaumarchais’s brief imprisonment shocked Paris far more than the persecution of the Huguenots in the previous century.

When Louis first read Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro in 1781—he read it aloud to Marie Antoinette—he cried out ‘Detestable’, complaining that, ‘That man makes fun of everything which should be respected’, and forbade the play’s performance. For two years Beaumarchais campaigned to save his play, giving readings and enlisting support from very important personages like Artois. The play tells how a grand seigneur, Count Almaviva, plots the seduction of a servant girl and how her fiancé—his valet, Figaro—joins with the Countess in thwarting the Count’s attempt to revive the droit de seigneur. Throughout, the valet’s superiority over the nobleman is emphasized, and the unfairness of the social order—‘You nobles merely take the trouble to be born’, Figaro tells the Count. Eventually the King gave way to the popular clamour, and the play’s first night on 27 April 1783 was a succès de scandale, cheered to the echo by the glittering audience whom the author ridiculed so subtly; some spectators realized its implications, but the fashionable world ignored them. Beaumarchais at once published a mocking pamphlet, whereupon he was arrested and sent to the St Lazare prison; the public outcry was so enormous that he was released after only twenty-four hours.

Talleyrand’s claim that anyone who had not lived under the Ancien Régime did not know how sweet life could be, has often been questioned. Nevertheless he seems to be born out by Tocqueville. ‘France in those days was a nation of pleasure seekers, all for the joy of life … The upper classes were far more interested in living beautifully than in comfort, in making a name for themselves than in making money.’ It was not only the world of Beaumarchais but of Mozart too, of Gluck and Grétry. Of its popular songs, Plaisir d’Amour, with its bittersweet yet simple elegance, conveys perfectly the spirit of the times. Stateliness went hand in hand with simplicity—at court, French country dances alternated with minuets. The fashionable painters, perhaps a little too relaxed, were Mme Vigée Le Brun, Greuze and ‘L’aimable Frago’ (as Fragonard liked to be called), though Neo-classical giants were emerging—the sensation of the Salon of 1785 was Louis David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’. The period’s delightful furniture was also Neo-classical, made by Reisener, Weisweiller, Molitor, Schichtig, and Jacob. Under the influence of Rousseau, clothes were becoming simpler, though no less elegant; men no longer wore wigs but powdered their hair and often wore riding boots and English hunting coats and breeches. Women tried to look like shepherdesses. Furthermore, the eighteenth century had invented the café and the restaurant—by 1785 there were 600 cafés in Paris alone. Even the life of the poorer classes could be surprisingly gay, to judge from the novels of Restif de la Bretonne, who writes not only of the debaucheries of underworld Paris, but also of the joyous life of the well-to-do peasant household.

In 1783 Yolande de Polignac coaxed Marie Antoinette into persuading the King to appoint Charles-Alexandre de Calonne as Controller-General. He was a most agreeable man in his late forties, handsome, always beautifully dressed and invariably charming, with exquisite taste in pictures (he owned ten Titians), furniture and mistresses: the Duc de Lévis said that he was the only member of the noblesse de la robe who knew how to behave like a gentleman. He had had an impressive career in administration, having been an Intendant for nearly twenty years, and he was hailed as a new Colbert. Calonne always lived above his means and on being appointed he joked, ‘The finances of France are in a deplorable state and I would never have accepted responsibility for them if my own were not in an equally shaky condition.’ His policy was original, to say the least. He believed, ‘A man who wants to borrow must appear to be rich; to seem rich one has to impress by lavish expenditure.’ Calonne had no problems with Marie Antoinette, who was enchanted by him (whatever her loyal Mme de Campan may say to the contrary). When the Queen made one of her demands for an enormous sum of ready cash, he replied, ‘If it is possible, Madame, it is already done; if it is impossible it shall be done.’ He levied no new taxes. His method was the same as Necker’s—simply to borrow.

Yet outside matters of finance, Calonne was surprisingly imaginative. He tried to encourage a French industrial revolution on the English model, and—with Louis’s support—suggested to a number of rich noblemen that they invest in mines and factories. But like his master, the Controller-General had no understanding of the way in which Pitt in England was able to dispose of a national debt far larger than the French deficit, by means of a sinking fund.

Two years after Calonne’s appointment, the monarchy was badly shaken by the comic opera affair of the Queen’s necklace. A seedy young adventuress (and occasional prostitute), the Comtesse de la Motte-Valois, had been ‘befriended’ by the Cardinal de Rohan, Prince-Bishop of the fabulously rich see of Strasbourg and Grand Almoner of France. This ornament of the boudoirs was a handsome, womanizing fop in his forties, straight out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, whose boundless conceit was matched only by his fatuity. His conduct as French ambassador in Vienna had been so scandalous that the Empress Maria Theresa had actually asked for his recall; later, as a friend of Mme du Barry, he had offended the Queen. However, Louis de Rohan had ambitions of becoming a second Richelieu, and was convinced that only Marie Antoinette’s disfavour stood between him and the highest office. Somehow Mme de la Motte persuaded the Cardinal that she had the Queen’s ear; the Countess arranged an ‘interview’, in the park at Versailles on a moonless night, Marie Antoinette being impersonated by a young prostitute from the Palais Royal, dressed in white, who bore a striking resemblance to her and who gave him a rose. Rohan was completely taken in. His pliability was in part due to the influence of the self-styled alchemist, magician and prophet, Count Cagliostro, who had thoroughly bemused this useful patron and had ‘foreseen’ a woman in white transforming the Cardinal’s life.

It was popular gossip that the Queen had been offered a wonderful diamond necklace by her jewellers at an astronomical price. Mme de la Motte informed the Cardinal that the Queen wanted him to buy the necklace for her discreetly—the commission was confirmed by forged letters. With staggering credulity, Rohan fetched the necklace from the jewellers, telling them that they would be paid in due course, and gave it to the Countess to take to Versailles—her husband speedily sold the stones in London. The theft came to light when the jewellers demanded payment from the Queen, and in August 1785 the Cardinal was arrested at Versailles as he was proceeding, vested for Mass, down the Hall of Mirrors to the Chapel Royal.

Next year Mme de la Motte was sentenced to be branded, but Rohan was acquitted by the Parlement of Paris; his acquittal was seen as a slur on the Queen and also as an example of social injustice. Louis, who was furious, banished the Cardinal to the country, thus heaping even more odium on poor Marie Antoinette, who was entirely innocent. (Later Rohan reformed, spending his last years in something very like sanctity.) Popular suspicions about the Queen’s frivolity—and also her spitefulness—deepened. ‘A nice little smear of dirt on both crown and crozier’, commented an ‘Enlightened’ councillor of the Parlement. None the less, the affair helped to forge an alliance between the clergy and the lawyers who had saved the Cardinal. Mme de Campan, a lady-in-waiting whose memoirs are sometimes a little unreliable, spoke the truth when she said that the Affair of the Necklace marked ‘the end of happy times’. Indeed Napoleon actually considered it to be a partial cause of the Revolution.

By 1786 even Calonne had to realize that a policy of pure optimism alone could no longer suffice. There was an annual deficit which he estimated at 112 million livres. He explained to the hapless King, who had no inkling that things were so desperate, that monies borrowed over the last ten years amounted to the then almost incredible sum of 1,250 million livres (well over £ 50 million in English money of the period). But for all his frivolity, the Controller-General could be both clearheaded and courageous. He proposed a programme of radical reform, derived partly from Turgot, which included a land tax from which no one, not even the clergy, would be exempt. Hoping to obtain as much support as possible, he persuaded Louis to call an Assembly of Notables, which met at Versailles in February 1787. It consisted of 144 persons, but had only twenty-seven representatives from the Tiers Etat (or Commons).

Unfortunately, the Notables were already convinced that the deficit was entirely due to the government’s mismanagement and that the solution was to force the King to share his power with the nobility, who would run things properly. Admittedly, of the 400,000 persons of noble birth in France at that time, most were small country gentlemen with minute incomes (in one case as little as £ 26 a year). But they felt as one with Dukes who possessed annual revenues in excess of £ 100,000 in their determination not to pay taxes.

When the Assembly met, the Controller-General addressed it with admirable frankness. Explaining that there was no way of remedying the deficit other than by taxing the privileged orders, he stressed that most of their rights and privileges would be untouched. The Franco-Irish Archbishop Dillon of Narbonne protested, ‘M de Calonne wants to bleed France; and he is asking the Notables’ advice on whether to bleed her in the foot, the arm or the jugular vein.’ The Assembly demanded to see detailed accounts of national expenditure. The debates became bogged down in a welter of recrimination. Calonne, whom overwork had driven to the verge of collapse, forgot his manners for once and told the Notables that the King would introduce the reforms whether they liked them or not. He enraged the Assembly still further by a clumsy attempt to recruit public support, circulating a pamphlet which attacked the privileged orders and their refusal to pay their fair share of taxes; he asked the King to arrest twenty of the more outspoken Notables. Louis thought he had gone mad, lamenting that Vergennes was no longer alive to help him, and he dismissed Calonne at the end of April. Later, when the Notables informed him that the ex-Controller-General had concealed the true magnitude of the deficit, the King smashed a chair in his rage and roared that he should have had him hanged. Nevertheless, when the Parlement attempted to try Calonne, Louis stopped the proceedings. The former minister fled to England, to live in elegant exile.

For a time the King retreated to Versailles. He was so overwhelmed by the problem of the deficit that he spent whole days cursing and weeping. However, the Assembly of Notables was still there, and in a rebellious mood. Eventually Louis chose a new Controller-General. Archbishop Loménie de Brienne was the last ecclesiastical statesman of France. He was a no less colourful figure than Calonne and, like him, had been recommended by the Queen. A true child of the Enlightenment, the Archbishop collected books, works of art and women (he suffered from secondary syphilis). A Deist rather than an atheist, he had no real Christian beliefs and had only entered the Church to restore the fortunes of his ancient but impoverished family.

Although Brienne revised Calonne’s new tax to make it more palatable, his proposals were rejected out of hand by the Notables. He therefore dismissed them and, without much hope, had recourse to the Parlement of Paris, who promptly rejected both a proposed stamp tax and a property tax, and demanded the publication of the national accounts, and—menacingly—the summoning of the States General. In August 1787, perched on the purple velvet cushions of the lit de justice, Louis forced them to register the new taxes, whereupon the Parlementaires declared the taxes illegal; they were banished to Troyes where they continued to demand a States General. The révolte nobilaire dragged on. At one point Philippe d’Orléans told Louis publicly, in his timid, stuttering voice, that he was breaking the law of the land; the Duke was banished to the country, becoming a popular hero. Poor Marie Antoinette, whose extravagances were insignificant compared with those of Orléans, was christened ‘La Reine Déficit’ and hissed at the Opera. In May 1788 Louis XVI copied his grandfather and took away most of the Parlements’ powers, replacing them by forty-seven new courts, together with a plenary court (whose membership was to resemble that of the English House of Lords) for the registration of royal edicts. The King also abolished all remaining use of torture in legal proceedings.

But the deficit remained. Brienne tried desperately to reduce the expenses of the royal household, dismissing half the staff, such as the falconers, selling the wolfhounds and boarhounds, while a number of royal châteaux were sold or demolished to avoid the cost of maintenance, and pensions were slashed. But it was not enough. The Archbishop turned desperately to the Church, as a last resort. In Tocqueville’s view, ‘There has probably never been a clergy more praiseworthy than that of Catholic France just before the Revolution’; but among the few failings which he discerned was ‘an instinctive, sometimes unjustified attachment to the rights of their corporation’. Brienne begged them to pay higher taxes. Their answer was, ‘No, the people of France are not taxable at pleasure.’ The final crisis came in August 1788 when the Archbishop discovered that the treasury was bankrupt. He suspended all payments, raised a little money from floating bonds and appropriated the funds of the Invalides, the Théatre Française and the Opéra. He then resigned, thankfully (for as long as he lived, Brienne could never afterwards speak of his time as Controller-General without shaking).

Meanwhile, the royal authority was breaking down all over France. There had been riots in favour of the Parlements; and very nearly civil war in Grenoble in June, on ‘The Day of the Tiles’, when troops refused to fire on the mob. Louis capitulated. Amid wide rejoicing, he recalled the perennially popular Necker, who swiftly borrowed sufficient funds. The King dissolved the new courts and brought back the Parlements. On 24 September 1788 the Parlement of Paris registered the royal edict that the States General would be summoned in January of the following year.

In every bailiwick and parish solemn little councils met, not only to elect a representative but also to draw up a Cahier des Doléances (List of Grievances). It must be explained that the States General had never been an established legislative assembly; by tradition it was an extraordinary body which the King only summoned in times of crisis or national dissatisfaction. (As recently as the mid-1950s, a large group of French deputies, the Poujadistes, were demanding the calling of a States General.) Its members had always represented the ‘estates’ or classes, rather than the country. Now, however, the Third Estate was determined to speak for the nation as a whole.

The Parlementaires had assumed that the coming assembly would be modelled on that of 1614. But the middle classes insisted furiously that the Tiers Etat must be doubled, to take account of the increased numbers of the bourgeoisie, and that the Three Estates should vote together instead of separately. Their proposals meant that the Tiers Etat would dominate the States General. The Parlementaires rejected these presumptuous demands, and were then amazed to find themselves hooted in the streets—their popularity had vanished overnight. No one had anticipated such a development. Calonne wrote to Louis from London, ‘I was unaware of the degree to which a division had developed between the nobility and the Third Estate in many provinces of the kingdom. I tremble to hear of it.’ Necker supported the Tiers Etat and the King gave way, announcing that their representation would be doubled. Marie Antoinette, who seemed to be learning a little political sense, declared that she was the ‘Queen of the Third Estate’. Alas, Louis’s insistence that the Estates vote separately lost him any support he might have hoped to gain from this concession.

The French Revolution was not a foregone conclusion. It is true, as Tocqueville says, ‘that if it had not taken place the old social structure would still have collapsed everywhere, here sooner, here later, except that it would have continued to crumble piecemeal.’ But by insisting on summoning the States General, the ruling classes had brought about the very thing they had sought to avoid—the loss of their privileges. The Third Estate alone were united, in their determination to secure radical changes; both the clergy and the nobility were divided among themselves; country priests were against the rich prelates, while the little hedge squires from the backwoods resented the great courtier lords and the Parlementaires. The privileged orders had made a revolution of which they were to be the first victims.

The situation was made even more explosive by the economic troubles. For all the new ideas, the country’s economy still depended almost completely on grain production and there was a disastrous harvest in 1788; all the poorer classes, artisans and peasants alike, suffered miserably from a catastrophic rise in the price of bread. The winter of 1788–89 was one of the worst France had ever known. In the countryside brigands roamed unchecked.

Yet in Paris, despite feverish talk of reform and the occasional riot, the atmosphere was one not only of optimism but of gaiety. And the people were as fond of Louis as ever. A German traveller, von Vitzin, who visited France in 1788, wrote that love of monarchy was ingrained in the French—‘the humblest chimney-sweep is enraptured with joy when he sees his sovereign.’ Throughout all the recent storms and troubles Louis had never lost his popularity. In the provinces he was still applauded; at Arras a local notary, M de Robespierre, told people to thank God for their King.

The States General met at Versailles in the Salle des Menus Plaisirs (‘The Hall of Lesser Pleasures’) on the morning of 4 May 1789. In the procession to its opening, the Host was carried before the King, fittingly, for this was to be the last great ceremonial appearance of the most sacred temporal institution in Western Europe. Louis, wearing the purple hat of state, walked under a canopy, followed by the Princes of the Blood. The deputies were led by the 291 members of the First Estate, the clergy, in their robes; after whom walked the 270 deputies of the Second Estate, the nobility, with swords, plumed hats and gold-braided cloaks. The 578 deputies of the Third Estate, the bourgeois, were in ridiculously old-fashioned black suits, a humiliation which made them all the more touchy; at the Mass in the church of Saint-Louis they insisted on occupying the front seats. None the less, a few noblemen had chosen to walk with them, including M d’Orléans and a certain Comte de Mirabeau.

Despite bickering between the three estates, the King was treated with the utmost respect. The hall rang with repeated shouts of ‘Vive le Roi!’ and clapping, even during his address. Surprisingly, Marie Antoinette was also acclaimed with cries of ‘Vive la Reine!’which she acknowledged by curtseying to the assembly—redoubled cheers won another, even deeper curtsey.

However, during these crucial days the King and Queen were overwhelmed by a heart-breaking domestic tragedy. The Dauphin Louis-Joseph had been dying since the last months of 1788; his deformed spine protruded, while one lung had been almost destroyed by tuberculosis—Hézecques tells us that by the beginning of 1789 his face had become distorted with pain. A feverishly precocious child, abnormally intelligent for his years, the Dauphin bore his sufferings with touching bravery; he watched the opening procession of the States General from a balcony, lying on a day-bed. When he died in June 1789, Louis collapsed and was in tears for weeks, while Marie Antoinette’s hair went grey. To observe the customary mourning, the court went to Marly. When some representatives of the Third Estate insisted on seeing him and forced their way in, the King muttered, ‘Is there not a father among them?’

Unfortunately, in his broken mood Louis was easily swayed by Artois, who begged him not to abandon the aristocracy. Unlike Louis XIV, nearly everyone whom Louis XVI knew belonged to the nobility or to the higher clergy; even his servants—at any rate, those with whom he came into contact—were gentlemen. The King was not sufficiently ruthless to throw his entire circle of friends and acquaintances to the wolves. Certainly he wanted the nobility to pay taxes, but he had no wish to ruin them. It never entered his head that the monarchy’s only hope was an alliance with the bourgeoisie.

While Louis was away from Versailles the Third Estate seized the initiative. They proclaimed themselves a national Constituent Assembly and persuaded the clergy to join them. When the Salle des Menus Plaisirs was barred to them on 20 June, they met in a tennis court where they took the famous oath not to disperse until France had a new constitution. The King ordered them to end their Assembly and debate separately. They refused. M de Mirabeau, a dissolute idealist who had the makings of a French Charles James Fox, shouted at the youthful official who brought Louis’s order, ‘Monsieur, go and tell your master that we are here by the will of the people and will only leave at the point of the bayonet!’ Some days later the Assembly was joined by a large group of liberal noblemen led by Orléans, who by now had hopes of succeeding his cousin on the throne. Although advised to break it up with troops, the King muttered weakly, ‘Foutre! If they don’t want to go, leave them alone.’ Necker said that he could see nothing against a national Assembly replacing the States General. However, bewildered and undecided, Louis then ordered up 30,000 troops from the provinces to Paris—mainly regiments of foreign mercenaries. On 11 July he dismissed Necker.

Uproar broke out, culminating three days later in the storming of the Bastille, the French Tower of London. (Ironically, Louis had already approved plans for its demolition.) The triumphant mob rampaged through the streets, joined by mutinous troops. The British ambassador, the cricketer Duke of Dorset, reported to his Secretary of State in London, ‘Thus, my Lord, was accomplished the greatest revolution recorded in history, and, relatively speaking, considering the importance of the results, one which has been achieved with very little bloodshed.’ Henceforward, one can only summarize the progress of the French Revolution, concentrating on the unfortunate Louis whenever his head can be seen in the maelstrom.

On 16 July 1789 Artois, the acknowledged leader of the privileged orders, left France, and many great nobles followed him. Necker was hastily recalled from Brussels. Before the month was over the American ambassador, Gouverneur Morris, was reporting to President Washington that the King had lost all authority. A National Guard was formed to protect the Assembly and placed under the command of that popular idol, the Marquis de Lafayette; they adopted a red, white and blue uniform and cockade—red and blue being the colours of Paris, white the colour of the monarchy. Orléans had himself painted in the new tricolour uniform. On 4 August liberal nobles voted enthusiastically for the abolition of their privileges; fuedalism vanished overnight—in theory at any rate. By 26 August the Constituent Assembly had published its Declaration of the Rights of Man (based on the American Declaration), which a historian has called ‘the death certificate of the Ancien Régime’.

Meanwhile there was uproar in the countryside. Unemployment, the soaring price of bread, and general misery had all contributed to ‘The Great Fear of 1789’, triggered off by rumours that the nobility were about to seize Paris and then subdue the rest of the kingdom with an army of mercenaries; the brigands who already roamed France were regarded as their agents. In July and August mobs of panic-stricken peasants took up scythes and muskets to attack manor houses and abbeys; what they were really after were title deeds to their lands, and everywhere archives went up in flames; often the lord of the manor was forced to sign a document renouncing his dues. The Englishman Arthur Young heard in Besançon at the end of July that, ‘Many châteaux have been burnt, others plundered, the seigneurs hunted down like wild beasts, their wives and daughters ravished …’

Many of the Assembly now considered that the revolution had gone quite far enough. A conservative party of monarchiens emerged, who hoped to give back to the King much of his power and to create a limited monarchy with an upper and lower house on the English model. Unfortunately, this only served to bewilder Louis still more. Marie Antoinette persuaded him to summon the reliable Flanders Regiment to Paris, despite Mirabeau’s warnings. The Parisians, already suspicious that a counter-revolutionary plot was brewing, learnt on 2 October that the day before the King’s Bodyguard had given a dinner party for the officers of the Flanders Regiment, drinking loyal toast after loyal toast and singing emotionally Grétry’s poignant aria, O Richard, O mon Roy, l’univers t’abandonne; the King and Queen had paid a brief visit to the party, where they had been cheered wildly. This news was embellished by tales that the health of the French nobility had been drunk and the tricolour cockade trampled underfoot.

Clamour overwhelmed the capital, fanned by a mad and evil journalist, Marat. It was rumoured that the King was about to seize Paris by force, that he was going to dismiss the Assembly; but it was the news of the banquet itself which enraged the women, for there had been a bread famine for months. On 5 October an armed rabble 5,000 strong—mainly women, and some of them well-to-do bourgeoises—set out from Paris to march the ten miles to Versailles; as they marched through the pouring rain they shouted, ‘Bread! Bread!’ or screamed what they would do to Marie Antoinette—‘We’ll cut off her head … rip her heart out … fry her liver … make her guts into ribbons.’ The popular story that Marie Antoinette, when told of the bread famine, had cruelly said, ‘Let them eat cake!’ shows how deeply she was hated by the people.

At Versailles a delegation was allowed in to see the King. Its spokesman, a seventeen-year-old female art student, Louison Chabry, said simply, ‘Bread, Sire’ and then fainted. When she revived Louis kissed her on both cheeks and promised to do something about the famine. But the mob outside remained, throughout the wet night, despite the fact that the palace was patrolled by Lafayette and his National Guard. Early next morning, in Lafayette’s absence, the crowd managed to break in through an unlocked door, killing and then decapitating two of the Bodyguard. Marie Antoinette barely had time to reach the King’s apartments. Luckily Lafayette arrived and calmed the crowd by promising that Louis would speak to them. The King appeared on the balcony, but was too overwrought to say anything. With remarkable bravery the Queen took his place. The crowd, waving their axes and the heads of guardsmen on pikes, howled in derision, but when Lafayette kissed her hand they began to shout, ‘Vive la Reine!’

They also yelled, ‘To Paris! To Paris!’ The minister for the royal household, M de Saint Priest, advised the King to flee to Rouen and raise an army to restore law and order, but Necker told him that such a step would be tantamount to abdication. Accordingly, Louis appeared on the balcony again and said, ‘Mes enfants, you want me to come with you to Paris. I consent, but only on condition that I shall never be parted from my wife and children.’ He also demanded safe conduct for his Bodyguard. Shortly after midday an extraordinary procession set out for the capital, headed by a gloating, uproarious mob, and including the miserable men of the Flanders Regiment and of the Bodyguard who had all been disarmed and now wore the Revolutionary cockade in their hats. The same day the royal family was installed in the Tuileries, which they found dirty and dilapidated, and with only a few sticks of old-fashioned furniture; the Dauphin was frightened by its gloom.

The Assembly was unwise enough to follow the King to Paris, where it found itself at the mercy of the mob. It decided to change Louis’s title—from being ‘by the grace of God King of France and Navarre’, he became ‘by the grace of God and the constitutional law of the state, King of the French’. Daily, crowds flocked to the Tuileries to see their Parisian King and Queen.

Mirabeau, leader of what were now the moderates in the Assembly, submitted a secret memorandum to Louis urging him to flee to Normandy and from there offer the country a workable democratic constitution. (Louis had made his only clever move during the entire Revolution, by offering to pay Mirabeau’s debts in return for his advice.) But Marie Antoinette did not trust Mirabeau, whose pock-marked face—like a diseased lion—and reputation for vice and atheism obscured his very real patriotism and political genius. In any case, the King was determined not to start a civil war. He had read Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion and it had impressed him deeply—he was convinced that so long as he did not oppose the revolution by force of arms in the way Charles I had done, everything would turn out right. Ironically, he gave it as his opinion that, ‘The Frenchman is incapable of regicide.’ Such beliefs suited his lethargic nature—he had always hated having to make decisions. And to anyone so politically naive as Louis XVI the situation seemed far from hopeless; he remained extremely popular, and medals and statues of him were still being inscribed ‘Restorer of Liberty’. In February 1790, addressing the Assembly, he declared himself to be King of the Revolution.

Indeed, life at the Tuileries, which had been refurnished, was not so very different from what it had been at Versailles. Count Fersen, visiting Marie Antoinette in February 1792, was staggered by the splendour of her apartments. Though Louis was no longer able to hunt, he went riding in the Bois, unescorted and plainly dressed as befitted a citizen King, where he was sometimes cheered by workmen. His new position as a constitutional monarch was curiously modern. Men like the Comte de Narbonne and the Vicomte de Noailles really believed that the new constitution would work—even Louis himself thought so at times.

The King co-operated with the Assembly throughout 1790. On 14 July, the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, there was a great ceremony in the Champs de Mars, which some saw as a revolutionary coronation, a ‘dispelling of Gothick mists’. Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, said Mass (for the last time). Louis made a most successful speech to the huge crowd and then took the Civic Oath: ‘I, the King of the French, do swear and declare that I will use all the powers delegated to me by the constitutional law of the state, to maintain the constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by me.’ Marie Antoinette, watching from a balcony of the Ecole Militaire, lifted up the six-year-old Dauphin to present him to the crowd, who cheered them emotionally. Most people thought that the revolution was over.

Unfortunately, the government, having abolished the traditional taxes, had to look for money elsewhere. On Talleyrand’s advice it seized all church property; henceforward the state would pay the clergy’s stipends. The government insisted that bishops and parish priests must be appointed by the state through the local authorities, and they were now required to swear an oath of obedience to the nation; the vast majority of French churchmen refused to take such an oath, which implicitly denied Papal supremacy, so ‘Down went the old Church of France with all its pomp and wealth’. As a man of rigid religious principles, the King was horrified by the government’s action. He still possessed the veto and refused to accept edicts against non-juring clergy. It was the veto which eventually destroyed him.

The break with Rome did not come until the Pope denounced the oath in April 1791. By then France was hopelessly divided. The lesser nobility, many of whom had been mildly liberal, turned against the Revolution when titles and the traditional law of inheritance were abolished in June 1790. They followed the grands seigneurs into exile, and among them were a large number of army officers and naval men. Many of these émigrés waited in the Rhineland towns just over the frontier, hoping for civil war or armed intervention by the great powers. Marie Antoinette was no longer ‘Madame Déficit’ but ‘Madame Veto’. Frantically she begged her brothers (the Emperors Joseph II, Leopold II and Francis II, who succeeded each other in turn) to invade France and save her. To Artois she wrote despairingly that Louis could not see his danger. At home, the constitutionalists were steadily losing ground to the extremist republicans of the political clubs. In September 1790 even Necker had resigned and fled to Switzerland. The streets rang with that gayest, catchiest and most sinister of all revolutionary songs, Ça Ira. Curiously, it had been composed by Couperin.

Hitherto the King had roundly cursed anyone who spoke to him of flight or of conspiring against the Revolution. But by the autumn of 1790 he had had to realize that in Paris he was a mere prisoner and, after being threatened on a number of occasions, almost at the mercy of the mob. In November he therefore commissioned M de Breteuil to negotiate secretly with foreign courts for help ‘to re-establish my lawful authority and my people’s happiness’. Shortly afterwards, the Assembly bullied him into signing an edict dismissing priests who would not take the oath. Mesdames Tantes, the Princesses Adelaide and Victoire, were sent to take refuge with old Cardinal de Bernis at the French embassy in Rome. Mirabeau, Louis’s one really able adviser, died in March 1791, lamenting that he had unwittingly helped to pull down the monarchy. Paris became more and more suspicious of the King, especially after the flight of his aunts. Jacobin extremists attacked him in the Assembly and in the gutter press. They were not without provocation. Nearly 400 pugnacious noblemen haunted the Tuileries, swaggering and boastful and known as the Chevaliers du Poignard—Knights of the Dagger. Their loose talk gave rise to rumours of conspiracy. One day, when they met at the Palace, they were arrested by a detachment of the National Guard—though only after a pitched battle—and dragged off to prison. Louis was so upset that he took to his bed. His Revolutionary subjects’ worst suspicions were confirmed. At Easter 1791, when the royal family tried to visit Saint-Cloud, they were prevented by a howling mob who seized their horses’ bridles. Louis commented, ‘They want to murder me like Henri IV.’ He realized that he had to get out of Paris at all costs.

The flight to Varennes was one of the worst-organized escape attempts in history. On the night of 20 June 1791 the King disguised in a brown wig, Marie Antoinette swathed in a voluminous black cloak, and the Dauphin dressed as a girl, together with Madame Royale and Louis’s sister Mme Elisabeth, climbed into a small carriage driven by Count Fersen. As soon as they were outside Paris they exchanged it for an enormous green and yellow coach which made disguise superfluous—it even had the royal arms on the door. Most unfortunately, one of the detachments of loyal Hussars who were supposed to meet them en route, failed to make contact. At Varennes the Dragoons were waiting for them on the wrong side of the river. When they arrived there at midnight, the royal family were met by some Hussars, but too few of them. Suddenly the entire party was surrounded by a large and excited detachment of National Guardsmen. Louis, with his almost superstitious dread of shedding French blood, ordered the Hussars not to resist.

The coach and its dejected occupants were driven back to the capital, a melancholy and terrifying journey which took nearly four days, during which they were frequently stoned. When they reached Paris they drove to the Tuileries through silent crowds—placards warned, ‘Whoever cheers the King will be flogged: Whoever boos him will be hanged.’ Soldiers reversed arms as though at a funeral parade. The National Assembly suspended Louis until a committee of investigation reported diplomatically that he had been kidnapped and was therefore innocent. But as Gouverneur Morris, a good friend to the monarchy, reported to President Washington, ‘It would not be surprising if such a dolt as this were to lose his throne.’ Even though the Assembly resisted an outcry for his deposition from Jacobins like Danton and Robespierre, the King was doomed. He had lost his last asset, his popularity.

Even now, however, his situation seemed far from desperate. In July a great anti-monarchist demonstration in the Champs de Mars was broken up by the National Guard, who opened fire and killed over sixty demonstrators; many Jacobin extremists went into hiding, Danton actually fleeing across the Channel. On 3 September 1791 the Constituent Assembly completed its work and introduced a definitive Constitution. The King retained his functions, but had to swear yet another oath, pledging his loyalty to all the provisions of the new Constitution. He did so publicly before the Assembly, with considerable aplomb; while he was taking the oath the Deputies rudely sat down, whereupon Louis sat down himself and continued. In private he was miserably dejected and wept, groaning, ‘It’s all over.’ Marie Antoinette was furious with him. Reading his speech, which had been carefully prepared for him by the Assembly, she cried angrily, ‘That’s hardly the speech of a King deeply resentful of his ill treatment!’ Louis simply shrugged his shoulders. But Paris was en fête—for a second time people thought that the Revolution was over. Poor simple Marie de Lamballe came home to her beloved Queen.

The Constituent Assembly had naively forbidden the reelection of any of its members. As a result, the new Legislative Assembly was far more to the left, though a minority were still convinced supporters of Louis XVI. At once egalitarian debates began as to whether he should still be addressed as Sire and Majesty. Emperor Leopold II and King Frederick William of Prussia had issued a declaration, in August, that it was in the interests of every European sovereign that the King of France should recover all his powers. In November 1791, at the Assembly’s prompting, Louis issued a declaration to the effect that France was ready to fight in defence of its new constitution and laws; he also asked his fellow sovereigns to withdraw their troops from the French borders. In addition, he issued an open letter to his brother Artois, who was busy organizing an émigré army, inviting him to come home. On 20 April 1792 the King went to the Legislative Assembly and asked it to declare war on the new Emperor, Francis II.

Quite rightly, many people suspected Louis of playing a double game. Both he and the Queen believed that a war would be their salvation—6,000 out of 9,000 army officers had left the country and it was reasonable to assume that an undisciplined rabble would be speedily defeated. In fact, his open letter to his brother was a calculated lie—for many months he had been sending money to the émigrés, and to Artois in particular. He had already vetoed laws against them (to confiscate their property and make them liable to the death penalty if ever they returned to France), despite the Assembly’s remonstrances. Ironically, he was now behaving exactly like his bête noire, Charles I, negotiating with both sides.

To begin with, the war went badly for France. A French attack in the Low Countries failed disastrously, largely because the men did not trust their officers. At home the new paper currency of assignats collapsed, resulting in savage inflation and food riots. In the panic, the Assembly began to lose control—on 20 June it was invaded by a savage mob who ordered the deputies to force Louis to sign an edict deporting priests who would not take the oath, and which he had been resisting for over a month.

At the same time, an enraged rabble stormed its way into the Tuileries to force the King to sign the edict. They made him don the red cap of Liberty—they tried to put one on Marie Antoinette but she promptly placed it on the Dauphin. Threatened with a bayonet, the King invited a soldier to feel his heart ‘to see if I’m afraid’. He cheerfully drank from a bottle offered to him, and then appeared on the balcony, wearing his cap; but he none the less remained firm in his refusal to sign the edict. A young gunner officer who was watching outside asked a friend, ‘Why on earth did they let in that scum? If a few hundred had been mown down by cannon, the others would still be running.’ The officer’s name was Captain Bonaparte. Nevertheless, the King’s coolness and amiability impressed the mob, who withdrew, and aroused a certain admiration in most spectators. Moderate men were indignant and Lafayette prepared a counter-attack on the political clubs who had arranged the demonstration, but his plans were deliberately betrayed to the Mayor of Paris on the orders of Marie Antoinette, whose personal dislikes always overruled her judgement. By now the royal palace of the Tuileries had an atmosphere ‘like that of a wrecked ship in a storm’.

On 26 July the Duke of Brunswick, the general commanding the Prussian army, issued a proclamation which threatened that, if the Royal Family were harmed, Paris would be sacked and its inhabitants placed before firing squads; the Duke also announced that he was going to restore Louis XVI to his rightful powers. The French went almost mad with rage. Even moderates began to accuse the King of conspiring with the enemy—with justification Marie Antoinette was suspected of being an Austrian spy who was sending information to her brother the Emperor. The Assembly was inundated with letters and petitions demanding Louis’s deposition.

The Paris Commune, which was now controlled by extremists, carefully organized a final assault on the Tuileries, arming the mob from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and reinforcing it with like-minded National Guardsmen. In the early hours of 10 August they took up their position on the Place du Carrousel, in front of the palace, to the sound of ceaseless drum rolls and accompanied by twelve cannon. The Tuileries were defended by 900 red-coated Swiss Guards, 2,500 National Guardsmen, and 200 noblemen (including gallant old Malesherbes, well over seventy, who had brought his court sword). Unfortunately there was no one to lead them, as the National Guard officer commanding the palace had been lured away and murdered. Louis, as heedless of reality as ever, took a morning stroll in the garden, driving the mob outside the railings into a frenzy. The gates collapsed and the rabble swept in. But the King had already left, just in time, although the Queen wanted him to stay and die—he hoped to defuse the situation by taking refuge at the Manège (the royal riding school) where the Assembly were sitting. Unfortunately he forgot to tell the Swiss to withdraw. They and the armed gentlemen fired steadily into the mob until the courtyard was heaped with dead and dying sans-culottes. The mob had been all but beaten off when a message arrived from Louis ordering the Swiss to lay down their arms; they obeyed, whereupon they were hacked and clubbed to death, their severed heads being thrown into the air to be caught on pike points—over 800 died. Years afterwards Napoleon, who was not exactly a stranger to bloodshed, said that he had never seen such carnage. A few Swiss got away through the gardens, while many of the nobles—including Malesherbes—escaped through secret passages.

After a miserably uncomfortable confinement in the minute writers’ gallery at the Manège, the royal family were temporarily imprisoned in the former monastery of the Feuillants nearby. Louis had been quickly suspended from his functions by the Assembly, whose members were terrified by the mob outside howling ‘Down with the tyrant!’ Finally, the royal family were sent to the grim Tower of the Temple, a thirteenth-century building which until recently had been the headquarters of the Knights of Malta (it had been built by the Knights Templar). The prisoners’ quarters were on two floors, dungeonlike rooms which they found in a filthy, verminous condition and almost without furniture. Louis’s only comment was to remove a pornographic picture hanging on the wall, muttering, ‘I can’t allow such things to be seen by my daughter.’ Soon, however, the rooms were swept out and furnished, humbly but adequately. A single servant, Cléry, the King’s valet, waited on them. The Queen, Mme Elisabeth, the Dauphin and Madame Royale slept on the lower floor, Louis on the floor above. They met at breakfast, in the King’s room which served as a sitting-room, and spent the day together. In the morning Louis, Marie Antoinette and Mme Elisabeth gave lessons to the children—Latin, history, geography and arithmetic—and at one o’clock went for a walk in the grounds before lunching at two. The King slept afterwards and then there was reading aloud. Mme Elisabeth mended their clothes. The food and wine seem to have been excellent and the archivist’s fine library was available—after saying goodnight to his family at nine, Louis always read till midnight. The most unpleasant feature were the guards, two of whom were always in the sitting-room in case of any attempt at escape or to communicate with the outside world.

Outside, the terrified Assembly had dissolved itself and had been succeeded by the Convention, who proclaimed a republic and set about concocting yet another constitution. The Revolution was fighting for its life. Brunswick, having taken Longwy and Verdun, marched on Paris. On 20 November he was halted at Valmy by devastating fire from the French artillery (which was commanded by pre-1789 officers); to the amazement of all Europe, Brunswick withdrew and then began a general retreat. Goethe, who was a spectator at the ‘Cannonade of Valmy’, prophesied that a new era of history had begun. Meanwhile, in Paris the extremists, determined to cow any opposition, had instigated the dreadful ‘September Massacres’, butchering more than 1,200 prisoners in the Paris jails. Although the royal family had no means of knowing what was happening, they were sometimes stoned and screamed at during their walks. One day a mob paraded outside, waving a pike bearing a beautiful blonde head which the Queen suddenly realized was that of her faithful friend, Marie de Lamballe; the sans-culottes tried to storm the Temple but were stopped by an official; a deputation was allowed in, one of them holding a piece of bleeding flesh which he claimed was the heart of Mme de Lamballe—Marie Antoinette fainted. The guards were increasingly insolent, addressing Louis as ‘Capet’. One took particular pleasure in blowing tobacco smoke into the King’s face. Some drew cartoons on the walls, of their prisoners hanging from gibbets—inscribed ‘Louis taking an air bath’ or ‘Marie Antoinette dances’. But others were impressed by the King’s dignity and simplicity—one remarked, ‘A man who loves his children like that cannot have done all the evil that they say.’

The extremists demanded that ‘Citizen Capet’ be tried. Probably a majority of the Convention was against it. But on 20 November François Gamain, the locksmith who had once been a pampered favourite of the King’s, showed the authorities a secret iron safe which he had built for him at the Tuileries; it was opened and found to contain hundreds of documents which revealed that Louis had been subsidizing émigrés and begging foreign powers to invade France and save him. On 11 December he was summoned before the Convention to be accused of treason. His appearance was not helped by his being unshaven (his razors had been confiscated), yet although stripped of the trappings of royalty, his dignity was overwhelming—even Marat observed, ‘If he were not a King I would have said that he was a great man.’ Everyone present was haunted by the recollection of Charles I’s trial. Louis denied all charges and was allowed to choose counsel to defend him. The seventy-two-year-old Malesherbes came to the Temple and requested the honour. The King, in tears, embraced him but warned him that he was risking his neck. ‘Yours is a far greater sacrifice, because you are putting your own life in danger when you cannot even save mine.’ Louis had no doubt as to the verdict and made his will. During his trial he was not allowed to see his family—for Louis an almost unbearable hardship.

The Jacobins, whipped up by Marat, bullied the Convention into deciding both guilt and sentence by a public vote. The Girondins, republicans but not murderers, tried to save the King by vainly demanding a referendum—it was refused, as the extremists knew that the country would acquit him. Tom Paine, the English revolutionary, proposed that the King be exiled to America. But fanatics howled for Louis’s head, referring to him as ‘that fat pig who cost us so much’ or ‘the snoring rhinoceros’. Yet even the most savage Jacobin was shocked by the behaviour of Orléans—now known as Citizen Philippe Egalité—who voted for his cousin’s death (probably, like many others, he did so to save his own life). However, although a large majority found Louis guilty of conspiring against the state, a much smaller majority voted for execution—a single vote less, and he would have been saved. Malesherbes brought the verdict to Louis, falling at his feet. After comforting Malesherbes, the King told his valet to fetch a volume of history containing an account of the execution of Charles I. What hurt the simple creature most was that Orléans had voted for his death. The order for Capet’s execution was issued on 19 January. Even the ferocious Carnot, the architect of the republic’s victories, wept when he signed the death-warrant.

On Sunday 20 January 1793 a deputation called at the Temple to inform the King that he was to be executed within twenty-four hours. They refused his request for the sentence to be deferred for three days so that he could prepare his soul, but agreed to send him a non-juring priest. After a last evening with his family, he said goodbye. Marie Antoinette wanted to spend the night with him but he refused, promising to see everyone in the morning. They all insisted, ‘You promise!’ ‘Yes, I promise.’ The priest, the Franco-Irish Abbé Edgeworth, had supper with Louis who ate an excellent meal and then slept soundly.

Drums and trumpets sounded continuously throughout Paris from five am. The King’s first words on waking were to ask Cléry to draw the curtains. ‘I need daylight—yesterday’s business tired me.’ After having his hair dressed so that his neck would be ready for the guillotine, Louis heard Mass and communicated. Making what possessions remained to him into small parcels, and asking Cléry to give his wedding-ring to Marie Antoinette, he told the valet, ‘Tell the Queen, and my dear sister and my beloved children that I beg their pardon for not having allowed them to come upstairs—I wanted to spare them the pain of a cruel parting.’ At eight-thirty am Louis, wearing a black cocked hat and a brown overcoat, and the Abbé Edgeworth were driven in the Mayor of Paris’s carriage to the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde). The square was packed with 20,000 troops, though the streets were deserted. On the way, the King read the Psalms from Edgeworth’s breviary. When they arrived drums rolled, and as he climbed the steps of the scaffold the King shouted to the drummers, ‘Keep quiet!’—they ceased. He loosened his shirt, taking off his cravat with an almost unnatural calm. He demurred a little when the executioners wanted to tie his hands, but then agreed. As he was about to lie on the board beneath the knife he cried, ‘Frenchmen, I die innocent!’ The drums began to roll. His last words were, ‘May my blood strengthen the happiness of the Fr …’ As the knife fell, the Abbé Edgeworth prayed aloud, ‘Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven.’

However weak and indecisive Louis XVI may have been, no more honourable or decent man ever sat upon a throne. He could have escaped his fate many times over, if he had not been so determined to avoid shedding his people’s blood. Ernest Renan saw his killing as self-murder, ‘the suicide of France’.