CHAPTER 14
Ireign in Paris,” Lafayette wrote on the night of July 16, “and it is over an infuriated people driven by abominable cabals.” Casting himself as a calming influence, he explained that he was all but trapped in Paris, held hostage by his own success. “The people, in the delirium of their enthusiasm, can be tempered only by me,” he wrote. “Forty thousand souls gather, the fermentation is at its height, I appear, and one word from me disperses them. I have already saved the lives of six people who would have been hanged in various quarters.” He insisted, however, that his was not a position to be envied. Although he yearned to go to Versailles, where he hoped that he might persuade Louis XVI to hasten the promised removal of troops, “the well-being of Paris,” Lafayette reported, “demands that I not remove myself for a moment. As I write, eighty thousand people surround the Hôtel de Ville and say that they are deceived, that the troops are not withdrawing, that the king must come. Even at this moment, they issue terrible cries. If I were to appear, they would calm themselves; but others will replace them.”
Versailles, too, was astir that night. The Comte d’Artois, the Du- chesse de Polignac, and a half dozen more of the queen’s closest allies were preparing for a timely departure into exile. As the foreign troops dismissed by the king were making their way out of France, Artois and his circle took advantage of the military cover and traveled with the soldiers into more hospitable climes. Marie Antoinette, hoping that the royal family would join the exodus, was making her own preparations. By nightfall, the queen had arranged for all of her matching sets of diamond earrings and necklaces to be packed carefully into a single coffer for safe transport in her personal carriage. Assisted by Madame Campan, a lady-in-waiting, the queen set fire to a stash of papers lest they be seized in her absence; their contents have been lost to history. But Louis, convinced that he could win the people back, was determined to stay. Marie Antoinette was reduced to tears. And the diamonds would have to be unpacked.
As morning arrived on July 17, Louis XVI prepared to humble himself before the crowds of Paris. Accompanied by a handful of his remaining allies, the dispirited king climbed into a waiting carriage, passed through the palace gates, and set out along the Avenue de Paris, where expectant onlookers witnessed a sight unthinkable just a few weeks earlier. The customary royal entourage had dwindled to a skeleton crew; the king’s chief escorts consisted of the newly assembled citizens’ militia of Versailles, whose ranks were fleshed out by hundreds of the National Assembly’s deputies joining the procession on foot. To the eyes of the disapproving Marquis de Ferrières, the troupe looked more like a gang of vagabonds than the retinue of a great monarch. Yet such were the supporting players with whom Louis reached the southwestern edge of Paris, near Sèvres, around three in the afternoon. There, speeches by various officials welcomed the sovereign to his city, with the best-remembered passage coming from the mouth of the mayor, Bailly. “I bring your Majesty the keys to the good city of Paris,” he began. “These are the same keys that were presented to Henri IV. He had regained his people; here it is the people who have regained their king.” When the pleasantries concluded, the Versailles militia withdrew, and Louis XVI was then in the hands of Lafayette.
For the next ninety minutes, two royal carriages, hundreds of the nation’s deputies, and scores of city leaders followed behind Lafayette, who led the way on a white horse, surrounded by his aides-de-camp. Although planned in haste, the convoy was orderly, making its way through streets lined with tens of thousands of Parisian citizen soldiers, who stood six deep, from the city limit to the Hôtel de Ville—a route spanning more than three and a half miles. Unified by their red-and-blue cockades, this ragtag lot of men, women, and children made up in zeal what they lacked in refinement. Those who had gotten to the armaments carried muskets seized from the Bastille and the Invalides, while others equipped themselves with anything that might serve the purpose. Jefferson spotted not only pistols and swords but also “pikes, pruning hooks, scythes, etc.” carried by the crowd that day. “Vive la nation!” was the cry shouted from doors, windows, balconies, and rooftops along the route. The king had come to Paris of his own volition, but as Jefferson poignantly observed, “not a single ‘Vive le roi’ was heard.”
At four-thirty, the procession came to a halt at the Hôtel de Ville. A pulsing, cheering crowd surrounded the building, while an honor guard, épées unsheathed, awaited the king at the entrance. Making his way up the steps, Louis was startled to hear the loud clang of metal on metal as a ceremonial arch of swords went up over his head. By the time he took his seat on the throne that had been placed in the electors’ meeting hall, he was a badly shaken man.
Bailly approached, carrying in his hand a bouquet of red and blue ribbons. He hoped the monarch would join with the people in wearing the colors of Paris. Silently, Louis accepted the cockade and affixed it to his hat. At last the crowd erupted: “Vive le roi!” An address was expected, but the king was unable to stir his voice. Pressed by Bailly, he issued a few halting words audible only to the mayor, who repeated them at greater volume (and perhaps with a measure of embellishment) for the sake of the eager audience. The king, declared Bailly, loved his people and wished only for calm.
Lafayette, too, was silent, but his actions spoke louder than words. For him, the day had been an unmitigated success, and he later said as much to Morris, who watched the spectacle unfold from a well-placed window on the Rue Saint-Honoré—a plum location secured through the good graces of the Comtesse de Flahaut. It seems that Morris had hoped to arrange a government appointment for Lafayette as governor of the Île-de-France—the region that includes Paris—but the marquis had refused, declaring the command of the militia to be “the utmost of his Wishes.” No civilian post could possibly have compared. As Morris recalled Lafayette’s proud narration of the day’s events, “He had his Sovereign during the late Procession to Paris completely within his Power. He had marched him where he pleased, measured out the Degree of Applause he should receive as he pleased, and if he pleased could have detained him Prisoner.” Even Morris, who frequently questioned Lafayette’s grasp of political nuance, had to concede that “all this is strictly true.”
As Lafayette saw it, the king had “turned himself over as my prisoner” on that July day. Writing just a few weeks later, he remembered being moved by what he saw as the monarch’s humility. It had, Lafayette wrote, “attached me to his service more fully than if he had promised me half of his kingdom.” Still, Lafayette expected more from Louis, and he intended to get it: “If the king refuses the constitution, I will fight him. If he accepts it, I will defend him.”
Lafayette was well prepared to fight the king on almost any front—militarily with support from the National Guard, legislatively through his influence in the National Assembly, and rhetorically in the court of public opinion, thanks to allies in the press who became increasingly active in the wake of the Bastille’s fall. Le Patriote français, one of the new breed of explicitly political newspapers that emerged in 1789, was founded by Lafayette’s abolitionist colleague Jacques-Pierre Brissot and was particularly avid in its support of the forward-looking marquis. Brissot had been inspired by the free press he’d encountered during his 1788 visit to the United States, and his paper’s prospectus asserted that “without the Gazettes, the American Revolution, in which France played such a glorious role, could never have been achieved.” His explicit intent was to make the Patriote français into a vehicle for promoting sweeping reform in France. And as soon as Brissot began publishing on a daily basis, praise of Lafayette’s plans and speeches became a standard part of his paper’s fare.
Lafayette was a formidable rival to the weakened monarch, but his power soon faltered on the streets of Paris. Although the National Guard was charged with keeping the peace, Lafayette could not deploy the militia against the people in time of crisis without losing his credibility—and possibly his life. The predicament weighed on Lafayette. He alluded to it on July 16 when, in a fit of frustration, he wrote, presumably to Madame de Simiane, that “this furious, drunken populace will not always listen to me.” On the fateful date of July 22, he came face-to-face with the limits of his authority at a meeting that turned very ugly indeed.
Joseph-François Foulon de Doué understood that his life was in danger. The seventy-four-year-old financier had been named comptroller general of finances after Necker’s July 11 exile, only to be dismissed eight days later when the king announced Necker’s recall to France. Foulon was no friend of the general population. According to the weekly Révolutions de Paris—a paper that published its first issue on July 12—Foulon appeared to have profited at the expense of the nation, amassing “a stunning fortune” through “odious speculation” on the grain market. Worse still, he had reportedly scoffed at the starvation of the people, directing those afflicted by famine to sate themselves on hay. (The oft-repeated but almost certainly apocryphal story that Marie Antoinette, upon learning that the people lacked bread, exclaimed, “Let them eat cake!” may have originated as a variation on the Foulon story.) In a macabre episode that was later adapted by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, Foulon planted rumors of his own demise, going so far as to fake his own funeral by burying a conveniently deceased servant in his stead. Dead in name only, Foulon quietly stole out of Paris with the probable intention of fleeing the country; he was apprehended by villagers in the town of Viry, having hidden himself at the home of a friend. It was said that one of the widely despised moneyman’s own tenants had turned him in.
At five o’clock in the morning on July 22, a motley crowd deposited Foulon at the Paris Hôtel de Ville. Neither Lafayette nor Bailly was present, but the electors on site determined that Foulon, who had not been officially charged with any crime, should be imprisoned in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, located about a mile away, on the Left Bank, where he could later be turned over to the appropriate legal authorities. But with calls for Foulon’s death already being voiced, a transfer in broad daylight seemed too dangerous. Foulon would therefore remain in protective custody at the Hôtel de Ville until after dark, when the move could be effected surreptitiously. That, at least, was the plan. As news of Foulon’s whereabouts spread throughout the city, throngs of people flocked to the Place de Grève clamoring for instant gratification. “Hang him!” the crowd implored Bailly, as he desperately attempted to assure them that Foulon would be brought to justice after proper procedures had been followed.
Lafayette arrived in the midafternoon. By then, a crush of people had stormed the Hôtel de Ville, forcing their way through the courtyard, past barriers and guards, up the stairs, and into the assembly hall. There, Lafayette found a makeshift tribunal—having lost control of the situation, electors had been ordered by the crowd to judge the prisoner—that was doing its best to forestall a lynching. The room fell silent as Lafayette issued a personal plea. Noting that the people of France knew him well and had named him their general, he declared that his position “obliges me to speak to you with the liberty and frankness that form the basis of my character. You want to execute without trial this man before you: it is an injustice that would dishonor you, that would dishonor me, that would dishonor all the efforts I have made on behalf of liberty if I were to be weak enough to permit it; I will not permit it.” Lafayette insisted that he did not wish to defend Foulon. He wished “only that the law be respected, the law without which there is no liberty, the law without which I would not have contributed to the revolution of the New World and without which I will not contribute to the Revolution in progress.” As the Journal de Paris reported, Lafayette’s was a speech of rare eloquence. The paper praised “the justice of the ideas, the grace of the expressions, the truth of the movements.” Lafayette concluded by ordering that Foulon be conducted to the prison at the Abbey of Saint-Germain. Unfortunately, the words of the “orator hero” could not be heard above the din on the Place de Grève, and thus “served only to prove his talents.”
A grand commotion ensued. Bailly wrote that “impatience began to turn into fury, violent clamors arose on the Place; cries announced that the Palais-Royal and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine”—neighborhoods that had become synonymous with revolutionary agitation—“were coming to take the prisoner.” A wave of people surged toward the desk, and then toward the chair in which the captive was seated. Foulon was lost. Whisked across the room, down the stairs, and out the door, he was hanged from a lamppost on the Place de Grève—a plaza that had served for centuries as the site of some of France’s most gruesome public executions. But Foulon’s ordeal was not yet over. According to the Révolutions de Paris, no sooner had Foulon been hoisted aloft than the rope broke, sending him crashing to the ground. Instantly “it was reattached, a thousand hands, a thousand arms occupied themselves with his torture: soon, he was no more.” Foulon’s bloody head was impaled on a pike, a pitchfork full of hay stuffed into the open mouth as a reminder of the hated man’s contempt for the starving.
In a gruesome spectacle of a type that was becoming all too familiar, the severed head was carried through the streets. By sheer happenstance, Foulon’s son-in-law Louis-Bénigne-François Berthier de Sauvigny, formerly the royal intendant of Paris, had been taken prisoner in Picardy on suspicion of keeping grain from reaching Paris in order to drive up the price of wheat. Berthier was being transported through Paris in an open cabriolet escorted by 500 armed cavalry when it was spotted by celebrants rallying beneath Foulon’s hay-filled head near the Hôtel de Ville. “Kiss Papa!” cried the crowd, as the bearer of the gory standard waved his trophy in Berthier’s face. So grisly was the scene that a drawing of it was omitted from the series of prints published in multiple editions between 1791 and 1817 under the title Tableaux de la Révolution française. In its place, the Tableaux offered a more decorous, bird’s-eye view of the Place de Grève with Foulon’s unfolding ordeal barely discernible in the far distance. The Révolutions de Paris had no such qualms. It included an engraving of the unwelcome family reunion, noting in the caption that Berthier had inevitably suffered the same fate as his father-in-law.
Jean-Louis Prieur’s drawing Foulon’s Head Shown to Berthier, rejected from the Tableaux de la Révolution française in favor of a less grisly view of the same episode. (illustration credit 14.1)
Lafayette was profoundly unsettled. Just over one year earlier he had lamented the lassitude of his countrymen in a letter to Washington. The French, he had written, could not be roused to extremes. “Passive discontent” was the strongest response he had envisioned. Now he was obliged to look on in horror as men were murdered in the streets. The following day, he submitted his resignation, explaining in a letter to Bailly that “the people did not heed my advice; and the day I lack the confidence they promised me I must, as I said in advance, leave a position in which I can no longer be useful.” The resignation was refused. Emissaries from the sixty districts of Paris flocked to Lafayette, beseeching him to remain in his post. Once more, his election was affirmed by general acclaim. On July 24, he wrote to a confidant. “What to do? I am in despair … I cannot abandon the citizens who place all of their confidence in me, and if I remain, I am in the terrible situation of witnessing evil without remedying it.” In the end, he kept his commission, reasoning that if he could not rein in the violence, no one could.
The murders of Foulon and Berthier were still fresh in the collective mind of the deputies to the National Assembly on August 4, 1789, when they voted to alter the French power structure so fundamentally that the date has gone down in history as “the night the Old Regime ended.” In a single marathon session that ran from six in the evening until two in the morning, the nation’s representatives passed sweeping resolutions abolishing a host of feudal privileges that had endured for centuries. Lafayette was not at the assembly that night, but two men in his circle, the Vicomte de Noailles and the Duc d’Aiguillon, were among the most vocal advocates for reform, which they cast as the surest way to quiet the uprisings that had by then spread beyond Paris and were stirring up the countryside. Reading from prepared texts, they argued that the people had every reason to agitate for changes to a system that was inherently unjust and out of step with Enlightenment values.
Before the night was over, more than a dozen men—nobles, clergymen, and commoners alike—had highlighted injustices in need of redress. The Vicomte de Beauharnais proposed that “all ecclesiastical, civil, and military posts” should be open to “all classes of citizens” and that criminals should expect “equality of punishment” regardless of social status. The bishop of Chartres condemned the exclusive hunting rights enjoyed by the landed estates as “a curse” on rural areas that had been “battered by the elements for more than a year”; with so little nourishment available, “humanity and justice” demanded that peasants be permitted to hunt for food. Throwing itself into a frenzy of reform, the assembly approved all of these motions. It also voted to eliminate serfdom, to strip the nobility of its right to impose local taxes, to end the practice of purchasing military offices, and much else. Even the profoundly conservative Marquis de Ferrières assented to the changes, evidently out of fear. “It would have been useless, even dangerous,” he explained to a friend, the Chevalier de Rabreuil, on August 7, “to oppose the general will of the nation. It would have designated you, you and your possessions, as victims of the furor of the multitude.”
The significance of August 4 was lost on no one. Before adjourning, the deputies commissioned a commemorative medal immortalizing the date and arranged for a Te Deum to be sung. A deputation was dispatched to the royal chambers to share the news and to hail Louis XVI as the “Restorer of French liberty.” At this early moment in the French Revolution, Louis was still widely seen as a benevolent monarch whose sanctioning of reforms had earned him the gratitude of his people. The hopefulness of that day proved to be short-lived, but it was felt deeply and celebrated widely.
In Paris, Lafayette’s allies in the press ensured that he, too, would be lauded for his role in bringing about the nation’s transformation. Although Lafayette had not been among the deputies who passed the historic legislation, cadre of journalists, artists, and printers reminded the public that his Declaration of the Rights of Man and his leadership after the fall of the Bastille had helped make the change possible. For instance, one triumphant hand-colored print, probably published shortly after August 4, bears the caption “The French nation aided by Lafayette defeats the despotism and feudal abuses that oppressed the people.” Seen from a low vantage point, two monumental standing figures tower over their surroundings. Lafayette appears at the right, dressed in theuniform of a militia commander with the sword of authority raised high above his head and the National Guard arrayed behind him, the tricolor flag rising up from a collection of bayonets. Idealizing Lafayette’s appearance, the image depicts his tall, slender body positioned in a balletic stance, striking a graceful pose befitting his status. He is not an aggressor but, rather, a well-bred partner who gently holds the outstretched left hand of an allegorical female figure of uncommon strength. Dressed in red and blue, the colors of Paris, this handsome woman sports the helmet and sandals of Athena (the ancient goddess of war and wisdom), clutches in her right hand a sheaf of lightning bolts—the favored weapon of Zeus himself—and wears around her shoulders a blue robe dotted with golden insignia, evoking the traditional regalia of the king of France. The bulging muscles of her exposed calves and the hideous writhing of the winged, humanoid monster trapped beneath her firmly planted right foot attest that her might is not merely a costume. With Lafayette’s assistance, the image suggests, the French nation is all powerful—a pleasant interpretation of events but, unfortunately, not an accurate one.
Through the late summer and early fall of 1789, fiscal and political reform ground to a halt in Versailles while hunger and anger reached new heights in Paris. Although the National Assembly approved a final version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man on August 26, October arrived without the king signing off on it; Louis also neglected to sanction the abolition of feudal privileges approved by the deputies on August 4. As the nation despaired, unscrupulous individuals from every walk of life tried to turn the crisis to their own benefit. With flour scarce and bread prohibitively expensive, the Parisian bakers’ guild, angered by the city’s imprisonment of one of its members, threatened to go on strike if he was not released. Gouverneur Morris, who was considering going into the business of supplying Paris with flour and other foodstuffs, suspected municipal officials of “casting about for the Ways and Means to make Money out of the present Distress.” Worst of all, Morris heard rumors that the Duc d’Orléans was fomenting agitation in the streets, the press, and the assembly, “plunging himself into Debts and Difficulties to support the present factious Temper”—hoping to seize power from Lafayette, Louis, and anyone else who might be toppled in the process. As Lafayette put it in a late August letter, “All hell has conspired against us.”
The French Nation Helped by Mr de la Fayette Stops the Despotism and Abuses of the Feudal King Who Oppresses His People. Engraving. 1791. (illustration credit 14.2)
On October 2—a “rainy disagreeable Day” in Paris—Morris felt that it was time to have a heart-to-heart talk with the overmatched marquis. After dinner at the Rue de Bourbon, Morris took Lafayette aside to warn him that he was losing control of the National Guard and, by extension, the city. Believing danger to be imminent, Morris urged that Lafayette “immediately discipline his Troops and make himself obeyed,” emphasizing “that this Nation is used to be governed and must be governed, that if he expects to lead them by their Affection he will be the Dupe.” Morris evidently agreed with Jefferson that a “canine appetite for popularity” was Lafayette’s fatal flaw, but this view was not quite right. Glory, honor, and lasting fame were the treasures Lafayette sought—and his attempts to acquire them sometimes made him deeply unpopular. He expressed affection for the National Guard not because he craved adulation but because he could not imagine, blinded as he was by optimism, that his troops deserved anything less. Regardless of circumstance, Lafayette seldom foresaw the pitfalls ahead.
After months of hunger, the people of Paris became enraged when they learned of a feast held on October 1 in the royal opera house at Versailles. The revolutionary papers described it not merely as a spectacle of gluttony but as an “orgy.” Leaders of the King’s Bodyguard and officers of a recently arrived Flanders regiment broke bread together, drank toasts to Louis XVI, and sang songs in his honor seated at enormous tables on the opera’s stage, while an orchestra provided musical accompaniment to the great delight of spectators who filled the theater’s boxes. According to the Révolutions de Paris, when Marie Antoinette and the dauphin—both of whom were much beloved by the assembled officers—appeared before the celebrants, cries of “joy and jubilation” echoed through the hall and a lone voice could be heard above the din shouting, “Down with the colored cockades; long live the black cockade!” With that, the revelers began ripping from their hats the ornamental rosettes made of red and blue fabric that signified the revolution, sending a shower of cockades raining to the floor to be gleefully trampled under scores of boots. Soon, the women and children of the court, along with clergymen and other royalists, were merrily distributing black cockades, which may have been intended as a nod to the colors of the queen’s native Austria (black and yellow) but in any case were certainly a signal of opposition to the revolution. A group of officers even had the audacity to wear these “insulting signs”—as the Révolutions de Paris called them—while reviewing a division of the National Guard.
In the days that followed, the revolution’s opponents donned black cockades at their own risk. Rumors about the precise meaning of the black rosettes abounded; one story suggested that they might have been adopted by a coalition of thirty thousand noblemen who intended to sequester the king in the citadel at Metz with the aid of the royal guard before waging “war, in his name, against his people.” The Révolutions de Paris reported that five black cockades were confiscated in a single afternoon at the Palais-Royal and that one man was struck down by “a hundred canes” after he removed his cockade, only to hold it up in the air and bestow upon it a “respectful kiss.” Convinced that these small bundles of fabric signified nothing less than treason, one witness to the attack went so far as to argue that wearing black cockades should be prohibited on pain of death: “The law allows the killing of those who threaten our lives; well, anyone who wears a black cockade endangers the political life of the nation and the natural life of each citizen; the first person who wears an anti-patriotic cockade must therefore hang from the nearest lamppost.” It was a twisted bit of logic, but emblematic of the fear and anger raging throughout the capital.
On October 5, 1789, alarm bells sounded through the gray Paris dawn as thousands of marketwomen streamed toward the Hôtel de Ville. The women—known to their critics as poissardes, or fishwives—wielded pikes and pitchforks as they hauled heavy cannons across the cobblestones of the Place de Grève. When Lafayette reached the scene later that morning, the National Guard had just managed to roust a crowd of would-be arsonists from the government building. The guardsmen strained to stem the furious tide of people pouring into the quays along the Seine and the adjacent streets. Incensed by the soaring price of flour, which left them unable to feed their families, the women were joined by husbands, brothers, and sons, all of whom shouted for bread. They were certain that an aristocratic plot was at the root of their starvation. “To Versailles!” they clamored, as Lafayette struggled to prevent a march that was rapidly becoming inevitable.
From nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, Lafayette refused to sanction a march to Versailles and forbade the guard, whose loyalties were beginning to waver, to undertake any such action. Back and forth he went, alternating between closed-door meetings with elected representatives of the Paris Commune and high-decibel debates with the crowd on the Place de Grève. Convinced that an attack on Paris was imminent, a young lieutenant in the grenadiers named Mercier cried out, “My general, the king has fooled us all, you and everyone else: he must be deposed.” But still, Lafayette refused. Finally, between four and five, he came to understand that any opportunity to prevent a march had passed, as an intrepid contingent dominated by women and men armed with knives, picks, pikes, and pitchforks had started pulling cannons toward Versailles in the late morning. In the meantime, the weather had grown steadily worse—powerful winds had sprung up and a chilling rain was falling—but the crowd’s determination showed no signs of flagging. After obtaining a face-saving command from the Paris Commune—who “authorized … and even ordered him to transport himself to Versailles”—Lafayette mounted his white horse and took charge of several National Guard regiments. Together, Lafayette and his troops accompanied a crowd of some thirty thousand armed and angry Parisians, arrayed six abreast, on a seven-hour trek along fourteen miles of dark and muddy roads.
According to Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting Madame Campan, news that the National Guard had set out from Paris reached Versailles that afternoon while the king was hunting at Meudon, about six miles away, and the queen was alone, lost in “painful thought,” in her beloved gardens near the Trianon pavilion, not far from the spot where Lafayette’s grandfather Édouard had taken his fatal fall in 1736. The royal household leapt into action: the Marquis de Cubières, equerry to the king, set out on horseback to encourage Louis XVI to abandon that day’s hunt and return to the palace; the Comte de Saint-Priest, secrétaire de l’état de la maison du roi (the government minister charged with overseeing the king’s household), sent a letter to Marie Antoinette urging the royal family to depart immediately for the Château de Rambouillet, some twenty miles southwest of Versailles; and servants began packing bags and loading carriages so that the royal family could be whisked to safety. A few carriages were already on the road when an update arrived—the first Parisian women were drawing near. Versailles had not been designed to withstand a military attack, but now its limited defenses were mobilized: gates that had stood open for a century were pulled shut and locked; the Flanders Regiment assembled on the Place d’Armes, the rounded plaza in front of the château; and the Swiss Guard made ready to stand its ground in the inner courtyards and gardens.
These and other preparations were in progress when Louis XVI and his entourage returned bearing new orders. The king had passed the Parisian women as he made his way back from the hunt and had been gratified to hear cries of “Vive le roi!” from the crowd. Reassured that he would be safe at Versailles, he called off the move to Rambouillet. And, worried that a show of royal force would cause, rather than prevent, an escalation of violence, he ordered the Flanders Regiment to retire to its barracks. The men dutifully obeyed, but as they made their way from the Place d’Armes to their quarters, they found themselves pelted with rocks and gunshot. When Louis heard the news he began to reconsider his decisions but, as Madame Campan put it, “the moment to flee was lost.”
Lafayette knew none of this as he rode slowly toward Versailles to meet a fate that was uncertain at best. As Morris described events in his diary, Lafayette “marched by Compulsion, guarded by his own Troops who suspect and threaten him.” Yet this was the selfsame Lafayette who had managed to keep his head at Barren Hill as the redcoats bore down on his detachment from three sides, and now, in 1789, he still possessed the composure that had served him so well in 1778. With scores of lives in his hands—not only his own and his companions’ but also the lives of the royal family—he did everything in his power to ensure a peaceful resolution. With the sound of drums and the flicker of torches heralding his approach, Lafayette halted the march at around eleven o’clock near the National Assembly’s meeting hall in Versailles. There, he administered an oath to remind his troops of their allegiances; the men swore to honor “the nation, the law, and the king” before continuing on. While two officers were sent ahead to the château bearing assurances that Lafayette came to protect the king and not to oust him, a representative of the king appeared to inform Lafayette that Louis “saw his approach with pleasure” and “had just accepted his declaration of rights.” Happily, everyone was in agreement on one point: they wanted to see as little bloodshed as possible.
Expectant cries filled the air as Lafayette drew closer to the palace. “Long live the King! Long live the Nation! Long live Lafayette and Liberty!” shouted the contingent of Parisians, who had been driven by fear and desperation to slog through miles of mud on the road to Versailles. Leaving his troops, Lafayette approached the Place d’Armes around midnight, accompanied by two civilians representing the Paris city government. Facing him from the other side of the padlocked grille, the Swiss Guard hesitated; wary though they were of Lafayette’s motives, they admitted him to the courtyard and from there into the château, up the stairs, and to the Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf—the very antechamber where he had awaited the king in 1774, when he was presented at court. But on this occasion, the room was filled with shouts instead of whispers. “There’s Cromwell!” went the cry, but Lafayette rejected the comparison to the British general who had helped orchestrate the execution of King Charles I during the English Civil War. “Monsieur,” Lafayette snapped, “Cromwell would not have entered alone.” Still, the accusation struck a chord. Lafayette knew all too well that, with one false move, “instead of being a guardian, he would have been a usurper.” As the Marquise de La Tour du Pin remembered the scene, Lafayette’s voice filled with emotion as he explained to Louis the reasoning that compelled him to march: “Sire, I thought it better to come here, to die at the feet of Your Majesty, than to die uselessly on the Place de Grève.” Louis XVI was in no position to argue. He gave Lafayette free run of Versailles.
By two in the morning some semblance of order had been established. With the king’s guards maintaining calm inside the palace and National Guardsmen patrolling the grounds, Marie Antoinette felt secure enough to go to sleep with four ladies stationed in chairs pushed up against her bedroom door. At four-thirty, hearing shouts and gunshots ringing through the palace, they roused her. Giving the queen no time to dress, they hustled her through a narrow door and down a back passageway toward the king’s chambers, tossing a petticoat after her. As though in a French farce gone grievously awry, the ladies reached the king’s door only to find it locked. They knocked and were let in, but by then Louis was gone—he had taken the more public route to the queen’s bedroom at the first sound of alarm. In the adjacent Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf, royal guards faced off against armed citizens while the queen, reunited with her children, retreated to the bedroom. At last, a rapprochement involving the exchange of cockades was reached in the Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf, and calm returned to the château.
Daybreak found Lafayette conferring with the king and queen in their apartments, where the Parisian troops now fraternized with the royal guardsmen. From the marble court below, the clamor grew louder and more menacing. The people were calling in angry tones for Marie Antoinette. At first, they got only Lafayette, who harangued them from the balcony to little effect. He stepped back inside, and speaking again with the uneasy monarchs, he brokered yet another deal. If they came with him to Paris, as the crowd demanded, he would guarantee their safety. They agreed. With that, Lafayette turned to the queen:
“Come with me.”
“What? Alone on the balcony?”
“Yes, Madame. Let us go.”
Together, Lafayette and Marie Antoinette appeared before the angry crowd. Unable to make himself heard, Lafayette resorted to a gesture that would later be cited by his enemies as a sign of double-dealing: he kissed the hand of the queen. With this gallant pantomime, Lafayette bestowed his blessing on Marie Antoinette and changed the hearts of the people. “Long live the general! Long live the queen!” To the sound of cheers, the pair left the balcony and began preparing for the journey ahead.
At approximately one o’clock in the afternoon on October 6, 1789, the royal family set out from Versailles in a carriage. Inside, Marie Antoinette clutched her coffer of diamonds. Outside, Lafayette rode beside the monarchs on a handsome white horse, keeping pace with the coach. A hundred carriages followed behind, bearing the National Assembly’s deputies, while thousands of exhausted citizens and soldiers joined the historic journey on foot. It was six in the evening before Lafayette reached the Hôtel de Ville and quite dark by the time the royal family moved into a rambling suite of hastily evacuated apartments in their new home, the Tuileries Palace, which stretched along the banks of the Seine just west of the Louvre. There, Louis was fated to live by Lafayette’s rules and under Lafayette’s authority. On the morning of October 7, Lafayette attended what could only have been a very awkward ceremonial levee in the king’s new chambers. For better or for worse, it seemed that Louis XVI would always have Lafayette at his side.
That the march to Versailles ended so calmly was nothing short of extraordinary. October 5 had witnessed its share of fatalities—the heads of two royal bodyguards had been transported to Paris on pikes—but large-scale carnage had been avoided, and much of the credit belonged to Lafayette. His uncommon ability to think clearly under pressure and his unparalleled credibility with the crowd had allowed him to wrest control from mayhem. That night, Lafayette proved to the world that he deserved his reputation as Washington’s protégé. But the future would bring challenges that might have been too much for any man.