When the King Took Flight Read online

  And overcome by the emotion of the moment, awed and overwhelmed by the religious mystique of the monarchy and the aura of the king there in their presence, the town leaders agreed to help. If necessary, they said, they would accompany him themselves to Montmedy. As soon as dawn came, they would organize members of their own national guard and escort him. Their heads still swimming, they returned to the town hall to make arrangements. How could they not obey a command from Louis XVI himself, from the successor of a line who had ruled France for more than eight hundred years?

  Yet after they had left the presence of the king, after they had talked to others and had come to realize the implications of the situation in which they found themselves, they began to have second thoughts.

  The Third Summer of the Revolution

  For the people of Varennes were no longer the same as they had been just two years earlier. Over the previous months, the town had been swept up in an extraordinary series of developments that had touched every corner of the kingdom and irrevocably changed the way in which the inhabitants viewed themselves and their place in the world. In March 1789, following a complex conjunction of events over which they had no influence whatsoever, all townsmen over twenty-four years of age who paid any taxes-the overwhelming majority-had been invited to participate in a national election, a process that would designate deputies to the representative assembly of the Estates General, which had not met for 175 years.' Varennes had been the site of both a municipal election and a secondary regional election leading to the choice of their own mayor, a former lawyer, first as an alternate deputy and then as a deputy in full standing. Perhaps equally important, the electoral assemblies in March had been asked to draw up statements of grievances that the citizens wished to bring before the king. Although the grievance list of the people of Varennes has been lost, it probably was not unlike the one preserved for the small town of Montfaucon, only six miles away.6 As in communities all over France, the citizens began with a passage of extravagant praise for King Louis, who had convoked the elections. Then, scattered among demands for changes in a miscellany of local institutions, they asked that many burdensome taxes be lowered or suppressed; that all citizens, including nobles and clergymen, pay taxes in equal proportion to their revenues; that administrative authority be decentralized and shared with local provincial assemblies; and that more money be spent for the education of children. But whatever the specific demands made, the very act by which the citizens in Varennes and throughout the kingdom had systematically reflected on their lives and debated the institutions and practices that might best be changed or improved or abolished altogether had been a revolutionary event in itself. It had enormously raised expectations for a general transformation of a whole range of political, economic, social, and ecclesiastical institutions.

  In the following weeks and months, the people of Varennes had watched in amazement as the Estates General they had helped to elect converted itself into a National "Constituent" Assembly. The new Assembly not only set to work drawing up France's first constitution, but engineered a wholesale transformation of French political and social structures that went far beyond anything most of them had requested in their grievance lists. At the beginning of August 1789, the news of the fall of the Bastille in Paris and the victory over an apparent plot to overthrow the Revolution had led to a great townwide celebration.' There were cannon salvos, festive bonfires, a public ball in the town square, even a distribution of bread to the poor-as might have occurred during a major religious festival. There was also a rare "illumination" of the town, in which every household was expected to place candles or lanterns in its windows at night. For a society unaccustomed to public lighting, such a display of concentrated candlepower would have made for a stunning spectacle indeed.

  But it was not only a question of cheering from afar. Soon the citizens of Varennes had been asked to elect their own municipal and regional governments and to participate directly in the day-today implementation of the new laws. They entered into regular communication with the National Assembly, seeking advice and information, corresponding with their deputies, sending off a "lob- biest," and sometimes even offering their own suggestions for the drafting of the constitution. After centuries of domination by others-by nobles and churchmen and royal administrators in everything but their most immediate family and local concerns, they had now been invited, indeed compelled, to participate in their own government, their own destiny. Such a process had imparted an ex hilarating sentiment of involvement and local initiative. It had also instilled a new feeling of national identity, French identity, replacing the narrow world of the Aire Valley and the Argonne Forest, which had previously served as the inhabitants' principal points of reference. The great movement of the Enlightenment, the surge of intellectual emancipation and reevaluation that had blossomed among the cultural elites of the major cities of eighteenth-century Europe, had been very distant indeed for the people of Varennes. Perhaps it was only with the institutional transformations of the Revolution itself that Immanuel Kant's "motto of the Enlightenment," sapere aude-dare to know and to understand for oneselfcame to have any real meaning for the great mass of small townspeople and villagers of provincial France. It is only in the light of this accrued sense of self-confidence and of identity with the nation as a whole that we can understand the actions of men like Drouet and Sauce and the various municipal leaders throughout the region during the crisis of June 21-22.

  But two other institutional creations also played an important role in forming the Revolutionary psychology of the people of Varennes in the summer of 1791. In August 1789, confronted by the threat of anarchy and of possible counterrevolution after the collapse of the Old Regime, the town had formed its first citizens' militia.' Two companies of a local "national guard" were formed, the "chasseurs" and the "grenadiers," each with its distinctive uniforms, flags, and drummers, commanded by officers elected by the members themselves. One can scarcely exaggerate the feelings of pride with which the men of Varennes, some three hundred strong, aged sixteen to fifty, practiced marching through the streets and around the town square, accompanied by an improvised corps of local musicians. At first they carried only a few real weapons, hunting muskets or antique guns preserved by their families. But decked out in their new uniforms, the bright green of the chasseurs and the royal blue and white of the grenadiers, they felt an extraordinary sense of purpose and importance.' The status of uniformed officer, once the near-exclusive privilege of the nobility, was now within the reach of anyone-even the innkeeper Jean Le Blanc or the lawyer's son Justin George. Indeed, another of the officers leading the guardsmen of Varennes on June 21, the young Etienne Radet, would make a rapid wartime transition to the regular military, eventually emerging as a general in Napoleon's army.

  In the spring and summer of 1790 the guardsmen from Varennes had joined with their fellows from throughout the region to march in a series of unity or "federation" celebrations.1° One of these events, on July i, 1790, brought some three thousand guardsmen to Varennes itself, where they socialized, paraded, and swore oaths of allegiance to the nation. Two weeks later, on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, Justin George, Etienne Radet, and several other Varennes guardsmen had marched all the way to Paris to participate in the great national Federation Festival on the Champ de Mars parade grounds to the west of the capital, at the site of today's Eiffel Tower. There they had seen Louis XVI-only from a great distance no doubt-taking his own oath to the constitution. One can well imagine that they recalled this scene when the same king appeared in their town one year later, fleeing the very constitution he had sworn to defend.

  A second institution of considerable importance in the new Revolutionary ethos, not only for Varennes but for other towns throughout France, was the local popular society or "club." Perhaps under the influence of his deputy father, Justin George had helped establish a local chapter of the Friends of the Constitution on March 25, 1791. With an initial membership of fort
y-four, the club was one of the first such associations in the new administrative department of Meuse to which Varennes had been attached." It soon affiliated itself directly with the "Jacobins" of Paris, the popular name for the mother society of the Friends of the Constitution. The club's ostensible purpose was to support and propagate the decrees passed by the National Assembly. But in Varennes, as in much of the kingdom, the Jacobins rapidly revealed a special calling as watchdogs for the Revolution against all its known or suspected enemies.

  In the months preceding the June crisis, the club had focused particular scrutiny on the local clergy. A year earlier the National Assembly had passed a sweeping reorganization of the Catholic church known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and at the beginning of 1791 the representatives had required all priests with cure of souls to take a formal oath of allegiance to the constitution in general and to the clerical transformations in particular. In April the parish priest of Varennes, the abbe Methains, was formally removed from his functions by regional Revolutionary officials after he had refused to swear such an oath. Adamant that the state had no authority to remove him, the abbe had attempted to celebrate mass on Good Friday, and the Jacobins and the national guard had entered the church and ousted him by force. While there is no evidence that the leaders of Varennes were particularly anticlerical or antireligious, they were clearly disturbed that a man who refused to adhere to the constitution should be allowed to teach local children and control the confessional. The refusal of nearly half the parish priests in the surrounding district to take the prescribed oath helped to intensify suspicions that concerted counterrevolutionary plots were afoot in their region.'

  Indeed, almost from the beginning of the Revolution, the nearmillenarian optimism engendered by the events in Paris had been mixed with fear and anxiety. From the perspective of the twentyfirst century, we sometimes forget how frightening and unsettling the first experience in democracy must have seemed, even to those who fervently supported it. It was difficult to believe that the great aristocrats and clerics of the former regime were not manipulating events and that they might not still attempt to seize power once again or seek revenge for all they had lost. In fact three waves of near-panic apprehension had swept through Varennes before June 1791, all related to the fear of imagined enemies, perhaps in the pay of the former privileged classes. In August 1789 townspeople had been terrified by news that a band of brigands was approaching from the north. Even though the brigands in question never materialized, the defensive reaction that ensued had been fundamental in the formation of the town's first national guard units. Just one year later rumors spread wildly that Austrian imperial troops had invaded, and some five hundred guardsmen from the surrounding villages converged on Varennes to assist in its defense. A third surge of fear occurred in February 1791, with the rumor of yet another troop of brigands arriving from across the northern frontier. Although the alarm again proved unfounded, the town's desperate appeals for help had led the departmental administration to send substantial supplies of guns and ammunition, and even four small cannons, for the defense of Varennes.13 The successive periods of panic had provided a series of practice mobilizations that would serve the local citizens well when a real danger materialized. Perhaps more important, the Varennes city hall now had one of the largest stockpiles of arms of any community in the region, arms in readiness when the crisis of June 21 arrived.

  Beyond the fears of encroaching brigands or Austrians, a much more visible threat was posed by the large number of royal troops garrisoned in Varennes and in nearby towns, many of them mercenaries from Germany or Switzerland. Relations between civilians and soldiers had always been tense, even in the best of times. Local inhabitants were often expected to feed and house the soldiers at their own expense, and young military men were notoriously unruly, given to carousing and flirting with local women. The billeting of troops in individual villages had also been used on occasion to coerce communities into paying overdue taxes. Since October 1789 the municipal government had protested the placement of a detachment of German-speaking cavalry in Varennes.'4 These had been removed the following February, but six months later General Bouille, the regional commander, had sent in some six hundred infantry troops. These troops had only recently been involved in the brutal repression of a protest movement of common soldiers against their aristocratic officers in the nearby city of Nancy, a protest with which many civilian patriots had openly sympathized. The appearance of these soldiers in Varennes had led to enormous tensions. The situation was defused only after municipal leaders found a way of housing the troops at the edge of town in an abandoned Franciscan convent.

  The infantry troops had been removed in February 1791. But in early June General Bouille announced he was sending yet another contingent of sixty German-speaking hussars. We now know that this action was part of the general movement of troops intended to protect the king's escape, a conspiracy in which Bouille was intimately involved. Although this small detachment, again housed in the convent, caused relatively little immediate concern to the people of Varennes, many citizens had watched with growing skepticism as numerous couriers and wagons of military materiel passed through town and as they heard word of soldiers on the march throughout the region. Indeed, officials in the department of Meuse were mystified and intensely concerned by such movements in a period of peace: "marching and countermarching of infantry and cavalry, arriving one day, departing the next, advancing, retreating, and changing their quarters without any apparent necessity or utility."" On June 20 forty of Varennes' hussars set off to the west, supposedly to receive a "treasure" or strong box of money from Paris to pay the troops. The next day General Bouille's youngest son and another officer arrived to spend the night at the Grand Monarch Inn, just east of the river, claiming they had come to prepare for the arrival of the general himself on an unexplained visit.

  It is unclear how widespread local fears may have been. Sauce himself wrote a letter early in the day on June 21, welcoming the arrival of the hussars as a sign of his town's significance. He had spoken to the commander and had been assured that war was unlikely. But other citizens in Varennes, especially members of the Jacobin club, were far more mistrustful. A growing anti-aristocratic bias had made the noble officers who commanded the troops objects of general suspicion. One unknown club member wrote a series of letters to the department administrators in Bar-le-Duc on the very eve of the June 21 crisis. He detailed all the military activity in the town, extraordinary in a time of peace. He also described the visit of a certain Francois de Goguelat-another of the principal con spirators organizing the king's flight-who had interviewed Sauce about the national guard and the political views of the municipal leaders. In a wildly suspicious comment-which was only too close to the mark-he even speculated that the mysterious "treasure" the military was talking about might be the king himself, soon to be abducted from Paris by unspecified evildoers."

  It is not impossible that these various rumors and fears about the army were being discussed by George and his friends at the Golden Arm on the very evening of Drouet's appearance. In any case, the small, undistinctive town of Varennes, on the fringe of northeastern France, was far better prepared-institutionally, militarily, and psychologically-to meet the crisis of June 21 than any of the conspirators of the king's flight might have imagined.

  The Army and the People

  In the early morning of June 22, even as the town fathers debated what to do with the king of France who had arrived in their midst, the whole of Varennes had begun mobilizing. The exact chronology of that night is somewhat uncertain. Everyone noted the confusion, the rushing about, the numerous events happening at once. But it was hardly a moment for taking notes, and the account of the night's activities must be based on the sometimes discordant memories of the individuals present, written several days, even several months or years later. In any case, soon after Sauce's two sons had run through the town crying "fire!" someone had apparently begun ringing the bell
s in the parish church across the river. The church bells spoke a whole language of their own, with different rhythms or timbres calling people to mass or announcing a wedding or lamenting a death. But the rapid, repetitive tintinnabulation of the tocsin, as it was called, could only mean danger and emergency, and soon everyone was out in the streets asking what was wrong. Within minutes the national guard commanders had roused their drummers, who began beating the equally pressing cadences of the "call to arms," and, dressing as they went, men rushed to the center of town with their own muskets or to the town hall, where guns were distributed.

  Once they learned of the king's arrival, their curiosity and amazement were matched by anxiety. Suddenly the meaning of all the troop movements and the talk of treasures became clear. Those who had not experienced the magic of the monarch's immediate presence were quick to see the danger of reprisal against those who would halt the king's flight and the imminent possibility of attack from the soldiers known to have been moved into the region. Fortunately, the most immediate danger, the German cavalrymen still quartered in Varennes itself, never posed a threat. Most seemed either asleep or well into their cups at the inn and watching harmlessly. But someone had seen their commander mount, ford the river, and flee northward, soon followed by the younger Bouille and his companion. Everyone knew that the officers would inform the general himself and that they might soon find Bouille's whole army on their backs." The guard commanders sent detachments of men to the key entries of the town to set up barricades with wagons or logs or plows or whatever they found at their disposal. They also sent out couriers with desperate appeals for help from the surrounding villages.