Metro Stop Paris Read online

  This was perhaps the critical moment in the French Révolution, though it occurred almost a month before the popular rising of 14 July In denying the legitimacy of the two privileged orders the declaration of 17 June closed the door to the possibility of a two-house parliament, the mark of most democracies in the Western world today. It blocked the way to a calm "Glorious Révolution. "It cut the ground from beneath the Due d' Orléans. This was lost on the Duke who, caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment, committed himself to the single-chamber parliament, though it was quite against his own interest. On that same 17 June the Duke stood up and, with his voice shaking, demanded that his fellow gentlemen join the "National Assembly"; then he fainted and had to be carried outside to recover his nerve. Only eighty-nine nobles voted for the Duke's motion. After that, the Duke retreated once again into his shell.

  Later in the same week there occurred the famous Tennis Court Oath, when the Assembly vowed never to separate until they had voted on a "solid and equitable Constitution." It was the same week that the Comte de Mirabeau addressed, from his seat in the Assembly, the representatives of the King with the words, "We will only leave our places by the force of bayonets!" At ten o'clock on the morning of 25 June the forty-seven liberal nobles left their seats in the Second Estate and entered, with huge applause, the hall of the National Assembly The Duke was among them, though he did his best not to be noticed. "Yes, I was one of the forty-seven and all that is well and good," he told his son, Louis Phnippe, in the dark days of 1792. "But do you know what the others said to me? . . . Well, they said, 'Monseigneur, do not come with us for we will look as if we are following you, and that will not be good.'" He added, "They were most careful to distance themselves from me and to shun me on every occasion." So the Duke's political friends had abandoned him? Nothing of the sort. On 2 July the National Assembly voted him their president. On 3 July he refused to accept the honour with the curious explanation that "I will always sacrifice my personal interest for the good of the State." Not a few in the Assembly suspected that he meant exactly the reverse.

  What a dramatic period the last half of June had been. It had put France on the road to demagogy and terror; it had also shown to the world that little grain of folly in the Due d' Orléans ' personality— already known to his intimates—that would dampen hopes for an alternative, non-violent route towards reform: the Duke lacked guts.

  ON 14 JULY the Bastille fell. It was the behaviour of the Duke that day which determined that the prince of the people's Palais-Royal would never be king.

  On the night he joined the National Assembly, 3 July, there was a massive fireworks display at the Palais-Royal and all the houses in the neighbourhood were illuminated. On the doors to the circus in the middle of the gardens there were posters praising the Duke for his "zealous patriotism"; he was celebrated as the "avenger of the oppressed patrie" and compared to his ancestor, the first Bourbon king, Henri TV—"leplus ché'ri des rois." Jacques Necker, the reforming Controller-General, was acclaimed along with the Due d' Orléans. There had never been such agitation in and around the palace. But it was not all such a pretty sight. Bands of armed men, like those of April, roamed the streets; many of them could be seen at the Palais-Royal. The Marquis de Ferrières, a noble from the Poitou who had remained seated in the Second Estate, wrote to his sister of forty thousand armed brigands from Paris who were rumoured to be marching on Versailles. But the Marquis did not seem too worried. The man supposed to be responsible for all this, the Due d' Orléans, "is too cowardly to be a villain."

  Over the next fortnight there were armed attacks on the city barrières, those lovely eighteenth-century customs houses where all wagons had to stop and pay taxes for the produce they carried into Paris. For the mob the taxes were part of the "aristocratic plot" to starve the citizens. One of the reasons the twin houses of the Barriere d'Enfer can still be admired at Place Denfert-Rochereau is because that was the route to Orléans and the barriere was the Duke's property; none of the Duke's properties were attacked.

  The Palais-Royal by the first week of July was an entrenched camp where a respectable citizen no longer dared tread. A list of "Patriots" was registered at the café du Caveau; discours fleuveswere pronounced by agitators on the terraces. Narrow, curving streets —the Rue de Rivoli did not exist—led down to the Hôtel de Ville, or City Hall, where the propertied men of Paris had persuaded the electors of the Third Estate to gather their sixty local offices in an assembly they called the "Commune." The Commune of Paris decided that week to organize a new bourgeois militia that would contain the mobs and the wild men of the Palais-Royal should they turn violent. The King also had his troops surrounding Paris, ostensibly to keep order. But rumour spread that he was planning a coup d'état royal: the forced closure of the National Assembly and the occupation of the capital. His troops, under the command of the Due de Broglie, were not even French but Swiss and German mercenaries—it was like holding out a red blanket to the crowds.

  It was rumour, for once, founded on fact. The chief fomenters of the coup were, it seems, the King's youngest brother, the Comte d'Artois, with support from the older brother, the Comte de Provence, the Prince de Conde and his family along with the Polignacs. The signal for action would be the dismissal of the popular reformist first minister, Jacques Necker.

  Necker and his ministers were dismissed on Saturday afternoon, n July, and their places were taken by the Baron de Breteuil and the most reactionary nobles the King could find. The timing was obviously chosen to give the court the weekend to prepare for the use of force against the National Assembly, which would not meet on a Sunday. But the plotters of the coup had not counted on the reaction in Paris; the news of the dismissals arrived at the Palais-Royal on Sunday, the 12th, at midday when the number of working people present was at its maximum— the King could not have picked a worse hour of the week.

  Pandemonium broke out. Chairs were upturned and the tables were transformed into popular speaking stands. The most famous speech, because it was recorded, was made by Mirabeau's young secretary, Camille Desmoulins, on a table at the café de Foy The crowd grabbed the busts of their heroes, the Due d' Orléans and Necker, from Curtius's wax museum at Salon No. 7, dressed them in black crepe and stuck them on pikes. Then they marched them in procession up and down the Rues Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, obliging passers-by to doff their hats. In the Tuileries gardens they ran into a company of the Royal Allemand; in the skirmish that followed the man carrying the Duke's bust was dragged by a horse into the Place Louis XV (Place de la Concorde). But a defecting band of the old Gardes Francaises, in defence of the "people," drove the Royal Allemand away from the Tuileries. The battle was now on for the sovereignty of Paris.

  A Swiss regiment, the Salis-Samade, attempted to regain the right bank that Sunday night, but it retreated again across the river early the next morning. King Louis XVI had lost the centre of Paris. At the same time there were running battles fought out at the barrières, and the monastery—the seventeenth-century residence of Saint Vincent de Paul, now a grain depot and prison—was sacked.

  WHILE PARIS WAS in a state of insurrection, the "avenger of the oppressedpatrie," the Due d' Orléans, had spent his Sunday at the Château de Raincy fishing in the river with a party that included the liberal aristocrat, the Comte de La Marck, and Mrs. Elliot, who, fortunately for us, kept a record of their day and those that followed. They had planned on an evening of light Opéra at the Comedié Italienne (forerunner of the Opéra Comique). At 8 p.m. they duly arrived at the Porte Saint-Martin, where their city carriages awaited them. Mrs. Elliot's domestics came rushing up to speak of the dramatic events of the day; she proposed to the Duke that he join her in her coach to avoid being recognized. After making a few turns in the town they arrived at Monceau, another of the Duke's properties, where they found the servants in a state of panic—they had heard that the Duke had been imprisoned in the Bastille and had even been decapitated. Mrs. Elliot, a staunch royalist, took the Duke ou
t into the gardens and, in a conversation that lasted until two in the morning, persuaded him, in a demonstration of royal allegiance, to attend the next morning the daily ceremony of the King's rising from bed, the levée du Roi. The Duke sent a messenger to the Baron de Breteuil protesting that "he had done nothing to obtain this popularity" among the mob and would be at the King's chamber the next morning to watch him get out of bed.

  So on Monday, 13 July, as the armed boats of the Swiss Salis-Samade attempted, unsuccessfully, to regain the right bank of the Seine, the hero of the Paris crowd was in Versailles watching the King leave his bed. When the First Prince of the Blood passed a shirt to the King, His Most Christian Majesty went purple with rage and refused to say a word—a most embarrassing snub. The Duke left the palace in a state of shock. He dropped in for a moment at the National Assembly, which, in its first meeting during the insurrection, seemed to be managing very well without him. Then he rushed back to Monceau and Mrs. Elliot. He announced to her, fumbling with his coat, that from now on he was going to "cultivate friends for himself." Mrs. Elliot wrote that it was "from this moment that the Duke became his most violent in politics . . . I am sure that if one had shown him more consideration and confidence one would have been able to detach him from his detestable entourage." Talleyrand was to claim that the Duke had "already pushed himself too far forward to be able to retreat."

  But retreat he did—on Tuesday, 14 July—the day the crowd took the Bastille. That was the tragedy of the Duke, and of France. On Sunday night, while the Duke was having his conversation with Mrs. Elliot in the gardens of Monceau, the Paris Commune formally voted for the creation of their bourgeois militia. Each of the sixty electoral Districts was ordered immediately to enrol and arm 200 responsible men, thereby creating a force of 12,000 men. Within three days this independent force had risen to an incredible 48,000. It had been created without consulting either the King's ministry or the National Assembly; the Paris Commune was now acting effectively as an autonomous government, encouraging the demands of the ctowd in the street in order to bend both the King and the single-chamber Assembly to its will. A normal state would have considered the creation of such a militia treasonous, but nobody at the time dared pronounce the word. On Monday the crowd attacked and emptied the debtors' gaol of La Force, barricades went up in the streets and trenches were dug to repel any royalist cavalry attack.

  One act could have re-established, in a single blow, the rule of law; one single deed would have covered the executive ministry, the national legislature and the new municipal government with a sheen of legitimacy: the nomination of the First Prince of the Blood, the Due d' Orléans, as commander of Paris's new bourgeois militia. Even at this late date a decisive act by the Duke could have perhaps saved the situation. The project appears to have been under serious consideration on Tuesday morning, the 14th.

  Mrs. Elliot relates that when she came to Monceau that morning she discovered that two important men had already been admitted to the Duke's chamber, the Marquis de La Fayette and Monsieur Sylvain Bailly The Marquis, though only thirty-two, was vice-president of the National Assembly; during his youthful campaigning in America's War of Independence, he had become George Washington's adopted son and had returned to France married to "Liberty"—with a fortune of 120,000 livres a year to support him. Bailly, an astronomer, had been the first president of the Assembly and now chaired the executive committee of Electors that sat in the Hôtel de Ville. The two men together had the power to name the Duke "Lieutenant General of the Kingdom," as many of the placards posted in the Palais-Royal were demanding. Such a position would not only have given the Duke command of the new militia, it would have made him King. The militia's troops were already sporting cockades of red and blue, which were the colours of Paris but also, significantly, the colours of the House of Orléans —the addition of the colour white of royalty would be the basis of the tricolour flag of France. The Duke could have been King of the French under a tricolour flag on 14 July 1789.

  Exactly what La Fayette and Bailly discussed in the Duke's chamber is unknown. When the Duke emerged from the meeting he saw Mrs. Elliot and asked her to join him and his two friends in an early afternoon " déjeuner "—"lunch" in these early days of the Révolution had not yet become a common habit. They were just settling down to the meal when the sound of cannon could be heard in the distance. A few minutes later the message arrived that the Bastille had just been taken by force. The Duke's two honourable guests left "in great haste." Then the Due de Biron, a horse-racing enthusiast who received many of the leading liberal nobles in his home, and the Vicomte de Noailles, La Fayette's brother-in-law, burst into the room. Mrs. Elliot withdrew, though not without first pleading with the Duke to offer his services to the King. "He got very angry with me and asked if I was not in the pay of his enemies to give him such counsel, and he immediately left me."

  Was Grace Elliot simply inventing the story? She had no motive to do so. She does not appear to be aware of its significance. But important it seems to be. It was the last opportunity that France had to take the road towards a constitutional monarchy. The three men who had the power to do this were together on the morning the Bastille fell apparently discussing that very possibility. No witnesses were left because two of them were guillotined and the sole survivor developed such a contempt for the Duke that he would hardly have admitted being with him on 14 July.

  The crown was there for the picking that day Yet, for whatever rea- son, the Duke never presented himself as a candidate to command the National Guard, as the new militia was called, on Wednesday, the 15th. It brought down on him the contempt of all his followers, including Mirabeau, who remarked, "People were ready to make him Lieutenant General of the Kingdom and he had only himself to blame for not becoming it." La Fayette took up the command of the National Guard himself. As of that date, the chances of France adopting a constitutional monarchy during the Révolution were virtually dead—before the National Assembly had even started drawing up a constitution.

  When a humbled King, having ordered the withdrawal of his troops from the capital and the reinstallation of Necker as chief minister, went to Paris in simple civilian dress on 17 July, he was received on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville by General La Fayette and the new mayor of Paris, Monsieur Bailly. It was clear where the power now lay: in a one-chamber parliament and an autonomous Commune of Paris, both competing for approval from the mob. It was a poisonous combination.

  How different might have been the course of history can be seen when, forty-one years later, in July 1830, an older and wiser La Fayette received on the same steps the new Due d' Orléans, Louis Philippe Joseph's elder son, and proclaimed him "King of the French." It stopped the Révolution of 1830 dead in its tracks. If a similar act had been performed on the day of the seizure of the Bastille, the vicious process of revolution might have ended there and France could have avoided its mad career into terror and war. As Mirabeau bitterly put it, the fault lay in the weakness of one man. But instead of accepting the post of Lieutenant General of the Kingdom, and despite his angry response to Mrs. Elliot, the Duke did in fact follow her bad advice. He rode out to Versailles the same afternoon and sat meekly in an antechamber of the Versailles Palace waiting for one of the last sessions of the King's Council to draw to its dreary conclusion. When the doot finally opened, the Duke asked the King if he could depart for England. Louis XVI, exasperated at his cousin's evident cowardice, simply heaved his shoulders and swept by.

  The Duke did eventually leave for England, but only after a second occasion for kingship had presented itself during the bloody days of October 1789, when the King and his family were forcibly transferred to the Tuileries, the house next door to the Palais-Royal. Nobody has ever been able to establish precisely what the Duke's role was in this. But he was seen lurking in Versailles' Hall of Mirrors the day the crowd attacked Marie Antoinette's apartment, murdering and horribly mutilating her private guards. In England he attempted to establish an Angl
o-French alliance—long the ambition of France's liberal nobility—without any visible success. He returned to Paris in July 1790 in time for the Fete de la Federation on the Champ de Mars. The festival was presided over by La Fayette; it could have been the Duke if he had played his cards well in 1789. He and his son, the future King of the French, both became members of the Jacobin Club. In the Convention he sat as "Philippe Égalité " among the "Mountain"—the most radical wing of French revolutionary politics—and from there, on 16 January 1793, he voted for the death of the King. "This is a sad subject," he said to Mrs. Elliot two months after Louis XVI had been guillotined on Place de la Révolution (Concorde); "you cannot judge me, you must not judge me." To his younger son, the Due de Montpensier, he had said on the night of the vote, the tears pouring down his cheeks: "Montpensier, I haven't the courage to look at you . . . I did not know what I was doing."

  Philippe Égalité was arrested on 6 April of that same year on the trumped up charge that he had collaborated with generals who had deserted to the enemy on the northern war front—General La Fayette, who had never addressed a word to the Duke since the fall of the Bastille, was among the traitors. He spent the summer with two of his sons in a fortress at Marseille. In October he was taken back to Paris to face the Revolutionary Tribunal on 6 November. Philippe Égalité asked to be guillotined the same day His wish was granted.

  He died bravely. At five o'clock the following morning, his hair powdered and wearing polished boots, he mounted the tumbril with an assured air to join three unknown condemned artisans; one of them, a locksmith, refused to be guillotined in such bad company. But, one by one, all four climbed the scaffold, Philippe Égalité being—as he had often been in life —the last in the line. The aides of the executioner demanded his boots. "You can take them off easier from a corpse," he replied. The drums rolled. "Hurry up!" cried the Duke the instant before his head was chopped off.