Women began stopping carts of grain and dragging them to the Hôtel de Ville for distribution. On 17 September, after another morning when riflemen had been stationed at the bakers' to prevent rioting when the bread was handed out, they requested an audience with the mayor, saying ‘men didn't understand anything about the matter [the lack of grain] and they wanted to play a role in affairs’.
The issue of the veto (what Germaine de Staël had described as ‘her’ veto—Louis was delaying his assent to his new constitutional role, approved by the National Assembly on 10 September) exacerbated popular discontent and suspicion of the king and queen, who were scathingly known as Monsieur and Madame Veto. In revolutionary newspapers, firebrand journalists like Jean-Paul Marat urged their readers to ‘sweep away the corrupt, the royal pensioners and the devious aristocrats, intriguers and false patriots. You have nothing to expect from them except servitude, poverty and desolation.’
Given the atmosphere of starvation and destitution, an extravagant dinner held at Versailles on 1 October by the royal bodyguard was ill conceived. An additional regiment from Flanders had been summoned to Versailles as a precautionary measure, and the royal forces extended to them their traditional welcome of a banquet. Unusually, the king and queen made an appearance, bringing the gold-ringleted dauphin with them; toast after toast was drunk, royalist songs were increasingly blurrily sung, and court ladies handed out cockades in white and black, respectively—the Bourbon (for Louis) and Hapsburg (for Marie-Antoinette) colours.
The next day, the liberal press denounced this royalist ‘orgy’, repeating the words of one officer who had said, ‘Down with the cockade of colours [the tricolour]; may everyone take the black, that's the fine one.’ It was said the guards had stamped underfoot the tricolour cockade, since the fall of the Bastille in July the potent emblem of a new, reformed France. Marie-Antoinette later expressed her ‘enchantment’ with the guards' banquet, and this was taken to mean that she was enchanted by the insult offered to France. Black and white cockades seen on the streets of Paris began provoking fistfights; the people grew still hungrier.
At dawn on the morning of 5 October, a young market woman began beating a drum in the street in central Paris. By seven o'clock, perhaps two thousand women had gathered in front of the Hôtel de Ville, calling out for bread and for the punishment of the royal bodyguard. They broke into the building, threatening to burn all the council's papers, combing it for weapons, blockading the doors—refusing to let any men inside on the grounds that the city council was made up of aristocrats—and denouncing the mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and Lafayette, who they said deserved to be strung up from streetlights for not ensuring that Paris had bread. They declared that ‘men were not strong enough to be revenged on their enemies and that they [the women] would do better’.
This violent appropriation of previously proscribed places ‘was the first delight of the revolution’: ‘the beating down of gates, the crossing of castle moats, walking at ease in places where one was once forbidden to enter’. For ordinary women, restricted by their gender as well as by their status, these new liberties were all the more potent. What is evident in the accounts of these October days is that the women revelled in their own boldness and determination. They were driven to act by desperation, but they seem to have surprised even themselves, and they were proud of what they did.
Men, who had failed in their duties as administrators and providers, were deliberately barred from the Hôtel de Ville. The only man the women allowed in was a National Guardsman called Stanislas Maillard. At first, because of his black coat (members of the Third Estate wore plain black coats), they thought he was a councillor; but then they recognized him as a vainqueur, one who had participated in the sacking of the Bastille, and opened the doors to him.
Despite Maillard's initial efforts to dissuade them, the women insisted they were going to Versailles to present their demands to the king and the National Assembly. Maillard decided to go with them, explaining to a colleague that in this way warning could be sent ahead of the crowd of angry women and control maintained over them. He was also sympathetic to their cause, as were many National Guardsmen who were husbands or sons of those protesting. Lafayette, knowing this, tried to keep the National Guard under his command from joining up with the marchers for as long as possible, fearing violence.
Another Guardsman, known as Fournier ‘l'Américain’, who defied ‘the sycophant Lafayette’ to assemble troops to follow the women to Versailles, believed, like the women, that royalists were plotting to starve the nation into submission. Writing during the Reign of Terror, he remembered rallying straggling women in Paris with the words, ‘Your children are dying of hunger; if your husbands are perverted and cowardly enough not to want to go look for bread for them, then the only thing left for you to do is to slit their throats.’
Maillard began beating a drum to call the women to order, but the area in front of the Hôtel de Ville was too small to hold them all and they moved their assembly point first to the Place Louis XV at the end of the Tuileries gardens and then spilled over into the open Place d'Armes on the Champs Élysées. Children blowing bugles and ringing bells went round the market area of Les Halles to assemble the throng. Women converged on the site carrying makeshift weapons like pitchforks and broomsticks as well as pikes, swords and muskets. ‘The town is in alarm,’ reported Gouverneur Morris. ‘All carriages were stopped’, and any passing woman was swept along by the crowd and ‘obliged to join the female mob’. Later, respectable bourgeois women would testify that they had been forced to join the crowd; onlookers were surprised to catch sight of pale-complexioned women in fine clothes alongside the rough market women.
Numbering by this stage about six thousand, the women set off for Versailles, fourteen kilometres distant, through driving rain. Maillard and six drummers headed the procession alongside two cannon, ridden by women. The cannon were taken for effect; they had no powder, but all the same Maillard persuaded the women to place them at the back of the cavalcade when they reached Versailles so as not to intimidate the townspeople. The marchers wore tricolour cockades and carried leafy branches, just as Camille Desmoulins's mob had three months earlier when they stormed the Bastille. They sang poissard songs such as the ‘Motion of the Market Women of La Halle’, which just tipped the balance between coarsely amusing and threatening:
If the High-ups still make trouble
Then the Devil confound them, And since they love gold so much May it melt in their traps— That's the sincere wish Of the Women Who Sell Fish.
With cries of ‘Vive le roi!’ the women reached Versailles at about five in the afternoon, just as dusk was beginning to fall, marching down the broad allée that leads straight up to the palace. Germaine de Staël, who had driven to Versailles by the back roads as soon as she heard news of the march, had already arrived, but a reluctant Lafayette, at the head of the seditious National Guard, was some hours behind her. The great gates had been drawn across the palace entrance for the first time in its history. ‘Every eye was turned towards the road that fronts the windows of the palace of Versailles,’ recalled Germaine. ‘We thought that the cannon might first be pointed against us, which occasioned us much alarm; yet not one woman thought of withdrawing in this great emergency.’ Both inside and outside the palace women were preparing themselves to participate in history.
After much discussion, fifteen were chosen to appear with Maillard before the National Assembly. Maillard spoke for them, raising rumours of grain hoarding, which the women believed was an aristocratic plot. Deputy Robespierre, immaculate as usual, rose to his feet to confirm the rumours of hoarding. Maillard took the floor again, this time asking that the royal bodyguard be requested to adopt the tricolour cockade to make amends for the insult they were said to have made to it.
As he spoke, the women waiting outside flooded into the assembly hall, declaring that the bodyguards in the palace courtyard had fired on them. The mood in the hall became riotous, almost carnivalesque: the marchers