For several months the king could not face the meetings of the Assembly, and took refuge in family life, spending more time with his children. While the deputies debated the future of France, he had a smithy installed in the Tuileries, and worked at making locks there, alone. For Louis, in his virtual prison, terrible despair and fragile hope had become the bread and butter of his daily life as he sank into helpless depression. ‘The late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable,’ commented the English writer Edmund Burke. Burke was struck by ‘the portentous state of France – where elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it’. Stripped of the glory of Versailles and the powers of an Absolute Monarch, the king seemed a spent political force.
Royal authority was also undermined by the continuous outpouring of vicious slander, especially against the queen. Absurdly, even while under the close scrutiny of the National Guard at the Tuileries, she was accused of every conceivable sexual obsession and debauchery: with the guards themselves, courtiers, actors, there was no limit to her superhuman appetite. In an updated version of Madame de La Motte’s Memoirs published in 1789, her passion for women was also set out in explicit detail: ‘her lips, her kisses followed her greedy glances over my quivering body’, claimed La Motte. ‘What a welcome substitute I made, she laughed, for the lumpish, repulsive body of the “Prime Minister”’ – her mocking name for the king. The image of her as an insatiable, tyrannical queen was invariably linked to her bloodthirsty lust for revenge on the French people for the uprising: ‘Her callous eyes, treacherous and inflamed, radiate sheer fire and carnage to gratify her craving for unjust revenge … her stinking mouth harbours a cruel tongue, eternally thirsty for French blood.’ Letters were ‘found’, allegedly written by her and intercepted by spies. ‘Everything goes well, we shall end by starving them,’ she was quoted as having written to Artois, one of her accomplices. The extremists in the Assembly knew that this skilfully orchestrated propaganda against the queen greatly advanced their political aims to slay royal power. She became the focal point, the hate object of all who were opposed to the monarchy.
As the moderates were forced out of the Assembly and radicals gained the upper hand, royal power continued to decline. Some extremists wished to abolish the monarchy altogether; others to limit its powers still further. It wasn’t long before the king found that his religious beliefs were to come under attack and, for Louis, this was the final straw. The Assembly increasingly saw the clergy as a pillar of a now discredited ancien régime, loyal to the king. Fearing it was a threat to the survival of the revolution, they searched for a way to reduce its powers. They still had to deal with the problem of the national debt and staving off bankruptcy and realised this problem could be tackled at a stroke. In November 1789 they simply nationalised all the church land, valued at a colossal three thousand million livres. The Assembly then moved swiftly to introduce the ‘civil constitution’ in which the state took responsibility for the administration of the clergy. By November 1790 it was decreed that every priest in the land had to swear an oath of loyalty to the state.
As a devout Roman Catholic, Louis’ instincts were to oppose this latest dictate from the Assembly. Yet fearful of where this might lead, finally that Christmas he felt coerced into signing the decree. This prompted the pope, Pius VI, to intervene, opposing the revolution. Any priest who took the oath was suspended, decreed the pope, unless he retracted the oath within forty days. Once more the Paris mobs took to the streets; an effigy of the pope was burned and the king was denounced for ‘treason’ for having received communion from a priest who had not sworn the oath. Louis came close to nervous collapse in the spring of 1791 and his doctors advised him to take a rest away from Paris. With the approval of the Assembly, the king resolved to take his family to Saint Cloud.
On 18 April 1791 at one o’clock, the king, queen, Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Charles and their entourage were in their berline in the courtyard of the Tuileries, ready to depart. However, a large, menacing crowd had gathered at the gates and blocked their path. Far from protecting the royal family, the National Guard refused to disperse the rioters. ‘They mutinied, shut the gates, and declared they would not let the king pass,’ recorded Madame Campan. Hearing of the emergency, Lafayette hurried to the Tuileries and ordered the guards to allow the king’s carriage to depart. It was impossible. The rioters became angry and abusive. The Marquise de Tourzel, who was in the carriage, wrote of the ‘horrible scene’ as she observed the king himself trying to appeal to the people. ‘It is astonishing that, having given liberty to the nation, I should not be free myself,’ he pleaded. It was no use. The crisis lasted two hours. Some of the king’s attendants were dragged away; one was violently assaulted. At this point, the Dauphin became frightened. He rushed to the window and cried out, ‘Save him! Save him!’ The royal family were obliged to admit defeat and go back inside the Tuileries, the king deeply depressed. There was no escaping the fact that had been evident for months: they were prisoners.
The king felt his position becoming untenable. Politically, he had been systematically stripped of his powers, sidelined and humiliated. The events of that ‘cruel day’ had provided unnerving evidence that the National Guard could not be trusted to enforce the law and defend the royal family against a hostile mob. Up until this point, despite pressure from his wife and others, the king had been unwilling to reconcile himself to the idea of fleeing from his own people. Now, at last, the urgent need for escape began to take shape in his mind.
Six hundred National Guards, increasingly more loyal to the nation than to the king, were now patrolling the Tuileries and spies were everywhere. However, the king and queen could count on one very loyal and capable ally: Count Axel Fersen. Determined to rescue the queen from her impossible position, he told his father, ‘I should be vile and ungrateful if I deserted them now that they can do nothing for me and I have hope of being useful to them’.
Axel Fersen advised the king and queen to escape separately, in light, fast carriages, but they insisted on travelling together with the children, in a more capacious, but much slower, berline. They aimed to reach Montmédy, a border town almost two hundred miles to the east by the Austrian Netherlands. Here, protected by a garrison led by his faithful general, Marquis Louis de Bouillé, the king hoped to unite his supporters and challenge the right of the Assembly to usurp his authority.
Fersen coordinated arrangements for their escape. Fresh horses were needed at staging posts every fifteen miles from Paris. For the last eighty miles, once they had passed Châlons in the Champagne region, troops would be waiting at various points from the Pont de Somme-Vesle to escort them to the border. Throughout the spring meticulous arrangements were in progress. At the palace, secret doors were constructed to assist the escape. Disguises and passports were obtained for the royal family. The Marquise de Tourzel would pose as a wealthy Russian woman, ‘Baronne de Korff’, travelling with her two ‘daughters’, Marie-Thérèse as Amélie and Louis-Charles as Aglae. The king would be dressed simply as her valet and the queen, in black coat and hat, was to be the children’s governess.
On the planned day of departure, 20 June 1791, the king and queen tried to keep a semblance of normality but their anxiety did not pass unnoticed. Marie-Thérèse was only too aware that her mother and father ‘seemed greatly agitated during the whole day’, although she had no idea why. Her anxiety only increased when in the afternoon her mother found an opportunity to take her aside and whisper that she ‘was not to be uneasy at anything that I might see’, and that ‘we might be separated, but not for long … I was dumbfounded’.
‘I was hardly in bed before my mother came in; she told me we were to leave at once,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse. Marie-Antoinette had already woken the Dauphin. Although more asleep than awake, Louis-Charles was annoyed to find himself being dressed as a girl. His daytime games were all of soldier heroes and now he thought he was about to command a regiment, shouting for his boots and sword. At half past ten Marie-Antoinette escorted them downstairs and out through an empty apartment to a courtyard where Fersen was waiting, dressed as a coachman and even smoking tobacco.
The Dauphin, in his plain linen dress and bonnet, hid at the bottom of the carriage under Madame de Tourzel’s