‘There is no longer a king in France!’ Louis declared as he heard the decree, in effect demanding his arrest. Marie-Antoinette was less accepting. ‘Insolence!’ she declared. ‘What audacity, what cruelty,’ and she threw the document on the floor. She was overcome by rage and despair, by the bungling and lack of decisiveness, as events had slowly shaped themselves into disaster. When the agents of Lafayette put pressure on the king, saying Paris was in uproar over his departure, women and children might be killed, Marie-Antoinette replied, ‘Am I not a mother also?’ Her anxiety for her two children was her paramount concern.
The royal family tried to play for time. Surely General de Bouillé would send a detachment to rescue them? As the king’s young daughter points out, they could so easily have been carried off to the frontier ‘if anyone had been there who had any head’. However, by daybreak all they could hear was the sound of some six thousand people gathering outside, jeering and demanding that the king turn back. At last, at seven in the morning, ‘seeing there was no remedy or help to be looked for’, wrote Marie-Thérèse, ‘we were absolutely forced to take the road back to Paris’.
It took almost four terrifying days in the stifling heat to make the dismal and humiliating return journey under heavy guard. The crowds lining the roads back to Paris were aggressive and threatening; their mood was unpredictable. The people wanted to see the king, so the windows were open, the blinds drawn back; they were ‘baked by the sun and suffocated by the dust’. ‘One cannot imagine the suffering of the royal family on this luckless journey,’ wrote Madame de Tourzel. ‘Nothing was spared them!’ On top of their carriage were three of their bodyguards, handcuffed in fetters and in danger of being dragged down and killed.
For the king it was a terrible defeat. Yet again, he had failed. He had failed as a king, and brought his country to revolution. He had failed as a husband to protect his wife: she was now subject to even worse unknown terrors. He had failed as a father to bring his precious children to safety. Travelling with his loyal wife, his devoted sister and his young children, he knew that any words of assurance to them were empty promises; events had moved beyond his control. And somehow the failures had piled up despite his best efforts. He had always tried to avoid bloodshed; he couldn’t bear anyone to be hurt on his behalf. Yet his very gentleness and compassion had led inexorably to this utterly terrifying point in their lives. ‘I am aware that to succeed was in my hands,’ he wrote later to General de Bouillé. ‘But it is needful to have a ruthless spirit if one is to shed the blood of subjects … the very thought of such contingencies tore my heart and robbed me of all determination.’
During the mid-afternoon, a local nobleman, the loyal Comte de Dampierre, rode up to salute the king, ‘in despair at the king’s being stopped’. The crowd were enraged at Dampierre’s royalist gesture and tried to pull him off his horse. According to Marie-Thérèse, ‘hardly had he spurred his horse, before the people who surrounded the carriage fired at him. He was flung to the ground … a man on horseback rode over him and struck him several blows with his sabre; others did the same and soon killed him.’ The scene was horrible, wrote Marie-Thérèse, ‘but more dreadful still was the fury of these wretches, who not content with having killed him, wanted to drag his body to our carriage and show it to my father’. Despite his entreaties, ‘these cannibals came on triumphantly round the carriage holding up the hat, coat and clothing of the unfortunate Dampierre … and they carried these horrible trophies beside us along the road’.
Worse was to come at Épernay, the following day. At one point the royal family were obliged to abandon their carriage to enter a hotel, struggling through a crowd of angry people armed with pikes ‘who said openly that they wished to kill us’, wrote Marie-Thérèse, shocked by their bloodcurdling threats. ‘Of all the awful moments I have known, this was one of those that struck me most and the horrible impression of it will never leave me … My brother was ill all night and almost had delirium so shocked was he by the dreadful things he had seen.’
Ahead, a hostile reception was waiting for them in Paris. Following orders from Lafayette, the people lining the streets kept their heads covered and remained absolutely silent, to show their contempt for this monarch who had tried to flee. Lafayette’s orders were so strictly observed that ‘several scullery boys without hats, covered their heads with their dirty, filthy handkerchiefs’, recorded Madame de Tourzel. As they made their way down the Champs-Elysées and across the Place Louis XV, it was like an unspoken, public decoronation, as the citizens of Paris refused to acknowledge the royal status of their king and queen.
The crowds were so great it was evening before they finally reached the Tuileries. As they stepped down from the carriage someone tried to attack the queen. The Dauphin was snatched from her and whisked to safety by officials as others helped the queen into the palace. Louis-Charles was becoming increasingly terrified at the violence targeted directly at the royal family. ‘As soon as we arrived in Varennes we were sent back. Do you know why?’ he asked his valet, François Huë, as he struggled to make sense of it all. He was not easily comforted and that night, once again, he was woken with violent nightmares of being eaten alive by wolves.
As the Dauphin fell into a fitful sleep, ‘guards were placed over the whole family, with orders not to let them out of sight and to stay night and day in their chambers’. The next day the Assembly provisionally suspended Louis from his royal functions. The once untouchable king and queen were now finally reduced to the powerless symbols of a vanishing world.
The king’s support collapsed after his abortive flight to Varennes. Those who had remained loyal to the monarchy now questioned the motives of a king who had tried to flee, exposing his people to the risk of civil war. Those who had opposed the monarchy had a concrete weapon: here was evidence that the king would betray his people. Imprisoned in the Tuileries, with little support in the Assembly or outside it, in September 1791 the king reluctantly signed the new constitution. The once supreme Bourbon ruler was now, by law, no more than a figurehead, stripped of his powers.
Louis still clung to the hope that this would mark an end to the revolution and that France would settle down as a constitutional monarchy. Yet when he inaugurated the new ‘Legislative Assembly’ in October, demands for still further change gathered momentum. Conflicts grew between the moderates and the extremists in the Assembly. The key battlegrounds were over the growing number of émigrés and the clergy. What measures should be taken to protect France from the émigrés who might be plotting counter-revolution? How could the clergy who had refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the constitution be brought into line?
The king found himself facing a crisis in November, when the Assembly introduced a punitive decree: any priest who had not signed the oath would lose his pension and could be driven from his parish. This was presented to the king for his approval under the new constitution. As crowds gathered menacingly outside the Tuileries demanding that he sign, Louis wrestled with his conscience. His only remaining power was a delaying veto. If he used this he would infuriate the Assembly and the Parisian people, but how could he approve such a measure when the constitution promised ‘freedom to every man … to practise the religion of his choice’? The king vetoed the decree.
The news outraged deputies at the Assembly. The extremists, largely drawn from a political club known as the Jacobins, sought to limit the king’s power still further. Maximilien Robespierre was not a member of the Legislative Assembly, but was highly influential in the Jacobin Club and could exploit its powerful network throughout the country to influence opinion. Although he was not a good speaker, his supporters considered him eloquent and he was a skilled strategist, whose