The events of that day proved that Lafayette had not the quality of a great leader of men. How much of his ill success was due to bad luck, how much to over-conscientiousness in fulfilling the letter of his oath, how much to physical weariness, we may never know. The royal family believed he had saved their lives, and the vilest accusations against him, including the one that he really wished Louis to fall a victim of the mob, appear to have been manufactured twenty-five years later in the bitterness of another political struggle. It is significant that very soon after the king came to Paris Lafayette held a stormy interview with the Duc d'Orléans, who forthwith left France.
Since that melancholy ride back to Paris the rulers of France have never lived at Versailles. Within ten days the National Assembly followed the king to town, and during the whole remaining period of the Revolution the mob had the machinery of government in its keeping. It invaded the legislative halls to listen to the making of the Constitution, it howled approval of speeches or drowned them in hisses, and called out from the windows reports to the crowds packing the streets below.
Political clubs soon became the real censors of public opinion, taking an ever larger place in the life of the people, until, alas! they began to take part in the death of many of them. The most influential club of all was the Jacobins, known by that name because of the disused monastery where it held its meetings. It began as an exclusive club of well-to-do gentlemen of all parties, who paid large dues and met to discuss questions of interest. Then it completely changed its character, took into its organization other clubs in Paris and other cities, and by this means became a vast, nation-wide political machine of such iron discipline that it was said a decree of the Jacobins was better executed than any law passed by the National Assembly. When its decrees grew more radical its membership changed by the simple process of expelling conservative members, until Robespierre became its controlling spirit. Another club more radical still was the Cordelières, in which Marat and Danton, those stormy petrels of the Terror, held sway. This smaller organization influenced even the Jacobins and through them every village in France. Several of the most radical leaders published newspapers of vast influence, like Marat's Ami du Peuple, which carried their opinions farther than the spoken word could do, out into peaceful country lanes. In the cities the great power of the theater was directed to the same violent ends. In vain the more conservative patriots started clubs of their own; the others had too great headway. The Feuillants, that Lafayette and Bailly were instrumental in founding, was called contemptuously the club of the monarchists. All these changes were gradual, but little by little, as time passed, the aims of the revolutionists altered. What had been at first a cry for justice became an appeal for liberty, then a demand for equality, and finally a mad howl for revenge.
XXIII
POPULARITY AND PRISON
So many local National Guards and revolutionary town governments had been formed that France was in danger of being split into a thousand self-governing fragments. Some of these came together in local federations for mutual benefit; and as the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile rolled around, Paris proposed a grand federation of all such organizations as a fitting way to celebrate the new national holiday. The idea caught popular fancy, and the city made ready for it with a feverish good will almost as strange as that of the memorable night when nobles and clergy in the National Assembly had vied with one another to give up their century-old privileges.
The spot chosen for the ceremonies was the Champs de Mars, where the Eiffel Tower now stands. It is a deal nearer the center of Paris now than it was in 1790, when it was little more than a great field on the banks of the Seine, near the military academy. This was to be changed into an immense amphitheater three miles in circumference, a work which required a vast amount of excavating and building and civil engineering. Men and women of all classes of society volunteered as laborers, and from dawn till dark a procession, armed with spades and every implement that could possibly be used, passed ceaselessly between the heart of the city and the scene of the coming festivity. Eye-witnesses tell us that on arriving each person threw down his coat, his cravat, and his watch, "abandoning them to the loyalty of the public" and fell to work. "A delicate duchess might be seen filling a barrow to be trundled away by a fishwife"; or a chevalier of the Order of Saint-Louis laboring with a hurried, flustered little school-boy; or a priest and an actor doing excellent team-work together. A hundred orchestras were playing; workers quitted their labors for a few turns in the dance, then abandoned that again for toil.
Lafayette encouraged them by his enthusiastic presence, and filled and trundled a barrow with his own hands; and when the king appeared one day to view the strange scene he was greeted with extravagant joy. Though this went on for weeks, the undertaking was so vast and the best efforts of duchesses and school-boys so far from adequate, that a hurry call had to be sent out, in response to which it was estimated that during the last few days of preparation two hundred and fifty thousand people were busy there. Evil rumors were busy, too, under cover of the music, and whispers went through the crowd that no provisions were to be allowed to enter Paris during the entire week of festivities and that the field had been honeycombed with secret passages and laid with mines to blow up the whole great throng. Such rumors were answered by a municipal proclamation which ended with the words, "Cowards may flee these imaginary dangers: the friends of Revolution will remain, well knowing that not a second time shall such a day be seen."