On the 1st of March the King of Prussia has agreed to march with Leopold, and all is ready for that armed demonstration which would, as she was convinced, calm this great storm about her. On that same day, the 1st of March, Leopold lay dead. Doctors assure us that he was not poisoned.
Two things followed upon that death: first, the heir, her nephew, a sickly boy of twenty-four, now held in Vienna all the power that in those days accompanied a Crown, and he in his weakness was now the master of the armies his father had summoned.
Secondly, there must be a long delay for the business and the trapping of his election and his crowning.
Her plan meanwhile had failed. It was to be not a silent threat of arms, but war. The French temper had taken Leopold’s command as a challenge. The ultimatum she had suggested or drafted was met by a total change in the Executive of France. Dumouriez was made the chief man in the new Ministry and was put personally in charge of Foreign Affairs. The guns were certainly ready. For ten days after Dumouriez’ nomination the Queen drew from him his designs; and on the tenth day wrote secretly to Mercy in cipher betraying the French plan of campaign upon the Meuse. Three days later the last of her friends who could command an army, the King of Sweden, stabbed a fortnight earlier, died; and on the 20th of April her husband, as “the Head of the French Executive,” read out in a firm voice a declaration of war against her nephew “the King of Hungary”—for he was not yet crowned Emperor. Having so read it in a firm voice he went back home, and Marie Antoinette and he must now bethink themselves how the madness of the Parisians, when the invasion should begin, might be fended off—at least from their own persons and from their heir, until their saviours should show the white Austrian uniforms in Paris and march the grotesque Prussian march within sight and hearing of the Tuileries. On the 30th of the month she advised Mercy that the first proclamation of the invaders had best be mild.
Such had been the plan of the Queen, and such its fortune; and by such a fate had she been shadowed. For the sake of clarity I have omitted during this recital all save her negotiation. I will briefly return to the drift of the Revolutionary progress around her, and show how this also led up to that fatal conclusion, from the failure of the flight to Varennes at the end of June 1791 to the declaration of war in the following April.
When spirits are at high tension and in full vision, as it were, often a shock brings back the old, sober, and incomplete experience of living. Such a shock the flight to Varennes had afforded. While the royal family were yet absent there had been talk against the very institution of the Crown; some rich men had spoken of the Republic; the Revolutionary exultation ran very high. The flight was arrested: the royal family were brought back, and in a sort of mechanical, unconscious way reaction gathered force; after all (the politicians thought) the nation must not lose, could not afford to lose, might lose its very soul in losing, the web of inheritance which had come to it from so many centuries.
This force of reaction exploded when, during the Feasts of the Federation, three weeks after the return of the royal family, a popular outbreak upon the Champ de Mars was repressed by the declaration of martial law, the use of the Militia under La Fayette, and the authority of the Mayor of Paris.
The Revolution, going the way we know it did, the hatreds, the threats of vengeance covertly growing from that day (which the poor and their champions had already christened among themselves the “Massacre of the Champ de Mars”), take on a great importance; but to the people of the time the tumult and its armed repression did not seem of any great consequence save as the beginning of quieter things. The end of the summer was principally occupied in some speculation as to what the new Parliament would do when it should be convened in the autumn. That Parliament was restricted in power: the National Assembly which had made the Revolution was to be dissolved. This second body was to do no more than elaborate the details of laws; it was called, and remains to history, “The Legislative.”