Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty

by Imbert de Saint-Amand

THE FÊTE OF THE SWISS OF CHATEAUVIEUX.

Dumouriez, at the beginning of his ministry, was still the slave of the Jacobins, his allies and protectors. His elevation to the ministry was in great part due to them, and even while despising them, he felt unable to shake off their yoke. Little by little, they inspired him with horror, and before many weeks were over, his only idea was to free himself from their control. But at first he treated them like a power with which he was obliged to reckon. What proves this is his passive attitude at the time of the celebrated fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux. The prologue of the bloody tragedies that were in course of preparation, this fête shows what headway the revolutionary ideas had made. The sinister days of the Convention were approaching, the Terror existed in germ, and already many representatives who, on a secret ballot, would have voted in accordance with right and honor, were cowardly enough to do so against their conscience when they had to answer to their names.

Things had travelled fast since the close of the Constituent Assembly. In 1790, that Assembly, as the faithful guardian of discipline, had congratulated the Marquis de Bouillé on the energy with which he repressed the military rebellion that broke out at Nancy, August 31. The soldiers garrisoned at this town were guilty of the greatest crimes. They pillaged the military chests, arrested the officers, and fired on the troops who remained faithful. M. Desilles, an officer of the King's regiment, conducted himself at the time in a heroic manner. When the insurgents were about to discharge the cannon opposite the Stainville gate, he sprang towards it, and covering it with his body, cried: "It is your friends, your brothers, who are coming! The National Assembly sends them. Do you mean to fire on them? Will you disgrace your flags?" It was useless to try to hold Desilles back. He broke away from his friends and threw himself again in front of the rebels, falling under four wounds at the moment when the fight began.

The Constituent Assembly passed a decree by which it thanked the Marquis de Bouillé and his troops "for having gloriously fulfilled their duty" in repressing the military insurrection of Nancy. Its president wrote an official letter to Desilles, soon to die in consequence of his wounds: "The National Assembly has learned with just admiration, mingled with profound sorrow, the danger to which your heroic devotion has exposed you; in trying to describe it, I should weaken the emotion by which the Assembly was penetrated. So sublime an example of courage and civic virtue is above all praise. It has secured you a sweeter recompense and one more worthy of you; you will find it in your own heart, and the eternal memory of the French people."

The Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux had taken part in the rebellion at Nancy. Switzerland had reserved, by treaty, its federal jurisdiction over such of its troops as had taken service under the King of France. By virtue of this special jurisdiction the soldiers of the regiment of Chateauvieux, taken arms in hand, were tried before a council of war composed of Swiss officers. Twenty-two were condemned to death and shot. Fifty were condemned to the galleys and sent to the convict prison at Brest. It was in vain that Louis XVI. attempted to negotiate their pardon with the Swiss Confederacy. It remained inflexible, and the guilty were still undergoing their penalty when the Jacobins resolved to release them from prison in defiance of the treaties uniting Switzerland and France. "To deliver these condemned prisoners," says Dumouriez in his Memoirs, "was to insult the Cantons, attack their treaty rights, and judge their criminals. We had enemies enough already without seeking new ones among an allied people who were behaving wisely towards us, especially a free and republican people." But revolutionary passions do not reason. Collot d'Herbois, a wretched actor who had passed from the theatrical stage to that of politics, and who, not content with having bored people, wished to terrorize them also, made himself the champion of the galley-slaves of the regiment of Chateauvieux. He was the principal impresario of the lugubrious fête which disgraced Paris on April 15, 1792.

The programme was not arranged without some opposition. Public opinion was not yet ripe for saturnalia. There were still a few honest and courageous publicists who, like André Chénier, boldly lifted their voices to stigmatize certain infamies. In the tribune of the Assembly some orators were to be found who expressed their minds freely and held their own against the tempests of demagogy. There were generals and soldiers in the army for whom discipline was not an idle word; and if the fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux made the future Septembrists and furies of the guillotine utter shouts of joy, it drew from honest men a long cry of grief and indignation.

Intimidated by the menaces of the Jacobins, the Assembly voted the release of the Swiss incarcerated in the prison of Brest. But merely to deliver them was not enough: the Jacobins wanted to give them an ovation. Their march from Brest to Paris was a triumph, and Collot d'Herbois organized a gigantic fête in their honor.

André Chénier was at this time writing weekly letters for the Journal de Paris, in which he eloquently supported the principles of order and liberty. As M. de Lamartine has said, he was the Tyrtæus of good sense and moderation. He was indignant at the threatened scandal, and, in concert with his collaborator on the Journal de Paris, Roucher, the poet of Les Mois, he criticised in most energetic terms the revolutionary manifestation then organizing. At the Jacobin Club, on April 4, Collot d'Herbois freed his mind against him. "This is not Chénier-Gracchus," said the comedian; "it is another person, quite another." He spoke of André as a "sterile prose writer," and pointed him out to popular vengeance. The two brothers were in opposing camps. While André Chénier stigmatized the fête of anarchy, his brother Joseph was diligently manufacturing scraps of poetry, inscriptions, and devices which were to figure in the programme. "What!" cried André, "must we invent extravagances capable of destroying any form of government, recompense rebellion against the laws, and crown foreign satellites for having shot French citizens in a riot? People say that the statues will be veiled in every place through which this procession is to pass. Oh! if this odious orgy takes place, it will be well to veil the whole city; but it is not the images of despots that should be wrapt in funeral crape, but the faces of honest men. How is it that you do not blush when a turbulent handful, who seem numerous because they are united and make a noise, oblige you to do their will, telling you that it is your own, and amusing your childish curiosity meanwhile with unworthy spectacles? In a city which respected itself such a fête would meet nothing but solitude and silence." The controversy waxed furious. The walls were covered with posters for and against the fête. Roucher thus flagellated Collot d'Herbois: "This character out of a comic novel, who skipped from Polichinello's booth to the platform of the Jacobins, has sprung at me as if he were going to strike me with the oar the Swiss brought back from the galleys!"

Pétion, then mayor of Paris, far from opposing the fête, approved and encouraged it. "I think it my duty," he wrote, April 6, 1792, "to explain myself briefly concerning the fête which is being arranged to celebrate the arrival of the soldiers of Chateauvieux. Minds are heated, passions are in ferment, and citizens hold different opinions; everything seems to betoken disorder. It is sought to change a day of rejoicing into a day of mourning.... What is it all about? Some soldiers, leaders with the French guards, who have broken our chains and afterwards been overloaded with them, are about to enter within our walls; some citizens propose to meet and offer them a fraternal welcome; these citizens are obeying a natural impulse and using a right which belongs to all. The magistrates see nothing but what is simple and innocent in all this; they see certain citizens abandoning themselves to joy and mirth; every one is at liberty to participate or not to participate in the fête. Public spirit rises and assumes a new degree of energy amidst civic amusements." The municipality ordered this letter of Pétion's to be printed, posted on the walls, and sent to the forty-eight sectional committees and the sixty battalions of the National Guard.

Not all the members of the National Assembly shared the optimism of the mayor of Paris. The preparations for the fête, which was announced for April 15, occasioned, on the 9th, a session as affecting as it was stormy. The whole debate should be read in the Moniteur. The question was put whether the Swiss of Chateauvieux, then waiting outside the doors, should be introduced and admitted to the honors of the session. M. de Gouvion, who had been major-general of the National Guard under Lafayette, gravely ascended the tribune. "Gentlemen," said he, "I had a brother, a good patriot, who, through the favorable opinion of your fellow-citizens, had been successively a commander of the National Guard and a member from the Department. Always ready to sacrifice himself for the Revolution and the law, it was in the name of the Revolution and the law that he was required to march to Nancy with the brave National Guards. There he fell, pierced by fifty bayonets in the hands of those who.... I ask if I am condemned to look on tranquilly while the assassins of my brother enter here?" A voice rising from the midst of the Assembly cried: "Very well, sir, go out!" The galleries applauded. Gouvion attempted to continue. The murmurs redoubled. Several persons in the galleries cried: "Down! down!"