Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty

by Imbert de Saint-Amand

XVIII.

THE MORNING OF JUNE TWENTIETH.

It is Wednesday, June 20, 1792, the anniversary of the oath of the Jeu de Paume. The signal is given. The faubourgs assemble. It is five in the morning. Santerre, on horseback, is at the Place de la Bastille, at the head of a popular staff. The army of rioters forms slowly. Some anxiety is shown at first. The departmental decree forbidding armed gatherings had been posted, and occasioned some reflection in the timid. But Santerre reassures them. He tells them that the National Guard will not be ordered to oppose their march, and that they may count on Pétion's complicity.

When the march toward the National Assembly begins, hardly more than fifteen hundred are in line. But the little band increases as it goes. The route lies through rues Saint-Antoine, de la Verrerie, des Lombards, de la Ferronnerie, and Saint-Honoré. The procession is headed by soldiers, after whom comes a great poplar stretched upon a wagon. It is the Liberty tree. According to some, it is to be planted in the courtyard of the Riding School, opposite the Assembly chamber; according to others, on the terrace of the Tuileries, before the principal door of the palace. A military band plays the Ça ira, which is chanted in chorus by the insurrectionary troop. No obstacle impedes their march. The torrent swells incessantly. The inquisitive mingle with the bandits. Some are in uniform, some in rags; there are soldiers, active and disabled, National Guards, workmen, and beggars. Harlots in dirty silk gowns join the contingent from studios, garrets, and robbers' dens, and gangs of ragpickers unite with butchers from the slaughter-houses. Pikes, lances, spits, masons' hammers, paviors' crowbars, kitchen utensils,—their equipment is oddity itself.

It is noon. The session of the Assembly has just been opened. At this hour the throng, now numbering some twenty thousand persons, enters the rue Saint-Honoré. The Directory of the Department of Paris demands admission to the bar on pressing business, and the municipal attorney-general, Roederer, begins to speak. Heeding neither the murmurs of the galleries, the disapprobation of part of the Assembly, nor the clamor sure to be raised against him that evening in the Jacobin and Cordelier clubs, he boldly announces what is going on. He reminds them of the law, and the decrees forbidding armed gatherings which have been issued by the Commune and the Department. He adds that, without such prohibitions, neither the authorities nor private individuals have any security for their lives. "We demand," cried he, "to be invested with complete responsibility; we demand that our obligation to die for the maintenance of public tranquillity shall in nowise be diminished."

Vergniaud ascends the platform. He owns that, in principle, the Assembly is wrong in admitting armed gatherings within its precincts, but he declares that he thinks it impossible to refuse a permission accorded to so many others to that which now presents itself. He believes, moreover, that it could not be dispersed without a resort to martial law and a renewal of the massacre of the Champ-de-Mars. "It would be insulting to the citizens who are now asking to pay their respects to you," said he, "to suspect them of bad intentions... The assemblage doubtless does not claim to accompany the citizens who desire to present a petition to the King. Nevertheless, as a precaution, I propose that sixty members of the Assembly shall be commissioned to go to the King and remain near him until this gathering shall have been dispersed."

The discussion continues. M. Ramond follows Vergniaud. What is going to happen? What will the insurrectionary column do? Glance for an instant at the topography of the Assembly and its environs. The session-chamber is the Hall of the Riding School, which extends to the terrace of the Feuillants, and occupies the site where the rue de Rivoli was opened later on, almost at the corner of the future rue de Castiglione. It is a building about one hundred and fifty feet long. In front of it is a long and narrow courtyard beginning very near the rue de Dauphin. It is entered through this courtyard, which a wall, afterwards replaced by a grating, separates from the terrace of the Feuillants. It may be entered at the other extremity, also, at the spot where the flight of steps facing the Place Vendôme was afterwards built. From the side of the courtyard it can be approached by carriages, but from the other, only by pedestrians who cross the narrow passage of the Feuillants, which starts from the rue Saint-Honoré, opposite the Place Vendôme, and leads to the garden of the Tuileries. This passage is bordered on the right by the convent of the Capuchins; on the left is the Riding School, almost at the spot where the passage opens into the Tuileries Garden by a door which had just been closed, and before which had been placed a cannon and a battalion of National Guards.

On reaching the rue Saint-Honoré, the crowd had taken good care not to enter the court of the Riding School, where they might have been arrested and disarmed. They preferred to follow the rue Saint-Honoré and take the passage conducting thence to the Assembly and the terrace of the Feuillants. Three municipal officers who had gone to the Tuileries Garden, passed through this passage before the crowd, and met the advancing column at the door of the Assembly, just as M. Ramond was in the tribune discussing Vergniaud's proposition. While the head of the column was awaiting the issue of this discussion, the rank and file were constantly advancing. The passage became so thronged that people were in danger of stifling. Part of them withdrew from the crowd and went into the garden of the Capuchin convent, where they amused themselves by planting the Liberty tree in the classic ground of monkish ignorance and idleness, as was said in those days. The remainder, which was in front of the door and the grating of the terrace of the Feuillants, became exasperated. The sight of the glittering bayonets, and the cannon placed in front of this grating, roused them to fury.