Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty

by Imbert de Saint-Amand

On Sunday, August 5,—the last Sunday the royal family were to spend at the Tuileries,—as they were going to the chapel to hear Mass, half the National Guards on duty cried: "Long live the King!" The others said: "No, no; no King, down with the veto!" The same day, at Vespers, the chanters had agreed to swell their tones greatly, and in a menacing way, when reciting this versicle of the Magnificat: Deposuit potentes de sede—"He hath put down the mighty from their seat." In their turn the royalists, after the Dominum salvum fac regem, cried thrice, turning as they did so toward the Queen: Et reginam. There was a continual murmuring all through the divine office. Five days later, the same chapel was to be a pool of blood.

And yet Madame Elisabeth, always calm and always angelic, still had illusions. One morning of this terrible month of August, while in her room in the Pavilion of Flora, she thought she heard some one humming her favorite air, Pauvre Jacques, beneath her windows. Attracted by this refrain, which in the midst of sorrow renewed the souvenir of happier times, she half opened her window and listened attentively. The words sung were not those of the ballad she loved, yet they were royalist in sentiment and adapted to the same air. The poor people had been substituted for poor Jack—the poor people who were pitied for having a king no longer and for knowing nothing but wretchedness. Such marks of attachment consoled the virtuous Princess, and made her hope against all hope. She wrote, August 8, to her friend Madame de Raigecourt: "They say that the King is going to be turned out of here somewhat forcibly, and made to lodge in the Hôtel-de-Ville. They say that there will be a very strong movement to that effect in Paris. Do you believe it? For my part, I do not. I believe in rumors, but not in their resulting in anything. That is my profession of faith. For the rest, everything is perfectly quiet to-day. Yesterday passed in the same way, and I think this one will be like it." On August 9, the eve of the fatal day, Madame Elisabeth again addressed a reassuring letter to one of her friends, Madame de Bombelles. Curiously enough she dated this letter August 10, no doubt by accident, and when Madame de Bombelles received it, she read these lines, which seem like the irony of fate: "This day of the 10th, which was to have been so exciting, so terrible, is as calm as possible; the Assembly has decreed neither deposition nor suspension."

XXVI.

THE PROLOGUE TO THE TENTH OF AUGUST.

The first rumblings of the storm began. People quarrelled and fought in the Palais Royal, the cafés, and the theatres. Half of the National Guard sided with the court, and the other half with the people. To seditious speeches were added songs full of insults to the King and Queen. These songs, sold on every corner, applauded in every tavern, and repeated by the wives and children of the people, propagated revolutionary fury. There was a constant succession of gatherings, brawls, and riots. The Assembly had declared the country in danger. Rumors of every sort excited popular imagination. It was said that priests who refused the oath were in hiding at the Tuileries, which was, moreover, full of arms and munitions. The Duke of Brunswick's manifesto exasperated national sentiment. It was read aloud in every street. The leaders neglected nothing likely to excite the populace, and prepared their last attack on the throne, their afterpiece of June 20, with as much audacity as skill.

In order to subdue the court, it was necessary to destroy its only remaining means of defence. To leave plenty of elbow-room for the riot, the Assembly, on July 15, ordered the troops of the line to be sent some thirty-five miles beyond Paris and kept there. A singular means was devised for breaking up the choice troops of the National Guard, who were royalists. They were told that it was contrary to equality for certain citizens to be more brilliantly equipped than others; that a bearskin cap humiliated those who were entitled only to a felt one; and that there was a something aristocratic about the name of grenadier which was really intolerable to a simple foot-soldier. The choice troops were dissolved in consequence, and the grenadiers came to the Assembly like good patriots to lay down their epaulettes and bearskin caps and assume the red cap. On July 30, the National Guard was reconstructed, by taking in all the vagabonds and bandits that the clubs could muster.

The famous federates of Marseilles, who were to take such an active part in the coming insurrection, arrived in Paris the same day. The Girondins, having failed to obtain their camp of twenty thousand men before Paris, had devised instead of it a reunion of federate volunteers, summoned from every part of France. The roads were at once thronged by future rioters whom the Assembly allowed thirty cents a day.

The Jacobins of Brest and Marseilles distinguished themselves. Instead of a handful of volunteers they sent two battalions. That of Marseilles, recruited by Barbaroux, comprised five hundred men and two pieces of artillery. Starting July 5, it entered Paris July 30. Excited to fanaticism by the sun and the declamations of the southern clubs, it had run over France, been received under triumphal arches, and chanted in a sort of frenzy the terrible stanzas of Rouget de l'Isle's new hymn, the Marseillaise. It was at this time that Blanc Gilli, deputy from the Bouches du Rhone department to the Legislative Assembly, wrote: "These pretended Marseillais are the scum of the jails of Genoa, Piedmont, Sicily, and of all Italy, Spain, the Archipelago, and Barbary. I run across them every day." Rouget de l'Isle received from his old mother, a royalist and Catholic at heart, a letter in which she said: "What is this revolutionary hymn which a horde of brigands are singing as they pass through France, and in which your name is mixed up?" At Paris the accents of that terrible melody sounded like strokes of the tocsin. The men who sang it filled the conservatives with terror. They wore woollen cockades and insulted as aristocrats those who wore silk ones.