Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

It made its first trial amid the excitements of the election to the States General which Louis was forced to summon when the Notables failed to suggest any solution of the country’s problems. It met in the spring of 1789, the first time in one hundred and seven-five years. Riots were frequent, prophetic of the struggle with the king which began as soon as the sitting opened at Versailles. Louis closed the hall to the assemblage and they met in the tennis court and took the famous oath by which they bound themselves not to disband until they had prepared a written constitution. They called themselves the National Constituent Assembly, the nobility and clergy joined them at the king’s request, and they voted thereafter not by classes but as individuals.

Some of the Third Estate knew definitely what they wanted. A peasant declared that he was going to work for the abolition of three things—pigeons, because they ate the grain; rabbits, because they ate the sprouting corn; and monks, because they ate the sheaves.

Three weeks after the Oath of the Tennis Court, Desmoulins, a young journalist, made an inflammatory speech in the garden of the Palais Royal, declaring that the fact of the king’s surrounding his family with Swiss soldiers was an introduction of force that made the wise regard the Bastille as a menace to the city.

The facts seem to be that most of the prisoners were well cared for, so well fed that Bastille diet was a town joke, and, as a picture by Fragonard shows, might even entertain their friends.

On July 14, 1789, two days after Desmoulins’ speech, the Parisians poured against the fortress a horde of citizens armed with weapons taken from the Hôtel des Invalides. They forced the first drawbridge, burned the governor’s house and easily compelled his surrender, since the garrison of which the people declared themselves in terror consisted only of about eighty men who were but scantily provided with ammunition. The crowd set free the prisoners, who numbered but a half dozen or so under Louis’ mild rule, seized the captain and hurried him to the Grève where they struck off his head and carried it about the city on a pike—the first of such hideous sights of which the Revolution was to know an appalling number. The destruction of the huge mass of masonry was begun the next day and lasted through five years. Lafayette sent one of the keys to General Washington.

So thoroughly did the Bastille symbolize oppression in the public mind of France that the anniversary of the day of its fall has been made the national holiday.

One of the schemes proposed for the decoration of the vacant square was the erection of an enormous elephant to be made from guns taken in battle by Napoleon. A plaster model stood in the place for several years, the same animal which served as a refuge for the street urchin, Gavroche, in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” After 1830 the present “July Column” was erected to the memory of the victims of the “Three Glorious Days” of the Revolution of that year.

Upon hearing of the Fall of the Bastille the king made concessions to the Assembly and then went to Paris accompanied by a huge and motley crowd armed with guns and scythes. The mayor went through the ceremony of presenting him with the keys of the city in token of its loyalty, while at almost the same time Lafayette was organizing the citizens into the National Guard, who wore a cockade made up not only of red and blue, the colors of Paris, but of white, the royal hue.

The nobles, awakened to the danger of a general insurrection, tried to put a stop to the rioting and incendiarism that was spreading over the country by offering to yield their privileges. This concession proved but a sop, for the people’s hunger was now unappeasable. Louis continued to spend most of his time at Versailles to the dissatisfaction of the Parisians. When they heard of the expressions of loyalty uttered by the king’s body-guard at a banquet they voted that the court had no right to feast while Paris was suffering for bread, marched to Versailles and forced the king, the queen, and the little dauphin—the baker and his wife and the baker’s boy, they called them—to go back with them to town. Marie Antoinette had succeeded in making herself extremely unpopular, both with the nobility who objected to her independence of the laws of etiquette to which they were accustomed, and with the people, who called her the “Austrian Wolf,” and who really believed her to be sinister and wicked instead of a gay and affectionate young woman, whose worst fault was thoughtlessness. If she had had before but small knowledge of the opinion in which she was held by her subjects she discovered it during this ten-mile drive when her carriage was surrounded by east-end roughs and disheveled women from the Halles who had only been deterred from killing her as she stood beside her husband at Versailles by her display of dauntless courage, and who crowded upon her now, yelling indecencies and shaking their fists at the king and the uncomprehending little prince and his sister. This return to Paris was called the “Joyous Entry.”

Arrived at Paris they went to the Tuileries and passed a sleepless night in the long-deserted palace which seems to have been despoiled even of its beds. There they lived for many months, willingly served only by a few faithful guards and daily insulted by people who came to see the tyrants and to watch the “Wolf’s Cub” dig in the little fenced enclosure which he called his garden. The king’s brother and his closest friends fled from the country, leaving him to face his troubles alone.