Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

The first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was celebrated upon the Field of Mars by a great festival. Undeterred by a violent rainstorm a hundred thousand people passed before an Altar of the Fatherland erected in the middle, and after taking part in a religious service, listened to Lafayette, who was the first to swear to uphold the Constitution, and to Louis, who declared: “I, King of the French, swear to use the power which the constitutional act of the State has delegated to me, for the maintenance of the Constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by me.”

The Assembly confiscated church property and gave to the state the control of the clergy. Then it ordered the clergy to take an oath to support the Constitution. Because this implied an acknowledgment that the action of the Assembly was justifiable the pope forbade the clergy to take the oath. At first the king vetoed this bill, called the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy,” and then he sanctioned it. It was this vacillation that caused the distribution in Paris of the cartoon of “King Janus.”

The Assembly worked hard in the old riding school near the Tuileries, and formulated many political changes which did not live and many civil improvements which were more enduring. Mirabeau used his strength for order; but popular clubs, the Jacobins and Cordeliers, which took their names from the old religious buildings in which they met, were constantly stirring the fiercest passions of the people, and principles closely akin to anarchy were taught in the press of Danton and Desmoulins, sincere believers in revolution.

Despairing of achieving peace from within the king entered into a secret arrangement with several other European rulers, by which they were to invade France and subdue his subjects for him, and in June, 1791, he tried to escape from the country with his family and to join his allies. They stole forth at night from the Tuileries and managed to leave the city, but they were recognized and sent back, making their way once more to the palace through a huge and sullen crowd. The clubs clamored for the king’s deposition and the people rioted in the Field of Mars against Lafayette and the mayor of Paris, who dispersed them at the command of the Assembly.

In the autumn the Assembly finished the preparation of the constitution and disbanded, to be succeeded at once by the Legislative Assembly, whose leaders, the Girondins, were antiroyalists, but not active republicans. War was declared against Austria, but distrust and discontent led the French army to reverses of which the revolutionary press made the most.

It happened to be on the anniversary of the flight of the royal family that the Marais and the Faubourg Saint Antoine again gave up their hordes, who lashed themselves into fury as they pushed their way through the chamber where the Assembly was sitting, and then surged on to the Tuileries. Without doubt their intention was murder, but once more, as when Marie Antoinette fronted them at Versailles, they stopped abashed before a calm which they could not understand. Louis donned the scarlet liberty cap which they handed him, the queen allowed a similar “Phrygian bonnet” to be put upon the dauphin, and the mob stood appeased and even admiring. Yet only a few days later Lafayette, the defender of the Assembly, was forced to flee from the country. The Reign of Terror had begun.

The threatened approach of the foreign enemy was the signal for a final attack upon the royal family. Early on one August morning the National Guard and the Swiss Guards massed themselves about the palace to withstand the assault of the crowd whose ominous roar was heard growing momentarily louder as it poured westward under the leadership of a brewer of the Faubourg St. Antoine. The guards gave their life valiantly, but they were hacked to pieces in the struggle which Thorwaldsen’s famous Lion commemorates at Lucerne. The victorious rabble set fire to the palace, which was partly destroyed, and then rushed before the Assembly, demanding that it dissolve in favor of a National Convention. In the old riding school the king and queen, their children and the king’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, took refuge, staying crowded into a small room while the Assembly discussed the question of what should be done with them. After three days and nights of extreme discomfort they were removed to the tower of the ancient Temple.[5]

Paris was the very heart of the Terror. The rabble had learned its power and unscrupulous leaders permitted brutality and urged violence. A casual word was enough to cause anybody, man, woman or child, to be arrested as a suspect and thrown into prison. If he did not die there, forgotten, he came out only to be taken before a so-called tribunal which listened to false charges, practically allowed no denial or protest, declared its victims, in detachments, guilty of “conspiring against the Republic” and sent them straightway to the guillotine.

This instrument was invented by a physician, Dr. Guillotin, to provide a humane method of capital punishment. Its victims would feel no pain he said; only a refreshing coolness! It was set up in various parts of the city. In the Place Louis XV, then called the Place de la Révolution, the scaffold was erected near the statue of Liberty to which Mme. Roland addressed her famous exclamation: “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” Around it gathered a daily crowd, some, the industriously knitting women described in “A Tale of Two Cities,” who came as to a vaudeville performance; some, fanatics, equally joyous over the downfall of hated aristocrats or of plebeian “enemies of the Republic,” others, monsters who rejoiced in blood, no matter whose. Pitiful, indeed, were those who came day after day to watch the tumbrils approaching from the east through the rue Royale from the rue Saint Honoré for some friend whose appearance here might solve the mystery of an unexplained disappearance. In a little over two years two thousand and eight hundred people lost their heads in this place; one thousand three hundred were slain in six weeks in the Square of the Throne; scores more suffered in the small square where the Sun King had held his Carrousel, and yet others in the Grève before the City Hall.

Even such slight semblance of the forms of justice as preceded the ride to the guillotine was denied to hundreds of people, many of them innocent of any fault. Almost a thousand of such victims were massacred in the early days of September following the incarceration of the royal family. Bands of authorized assassins held pretended court in the prisons and butchered the helpless prisoners. At the Abbaye, the old prison of the monastery of Saint Germain-des-Près, the unfortunates were killed in the square before the church. It was in this prison that Mme. Roland wrote the “Memoirs” that give us one of the most vivid contemporary pictures that we have of these awful days. Here, too, Charlotte Corday spent the days between her murder of Marat and her passage to the guillotine.