A Short History of France

by Mary Platt Parmele

Probably of all the cruelties inflicted upon this unhappy woman, none caused her such anguish as the testimony of her son before the Revolutionary Tribunal, that he had heard his mother say she "hated the French people." Placed under the care of the brutal Simon after his father's removal from the Temple, the child had become a physical and mental wreck. The queen, in her last letter to her sister the Princess Elizabeth, makes pitiful allusion to the incident, begging her to remember what he must have suffered before he said this; also reminding her how children may be taught to utter words they do not comprehend. His lesson, no doubt, had been learned by cruel tortures; and, rendered half imbecile, it was recited when the time came. None but his keeper was ever permitted to see the boy. His condition, final illness, and death are shrouded in mystery. In June, 1794, eight months after his mother's execution, it was announced that he was dead. It would be difficult to prove this event before a court of justice. There were no witnesses whose testimony would have any weight. No one was permitted to see the child who was put into that obscure grave; and many circumstances give rise to a suspicion that the boy, who might have been a source of political embarrassment in the rehabilitation of France, was disposed of in another way—dropped into an obscurity which would serve as well as death.

There was a surfeit of killing, and a waning Revolution. We are far from saying that such a thing happened. But ambitious royalists might have thought their money well expended in removing the son of the murdered king from the scene. The claim of the American dauphin, Eleazer Williams, may have been fanciful, or even false; but what safer and more effectual plan could be devised than to drop the half-imbecile heir to a throne into the heart of a tribe of Indians in an American wilderness?

When Louis XVIII. occupied his brother's throne, in 1814, and erected over the dishonored graves of his family that beautiful Chapelle Expiatoire, he also gave orders for masses to be said for the repose of the souls of his murdered kindred, whom he designated by name: Louis XVI., king; Marie Antoinette, queen, and the Princess Elizabeth, his sister. If it is true, as has been said, that the name of the dauphin was not included in this list, it is a most suggestive omission. Technically, this boy was king from the moment of his father's death until his own, and on the lists of sovereigns is called Louis XVII. Then why was there no mention of him as one of that martyred group?

Twenty-two of the Girondists who had helped to dethrone the king on that 10th of August, and later consented to his death, were now facing the same doom to which they had sent him only six months before, and by a strange fatality were under the same roof with the queen. Only a few feet, and two thin partitions, separated them; and in her cell she must have heard their impassioned voices during that dramatic banquet, the last night of their lives. And the next day this group of extraordinary men—men singularly gifted and fascinating—were all lying in one tomb, at the side of Louis XVI.

Philip Égalité, the Duke of Orleans, was to meet his Nemesis also. Brought a prisoner to that grim resting-place, he occupied the adjoining cell to that which had been the queen's, and, it is said, had assigned to him the wretched cot she no longer needed. His desperate game had failed. No elevation would come to him out of the chaos of crime, and the reward for scheming and voting for the death of his cousin, the king, would be a scaffold, not a throne. His name had been upon the list of the proscribed for some time; but the end was precipitated by an act of his young son, Louis Philippe, then Duke de Chartres, and aide-de-camp to Dumouriez, who was defending the frontier from an invasion of Austrian troops. After the execution of the queen, Dumouriez refused longer to defend France from an invasion the purpose of which was to make such horrors impossible. He laid down his command, and, with his aide, Louis Philippe, joined the colony of exiles in Belgium, while the Austrian troops were in full march upon Paris from Verdun.

This was treason—whether justifiable or not this is not the place to discuss.

Philip Égalité knew that he no longer had the confidence of the leaders, and that they also knew that he was an aristocrat in disguise. So when this defection of Dumouriez came, and was shared by his own son, he tried to get out of the country. He was arrested at Marseilles, brought to the Conciergerie, that half-way house to the scaffold, and was soon following in the footsteps of his king and queen, through the Rue St. Honore, passing his own Palais Royal on his way to the Place de la Revolution.

The Revolution, beginning with a patriotic assembly, in a measure sane, had made a rapid descent, first falling apart into Girondist and Jacobin, moderate and extremist, the Girondist with a shudder consenting to the execution of the king. Then, the power passing to a so-called "Committee of Public Safety" and a Triumvirate, in order to sweep away the obstructive Girondist; and then an untrammelled Terror, in the hands of three, and, finally, one. Such had been its mad course. But with the death of the king and queen, the madness had reached its height, and a revulsion of feeling set in. There was a surfeit of blood, and an awakening sense of horror, which turned upon the instigators. Danton fell, and finally, when amid cries of "Death to the tyrant!" Robespierre was dragged wounded and shivering to the fate he had brought upon so many thousands, the drama which had opened at the Bastille was fittingly closed.

The great battle for human liberty had been fought and won. Religious freedom and political freedom were identical in principle. The right of the human conscience, proclaimed by Luther in 1517, had in 1793 only expanded into the large conception of all the inherent rights of the individual.

It had taken centuries for English persistence to accomplish what France, with such appalling violence, had done in as many years. It had been a furious outburst of pent-up force; but the work had been thorough. Not a germ of tyranny remained. The incrustations of a thousand years were not alone broken, but pulverized; the privileged classes were swept away, and their vast estates, two-thirds of the territory of France, ready to be distributed among the rightful owners of the soil, those who by toil and industry could win them. France was as new as if she had no history. There was ample opportunity for her people now. What would they do with it?