Paris and Its Story

by Thomas Okey

“But though the gods see clearly, they are slow
In marking when a man, despising them,
Turns from their worship to the scorn of fools.”

Half a century had elapsed since that meal in the peasant’s house and the royal colloquy with the villager in the forest of Senard, when the Nemesis that holds sleepless vigil over the affairs of men stirred her pinions and, like a strong angel with glittering sword, prepared to avenge the wrongs of a people whose rulers had outraged every law, human and divine, by which human society is held together. King, nobles, and prelates had a supreme and an awful choice. They might have led and controlled the Revolution: they chose to oppose it, and were broken into shivers as a potter’s vessel.

After the memorable cannonade at Valmy, a knot of defeated German officers gathered in rain and wind moodily around the circle where they durst not kindle the usual camp-fire. In the morning the army had talked of nothing but spitting and devouring the whole French nation: in the evening everyone went about alone; nobody looked at his neighbour, or if he did, it was but to curse and swear. “At last,” says Goethe, “I was called upon to speak, for I had been wont to enliven and amuse the troop with short sayings. This time I said, ‘From this day forth, and from this place, a new era begins in the history of the world and you can all say that you were present at its birth.’” This is not the place to write the story of the French Revolution. Those who would read the tremendous drama may be referred to the pages of Carlyle. As a formal history, that work of transcendent genius may be open to criticism. Indeed to the present writer the magnificent and solemn prosody seems to partake of the nature of a Greek chorus—the comment of an idealised spectator, assuming that the hearer has the drama unfolding before his eyes. Recent researches have supplemented and modified our knowledge. It is no longer possible to accept the more revolting representations of the misery[156] of the French peasantry as true of the whole of France, for France before the Revolution was an assemblage of many provinces of varying social conditions, subjected to varying administrative laws. Nor can we accept Carlyle’s portraiture of Robespierre as history, after Louis Blanc’s great work. So far from Robespierre having been the bloodthirsty protagonist of the later Terror, it was precisely his determination to make an end of the more savage excesses of the extreme Terrorists and to chastise their more furious pro-consuls, such as Carrier and Fouché, that brought about his ruin. It was men like Collot d’Herbois, Billaud Varenne and Barrère, the bloodiest of the Terrorists, who, to save their own skins, united to cast the odium of the later excesses on Robespierre, and to overthrow him. During the forty-five days that preceded his withdrawal from the sittings of the Committee of Public Safety, 577 persons were guillotined: during the forty-five days that succeeded, 1285 went to their doom. Of the twelve decrees that have been discovered signed by Robespierre during the four last decades, only one had any relation to the system of terror. But whatever defects there be in Carlyle, his readers will at least understand the significance of the Revolution, and why it is that the terrible, but temporary excesses which stained its progress have been so unduly magnified by reactionary politicians, while the cruelties of the White Terror[157] are passed by.

Few of the buildings associated with the Revolution remain at Paris. The Salle du Manège, the Feuillants and Jacobin clubs were swept away by Napoleon’s Rue de Rivoli. But at Versailles little is changed; the broad Avenue de Paris, once filled with double uninterrupted files of brilliant equipages, racing with furious speed from morning to evening along the five leagues between Versailles and Paris, is now silent and deserted. Here, outside the gates of the château were seen in 1775 that vast “multitude in wide-spread wretchedness, with their sallow faces, squalor and winged raggedness, presenting in legible, hieroglyphic writing their petition of grievances, and for answer two were hanged on a new gallows forty feet high.” Here the traveller may see at the corner of the Rue St. Martin in the Avenue de Paris, that Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs, where the States-General sat, 5th May 1789, and where the Commons took the bit in their mouths by declaring themselves the National Assembly, whether the two privileged orders sat with them or not, and decided to set about the task of regenerating France. Here under the elm trees on the Paris road stood the Deputies in the drizzling rain when they found the doors of the hall closed, by royal order, against them, while giggling courtiers looked mockingly on. We may trace their footsteps as they angrily paced to the Rue St. François; we may stand in the very tennis-court whose walls echoed to the solemn oath sworn by their 700 voices never to separate until they had given a constitution to France. Hard by, in the Rue Satory, is the church of St. Louis, where they met the next day on finding the court retained for a tennis-party by the king’s brother, the Count of Artois. We may return to the Menus Plaisirs, where the king’s messenger, de Brézé, ordering them to disperse after the famous royal sitting, heard Mirabeau’s leonine voice bidding him go back to his master and tell him that they were there by the people’s will, and that nothing but the force of bayonets should drive them forth.[158] We may enter the royal apartments, the famous ante-room of the Œil de Bœuf with its oval ox-eyed windows, the king’s bed-chamber, and the council hall; we may look on the foolish faces of the later Bourbons, of the princesses his daughters whom Louis XV. dubbed Rag, Tatter, Snip, and Pig. In the opera-house built for Mesdames Pompadour and Du Barry, we may recall that mad scene of 1st October, when the officers of the bodyguard, having invited their comrades of the Regiment of Flanders to a dinner on the stage, were shaking the roof with cries of “Vive le roi!” while the orchestra played the air, “O Richard! O mon roi! l’univers t’abandonne,” the king suddenly appeared in the royal box facing them, leading the queen, who bore the Dauphin in her arms. Then was the air repeated, and amid a scene of wild enthusiasm the royal family were rapturously acclaimed with clapping of hands and deafening shouts of “Vive le roi! Vive la reine! Vive le dauphin!” Ladies distributed white cockades, the Bourbon colour, and the tricolor was trodden underfoot. Intoxicated soldiers danced under the king’s balcony, and next morning it was discussed at a breakfast given at the hôtel of the bodyguards whether they should march against the National Assembly. And this within three months of the taking of the Bastille and when Paris was in the grip of famine!

The news of the mad orgy goaded the people to fury, and on 5th October an insurrectionary army of 10,000 women advanced on Versailles and encamped on the vast open space in front of the gates. As we stand in the Cour de Marbre, we may lift our eyes to that balcony of the first floor where, on 6th October, Marie Antoinette stood bravely forth, holding her two children by the hand and confronting the vociferating people. At their cry, “No children!” she gently pushed the little Dauphin and his sister back into the room, and with folded arms, for she at least lacked not courage, gazed calmly at them in regal dignity, to be answered by shouts of “Vive la reine!” It was the last time she trod the palace of Versailles. The same day king, queen and children went their way amid that strange procession to Paris, the women crying: “We need not die of hunger now. Here are the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy.” The palace of the Tuileries was hastily prepared for their reception and for the first time Louis XVI. entered its gates.

Camille Desmoulins has described in his Memoirs how on 11th July he was lifted on a table in front of the Café Foy, in the garden of the Palais Royal, and delivered that short but pregnant oration which preceded the capture of the Bastille on the 14th, warning the people that a St. Bartholomew of patriots was contemplated, and that the Swiss and German troops in the Champ de Mars were ready for the butchery. As the crowd rushed to the Hôtel de Ville, shouting “To arms!” they were charged by the Prince de Lambesc at the head of a German regiment, and the first blood of the Revolution in Paris was shed.

The Bastille, like the monarchy, was the victim of its past sins. That grisly fortress, with the jaws of its cannon opening on the most populous quarter of Paris, and its sinister memories of the Man in the Iron Mask,[159] embodied in the popular mind all that was hateful in the old régime, though it had long ceased to be more than occasionally used as a state prison. If we would restore its aspect we must imagine the houses at the ends of the Rue St. Antoine and the Boulevard Henri IV. away and the huge mass erect on their site and on the lines marked in white stone on the present Place de la Bastille. A great portal, always open by day, yawned on the Rue St. Antoine and gave access to the first quadrangle which was lined with shops: then came a second gate, with entrances for carriages and for foot passengers, each with its drawbridge. Beyond these a second quadrangle was entered, to the right of which stood the Governor’s house and an armoury. Another double portal gave entrance across the old fosse once fed by the waters of the Seine, to the prison fortress itself, with its eight tall blackened towers and its crenelated ramparts.