Paris and Its Story

by Thomas Okey

The Bastille, first used in Richelieu’s time as a permanent state prison, was filled under Louis XIV. with Jansenists and Protestants, who were thus separated from the prisoners of the common jails; and, later, under Louis XV. by a whole population of obnoxious pamphleteers and champions of philosophy. Books as well as their authors were incarcerated, and released when considered no longer dangerous; the tomes of famous Encyclopédie spent some years there. From the opening of the eighteenth century the horrible, dark and damp dungeons, half underground and sometimes flooded, formerly inhabited by the lowest type of criminals, were reserved as temporary cells for insubordinate prisoners, and since the accession of Louis XVI. they were no more used. The Bastille during the reigns of the three later Louis was the most comfortable prison in Paris, and detention there rather than in the other prisons was often sought for and granted as a favour; the prisoners might furnish their rooms, have their own libraries and food. In the middle of the seventeenth century certain rooms were furnished at the king’s expense for those who were without means. The rooms were warmed, the prisoners well fed, and sums varying from three francs to thirty-five francs per day, according to condition,[160] were allotted for their maintenance. A considerable amount of personal liberty was allowed to many and indemnities were in later years paid to those who had been unjustly detained. But a prison where men are confined indefinitely without trial and at a king’s arbitrary pleasure is none the less intolerable, however its bars be gilded. Prisoners were sometimes forgotten, and letters are extant from Louvois and other ministers, asking the governor to report how many years certain prisoners had been detained, and if he remembered what they were charged with. In Louis XIV.’s reign 2228 persons were incarcerated there; in Louis XV.’s, 2567. From the accession of Louis XVI. to the destruction of the prison the number had fallen to 289. Seven were found there when the fortress was captured—four accused of forgery, two insane; one, the Count of Solages, accused of a monstrous crime, was detained there to spare the feelings of his family. The Bastille, some time before its fall, was already under sentence of demolition, and various schemes for its disposal were before the court. One project was to destroy seven of the towers, leaving the eighth standing in a dilapidated state. On the site of the seven a pedestal formed of chains and bolts from the dungeons and gates was to bear a statue of Louis XVI. in the attitude of a liberator, pointing with outstretched hand towards the remaining tower in ruins. But Louis XVI. was always too late, and the Place de la Bastille, with its column raised to those who fell in the Revolution of July, 1830, now recalls the second and final triumph of the people over the Bourbon kings. Some stones of the Bastille were, however, built into the new Pont Louis Seize, subsequently called Pont de la Revolution and now known as Pont de la Concorde: others were sold to speculators and were retailed at prices so high that people complained that Bastille stones were as dear as the best butcher’s meat. Models of the Bastille, dominoes, inkstands, boxes and toys of all kinds were made of the material and had a ready sale all over France.

Far to the west and on the opposite side of the Seine is the immense area of the Champ de Mars, where, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was enacted the fairest scene of the Revolution. The whole population of Paris, with their marvellous instinct of order and co-operation, spontaneously set to work to dig the vast amphitheatre which was to accommodate the 100,000 representatives of France, and 400,000 spectators, all united in an outburst of fraternal love and hope to swear allegiance to the new Constitution before the altar of the Fatherland. The king had not yet lost the affection of his people. As he came to view the marvellous scene an improvised bodyguard of excavators, bearing spades, escorted him about. When he was swearing the oath to the Constitution, the queen, standing on a balcony of the Ecole militaire, lifted up the dauphin as if to associate him in his father’s pledge. Suddenly the rain which had marred the great festival ceased, the sun burst forth and flooded in a splendour of light, the altar, Bishop Talleyrand, his four hundred clergy, and the king with upraised hand. The solemn music of the Te Deum mingled with the wild pæan of joy and enthusiasm that burst from half a million throats.

The unconscionable folly, the feeble-minded vacillation and miserable trickery by which this magnificent popularity was muddled away is one of the saddest tragedies in the stories of kings. The people, with unerring instinct, had fixed on the queen as one of the chief obstacles to what might have been a peaceful revolution. Neither Marie Antoinette nor Louis Capet comprehended the tremendous significance of the forces they were playing with—the resolute and invincible determination of a people of twenty-six millions to emancipate itself from the accumulated and intolerable wrongs of centuries. The despatches and opinions of American ambassadors during this period are of inestimable value. The democratic Thomas Jefferson, reviewing in later years the course of events, declared that had there been no queen there would have been no revolution. Governor Morris, whose anti-revolutionary and conservative leanings made him the friend and confidant of the royal family, writes to Washington on January 1790: “If only the reigning prince were not the small beer character he is, and even only tolerably watchful of events, he would regain his authority,” but “what would you have,” he continues scornfully, “from a creature who, in his situation, eats, drinks and sleeps well, and laughs, and is as merry a grig as lives. He must float along on the current of events and is absolutely a cypher.” But the court would not forego its crooked ways. “The queen is even more imprudent,” Morris writes in 1791, “and the whole court is given up to petty intrigues worthy only of footmen and chambermaids.” Moreover, in its amazing ineptitude, the monarchy had already toyed with republicanism by lending active military support to the revolutionists in America, at a cost to the already over-burdened treasury of 1,200,000,000 livres.

The American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, was crowned at court with laurel as the apostle of liberty, and in the very palace of Versailles medallions of Franklin were sold, bearing the inscription: “Eripui coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis” (“I have snatched the lightning from heaven and the sceptre from tyrants”). The revolutionary song, Ça ira, ça ira (“That will go, that will go”), owes its origin to Franklin’s invariable response to inquiries as to the progress of the American revolutionary movement. There was explosive material enough in France to make playing with celestial fire perilous, and while the political atmosphere was heavy with the threatening change, thousands of French soldiers returned saturated with enthusiasm and sympathy for the American revolution. Already before the Feast of the Federation the queen had been in secret correspondence with the émigrés at Turin and at Coblenz who were conspiring to throttle the nascent liberty of France. Plots had been hatched to carry off the royal family. Madame Campan relates that the queen made her read a confidential letter from the Empress Catherine of Russia, concluding with these words: “Kings ought to proceed in their career undisturbed by the cries of the people, as the moon pursues her course unimpeded by the howling of dogs.” Mirabeau was already in the pay of the monarchy; soon after the return of the court to St. Cloud the queen had a secret interview with him in the park, and boasted to Madame Campan how she had flattered the great tribune.

As early as December 1790 the court had been in secret communication with the foreigner. Louis’ brother, the Count of Artois (afterwards Charles X.), with the queen’s and king’s approval, had made a secret treaty with the house of Hapsburg, the hereditary enemy of France, by which the sovereigns of Austria, Prussia and Spain agreed to cross the frontier at a given signal, and close on France with an army a hundred thousand strong. It was an act of impious treachery, and the beginning of the doom of the French monarchy. Yet if but some glimmer of intelligence and courage had characterised the preparations for the flight of the royal family to join the armed forces waiting to receive them near the frontier, their lives at least had been saved.

The incidents of the four months’ “secret” preparations to leave the Tuileries as described by Madame Campan read like scenes in a comic opera. The disguised purchases of elaborate wardrobes of underlinen and gowns; the making of a dressing-case of “enormous size, fitted with many and various articles from a warming-pan to a silver porringer”; the packing of the diamonds; the building of the new berline, that huge, lumbering Noah’s ark which was to bear them swiftly away! The story of the pretended flight of the Russian baroness and her family; the start delayed by the queen turning into the Carrousel instead of into the Rue de l’Echelle, where the king and her children were awaiting her in the glass coach; the colossal folly of the whole business has been told by Carlyle in one of the most dramatic chapters in history.

The Assembly declared on hearing of Louis’ flight that the government of the country was unaffected and that the executive power remained in the hand of the ministers. After voting a levy of three hundred thousand National Guards to meet the threatened invasion, they passed calmly to the discussion of the new Penal Code.

The king returned to Paris through an immense and silent multitude. “Whoever applauds the king,” said placards in the street, “shall be thrashed; whoever insults him, hung.” The idea of a republic as a practical issue of the situation was now for the first time put forward by the extremists, but met with little sympathy, and a Republican demonstration in the Champ de Mars was suppressed by the Assembly by martial law at the cost of many lives. Owing to the aversion felt by Marie Antoinette to Lafayette, who with affectionate loyalty more than once had risked his popularity and life to serve the crown, the court made the fatal mistake of opposing his election to the mayoralty of Paris and paved the way for the triumph of Petion and of the Dantonists. To the famous manifesto of Pilnitz by the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia in August 1791, calling on the sovereigns of Europe to support them in an armed intervention to restore the rights and prerogatives of the French king, the Assembly replied that, while they must regard as enemies those who tolerated hostile preparations against France, they offered good neighbourship, the amity of a free and puissant country to the nations of Europe. They desired no conquests and would respect the laws and constitutions of others if they evinced the same respect towards those of France: if the German princes favoured military preparations directed against the French, the French would carry among them, not fire and sword, but liberty. “Let them ponder on the consequences of an awakening of the nations.”

Meanwhile the Assembly renewed some laws of the ancien régime against émigrés, who were threatened with the confiscation of their property without prejudice to the rights of their wives and children and lawful creditors if they did not return within a definite time. The foreign monarchies reasserted the lawfulness of their acts and war became inevitable.