The last days of the French monarchy E-Book

Hilaire Belloc

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

UPON the crest of the steep and thickly wooded hills that rise from the left bank of the Seine below Paris, you may find a village, the old stones of which, and something spacious in its whole arrangement, are consonant with its name. It is called “Marly of the King.”
There the great trees, the balustrade, and gates still standing recall the palace to which the French monarchy retired when leisure or fatigue or mourning withdrew it from Versailles; for it was a place more domestic and far less burdened with state.
To the gates of that great country house there came near ten o’clock, just after the hour when full darkness falls on a midsummer evening, a great coach, driving from Versailles. It was the coach of the Archbishop of Paris, coming urgently to see{16} the king, and the day was Friday, the nineteenth of June, 1789. They were in the full crisis that opened the Revolution. 

Leseprobe

THE LAST DAYS OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY MANZI-JOYANT FRONTISPIECE. THE YOUNG ROYALIST

ERRATA.

T

HE author very much regrets to say that since the first edition of this book was printed off and bound, he discovered its title was identical with one on the same subject, written by Miss Maclehose some years ago, and he trusts that this errata slip will correct any confusion between the two works.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY

BY HILAIRE BELLOC © 2025 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385749880

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I

PAGE

The Royal Seance

15

Part II

Introduction

49

The Flight to Varennes

53

Part III

Introduction

87

The Storming of the Tuileries

91

Part IV

Introduction

117

The Role of Lafayette

119

Part V

Introduction

169

Under the Mill of Valmy

171

Part VI

Introduction

197

The Death of Louis XVI

199

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Young Royalist

frontispiece

Louis XVI

Louis-Stanislas-Xavier de Bourbon, Comte de Provence, afterward Louis XVIII

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

Jean-Sylvain Bailly, President of the Commons in 1789

The Commons taking the oath in the Tennis-Court at Versailles

Jacques Necker, Rector-General of Finances

The meeting of the National Assembly at Versailles, June, 1789

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Deputy from Paris to the National Assembly

Gabriel Honoré Riquetti, Comte De Mirabeau

Allegory of the oath-taking in the Tennis-Court at Versailles

“Vive le Roi! Vive la Nation!”

The National Assembly Petrified

The National Assembly Revivified

Madame Elisabeth

The end of the flight of the Royal Family at Varennes

The Royal Family at Varennes, June 22, 1791

Drouet, the Postmaster at Varennes

The return to Paris

The arrival of the Royal Family in Paris, June 25, 1791

Enrolling volunteers in Paris on the Pont Neuf, before the statue of Henry IV

The Storming of the Tuileries

The Assault on the Tuileries

A Soldier of the National Guard

Grenadier of the Infantry of Ligné

Marie-Antoinette and her Children

Louis XVI—The Forge in the Palace at Versailles

The Tuileries and its Garden in 1757

The Struggle in the Halls of the Tuileries, August 10, 1792

Armand Gaston, Cardinal de Rohan

Cartoon of the Three Orders [The Clergy, Nobility and the Commons] in the National Assembly Forging the New Constitution

A Popular Print at the time of the Revolution

Maximilien Robespierre

Georges Jacques Danton

Marie Jean Paul Roch Yves Gilbert Motier, Marquis de Lafayette

Ceremonial Costume of the Clergy, the Nobility and the Commons

Uniforms of the Army of French Emigrants

Goethe, who was with the German Army at Valmy

Marshal François-Christophe Kellermann, Duke of Valmy

A Republican General

A Colonel of Infantry

Under the Mill at Valmy

General Charles-François Dumouriez—In Command of the French at Valmy

Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Counsel for the King at his Trial

Republican soldiers in the Revolution

Proclamation of the Provisional Executive Council

The last victims of the Terror

King Louis taking leave of his family in the tower of the Temple

A Mass under the Terror

The death of King Louis XVI, January 21, 1793

PART ONE THE ROYAL SEANCE

LOUIS XVI From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of the painting by Antoine-François Callet, in Museum of VersaillesTo face p. 15

THE LAST DAYS OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY

PART ONE THE ROYAL SEANCE

U

PON the crest of the steep and thickly wooded hills that rise from the left bank of the Seine below Paris, you may find a village, the old stones of which, and something spacious in its whole arrangement, are consonant with its name. It is called “Marly of the King.”

There the great trees, the balustrade, and gates still standing recall the palace to which the French monarchy retired when leisure or fatigue or mourning withdrew it from Versailles; for it was a place more domestic and far less burdened with state.

To the gates of that great country house there came near ten o’clock, just after the hour when full darkness falls on a midsummer evening, a great coach, driving from Versailles. It was the coach of the Archbishop of Paris, coming urgently to see the king, and the day was Friday, the nineteenth of June, 1789. They were in the full crisis that opened the Revolution. The tall windows of the palace were fully lit as the coach came up the drive. The night air was cold, for those June days were rainy and full of hurrying cloud. The Archbishop of Paris and his colleague of Rouen, who was with him, were summoned by their titles into the room where Louis XVI sat discussing what should be done for the throne.

Two days before, upon the Wednesday, the commons of the great Parliament—the Commons House in that great Parliament which had met again after a hundred years, and which now felt behind it the nation—had taken the first revolutionary step and had usurped authority. The quarrel which had hampered all reform since this Parliament of the States General had met six weeks before; the refusal of the two privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to vote with the commons and to form with them one National Assembly; the claim of the privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to bar whatever the popular representatives might decide—all that had been destroyed in spirit by a new act of sovereignty.

Using the title that was on all men’s lips and calling themselves the “National Assembly,” the commons had declared that the whole assembly was an indivisible body, and alone the organ of the nation. They had used with conscious purpose the solemn formula “Desires and decrees,” which hitherto throughout all these centuries had never appeared above any seal or signature save that of a king. They clothed this spiritual thing with body by the enormous decision that no tax should be paid in the kingdom that had not their approval.

This was the blow that had summoned the council round the king at Marly upon this Friday night. For now two anxious days doubtful issues and conflicting policies had pulled Louis this way and that, whether to yield, whether to compromise, or whether to strike back.

It was a fortnight since the sickly child who was heir to the throne had died, and this retirement of the royal family to Marly, consequent upon such mourning, was confused by the numbness of that shock also. The king perhaps more than the queen had suffered in his powers and judgment; for Marie Antoinette, the most vigorous and lucid of those gathered in council at Marly, the least national, and the least wide in judgment, was active at this moment for the full claims of the crown.

With her at the king’s side in the taking of this crucial decision stood other advisers. The king’s two brothers, the elder and the younger, who, as Louis XVIII and Charles X, were to rule after the restoration, and who were now known under the titles of Provence, and Artois were in the palace together. Provence, the elder, very dull and heartless, was the more solid; Artois, the younger, empty, poor in judgment, was the least unattractive. They counted for their rank, and even Provence for little else.

Barentin was there, the keeper of the seals. He was a man of very clear decision, of straightforward speech and manner; a man with something sword-like about him. He thought and said that the king had only to move troops and settle matters at once.

There also, lit by the candles of that night, was the vacuous, puffed face of Necker, the millionaire. This man, famous through his wealth, which was ill acquired and enormous, an alien in religion as in

LOUIS-STANISLAS-XAVIER DE BOURBON, COMTE DE PROVENCE, AFTERWARD LOUIS XVIII From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by Jean-Martial Fredou, belonging to Marquis de Virieu, at the Château de LantillyTo face p. 18

blood, had become, by one of those ironies in which the gods delight, the idol of the national movement. He was pitifully inferior to such an opportunity, empty of courage, empty of decision, and almost empty of comprehension. No idea informed him unless it was that of some vague financial “liberalism” (rather, say, moral anarchy) suitable to the crooked ways by which he himself had arrived. Those protruding eyes, that loose mouth, and that lethargic, self-satisfied expression were the idol that stood in the general mind for the giant things that were coming. Behind such cold dross was reddening the creative fire of the nation! Such a doorkeeper did Fate choose to open the gates for the armies of Marceau and Napoleon! All his advice was for something “constitutional.” In days better suited for such men as he Necker would have been a politician, and a parliamentary politician at that.

To these, then, thus assembled entered the archbishops with their news. The news was this: that before sunset, just before they had left Versailles, the clergy had rallied to the commons. The bishops, indeed, all save four, had stood out for the privileged orders; but the doubt in which all minds had been since the revolutionary step of forty-eight hours before was resolved. The clergy had broken rank with the nobles; for that matter, many of the wealthier nobles were breaking rank, too. Decision was most urgent; the moment was critical in the extreme, lest in a few hours the National Assembly, already proclaimed, already half formed, should arise united and in full strength over against the crown.

In not two hours after the arrival of the prelates the decision, nearly reached before they came, was finally taken by the king. He would follow Necker, and Necker was for a long, windy, complicated compromise. Necker was for a constitution, large, “liberal,” strangling the action of the popular life, dissolving the yes and no of creative creeds, leaving to the crown as much as would preserve its power to dismiss the States General and to summon a new body less national—and, above all, less violent. There is an English word for this temper, the word “Whig.” But that word is associated in the English language with the triumph of wealth. Necker’s muddy vision did not triumph.

That decision was taken upon this Friday night, the nineteenth of June, 1789—taken, I think, a little before midnight. Artois was off to bed, and Provence, too. The council was broken up. It was full midnight now when wheels were again heard upon the granite sets before the great doors, and the hot arrival of horses. The name announced was that of Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun, and the king, perhaps angrily, refused to see him.

This man, with eyes like a ferret and an intelligence as keen as it was witty and narrow, a bradawl of a mind, as invincible at intrigue as in vice, given up wholly to the search for personal advantage, had about him all that the plain piety of Louis XVI detested, and all that Louis XVI’s slow mind most feared. The king had made him Bishop of Autun against his every judgment, and only at the call of Talleyrand’s fellow-clergymen, who loved their comrade’s amusing sallies against religion and his reputation of the brain. It was a reputation that had led Rome to consider the making of him a cardinal, and only Louis himself had prevented it. For Louis profoundly believed. It was Louis who had said in those days just before the Revolution, “I will give no man the see of Paris who denies his God.”

Such was Talleyrand, thirty-five years of age, destined to compass the ruin of the French church, to ordain to the schismatic body which attempted to replace it, to be picked out by Danton for his very vices as a good emissary to Pitt, to be one of the levers of Napoleon, to be the man that handed the crown to Louis XVIII at the restoration. Such was the man, full of policy and of evil, whom on that midnight Louis XVI refused to see.

The king refused to see him with the more determination that Talleyrand had asked for a secret audience. Talleyrand sent a servant to the king’s younger brother, Artois, who knew him well, and Artois, who was in bed, asked him to come to the bedroom to speak to him, which he did; and there in that incongruous place, to the empty-headed man lying abed listening to him, Talleyrand, till well after midnight, set forth what should be done. He also came, he said, hot-foot from Versailles, a witness. He had twenty times the grip of any of these others (he said) to seize what had happened.

He offered, as such men do, a bargain. He had prepared it, as such men will, for immediate acceptance; “all thought out,” as people say to-day of commercial “propositions.” Let him form a ministry. (He had actually brought in his carriage

CHARLES MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND To face p. 22

with him certain friends who would support him in it!) They would rapidly summon military force, dissolve the assembly at once, erect a new one that would be at the service of the crown. Artois dressed and went to see the king. But his brother gave him short shrift, and bade him tell Talleyrand to go. Then Talleyrand, with that look in his eyes, I think, that was noted so often when, later, he found himself thwarted in any one of his million plots and forced to creep round by some new way, went out to serve the Revolution.

At the same time there was sent through the night to Versailles the royal order, to be proclaimed by heralds, that no meeting of the Parliament should take place until the Monday when, in the commons’ hall, the king would declare his will to all the three houses, clergy, commons and nobles assembled; and that will, of course, was to be the muddled compromise of Necker.

These things done, they slept at last in Marly, and the very early dawn of the Saturday broke in a sky still troubled, rainy, and gray.

Bailly, the President of the Commons sitting at Versailles, was a man such as float to the surface in times of peace. He was honest and rich, a little paunchy, sober, and interested in astronomy. He was not without courage of the less vivid sort. He was fifty-three years of age.

Bailly, the dignified spokesman of the commons in this awful crisis, was in his bed at Versailles: like everybody else except sentries, watchmen, and a few political intriguers, upon this very short summer night of dull, rainy weather. They knocked at his door and woke him to bring him a note. It was a very curt note from the Master of Ceremonies at the court. It told him that the great hall in which the Commons met was not to be used by them that day, that Saturday; for it was to be decorated for the royal session of all the estates, to be held there upon the Monday, when the king would address the whole States General gathered together and tell them his will.

It is not a weak spur to a man of such an age, especially if he is well to do, to have his dignity neglected and his sleep interrupted as well. Bailly had thought the Commons worthy of more respect and of longer notice. When, therefore, the members came, most of them under dripping umbrellas, to the door that should admit them to their great hall, Bailly was at their head as indignant as such a man could be. He found the door shut, a paper pinned upon it, whereon was written the royal order, and a sentry who told him and all his followers that no one could come in save the workmen; for it would take all that day to prepare the hall for the royal meeting upon Monday. They let Bailly in to fetch his papers, no more.

The Commons went off under their umbrellas in the rain, a straggling procession of men, mostly middle class, in good black knee-breeches and coat, in dainty buckled shoes not meant for such weather, Bailly leading them; they picked their way, this dripping lot of them over the puddles of the roadway, and made history quickly and well. They found in an adjoining street an empty tennis-court at their disposal, and there they met, organised a session, and took the oath, with one dissentient, that they would not disperse until they had achieved a new constitution for the French.

The French do things themselves, a point in which they differ from the more practical nations. For instance, Macmahon, the soldier and president, used to brush his own coat every morning. Barentin, the keeper of the seals, followed all this business, but he followed it in person. From the window of a house just across the narrow way he himself overlooked through the upper windows of the tennis-court the swarm of the Commons within, and the public audience that thronged the galleries or climbed to the sills of the windows. He saw the eagerness and the resolve. He scribbled a rough note to be sent at once to Marly—a note that has come to light only in the last few years, “Il faut couper court.” That is, “End things up at once, or it will be too late.”

The royal session and the king’s declaration were postponed. They did not take place upon the Monday for which they were planned; they were put forward to the Tuesday, the twenty-third of June. What passed during those two days men will debate according as they are biased upon one side or the other of this great quarrel. Necker would have it in his memoirs that he was overborne by Barentin, and, as one may say, by the queen’s party; that his original compromise was made a little stronger in favour of the crown. To this change, like the weak and false man he was, he ascribed all the breakdown that followed. I do

JEAN-SYLVAIN BAILLY, PRESIDENT OF THE COMMONS IN 1789To face p. 27

not believe him. I think he lied. We know how he made his fortune, and we know how to contrast the whole being of a man like Necker with the whole being of a man like Barentin. Read Barentin’s notes on those same two days, and you will have little doubt that Necker lied. That he muddled things worse through the delay and through the increasing gravity of the menace to the throne is probable enough. That he showed any vision or determination or propounded any strict policy is not morally credible. The foolish document which the king was to read was drawn up wholly in Necker’s own hand, and he was wholly responsible.

Now turn to Versailles upon the morning of that Tuesday, the twenty-third of June, 1789, the court having come in from Marly, and all being ready for the great occasion. Remember that in the interval the Commons had met again; the mass of the lower clergy had joined them, not by vote this time, but in person, and two archbishops and three bishops with them, and even from the nobles two men had come.

It was therefore to be a set issue between the National Assembly now rapidly forming, that is, the Commons triumphant, and the awful antique authority of the crown.