The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son

Meanwhile, Marie-Antoinette, finally reunited with both her son and daughter, was forced to flee from the Dauphin’s rooms as they could hear doors to the antechambers being hacked down. Accompanied by a few loyal allies, Princesse de Lamballe and Madame de Tourzel, they tried to escape to the king’s bedroom, without success. Clinging to her children, she took refuge in the Council Chamber. Trapped behind a table before the hostile crowds, they were protected by just a few guards. For two hours they endured taunts and jeers as the angry hordes paraded past, some bearing ‘symbols of the most unspeakable barbarity’, wrote Madame Campan. There was a model gallows, ‘to which a dirty doll was suspended bearing the words “Marie-Antoinette à la lanterne”’, to represent her hanging. There were model guillotines and a ‘board to which a bullock’s heart was fastened’, labelled ‘Heart of Louis XVI’. The seven-year-old Dauphin, who was ‘shrouded in an enormous red cap’, was crying.

After several hours, the mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, arrived and dispersed the mob, pretending ‘to be much astonished at the danger the king had faced’, observed Marie-Thérèse. Traumatised, the royal family were finally reunited. Louis-Charles was so shocked by the day’s events that his usual sunny personality was stunned into complete silence as he clung to his parents in great relief. As for Marie-Thérèse, the endless succession of traumatic ordeals was rapidly undermining her. Already by nature ‘Madame Sérieuse’, she was losing ‘all the joy of childhood’, observed Madame de Tourzel’s daughter, Pauline, and she would lapse into deep and gloomy silences like her father.

For the next few days, the king’s bravery caused a popular swing in his favour. Nevertheless, behind the scenes the political landscape was changing fast. Robespierre, voted vice-president of the Jacobin Club in July, with well-argued, cold cunning, dedicated himself to the idea that democracy could only be established with the overthrow of the monarchy – and also the constitution and Legislative Assembly that recognised the role of the king. Together with radicals drawn from the Cordeliers Club, such as Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat and Jacques-René Hébert, they played on people’s terror of a foreign invasion. The king and queen in the Tuileries were portrayed as being at the scheming centre of interests that wanted to destroy France. When the Prussians entered the war, promising ‘vengeance’ if the king and queen were harmed, collusion seemed only too likely. While moderates like Lafayette left the capital, National Guards from the provinces poured into Paris. The highlight came on 30 July, when five hundred National Guards from Marseilles, recruited for their radicalism by their local Jacobin Club, arrived in Paris singing the rousing Marseillaise. The revolutionaries became known as sans culottes – meaning literally ‘without breeches’ – since they were dressed in working men’s clothes: baggy trousers, carmagnole jacket and hat. Whipped up into a frenzy of hatred by the militant journalism of Hébert, Desmoulins and others, these sans culottes were united in the desire to incite an insurrection against the ‘despicable tyrant’ and the ‘colossus of despotism’ in the Tuileries.

Inside the palace, clinging onto the last semblance of royalty, the queen was only too aware of the dangers. ‘On all sides’, wrote Madame Campan, ‘were heard the most jubilant outcries of people in a state of delirium almost as frightful as the explosion of their rage.’ The queen wrote to Fersen in early August: ‘our chief concern is to escape the assassins’ knives and to fight off the plotters who surround the throne on the verge of collapse. The factions no longer bother to hide their plans about murdering the royal family … they merely disagree about the method.’

Events came to a head during the night of 10 August, when an ‘Insurrectionary Commune’ was established at the Hôtel de Ville and began to give orders to the National Guard, in effect challenging the Legislative Assembly and creating a revolutionary government. Soon after midnight, bells rang out across Paris – the insistent sound a call to arms and a death knell for the French monarchy. The insurgents began to gather and soon the streets around the Tuileries palace were bristling with at least twenty thousand armed citizens.

Inside the palace, they could hear the tocsin ring out and the ominous sounds of the impending attack. The king had summoned 900 Swiss Guards in addition to the 900 Gendarmes and 2500 National Guards on duty at the palace, but only the Swiss Guards could be relied upon to remain loyal. No one slept, except the little Dauphin, whose ‘calm and peaceful slumber formed the most striking contrast with the agitation which reigned in every heart’, wrote the Marquise de Tourzel. The queen, true emperor’s daughter, wanted to stand her ground and fight to the last. The king, in helpless despair, could see no solution to the impasse. The attorney-general of the département of Paris, Pierre Roederer, arrived and informed them they had no choice but to flee before they were murdered. ‘Imagine the situation of my unhappy parents during that horrible night,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse, ‘expecting only carnage and death.’ Early in the morning the king tried to rally his troops. The queen heard in despair as the king, dishevelled and downtrodden, was greeted with hoots of derision and shouts of ‘Vive la nation!’ by some of the palace National Guards, many of whom were now fraternising with the protesters. ‘Some artillery men’, reported Marie-Thérèse, ‘dared turn their cannon against their king … a thing not believable if I did not declare that I saw it with my own eyes!’

At seven in the morning, Roederer insisted that they escape and take refuge in the Legislative Assembly, urging that ‘all of Paris was on the march’. The queen, bitterly frustrated at the prospect of fleeing to the lion’s den, held out against the idea. But the king would not risk bloodshed. ‘Marchons!’ he said, raising his hand. ‘There’s nothing to be done here.’

There was no time for preparations, no time to gather together treasured possessions or mementoes, even a change of clothes; the royal family fled with nothing from the palace. Marie-Antoinette followed Louis, holding her son and daughter by the hand, Louis-Charles disconsolately kicking out at leaves, which had fallen early. Princesse de Lamballe, Princess Elisabeth and the Marquise de Tourzel – in some agitation because she had been obliged to leave Pauline behind – followed, discreetly protected by a few Swiss Guards. ‘The terrace … was full of wretches who assailed us with insults. One of them cried out: “No women or we will kill them all!”’ recalled Marie-Thérèse.

‘At last we entered the passage to the Assembly. Before being admitted we had to wait more than half an hour, a number of deputies opposing our entrance. We were kept in a narrow corridor, so dark that we could see nothing and hear nothing, but the shouts of the furious mob … I was held by a man that I did not know. I have never thought myself so near death, not doubting that the decision was made to murder us all. In the darkness, I could not see my parents, and I feared everything for them. We were left to this mortal agony more than half an hour.’

Finally they were permitted to enter the hall of the Assembly. ‘I have come here,’ the king declared, ‘to prevent the French nation from committing a great crime.’ The royal family were hurriedly ushered into a journalist’s box, a small room, ten feet long, with a window with iron bars looking out onto the public gallery. Absolutely terrified, prisoners in this tiny hiding place, looking out through bars on their enemies debating their future, they lost all hope. There was no chance of preserving even a semblance of royal dignity. Through the tiny window they could only watch helplessly, hour after hour, impassive witnesses to the end of the monarchy. ‘We had hardly entered this species of cage,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse, ‘when we heard the cannon, musket-shots and the cries of those who were murdering in the Tuileries.’

Louis had assumed that by leaving the Tuileries he would stop an attack and help to prevent any bloodshed. However, the revolutionaries, armed with sabres and pikes, stormed the palace and attacked the red-uniformed Swiss Guards. The Swiss fired back and the sans culottes took casualties. Hearing of the slaughter, the king sent his last order, instructing his faithful Swiss Guards to lay down their arms. They obeyed, only to be massacred as the ‘populace rushed from all quarters into the interior of the palace’. The Tuileries became a bloodbath, with guards and nobles chased up onto the parapets fighting to the last as they were stabbed, shot or sabered. The dead or dying were flung from windows, some grossly mutilated, others impaled on pikes as trophies. Madame Campan, trapped inside the palace, ‘felt a horrid hand thrust down my back to seize me by the clothes’. She had sunk to her knees and was aware of ‘the steel suspended over my head’ by a ‘terrible Marseillais’, when she heard another voice yelling ‘We don’t kill women!’ She escaped.

As people fled from the palace, anyone who had defended the king – or was even dressed like a noble – was mercilessly hunted down. One woman reported glimpsing through the blinds of a house ‘three sans-culottes holding a tall handsome man by the collar’. When they had ‘finished him off with the butt of a rifle’, at least ‘fifteen women, one after the other, climbed up on this victim’s cadaver, whose entrails were emerging from all sides, saying they took pleasure in trampling the aristocracy under their feet’. During the day, over nine hundred guards and three hundred citizens became victims of the hysterical slaughter. Sixty Swiss Guards were taken prisoner, only to be led away to the Hôtel de Ville and brutally killed. A young Corsican by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte who witnessed the events of that day was filled with a sense of horror at the power of the mob. For Maximilien Robespierre, it was a ‘glorious event … the most beautiful revolution that has ever honoured humanity’. By nightfall the entire gruesome spectacle was illuminated by the orange glow of the Tuileries in flames.

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