THE
LOST KING
OF FRANCE

THE TRAGIC STORY OFMARIE-ANTOINETTE’S FAVOURITE SON

Deborah Cadbury

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

PART ONE

1 ‘The Finest Kingdom in Europe’

2 ‘Grâce pour Maman’

3 The Tuileries

4 ‘God Himself has Forsaken Me’

5 The Young Sans Culotte

6 The Orphan of the Temple

PART TWO

7 Farce and Fraud

8 Return of the Lilies

9 The Shadow King

10 The Royal Charade

11 Resolution

Acknowledgements

Notes on Sources

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION: THE HEART OF STONE

At certain revolutions all the

Damned are brought and feel

By turns the bitter change

Of fierce extremes

John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)

From the portrait by Alexandre Kucharski, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie looks out confidently on the world with large blue eyes in a sensitive face framed by fair hair; the perfect storybook prince. His life had begun in 1785, four years before the French revolution, and his early years had been spent safely cocooned in the gilded palace of Versailles near Paris. At the age of four, on the death of his older brother, he had become the royal heir, the Dauphin, in whose small frame was centred all the hopes of the continuing Bourbon dynasty that had sat on the French throne since the sixteenth century. With his good looks and sunny nature he was a much-loved child, Marie-Antoinette’s treasured little chou d’amour.

However, this charmed childhood, played out in the elegantly ornamental but closeted walkways of Versailles, led only to a life of mounting terror as he was, all too soon, encompassed by the fierce extremes of the revolution. When his father, Louis XVI, and then his mother, Marie-Antoinette, were taken from him and executed at the guillotine in 1793, the ‘orphan of the Temple prison’ inherited not only a throne but also the hostility and hatred of a nation. Confused and terrified by events, the ‘wolf-cub’ or ‘son of a tyrant’ – as he was now known – was isolated in solitary confinement, taught to forget his royal past and punished for the errors and extravagances of his ancestors. Forbidden to see his older sister, Marie-Thérèse, the only other surviving member of his immediate family, the boy-king became the victim of brutal physical and emotional abuse in his filthy, rat-infested cell. He was thought to have died in the Temple prison in Paris at the age of ten, unrecognisable as the royal prince, his body covered with scabies and ulcers.

In 1795, when leaders of the French revolution announced his death, rumours immediately began to circulate that he was still alive. Many were convinced that he had been spirited out of the prison by royalist supporters and had escaped to safety abroad, ready to reclaim the throne. After all, there was no tomb to mark his official burial site; his death certificate, drawn up by revolutionary officials, was widely believed to be a forgery; one official’s wife even admitted that she had helped to smuggle him from the prison in a laundry basket, leaving a dying substitute child in his place.

In 1816, after the restoration of the royal line to the throne, when the bodies of his parents, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, were found and reburied in the royal crypt at Saint Denis in Paris, plans were also made to honour the supposedly dead child-king. A tomb was designed; the inscription for it was even composed:

TO THE MEMORY

OF

LOUIS XVII

WHO,

AFTER HAVING SEEN HIS BELOVED PARENTS

REMOVED BY A DEATH

WHICH SORROW SHRINKS FROM RECALLING,

AND HAVING DRAINED TO THE DREGS

THE CUP OF SUFFERING,

WAS, WHILE STILL YOUNG

AND BUT ON THE THRESHOLD OF LIFE,

CUT DOWN BY DEATH.

HE DIED ON VIII JUNE MDCCLXXXXV,

AGED X YEARS II MONTHS AND XII DAYS.

However, when his body could not be found the official plans were scrapped and his burial place was never built. The following year a communal grave in the ossuary of the royal crypt was constructed to receive the bones of all the French kings and queens, Bourbons, Capetians, Orléans and others, who had been flung from their grand tombs into paupers’ graves during the Terror at the height of the revolution. But the uncrowned king was not among them. Without a body, no one could be completely sure that Louis-Charles was dead.

As in a fairytale, after the revolution the young prince sprang to life. He was sighted in Brittany, Normandy, Alsace and in the Auvergne. Was he the charming and dignified ‘Jean-Marie Hervagault’ who held court so convincingly and attracted a large and faithful following intent on seeing him attain the throne? Could he have been the rough diamond ‘Charles de Navarre’, generous-natured, confident, whose love of parties usually ended in drunken bad manners, accounts of which tallied so neatly with the brutalising treatment meted out to the ‘son of Capet’ in prison? Navarre was popular and resourceful and promised to reduce the price of bread as well as taxes and be in every way like the illustrious Henry IV, the first Bourbon king, a father to his people. Or was Louis-Charles the suave and smooth-talking ‘Baron de Richemont’, who could tell of his childhood in Versailles and the Temple prison in compelling detail and whose epitaph in Gleizé in France acknowledged him as ‘Louis-Charles of France, son of Louis XVI and of Marie-Antoinette’?

Over the years more than a hundred young dauphins stepped forward to claim their inheritance, the constant uncertainty adding to the anguish of Marie-Thérèse, the lost king’s ‘sister’, who thought her brother was dead. Many an adventurer or vagrant suddenly recalled their blue-blooded descent and potential princes hopefully presented themselves at the gates of the palace of the Tuileries in Paris. The ‘little boy the dolphin’ – as he was disparagingly called by Mark Twain – appeared in London, America, Russia, even in the Seychelles. In time, dauphins – not necessarily of French origin or even French-speaking – surfaced in all corners of the globe; one was an American Indian half-caste. Some claimants seemed genuine, gaining supporters willing to sponsor their cause, and lived out their days in lavish surroundings holding court with devoted admirers. Others were thrown into prison or swiftly exposed as frauds.

To the astonishment of Europe, nearly forty years after the official death of Louis-Charles, a certain Prussian, Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, returned to France and announced that he was the lost king and wished to claim the throne on the restoration of the monarchy. Unlike many other claimants, ‘Prince’ Naundorff could remember his childhood in Versailles with chilling accuracy and vividly describe his escape from the Temple prison. A succession of former courtiers at Versailles, even the Dauphin’s governess and nursemaid, joyfully confirmed he was telling the truth and begged his ‘sister’ to acknowledge him. Yet she refused to meet him; the French authorities rejected his claims, his numerous identity documents were seized and he lived out his years in exile.

When ‘Prince’ Naundorff finally died in Holland in 1845 he too was recognised by the Dutch authorities. His tombstone was engraved:

HERE LIES LOUIS XVII.

CHARLES LOUIS, DUKE OF NORMANDY,

KING OF FRANCE AND NAVARRE.

BORN AT VERSAILLES ON MARCH 27th 1785.

DIED AT DELFT ON AUGUST 10th 1845.

There were now three graves for Louis-Charles – two in France and one in Holland – and more were to follow. Several claimants even created their own dynasties; to this day, Naundorff’s descendants resolutely seek to prove that he was the rightful king of France.

There is one remaining clue to the mysterious life of the young prince – a grisly relic inside the great gothic basilica at Saint Denis, in a northerly suburb of Paris. By the high altar, almost hidden by the tall pillars, there is a dark passageway leading down to an even darker underground world: ‘the City of the Dead’. Stretching almost the entire length of the basilica is the vast crypt, with vaulted ceiling and thick shadowy arches where by tradition the kings and queens of France now rest. At the bottom of the dark passageway, barred from the main crypt by a heavy iron grille bearing the Bourbon coat of arms, there is a side chapel known as La Chapelle des Princes. Unlit, except for an ornamental brass ceiling light which casts strange, spiky shapes across the deep shadows of the room, the chapel is crammed with wooden coffins.

Beyond these coffins, thin shafts of light direct the eye to a crucifix and stone shelving behind, displaying various brass caskets. These contain the preserved organs, hearts and entrails of various Bourbon kings of France, removed, according to tradition, prior to embalming the bodies. Hard to discern in the dim light, on the bottom shelf behind the crucifix there is a small, plain, crystal urn, marked with the Bourbon fleur de lys. It contains a round object that, on first inspection, resembles a stone, shrivelled and dried hard as rock, hanging on a thread. Yet this is no ordinary stone. This is thought to be the actual heart of the ill-fated boy who died in the Temple prison, stolen from his dead body at the height of the revolution.

Now over two hundred years old, this child’s heart has had a remarkable journey through time. Cut hurriedly from the supposed Dauphin’s body during his autopsy in the Temple prison in 1795 and smuggled out in a handkerchief, the heart which once raced and quickened to the Terror of the revolution even in death became a symbol to be treasured or despised. Preserved merely to be stolen once more, hidden in grand palaces and lost again during the revolution of 1830, only with the passage of time, as the years slowly buried all painful memories, was the child’s heart quietly forgotten, eventually coming to rest by the coffins in La Chapelle des Princes.

With recent developments in forensic science it has become possible to uncover one of the most enduring secrets of the French revolution – what actually happened to the Dauphin – and for his true identity to be revealed. With improvements in the restoration of ancient DNA and the analysis of special genes inherited from the maternal line, known as mitochondrial DNA, the petrified heart of the child offers a possible end to two hundred years of speculation.

The fate of the royal family during the revolution was still a sensitive issue in France. Some maintained that modern science was making an unwelcome intrusion into the past and might reveal secrets best forgotten. However, the Duc de Bauffremont, head of the Memorial of France at Saint Denis, an organisation that superintends the royal graves, gave his consent. ‘There are so many hypotheses about what happened,’ the Duke told reporters. ‘Now, maybe, we will know what happened once and for all.’

On 15 December 1999, at the abbey of Saint Denis, the crystal urn which held the heart was veiled in a purple cloth and brought out from its shadowy tomb in La Chapelle des Princes for scientific testing. A small crowd had gathered in the basilica: leading scientists such as the geneticist Professor Jean-Jacques Cassiman from the University of Leuven, Belgium, historians with an interest in the case, notaries to witness the proceedings, the inevitable TV crews and the various Naundorff and Bourbon pretenders to the French throne. The heart was placed on a small table in front of the high altar. Here, bathed in a fine tracery of stained-glass light, it could be clearly seen: an unprepossessing object, not unlike a garden stone. It was blessed by the priest who led a short ceremony. ‘I do not know whose heart this is,’ he said, ‘but it is certainly symbolic of children anywhere in the world who have suffered. This represents the suffering of all little children caught up in war and revolution.’

With great solemnity, the crystal urn was taken in a hearse to the nearby Thierry Coté Medical Analysis Laboratory in Paris. Here, with every step of the proceedings scrutinised by law officers who were masked, gowned and standing well back, it was placed on a bench and carefully examined. In spite of its eventful passage through history, Professor Cassiman could see at once that the organ was remarkably well preserved; its vessels and compartments were still intact. Could this really hold the secret to the identity of a small boy who was meant to inherit the most prestigious throne in Europe? Looking at the heart, he was immediately struck by something else as well. ‘The way the large blood vessel, the aorta, had been cut – this was not fine work, in fact it was really crude,’ he said. ‘This suggests that the heart had been removed from his body hurriedly. It’s not evidence – but it supports the history of the heart.’ Pathologists examined the heart and the development of the blood vessels to ascertain the age of the child. They estimated the child was eight to twelve years old, ‘which again fits nicely with the age of Louis XVII’, adds Cassiman.

The two-hundred-year-old heart was hard as rock. Anticipating this, Cassiman and his colleague, Dr Els Jehaes, had brought a sterile handsaw with which they could cut along the bottom tip. It took some time to saw a small strip, barely a centimetre wide; this was then split in two. ‘One sample we put in a sterile tube for us to test in Belgium,’ says Cassiman. ‘The other was for a leading genetics laboratory in Germany which we had invited to carry out tests independently.’ Both tubes were sealed and escorted to the respective laboratories.

Invisible to the naked eye for over two centuries, the secrets locked within the tissues of this heart could now be revealed to modern science. Did the young son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette die a brutal death during the French revolution? Or did he escape this fate and survive, only to be ridiculed later as an impostor when he returned to claim the throne of France? In the gloved hands of the geneticists, the centuries of time which had slowly buried the terrible story of the owner of the heart could now be rolled back to solve one of the great enigmas in the history of the revolution. For the first time, the true story of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s son and heir can be told and his memory can finally be laid to rest.

PART ONE

1 ‘THE FINEST KINGDOM IN EUROPE’

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract (1762)

On Saturday 21 April 1770, Archduchess Maria-Antonia of Austria left her home, the imperial palace of Hofburg in Vienna, for ever and embarked on the long journey to France. On departure, in the courtyard in front of the palace, the royal entourage assembled. Two grand berlines lavishly upholstered in blue and crimson velvet and decorated with fine embroidery had been provided by the French ambassador to take Maria-Antonia to Paris. These were to be conveyed in a cavalcade of almost fifty carriages, each to be drawn by six horses and an array of guards and outriders. The whole of the Austrian court, in all its silken and bejewelled finery, attended this auspicious event. Maria-Antonia, the youngest daughter of the distinguished Empress Maria-Theresa and Emperor Franz I, was to marry the future king of France and, it was hoped, consolidate Austria’s troubled relationship with France.

Maria-Antonia was slightly built, with all the attractiveness of youth. ‘She has a most graceful figure; holds herself well; and if, as may be hoped, she grows a little taller, she will possess every good quality one could wish for in a great princess,’ wrote her tutor, the Abbé Jacques de Vermond, adding, ‘her heart and character are both excellent’. Maria-Antonia had large blue eyes, reddish blonde hair and a good complexion; many even considered her a beauty. The ageing French king, Louis XV, eagerly enquiring about the prospective Austrian bride for his grandson, was told by officials that she had ‘a charming face and beautiful eyes’. She had, however, inherited the Habsburg projecting lower lip and prominent brow, which prompted her mother, in preparations for the event, to bring a coiffeur from France to arrange her hair to soften the line of her forehead.

Maria-Antonia, the subject of all this detailed scrutiny, had had her future determined when she was thirteen. ‘Others make war but thou, O happy Austria, makest marriages,’ was a family motto. Her mother, the Empress Maria-Theresa, who was widely considered to be the best queen in Europe since Elizabeth I of England, ruled the Habsburg empire. Her territories encompassed most of central Europe, reaching to parts of Romania in the east, regions of Germany in the north, south to Lombardy and Tuscany in Italy and west to the Austrian Netherlands, now Belgium. Some of this success was due to a series of strategic marriages, which were an important part of royal diplomacy. Maria-Antonia was the youngest of sixteen children and several of her older sisters had already taken part in Austrian foreign policy. One sister was married to the governor general of the Austrian Netherlands, another became the Duchess of Parma, and a third, Maria-Antonia’s favourite sister, Maria Carolina, had become the queen of Naples – a role that at first she deplored. ‘The suffering is true martyrdom,’ Maria Carolina wrote home, ‘made worse by being expected to look happy … I pity Antonia who has yet to suffer it.’

For the Empress Maria-Theresa, eclipsing all these marriages was the prospect of an alliance with the French. France was seen as the richest and most powerful state in Europe, and, with twenty-five million people, was also the largest. Yet France had been Austria’s enemy for over two hundred years. For many, a permanent alliance between the two former long-standing enemies seemed out of the question, even potentially dangerous. However, the empress was determined to secure a match between her youngest daughter and the Dauphin of France. Such an important marriage would seal a political alliance and enable the two countries to work as allies against the growing Prussian influence.

Despite the exciting prospects that lay ahead, Maria-Antonia’s departure from her home, and her mother in particular, was still an ordeal, according to one witness, Joseph Weber, the son of her former nurse.

‘The young Maria-Antonia burst into tears and the spectators, touched by the sight, shared the cruel sufferings of mother and daughter. Maria-Theresa … took her into her arms and hugged her … ‘Adieu, my dear daughter; a great distance is going to separate us, but be just, be humane and imbued with a sense of the duties of your rank and I will always be proud of the regrets which I shall always feel … Do so much good to the people of France that they will be able to say that I have sent them an angel.’

As her carriage departed, Maria-Antonia, ‘her face bathed with tears, covered her eyes now with a handkerchief, now with her hands, and put her head out of the window again and again, to see once more the palace of her fathers to which she would never return’. All she had to represent her future was a miniature portrait of her future husband, Louis-Auguste, the Dauphin.

Her magnificent cortège travelled for a week through Austria and Bavaria until finally they reached the frontier with France, on the banks of the River Rhine near Kehl. On an island in the middle of the river, Maria-Antonia had to undergo a ceremony in which she was symbolically stripped of her Austrian roots and was then reborn, robed in French attire. A magnificent wooden pavilion, over a hundred feet long, had been constructed, divided into two main sections. On one side were the courtiers from Vienna and on the other those from France. Once the formal ceremonies were completed the door to the French side was opened, and the Dauphin’s future bride had to make her entrance into the French court, no longer Maria-Antonia but Marie-Antoinette. As she realised that the door to the Austrian side had closed behind her on all those familiar faces, she was overwhelmed, and ‘rushed’ into the French side ‘with tears in her eyes’.

As she continued her journey into France she received a rapturous welcome. Every kind of extravagant preparation had been made to honour the young princess. There were displays of all kinds – fireworks, dances, theatre – great triumphal arches built, petals strewn before her feet, floating gardens on the river beneath her window, fountains flowing with wine, endless enthusiastic crowds, cheer upon cheer. If she had left the Austrian court in tears, her slow progress through France to such approbation could only fill her with every possible hope.

By 14 May she arrived at Compiègne, some forty miles north-east of Paris, where she was to meet her future husband, Louis-Auguste. By now well briefed on etiquette by her new advisor, the eminent Comtesse de Noailles, Marie-Antoinette stepped from her carriage and sank into a deep curtsy before the king. Louis XV was still a handsome man, whose regal presence eclipsed that of the shy and somewhat overweight sixteen-year-old standing next to him. If she was disappointed by her first impressions of her future husband, there is no record of it. Others, however, have left a less than favourable account. ‘Nature seems to have denied everything to Monsieur le Dauphin,’ Maria-Theresa’s ambassador in France had reported, somewhat harshly. ‘In his bearing and words, the prince displays a very limited amount of sense, great plainness and no sensitivity.’ Indeed, the tall, ungainly youth was more than a little awkward with his prospective bride. When Marie-Antoinette politely kissed him he seemed unsure of himself and promptly moved away.

It took twenty-three days from leaving the Hofburg in Vienna to reach Versailles on 16 May 1770. As the cavalcade of carriages turned into the drive that sunny morning the vast scale of the magnificent chateau came into view. Once the dream of the Sun-King, Louis XIV, who had transformed it from a hunting lodge to a sumptuous estate and symbol of royal power, it created an immediate impression of classical grandeur, ionic columns, arched windows and balustrades receding into the distance as far as the eye could see. The ornamental façade of the main block alone, in brick and honey-coloured stone, stretched over a third of a mile. This was the administrative centre of Europe’s most powerful state, nothing less than a town for up to ten thousand people: the royal family and their entourage, several thousand courtiers and their servants, the King’s Household Troops, Swiss Guards, Musketeers, Gendarmes and countless other staff and visitors.

Marie-Antoinette was taken to the ground-floor apartments where her ladies-in-waiting were to get her ready for her wedding. Nothing can have prepared the princess for the lavishness of the palace; the Hofburg in Austria was modest by comparison. The reception rooms were of an unbelievable richness and elegance, and the draped and canopied beds of the royal apartments had more in common with Cleopatra’s silken barge than the planks and straw of the common lot. Then there were the endless mirrored panels of the vast Galerie des Glaces where courtiers were assembling to greet her. This famous Hall of Mirrors was the talk of Europe, with its four hundred thousand reflected candles, gold and more gold, the sparkle of diamonds and the finest crystal – and, beyond the tall western windows, the perfect view with its enchanted blue distance held for ever in mirrors. It could not fail to seduce the senses and beguile the emperor’s daughter as to her assured prospects at Versailles.

The marriage ceremony took place later that day in the gilt and white chapel at Versailles. In this regal setting, Bourbon kings were traditionally christened and married, secure in the knowledge of their ‘divine right’ as monarch. Standing before the carved marble altar, the Dauphin, dressed in cloth of gold studded with diamonds, found the whole procedure something of an ordeal. ‘He trembled excessively during the service,’ wrote one eyewitness. ‘He appeared to have more timidity than his little wife and blushed up to his eyes when he gave [her] the ring.’ Marie-Antoinette, her slender figure seeming lost in her voluminous white brocade gown, was sufficiently nervous that when she signed the register, she spilt some ink.

The ceremony was followed by a grand reception in the Galerie des Glaces for over six thousand guests and a sumptuous wedding feast in the Opera House, which was inaugurated in their honour. Afterwards, following customary French etiquette, the bride and groom were prepared for bed in a very public ritual where the king himself gave the nightshirt to his grandson. Yet for all the weeks of imposing preparations in anticipation of this happy moment, when the sheets were checked in the morning, there was no evidence that the marriage had been consummated.

While the ageing king ‘was enchanted with the young Dauphine’, observed her First Lady of the Bedchamber, Henriette Campan – ‘all his conversation was about her graces, her vivacity, and the aptness of her repartees’ – her new husband was not so appreciative. Rumours soon began to circulate that the Dauphin was impotent or had difficulty making love. He showed only ‘the most mortifying indifference, and a coldness which frequently degenerated into rudeness’, continues Madame Campan, whose memoirs as the queen’s maid convey many intimate details of Marie-Antoinette’s early years in France. ‘Not even all her charms could gain upon his senses; he threw himself as a matter of duty upon the bed of the Dauphine, and often fell asleep without saying a single word to her!’ When Marie-Antoinette expressed her concerns in a letter to her mother, the empress advised her not to be too impatient with her husband, since increasing his uneasiness would only make matters worse. None the less, Marie-Antoinette was worried and ‘deeply hurt’ by his lack of physical interest in her.

The Dauphin was, in fact, a serious, well-intentioned young man who suffered from a chronic lack of confidence and self-assertiveness. As a child, Louis had felt himself to be in the shadow of his brothers; first his brilliant older brother, who had died at the age of ten, and then his younger brothers, the clever and calculating Comte de Provence – who wanted the throne for himself – and the handsome Comte d’Artois. To add to his sense of insecurity, when Louis was eleven his father had died of tuberculosis, to be followed soon afterwards by his mother – a loss which he felt deeply. Increasingly anxious about whether he was equal to his future role, he withdrew, absorbing himself in his studies, especially history, or pursuing his passion for the hunt. Somewhat incongruously for a future king, he also loved lock-making and had a smithy and forge installed next to his library. Marie-Antoinette did not share his interest in history or reading and thought his smithying quite ridiculous. ‘You must agree that I wouldn’t look very beautiful standing in a forge,’ she told a friend. Her mother, the empress, was increasingly concerned about their apparent incompatibility.

For the public, however, the fortunate young couple symbolised all the promise of new age. When Louis and Marie-Antoinette made their first ceremonial entrance into Paris on 8 June 1773, there was jubilant cheering. Their cortège clattered across the streets of the capital, which had been strewn with flowers. ‘There was such a great crowd,’ wrote Marie-Antoinette, ‘that we remained for three-quarters of an hour without being able to go forwards or backwards.’ When they finally appeared on the balcony of the palace of the Tuileries, the crowds were ecstatic and their cheers increased as the Dauphine smiled. Hats were thrown in the air with abandon, handkerchiefs were waving and everyone was enthusiastic. ‘Madame, they are two hundred thousand of your lovers,’ murmured the governor of Paris, the Duc de Brissac, as he saw the sea of admiring faces.

The following year, their protected lives were to change dramatically. On 27 April 1774, Louis XV was dining with his mistress when he became feverish with a severe headache. The next day, at Versailles, he broke out in a rash. The diagnosis was serious: smallpox. Within a few days, as his body became covered with foul-smelling sores, it was apparent that the king was suffering from a most virulent form of the disease. Louis and Marie-Antoinette had no chance to pay their last respects; they were forbidden to visit him. In less than two weeks the once handsome body in his exquisite gilded bed festooned in gold brocade appeared to be covered in one huge, unending black scab.

For those who could not come near the sick room, a candle had been placed near the window, which was to be extinguished the instant the king died. Louis and Marie-Antoinette were waiting together, watching the flickering light at the window with growing apprehension. When the flame went out, ‘suddenly a dreadful noise, absolutely like thunder’, wrote Madame Campan, was heard in the outer apartment. ‘This extraordinary tumult … was the crowd of courtiers who were deserting the dead sovereign’s antechamber to come and bow to the new power of Louis XVI.’ The courtiers threw themselves on their knees with cries of ‘Le roi est mort: vive le roi!’ The whole scene was overwhelming for the nineteen-year-old king and his eighteen-year-old queen. ‘Pouring forth a flood of tears, [they] exclaimed: “God guide and protect us! We are too young to govern.”’

The coronation ceremony was held on a very hot day in June 1775. Louis-Auguste walked up the aisle of Rheims cathedral dressed in stately splendour and bearing the sword of Charlemagne. He was anointed with oil and the crown of France was solemnly lowered onto his head. Such was the magnificence of the occasion and the jubilation of the crowds that Marie-Antoinette was overwhelmed and had to leave the gallery to wipe away her tears. When she returned the spectators in the packed cathedral cheered once again and the king’s eyes were full of appreciation for his young wife. ‘Even if I were to live for two hundred years,’ Marie-Antoinette wrote ecstatically to her mother, she would never forget the wonderful day. ‘I can only be amazed by the will of Providence that I, the youngest of your children, should have become queen of the finest kingdom in Europe.’

However, ‘the finest kingdom in Europe’ that Louis-Auguste and Marie-Antoinette had inherited was not all that it appeared. The visible outward signs of great wealth that greeted them every day in the sheer size and opulence of Versailles disguised a huge national debt. Their predecessors, Louis XIV and Louis XV, had pursued policies that had driven France to the verge of bankruptcy. A succession of expensive wars had aggravated the problem. In the War of Austrian Succession, spanning 1740 to 1748, France had fought as an ally of Prussia against Austria, the Netherlands and Britain. Eight years later, between 1756 and 1763, Louis XV reversed France’s historic hostility to Austria by allying with them against Britain and Prussia in the Seven Years’ War. These two wars alone cost France 2.8 billion livres (around twenty-four livres to the pound), much of which could only be paid by borrowing.

These problems were compounded by an ancient system of taxation that exacted more from the poor than the rich. The fast-growing population of France was divided into three ‘estates’. The First Estate consisted of around one hundred thousand clergy. The Second Estate comprised almost half a million nobility. The Third Estate were the commoners, the vast majority of the population, consisting of the peasants, wage earners and bourgeoisie. Under this increasingly despised system, the first two estates, the clergy and nobility, were largely exempt from taxes, even though they were the wealthiest. They also enjoyed traditional privileges over the Third Estate, whose members could rarely achieve high rank, such as officer, in the army.

As a result of tax exemptions for the nobility and clergy, the tax base was small and fell disproportionately on those least able to pay. Louis XV had repeatedly failed to tackle the problem of tax reform; time and time again, he faced opposition from nobles and clergy who were not going to give up their tax concessions. Since he could not raise money by increasing taxation, he was obliged to borrow still more. By the 1770s the government deficit was huge and growing, as annual expenditure continued to exceed revenue.

The unjust system of taxation underlined huge disparities in wealth. Peasants felt increasingly insecure as many found that their incomes were dwindling and their debts were rising. Their problems were compounded by the fact that France was still almost entirely an agricultural nation. Only around half a million people produced manufactured goods, so there were few exports to cover the cost of imports of wheat when the harvest failed. One traveller, François de la Rochefoucauld, commenting on the incredible hardships of the peasants he observed in Brittany, declared, ‘they really are slaves … their poverty is excessive. They eat a sort of porridge made of buckwheat; it is more like glue than food’. Indeed, the extreme wealth of the nobles in their magnificent chateaux in contrast to the wretched poverty of many of the people could not have been more plain for all to see.

In eighteenth-century France there was no institutional framework that would readily allow Louis XVI to tackle these fundamental problems. Administratively it was a fragmented nation, each region with completely separate customs, taxes, even different measurements and weights. Each region jealously protected its own interests and independence, which had grown up around local parlements, thirteen in all. These parlements were not like the English parliament of elected representatives. They were lawcourts of magistrates and lawyers who had paid for their seats, and who used them, not to represent the people, but principally to further their own interests. Although the king could formally overrule a parlement or dissolve it, conflicts with the parlements had been a feature of Louis XV’s reign and had stifled modernising reforms.

As Absolute Monarch, the king had authority over the military and the national system of justice, and could determine levels of taxation and influence the clergy. The difficulty was in exercising this power when the country was politically divided. Louis XVI faced a situation where no section of society was satisfied. The nobles wanted to restore ancient rights and to resist any tax changes, the bourgeoisie resented the privileges of the nobles, and the commoners criticised the tax system. The British ambassador, Lord David Murray Stormont, captured the difficulties: ‘every instrument of faction, every court engine is constantly at work, and the whole is such a scene of jealousy, cabal and intrigue that no enemy need wish it more.’ As a young, rather idealistic man, Louis XVI earnestly wished to enhance the reputation of the monarchy and build a more prosperous France, yet he knew this would require major unpopular reforms.

One of the king’s first priorities was to cut back the nation’s debt. To do this he had to reduce state expenditure, starting with Versailles. Versailles just soaked up money; the palace was in need of repair and some servants had not been paid for years. Even before he was king, Louis spent nearly a quarter of his allowance in back payment to staff. He continued to be strict about the royal family’s spending and repaying debts. Provence, Artois and their wives were ordered to eat with him and the queen at Versailles to minimise demands on their own expensive households, and he discouraged the many extravagant noblemen at court from living beyond their means.

He appointed as finance minister Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, who tried to increase state revenue by stimulating the economy. He removed restrictions on the grain trade between the thirteen different regions and promoted light industry by suppressing the powerful guilds which would not allow non-members to practise a trade. This was achieved with some success. Louis was also able to introduce other reforms. He passed measures to improve the appalling state of prisons in France and abolished the barbaric practice of torturing accused prisoners which, up until then, had been regarded as a legitimate means to get at the truth of a man’s innocence or guilt. However, for all his humanitarian instincts, he failed to get to grips with tax reform, and the nation’s debt continued to rise.

While Louis XVI was trying to come to terms with his role as king, Marie-Antoinette was creating her new life as queen. She quickly understood that she was barred from politics but soon found there were other ways of exercising her power at Versailles. As Dauphine she had made no secret of the fact that she disliked the time-consuming, exacting etiquette and formality of the French court where, she felt, her life was lived ‘in front of the whole world’. Depending on their rank, courtiers could attend the rising or lever of the monarch and his family, and in the evening the ceremony for undressing, or coucher. For the all too frequent public meals, or grand couvert, the royal family could be watched dining by any member of the public who was suitably attired.

The queen’s disregard for ceremony shocked the more traditional courtiers in Versailles, who observed her on occasion to yawn or giggle during an event, perhaps disguising her expression with her fan. Needless to say, the young queen was continually reproved by her advisor on social etiquette, Madame de Noailles. Yet ‘Madame Etiquette’, as Marie-Antoinette called her, failed to inspire her protégée with the significance of these rituals. ‘Madame de Noailles held herself bolt upright with a most severe face,’ observed Madame Campan, and ‘merely succeeded in boring the young princess.’ It wasn’t long before Madame Etiquette lost her post altogether and this was followed by many relaxations in court ceremony. Madame Campan, who had lived at Versailles since her youth when she was employed as reader to the princesses of Louis XV, was concerned at the harm this might do her mistress: ‘an inclination to substitute by degrees the simple customs of Vienna for those of Versailles, proved more injurious to her than she could have possibly imagined.’ Her insensitivity to the French way of doing things was adding to the slowly creeping distrust of a foreign queen.

As Marie-Antoinette gained confidence, she began to place her own stamp on court life. She soon found she could patronise friends of her own choosing, such as the Princesse de Lamballe, of the house of Savoy. They had become friends at a winter sledge party, where, according to Madame Campan, the princess, ‘with all the brilliancy and freshness of youth, looked like Spring peeping from under sable and ermine’. Lamballe had been widowed at nineteen, when her husband died of syphilis. Marie-Antoinette found in her a sensitive confidante and soon appointed her Superintendent of the Queen’s Household, a move that caused uproar since there were others whose rank made them much more suited for the post. Unlike the Princesse de Lamballe, another intimate friend, Gabrielle de Polignac, was drawn from the impoverished nobility. Gabrielle was a generous-spirited, level-headed girl with a taste for simplicity. The queen found her husband an official position at Versailles so that Gabrielle, too, could live at the court. It wasn’t long before the queen was bestowing favours to numerous other members of the Polignac family.

With her newfound friends, Marie-Antoinette’s life became more fun and increasingly indulgent: a whirlwind of masked balls, plays and operas in Paris, race meetings and hunting parties. Even Madame Campan, who invariably writes appreciatively of her mistress, was critical. ‘Pleasure was the sole pursuit of everyone of this young family, with the exception of the king,’ she wrote. ‘Their love of it was perpetually encouraged by a crowd of those officious people, who by anticipating their desires … hoped to gain or secure favour for themselves.’ Who would have dared, she asks, to check the amusements of this young, lively and handsome queen? ‘A mother or husband alone, had the right to do it!’ Although the king rarely joined her for these social events, he threw no impediment in her way. ‘His long indifference had been followed by feelings of admiration and love. He was a slave to all the wishes of the queen.’ However, her mother, hearing of these indulgences, was quick to warn Marie-Antoinette in frequent letters from Austria: ‘I foresee nothing but grief and misery for you.’

Gambling soon became another irresistible occupation for the young queen, who managed to accumulate heavy debts, which her husband settled from his private income. Constantly frugal himself, Louis failed to impose this self-discipline on his young wife. Worse criticism was to come when she began to ring up bills for diamonds, followed by more diamonds, in increasing size and quantity, until her mother wrote in some distraction: ‘a Queen can only degrade herself by such impossible behaviour and degrades herself even more by this sort of heedless extravagance, especially in difficult times … I hope I shall not live to see the disaster which is all too likely to occur.’ Marie-Antoinette replied, ‘I would not have thought anyone could have bothered you about such bagatelles.’

Inevitably all this played into the hands of the rumour-mongers. Malicious gossip soon spread about how much money the queen was spending. Apart from jewels and clothes – around 170 creations a year – not to mention her famous hairdresser, Léonard Hautier, who came out from Paris each day to create a powdered, coiffured fantasy up to three feet high, she also lavished money on the Petit Trianon. This was an elegant neoclassical pavilion about a mile from Versailles given to her by the king, which she refurbished to her own taste, including the creation of an English-style garden. This little private heaven was a place where Marie-Antoinette could escape the suffocating etiquette of court and enjoy being informal with her friends; but of course, the money poured into the Petit Trianon, together with enormous sums spent on generously favouring her friends, created jealousy and hostility amongst those who were not so favoured. Courtiers frustrated not to be part of her inner circle maliciously called the Petit Trianon ‘Little Vienna’.

Marie-Antoinette’s Austrian blood still rankled with many in France. All too many nobles had had relatives killed by Austrians in recent wars or at least had fought against Austrian troops. The queen’s apparent contempt for French customs soon made her enemies among the nobility. ‘Apart from a few favourites … everyone was excluded from the royal presence,’ complained one nobleman, the Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix. ‘Rank, service, reputation, and birth were no longer enough to gain admittance.’ Some nobles, he said, stayed away from Versailles rather than endure snubs from such a young, apparently light-headed and frivolous foreigner.

Yet she was not without admirers; she particularly cultivated the good-looking and fashionable men, such as the king’s youngest brother, Artois. With his cosmopolitan air and ease with women, he was only too happy to oblige the king and escort the queen to countless social events. On one occasion, in January 1774, at a masquerade at the opera in Paris, through her grey velvet mask Marie-Antoinette found herself talking to a tall, attractive man with a somewhat serious expression. He was finishing a European grand tour and, as he talked, she realised he had a delightful Swedish accent. Always drawn to a foreigner, she became interested in this aristocratic stranger who was so at ease in Parisian high society. The glamorous Count Axel Fersen made an instant impression.

Not surprisingly, her relationship with her husband was under strain. Anxious about his new role as king, he seemed intimidated by this sophisticated and beautiful wife whom he could not satisfy. ‘The king fears her, rather than loves her,’ observed one courtier, who noticed the king seemed much happier and more relaxed when she was absent. Marie-Antoinette, in turn, chose the company of young men full of energy and wit who would flatter and amuse her; she found it difficult to be patient with such a dull and unexciting husband. Yet they both wanted the marriage to succeed and, in particular, they both wanted an heir.

However, as the years passed, no heir was produced, which incited much malicious gossip. In the autumn of 1775, five years into the marriage, Parisian women were heard shouting revolting obscenities at Marie-Antoinette at a race meeting, mocking her for not giving birth to a dauphin. In the same year she wrote to her mother to tell her about the birth of Artois’ first son, the Duc d’Angoulême, now third in line to the throne. ‘There’s no need to tell you, dear Mama, how much it hurts me to see an heir to the throne who isn’t mine.’ Despite this pressure, Louis remained, to say the least, rather uninterested in sex. The best doctors were consulted and various diagnoses were made, although no serious impediment to the match was found. Marie-Antoinette told her mother that she tried to entice her husband to spend more time with her, and reported enthusiastically early in 1776 that ‘his body seemed to be becoming firmer’.

The empress, however, required much more than this to seal the all-important political alliance. The following year, in April 1777, Marie-Antoinette’s brother, now the Emperor Joseph, came to visit Versailles, charged, amongst other things, with trying to ascertain why no heir was forthcoming. Joseph was enchanted with his sister, whom he described as ‘delightful … a little young and inclined to be rash, but with a core of honesty and virtue that deserves respect’. It would appear from Joseph’s private letters afterwards to his brother Leopold of Tuscany that during his six-week stay he did not shrink from probing the intimate details of their marriage: ‘In the conjugal bed, here is the secret. He [Louis] has excellent erections, inserts his organ, remains there without stirring for perhaps two minutes, and then withdraws without ever discharging and, still erect, he bids his wife goodnight. It is incomprehensible.’ Joseph continued, ‘he ought to be whipped, to make him ejaculate, as one whips donkeys!’ As for Marie-Antoinette, he wrote that she was not ‘amorously inclined’, and together they were ‘a couple of awkward duffers!’

Joseph reproved his sister for not showing her husband more affection. ‘Aren’t you cold and disinterested when he caresses you or tries to speak to you?’ he challenged her. ‘Don’t you look bored, even disgusted? If it’s true, then how can you possibly expect such a cold-blooded man to make love to you?’ Marie-Antoinette evidently took his advice to heart. That summer she was elated to tell her mother that at last she had experienced ‘the happiness so essential for my entire life’. The king and queen’s sexual awakening brought them closer together and, early the following year, she reported that ‘the king spends three or four nights a week in my bed and behaves in a way that fills me with hope’. Some weeks later Marie-Antoinette proudly announced to her husband that she was at last expecting a baby. Louis was overjoyed.

On 19 December 1778 Marie-Antoinette went into labour. At Versailles a royal birth, like eating or dressing, was a public ritual, open to spectators who wished to satisfy themselves that the new baby was born to the queen. As the bells rang out, ‘torrents of inquisitive persons poured into the chamber’, wrote Madame Campan. The rush was ‘so great and tumultuous’ that it was impossible to move; some courtiers were even standing on the furniture. ‘So motley a gathering,’ protested the First Lady of the Bedchamber, ‘one would have thought oneself in a place of public amusement!’ Finally, when the baby was born, there was no sound, and Marie-Antoinette began to panic, thinking it was stillborn. At the first cry, the queen was so elated and exhausted by the effort that she was quite overcome. ‘Help me, I’m dying,’ she cried as she turned very pale and lost consciousness.

Princesse de Lamballe, horrified by the agony of her friend, also collapsed and was taken out ‘insensible’. The windows, which had been sealed to keep out draughts, were hurriedly broken to get more air, courtiers were thrown out, the queen was bled, hot water fetched. It took some time for the queen to regain consciousness. At this point ‘we were all embracing each other and shedding tears of joy’, writes Madame Campan, caught up in ‘transports of delight’ that the queen ‘was restored to life’. A twenty-one-gun salute rang out to announce the birth of a daughter: Princess Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte or Madame Royale. ‘Poor little girl,’ the queen is reported to have said as she cradled her daughter. ‘You are not what was desired, but you are no less dear to me on that account. A son would have been the property of the state. You shall be mine.’

Despite this success, there was still great pressure on Marie-Antoinette to conceive a male heir. To her delight, early in 1781 she found she was pregnant again. After the traumas of Marie-Thérèse’s very public delivery, spectators were banned from the next birth. In fact there was such deep silence in the room as the newborn emerged that the queen imagined she had again only produced a daughter. Then the king, overwhelmed with pride and delight, ‘tears streaming from his eyes’, came up to the queen and said, ‘Madam, you have fulfilled my wishes and those of France. You are the mother of a dauphin.’

A hundred and one cannon heralded the long-awaited birth of a son: Louis-Joseph. The news was greeted by wild celebrations: fireworks, festivities and fountains of wine in Paris. There was such ‘universal joy’, said Madame Campan, that complete strangers ‘stopped one another in the street and spoke without being acquainted’. A delegation of Parisian artisans and craftsmen came to Versailles with generous gifts for the young child. The king, at last showing confidence, was all smiles, remaining on the balcony a long time to savour the sight and constantly taking the opportunity to say with great pleasure, ‘my son, the Dauphin’. The royal line had an heir and the continuity of the monarchy seemed assured.

Nevertheless, for all the triumphant public displays, the monarchy was being imperceptibly undermined, sinking slowly beneath an ocean of debt. Furthermore, like his forebears, Louis XVI had found himself drawn into policies that added to the debt. He had agreed to provide secret funds to help General Washington’s army in America against Britain and soon sent troops and supplies as well. Support for the American revolution against the British was popular in France. Many wanted to retaliate for the defeats suffered in the Seven Years’ War, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, whose father had been killed by the British. Lafayette set sail for America in 1777 and was soon appointed major general, serving George Washington. His daring exploits were widely reported in France as he led his men in several victorious campaigns.

Louis XVI had found himself increasingly involved in the American war. In 1778 he recognised the American Declaration of Independence and signed a military alliance with the Americans. The eight thousand French soldiers who went to America made a significant difference to the war against England. Much to her disappointment, the queen’s favourite, Count Fersen, was one of many who volunteered to join the French expeditionary corps. However, as the fighting dragged on, the French government was forced to spend heavily to finance the military campaign against England.

A succession of finance ministers came and went, seemingly unable to get to grips with the deficit. Instead of reforming the tax system, Louis tried to solve the problem without alienating the aristocracy. Each year he was forced to borrow more to balance the budget, sinking further and further into debt. When his reforming finance minister, Turgot, tried to change this, he became so unpopular at court, especially with Marie-Antoinette, that he was dismissed.

His successor, Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker appointed in June 1777, attempted to reorganise the tax system but soon became embroiled in further borrowing at increasingly exorbitant interest rates. In 1781, in an attempt to win the confidence of creditors, he published the Compte Rendu, a highly favourable report of the state finances. His ambitious plan failed. His figures were challenged and in the ensuing furor, finding that he did not have the full support of Louis XVI, he resigned.

He was succeeded in 1783 by his rival, Charles Alexandre de Calonne. Calonne tried to tackle the problem by boosting the economy with increased state spending, especially on manufacturing. This only served to deepen the crisis and he was forced to contemplate further taxes. To add to the difficulties, a long agricultural depression gripped the country and inflation was rising. All this was exacerbated by the effects of the American war. Although the French secured a victory against England in the American War of Independence, aid to the Americans between 1776 and 1783 had added around 1.3 billion livres to the spiralling national debt. And there was another hidden cost of supporting America: the returning men, inspired by what they had seen overseas, brought back revolutionary ideas.

During the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century France, writers like François Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had set out radical new ideas in political philosophy. Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters of 1733 indicted the French system of government and were suppressed. He continued to challenge all manifestations of tyranny by the privileged few in church or state. Rousseau’s The Social Contract, published in 1762, tackled the great themes of liberty and virtue and the role of the state, creating a new sense of possibilities and opportunities. Intellectuals began to reject established systems of government; ‘reason’, they argued, had greater value than the king’s claim to a ‘divine right’, and they no longer saw the monarch’s rights and privileges as unchallengeable. Political issues became much more widely debated in the salons and academies of Paris. Why support a system that had the great mass of the populace in chains to abject poverty? Surely the people, rather than the king, should determine levels of taxation? Is a republic morally superior to a monarchy? Educated Frenchmen began to see in America’s Declaration of Independence a better model to follow. With the establishment of the American constitution there was a practical alternative to the monarchy of France.

Growing discontent with the government found a tangible focus in the popular press in the increasingly vitriolic portrayal of the queen. Although with the responsibilities of motherhood she had begun to moderate her earlier excesses and spent much time with her children, she had many enemies at court and the slanders continued unabated. In the streets of Paris, pornography, cartoons, prints and libelles poured out an endless barrage of spiteful criticism which, before long, became common truths throughout France. The production of these pamphlets was a commercial enterprise and writers fought to outdo each other in their ever more outrageous copy. The queen was portrayed as wildly frivolous and extravagant, with no care for the welfare of her people. Much was made of her seven years of childlessness and she was accused of lesbian relationships, especially with her favourites, Gabrielle de Polignac and the Superintendent of the Household, Princesse de Lamballe: ‘In order to have children, Cupid must widen Aphrodite’s door. This Antoinette knows, and she tires out more than one work lady widening that door. What talents are employed! The Superintendent works away. Laughter, games, little fingers, all her exploits proved in vain.’

Even when she fulfilled her role as mother, Marie-Antoinette was portrayed as unfaithful, turning the king of France into a ‘perfect cuckold’.

Our lascivious Queen

With Artois the debauched

Together with no trouble

Commit the sweet sin

But what of it

How could one find harm in that?

These calumnies demonising the queen became increasingly explicit and obscene. The Love Life of Charlie and Toinette, of 1779, outlines in graphic detail the ‘impotence of L— —’ whose ‘matchstick … is always limp and curled up’, and how ‘Toinette feels how sweet it is to be well and truly fucked’ by Artois. In the pamphlets and libelles, the queen’s voracious sexual appetite required more than one lover: Fersen, Artois and others were implicated. There was even a fake autobiography, A Historical Essay on the Life of Marie-Antoinette, which first appeared in the early 1780s and proved so popular it was continually updated, purporting to be her own confession as a ‘barbaric queen, adulterous wife, woman without morals, soiled with crime and debauchery, these are the titles that are my decorations’. Yet for many her worst crime was undeniable: she was Austrian. To the gutter press of Paris, in addition to all her other failings, she was invariably l’Autrichienne, stressing the second half of the word, chienne or ‘bitch’.

In March 1785 Marie-Antoinette had a second son, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie. Could Count Axel Fersen have fathered this child, as some historians have suggested? He was the only man out of the many named in the libelles with whom the queen might have had an affair. There is no doubt of their mutual attraction, yet historians cannot agree over the nature of their relationship. Was this a courtly romance, where Fersen discreetly adored the queen from a distance? Or was this a romantic passion with many secret rendezvous in the privacy of her gardens at Trianon? The many deletions in Marie-Antoinette’s correspondence with Fersen, made years later by the Fersen family, make the matter impossible to resolve. The most likely conclusion is that, although it is probable that they had an affair, there is no evidence that Louis XVI was not Louis-Charles’ father. Quite the reverse: courtiers noted that the date of conception did indeed neatly coincide with the dates of the king’s visits to his wife’s bedroom.

However, so successfully had lampoonists demolished the queen’s reputation that when she made her traditional ceremonial entry into Paris after the birth of her second son, there was not a single cheer from the crowd. As she walked though the dark interior of Notre Dame towards the great sunlit western door and square beyond, the awesome silence of the crowd was the menacing backdrop as the clatter of horses’ hooves rang out in the spring air. It was in stark contrast to the tumultuous celebrations that had greeted her on her arrival in Paris as a young girl. The queen was distraught by this hostility, crying out as she returned to Versailles, ‘What have I done to them?’

She could no longer turn to her mother in Austria for advice. The Empress Maria-Theresa never had the satisfaction of knowing that her daughter had finally provided two male heirs. After a short illness, she had died of inflammation of the lungs. Marie-Antoinette was inconsolable, reported Madame Campan. ‘She kept herself shut up in her closet for several days … saw none but the royal family, and received none but the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac.’ Even at a distance, her mother had been a powerful influence in her life, constantly providing shrewd and critical guidance. She felt her isolation now, in a foreign court, with all the responsibilities of queen, wife and mother.

Marie-Antoinette did have one treasured memento of her mother, a lock of her hair, which she wore close to her skin. And in Austria, concealed in the empress’s rosary, there was a small token of her distant daughter. The delicate chain of black rosary beads was entwined with sixteen gold medallions encasing locks of hair from her children. After her death, the rosary passed to her oldest daughter, the invalid, Maria-Anna, who lived in the Elisabethinen convent in Klagenfurt. These small symbols of the empress’s children were all but forgotten. In time, they would assume great significance.

2 ‘GRÂCE POUR MAMAN’

‘This is a revolt?’ asked the king, hearing of the fall of the Bastille.

‘No sire, it is a revolution,’ came the reply.

Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (July 1789)

At Versailles, Louis-Charles, the Duc de Normandie, lived a charmed life, well protected from the ‘trifling disturbances’ – as they were sometimes known at court – beyond the palace gates. In the royal nursery, under the sensitive administration of the Governess of the Children of France, the Duchesse de Polignac, his little empire was well endowed with servants. Apart from Cecile, his wet nurse, there was a cradle rocker, Madame Rambaud, and his personal rocker, Madame Rousseau, otherwise known as ‘Rocker to the Children of France’, whose sister, Madame Campan, worked in the Queen’s Household. Valets were appointed such as Hanet Cléry, a particularly loyal and discreet servant who had been in service to the royal family since 1782. In addition, the Duc de Normandie had two room boys, four ushers, a porter, a silver cleaner, a laundress, a hairdresser, two first chamber women, eight ordinary women and a periphery of minor staff all vying for importance.

The nursery on the ground floor of Versailles opened out onto the large terraces and acres of ornamental gardens beyond; rows of orange trees and neatly trimmed box bushes receded into the distance, geometrically arranged around circular pools with tall fountains cascading onto statues, gilded each year. Any infant tumble from the prince as he took his first steps would bring a kaleidoscope of riches to view; wherever he looked, his soft and silken world was perfect. His mother watched his excellent progress with delight. Louis-Charles was glowing with vitality, ‘a real peasant boy, big, rosy and plump’, she wrote. This contrasted sharply with his brother, Monsieur le Dauphin, who although more than three years older was constantly prone to infections.

Monsieur le Dauphin was eventually moved out of the nursery and established in his own official suite on the ground floor of Versailles, ousting his Uncle Provence. His older sister, Madame Royale, also had her own apartment near Marie-Antoinette, under the Hall of Mirrors. Apart from occasional state duties, such as the grand couvert, where they would dine in public – Madame Royale with her hair powdered and wearing a stiff panniered gown, the Duc de Normandie usually sitting on his mother’s lap – their lives were shielded from the public. The Duc de Normandie was taken on carriage trips around the park and visits to the farm at the Trianon, or he could play in his little garden on the terrace. Occasionally there would be trips to nearby palaces at Marly, Saint Cloud or Fontainebleau.

None the less, the ‘gilded youth’ of Versailles, in the words of one nobleman, the Comte de Ségur, walked ‘upon a carpet of flowers which covered an abyss’. France’s deepening financial crisis was beginning to dominate public life. In 1787 interest on the national debt alone had risen to almost half of all state expenditure. Louis and his finance minister, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, were fast approaching a point where it was no longer possible to borrow more money except at excessive interest rates. They faced no alternative but to raise taxes.

Calonne, like his predecessors, urged the king to reform the tax system and abolish the partial exemption from direct taxation enjoyed by the nobility and clergy. The king, always anxious to create a consensus for change rather than appear to act as autocratic leader, wanted to introduce Calonne’s reforms without confrontation. Consequently, rather than present his proposals to the parlements – which he knew would be hostile – he decided to take a chance and call a special ‘Assembly of Notables’ composed of leading figures in society, hand-picked for the occasion.

However, when the Assembly of Notables gathered in Versailles in February 1787, far from accepting and popularising the tax reforms as the king had hoped, they were suspicious. The clergy and nobles, who owned most of the land, were largely exempt from the principal land tax, the taille, yet under the new measures they would pay up to five per cent of their own income. As news spread of the proposed tax reforms and soaring deficit, Calonne became the focus of the passionate criticism. In Paris his effigy was burned in the streets. By April 1787 the king was forced to dismiss his unpopular minister, and the following month he dissolved the Assembly of Notables.

His new finance minister, Loménie de Brienne, prepared a revised package of tax reforms and boldly decided he would try to win approval directly from the Parlement of Paris. However, the Parlement, like the Assembly of Notables, rejected the equalisation of taxation. Ironically, this revolutionary measure, which would have benefited the vast majority of people, was perceived to be an act of despotism by the monarchy. Since the king had to raise money somehow, to pay staff and honour debts, he was becoming increasingly desperate. In August 1787 he exiled the entire Parlement of Paris to the country at Troyes. This caused uproar; there were demonstrations in Paris and crowds gathered outside Parlement crying for ‘liberty’. Although Louis had reduced court spending, the proposed increases in taxes for the nobles and clergy were inextricably linked in the public’s mind with the demands made by the royal family on the public purse to fund their extravagant lifestyle. The public’s growing hostility began to focus on Louis and, inevitably, his Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette.

A large diamond necklace would prove the queen’s undoing: 647 brilliants, 2,800 carats, arranged in glittering layer upon layer, a piece of jewellery to dazzle the eye and empty the purse. It was the dream creation of the court jewellers, Böhmer and Bassenge, and they hoped to sell this diamond fantasy to Marie-Antoinette. To their disappointment, by the late 1780s the ‘Queen of the Rococo’ was now much more restrained; she repeatedly refused to buy the necklace.

Böhmer would not give up. He offered his 1.6 million livres ‘superb necklace’ to the king, hoping he would buy it for Marie-Antoinette. The king, it seems, was not in a necklace-buying mood. Faced with constant if polite refusals, the worried Böhmer, increasingly looking bankruptcy in the eye, decided on a rather theatrical appeal to the queen and waylaid her at court. ‘Madame, I am ruined and disgraced if you do not purchase my necklace,’ he cried as he threw himself on his knees. ‘I shall throw myself into the river.’ The queen spoke to him severely: ‘Rise, Böhmer. I do not like these rhapsodies.’ She urged him to break up the necklace and sell the stones separately.

It was the queen’s misfortune that the grand almoner of France, one Cardinal de Rohan, had long dreamed of enhancing his standing with the royal family. The cardinal fell prey to a con artist posing as a friend of the queen, a certain charming Comtesse Jeanne de La Motte-Valois. Knowing that the cardinal wished to ingratiate himself and be part of the queen’s elite circle, Jeanne de La Motte hired a woman to dress like Marie-Antoinette and meet him secretly one night in the palace grounds. This false queen pressed a rose into the cardinal’s hand and hurried away, leaving him under the delightful impression that he had indeed met with the queen’s favour.

Encouraged by this, when Jeanne de La Motte told the cardinal that the queen wished him to purchase Böhmer’s famous necklace on her behalf, he obligingly did so. He duly passed the fabulous necklace to Jeanne de La Motte, who went to London post-haste to make her fortune as the gems emerged in brooches, ear-rings, snuff boxes and other trifles.

There was just the outstanding sum of 1.6 million livres. When the court jewellers demanded payment, the shocking scandal began to unravel. The king arrested the cardinal and he was sent to the Bastille, only to be tried and acquitted of theft later before a sympathetic parlement. There were cries of ‘Vive le cardinal!’ in the streets, expressing the people’s view that he was the foolish victim of a ‘tyrant’ king. Eventually brought to justice, Jeanne de La Motte was sent to the prison of La Salpêtrière and condemned to a public flogging. She was to be branded with a V for voleuse (‘thief’) on her shoulder. In front of a huge crowd, the iron rod slipped as she struggled and she was burned on the breast. She too successfully portrayed herself as victim in the ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’ in her memoirs, in which she claimed only to have confessed to the theft to protect the queen, with whom she had had an affair.

Although Marie-Antoinette was entirely innocent, as the unbelievable saga unfolded before the amazed public in the late 1780s, it was her reputation that became the most sullied. Her love of beautiful jewels had been widely reported. It was easy to believe that she had accepted the necklace, refused to pay for it and then spitefully passed the blame onto others. Under the relentless onslaught of outrageous libelles that poured onto the streets of Paris, her image became irrevocably tarnished. It was claimed that she and her favoured friends continued to spend recklessly and that she had handed over millions of livres to her Austrian family.

She was portrayed as the real power behind the throne who pushed Austrian interests on a weak king. The degree to which she was seen as out of touch with the realities of the poor came when she was attributed as saying ‘Let them eat cake’ when bread was in short supply. There is no evidence that she said this; the remark is more likely to have been made a century before, by Louis XIV’s queen. Yet the queen began to receive pointed demonstrations of disapproval when she ventured out in public. Trips into Paris could turn quickly into frightening undertakings.

With France teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and the king demanding yet more taxes, the queen began to emerge as the prime culprit. The ‘Austrian whore’ or ‘Austrian bitch’ was transformed into the root cause of the country’s financial plight. At a watershed in the destruction of her image she was dubbed the wildly extravagant ‘Madame Déficit’. Owing to her unpopularity, her latest portrait was not hung in the Royal Academy of Paris. In the blank frame remaining, someone had written: ‘Behold the Deficit!’

The once pleasure-loving queen retreated from public gaze. Occasional rides into the country around the Trianon with Count Axel Fersen were among the few consolations at a time when she was increasingly preoccupied with motherhood. In the summer of 1787 her fourth child, Sophie, born the year before, died suddenly from tuberculosis. As she struggled with this loss, it was becoming increasingly evident that the Dauphin, too, was showing signs of tuberculosis. He began to lose weight and suffered attacks of fever.

As the autumn and winter months wore on, the king was losing control of the political situation. Under continued financial pressure, Louis recalled the Parlement. However, the king’s insistence that he wanted a fairer system of taxation fell on deaf ears. He seemed unable to get his message across, and was even opposed by his own distant cousin, the scheming Philippe d’Orléans, head of the Orléanist line of the Bourbon family. It was becoming clear to Louis that the tax issue was being used as a pretext for a wider challenge to his authority as the king. A system of rule that had existed in France for generations was now at risk. At stake was not just balancing the budget and pushing through a fairer system of taxation, but more fundamentally who had the right to take these decisions and govern France. Determined to re-establish his authority, on 8 May 1788 Louis gambled yet again. He suspended not only the Parlement of Paris but also the other twelve provincial Parlements as well. This prompted a wave of rioting across France. There was an outpouring of support for the parlements and all sections of society seemed ranged against a king who was increasingly portrayed as a tyrant. Louis began to doubt his own ability and, according to his youngest sister, Madame Elisabeth, was racked with indecision. ‘My brother has such good intentions,’ she wrote, ‘but fears always to make a mistake. His first impulse over, he is tormented by the dread of doing an injustice.’ Both he and his finance minister became ill with the stress as the government’s financial position continued to deteriorate. Many people refused to pay any taxes at all until the king backed down. Loménie de Brienne, now unable to raise money either by credit or taxes, was obliged to print money to pay government staff. It was, in effect, an admission of bankruptcy. He was losing command of the situation and by August he was fired.

In the hope of bringing order to the disintegrating condition of the state, Louis came under increasing pressure to summon an ancient institution known as the Estates-General. This comprised elected representatives of three great medieval orders or estates: the clergy, the nobles and the commoners. The Estates-General was only summoned in times of crisis; Louis was only too aware that such a meeting might undermine his authority still further. The last time the Estates-General had sat, in 1614, they had only become a forum for disagreement and conflict. Yet the whole nation seemed to be demanding its recall. In late August, responding to popular demand, he reappointed his former finance minister, Jacques Necker. Lurching from one policy to another, increasingly unable to stave off bankruptcy, Louis became trapped. Finally, he agreed to summon the Estates-General to Versailles the following year. It was a desperate gamble.

When the Estates-General had last met 174 years previously, it had had an equal number of representatives from each estate, in which the First Estate, the clergy, and the Second Estate, the nobility, could always combine together to outvote the Third Estate, the commoners. When the restored parlement demanded the same arrangement this time, there was outrage and further riots. Louis decided to right this imbalance by giving the commoners as many representatives as the nobility and clergy together, but he neglected to say whether the voting would be by ‘order’ or by head. What had initially begun as a protest by the clergy and nobles against the powers of the king to raise their taxes had now set in motion a chain of events in which all sections in France sought to exert greater political power. Even the elements seemed ranged against Louis. A very bad harvest was followed in 1788 by a viciously cruel winter in which many of the poor died of cold or starvation. Unrest was growing; robber bands pillaged the countryside. To many ordinary people the whole system in France seemed rotten; feelings against the king and queen hardened as deeply felt grievances were aired.

As the debates raged about the Estates-General, Marie-Antoinette watched anxiously over the declining health of her eldest son. ‘The young Prince fell, in a few months, from rude health into a condition which curved his spine, distorted and lengthened his face, and rendered his legs so weak that he was unable to walk without being supported like some broken old man,’ wrote Madame Campan. Still only six years old, his little body slowly became pitifully deformed as his tuberculosis spread. ‘He has one leg shorter than the other, and his spine is twisted and sticks out unnaturally,’ the queen confided to her brother, Emperor Joseph II, in February 1788. The next month the Dauphin was sent to the Château de Meudon with his governor, in the hopes that his health would recover with the fresh country air. The king visited his son no less than forty times over the summer months, eagerly looking for any sign of improvement. There was none.

The queen took comfort from her other two children. Marie-Thérèse, the eldest, she nicknamed Mousseline la Sérieuse on account of her serious, thoughtful manner. The Petite Madame took after her father in temperament, although she could be dignified sometimes to the point of seeming haughty. The queen reserved her strongest endearments for her youngest, Louis-Charles: ‘mon chou d’amour’. His blue eyes and blond hair resembled his mother’s and with his affectionate and playful personality he proved a most rewarding child. He enjoyed games of ‘wedding’ in the nursery with his friends and playing with sand or horses – his great aunts had given him eight small black ponies, which had been specially trained so he could ride them. Madame Campan observed, ‘his ruddy health and loveliness did, in truth, form a striking contrast to the languid look and melancholy disposition of his elder brother’. Increasingly the king and queen’s hopes for the future of their line were concentrated on this charming little ruler of the nursery who, at four and a half, was already wearing coat and trousers.

4 May 1789. The streets of Versailles were hung with tapestries for the magnificent opening procession to mark the historic gathering of the Estates-General. With great ceremony to mark this ‘rebirth’ of France – as some believed – the parade of two thousand people filed though the crowded streets for a service at the church of Saint Louis. The king walked behind the archbishop of Paris, followed by the royal family, then representatives of the three estates, each with lighted candles.

Marie-Antoinette, sumptuously bejewelled in a silver dress, ‘looked sad’ as she passed. Unable to take part, but watching the proceedings from a balcony, was her seven-year-old son, his twisted little body stretched on a day bed. She now knew he was dying and could scarcely hold back her tears as he smiled valiantly at her. At that moment some ‘low women’, according to Madame Campan, ‘yelled out “Vive le Duc d’Orléans!” in such a rebellious manner that the queen nearly fainted’. Many of the representatives, she wrote, arrived in Versailles with the ‘strongest prejudices’ against the queen, certain she ‘was draining the treasury of the state in order to satisfy the most unreasonable luxury’. Some demanded to see the Trianon, convinced that there was at least one room ‘totally decorated with diamonds, and columns studded with sapphires and rubies’. Disbelieving representatives searched the pavilion in vain for the diamond chamber.

The first session of the Estates-General met the next day in the opulent surroundings of the Salle des Menus Plaisirs in the palace. The clergy, in imposing scarlet and black ecclesiastical robes, were seated on benches on the right. The nobles, richly dressed in white-feathered hats and gold-trimmed suits, took the benches on the left. The commoners sat furthest from the king at the far end, dressed simply in black. One of those among them taking in the scene – the large ornate chamber, the symbolic ranking of the representatives with the Third Estate in plain clothes at the back – was a young lawyer called Maximilien Robespierre.

At the age of eleven Robespierre had won a scholarship to one of the most prestigious schools in France, Louis-le-Grand, in Paris. He had graduated in law in 1780 and returned to practise in his home town, Arras, in the northern province of Artois. When the Estates-General were summoned, he seized his chance to further his career and successfully secured a position as one of eight Third Estate deputies for Artois. Like many commoners, he arrived in Versailles determined to challenge the structures of privilege at the heart of French society and create social equality.

As the speeches and debates began, the great expectations that had preceded the opening of the Estates-General soon disintegrated. Far from even attempting to resolve the all-important financial crisis, which Necker outlined at great length, there were increasingly bitter arguments about voting procedures, with each estate continually plotting for positions of power over the others. As the weeks of May passed, rather than resolving the issue of tax reform, the meeting served as a catalyst, crystallising grievances at the very heart of the constitution of France.

At this time the queen was almost completely preoccupied with the Dauphin. The young prince suffered as his illness slowly destroyed every trace of childish vitality. When Princesse de Lamballe visited him at Meudon with her lady-in-waiting, they could hardly bear to look at his ‘beautiful eyes, the eyes of a dying child’. The queen watched helplessly as his emaciated body became covered in sores. ‘The things that the poor little one says are incredible; they pierce his mother’s heart; his tenderness towards her knows no bounds,’ observed a friend. On 2 June services were held for him across France and prayers were said. It was to no avail. Two days later he died in his mother’s arms.

The significance of these events was lost on the four-year-old Louis-Charles playing in the nursery at Versailles. He wept to hear of the death of his older brother, now lying in state at Meudon in a silver and white room, his coffin covered with a silver cloth, his crown and sword. All around him, the chambers of Versailles resounded to the acrimonious debates of the deputies. Louis-Charles had now become the symbol of the royal future of France, ‘Monsieur le Dauphin’, next in line to a throne increasingly devoid of authority as well as funds.

The king, somewhere during these events, private and public, missed his opportunity to rally the deputies and inspire their support. Overwhelmed with grief, he and the queen left Versailles to mourn their oldest son. In his absence, the deputies of the Third Estate seized the initiative. At a pivotal meeting on 17 June 1789, they passed a motion that since they represented ninety-five per cent of the people, the Third Estate should be renamed as a new body, called the ‘National Assembly’, which had the right to control taxation. With flagrant disregard for the king they planned to proceed, with or without royal approval.

While the king vacillated, hopelessly torn between the advice of ministers such as Necker who counselled compromise, and that of his wife and brothers who argued for a tougher line, the Third Estate went even further. When the deputies of the new National Assembly found themselves locked out of their usual meeting room, they adjourned to an indoor tennis court. Here each member solemnly swore not to separate until France had a new constitution. This became known as the ‘Tennis Court Oath’.

The king’s power was collapsing. His specially appointed Assembly of Notables had defied him, the Parlement had defied him, now the Third Estate was defying him. With each successive swipe at the monarchy, the king was racked with indecision. ‘All goes worse than ever,’ Madame Elisabeth reported frankly to her friend, the Marquise de Bombelles, as she confided her despair at her brother’s lack of the ‘necessary sternness’. Foreseeing disaster, she wrote, ‘the deputies, victims of their passions … are rushing to ruin, and that of the throne and the whole kingdom’. As for herself, she told the marquise ominously, ‘I have sworn not to leave my brother and I shall keep my oath.’

As support grew rapidly for the new National Assembly, the king was obliged to recognise it. He ordered the other two estates to join the Third. As a result, the commoners, who had had their representation doubled, now held a majority. Many took the Third’s victory and the king’s acquiescence as a sign that his authority had completely broken down. There was rioting on the streets; civil war seemed imminent. The king summoned extra regiments to Paris. He told the deputies of the National Assembly that the troops were stationed as a precaution, to protect the people. The deputies, however, saw the presence of twenty-five thousand troops in and around the capital differently and feared that they themselves were under direct threat from the king. One of them spoke out: ‘these preparations for war are obvious to everyone and fill every heart with indignation.’

On 12 July, following the dismissal of the popular finance minister, Necker, crowds gathered to hear rousing revolutionary speeches against the ‘tyranny’ of the monarchy, who it was feared was seeking to destroy the new National Assembly that represented the people. ‘Citizens, they will stop at nothing,’ urged one speaker, the journalist Camille Desmoulins, a schoolfriend of Robespierre. ‘They are plotting a massacre of patriots.’ People rushed to arm themselves. As a wave of panic swept the Paris streets, armourers and gunsmiths were raided – one later reported that he was looted no less than thirty times. The monastery of Saint Lazare, a depot for grain and flour, was sacked. The next day, at the Hôtel de Ville, Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American war, set out to enrol a new ‘National Guard’ with himself as colonel, creating a new citizens’ army. Early the next morning, on 14 July, around eighty thousand people gathered at the Invalides, the army’s barracks, where they overwhelmed the troops and managed to obtain thirty thousand muskets and some cannon. Faced with rumours that royal troops were on the move, the citizens’ army needed gunpowder and this was in the Bastille. The crowd swept forward, to rousing cries of ‘To the Bastille!’

The grey stone walls and menacing towers of this fourteenth-century fortress rose as a great, dark edifice on the Rue Saint Antoine in the eastern side of Paris. For years any enemies of the crown could be detained in this prison without a judicial process, merely by a royal warrant: the notorious lettres de cachet. Consequently, the almost windowless walls, five feet thick, rising sheer from the moat, had come to represent a mighty symbol of royal tyranny and oppression. The cry went up to seize the Bastille, take the gunpowder and release the prisoners. Revolt was fast turning into revolution.

As nine hundred men gathered around the Bastille, the atmosphere inside was tense. The governor, Marquis Bernard-René de Launay, gave orders for his guards to defend the prison at all cost. After midday, the mob broke through the first drawbridge and behind a smoke screen formed by burning two carts of manure, they aimed their guns at the gate and the second drawbridge. With the fortress under siege, the garrison fought back, killing almost one hundred of the assailants and injuring many more. Yet the mob continued to attack. The guards eventually surrendered, defying de Launay’s orders, and lowered the second drawbridge. The crowds, now out of control, surged forward into the fortress, breaking windows and furniture, and killing any guards who had not put down their weapons. The prisoners were released; for all the furor, there were only seven – including one madman.

In their lust for vengeance the excited crowd seized de Launay and dragged him towards the Hôtel de Ville, kicking him down until, unable to endure another moment, he screamed, ‘Let me die!’ As he lashed out, the crowd finished off their victim with hunting knives, swords and bayonets. Finally a cook named Désnot cut off his head with a pocket knife. The still dripping head was twisted onto a pike and paraded around the streets to the cheering crowd, described on a placard as ‘Governor of the Bastille, disloyal and treacherous enemy of the people’. For patriots, the fall of the Bastille created a wave of euphoria, and it would not be long before the prison was demolished entirely.

Faced with this new crisis, the king went to the National Assembly and effectively surrendered, promising to withdraw his troops from Paris. As the sense of desperation grew, many senior members of the Versailles court now fled. On the night of 16 July the king’s young brother, Artois, and the queen’s close friend, Gabrielle de Polignac, left the palace with their families. ‘Nothing could be more affecting than the parting of the queen and her friend,’ wrote Madame Campan. The queen ‘wished to go and embrace her once more’ after they had parted, but knowing that her movements were watched, was too frightened that she might give her friend away. The duchess ‘was disguised as a femme de chambre’, and instead of travelling in the waiting berline, stepped up in front with the coachman, like a servant.

After long discussions with his ministers, the king decided that the royal family would stay at Versailles. Madame Campan saw the queen tear up the papers ordering preparations for departure ‘with tears in her eyes’. She was in no doubt about the danger they faced. In the event of an attack on the palace, they might not even be able to count on the loyalty of the guard at Versailles to protect them. In a bold attempt to defuse the situation, Louis agreed to a request by the National Assembly to visit Paris. Marie-Antoinette begged him not to go. Locked in her rooms with her family, she sent for members of the court, only to find they had already fled. ‘Terror had driven them away,’ said Madame Campan; no one expected the king to return alive. ‘A deadly silence reigned throughout the palace.’

It was dark before the king returned. He had faced the crowd and was now wearing the red, white and blue cockade – soon to be the badge of the revolutionary – as he made his way back to his palace escorted by a citizens’ army. ‘Happily no blood has been shed,’ he told his family, ‘and I swear that never shall a drop of French blood be shed by my order.’

Only five days later Joseph Foulon, one of the ministers brought in to replace Necker, was recognised by the crowd and dragged to the Hôtel de Ville. ‘After tormenting him in a manner the particulars of which make humanity shudder,’ reported Campan, the people hanged him. ‘His body was dragged about the streets and his heart was carried – by women – in the midst of a bunch of white carnations!’ It had been rumoured that Foulon had said, ‘If the rogues haven’t any bread, they can have hay’. Now hay was stuffed in his mouth as his head was thrust on a pike and borne through the streets of Paris.

The terror in Paris ricocheted around the country in a wave of panic known as La Grande Peur. Angry mobs invaded the bastilles at Bordeaux and Caen; fighting broke out in the streets of Lyon, Rennes, Rouen and Saint Malo. With the harvest not yet in, the price of bread soared. Many feared that there was a plot to starve the people into submission. As the poor left their homes to scavenge for food it was widely believed that these vagrants were paid by the nobility to cause disruption and steal bread. Rumours were rife that the food shortages were exacerbated by the stockpiling of grain by the wealthy, including the royal family. As panic spread, peasants invaded the chateaux to exact bloody revenge on their masters.

At Versailles, the queen was increasingly concerned about the safety of her children. Following the departure of Gabrielle de Polignac, she chose as their governess the Marquise de Tourzel, a woman who combined ‘an illustrious ancestry with the most exemplary virtue’, according to the king. However, the marquise hesitated; she had children of her own and was under no illusion as to the ‘perils and responsibilities’ of the post. It was only the ‘spectacle of desertion’ by so many of their friends that persuaded her to accept.

On 24 July the queen wrote to the marquise with practical details of her new charges:

‘My son is two days short of being four years and four months old … His health has always been good, though even in his cradle we noticed that he was very nervous and upset by the slightest sudden noise … Because of delicate nerves he is always frightened by any noise to which he isn’t accustomed and for example, is afraid of dogs after hearing one bark near him.’

Despite these sensitivities, she portrays Louis-Charles as a good-natured child, ‘with no sense of conceit’ although he could, on occasion, be a little thoughtless. His greatest defect, wrote the queen, was his indiscretion: ‘he easily repeats what he has heard; and often without intending to lie, adds things according to his imagination. This is his greatest fault and must be corrected.’

‘My son has no idea of rank in his head and I would like that to continue: our children always find out soon enough who they are. He is very fond of his sister and has a good heart. Every time something makes him happy, a trip somewhere or a gift, his first impulse is to request the same for his sister. He was born cheerful; for his health he needs to be outside a great deal, and I think it is best for him to play and work on the terraces rather than have him go any further. The exercise taken by little children playing and running about in the open air is far healthier than making them go for long walks which often tire their backs.’

The queen instructed her new governess never to let him out of her sight. Finding the virtuous marquise stricter than her predecessor, it wasn’t long before the Dauphin dubbed her ‘Madame Sévère’.

During August 1789 the National Assembly moved quickly to destroy many of the pillars of the ancien régime, the previous or old order of France. On the night of the fourth, in a highly charged and emotional sitting, the nobles and clergy capitulated and agreed to relinquish all feudal privileges. All exemptions from taxation and a multitude of dues that peasants owed their landlords were abolished. It was the overthrow of feudalism. Over the next two weeks the National Assembly went further to try to establish equality throughout France in a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’. In this declaration, ‘all men [were] born free and equal’ and every citizen had the right to decide what taxes should be imposed. It also set out a definition for fundamental human rights: freedom of speech, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom of the press and religious liberty. The declaration was then given to the king at Versailles for his formal assent. He played for time and delayed approving the documents.

Feeling increasingly vulnerable at Versailles, in mid-September Louis summoned a thousand troops that he knew to be loyal from the northern frontier: the Flanders regiment. According to tradition, the king’s bodyguards held a celebratory dinner to welcome officers of the new regiment to Versailles. On 1 October a lavish banquet was prepared by the royal chef, and set up beneath the gold and blue canopies of the Opera House. ‘There were numerous orchestras in the room,’ says Madame Campan. ‘The rousing air, “O Richard! O mon roi” was played and shouts of “Vive le roi!” shook the roof for several minutes.’

The king and queen, who had not planned to attend, made an unexpected entrance with the Dauphin. Immediately the orchestra struck up. ‘People were intoxicated with joy,’ wrote Madame Campan. ‘On all sides were heard praises of Their Majesties, exclamations of affection, expressions of regret for what they had suffered, clapping of hands and shouts of “Vive le roi!” “Vive la reine!” “Vive le dauphin!”’ A highly charged atmosphere was created, with many tears and with officers dramatically saluting the king with their swords. At one point the young dauphin was lifted onto the horseshoe table at the centre of the stage. Rising to the occasion, he walked the length of the table, smiling at everyone as he carefully picked his way through the fine china and glassware. When the king and queen finally left, the theatre resounded with defiant shouts of ‘Down with the Assembly! Down with the Assembly!’ Yet there were spies everywhere and reports of the grand banquet spread like fire around Paris.

It was an incendiary piece of news: while people were almost starving in Paris, banquets were apparently being organised for counter-revolutionaries in Versailles. Reports became wildly exaggerated. The feast was no less than an orgy at which red, white and blue cockades were crushed underfoot, to gleeful shouts of ‘Down with the nation!’ Did not the queen personally distribute white rosettes to each person at the feast? That week in Paris bread was becoming increasingly scarce, with many bakeries completely out of supplies. By Sunday 4 October bread riots even led to one baker being hanged, accused of hoarding flour in the expectation of higher prices. Increasingly bitter charges were made against the queen. It was widely rumoured that she was planning the counter-revolution and had given instructions for the stockpiling of flour at Versailles, hoping to crush the people with famine. The queen became a lightning conductor for much of the fury and frustration in Paris.

Monday, 5 October. Church bells rang out around the Place de Grève by the Seine in Paris, traditionally the place used for executions and hangings. Women began to gather: the poissardes – or fishwives – and market women, servants and washerwomen converged on the square united by their desperate poverty and equally desperate need for bread, their anger and resolve strengthened by the sight of their own hungry children. Despite the rain, by early afternoon more than six thousand women had assembled, armed with anything they could find: pitchforks, scythes, kitchen knives, even skewers and sticks. Nothing could deter them; they had nothing to lose as they began to march the twelve miles to Versailles, with the now driving rain soaking their ill-clad bodies. Soon after they left, the National Guard of Paris, eager to support the women’s march, also began to assemble. By the late afternoon fifteen thousand National Guards set out for Versailles, reluctantly led by Lafayette.

Marie-Thérèse, the queen’s daughter, still only ten years old, later wrote vividly of ‘that too memorable day’, which for her marked the beginning of the ‘outrages and cruelties’ that her family was to endure. That morning everything was tranquil at the palace; she was having her lessons, her Aunt Elisabeth had ridden out to her property at Montreuil, her father was hunting, her mother was in her gardens at Trianon. Madame Elisabeth was the first to hear that Paris was on the march and rushed to Versailles, in great agitation, to warn the queen. Her father raced back at three in the afternoon. The wrought-iron gates of the chateau were swung tightly shut against the people.

Soon after this the army of women, soaked and splashed with mud, arrived at the gates, demanding bread and shouting violent abuse at l’Autrichienne. Marie-Thérèse was in no doubt of their intentions. ‘Their [principal] purpose was to murder my mother,’ she wrote, ‘also to massacre the bodyguards, the only ones who remained faithful to their king.’ Terror reigned at Versailles.

The captain of the guard asked the king for authority to disperse the crowd. Louis could not bring himself to fire against women and agreed to meet a delegation. Their spokesperson, a demure seventeen-year-old called Pierrette Chabry, in spite of fainting at the critical moment, managed to get across the need for bread. The king reassured her that he had given orders already for any grain held up on the roads around Paris to be delivered at once. Gratefully, she asked to kiss the king’s hand.

Outside the palace, the crowd were not so easily appeased and shots rang out. Marie-Antoinette begged Louis to flee Versailles with his family. The king delayed, tormented with indecision. ‘A fugitive king, a fugitive king,’ he said over and over again, unable to come to terms with such a momentous defeat. How could he be driven from his palace merely by a crowd of hungry women? He missed his moment. When he finally decided on flight, the crowd were prepared and would not allow him to depart. They mounted the carriages, cut the harnesses and led the horses away.

As dusk fell, the crowd camped around the palace; bonfires were lit, a horse was roasted. The arrival of the National Guard of Paris was ambiguous. Would they protect the king or further the interests of the crowd? At midnight, Lafayette was presented before the king and reassured him that the National Guard would stop the mob from attacking the palace. Comforted by this, finally, at two in the morning the royal family attempted to get some rest. ‘My mother knew that their chief object was to kill her,’ wrote her daughter. ‘Nevertheless in spite of that, she made no sign, but retired to her room with all possible coolness and courage … directing Madame de Tourzel to take her son instantly to the king if she had heard any noise in the night.’

However, at five in the morning, some women discovered that the gate to the Cour des Princes was not properly locked. There was a call to action. The crowd surged into the palace and entered the inner courtyard, the Cour de Marbre, by the royal quarters. Many rushed straight up the stairs leading to the queen’s apartments, yelling obscenities. A guard later reported that he heard: ‘we’ll cut off her head … tear her heart out … fry her liver … make her guts into ribbons and even then it would not be all over.’ One of the bodyguards tried to defend the stairway. He was stabbed with pikes and knives and dragged half alive into the courtyard where his head was chopped off with an axe. Inside the palace, according to Marie-Thérèse, another of the guards, ‘though grievously wounded, dragged [himself] to my mother’s door, crying out for her to fly and bolt the doors behind her’. Just at this point, the queen’s femme de chambre opened the door of the queen’s antechamber and was horrified to see this bodyguard holding a musket valiantly across the door as he was struck down by the mob. ‘His face was covered with blood,’ wrote Madame Campan. ‘He turned round and exclaimed: “Save the queen, Madame! They are come to assassinate her.” She hastily shut the door on the unfortunate victim of duty and fastened it with a great bolt.’ Seconds later, ‘the wretches flung themselves on him and left him bathed in blood’.

Hearing firing and shrieks outside her door, ‘my mother sprang from her bed, and half dressed, ran to my father’s apartment, but the door of it was locked within’, wrote Marie-Thérèse. Within moments the rioters had burst into the queen’s empty bedroom and cut her bedclothes to shreds with their sabres and knives, to cries of ‘Kill the bitch’ or ‘Kill the whore!’ Those protecting the king did not realise it was the queen herself – not rioters – at the door. For several terrifying minutes she was trapped, hammering on the door, unable to enter the king’s apartments. ‘Just at the moment that the wretches forced the door of my mother’s room, so that one instant later, she would have been taken without means of escape … the man on duty … recognised my mother’s voice and opened the door to her.’

In the frenzy of the night, the king was trying to reach the queen’s apartment to bring her to safety, Madame de Tourzel was trying to protect the Dauphin, while the queen went in a frantic search of Marie-Thérèse. Gradually, they all reunited in the Salon de l’Oeuil de Boeuf, where they could hear axes and bars thumping against the door as the guards tried to drive the rioters away with their bayonets. It was only when the guards had driven the rioters outside to the courtyard that Lafayette finally emerged with his men and managed to save the bodyguards.

Outside in the marble courtyard, the crowd demanded to see the king. He emerged onto the balcony; but this did not appease the crowd, who began to shout for the queen. Inside, Marie-Antoinette turned white, ‘all her fears were visible on her face’. Dazed and numbed by the attempt on her life, she hesitated. Everyone in the room urged her not to face the crowd. Outside, the yells echoed ever more insistently around the courtyard and rose in a great cry: ‘The queen to the balcony!’ Summoning extraordinary courage, she stepped out, her hair dishevelled, in a yellow-striped dressing gown, her children by her side. For Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Charles, looking through the familiar gilded balustrade on the sea of hostile faces staring at them, it was a terrifying glimpse of the full force of the hatred of the French people. ‘The courtyard of the chateau presented a horrible sight,’ recalled Marie-Thérèse. ‘A crowd of women, almost naked, and men armed with pikes, threatened our windows with dreadful cries.’

There were cries of ‘No children! No children!’ The queen ushered her children inside to safety. For a few minutes she faced out the murderous, armed crowds alone with incredible nerve. ‘She expected to perish,’ reported her daughter, but happily ‘her great courage awed the whole crowd of people, who confined themselves to loading her with insults, without daring to attack her person’. No one fired. After a while she simply curtsied and went back into the palace, gathered her son into her arms and wept.

However, their ordeal was not over. The menacing cry went up: ‘The king to Paris!’ The king felt he had no alternative but to agree, in order to avoid further bloodshed. He decided he must take his family with him as it was too dangerous to leave them behind. ‘I confide all that I hold most dear to the love of my good and faithful subjects,’ he told the vengeful mob in the courtyard.

By one o’clock in the afternoon everything was ready for the departure of the royal family. ‘They wished to prevent my father from crossing the great guard rooms that were inundated with blood,’ reported Marie-Thérèse; ‘we therefore went down by a small staircase … and got into a carriage for six persons; on the back seat were my father, mother and brother; on the front seat … my Aunt Elisabeth and I, in the middle my uncle Monsieur and Madame de Tourzel … the crowd was so great it was long before we could advance.’

It was the most extraordinary and grotesque procession. News had spread that the royal family was forced out of Versailles and thirty thousand, at least, had gathered to escort the king to Paris. The scene was terrifying: a great, swirling mass of humanity, most intent on harm, some so drunk with hatred that any form of violent disturbance could erupt within seconds. Leading the ‘horrible masquerade’ – in the words of one courtier – was the National Guard, with Lafayette always in view near the royal coach. The poissardes, market women and other rioters followed like so many furies, brandishing sticks and spikes, some topped with the heads of the king’s murdered guardsmen. These gruesome trophies were paraded with devilish excitement as they danced around the royal coach, all too conscious that power was indeed an intoxicating mixture as they endlessly threatened obscene and imminent death to the queen. Many had loaves of bread from the kitchens of Versailles stuck on their bayonets and were chanting, ‘We won’t go short of bread any more. We are bringing back the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy’. Behind were the household troops and Flanders regiment, unarmed – many obliged to wear the revolutionary cockade. They were followed by innumerable carriages bearing the remnants of the royal court and deputies from the new National Assembly. Count Axel Fersen, who was in one of the carriages following the king, wrote of their six-and-a-half-hour journey to Paris: ‘May God preserve me from ever seeing again so heart-breaking a spectacle as that of the last few days.’

For the royal family, forced to take part in this terrifying and until then almost unimaginable procession, it was a definitive end of an era. In the distance behind them, glimpsed only through a forest of pikes and a sea of hostile faces, the palace of Versailles, which for more than a century had epitomised the Bourbons’ absolute power, slowly retreated from view, quietness descending, the only sound the hammers of workmen fastening the shutters. Now the king, impassive and silent, was a consenting victim to the barbarity of the mob, as he allowed his family to be led in humiliation to Paris. Inside the coach, he held a handkerchief to his face to hide his shame and tears. Next to him was the queen, clutching her four-year-old son tightly, her expression bearing ‘the marks of violent grief’. She tried to ignore the poissardes who climbed onto the carriage, yelling still more insults and abuse at her. ‘Along the whole way, the brigands never ceased firing their muskets … and shouted “Vive la nation!”’ wrote Marie-Thérèse. Occasionally the young Dauphin – terrified as this horrific grown-up world suddenly burst in on his orderly life with such force – bravely leaned out of the window and pleaded with the crowds not to harm his mother. ‘Grâce pour Maman! Grâce pour Maman!’ he cried. ‘Spare my mother, spare my mother …’.

3 THE TUILERIES

The Tuileries Palace, a large jail filled with the condemned, stood amid the celebration of destruction. Those sentenced also amused themselves as they waited for the cart, the clipping, and the red shirt they had put out to dry. And through the windows, the queen’s circle could be seen, stunningly illuminated.

Châteaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (1849–50)

The royal family were taken to the Tuileries, a sixteenth-century palace in the heart of Paris by the Seine. For over sixty years it had been abandoned as a royal residence and servants and artisans had settled into the rabbit warren of dark chambers and seemingly endless, dimly lit galleries and stairways. The place was crowded and in disrepair. Rooms were hurriedly prepared for the royal family, but it was soon found that the doors to the Dauphin’s room would not close and had to be barricaded with furniture. ‘Isn’t it ugly here, Maman,’ said Louis-Charles. Marie-Antoinette replied, ‘Louis XIV was happy here. You should not ask for more.’ Yet he was clearly anxious. The young child who had lived surrounded by richness and elegance, with never a cross word, found, in the space of a few days, his world had become an unrecognisable, frightening chaos. The queen asked the Marquise de Tourzel to watch over him all night.

Woken by the clamour of the crowd outside their windows in the gardens of the Tuileries, Louis-Charles was still terrified. ‘Good God, Maman! Is it still yesterday?’ he cried as he threw himself in her arms. Struggling to understand their change in fortunes, later he went up to his father and asked why his people, who once loved him so well, were ‘all at once so angry with him and what had he done to irritate them so much?’ The king took his young son on his lap. ‘I wanted money to pay the expenses occasioned by wars,’ he replied. He carefully tried to explain how he had tried, unsuccessfully, to raise money through the parlement and then through the Estates-General. ‘When they were assembled they required concessions of me which I could not make, either with due respect for myself or with justice to you, who will be my successor. Wicked men, inducing the people to rise, have occasioned the excesses of the last few days; the people must not be blamed for them.’

The king and queen were forced to face the fact that they were now detained in Paris indefinitely – at the people’s pleasure. They no longer had their own bodyguards; the Tuileries was surrounded by the National Guard, who answered to the Assembly. With six armed guards constantly tailing them and their movements closely monitored, the queen quickly made the young prince understand the importance of treating everyone about him politely and ‘with affability’ – even those that they distrusted. The Dauphin ‘took great pains’ to please any visitors. When he had an opportunity to speak to any important dignitaries, he often looked for reassurance from his mother, whispering in her ear, ‘Was that all right?’ With his customary charm, he soon made friends with the sons of National Guards, and established his own pretend ‘Royal Dauphin Regiment’ with himself as colonel. People flocked to see him when he was allowed outside where he kept his own pet rabbits and tended a small garden.

Marie-Antoinette struggled to keep up a semblance of normality, and various possessions claimed from Versailles helped as she set about making the Tuileries as comfortable as possible. She drew strength from devoting herself to her children. ‘They are nearly always with me and are my consolation,’ she wrote to Gabrielle de Polignac, who was now safely out of the country. ‘Mon chou d’amour [the Dauphin] is charming and I love him madly. He loves me very much too, in his way, without embarrassment. He is well, growing stronger and has no more temper tantrums. He goes for a walk every day which is extremely good for him.’ The queen still had a few of her friends around her, such as the loyal Princesse de Lamballe, who invariably accompanied her when she had to receive deputations of poissardes and others, who had come for a hundred reasons, but mostly to air their grievances. Count Axel Fersen also remained discreetly in Paris, in case he could be of any use to the queen.

The king desperately allowed himself to hope that all these arrangements would be temporary, and that he would eventually be restored to Versailles with full power. But power lay in the Assembly, renamed the ‘Constituent Assembly’, and, gallingly, now installed in the building opposite the Tuileries and flying the new flag which bore the words: ‘Freedom. Nation. Law. King.’ Although Louis was still king, his authority to pass laws had been effectively taken over by the Assembly. In principle, he retained a delaying veto, yet in the intimidating atmosphere of his confinement in the Tuileries, he was fearful of using even this remaining influence.

For several months the king could not face the meetings of the Assembly, and took refuge in family life, spending more time with his children. While the deputies debated the future of France, he had a smithy installed in the Tuileries, and worked at making locks there, alone. For Louis, in his virtual prison, terrible despair and fragile hope had become the bread and butter of his daily life as he sank into helpless depression. ‘The late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable,’ commented the English writer Edmund Burke. Burke was struck by ‘the portentous state of France – where elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it’. Stripped of the glory of Versailles and the powers of an Absolute Monarch, the king seemed a spent political force.

Royal authority was also undermined by the continuous outpouring of vicious slander, especially against the queen. Absurdly, even while under the close scrutiny of the National Guard at the Tuileries, she was accused of every conceivable sexual obsession and debauchery: with the guards themselves, courtiers, actors, there was no limit to her superhuman appetite. In an updated version of Madame de La Motte’s Memoirs published in 1789, her passion for women was also set out in explicit detail: ‘her lips, her kisses followed her greedy glances over my quivering body’, claimed La Motte. ‘What a welcome substitute I made, she laughed, for the lumpish, repulsive body of the “Prime Minister”’ – her mocking name for the king. The image of her as an insatiable, tyrannical queen was invariably linked to her bloodthirsty lust for revenge on the French people for the uprising: ‘Her callous eyes, treacherous and inflamed, radiate sheer fire and carnage to gratify her craving for unjust revenge … her stinking mouth harbours a cruel tongue, eternally thirsty for French blood.’ Letters were ‘found’, allegedly written by her and intercepted by spies. ‘Everything goes well, we shall end by starving them,’ she was quoted as having written to Artois, one of her accomplices. The extremists in the Assembly knew that this skilfully orchestrated propaganda against the queen greatly advanced their political aims to slay royal power. She became the focal point, the hate object of all who were opposed to the monarchy.

As the moderates were forced out of the Assembly and radicals gained the upper hand, royal power continued to decline. Some extremists wished to abolish the monarchy altogether; others to limit its powers still further. It wasn’t long before the king found that his religious beliefs were to come under attack and, for Louis, this was the final straw. The Assembly increasingly saw the clergy as a pillar of a now discredited ancien régime, loyal to the king. Fearing it was a threat to the survival of the revolution, they searched for a way to reduce its powers. They still had to deal with the problem of the national debt and staving off bankruptcy and realised this problem could be tackled at a stroke. In November 1789 they simply nationalised all the church land, valued at a colossal three thousand million livres. The Assembly then moved swiftly to introduce the ‘civil constitution’ in which the state took responsibility for the administration of the clergy. By November 1790 it was decreed that every priest in the land had to swear an oath of loyalty to the state.

As a devout Roman Catholic, Louis’ instincts were to oppose this latest dictate from the Assembly. Yet fearful of where this might lead, finally that Christmas he felt coerced into signing the decree. This prompted the pope, Pius VI, to intervene, opposing the revolution. Any priest who took the oath was suspended, decreed the pope, unless he retracted the oath within forty days. Once more the Paris mobs took to the streets; an effigy of the pope was burned and the king was denounced for ‘treason’ for having received communion from a priest who had not sworn the oath. Louis came close to nervous collapse in the spring of 1791 and his doctors advised him to take a rest away from Paris. With the approval of the Assembly, the king resolved to take his family to Saint Cloud.

On 18 April 1791 at one o’clock, the king, queen, Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Charles and their entourage were in their berline in the courtyard of the Tuileries, ready to depart. However, a large, menacing crowd had gathered at the gates and blocked their path. Far from protecting the royal family, the National Guard refused to disperse the rioters. ‘They mutinied, shut the gates, and declared they would not let the king pass,’ recorded Madame Campan. Hearing of the emergency, Lafayette hurried to the Tuileries and ordered the guards to allow the king’s carriage to depart. It was impossible. The rioters became angry and abusive. The Marquise de Tourzel, who was in the carriage, wrote of the ‘horrible scene’ as she observed the king himself trying to appeal to the people. ‘It is astonishing that, having given liberty to the nation, I should not be free myself,’ he pleaded. It was no use. The crisis lasted two hours. Some of the king’s attendants were dragged away; one was violently assaulted. At this point, the Dauphin became frightened. He rushed to the window and cried out, ‘Save him! Save him!’ The royal family were obliged to admit defeat and go back inside the Tuileries, the king deeply depressed. There was no escaping the fact that had been evident for months: they were prisoners.

The king felt his position becoming untenable. Politically, he had been systematically stripped of his powers, sidelined and humiliated. The events of that ‘cruel day’ had provided unnerving evidence that the National Guard could not be trusted to enforce the law and defend the royal family against a hostile mob. Up until this point, despite pressure from his wife and others, the king had been unwilling to reconcile himself to the idea of fleeing from his own people. Now, at last, the urgent need for escape began to take shape in his mind.

Six hundred National Guards, increasingly more loyal to the nation than to the king, were now patrolling the Tuileries and spies were everywhere. However, the king and queen could count on one very loyal and capable ally: Count Axel Fersen. Determined to rescue the queen from her impossible position, he told his father, ‘I should be vile and ungrateful if I deserted them now that they can do nothing for me and I have hope of being useful to them’.

Axel Fersen advised the king and queen to escape separately, in light, fast carriages, but they insisted on travelling together with the children, in a more capacious, but much slower, berline. They aimed to reach Montmédy, a border town almost two hundred miles to the east by the Austrian Netherlands. Here, protected by a garrison led by his faithful general, Marquis Louis de Bouillé, the king hoped to unite his supporters and challenge the right of the Assembly to usurp his authority.

Fersen coordinated arrangements for their escape. Fresh horses were needed at staging posts every fifteen miles from Paris. For the last eighty miles, once they had passed Châlons in the Champagne region, troops would be waiting at various points from the Pont de Somme-Vesle to escort them to the border. Throughout the spring meticulous arrangements were in progress. At the palace, secret doors were constructed to assist the escape. Disguises and passports were obtained for the royal family. The Marquise de Tourzel would pose as a wealthy Russian woman, ‘Baronne de Korff’, travelling with her two ‘daughters’, Marie-Thérèse as Amélie and Louis-Charles as Aglae. The king would be dressed simply as her valet and the queen, in black coat and hat, was to be the children’s governess.

On the planned day of departure, 20 June 1791, the king and queen tried to keep a semblance of normality but their anxiety did not pass unnoticed. Marie-Thérèse was only too aware that her mother and father ‘seemed greatly agitated during the whole day’, although she had no idea why. Her anxiety only increased when in the afternoon her mother found an opportunity to take her aside and whisper that she ‘was not to be uneasy at anything that I might see’, and that ‘we might be separated, but not for long … I was dumbfounded’.

‘I was hardly in bed before my mother came in; she told me we were to leave at once,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse. Marie-Antoinette had already woken the Dauphin. Although more asleep than awake, Louis-Charles was annoyed to find himself being dressed as a girl. His daytime games were all of soldier heroes and now he thought he was about to command a regiment, shouting for his boots and sword. At half past ten Marie-Antoinette escorted them downstairs and out through an empty apartment to a courtyard where Fersen was waiting, dressed as a coachman and even smoking tobacco.

The Dauphin, in his plain linen dress and bonnet, hid at the bottom of the carriage under Madame de Tourzel’s gown. To attract less attention, the carriage made several turns around the nearby streets before waiting near the Tuileries for the king and queen. ‘We saw Monsieur de la Fayette pass close by us, going to the king’s coucher,’ recalled Marie-Thérèse. ‘We waited there a full hour in the greatest impatience and uneasiness at my parents’ long delay.’ Eventually, to her alarm, ‘I saw a woman approach and walk around our carriage. It made me fear we were discovered’. However, it was her Aunt Elisabeth, disguised as a nurse to Baronne de Korff. ‘On entering the carriage she trod upon my brother, who was hidden at the bottom of it; he had the courage not to utter a cry.’

At last the king was able to make his escape through a secret passage to Marie-Antoinette’s room and then down the staircase, straight past the guards, and out of the main palace entrance. For over two weeks before this, a friend, the Chevalier de Coigny, had visited the Tuileries each evening in similar clothes to those planned for the king’s escape. The guards, seeing the same corpulent figure in a brown and green suit, grey wig and hat, assumed this was the Chevalier de Coigny once more, and let him pass. With uncharacteristic cool, Louis even stopped in full view of the guards to tie up one of his shoe buckles. He had left a declaration behind in his rooms at the Tuileries, revealing why he had felt compelled to leave Paris. He argued that the country had deteriorated while he had not been in control; the deficit was ten times bigger, religion was no longer free, and lawlessness was commonplace. He called upon all Frenchmen to support him and a constitution that guaranteed ‘respect for our holy religion’.

Everyone in the escape carriage was waiting for Marie-Antoinette. Just as she ventured out of the palace, another carriage passed right in front of her. It was Lafayette and some guards on their nightly security round. She stepped back quickly, pressing herself against a wall. They had not seen her, but she was so shaken that she mistook her route through the palace and was soon lost in a warren of narrow dark passages. For almost half an hour she frantically tried to get her bearings while at the same time avoiding the armed guards patrolling the corridors.

Meanwhile, Lafayette approached the carriage again, as he left the palace. To their relief, he did not stop to check the passengers; it was not uncommon to see carriages waiting in the Petit Carrousel. When the queen finally made her escape, the king was so delighted, wrote Madame de Tourzel, that he ‘took her in his arms and kissed her’. Fersen urged the horses on cautiously and the carriage moved forward, slipping out of the Tuileries unnoticed.

At last they made their way through Paris, and once through the customs post discarded their ‘escape’ coach for the especially built berline. Unfortunately, at the next change of horses Fersen had to leave the party. The king feared that if their escape were discovered, it would make their position untenable if a foreigner had escorted the royal party to the border. With the cool and capable Fersen now gone, they were much more vulnerable. The three bodyguards riding on top were junior officers, more used to receiving orders than giving them, and leading the expedition was the king, a man not noted for his decisive action. The berline, smartly painted in green, black and lemon and drawn by six horses, with its lavishly appointed interior, ‘a little house on wheels’, was the sort of vehicle that would draw attention to itself as it trundled through the countryside.

Everything went as planned. Six fast horses were waiting at every staging post and by early morning, with Paris now several hours behind him, Louis smiled to think of his valet at the Tuileries, entering his bedroom and raising the alarm. ‘Once we have passed Châlons there will be nothing to fear,’ he told Marie-Antoinette with great confidence in his waiting troops. However, the berline was three hours behind schedule. Apart from the delay in leaving the palace, some of the relays had taken a little longer than they had planned. Worse still, while crossing a narrow bridge at Chaintrix, the horses fell and the straps enabling the carriage to be drawn were broken. They had to improvise a repair but more precious minutes were lost. None the less, they passed Châlons successfully at around five in the afternoon. Their armed escort should be waiting for them at the next stop: Pont de Somme-Vesle.

As they approached the town, their eyes discreetly scanning the horizon from behind the green taffeta blinds, there were no soldiers in sight. The village was silent. The king did not dare knock on the doors to find out if the troops had been waiting there. He sensed something had gone terribly wrong. Had the escape plan been discovered? Were their lives now at risk? ‘I felt as though the whole earth had fallen from under me,’ he wrote later.

The soldiers had, in fact, arrived in Pont de Somme-Vesle early in the afternoon under the leadership of the Duc de Choiseul. As they waited in the village for the king, the local people became alarmed at the sight of so many armed men. Since the peasants assumed that the soldiers were there to enforce the collection of overdue rent, a huge crowd gathered, armed with pitchforks and muskets, preparing to fight if necessary.

When the king had still not arrived by late afternoon, Choiseul had panicked. He feared that the king’s escape had been foiled somewhere on the road and that the armed peasants would attack his men. Rashly, not only did he give orders that his own men must disperse but also passed these instructions to the other staging posts down the line. ‘There is no sign that the treasure will pass today,’ he wrote. ‘You will receive new instructions tomorrow.’ Barely half an hour after Choiseul’s departure, the king’s berline drove into the village.

Without its armed escort, the carriage wound its way for a further two hours along the country road to the next town, Sainte-Ménehould, the anxious passengers inside still daring to hope that all was not lost. When they arrived, once again, there was still no evidence of any dragoons. At last, Captain d’Andouins, who had been in command of the soldiers in this village, approached the berline. The captain told the king briefly that the plan had gone awry but he would reassemble his troops and catch up with the king. Unfortunately, as he moved away, he saluted the king.

The vigilant postmaster of the village, one Jean-Baptiste Drouet, noticed that the captain saluted the person in the carriage. Even more surprising, as the carriage departed, he thought he recognised the king leaning back inside. Drouet sounded the alarm. A roll call of drums summoned the town’s own National Guard, who stopped the king’s soldiers leaving the village.

By this time, on the streets of Paris there was commotion as news of the daring escape spread. ‘The enemies of the revolution have seized the person of the king,’ Lafayette announced, and gave orders that the king must be found and returned at once to the capital. A dozen riders were found to spread this message quickly throughout France. Meanwhile, at Sainte-Ménehould, Drouet had obtained permission from the local authorities to set off at speed and detain the berline.

In the lumbering berline, the royal family continued their way ‘in great agitation and anxiety’. By eleven o’clock that night they were approaching Varennes, just thirty miles from the border and safety. Unknown to the royal party, their driver had been overheard giving instructions to take the minor road to Varennes and this had been passed on to Drouet. With the pursuit closing in on them, they stopped, as arranged, in the upper part of Varennes for their fresh horses. These were nowhere to be seen and the postilions – responsible for the horses – refused to take the tired horses any further. A dispute began between the postilions and the drivers of the coach. In desperation, the king, queen and Madame Elisabeth stepped out, frantically searching in the pitch black for the new horses themselves. These were in fact in the lower part of the town, beyond the River Aire, being held by officers who had no idea the king was so near. Just at this point, Drouet came racing past the carriage, and went straight to find the mayor of Varennes to alert him to the royal fugitives in his village.

The king finally persuaded the drivers that the horses must be in the lower part of the village and the berline set off down the steep slope. Suddenly there was a jolt. ‘We were shocked by the dreadful cries around the carriage, “Stop! Stop!” Then the horses’ heads were seized and in a moment the carriage was surrounded by a number of armed men with torches,’ recalled Marie-Thérese. ‘They put the torches close to my father’s face, and told us to get out.’ When the royal party refused, ‘they repeated loudly that we must get out or they would kill us all, and we saw their guns pointed at the carriage. We were therefore forced to get out’.

As alarm bells resounded round the village, the royal party was led to the mayor’s house, up a narrow, spiral stairway to a small bedroom where they were detained. ‘My father kept himself in the farthest corner of the room, but unfortunately his portrait was there, and the people gazed at him and the picture alternately,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse. They evidently did not believe Madame de Tourzel, who ‘complained loudly of the injustice of our stoppage, saying that she was travelling quietly with her family under a government passport, and that the king was not with us’. As the accusations became increasingly confident and acrimonious, the king was obliged to admit the truth. During the night, as the news spread through the region, hundreds of armed National Guards began to arrive, some with cannon, making escape increasingly impossible. Eventually, at around five in the morning, two agents of Monsieur de Lafayette arrived. They presented the king with a decree from the Assembly ordering his return to Paris.

‘There is no longer a king in France!’ Louis declared as he heard the decree, in effect demanding his arrest. Marie-Antoinette was less accepting. ‘Insolence!’ she declared. ‘What audacity, what cruelty,’ and she threw the document on the floor. She was overcome by rage and despair, by the bungling and lack of decisiveness, as events had slowly shaped themselves into disaster. When the agents of Lafayette put pressure on the king, saying Paris was in uproar over his departure, women and children might be killed, Marie-Antoinette replied, ‘Am I not a mother also?’ Her anxiety for her two children was her paramount concern.

The royal family tried to play for time. Surely General de Bouillé would send a detachment to rescue them? As the king’s young daughter points out, they could so easily have been carried off to the frontier ‘if anyone had been there who had any head’. However, by daybreak all they could hear was the sound of some six thousand people gathering outside, jeering and demanding that the king turn back. At last, at seven in the morning, ‘seeing there was no remedy or help to be looked for’, wrote Marie-Thérèse, ‘we were absolutely forced to take the road back to Paris’.

It took almost four terrifying days in the stifling heat to make the dismal and humiliating return journey under heavy guard. The crowds lining the roads back to Paris were aggressive and threatening; their mood was unpredictable. The people wanted to see the king, so the windows were open, the blinds drawn back; they were ‘baked by the sun and suffocated by the dust’. ‘One cannot imagine the suffering of the royal family on this luckless journey,’ wrote Madame de Tourzel. ‘Nothing was spared them!’ On top of their carriage were three of their bodyguards, handcuffed in fetters and in danger of being dragged down and killed.

For the king it was a terrible defeat. Yet again, he had failed. He had failed as a king, and brought his country to revolution. He had failed as a husband to protect his wife: she was now subject to even worse unknown terrors. He had failed as a father to bring his precious children to safety. Travelling with his loyal wife, his devoted sister and his young children, he knew that any words of assurance to them were empty promises; events had moved beyond his control. And somehow the failures had piled up despite his best efforts. He had always tried to avoid bloodshed; he couldn’t bear anyone to be hurt on his behalf. Yet his very gentleness and compassion had led inexorably to this utterly terrifying point in their lives. ‘I am aware that to succeed was in my hands,’ he wrote later to General de Bouillé. ‘But it is needful to have a ruthless spirit if one is to shed the blood of subjects … the very thought of such contingencies tore my heart and robbed me of all determination.’

During the mid-afternoon, a local nobleman, the loyal Comte de Dampierre, rode up to salute the king, ‘in despair at the king’s being stopped’. The crowd were enraged at Dampierre’s royalist gesture and tried to pull him off his horse. According to Marie-Thérèse, ‘hardly had he spurred his horse, before the people who surrounded the carriage fired at him. He was flung to the ground … a man on horseback rode over him and struck him several blows with his sabre; others did the same and soon killed him.’ The scene was horrible, wrote Marie-Thérèse, ‘but more dreadful still was the fury of these wretches, who not content with having killed him, wanted to drag his body to our carriage and show it to my father’. Despite his entreaties, ‘these cannibals came on triumphantly round the carriage holding up the hat, coat and clothing of the unfortunate Dampierre … and they carried these horrible trophies beside us along the road’.

Worse was to come at Épernay, the following day. At one point the royal family were obliged to abandon their carriage to enter a hotel, struggling through a crowd of angry people armed with pikes ‘who said openly that they wished to kill us’, wrote Marie-Thérèse, shocked by their bloodcurdling threats. ‘Of all the awful moments I have known, this was one of those that struck me most and the horrible impression of it will never leave me … My brother was ill all night and almost had delirium so shocked was he by the dreadful things he had seen.’

Ahead, a hostile reception was waiting for them in Paris. Following orders from Lafayette, the people lining the streets kept their heads covered and remained absolutely silent, to show their contempt for this monarch who had tried to flee. Lafayette’s orders were so strictly observed that ‘several scullery boys without hats, covered their heads with their dirty, filthy handkerchiefs’, recorded Madame de Tourzel. As they made their way down the Champs-Elysées and across the Place Louis XV, it was like an unspoken, public decoronation, as the citizens of Paris refused to acknowledge the royal status of their king and queen.

The crowds were so great it was evening before they finally reached the Tuileries. As they stepped down from the carriage someone tried to attack the queen. The Dauphin was snatched from her and whisked to safety by officials as others helped the queen into the palace. Louis-Charles was becoming increasingly terrified at the violence targeted directly at the royal family. ‘As soon as we arrived in Varennes we were sent back. Do you know why?’ he asked his valet, François Huë, as he struggled to make sense of it all. He was not easily comforted and that night, once again, he was woken with violent nightmares of being eaten alive by wolves.

As the Dauphin fell into a fitful sleep, ‘guards were placed over the whole family, with orders not to let them out of sight and to stay night and day in their chambers’. The next day the Assembly provisionally suspended Louis from his royal functions. The once untouchable king and queen were now finally reduced to the powerless symbols of a vanishing world.

The king’s support collapsed after his abortive flight to Varennes. Those who had remained loyal to the monarchy now questioned the motives of a king who had tried to flee, exposing his people to the risk of civil war. Those who had opposed the monarchy had a concrete weapon: here was evidence that the king would betray his people. Imprisoned in the Tuileries, with little support in the Assembly or outside it, in September 1791 the king reluctantly signed the new constitution. The once supreme Bourbon ruler was now, by law, no more than a figurehead, stripped of his powers.

Louis still clung to the hope that this would mark an end to the revolution and that France would settle down as a constitutional monarchy. Yet when he inaugurated the new ‘Legislative Assembly’ in October, demands for still further change gathered momentum. Conflicts grew between the moderates and the extremists in the Assembly. The key battlegrounds were over the growing number of émigrés and the clergy. What measures should be taken to protect France from the émigrés who might be plotting counter-revolution? How could the clergy who had refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the constitution be brought into line?

The king found himself facing a crisis in November, when the Assembly introduced a punitive decree: any priest who had not signed the oath would lose his pension and could be driven from his parish. This was presented to the king for his approval under the new constitution. As crowds gathered menacingly outside the Tuileries demanding that he sign, Louis wrestled with his conscience. His only remaining power was a delaying veto. If he used this he would infuriate the Assembly and the Parisian people, but how could he approve such a measure when the constitution promised ‘freedom to every man … to practise the religion of his choice’? The king vetoed the decree.

The news outraged deputies at the Assembly. The extremists, largely drawn from a political club known as the Jacobins, sought to limit the king’s power still further. Maximilien Robespierre was not a member of the Legislative Assembly, but was highly influential in the Jacobin Club and could exploit its powerful network throughout the country to influence opinion. Although he was not a good speaker, his supporters considered him eloquent and he was a skilled strategist, whose passionate appeals for patrie and virtu stirred political activists. ‘I will defend first and foremost the poor,’ he declared, as he campaigned against the privileges of the nobility and the monarchy. He found support in other prominent republicans such as the barrister Georges Danton, leader of the extremist Cordeliers Club.

Those opposed to the monarchy could turn to militant journalists such as Camille Desmoulins and Jacques-René Hébert to whip up public opinion in their favour. Hébert was a zealot for the cause, and with killing cruelty, week after week in his journal, Le Père Duchesne, he stirred up loathing of the royal tyrants. They were dehumanised and turned into hate objects. The king, for so long the ‘royal cuckold’ or ‘fat pig’, was now ‘the Royal Veto’: an animal ‘about five feet, five inches long … as timid as a mouse and as stupid as an ostrich … who eats, or rather, sloppily devours, anything one throws at him’. Whereas the ‘Female Royal Veto’ was ‘a monster found in Vienna … lanky, hideous, frightful … who eats France’s money in the hope of one day devouring the French, one by one’. Marie-Thérèse was ‘designed like the spiders of the French Cape, to suck the blood of slaves’. As for ‘the Delphinus … whose son is he?’ The endless stream of vituperation soaked into the consciousness of Parisians. It became easy to see the royal family as the terrible Machiavellian enemy gorged from preying on innocent French people.

The queen, drawing on all the strength of her character, was indeed now playing a formidable, duplicitous role. Determined to save the throne, that autumn she charmed the moderates in the Assembly with her apparent support for the constitution, while she was in fact in secret correspondence with foreign courts and her devoted Fersen. Count Fersen had escaped to Brussels where he joined the king’s brother, Provence, and was devastated to hear of the royal family’s recapture at Varennes. ‘Put your mind at rest; we are alive … I exist,’ the queen reassured him as she adapted to life closely surrounded by spies and enemies; even when she went to see her own son, an army of guards would follow her. Her only hope, she said, ‘is that my son at least can be happy … When I am very sad, I take my little boy in my arms, I kiss him with all my heart and this consoles me for a time’.

While Marie-Antoinette was writing in code to her brother, the Emperor Leopold, asking him to support the French monarchy, Fersen went on a desperate diplomatic tour of European capitals. In February 1792 he risked his life in a daring mission to return to France in disguise to see the queen in the Tuileries. Despite their efforts, in March the Austrian Emperor Leopold II died suddenly, to be replaced by Marie-Antoinette’s nephew, Francis II. Marie-Antoinette could not be sure that the Emperor Francis would intervene on her behalf and feared betrayal.

By spring 1792 the new powers in France were growing increasingly militaristic, convinced that neighbouring countries would be forced to act against their own populations’ possible political awakening. Rumours were rife of an immediate attack against France by an alliance of Austrians and Prussians, supported by émigré forces. Soon there were calls upon all patriots to defend their country as the warmongering verged on hysteria. In April, France declared war on Austria. Marie-Antoinette’s position became intolerable. Many people were convinced that l’Autrichienne who wished to ‘bathe in the blood of French people’ was an enemy agent, betraying the nation. When the French offensive in the Netherlands went badly, fears mounted that the Austrians and Prussians would march on Paris and restore the ‘royal tyrants’.

Despite the pressures of war the Assembly continued to persecute the clergy. Any priest still loyal to Rome denounced by more than twenty citizens was to be deported to the French colony of Guiana, a fate which was certain death, since leprosy and malaria were endemic in the colony. This decree was sent to the king for his approval. After much heart searching and anguish, he again used his veto and refused to sign this decree.

The very next day, 20 June 1792, thousands of citizens, angered by the king’s use of his veto, gathered around the palace. ‘This armed procession began to file before our windows, and no idea can be formed of the insults they said to us,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse. ‘On their banners was written “Tremble Tyrant; the people have risen”, and we could also hear cries of “Down with the Veto!” And other horrors!’ Thirteen-year-old Marie-Thérèse witnessed what happened next. ‘Suddenly we saw the populace forcing the gates of the courtyard and rushing to the staircase of the château. It was a horrible sight to see and impossible to describe – that of these people with fury in their faces, armed with pikes and sabres, and pell-mell with them women half unclothed, resembling Furies.’ In all the turmoil, Marie-Antoinette tried to follow the king but was prevented. ‘Save my son!’ she cried out. Immediately someone carried Louis-Charles away and she was unable to follow. ‘Her courage almost deserted her, when at last, entering my brother’s room she could not find him,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse.

Meanwhile, the crowd surged upstairs armed with muskets, sabres and pikes. Madame de Tourzel describes the ordeal. ‘The king, seeing that the doors were going to be forced open, wanted to go out to meet the factionists and try to control them with his presence.’ There was no time. The doors to the king’s rooms were axed down in seconds and the crowd burst in, shouting ‘The Austrian, where is she? Her head! Her head!’ Elisabeth stood valiantly by her brother, and Madame de Tourzel describes her great bravery as she was mistaken for the queen. ‘She said to those around her, these sublime words: “Don’t disillusion them. If they take me for the queen, there may be time to save her.”’

The revolutionaries turned on the king and demanded that he sign the decrees of the Assembly. For over two hours, Louis tried to reason with them. He pointed out that he had acted in accordance with the constitution and that in all conscience he believed his actions were right. At the insistence of the crowd, to prove his loyalty to the revolution, he wore a bonnet rouge, the symbol of liberty, and toasted the health of the nation. After some hours, it became clear that the king would not yield.

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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