CONTENTS.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE
FRENCH MONARCHY

ERRATA.

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

THE LAST DAYS OF THE
FRENCH MONARCHY

BY
HILAIRE BELLOC

Author of “Robespierre,” “Marie
Antoinette,” etc.


WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PAINTINGS AND PRINTS


LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL LTD.
1916



TO
JAMES MURRAY ALLISON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PART ONE

THE ROYAL SEANCE

THE LAST DAYS OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY

PART ONE

THE ROYAL SEANCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If one had looked from the windows of the palace of Versailles upon that morning, still gray and rainy, still cold in weather, out toward the scene where so much was to be done, one would have caught beyond the great paved, semi-circular place, beyond the gilded, high railings of the courtyard, in the central one of the three diverging avenues (the broad road leading to Paris) the roof of a great barn-like building, a long parallelogram of stone and brick, with an oval skylight atop. There was but little to hide it, for the ground about was only beginning to be built over; young trees, just planted, marked each side of the road upon which one end of this building abutted. Within this hall, ungainly, and oddly apparent above the lower roofs about it and the unfinished lower buildings of the quarter, was to be acted a drama which deflected and, as some believe, destroyed the immemorial institution of personal government in Europe, and launched those experiments by which the French people in arms proposed to change the face of Christendom.

Under the rain and in the cold air of that morning there was not much movement in Versailles. The great desert of hard paving-stones before the gilded railings of the palace yard was almost empty save of troops, and these, not yet arrived in very great numbers, seemed to be doing the work of a police rather than of an army. They were drawn up in lines that cut the Paris road and its approaches guarding on all sides this hall of the Commons. The side streets which led past the back doors of that hall, the Street of St. Martin and the Street of the Works, had each their cordon of men. Small groups of soldiery, not patrolling, but watching, were distributed here and there.

The eye caught in the glistening, empty spaces of that wet, gray morning the red of the Swiss Guard and the blue and white of the militia. Beyond these uniforms there was little else; no crowd was yet gathered. Nor was there as yet any parade or any standing to arms.

The ear could no more judge Versailles that morning than the eye. The rain was too soft for any noise, the early life of the town too dulled under such weather to send up any echo from the streets. But there could still be distinguished from that quarter of a mile away the occasional sound of hammering where the workmen within the hall were finishing the last of its decorations for the ceremony that was to take place that day. It was a little before nine o’clock in the morning.

That large hall had its main entrance upon the new wide, bare Avenue de Paris, with its sprigs of trees. Years before it had been built to house the rackets and the tennis nets, perhaps the scenery of plays—all the material of the lesser pleasures of the court; for which reason it was still called the “Menus-Plaisirs,” that is, the “Petty Pleasures.” It had stood for some forty years, and the things to be warehoused had come in by its principal opening upon this great main road.

By this main door you might have seen, under the rain, one after another entering as the morning wore on to ten o’clock. Some came on foot, most in the carriages of their equipage; but every individual, driven or walking, first halted at the line of armed men that barred the avenue, showed a card to prove that he was a deputy of the privileged orders, cleric, or noble, and only then was let through. But though the public gathered slowly (in such weather!) the careful policing of the streets by these armed men was maintained, and

the lines of red and blue still stood across the Avenue de Paris. They so came slowly up and in, the two privileged orders for one hour, six hundred in all.

The hour drew to its close. Before the bugles up in the low, wooded heights to the south had sounded for the ten o’clock meal of the camp, before the hour had struck from the clocks of the churches, files drew up to line the street on each side, and a guard stood before the porch.

Much farther down the road, beyond a second line of soldiery which barred access from that far side also, a small, but gathering, crowd of citizens showed far and small. Mixed with them and passing through them were figures hurrying toward a narrow side street which ran to a back entrance of the Menus-Plaisirs—men in knee-breeches and short coats, all in black, solemn. Those distant figures in black thus mixing with the crowd and getting in by a back way were the Commons, the men who had just claimed to be all France, to be sovereign. They had not been permitted to come in by the main door of their hall; they were under orders to reach the place in this fashion by the meaner street behind it.

Even that back door was shut against them. Of the four thousand soldiers all told who formed the ornament, the patrol, and the barriers of those streets, one guard was set at this closed back door forbidding entry. The six hundred Commons, crowded and pushing under their dripping umbrellas, began loud complaints, suggested protests, egged on their officials and in particular their president. He, Bailly, the middle-aged astronomer, full of rectitude, simple, and pompous, still called it an insult to be kept thus. But the guard had no orders and would not open. Such citizens as had assembled in the street mixed now with the Commons, supported their indignation. The rain still fell.

It was not until nearly a full hour had passed, until a commotion farther up toward the palace, and the shouted presenting of arms announced the arrival of the king that these six hundred, now at the limit of their restrained and profound exasperation, were at last admitted to the ramshackle wooden corridor that was their only vestibule. They folded their umbrellas, shook the rain from their cloaks, and, hat under arm, filed through the inner way which led to the back of the hall. Thus did they meanly enter it, at last, humiliated and angry, they who would be the nation itself.

The Commons filed in two by two through the side door at the end of the great hall. They saw before them, under the great veiled, oval skylight of the place, the ranks of the clergy and of the nobles already assembled, rows deep, upon each side of the central gangway. They saw the throne, with its noble purple hangings roof-high and spangled with the golden lilies, upon the raised platform at the farther end. They saw the whole place draped and painted and upholstered as it had been for the great ceremony of the Parliament’s opening seven weeks before. It was eleven o’clock.

Upon the king’s right the queen, suffering somewhat from that theatrical dignity which had been the bane of her carriage at the court, and had so offended the French sense of measure, courtesied deep, and would not be seated while the king still stood. Before the throne the ministry sat in rank; but one chair was empty, and all men gazed at it. It was amazing that this chair should be empty, for it was the chair of the chief minister; it was Necker’s chair.

What was about to be done was Necker’s doing. It was he who had written the words the king was to read. But that very morning he had grown afraid. He had ordered his carriage to take him with the rest; then, seeing how feeling had risen, persuaded partly by his women, partly by a native duplicity, that something was to be gained by a dramatic absence and a show of displeasure at what he knew would clash with opinion, he had at the last moment shirked and remained at home. He betrayed the king by that shirking. He left it to be thought that he was not the author of his own words. Unlike most traitors, he reaped no reward.

Whether rumours of what was to come had leaked out or not we cannot tell. Some of that great audience afterward said that they knew what was toward, and certainly among the two privileged orders there were a few who had heard the tenor of the speech. There were even one or two among the Commons. But for the great bulk of those who waited curiously for the fruition of so dreadful a moment, the fruit of that moment was still unknown until the herald gave forth his cry, until the rustle of seating was over, and the king spoke.