PART TWO

THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES

INTRODUCTION

After the successful assertion by the Commons of their new usurped powers over the crown, just described, a second attempt at coercion, backed by the foreign mercenary troops in the service of the king, failed. The depots of arms at the Invalides and the Bastille in Paris were sacked by the populace, and the latter was taken by force upon the same day, July 14th, 1789. The first principles of the Revolution were laid in resolutions of the parliament at Versailles during the summer, notably the declaration known as that of the “Rights of Man” and the abolition of the feudal property of the nobility.

Another popular rising in the capital in the month of October brought the court back to Paris, and the parliament followed it. For eighteen months the tide of democratic reform rose with greater and greater violence, and while the crown still remained the sole executive of the nation, possessed of all immediate control over the regular armed forces and the disbursement of public money, the personal peril of the royal family grew greater, and the term within which it seemed certain that the executive would lose its authority drew near.

There stood between the monarchy--the one vital institution of the French--and its ruin no real forces save the personality of Mirabeau and the regular troops. As against the latter there had been raised and organized a considerable militia, duly armed by law and present in every village and town in the country; while the mass of the regular troops had purposely been stationed at a distance from Paris through the growing power of the parliament.

A foreign war was threatened through the desire of every ancient authority in Europe to repress the movement, and with this approaching threat of invasion, which could not but serve the king, the unpopularity, and therefore the danger, of his family grew greater still.

Mirabeau, who dominated the parliament by his personality even more than by his oratory and his prodigious industry, had secretly entered into the service of the court in his determination to save the monarchy, in the fall of which he believed would be involved the breakdown of the country. He had drawn up a regular plan presupposing and inviting civil war. He would have the king leave Paris for some town such as Compiègne, not more than a day’s posting away, and from that point appeal to the people and to the army to support him. All this work of Mirabeau was being done in the winter of 1790-91.

Meanwhile the personal alarm of the queen,

[Illustration: ALLEGORY OF THE OATH-TAKING IN THE TENNIS-COURT AT VERSAILLES

_To face p. 51_ ]

backed by her rare energy, preferred a complete flight with her husband and children, either to the frontier itself or beyond it, a total undoing of the Revolution if that flight were successful, and the return of the monarchy, backed, not only by the army, but by the threat of foreign powers and of invasion.

In this perhaps impracticable and too heroic scheme, utterly anti-national, her great ally was Fersen, a Swedish nobleman who had loved her with devotion from his first youth, and whom she, since her misfortunes began, had come to love as devotedly in return.

It seems certain that the overmastering ability of Mirabeau would have carried his plan and would probably have saved the French monarchy had he lived. But he died from overwork upon the second of April, 1791. With him lacking, nothing could prevent the maturing of the queen’s plan.

A fortnight after Mirabeau’s death the mob had prevented the king from leaving Paris, in a perfectly open manner, for a visit to one of his suburban palaces, and the great militia guard of the palace had not shown discipline or loyalty.

After that nothing remained but to fix a date for secret flight, and this date was ultimately fixed for the night of the twentieth of June.

Fersen worked out all the plans in detail. He had the great travelling-coach, or “Berline,” specially built. The commander of the army upon the eastern frontier, Bouillé was warned and provided a succession of cavalry outposts to receive the fugitives when they should have proceeded a little more than a hundred miles from Paris, and to pass them on in safety to Montmédy upon the extreme frontier. Thence, when he should safely have reached it, the king was to issue his proclamation to the army and to the people. The travelling disguises for the royal family were prepared; three gentlemen of their former guard were trusted to accompany the flight. A passport in the name of a Mme. de Korff, a Russian lady resident in Paris, was obtained, and the queen was to travel in that name with her two children, and her husband as a servant.