Like You'd Understand, Anyway

The National Assembly had announced only the abolition of royalty. Everyone saw clearly what needed to be razed or pillaged, but no one agreed on what to erect in its place. Not a man near the wheels of power was equal to the task at hand, with ever greater tasks impending. The more radical, sensing conspiracies, wanted evermore surveillance, evermore wide-ranging arrests, evermore extremity. The maintenance of civic virtue, they insisted, was impossible without bloodshed. They learned the hard way that government was impossible if the bloodshed was not monopolized and managed.

First the King's Swiss Guards were slaughtered defending him at the Hôtel de Ville. Some were thrown living into a bonfire. Others from windows onto a forest of pikes. My assistant Legros, passing the Tuileries, saw furniture together with corpses being pitched from the upper stories into the courtyard. He met us on our way home, and Anne-Marie and I had to wait at each city gate so he could shout “Vive la nation!” like a good sansculotte, thereby diffusing the murderousness of those roaming the streets around us. Four times we were stopped and made to swear an oath to the new regime. At the entrance to our courtyard we found half a corpse, which I dragged out of the archway by the feet.

Then in September it was deemed necessary to weed out royalist sympathizers after the Prussians had enjoyed some success against our armies, and people's tribunals, set up in each of the prisons, began handing prisoners over to crowds gathered outside with butchers' implements and bludgeons. In four days thirteen hundred — one half of all the prisoners in Paris — were massacred, including the Mme de Lamballe, whose body was dragged behind a wagon by two cords tied to her feet while her head was carried on a pike to where the royal family was imprisoned, so that it might be made to bow to the Queen. One of the killers was said to have used a carpenter's saw. Each neighborhood seemed to have its own mob of National Guards and sansculottes, a few of them mounted, on their horses bearing fishwives and bacchantes, filthy and bloody and drunken, their clothes all at sea. At the Quai d'Or-say hung a whole row of men mangled and lanterned, their feet continually set in motion by people brushing past. Garden terraces were ashine each morning with smashed bottles in the sunlight. It was said that Mme de Lamballe's head was found wedged upside down on a cabaret bar and surrounded by glasses, as if serving as a carafe. She'd been famous for her fragile nerves and her penchant for fainting at the slightest unpleasantness.

As was the King. We followed his trial through the newspapers and broadsheets. Talking with Henri-François, our eldest, was like conversing with a rock garden, so Anne-Marie was left with me. During meals we were circumspect because Legros shared our table, but at night in bed some of our old intimacy returned. She argued the King's side: perhaps the mildest monarch to ever fill the throne had been precipitated from it because of his refusal to adopt the harshness of his predecessors. Throughout the proceedings the Jacobins — men and women alike — ate ices and bawled from the galleries for the death penalty. Legendre proposed to divide the accused into as many pieces as there were departments, so as to mail a bit of him to each. My wife was at a loss, reading such news: where did such ferocity originate? I had no answer for her. Just as the King had no ally in the Assembly willing to risk his own life on his sovereign's behalf. Having refused to become the patron of any one side, our helpless monarch had become the object of hatred for all.

Robespierre finally doomed him with the argument that if the King was absolved, what became of the Revolution? If he was innocent, then the defenders of liberty were malefactors, the royalists the true inheritors of France. To those who said that the state had no right to execute the King, he countered that the Revolution had been “illegal” from the outset. Did the deputies want a Revolution without a revolution?

We were both awake the entire night before the execution. The day before, I'd been authorized to oversee the digging of a trench ten feet deep, along with the procurement of three fifty-pound sacks of quicklime. The machine was moved to the Place de la Révolution, near the pedestal from which the bronze equestrian statue of the King's father had been hacked down.

I had asked the prosecutor to relieve me of my responsibilities in the King's case. That request had been denied. I then asked for more detailed instructions: would the King require a special carriage? Would I accompany him alone, or with my assistants? I was informed that there would be a special, closed carriage, and that I was to await the King on the scaffold. The latter instruction I understood to suggest that I myself was suspected of royalist tendencies.