Nor were the peasants much comforted by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen which, affirming that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights’, was adopted by the National Assembly later on that month. For, encouraged by disagreements within the Assembly, the King withheld his consent both to the Declaration and to the ratification of the decrees in which the sacrifices of the privileged orders had been formulated and published. ‘I will never consent to the spoliation of my clergy or my nobility,’ he assured the Archbishop of Arles. ‘And I will not sanction decrees which seek to despoil them.’ So, faced by the passive resistance of the King, the ‘patriots’ decided that force would have to be used again. The Revolution required another dramatic journée.
The form that the journée was to take was indicated in a conversation between Dussaulx, a member of the Paris Commune, and Augeard, an official of the Queen’s Household, as they walked past the Tuileries one day.
‘When the King is living there,’ Dussaulx said pointing at the old, neglected palace, ‘this business can be settled. It was a great mistake not to keep him in Paris when he came here on 17 July. The King’s place of residence should be in the capital.’
Augeard objected that the King could not be told where he must live. But Dussaulx maintained, ‘He can be forced when the good of the country is at stake. We will have to come to that.’
On 29 September the Flanders Regiment arrived at Versailles. It was customary, when a new regiment came into garrison there, for a banquet to be given in its honour by the Gardes du Corps. The King saw no reason to interfere with this tradition. So the usual banquet was held on I October in the Opera House where the boxes were filled with spectators from the Court. It turned out to be just the provocation for which the ‘patriots’ and the newspapers that supported them were waiting: several of the guests got drunk; there were rowdy demonstrations of loyalty to the throne; insults were showered upon the National Assembly; soldiers tore off their red and blue cockades. At the appearance of the King and Queen, who walked around the table, the band struck up one of Grétry’s popular royalist airs, while the ladies of the Court, who had for several weeks been provocatively wearing lilies pinned to their dresses, distributed cockades of pure white in honour of the Bourbon dynasty.
In Paris, where the bread queues had been growing ever longer, accounts of this ‘orgy’, suitably embellished with reports that the national cockade had been trampled disdainfully underfoot, were soon spread far and wide. Camille Desmoulins renewed the call for the King to be brought to Paris away from the corrupting influence of the Court. Other popular orators leaped upon the tables shouting for a march upon Versailles, many of them combining that call with demands for a reduction in the price of bread.
Bread was the people’s staple diet. Most workers, who consumed about three pounds a day, spent half their wages on it, as opposed to about fifteen per cent on vegetables, oil and wine, five per cent on fuel and one per cent on lighting. Skilled workers such as locksmiths and carpenters earned about fifty sous a day in 1789, masons about forty, labourers no more than twenty to thirty, so when the price of bread, normally about eight sous for a four-pound loaf rose above ten or twelve sous they had to face the prospect of hunger, and disturbances became commonplace. In August that year the price of bread was not unduly high at twelve sous for a large loaf, but a prolonged drought had resulted in millers being unable to grind corn, so there was an acute shortage and a consequent increase in outbreaks of violence: fighting erupted in bread queues where women were pushed aside by men, bakers were threatened with hanging and guards had to be posted in their shops. At Versailles a furious crowd attempted to murder a baker who started to sell bread at eighteen sous to those who could afford it, and stale loaves at a rather less exorbitant price to those who could not. In several other places women seized cartloads of grain, and on the morning of 5 October huge crowds of women gathered in the central markets and in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine shouting for bread, forcing the bell-ringer of the Sainte-Marguerite church to ring the tocsin and calling upon the citizens to take up arms to force the Government to help them. They were mostly poissardes, fishwives, working women, prostitutes and market stall-holders, but among them were several quite smartly dressed bourgeoises who appeared as angry as the rest. Together they marched towards the Place de Grève.
They arrived there at about half-past nine and stormed up the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. The guards were disarmed and their weapons handed to men who had now joined the demonstration and were encouraging the women in their demands. As some of them burst through the door leading to the bell tower to sound the tocsin, others invaded the main building, searching for arms and powder, tearing up documents and ledgers for good measure. Persuaded that their best hope was to petition the King, they then set off for Versailles under the not entirely willing leadership of that self-proclaimed hero of the taking of the Bastille, Stanislas Maillard, who evidently considered it undignified to command such motley female troops.
Further recruits were collected on the way, not all of them willing ones. A nurse, Jeanne Martin, the wife of a porter, claimed afterwards that she was forced to march by a group of about forty women who thrust a stick in her hand, threatening to beat her with it unless she accompanied them. She protested that she had not yet had any breakfast and had not a sou with her; but they shouted, ‘Come on, march, march! You won’t need anything.’ Another woman, Marie-Catherine-Victoire Sacleux, proprietor of a cleaning and dyeing shop which she had closed for the day ‘because of the public clamour’, made the excuse that she was urgently wanted at home and that, in any case, she was wearing the wrong kind of shoes, but she, too, was forced to go with the others and made to help drag along a cannon which had been brought from the Place de Grève.
Compelling or inviting numerous others to accompany them, the women who had invaded the Hôtel de Ville had soon mustered a force over 6,000 strong. Among them were several men-some of hem dressed as women–agents provocateurs in the pay of the Duc d’Orléans as well as other agitators intent upon ensuring that their female companions did not just demand bread but the acceptance of the Assembly’s decrees, the King’s return to Paris and the punishment of all who had insulted the national cockade. Tramping through the rain, some with muskets, others with pikes and swords, bludgeons, crowbars, pitchforks and scythes, they passed through Sèvres where they pillaged the shops, and at five o’clock in the afternoon were in sight of Versailles.
The King had been out hunting again. On his return he went immediately to a council of Ministers most of whom, with the notable exception of Necker, advised flight, though they did not know yet just what the women wanted. Louis was, as usual, hesitant. ‘A fugitive King,’ he murmured doubtfully, repeating the words several times. Eventually he adjourned the Council and went to consult the Queen who had spent the early afternoon in the gardens of the Trianon, which she was never to see again. She too urged him to escape while there was still time, but he could not bring himself to do so. And when, at half past five, the women stormed through the doors of the National Assembly, the King was still at Versailles. Two hours later the hall of the Assembly ‘remained full of women and men armed with scythes, sticks and pikes’, so Étienne Dumont, a friend of Mirabeau, reported. ‘The President was wasting his strength trying to keep order…Mirabeau raised his powerful voice and called for the withdrawal from the Chamber of all strangers. It needed all his popularity to achieve this. Gradually the crowd withdrew’. About ‘a hundred women and a number of young people’ remained in the gallery, however, and these shouted or kept silence at the orders of a ‘harridan who addressed the deputies with coarse familiarity: “Who’s that talking down there? Make the chatterbox shut up. That’s not the point. The point is, we want bread. Tell them to put our little mother Mirabeau up to speak. We want to hear him.” Then everyone shouted for “our little mother Mirabeau” (a form of affectionate expression employed by people of this class). But Mirabeau was not the man to waste his energy on occasions such as this. His popularity as he said himself, was not that of a demagogue.’