The preparations for the festival and the festival itself had, indeed, provided a convincing display of national unity and given grounds for hope that the bitterness of the past would soon be forgotten.
In the spring and summer of 1791, however, this national unity was undermined by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. People came out into the streets in support of recalcitrant priests wearing royalist cockades, there were riots in several towns and violent disturbances in many villages from which curés who refused to take the oath were evicted.
The King had signed the Civil Constitution, on the advice of a majority of his Ministers, with evident reluctance. Soon afterwards he received a long-delayed letter from the Pope expressly declaring that if he lent his approval to it he would be leading his nation into schism. This was followed by another letter suspending all priests who accepted the Civil Constitution and firmly condemning the election of clergy by the people. The King thereupon replaced his confessor who had taken the oath by one who had not, and consulted a distinguished theologian, the Bishop of Clermont, as to whether he could now take communion from his parish priest who had also taken the forbidden oath.
Up till now the Paris which the King overlooked from his first-floor windows above the Seine had remained quite calm. The upheavals of the summer of 1789 had not been repeated. While outbreaks of violence and sporadic riots were troubling several provinces – particularly in the south where many regiments were so close to mutiny that Mirabeau thought it would be a good idea to disband the whole army and ‘enlist another on revolutionary principles’–the life of the capital had continued largely undisturbed. The cafés were crowded, the theatres played to full houses, the salons were as well attended as ever and rich aristocrats continued to walk the streets and patronize the fashionable shops. ‘We have had several delightful tea parties the last few days,’ one of these aristocrats wrote. ‘We are all amusing ourselves.’ To some the Revolution had become a kind of joke. Women wore Constitution jewellery and Liberty caps decorated with ribbons the colour of that vivid red known as Foullon’s blood; men took pinches of snuff from boxes elegantly enamelled with the tricolour. ‘Feudal’ became a popular word of playful denigration to be used of coffee-grinders that failed to work or watches that refused to keep time. There was a strange light-heartedness in the air. When Madame de Simiane was hit by an apple thrown from the upper gallery of the Théâtre Français, she sent it to her brother-in-law, Lafayette, with the comment, ‘Here, my dear General, is the first fruit of the Revolution that has so far come into my hands.’
In this atmosphere the King had begun to suppose that he might yet recover his lost authority. At the beginning of 1790 he had made a speech to the Assembly in which he had promised to educate his son in the new principles of constitutional monarchy, of freedom with justice, and had associated himself with those plans which the Assembly were carrying out ‘for the benefit of France’. He had been loudly cheered and escorted back to the Tuileries as a hero. More recently, and more than once, he had been vociferously cheered again as he had been during the celebrations of the Fête de la Fédération. ‘I am still King of the French,’ he said with some satisfaction.
When he had first arrived at the Tuileries he had seemed listless and despairing. Although it was not suggested to him that he must forego the pleasure of hunting, he had sulkily indicated that he had lost his zest for it. Followed everywhere by six National Guardsmen who were ordered by the Assembly never to lose track of him, he had grown fat and discontented. But as the months passed his spirits revived. The Queen, too, became less unpopular. She was still the victim of libels, accused of plotting to starve the poor, of sending money to Austria, of continuing to indulge a voracious sexual appetite with both men and women. Yet deputations of citizens came to wish her well, while she herself attempted to prove herself worthy of their regard by visiting hospitals and workshops.
Encouraged by the respect which the monarchy still commanded and by a growing feeling in the Assembly, except on the Left, that the Revolution had gone far enough and it was time to conciliate the King, the counter-revolutionaries now urged him to strike back, to turn to the army and to prepare for civil war. This was the advice of the Comte d’Artois given from the safety of exile in Savoy; this was the advice, too, of their sister Elisabeth. The King, however, could not face the prospect of civil war, clinging to his hope that there were now sufficient deputies in favour of compromise with the Court to ensure a return to the quiet pleasures of Versailles. This hope was shattered by the Pope’s firm stand against the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and by the King’s decision that, in loyalty to his faith and conscience, he must accept the view of Bishop Bonal that he could not receive Holy Communion from a ‘Constitutionnel’ priest.
The Pope’s unequivocal pronouncement against the Civil Constitution, made public in a brief, led to serious disturbances in Paris where the people’s anti-clericalism was fostered both by political clubs and by the theatres which, when not presenting plays celebrating civic virtue, put on others that displayed the horrors of the Inquisition, the tribulations and hypocrisy of monastic and convent life, and the greed and dissipation of real and fictional leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. Outside the theatres and in the gardens of the Palais Royal effigies of the Pope were set alight on bonfires, a severed head was tossed through the windows of the Papal Nuncio’s carriage, convents were broken into and nuns assaulted and revolutionary slogans were scrawled on church doors. A mob broke into the Church of St Sulpice, calling out for the head of the curé who had protested against the Civil Constitution and forcing the organist to play the tune of ‘Ça ira’, the words of which they sang with frightening intensity. The King was called upon to dismiss his new confessor and condemned in pamphlets as a traitor for having flouted the laws of the nation by receiving Communion from a priest whose allegiance was to the Pope rather than to the state.
In fact, the King had not yet committed this breach of the Civil Constitution, but he had made up his mind to do so, and at Easter he and his family prepared to leave the Tuileries for Holy Communion at Saint-Cloud. The gates of the palace, however, were shut against them by a shouting crowd that had intimidated the National Guardsmen on duty in the courtyard. Lafayette arrived on the scene. So did Bailly. But neither of them could persuade the mob to let the carriage pass. Nor could the King who put his head out of the window to ask for that freedom for himself which, he told them, he had given to the nation. His words were met by insults and by a rattling of fists on the carriage doors. For nearly two hours the uproar continued while the Queen, pale yet composed, comforted the weeping Dauphin and the King waited vainly for the crowds to disperse. Then he told the coachman to return to the palace.
In the Tuileries he was advised once again, as he had so often been in the past, to escape from Paris: once he had got away to the army on the frontier he would be able to persuade his brother-in-law, the Austrian Emperor, to take part in an armed congress if not actually to order an invasion of France; he would then be in a position to act as negotiator and the Assembly would be obliged to have him back on his own terms. He would also be free to worship as his conscience urged him to do. Slowly convinced by suggestions and propositions such as these, and by the Queen’s strong endorsement of them, the King came to the conclusion that he must make a dash for the frontier. After all, both the King of Spain and the Austrian Emperor had stressed that they could not help him until he and his family were in a place of safety. Once they were, the foreign powers would at least be given the opportunity of proving that they were not using the French royal family’s present confinement merely as an excuse for doing nothing as the Queen suspected. The time chosen for the dangerous attempt was the night of 19 June 1791.