The State of France

Brissot’s brilliant compromise – and in recent years, his reputation has been much revived as history has gained a greater appreciation of the urgency of peace in 1795 – proved immediately and deeply controversial. Whilst the Orléanists, by then the de facto opposition party in the Assembly, rejoiced the coming of peace, even they did not much celebrate the return of Louis to Versailles. A Revolutionary Guard battalion, led by the Orléanist major Henri de la Rochejaquelin, had to escort the royal entourage all the way from Toulon to Versailles, lest the King was attacked by angry mobs looking to avenge Marseille. These men, however, were following orders from Lafayette – now returned to his 1789 position of Prime Minister – and paid no attention to those of the King. Thus began ten years of King Louis XVI of France, already embittered and resentful following his exile in Corsica, effectively becoming a prisoner in his own palace.

The population of France at large was no less pleased about Louis’s return to Versailles. However, they were pleased with the end of the war, which they all agreed that they had won, and by and large, they grudgingly accepted that Louis could wear his crown, don his robes and go hunting on his much-reduced royal estates… so long as he did not have a hand in government, and so long as peace and prosperity returned to France. Out of sight, out of mind was the general attitude, so long as Louis had no role in the administration of the country. That “live and let live” attitude, however, would struggle to survive to the turn of the century as the flaws in Brissot’s compromise became more and more obvious.

As peace returned to Europe, the revolutionaries were able to finally take stock and look back on their work. First French Revolution had utterly changed one of the oldest and most complicated states in continental Europe. In less than seven years, France had gone from a mismatched patchwork quilt of old feudal domains with inconsistent, vague and illogical taxation, legal and privilege systems to a modern nation united under a single banner. And now, after the war, this new modern nation flourished.

Merchants, traders, and industrialists found a France ready and eager for investment of any kind, and American, British and Dutch capital flooded into the country. This investment was particularly concentrated in Paris, large parts of which were still burned-out husks after Bloody Saturday, and the devastated south. By 1799, much of Paris had been rebuilt, with wide, smooth streets, a modernized aqueduct and sewer system that would greatly reduce the spectre of disease in the capital, and gaslighting on every street corner and boulevard. At Lafayette’s insistence, the first areas of the city to be rebuilt and have their sanitation brought up to modern standards were the poor sans-culotte districts of eastern Paris. The City of Lights had reclaimed its mantle in full.

Indeed, all of France flourished in the years following the end of the war. The Girondins were, to a man, economic and political liberals, and the suite of reforms passed during the Second Assembly bore fruit after the war’s conclusion. The old protectionist guild systems were swept aside, eliminating the major barriers to entry for would-be entrepreneurs. The inefficient and manifestly unfair taxation system that asked too much of the common people and next to nothing of the nobility was brought out of its feudal decay, and any number of arcane rules and restrictions on who could do what and where was struck from the books. At the same time, the laughably ineffective tax farming system was abolished and replaced with a modern, centralized revenue collection service based on the American IRS, which together with the tax reforms meant that the common French peasant paid far less in tax but the French state made far more in tax revenue, thus solving the financial problems that had driven France into revolution in the first place.

The much-despised and much-criticized French legal system too underwent vast reform; no longer was France separated into a variety of illogical and mutually disjoint systems of generalités, parlements, and dioceses. A project spearheaded by the Assembly deputies Nicolas Bergasse and Dr. Joseph Guillotin had drawn up a wholly new and infinitely more sensible administrative legal system for France, based on the equality of justice, the right to a fair trial, and judicial independence from the state based on the common law system (which had previously only applied in the north). The French departmental system had also been created to help facilitate this transformation; no longer were people “obliged to go to law over two to three years at great costs to find out which judge they would have the misfortune to appear before”, as one member of the Paris parlement had complained in the 1760s. Neither was the result you could expect in a French court dependent primarily on your social standing and your financial means; evidence now governed the judiciary in France.

The result was that France, like a spring long-constrained by a decaying political structure and the pressures of war, rebounded beyond all expectations in 1797. Enterprise and entrepreneurship flourished as the old privileges, guild systems, and barriers were dissolved and foreign trade surged. Many rich merchants and traders in France had despaired the near-total loss of France’s colonial Empire to the Spanish (and to some extent the British) under the Treaty of Andorra, but they soon found America and Britain far better places to do business. Like in America, post-war France was a hub of free thought, experimentation, and innovation, and economic growth between 1796 and 1801 rose to stratospheric heights by European standards.

It was this environment that a satisfied Marquis de Lafayette was able to retire from active politics at last when his third and final term expired in 1799 amidst a full-blown economic boom. The “Father of the Republic”, as he was known even before he stepped down, had wanted a stable, liberal, and democratic constitutional monarchy (despite his professed republicanism) from the outset; he had finally achieved his goal albeit by circuitous means. Although still a relatively young man – he had barely turned 42 when his third term expired – the stresses and rigors of leading France through the heady days of the Revolution and the war had drained the energy out of Lafayette, and for the next five years he would be little involved in the day-to-day politics of France. Instead, he often chose to visit his old comrades in America from time to time, rather than stay in France where he felt he would overshadow those who came after him.

Nonetheless, Lafayette would go down in history as the father of the French Republic and the hero of two worlds. Though the Girondins would have the first and most persistent claim on Lafayette’s legacy, like those on the left-wing of French politics reorganized in the first year would point out – and with good reason – that the most popular and celebrated parts of Lafayette’s political legacy were those that they had pushed for: universal suffrage and the abolition of the active/passive citizen distinction, gender equality in the national guard, the abolition of slavery, all those ideas had come from the radical wing of the early Revolution, not the moderate and center-right Girondins. Regardless, all agreed that his mixture of idealism, level-headedness, foresight, and wisdom would be the model for all future French leaders to aspire towards, regardless of political faction or ideology.

Moreover, his commitment to French democracy was no self-serving façade; there were many occasions, particularly in 1791 and 1792, when he could have transformed himself into a military dictator, and few other than Robespierre would have complained. When he did return to French public life during the Second Coalition War, it would indeed be in his beloved National Guard as an officer, not in politics. While he would have a significant effect on French politics when he did choose to intervene, such interventions were rare and indirect, usually in the form of advisory letters to his successors. He was keen to create an example, following that of his American friends and heroes Washington and Kim, to those that followed him that when one’s time was up in politics, one’s time was up.

His successor, unsurprisingly, was the author of the compromise of 1796, Jean-Jacques Brissot. Still, in the height of the post-war boom and at the top of the political party that had dominated France virtually uncontested since 1792, Brissot was at the very height of his popularity in 1799. The Presidential election of 1799 still stands today as the most one-sided in French history, as Girondins or Girondin-aligned groupings took over 80% of the vote, with only a handful of Catholic Orléanists and Parisian or Marseillean radicals not aligned in some way with the Society of 1789. As he took office as President, he was content to continue the Girondin focus on rebuilding damaged infrastructure, building forts on the French borders and coastlines, infusing the military with the latest and greatest innovations from both France and America, and encouraging foreign investment in France with free trade policies. France was rich, France was powerful, and times were good.

The death of the Jacobins

However, the economic boom and good times could not fully paper over the cracks that were apparent from the beginning. With Louis’ return had also come all the émigré nobles who had converged on Marseille in 1789 and 1790 and then fled to Corsica in 1794, and they were none too pleased to find all their estates confiscated and distributed out to the commoners. “The Marquis of the Jacobins” was a common epithet attached to Lafayette in conservative circles in the late 1790s, and many of these nobles were ‘forced’ to buy back their old estates outright, which in turn angered many of the peasants who had been promised their share of the land, although the accountants in the State Treasury were mighty pleased with such an outcome.

Moreover, the question of the status of women, which had been one of the advances ‘confirmed’ by the Treaty of London, rose back to prominence as peace came. The population of France had, by and large, accepted the revolutionary feminist reforms during the war, aimed as they were at encouraging women to join the National Guard. Tens of thousands had done so, serving alongside their male colleagues with great bravery and distinction, and now they returned home to find that, below the grand political gestures, little had changed for them back home. They could vote, yes, but socially their status had barely advanced as distinctly second-class citizens. For these women, many of whom continued to wear their full National Guard uniforms even after their units were officially disbanded, this was a slight that they would not and could not accept and, by and large, they were supported by their former male comrades, who needed no lessons on the worthiness and bravery of the French woman as a citizen and defender of the Republic. As we will soon discuss, they quickly formed a nucleus of opposition to the compromise of 1796.

The largest sore, however, was unquestionably the presence of Louis in Versailles. Louis had returned to his Kingdom – or State, as it was now known – a bitter and depressed man. Cut off from any independent and tangible source of actual events, he had taken the reports of anti-Royalist atrocities being carried out by the “Republican hordes” – not all of which were fabricated or exaggerated – with grim despair, firm in his belief that chaos was the true ruler of his Kingdom. As much as anyone else, he resented the compromise that had been fostered upon him by the European powers – and Britain most of all – that revoked his divine right to rule in all substance and reduced him to a virtually powerless figurehead. His mood was not improved by his deeply uncomfortable return to Versailles, flanked all the way by National Guard units who flew the Corday tricolor as they escorted him back to the palace, and only Rochejaquelin's battalion as a barrier between him and the baleful glares of the National Guards beyond. As soon as he returned to Versailles, therefore, he began looking for opportunities to undermine and eventually overthrow the system. Such was his low public stature and lack of political power, however, that it would take ten years for that opportunity to come.

In the meantime, Louis – or, rather, the spectre of Louis and a return to the ancien régime – provided a focal point around which anti-Girondist, anti-compromise agitation began. Not only did Louis provide a highly convenient scapegoat upon whom all problems in the “republican monarchy” could be blamed, but the presence of Louis himself was also seen as an affront to national honor; honor that had been won with the shedding of blood on the battlefield. This slight was only magnified by Louis’s insistence on adopting a modified tricolor as the national flag: one with the fleur-de-lis superimposed on top. This was more than a little inflammatory, especially to the Montagnard remnants still present in French politics.

Indeed, when the Jacobin ringleaders were returned to Paris for their trials and sentencing, several of the most die-hard and notorious Jacobins chose to make their last speeches a call for the deposition of the monarchy – and in some cases suggestions that Louis himself would be on the scaffold one day – to raucous cheers from the assembled crowd. Robespierre, curiously, was not amongst them; during his Austrian imprisonment, he had seemingly come to deeply regret his actions throughout late 1792 and was the only one of the Jacobins to plead guilty to all charges. “Do not make my mistake,” he implored the Parisians who had come to watch the death of the once-leader of the Montagnards and the dominant radical voice of the early Republic, “of waging war against liberty in liberty’s name. Never mistake, as I did, moderation for treason.”. From all reports, Lafayette attempted to gain clemency from his former political foe, but Brissot would not have a bar of it. Robespierre would be executed by louisette [2] on 28 September 1796 – four years after his failed insurrection was exposed.

Maximilien Robespierre would end his life a tragic figure, filled with remorse. The Girondin caricature of the man as a blood-crazed tyrant stopped only by the patriotism and integrity of Lafayette has long since been discredited as unfair – not least because Danton, not Lafayette, was the one truly responsible for Robespierre’s downfall. The Girondin critique also focusses unduly on the final stages of Robespierre’s political career when his own personal hatred of Brissot got in the way of his usual good sense, and it misses that Robespierre was, in many ways, the driving intellectual force behind many of the democratic reforms in the first two years of the Revolution. It was Robespierre who convinced Lafayette to end the active-passive citizen distinction that barred democracy to the bulk of the citizenry, it was Robespierre who passionately spoke in 1789 when few others agreed that égalité meant exactly that – for women, for slaves, for Jews and Protestants. Above all, it was Robespierre who, with great foresight and wisdom, warned France of the dangers of aggressive wars against Europe, even one in service of so noble a goal as democracy. The great irony of his life was that whilst Brissot and the Girondins had won their own personal battle over Robespierre, France by 1796 was a nation far more in line with Robespierre’s vision of the “republic of virtue” that he alone had believed in from the beginning. However, he would no longer be there to see the republic return and mature, ten years later.

The Anti-Monarchy Clubs

Nevertheless, Robespierre to the end was strident in his belief that Louis could not reign with any legitimacy in France, and it did not take long for many to agree with him. Almost at once, political clubs sprung up across the country calling for the monarchy to be abolished completely and for the Republic to be restored under the Constitution of 1793. These were, naturally, especially concentrated in Paris and Marseille, but there were hundreds of “Anti-Monarchy” clubs scattered across every city and town of note in the country. There was a surprising amount of political diversity in these clubs; some were Girondist liberals who thought the Constitution of 1793 was essentially perfect, some were radical neo-Montagnards who thought monarchy a repellent abomination on principle, others were gatherings of veterans, especially female veterans, who felt that France had been cheated of its well-earned victory by the Treaty on London and that the settlement embodied by the State of France was a large backward step (which, for the female veterans returning home to find their broader place in society little-changed, it most certainly was).

These veterans would mostly coalesce under the banner of the revived Defenders of Equality, the secretive revolutionary feminist society begun by Méricourt, de Gouges, and Corday in 1791. It had mostly become dormant after achieving most of its original goals, but with the threat of losing their gains growing by the day (and her own political ambitions in mind), Corday decided to revive the society. This was no longer the secret group of pamphleteers it had been in 1791. Corday opened membership and affiliation with any group of National Guard veterans and supporters who professed belief in female equality as embodied by the Constitution of 1793. By 1798, the Defenders of Equality was the largest grouping of war veterans in the Republic, with over a hundred thousand members across France, and virtually all its female veterans.

It was this network and the political organization – not to mention hard muscle – they provided that truly launched Corday into her now-famous political career despite being both still a full colonel in the National Guard and a new mother as of 1798. Such concerns could not stop the indomitable Angel of Equality, however, and she ran for election to the National Assembly in 1799 at the head of a grouping now calling itself the “Left-Girondins”. She was still part of the Society of 1789, but there was an increasingly clear divide within the Girondin camp between those who supported the compromise of 1796, like Brissot and Condorcet, and those opposed, like Corday. It was of course not at all clear that women could run for national office, but no one was about to say “no” to Charlotte Corday, and she was elected by a landslide in her Caen electorate.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

However, despite the deep military roots, the Defenders of Equality were not the largest and most powerful of the new Anti-Monarchy Clubs by the turn of the century. That instead was an entirely new group of political clubs that sprung up across France in 1797 that affiliated to each other under the name “The Society of the Friends of the Republic”, but they were more often known by the name of their newsletter: Les Nouveaux Cordeliers. Like the original Cordeliers Club, this organization was dominated by its two leaders, giants of the original Revolution: Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins.

Danton had been retired from politics since 1793, and the original Cordeliers Club had dissolved itself not long afterward. However, his outrage at Brissot’s compromise – his distaste for the man was second only to Robespierre’s – had driven him to return to Paris and his old apartment in the Cordeliers district. From there, it was surprisingly easy for him to reconnect with his former friends and networks within Paris, particularly within the Ministry of Information. Much of the anger directed his way after the failed 1792 coup had dissipated; the most diehard anti-Danton radicals had mostly been caught up in Bloody Saturday and been executed or exiled, and the chaos of those two weeks had made many realize that Danton had been right along. With even Robespierre admitting on the scaffold that Danton’s moderation had been correct, most of the remaining left-wing and sans-culotte activists in Paris were happy to have a man of Danton’s political stature – and networking ability – to lead them.

And lead them he did. In 1798, Danton’s New Cordeliers clubs started holding demonstrations against the monarchy and the compromise of 1796. By 1802, the New Cordeliers clubs numbered half a million adherents across France. Corday had the support of the veterans, but Danton had the people as a whole. The two of them, increasingly occupying shared political ground through common hatred for the compromise of the Treaty of London and of the monarchy, were well-placed to take advantage of any slip-ups the compromettants, as they called them, would make.

Their wish was granted in 1801. as the French economy, allowed to run wild by the laissez-faire free trade principles of the Girondins, overheated and crashed in 1801. This led to a deep and painful recession by 1802, made worse by a poor harvest in 1803. Shockingly, the Girondins, who had ruled without seriously being contested since 1792, very nearly lost their majority in the Assembly in the elections of that 1802, gaining only 52% of the vote, whereas three years before the Gironde had won over 70%. 1802 also marked Danton returning to the Assembly for the first time since 1793. With the economic crisis, of course, came a sharp decline in tax revenue for the French government coupled with runaway inflation, raising the spectre of a renewed financial crisis – the very thing that had triggered the original Revolution in the first place. A suite of economic and financial reforms was rammed through by Brissot and the more economically-minded reformists in the Girondins in 1803 and these did stabilize the French economy to a large degree, mostly by getting inflation under control, and averted the risk of the French government once again going bankrupt. However, public credit for this achievement was minimal: the left and the general population of France was furious that several taxes had been raised to eliminate the government deficit, and the remaining nobles and conservative right were apoplectic that much of the inflation control measures had involved printing mass amounts of silver coins… silver that had been obtained by melting down the large amounts of confiscated property of emigre nobles who had fled their estates during the war [3].

Amongst these increasingly disillusioned citizens of France was one citizen that Brissot could ill-afford to alienate: Corday. Always on the leftward edge of her party and self-admittedly much less interested in the ins and outs of economic policy than the great questions of political rights and natural justice, she found both the raising of taxes and the melting down of seized property objectionable. Not that she had any problem with confiscating noble property – in her eyes, emigres were traitors and were lucky not to face the louisette along with Robespierre and Marat – but she felt that it was improper for the government to simply melt it down to mint new silver, rather than selling it on the open market to raise money. Nor did she have particular problems with Brissot’s insistence on funneling what money the government did make on beefing up the military rather than on public works programs, as Danton wanted. Regardless, she despised the monarchy – ironically enough, given that she had been a constitutional monarchist herself in 1789 and like would have found the State of France an ideal endpoint for her own early liberal ideals – and wanted to see it and the compromise of 1796 gone.

Her true animating issue, however, was the same one that had brought her into politics in the Paris salons in 1790 as a comely but anonymous young lady from Caen: the status of women in France, and above all the fifty thousand or so female veterans of the First Coalition War. Stories about how the women of the National Guard, who had fought and bled for France, returned home to cold shoulders, suspicion and outright ostracization in some cases, enraged her. These slights were particularly galling as, in the majority of cases, the perpetrators were in fact other women who felt the female veterans had gone "against their sex" by fighting in the war. It was a reminder that while the revolutionary feminist gains of the Revolution were superficially obvious and celebrated, underneath much less had truly changed about French society, especially rural French society. This, more than anything, was the sore point that pushed her away from her moderate Girondism and steadily to the left, no doubt finally succumbing somewhat to the influence of Saint-Just. For now, however, she stayed true to her roots in the Society of 1789 and decided to prop up the ailing Girondin government.

Yet public discontent with the economic torpor and the strict and seemingly unfair measures the Girondins were using to deal with it grew throughout 1804, even as Dantonists organized mass demonstrations and riots that rocked an increasingly angry (and hungry) country. They wanted money for bread rather than new forts, ships and guns – although in truth they wanted those too, a strong army was universally popular – but Brissot would not, or more likely could not, listen. In truth, it would likely have made no difference; he could not well snap his fingers and fix the economic crisis, particularly since it is now generally agreed that excess inflation was the ultimate cause of the crisis, and thus could not be solved simply by printing more livres as his critics generally wanted. Nevertheless, it was no surprise that the Gironde lost any semblance of a majority in the 1805 elections, although his opponents were sufficiently divided that his 37% vote share – half of what it had been six years before – was still enough to see him elected President.

By then, however, Corday had become just as disillusioned by Brissot and Condorcet’s insistence on a hands-off economic policy as everyone else. Since late 1801, she had started up a secret correspondence with Danton, at first little more than cordial discussions about the state of the country between two patriots, not least because Danton was one of the few prominent male politicians willing to publicly speak on behalf of female veterans. But by 1805, Corday’s shift to the left had meant this correspondence had turned into active feelers being sent out by Danton, who was ever attuned to the possibility of wedging out a political opening when it appeared, for a possible political alliance with the explicit aim of ending the constitutional settlement and restoring the Constitution of 1793. While they still had their differences and would continue to do so, they now aligned on most key issues, and they were willing to set aside what they still disagreed with to achieve their true goal: a restoration of the Republic and, by extension, of French honor.

However, this correspondence was entirely secret, even as the new Assembly took its seats and Brissot was sworn in for his third and final term as Prime Minister. It was not until November 1805 that Corday finally tipped her hand, when the Defenders of Equality walked out of the Society of 1789 and disaffiliated themselves, never to return. Brissot and Condorcet, used to somewhat dramatic flair from Corday – she had taken to wearing her National Guard uniform full-time in recent months, for example – saw it as a warning but little more than that and expected her to return in due course, but Madame Roland, who had never trusted Corday, warned that it was a sign of a deeper betrayal. It would take her less than a fortnight to be proved correct when the critical vote to confirm Brissot’s nominations to the royal ministry came up. Until then, it had always been understood that as the President – or Prime Minister – went, so did the ministry and that a vote for one was a vote for the other. With Brissot confirmed as Prime Minister as the winner of the most votes, few expected any problems with Brissot’s ministry. That was, however, until he nominated Jean-Marie Roland, husband of Madame Roland, as Minister of Finance. Not only was Mr. Roland the husband of the one figure that Corday felt epitomized all that was wrong with the Girondin core, but he had been the architect of many of the economic reforms that Corday had angered so many ordinary citizens. Superficially, therefore, there seemed plenty of reasons for her to oppose his nomination.

In truth, Roland’s nomination was little more than a pretextual trigger for Corday to carry out the plan that she and Danton had already prepared, and was just waiting for the right moment to strike. Thus, when the critical vote came to the floor, Corday and her assortment of a hundred or so left-Girondins stood from her previous seat next to the Girondins and crossed the chamber, joining Danton’s Republicans on the left of the chamber. The chamber descended into an uproar, but soon the rest of Corday’s left-Girondins had followed her and Danton’s Republicans – soon to be an official party, formed out of a formal alliance between of the New Cordeliers and Defenders of Equality – were the largest grouping in the Assembly. Brissot and Madame Roland were furious, but there was little they could do – there was no law or constitutional rule that prevented Corday’s action, and besides, between Corday and Danton, the vast bulk of the National Guard was on their side. There was brief talk of withdrawing the nomination to get Corday back onside, but it soon became clear that the split was permanent, and that Corday had formed a permanent alliance with Danton. Brissot’s majority in the Assembly was now gone and he had no Ministry, and under the structure of the constitution, that meant one thing: permanent deadlock in the Assembly.

The April Revolution

It was at this moment that Louis spied his opportunity. Stripped of all political power, he had stewed and vacillated in Versailles for almost a decade, urged by some advisors to take a harder stand against the leftover institutions of the Republic, urged by others to let politics be the business of the common people and enjoy the life of a King. Now, however, as 1805 ticked over to 1806 and the Assembly looked no closer to resolving its newfound constitutional crisis, those advisors telling him to try and reclaim his mantle as a true monarch implored him to take his chance now that the Assembly was falling into – in their eyes – inevitable division, chaos, and deadlock. Only the uniting force of a King, they argued, could give France the stability it needed and return the boom times to France.

Thus, in April 1806, Louis made another fateful decision, but not one that would see his full kingly authority restored. Instead, it would start a chain of events that would lead to a second Revolution and his final flight from France, never to return.

In fact, King Louis had been agonizing over what to do for months by that point. It had been obvious since November the previous year that France was in the grip of a constitutional crisis every bit as serious as the one in 1788 and 1789 that had preceded the first Revolution when the Paris parlement had refused to back the reform packages presented to them unless the Estates-General was called. To him, the fact that history seemed to be repeating in some degree was a deeply ominous omen, and as much a danger as an opportunity. On this, his instincts were to be proved correct, but his inner circle led by Queen Marie Antoinette, the Comte d’Artois, the Comte de Conde and other key members of his court urged him to seize the opportunity to, if not overturn the republican Assembly entirely, then at least regain some semblance of political power.

On the 5th of April, he finally gave in to the constant urgings of those around him and made his move. In the morning, decrees were printed, promulgated and circulated around Paris of the King’s shocking decision: Brissot had been dismissed as Prime Minister, on the basis that he clearly no longer had “the will of the people” behind him as he had no majority on the floor of the Assembly and no sign of obtaining one. That in itself was eyebrow-raising and likely would have provoked unrest, but Brissot was sufficiently unpopular by then that there was still a chance that the King could have been successful in his scheme, and Brissot would have gone quietly, had he not added a second, far more controversial clause to his decree.

Claiming that if Brissot didn’t have the “will of the people”, as the Constitution required the Prime Minister to have, then no one did, Louis declared that the decision to appoint Prime Ministers – and Ministers in general – thus defaulted back to the King, and he declared with this returned power that the Duc du Richelieu was the new Prime Minister, with other Ministers to follow in due course. Richelieu was a man of little public stature at that stage outside being a notable royalist and had no particularly standout qualities beyond one outstanding one: unswerving loyalty to the monarchy. A close confidant of the Queen’s, he had been a royal attendant from a young age and had been with Louis through thick and thin throughout the entire First Coalition War. It was, in short, a royal coup.

In Paris, the news hit like a case shot exploding over the city. After several hours of bewilderment in which people at first struggled to believe that the King had gone so far, realisation began to dawn that, yes, Louis had undertaken a coup right underneath their noses. Spontaneously, the various Anti-Monarchy Clubs – spearheaded by the New Cordeliers – began to meet and the dormant National Guard units of the city reactivated themselves. Fear of a royalist army marching on the city and a repeat of the Battle of Paris was thick in the air that evening, and the people of the city organized and collected arms en masse in preparation to defend themselves. Paris was mobilizing for a second Revolution.

An emergency meeting of the Assembly was called that same afternoon, but few paid heed to the stern speeches and defiant decrees passed on the flood of the chamber that day. Everyone to the right of the Girondins was laying very low, not wanting to get caught up in the increasingly febrile mood of the city, and everyone to their left was out on the streets of Paris and many no longer recognized his authority as Prime Minister. In truth, no one inside the chamber did so either, as after a few perfunctory denunciations and registrations of concern as to the King’s blatant power-grab, focus on the Assembly floor soon turned to the question of who was to replace Brissot as Prime Minister, with various Girondin candidates putting up their hand. However, out in the streets, these were not the questions that were animating the ever-growing crowds and mobilizing the Anti-Monarchy clubs to act as the tocsin bells rang throughout the city. It was time for action.

The increasingly well-armed mob only grew in size throughout the evening, and by seven o’clock, an enormous crowd had filled the Place du Hotel de Ville – the same site that had seen the heaviest fighting during the Battle of Paris seventeen years before – and overflowed onto the surrounding streets. Estimates vary wildly in size, but credible ones put it at well north of a hundred thousand people who had poured out onto the streets of Paris. Spontaneous rounds of La Marseillaise – no longer the national anthem – and cries of “down with the Bourbons!” dominated the air, but those later became mixed with “down with the Gironde!” and even “death to the compromisers!”. With the mood growing increasingly heated in the city and the National Guard quite clearly on the side of the mob, nerves inside the Tuileries grew about the intentions of the mob. Someone needed to take control.

At eight o’clock, someone did.

There were two notable absentees from the debates in the chamber: Danton and Corday. Unbeknownst to almost all, they were in fact inside the Hotel de Ville, holding secret conversations with, of all people, the American Ambassador, who had indicated to them early in the afternoon that he wished to meet urgently with them. Like the famous secret meeting with Lafayette, this meeting has been the fodder for many conspiracy theories down the years about American involvement in French republican history, but in truth, this meeting was far less secret: Danton and Corday had resolved that Brissot needed to go and the monarchy had to fall, and they had agreed that in that event, Danton would take the Presidency and Corday would become Minister of Defence. All that changed on the 5th of April was that both now had assurances that the Americans would actively support the new Second Republic in any war declared on France, so long as France was not the aggressor.

By eight, however, that meeting was finished, and an excited hush fell over the massive crowd as a door opened and out strode two giants of the First Republic: Georges Danton and Charlotte Corday. Both were dressed in full National Guard uniform, complete with decorations in Corday’s case, and were wearing tricolour cockades. Two horses were quickly found for the pair, as it was obvious now that they would be leading this makeshift army. In a moment often-reproduced and dramatized since, Corday is said to have mounted her horse and held the bloodstained tricolor flag from Lyon aloft – although it is not at all clear how it was brought to her – and called:

“Citoyens, le Boucher du Marseille essaie de nous prendre notre liberté. Alors, Gardes et Gardées, marchons!” [4]

Thus, by eight-thirty, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred thousand men and women, armed with everything from the new cartridge-firing breechloader muskets to shovels and rocks, marched out of the center of Paris and southwest, with Danton and Corday at their head. Their destination: Versailles…

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[1] Of course OTL history clearly demonstrates otherwise; the successful women’s march on Versailles in October 1789 was one of the great turning points of the Revolution that set in motion all the forces that would push it to ever-increasing radicalization for the next four and half years. But the author doesn’t know that.

[2] This is the original OTL name of the guillotine, which has hung around here rather than being attached to poor old Joseph Guillotin. Without the Terror, the guillotine/louisette is seen as the honorable and humane method of execution that it was always intended to be (certainly much more humane than what it replaced), without the horrible political connotations attached to it in OTL.

[3] These economic reforms are basically the same as the Directorate’s reforms from 1796 – 1799 OTL that had a similar stabilizing effect on the French economy and provoked similar public ire, I don’t know enough about that period to craft something more novel.

[4] “Citizens, the Butcher of Marseille is trying to take away our liberty. Therefore, National Guards, march!”