The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son

The Dauphin, in his plain linen dress and bonnet, hid at the bottom of the carriage under Madame de Tourzel’s gown. To attract less attention, the carriage made several turns around the nearby streets before waiting near the Tuileries for the king and queen. ‘We saw Monsieur de la Fayette pass close by us, going to the king’s coucher,’ recalled Marie-Thérèse. ‘We waited there a full hour in the greatest impatience and uneasiness at my parents’ long delay.’ Eventually, to her alarm, ‘I saw a woman approach and walk around our carriage. It made me fear we were discovered’. However, it was her Aunt Elisabeth, disguised as a nurse to Baronne de Korff. ‘On entering the carriage she trod upon my brother, who was hidden at the bottom of it; he had the courage not to utter a cry.’

At last the king was able to make his escape through a secret passage to Marie-Antoinette’s room and then down the staircase, straight past the guards, and out of the main palace entrance. For over two weeks before this, a friend, the Chevalier de Coigny, had visited the Tuileries each evening in similar clothes to those planned for the king’s escape. The guards, seeing the same corpulent figure in a brown and green suit, grey wig and hat, assumed this was the Chevalier de Coigny once more, and let him pass. With uncharacteristic cool, Louis even stopped in full view of the guards to tie up one of his shoe buckles. He had left a declaration behind in his rooms at the Tuileries, revealing why he had felt compelled to leave Paris. He argued that the country had deteriorated while he had not been in control; the deficit was ten times bigger, religion was no longer free, and lawlessness was commonplace. He called upon all Frenchmen to support him and a constitution that guaranteed ‘respect for our holy religion’.

Everyone in the escape carriage was waiting for Marie-Antoinette. Just as she ventured out of the palace, another carriage passed right in front of her. It was Lafayette and some guards on their nightly security round. She stepped back quickly, pressing herself against a wall. They had not seen her, but she was so shaken that she mistook her route through the palace and was soon lost in a warren of narrow dark passages. For almost half an hour she frantically tried to get her bearings while at the same time avoiding the armed guards patrolling the corridors.

Meanwhile, Lafayette approached the carriage again, as he left the palace. To their relief, he did not stop to check the passengers; it was not uncommon to see carriages waiting in the Petit Carrousel. When the queen finally made her escape, the king was so delighted, wrote Madame de Tourzel, that he ‘took her in his arms and kissed her’. Fersen urged the horses on cautiously and the carriage moved forward, slipping out of the Tuileries unnoticed.

At last they made their way through Paris, and once through the customs post discarded their ‘escape’ coach for the especially built berline. Unfortunately, at the next change of horses Fersen had to leave the party. The king feared that if their escape were discovered, it would make their position untenable if a foreigner had escorted the royal party to the border. With the cool and capable Fersen now gone, they were much more vulnerable. The three bodyguards riding on top were junior officers, more used to receiving orders than giving them, and leading the expedition was the king, a man not noted for his decisive action. The berline, smartly painted in green, black and lemon and drawn by six horses, with its lavishly appointed interior, ‘a little house on wheels’, was the sort of vehicle that would draw attention to itself as it trundled through the countryside.

Everything went as planned. Six fast horses were waiting at every staging post and by early morning, with Paris now several hours behind him, Louis smiled to think of his valet at the Tuileries, entering his bedroom and raising the alarm. ‘Once we have passed Châlons there will be nothing to fear,’ he told Marie-Antoinette with great confidence in his waiting troops. However, the berline was three hours behind schedule. Apart from the delay in leaving the palace, some of the relays had taken a little longer than they had planned. Worse still, while crossing a narrow bridge at Chaintrix, the horses fell and the straps enabling the carriage to be drawn were broken. They had to improvise a repair but more precious minutes were lost. None the less, they passed Châlons successfully at around five in the afternoon. Their armed escort should be waiting for them at the next stop: Pont de Somme-Vesle.

As they approached the town, their eyes discreetly scanning the horizon from behind the green taffeta blinds, there were no soldiers in sight. The village was silent. The king did not dare knock on the doors to find out if the troops had been waiting there. He sensed something had gone terribly wrong. Had the escape plan been discovered? Were their lives now at risk? ‘I felt as though the whole earth had fallen from under me,’ he wrote later.

The soldiers had, in fact, arrived in Pont de Somme-Vesle early in the afternoon under the leadership of the Duc de Choiseul. As they waited in the village for the king, the local people became alarmed at the sight of so many armed men. Since the peasants assumed that the soldiers were there to enforce the collection of overdue rent, a huge crowd gathered, armed with pitchforks and muskets, preparing to fight if necessary.

When the king had still not arrived by late afternoon, Choiseul had panicked. He feared that the king’s escape had been foiled somewhere on the road and that the armed peasants would attack his men. Rashly, not only did he give orders that his own men must disperse but also passed these instructions to the other staging posts down the line. ‘There is no sign that the treasure will pass today,’ he wrote. ‘You will receive new instructions tomorrow.’ Barely half an hour after Choiseul’s departure, the king’s berline drove into the village.

Without its armed escort, the carriage wound its way for a further two hours along the country road to the next town, Sainte-Ménehould, the anxious passengers inside still daring to hope that all was not lost. When they arrived, once again, there was still no evidence of any dragoons. At last, Captain d’Andouins, who had been in command of the soldiers in this village, approached the berline. The captain told the king briefly that the plan had gone awry but he would reassemble his troops and catch up with the king. Unfortunately, as he moved away, he saluted the king.

The vigilant postmaster of the village, one Jean-Baptiste Drouet, noticed that the captain saluted the person in the carriage. Even more surprising, as the carriage departed, he thought he recognised the king leaning back inside. Drouet sounded the alarm. A roll call of drums summoned the town’s own National Guard, who stopped the king’s soldiers leaving the village.

By this time, on the streets of Paris there was commotion as news of the daring escape spread. ‘The enemies of the revolution have seized the person of the king,’ Lafayette announced, and gave orders that the king must be found and returned at once to the capital. A dozen riders were found to spread this message quickly throughout France. Meanwhile, at Sainte-Ménehould, Drouet had obtained permission from the local authorities to set off at speed and detain the berline.

In the lumbering berline, the royal family continued their way ‘in great agitation and anxiety’. By eleven o’clock that night they were approaching Varennes, just thirty miles from the border and safety. Unknown to the royal party, their driver had been overheard giving instructions to take the minor road to Varennes and this had been passed on to Drouet. With the pursuit closing in on them, they stopped, as arranged, in the upper part of Varennes for their fresh horses. These were nowhere to be seen and the postilions – responsible for the horses – refused to take the tired horses any further. A dispute began between the postilions and the drivers of the coach. In desperation, the king, queen and Madame Elisabeth stepped out, frantically searching in the pitch black for the new horses themselves. These were in fact in the lower part of the town, beyond the River Aire, being held by officers who had no idea the king was so near. Just at this point, Drouet came racing past the carriage, and went straight to find the mayor of Varennes to alert him to the royal fugitives in his village.

The king finally persuaded the drivers that the horses must be in the lower part of the village and the berline set off down the steep slope. Suddenly there was a jolt. ‘We were shocked by the dreadful cries around the carriage, “Stop! Stop!” Then the horses’ heads were seized and in a moment the carriage was surrounded by a number of armed men with torches,’ recalled Marie-Thérese. ‘They put the torches close to my father’s face, and told us to get out.’ When the royal party refused, ‘they repeated loudly that we must get out or they would kill us all, and we saw their guns pointed at the carriage. We were therefore forced to get out’.

As alarm bells resounded round the village, the royal party was led to the mayor’s house, up a narrow, spiral stairway to a small bedroom where they were detained. ‘My father kept himself in the farthest corner of the room, but unfortunately his portrait was there, and the people gazed at him and the picture alternately,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse. They evidently did not believe Madame de Tourzel, who ‘complained loudly of the injustice of our stoppage, saying that she was travelling quietly with her family under a government passport, and that the king was not with us’. As the accusations became increasingly confident and acrimonious, the king was obliged to admit the truth. During the night, as the news spread through the region, hundreds of armed National Guards began to arrive, some with cannon, making escape increasingly impossible. Eventually, at around five in the morning, two agents of Monsieur de Lafayette arrived. They presented the king with a decree from the Assembly ordering his return to Paris.

‘There is no longer a king in France!’ Louis declared as he heard the decree, in effect demanding his arrest. Marie-Antoinette was less accepting. ‘Insolence!’ she declared. ‘What audacity, what cruelty,’ and she threw the document on the floor. She was overcome by rage and despair, by the bungling and lack of decisiveness, as events had slowly shaped themselves into disaster. When the agents of Lafayette put pressure on the king, saying Paris was in uproar over his departure, women and children might be killed, Marie-Antoinette replied, ‘Am I not a mother also?’ Her anxiety for her two children was her paramount concern.

The royal family tried to play for time. Surely General de Bouillé would send a detachment to rescue them? As the king’s young daughter points out, they could so easily have been carried off to the frontier ‘if anyone had been there who had any head’. However, by daybreak all they could hear was the sound of some six thousand people gathering outside, jeering and demanding that the king turn back. At last, at seven in the morning, ‘seeing there was no remedy or help to be looked for’, wrote Marie-Thérèse, ‘we were absolutely forced to take the road back to Paris’.

It took almost four terrifying days in the stifling heat to make the dismal and humiliating return journey under heavy guard. The crowds lining the roads back to Paris were aggressive and threatening; their mood was unpredictable. The people wanted to see the king, so the windows were open, the blinds drawn back; they were ‘baked by the sun and suffocated by the dust’. ‘One cannot imagine the suffering of the royal family on this luckless journey,’ wrote Madame de Tourzel. ‘Nothing was spared them!’ On top of their carriage were three of their bodyguards, handcuffed in fetters and in danger of being dragged down and killed.

For the king it was a terrible defeat. Yet again, he had failed. He had failed as a king, and brought his country to revolution. He had failed as a husband to protect his wife: she was now subject to even worse unknown terrors. He had failed as a father to bring his precious children to safety. Travelling with his loyal wife, his devoted sister and his young children, he knew that any words of assurance to them were empty promises; events had moved beyond his control. And somehow the failures had piled up despite his best efforts. He had always tried to avoid bloodshed; he couldn’t bear anyone to be hurt on his behalf. Yet his very gentleness and compassion had led inexorably to this utterly terrifying point in their lives. ‘I am aware that to succeed was in my hands,’ he wrote later to General de Bouillé. ‘But it is needful to have a ruthless spirit if one is to shed the blood of subjects … the very thought of such contingencies tore my heart and robbed me of all determination.’

During the mid-afternoon, a local nobleman, the loyal Comte de Dampierre, rode up to salute the king, ‘in despair at the king’s being stopped’. The crowd were enraged at Dampierre’s royalist gesture and tried to pull him off his horse. According to Marie-Thérèse, ‘hardly had he spurred his horse, before the people who surrounded the carriage fired at him. He was flung to the ground … a man on horseback rode over him and struck him several blows with his sabre; others did the same and soon killed him.’ The scene was horrible, wrote Marie-Thérèse, ‘but more dreadful still was the fury of these wretches, who not content with having killed him, wanted to drag his body to our carriage and show it to my father’. Despite his entreaties, ‘these cannibals came on triumphantly round the carriage holding up the hat, coat and clothing of the unfortunate Dampierre … and they carried these horrible trophies beside us along the road’.

Worse was to come at Épernay, the following day. At one point the royal family were obliged to abandon their carriage to enter a hotel, struggling through a crowd of angry people armed with pikes ‘who said openly that they wished to kill us’, wrote Marie-Thérèse, shocked by their bloodcurdling threats. ‘Of all the awful moments I have known, this was one of those that struck me most and the horrible impression of it will never leave me … My brother was ill all night and almost had delirium so shocked was he by the dreadful things he had seen.’

Ahead, a hostile reception was waiting for them in Paris. Following orders from Lafayette, the people lining the streets kept their heads covered and remained absolutely silent, to show their contempt for this monarch who had tried to flee. Lafayette’s orders were so strictly observed that ‘several scullery boys without hats, covered their heads with their dirty, filthy handkerchiefs’, recorded Madame de Tourzel. As they made their way down the Champs-Elysées and across the Place Louis XV, it was like an unspoken, public decoronation, as the citizens of Paris refused to acknowledge the royal status of their king and queen.

The crowds were so great it was evening before they finally reached the Tuileries. As they stepped down from the carriage someone tried to attack the queen. The Dauphin was snatched from her and whisked to safety by officials as others helped the queen into the palace. Louis-Charles was becoming increasingly terrified at the violence targeted directly at the royal family. ‘As soon as we arrived in Varennes we were sent back. Do you know why?’ he asked his valet, François Huë, as he struggled to make sense of it all. He was not easily comforted and that night, once again, he was woken with violent nightmares of being eaten alive by wolves.

As the Dauphin fell into a fitful sleep, ‘guards were placed over the whole family, with orders not to let them out of sight and to stay night and day in their chambers’. The next day the Assembly provisionally suspended Louis from his royal functions. The once untouchable king and queen were now finally reduced to the powerless symbols of a vanishing world.

The king’s support collapsed after his abortive flight to Varennes. Those who had remained loyal to the monarchy now questioned the motives of a king who had tried to flee, exposing his people to the risk of civil war. Those who had opposed the monarchy had a concrete weapon: here was evidence that the king would betray his people. Imprisoned in the Tuileries, with little support in the Assembly or outside it, in September 1791 the king reluctantly signed the new constitution. The once supreme Bourbon ruler was now, by law, no more than a figurehead, stripped of his powers.

Louis still clung to the hope that this would mark an end to the revolution and that France would settle down as a constitutional monarchy. Yet when he inaugurated the new ‘Legislative Assembly’ in October, demands for still further change gathered momentum. Conflicts grew between the moderates and the extremists in the Assembly. The key battlegrounds were over the growing number of émigrés and the clergy. What measures should be taken to protect France from the émigrés who might be plotting counter-revolution? How could the clergy who had refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the constitution be brought into line?

The king found himself facing a crisis in November, when the Assembly introduced a punitive decree: any priest who had not signed the oath would lose his pension and could be driven from his parish. This was presented to the king for his approval under the new constitution. As crowds gathered menacingly outside the Tuileries demanding that he sign, Louis wrestled with his conscience. His only remaining power was a delaying veto. If he used this he would infuriate the Assembly and the Parisian people, but how could he approve such a measure when the constitution promised ‘freedom to every man … to practise the religion of his choice’? The king vetoed the decree.

The news outraged deputies at the Assembly. The extremists, largely drawn from a political club known as the Jacobins, sought to limit the king’s power still further. Maximilien Robespierre was not a member of the Legislative Assembly, but was highly influential in the Jacobin Club and could exploit its powerful network throughout the country to influence opinion. Although he was not a good speaker, his supporters considered him eloquent and he was a skilled strategist, whose passionate appeals for patrie and virtu stirred political activists. ‘I will defend first and foremost the poor,’ he declared, as he campaigned against the privileges of the nobility and the monarchy. He found support in other prominent republicans such as the barrister Georges Danton, leader of the extremist Cordeliers Club.

Those opposed to the monarchy could turn to militant journalists such as Camille Desmoulins and Jacques-René Hébert to whip up public opinion in their favour. Hébert was a zealot for the cause, and with killing cruelty, week after week in his journal, Le Père Duchesne, he stirred up loathing of the royal tyrants. They were dehumanised and turned into hate objects. The king, for so long the ‘royal cuckold’ or ‘fat pig’, was now ‘the Royal Veto’: an animal ‘about five feet, five inches long … as timid as a mouse and as stupid as an ostrich … who eats, or rather, sloppily devours, anything one throws at him’. Whereas the ‘Female Royal Veto’ was ‘a monster found in Vienna … lanky, hideous, frightful … who eats France’s money in the hope of one day devouring the French, one by one’. Marie-Thérèse was ‘designed like the spiders of the French Cape, to suck the blood of slaves’. As for ‘the Delphinus … whose son is he?’ The endless stream of vituperation soaked into the consciousness of Parisians. It became easy to see the royal family as the terrible Machiavellian enemy gorged from preying on innocent French people.

The queen, drawing on all the strength of her character, was indeed now playing a formidable, duplicitous role. Determined to save the throne, that autumn she charmed the moderates in the Assembly with her apparent support for the constitution, while she was in fact in secret correspondence with foreign courts and her devoted Fersen. Count Fersen had escaped to Brussels where he joined the king’s brother, Provence, and was devastated to hear of the royal family’s recapture at Varennes. ‘Put your mind at rest; we are alive … I exist,’ the queen reassured him as she adapted to life closely surrounded by spies and enemies; even when she went to see her own son, an army of guards would follow her. Her only hope, she said, ‘is that my son at least can be happy … When I am very sad, I take my little boy in my arms, I kiss him with all my heart and this consoles me for a time’.

While Marie-Antoinette was writing in code to her brother, the Emperor Leopold, asking him to support the French monarchy, Fersen went on a desperate diplomatic tour of European capitals. In February 1792 he risked his life in a daring mission to return to France in disguise to see the queen in the Tuileries. Despite their efforts, in March the Austrian Emperor Leopold II died suddenly, to be replaced by Marie-Antoinette’s nephew, Francis II. Marie-Antoinette could not be sure that the Emperor Francis would intervene on her behalf and feared betrayal.

By spring 1792 the new powers in France were growing increasingly militaristic, convinced that neighbouring countries would be forced to act against their own populations’ possible political awakening. Rumours were rife of an immediate attack against France by an alliance of Austrians and Prussians, supported by émigré forces. Soon there were calls upon all patriots to defend their country as the warmongering verged on hysteria. In April, France declared war on Austria. Marie-Antoinette’s position became intolerable. Many people were convinced that l’Autrichienne who wished to ‘bathe in the blood of French people’ was an enemy agent, betraying the nation. When the French offensive in the Netherlands went badly, fears mounted that the Austrians and Prussians would march on Paris and restore the ‘royal tyrants’.

Despite the pressures of war the Assembly continued to persecute the clergy. Any priest still loyal to Rome denounced by more than twenty citizens was to be deported to the French colony of Guiana, a fate which was certain death, since leprosy and malaria were endemic in the colony. This decree was sent to the king for his approval. After much heart searching and anguish, he again used his veto and refused to sign this decree.

The very next day, 20 June 1792, thousands of citizens, angered by the king’s use of his veto, gathered around the palace. ‘This armed procession began to file before our windows, and no idea can be formed of the insults they said to us,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse. ‘On their banners was written “Tremble Tyrant; the people have risen”, and we could also hear cries of “Down with the Veto!” And other horrors!’ Thirteen-year-old Marie-Thérèse witnessed what happened next. ‘Suddenly we saw the populace forcing the gates of the courtyard and rushing to the staircase of the château. It was a horrible sight to see and impossible to describe – that of these people with fury in their faces, armed with pikes and sabres, and pell-mell with them women half unclothed, resembling Furies.’ In all the turmoil, Marie-Antoinette tried to follow the king but was prevented. ‘Save my son!’ she cried out. Immediately someone carried Louis-Charles away and she was unable to follow. ‘Her courage almost deserted her, when at last, entering my brother’s room she could not find him,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse.

Meanwhile, the crowd surged upstairs armed with muskets, sabres and pikes. Madame de Tourzel describes the ordeal. ‘The king, seeing that the doors were going to be forced open, wanted to go out to meet the factionists and try to control them with his presence.’ There was no time. The doors to the king’s rooms were axed down in seconds and the crowd burst in, shouting ‘The Austrian, where is she? Her head! Her head!’ Elisabeth stood valiantly by her brother, and Madame de Tourzel describes her great bravery as she was mistaken for the queen. ‘She said to those around her, these sublime words: “Don’t disillusion them. If they take me for the queen, there may be time to save her.”’

The revolutionaries turned on the king and demanded that he sign the decrees of the Assembly. For over two hours, Louis tried to reason with them. He pointed out that he had acted in accordance with the constitution and that in all conscience he believed his actions were right. At the insistence of the crowd, to prove his loyalty to the revolution, he wore a bonnet rouge, the symbol of liberty, and toasted the health of the nation. After some hours, it became clear that the king would not yield.