Two days later, Lieutenant Colonel Berthier, having ridden in frantic haste from the Reims camp at the head of more than fifty light cavalrymen, finally reached the town of Moret. Producing a safe-conduct jointly signed by the President of the National Constituent Assembly and General Lafayette, Berthier ordered the local mayor and public prosecutor to release the King’s kinswomen at once.

  When those terrified old and frail women and children were at last brought out, each of them was on the verge of a nervous collapse. Their clothes were in rags, their stomachs empty; paying no heed at all to aristocratic decorum, they squatted on the grass and devoured every scrap of food and drop of wine the light cavalry had brought them.

  The next day, after a night of rest and the chance to wash and make themselves presentable, the royal ladies once more boarded their long-distance coaches. Under the escort of Lieutenant Colonel Berthier’s squadron of more than fifty light cavalrymen, they continued on their way. Several days later, near the south-eastern frontier, the convoy was stopped again in the city of Arnelle by several hundred sans-culottes. After a half-hour stand-off, the increasingly impatient Lieutenant Colonel Berthier simply ordered an attack. With sabres raised high, the cavalry charged; at the very first clash they scattered the rabble blocking the road.

  At dusk, Berthier stood on the French side of the frontier, watching the daughters of Louis XV—who were also the aunts of Louis XVI—leave the soil of France without the slightest trace of pity in his eyes and without a backward glance from them.

  Meanwhile, in Paris, Javert was complaining to André, asking why a Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor who had made it his mission to oppose the Bourbon dynasty would secretly help members of the royal family escape from France.

  André simply told his subordinate, “War is no place for women.”

  In terms of education, nobles and clergy stood far above the sans-culottes. As in Reims, once the local clergy had obeyed André’s orders and kept to their agreements with him, they received his protection and were spared harm; the same principle applied to noble families. By sending Berthier to rescue the royal women and children from danger, André was deliberately sending a positive signal to the outside world: that he was capable of mercy and compassion, and not the man-eating monster of rumour.

  As for the negative side-effects, they would amount to little more than provoking the deep displeasure of Marat’s faction. Ever since the Babeuf affair, André had long since parted ways with those people. Thanks to several rounds of mediation by Danton, they had, it was true, temporarily put their mutual grievances aside and even cooperated more than once, but it was in no sense an alliance.

  In the history of the French Revolution, the rough-hewn sans-culottes were destined to serve as cannon-fodder. Now they were led by Danton and Hébert; now they were manipulated by Robespierre. André, who held real military power as Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor, had no fear at all of attacks by that rabble. In times of famine, a few loaves of bread were enough to buy them off on the spot.

  In European history, apart from the brief episode of Athenian city-state democracy, politics in every country had always been dominated by a narrow elite—nobles, clergy, and intellectuals. In Paris, three years after the Revolution began, the people did indeed win the right to vote and to stand for election, and mass politics appeared in France for the first time. Yet after only a few short years, the Directory under Barras and then Napoleon’s First Empire would drag France back into a system once more dominated by elite rule.

  …

  Thanks to André’s quiet intervention, the royal ladies’ flight from Paris did not, as in the original course of history, stir up a political storm in the capital. The Cordeliers Club, under Danton and Marat, did not call upon the women of Paris and the sans-culottes to surround the Tuileries and the homes of other royal personages, nor did they launch endless campaigns of insults and intimidation against the high-born. Even so, life for Louis XVI remained far from easy.

  With Mirabeau’s sudden death, the Tuileries and the National Constituent Assembly lost their key intermediary and protector. Cabinet ministers, shaken and afraid, could only lament that “we are all going to be executed”. Egged on by agitators, the sans-culottes had long been launching personal attacks on the conservative deputies of the right, and the strength of the Royalist Party in the Assembly was now in steep decline; the moderate left had come to monopolise the legislature’s power to speak for the nation.

  On the other side, Lafayette tried to fill Mirabeau’s place in the minds of Louis XVI and the Queen. This “hero of two worlds” took seriously the political promise he had made to Mirabeau: he did everything he could to uphold the prestige of the Bourbon monarchy, and sent his most reliable officers to protect the Tuileries from disturbances by the sans-culottes. As always, however, most of the courtiers and leading members of the royal family saw Lafayette only as a “gaoler”, while Louis XVI grumbled that whenever there was trouble in Paris Lafayette was always slow and late to arrive.

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  The riot to which the King was referring had broken out a few weeks earlier in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, on the former site of the Bastille. That prison, symbol of the old regime and feudal monarchy, had been demolished by order of Paris City Hall and turned into a public dancing square. But the troubled times of the Revolution, coupled with the mass emigration of nobles and the wealthy, had ruined the livelihoods of many of the “heroes of the Bastille”—the artisans who once lived by making luxury goods for the aristocracy. Large numbers of them found themselves unemployed or half-employed; their families were worse off than before the Revolution, and they began to stir up unrest.

  At first, the local constables in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, assisted by a mobile squadron of mounted police, brought the situation under control and even arrested a group of ringleaders. But the ever-restless Duc d’Orléans began to fan the flames behind the scenes. He instructed his followers to denounce the police at the Constituent Assembly for “serious violations of the Declaration of the Rights of Man”, and the Prefecture was forced to release the rioters unconditionally. The Duke then sent his agents into the faubourg to distribute bread and wine and give inflammatory speeches, inciting the people to attack the “little Bastille”—the Chateau de Vincennes.

  Once several hundred people armed with pikes, muskets, and hammers had assembled in the streets, the situation was beyond the capacity of the police to handle. The National Guard was ordered out. Colonel Santerre, however, having accepted the friendly advice of his “well-wishers” at the Palais-Royal, dawdled on the march in the hope that the mob would disperse of its own accord before he arrived.

  Instead, the crowd swelled from hundreds to several thousand. The torrent of people terrified the National Guardsmen under Colonel Santerre; they refused to advance. The lieutenant colonel in command on the spot had no choice but to send for General Lafayette. After an hour, the white-horse General arrived at Vincennes. With fresh reinforcements behind him, he encircled the crowd around the chateau. Relying on his still-considerable personal prestige, he spent three exhausting hours remonstrating with the demonstrators. At last the hungry mob hoisted its flags, withdrew, and hurried home before nightfall.

  Yet the matter did not end there. Early the next morning, the people of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine marched to the Tuileries to hold further demonstrations and even tried to climb over the palace gates guarded by the National Guard. General Lafayette was roused from his sleep by his aides and rushed to the palace to relieve the situation. He dispersed the demonstrators and ordered the arrest of fifteen agitators. By that time, Louis XVI, the Queen, and the rest of the royal family had already spent 110 minutes in fear and anxiety.

  When he entered the palace, the exhausted Lafayette had to endure the King and Queen’s complaints and misunderstandings. The General refused to defend himself. He bowed silently before the royal couple and declared that he would strengthen the external defences of the Tuileries, pressing the Constituent Assembly to allow the King to recruit a private force of no more than 800 mercenaries.

  Thanks to Mirabeau’s tireless efforts, the National Assembly soon approved Lafayette’s proposal. But as Mirabeau lay dying, the extreme left pushed through a new resolution: a “Royal Volunteer Guard” would be formed in Paris from picked National Guardsmen chosen by the various provinces to defend the outer perimeter of the Tuileries, while the number of the King’s personal mercenaries would be cut from 800 to 200.

  Louis XVI and the Queen were convinced that Lafayette had been playing a double game behind their backs and came to hate this white-horse General all the more. Claiming ill health, the King refused to grant the Commander of the National Guard an audience.

  Three days after Mirabeau’s funeral, an uninvited guest came to André’s villa on the ?le Saint-Louis: the Marquis de Lafayette. In his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard, he brought an order of commission and a promotion decree from the Constituent Assembly. The Champagne Composite Regiment was to be expanded to brigade strength; Colonel André was promoted to the rank of brevet General and would continue to serve as the supreme commander of the Champagne Composite Brigade.

  This expansion of his command and promotion in rank were the political price André had bargained for in return for voluntarily resigning his prestigious post as a Paris prosecutor, “self-exiling” to Reims, and leading his troops to crush the rebellion there. Under Colonel André’s command, the unit had peacefully regained the “City of Kings” and quickly stabilised the political situation in Reims. Soon afterwards the Champagne regiment had devised and carried out a plan to annihilate the main force of the Ardennes bandits, driving the remnant back into the Ardennes Forest and vastly improving public security in the Marne. André thus quite naturally deserved to be rewarded.

  In the spacious, sunlit hall, André—now freshly changed into full uniform—solemnly accepted the commission and promotion decree from Lafayette’s hands. On examining the promotion, he noticed that the signature at the bottom was not that of the Minister of War, but that of the National Guard’s Commander-in-Chief, Lafayette.

  “Congratulations, my friend,” Lafayette said, stepping forward. Usually so cold and proud in manner, he actually smiled as he embraced André.

  When the formalities in the hall were over, André, as master of the house, invited Lafayette up to the drawing room on the second floor to talk in private and opened a bottle of genuine Scotch whisky from Judge Vinault’s collection to honour his guest.

  “You want me to come back to Paris and serve as your deputy?”

  Barely had he swallowed his first glass when André, taken aback, heard Lafayette extend the invitation. To become the First Assistant to the Commander of the National Guard was to hold powers far greater than those of the Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor: on paper, the post would give André authority to direct and deploy the urban National Guard units of all France.

  “Yes,” Lafayette replied with evident sincerity.

  Note:

  The General of the White Horse refers to Lafayette because of his habit of riding a white horse.