In late October, the various envoys dispatched by the Foreign Affairs Committee set out one after another for their respective destinations—Prussia, Denmark, the United Provinces, and the Kingdom of Great Britain. These ambassadors, ministers, and special envoys would execute the foreign policy André had drafted: to make every preparation for a European war in 1792.

  Among the four heads of mission, André’s appointment of Talleyrand provoked the fiercest controversy. Even inside the Foreign Affairs Committee there were many objections. Thuriot privately advised André that Talleyrand was absolutely unreliable. André only smiled and replied, “I only need him to carry out my arrangements. As for anything else, there is no need to examine it too closely.”

  That was 1791; no one yet understood the lame Talleyrand’s outstanding ability and astonishing gifts in diplomacy. In the end, André still overrode dissent and held to his proposal. To encourage Talleyrand to perform his diplomatic duties properly, he even approved a special fund of 100,000 livres, with no need for expense review.

  Moreover, André instructed the property notaries and testamentary lawyers on the Marne side to recognize Talleyrand as the sole lawful heir of the elder Bishop Talleyrand, entitled to a Champagne estate in Reims and various real properties, with a total value exceeding 200,000 livres. By the end of the year, Talleyrand allowed his mistress, Madame de Flahaut, and his illegitimate son, little Charles, to move together to the Champagne estate in Reims; as for himself, he preferred a splendid stage like Paris.

  …

  Just as Pétion, Danton, and André had hoped, Bailly, without warning, chose in mid-October to resign the office of Mayor of Paris. Since Bailly had once joined General Lafayette in producing the bloodshed on the Champ de Mars, Parisians did not feel much regret at the scholar-mayor’s voluntary resignation—despite the fact that, for most of Bailly’s tenure, six hundred thousand citizens of Paris had enjoyed sufficient and cheap bread, public order had been broadly sound, and employment was not, on the whole, catastrophically bad.

  The mayoral election was set for early November. Because the two major factions among the Constitutionalists failed to coordinate their interests—and because both Barnave and General Lafayette wanted the mayoral chair—they jockeyed against one another and refused to yield. Although Lafayette, by force of strength, secured the nomination within the Feuillants, the Constitutionalists were already demoralized by the infighting.

  Then the Tuileries intervened. Fearing that, if Lafayette won, he would become in effect a French Cromwell, Queen Marie lost her head and, in the King’s name, instructed all royalists loyal to the Crown to cast their ballots for the moderate Jacobin Pétion. (A historical event.)

  In the final election, Pétion defeated Lafayette by 6,728 votes to 3,126, and thus became the second Mayor of Paris. Enraged by the court’s shameless maneuver, Lafayette resigned all his posts and withdrew to his estate in seclusion; Barnave, likewise disappointed, announced his departure from Paris.

  Two weeks later, in the election for the chief and deputy Paris prosecutor, the Jacobins won again by a wide margin: Danton and Manier respectively secured the offices of Paris prosecutor and deputy prosecutor. Thus the top tier of the Paris municipal government was entirely in Jacobin hands—Mayor Pétion, Prosecutor Danton, and Deputy Prosecutor Manier.

  At Madame Roland’s salon, since André did not attend, General Dumouriez, in commenting on this great victory, said instead, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is less a victory for us Jacobins than a display of André’s power. Look carefully: Pétion and Danton are the dictator of Reims’s inseparable intimate allies outside the Legislative Assembly; and that stubborn Manier is nothing but a claw that André can set to work at will.”

  Most people laughed the provocation off. Brissot, however, sensed a profound danger, and he redoubled the pace of his actions within the Legislative Assembly.

  …

  It must be explained that, because of the King’s flight, the Legislative Assembly’s position was extremely difficult. The worsening economy and the quarrels of interest among the factions were secondary; the more decisive factor was the émigré nobles’ counterrevolutionary activity, which placed France under the collective hostility of almost all Europe’s monarchs, Britain excepted.

  In October, the King’s brother Comte d’Artois, Prince de Condé, and Duc de Bourbon publicly protested Louis XVI’s approval of the French Constitution of 1791. In other words, the émigré princes opposed the only method by which France might obtain national reconciliation. Overseas royalists had long declared that the King could not surrender the rights of the old monarchical system. Their protests spread throughout the country and exerted enormous influence among those who supported royal authority.

  Soon, officers of noble blood left their units, and rural nobles abandoned their chateaux. From Dunkirk on the Atlantic to the Alps along the Swiss border, whole companies and whole companies of officers and men fled toward the frontiers to form reactionary forces elsewhere. Those who delayed were sent agents from abroad to fetch them away; those nobles who refused to flee were threatened—told that when the nobles returned in victory, they would be degraded into the bourgeois estate.

  In the Austrian Netherlands and the neighboring electorates along the frontier, a so-called “émigré France” was organized. Under the protection, and even the support, of foreign courts, counterrevolutionary plots were openly laid in Brussels, Liège, Worms, and Koblenz. The governments of these states received envoys of the fleeing nobles, while France’s lawful envoys were either sent away or treated with cold contempt, and were even expelled with extreme rudeness.

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  Several states—Sweden, Russia, Sardinia, and Spain among them—openly declared, without the least disguise, that they were fully willing to serve the émigré nobles. Meanwhile the Prussian army proclaimed itself ready for war (though Austria refused military action). The Sardinian and Spanish armies extended their lines of alert to the Alpine and Pyrenean frontiers, and Gustavus III likewise assembled a Swedish force.

  At home, beyond the nobility, many clergy in the opposition camp used every means to act as internal accomplices for the émigrés. Priests—bishops in particular—employed all manner of fanatical religious methods to incite town and countryside against the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This propaganda produced precisely the results the bishops expected: by the end of the year, religious disturbances had broken out in more than ten provinces, with the Vendée offering the fiercest resistance.

  Brissot and his friends believed that the principal cause of these disorders was the anxiety created by the measures of Europe’s monarchs and by the émigrés’ intimidation. The only method was to pressure the kings by every means to recognize the Revolution—by persuasion when possible, by force when necessary—compelling them to disperse the émigré concentrations; and at the same time to strike their domestic accomplices, beginning with the refractory clergy.

  Thus, within the Legislative Assembly, to answer the émigré nobles’ mad assault upon France, with the support of André and other Jacobin forces, and with the tacit consent of many Constitutionalist deputies, Brissot and his friends, over the next three months, carried a series of major measures through the chamber:

  The decree of October 31, 1791, requiring Comte d’Artois and Comte de Provence to return to France within two months, or lose their rights of succession to the throne;

  The decree of November 6, 1791, requiring France’s ambassador in Vienna, Marquis de Noailles, to lodge a stern protest with Emperor Leopold II of the Holy Roman Empire and demand an end to all hostile acts against France;

  The decree of November 9, requiring émigrés to return before January 1, 1792, or be treated as suspects in conspiracy, with their estates seized and taken into state possession;

  The decree of November 29, stripping stipends from refractory priests who refused to swear acceptance of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; if they disturbed public order, local authorities were empowered to expel them and deprive them of their various qualifications;

  On the same day, another advisory motion, initiated by Deputy Condorcet in his personal name. As a core member of Brissot’s group, he asked the King to denounce the two electors within the German Empire, and other imperial princes who harbored fugitives, and to demand that these feudal rulers, within fifty days, end the émigrés’ frontier concentrations and the recruitment of forces against France. Otherwise, French forces would be entitled to carry out cross-border self-defense.

  At the other end of the Legislative Assembly, the Constitutionalists, lacking a leading core figure and thrown into chaos by the successive departures of Lafayette and Barnave, became a tangled mess. In the three committees they controlled—Justice, Finance, and Military—interlocking interests meant that no one truly answered to anyone else, and it became difficult to produce a bill that all could accept.

  The Justice Committee was led by the nose by Brissot’s group; the laws it passed in succession were all Jacobin proposals. The Military Committee appeared idle from day to day: without support from senior officers, and without sufficient funds, the committee members could not even command the troops in Paris. As for the Finance Committee, its work was worse still; like the Minister of Finance, Comte de Lacoste, they were helpless before the severe economic conditions of the moment.

  The mass flight of nobles caused consumption of luxury goods to wither day by day, unemployment to worsen, and the economic crisis driven by the continual depreciation of assignats to take effect. Strikes demanding higher wages and employment guarantees erupted one after another in Paris: seamstresses, gold- and silversmiths, carpenters, lacquerers, printers, hatmakers, and farriers all went out in turn.

  Fortunately, grain prices in Paris remained relatively stable. Thus, before winter arrived, the capital did not see any major upheaval. The provinces were worse: disturbances broke out frequently. By winter the situation deteriorated further—and continued for months.

  Within the Tuileries, the King and Queen, under close surveillance, were quietly pleased by the country’s miserable condition. Louis XVI and Queen Marie secretly approved Brissot’s camp’s war policy. In a letter to her lover, Comte de Fersen, the Queen wrote, “These fools do not realize that, if they take this step—if they threaten the electors—it will benefit us. If Austria strikes first, the European powers such as Spain and Sweden will inevitably be drawn into the vortex to protect their respective rights, and will most likely remain neutral and refuse to fight.”

  In other words, the Queen hoped to provoke a general armed intervention by the powers through a French initiative, thereby preventing unilateral action by the Holy Roman Empire (Austria) that might provoke other states’ displeasure.

  Since the failure of the émigré venture, the court had demanded that the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire carry out armed intervention against France, urgently pressing Vienna to implement the military threats issued at Pillnitz and to convene a congress of the powers to crush the Revolution as soon as possible. The King’s Austrian Queen wrote to her imperial brother, Leopold II, openly declaring: “Force has destroyed everything; only force can repair everything.”

  To bring the plot to success, the mistress of the Tuileries, together with the King’s cabinet ministers, argued at length and finally persuaded Louis XVI to divide the Jacobin measures passed by the Legislative Assembly into two categories. First, the decrees that might deprive the King’s two brothers of regency rights, that would issue a final ultimatum to the Elector of Trier and the Elector of Mainz, and that concerned negotiations with the Emperor—these the King ought to accept. Second, the various measures directed against émigrés and non-juring clergy—these must be vetoed.

  On December 9, Louis XVI followed the counsel of his Constitutionalist ministers, one by one. By his veto he rejected the decrees concerning the clergy and the émigrés, while continuing to call upon those royalists who could not return to France to return and serve.

  On December 14, the King appeared before the Legislative Assembly and declared solemnly that he “felt gravely insulted as the representative of the French people,” and therefore had notified the Elector of Trier that, before January 15, if he did not forbid French émigrés from assembling within his territory and cease all hostile demonstrations, he would be regarded as an enemy of France.

  5 chapters in advance of the Royal Road schedule. You can find it here:

  https://www.patreon.com/cw/wentaj

  free to read on Royal Road as always, so there’s absolutely no pressure — this is just for readers who want to be a little ahead and help me spend more time writing and researching this series.