The events of June 20 ignited the anger of the Royalist Party and the Constitutionalists toward the Paris mob and those directing it from behind the scenes. The trousered militants had breached the Tuileries more than once, humiliated the royal couple, delivered petitions through violent illegal action, and marched under arms. All of this brought fierce condemnation upon the Jacobins. Thus, the Constitutionalists joined hands with the court and launched a counterattack.

  Before long, Vergniaud and Isnard, who had incited the armed march, were indicted by the High Court. The judges declared that they had committed the crime of stirring up rebellion. Although deputies enjoyed political immunity, and the court could not pursue criminal charges unless eighty percent of the Assembly voted to lift it, the two men were still left disgraced for quite some time. Mayor Petion of Paris, who had failed to respond effectively, and the acting prosecutor Manuel were removed from office as well. As for Danton, he had resigned as Prosecutor of Paris three days earlier. Under worsening conditions, Brissot, Roland, and their circle had no choice but to adopt a defensive posture for the time being and to meet the looming crisis with caution.

  At No. 5, Place Vendome, in the mansion of a banker’s widow, Brissot, Condorcet, Vergniaud, Ducos, Isnard, Guadet, Gensonne, Barbaroux, as well as the fallen former Minister of Finance Claviere and the former Minister of War Servan, were gathered in an emergency meeting to discuss their strategy.

  Among Brissot’s faction, several key figures were absent. The Roland couple, having moved out of the residence of the Minister of the Interior, had returned to Lyon to visit their daughter, whom they had not seen for half a year, and were preparing to bring the child back to Paris to be raised there. The carefree Petion accepted an invitation from a beautiful noblewoman and went with her by boat to a country estate outside Rouen to escape the summer heat. As for Danton and Manuel, they clearly did not belong to the same camp as the people in the room. It was only because they shared a common enemy that they were forced into the same coalition at all.

  “We were sold out by Danton!” Isnard slammed the table in fury. “Under the original plan, Danton’s Cordeliers had to show the court the people’s hard power!”

  At this, Vergniaud shot Isnard an unhappy look. When he saw that no one else spoke, he could only close his mouth and swallow his irritation at his friend’s phrasing.

  The so-called “hard power of the people” was a euphemism. Put plainly, it meant spilling blood inside the palace, killing a few people, forcing Louis XVI to yield, and bringing down the Constitutionalists cabinet. But matters went the other way. The King displayed extraordinary courage when facing the mob and won cheers from many onlookers. Then came the counterstroke of the Royalist Party and the Constitutionalists, and Brissot’s group lost considerable ground both in the Jacobin Club and in the Legislative Assembly.

  “Whether it is Danton, Desmoulins, Marat, or anyone else in the Cordeliers, none of them can be trusted,” Condorcet set the tone at once. As a nobleman with refined manners, he had long despised that vulgar son of a Champagne peasant, especially the lewd gaze Danton cast upon Condorcet’s beautiful wife.

  Brissot, seated on the bench, still said nothing. He waited quietly for his friends to finish, even if all they did was vent their frustration. For the Jacobins, June 20 had indeed been a real defeat. Not only had the Constitutionalists regained their former advantage and returned to forming the government, but the Royalist Party and the army also began to stir, seeking to remove the King, Queen, princess, and Dauphin from the Tuileries, where they were effectively under popular supervision.

  In Rouen, Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt wished to escort the King into his own force, the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, because it was loyal and reliable. General Lafayette proposed taking the King to the Forest of Compiegne, where the Army of Moselle, under his command, would protect the royal family. In addition, Marshal Luckner of the Army of the Rhine openly declared his support for Lafayette’s proposal; he and the mayor of Strasbourg jointly wrote to the Tuileries, urging that Louis XVI be granted sufficient protection.

  What gave Brissot some relief was that Louis XVI, after showing courage for three or four hours on the day of the disturbance, became foolish once again. The King rejected all these suggestions without hesitation. Under the influence of Queen Marie, he believed that these military strongmen were in fact attempting to kidnap him, the King of France, in order to pursue military dictatorship.

  And Lafayette, most of all, was the least reliable.

  The thorny question before Brissot now was this: with his group’s political prestige sharply diminished and its strength far below what it had been, how could they escape their present embarrassment as quickly as possible, restore the trust of the people, the Assembly, and the court, and ultimately win back the right to form the central government?

  Condorcet, who had kept silent, suddenly said, “One month ago, someone said something in my house that I believe is a true maxim: ‘The first step of a revolution is to distinguish who is our enemy and who is our friend.’”

  Brissot’s mind stirred. Of course he knew who had spoken that line. He had been invited to that salon dinner hosted by Marquis de Condorcet, and in truth nearly everyone in the room had been present at the time.

  Ducos, warm-blooded and blunt, took up the academician’s thread. “There is no doubt our enemies are the counterrevolutionary royalists and the Constitutionalists. As for friends, every Jacobin member ought to be our ally.”

  Brissot looked toward Vergniaud. After hesitating for some time, Vergniaud finally said, “My friend Ducos, politics is not so simple. The Royalist Party backed by the Tuileries and the Constitutionalists centered on the Feuillant Club are full of contradictions and, most of the time, openly hostile to one another. And inside our Jacobins, factions proliferate and answer to no single line. That includes us, the Robespierre group, the Cordeliers group led by Danton and Marat, and Andre’s separate military faction.”

  The moment his words fell, Brissot interjected, “Then let us return to Andre’s second question: who is our primary enemy at present, and who can we win over and unite with!”

  Guadet, Gensonne, and Barbaroux agreed that the Constitutionalists centered on the Feuillant Club were the greatest enemy at present. They not only held the power to form the government, but also commanded a majority in the Legislative Assembly. More importantly, Lafayette and Luckner controlled the two principal border armies in the north, nearly 100,000 men. As for the royalists, most had fled abroad last year or retreated into private life. The political strength still inside the country was pitifully small; even with the Tuileries behind them, they could not amount to a serious political force.

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  As for potential partners, Brissot’s group first ruled out the Robespierre faction. Over the question of war abroad, months of polemics had already led to an open rupture. Moreover, in the failed June 20 affair, Brissot suspected that Robespierre had persuaded Danton to sabotage things in secret, causing the ferocious Maillard to refrain from killing and to spare the unarmed royal couple.

  “Although I do not oppose treating the Cordeliers as political allies, so as to improve our standing among the Paris trousered militants, experience and hard lessons tell us that such street ruffians and urban scoundrels may be used to a limited extent, but they can never be trusted,” Marquis de Condorcet stated his position.

  The others nodded. In the June 20 affair, Brissot’s faction had provided Maillard, Santerre, Legendre, and the rest with 150,000 in political funds, and had also created all kinds of conveniences for the trousered militants within the Legislative Assembly and at the Paris City Hall. In the end, however, they were stabbed in the back by Danton, the gangster who stood aside and played his own game.

  As for cooperating with Andre, matters had been pleasant enough. That orphan from Reims, trained by Sister Sophia, was far more honest and reliable than the crafty peasant’s son Danton. When negotiating terms and striking bargains, he was sharp and unyielding; but once an agreement was reached, Andre would execute it seriously and honor the alliance.

  Even if there were small frictions behind the scenes, they would not affect the larger picture. When Andre struck back at the former cabinet over the reduction of subsidies for the Paris police school, he stopped his corruption investigation of the deputy police director aligned with Brissot’s faction as soon as Roland withdrew the government order.

  “The price of working with Andre is too high.” This was the quiet anxiety of Claviere and Servan, especially the former Minister of War. He feared that Andre aimed to reach for the other two border forces as well, the Army of Moselle and the Army of the Rhine, and thereby control two thirds of the Kingdom of France’s main forces, becoming a military dictator in fact.

  In early May, Andre had been sent to the Army of the North as Plenipotentiary. The expectation had been that Marshal de Rochambeau, with his high prestige, would restrain Andre’s expansion of power inside the army. Yet, astonishingly, the old marshal resigned almost at once, leaving Andre to control every major and minor affair of the Army of the North. In less than one week, the entire army nearly became the Plenipotentiary’s one-man domain.

  At the time, many people came to complain to Brissot, arguing that Andre’s power was too great and would inevitably harm the politics of liberty and democracy. Yet Brissot continued to express firm support for Andre, and then came the Army of the North’s great victory in the north in June. It was precisely that victory over the Austrians that allowed Brissot’s faction to pass safely through the first major political crisis after the outbreak of the foreign war.

  But among politicians, friendship is a fiction; only interests are real.

  On the second day after the June victory report reached Paris, Brissot persuaded the Assembly to send two more Plenipotentiaries to the Army of the North. In name, they were to help Andre share the burden of military affairs; in reality, they were meant to dilute his enormous influence. Who would have thought that the moment the two new Plenipotentiaries arrived at the front camp, two hours later Andre kicked them back into Lille to “enjoy themselves,” barring them from all military matters, under the fine pretext that they were to help the Army of the North organize provisions and logistics, and that the responsibility was extremely important.

  Of course, it was not only Brissot’s faction that wished to curb the Plenipotentiary’s power. In the Legislative Assembly, there were many who envied Andre. A deputy once wrote to the commanders of the left wing and the right wing, General Fardel and General Beauharnais, urging them to be vigilant against the military dictatorship that Plenipotentiary Andre was said to be imposing within the Army of the North.

  Yet several days later, General Beauharnais suddenly fell under investigation by a military tribunal. It was said he was accused of poor command, having delayed the left wing’s advance on Mons and allowing an Austrian infantry division to escape in large part. In the end, General Beauharnais admitted that he had indeed missed the moment and was relieved of his command by the Plenipotentiary. Not long afterward, the War Ministry appointed Beauharnais again and sent him to serve with the Army of the Rhine. At Andre’s suggestion, General Hoche, his own trusted man, succeeded Beauharnais as commander of the right wing.

  As for General Fardel, he unexpectedly received a special commendation from the army headquarters. Rumor had it that he handed over to Plenipotentiary Andre the letter the deputy had written to him. Thus, General Fardel was not only pardoned but continued to be trusted, becoming a strong contender to be the next commander of the Army of the North.

  …

  Brissot’s political calculation was exactly this. Almost every time Andre cooperated with others, no matter the environment, he could always keep his footing with elegant flexibility among multiple fragile interests at once, maximizing his own advantage without anyone noticing. Over time, Andre’s power had swollen to a level that both allies and enemies found hard to believe. Even the deputies of the Gironde who had once been close to him were beginning to complain about him, calling him greedily terrifying, like a vampire.

  As Brissot thought of it, a sharp pain rose in his head. While he slowly pressed his fingers between his brows and at his temples to relax, a rapid knocking sounded at the door outside.

  Vergniaud, as something like a half host of the villa, hurried over and opened it. A messenger stood there and handed him a letter from Charleville-Mezieres.

  “Damn it.” Vergniaud tore it open and his face changed at once. He quickly shut the door, raised the letter to the room, and said, “Two days ago, Lafayette abandoned his post and is traveling from the Army of Moselle headquarters to Paris!”

  …

  Far away in the Lille camp, Andre was also watching Lafayette’s every move. In fact, even before Vergniaud received that secret letter, Andre had learned the news two days earlier. This was thanks to the Academy of Sciences’ remarkable device, the semaphore telegraph. From Charleville-Mezieres to Lille, a distance of roughly 200 kilometers, the message took only four or five hours to reach the headquarters of the Army of the North.

  Andre had long expected Lafayette’s departure. He even instructed the civil and military officials of the Ardennes and the Marne not to block it, even if Lafayette were to lead the Army of Moselle south toward Paris. In reality, Lafayette left the camp almost alone, with only one aide-de-camp and a few guards from Paris.

  This, instead, left Andre deeply disappointed.

  That General of the White Horse had courage, but not enough resolve. His mind was still packed with old, outdated notions and restraints, and they forced him to shrink from a decisive gamble. In truth, much of Paris’s power had already returned to the hands of the Constitutionalists. If Lafayette had been willing to lead 20,000 men south to Paris, he could have controlled the capital entirely.

  But Lafayette stubbornly chose his ridiculous chivalric virtue once again. He returned to Paris with “clean hands,” and in doing so he also squandered, for the last time, the precious chance history had offered to the Constitutionalists.