In eighteenth-century Europe, to say nothing of addressing a King and Queen of exalted rank, even when facing the lowest noble knight, to call him by his bare name—without title or territorial style—was a naked insult, a slap in the face. The natural consequence was an honor duel to the death.

  Now that Louis XVI had become a drowning dog cursed by all, perhaps no one remained willing to fight for the honor of a French King already doomed to fall—except the nine hundred Swiss mercenaries at his side and a handful of loyal courtiers.

  After learning that André, as President, had compelled the court to accept the humiliating form of address, Louis XVI and Queen Marie chose silence. Perhaps they felt some regret. Perhaps they had come to understand that they should never have exploited the mercy André had once shown to the Princess, stirring trouble in secret and trying to provoke contradictions among the Jacobin factions.

  Only days earlier, a rumor had been spread outside the Tuileries, claiming that André had taken a fancy to the Princess and wished to represent the Jacobins in reaching a political reconciliation with the court. Naturally, that contemptible maneuver succeeded in enraging André. This time he did not counter it with another rumor. He answered with action.

  In fact, before August seventh, André’s attitude toward the uprising of the ninth had wavered between two roles: active participant, or bored spectator. In reason, he had always favored a dignified abdication for the King and Queen. But reality now told him that the opposition—the court—would never accept its own extinction. It would strike back by any means.

  In the end, the foolish court helped André make the decision most disastrous for them: he would take command of the uprising by every means available, humiliate Louis XVI and Queen Marie without mercy, and then erase the Bourbon dynasty from France’s history altogether. Once André decided on retaliation, his assault became a storm—sudden, violent, and pitiless. The humiliation now inflicted was only the beginning.

  From the eastern door of The Manège Hall to the covered walkway connecting to the Tuileries’ western gate, there were 265 steps. Do not doubt it—André had measured it himself. When the Paris Chief Provincial Prosecutor’s messenger used that secure passage again to submit a request for asylum for the two citizens and their family, André signed at once, brisk and cheerful.

  However, the young rotating President also listened carefully to the advice of Deputy Couthon and Deputy Carnot, and then declared, “Louis Capet and Marie Antoinette must receive the forgiveness of the people of Paris.”

  In other words, the former royal family had to come out through the palace’s main southern gate and, under the witness of tens of thousands of bayonets and spears, walk on foot to the Legislative Assembly to seek political protection.

  Marshal Maillé de La Tour-Landry and a small number of courtiers opposed this with all their strength. They wanted Louis XVI to rouse himself and, like the brave Bourbon kings of earlier ages, choose to die in the palace rather than yield and flee. For ten or twenty seconds, the old marshal’s words did stir the heavy King’s heart. But when Louis XVI looked again at his beautiful wife and his two beloved children, his old weakness returned. In the end, he refused the royalists’ plea to resist to the last.

  Poor Marshal Maillé de La Tour-Landry, after repeated persuasion by the attendants, finally loosened the hands with which he had clutched the King’s coat. The old soldier, loyal to the Bourbons to the end, now looked like a helpless child. He collapsed onto a sofa and wept bitterly. Only minutes later, more than ten Bourbon courtiers, completely despairing, carried the old marshal out together through a western side gate, escaping the Tuileries under mob siege.

  By André’s order, before the volunteer cannon opened fire, no one leaving the palace toward The Manège Hall—whether volunteer troops or spear units—was to be obstructed. The royal family alone was excluded. Even afterward, those who fled would not be pursued by law for any offenses connected to the night between August ninth and tenth.

  …

  At around nine o’clock, the Paris Chief Provincial Prosecutor Roederer led the royal family out of the Tuileries complex—no, rather, Citizen Louis Capet, Citizen Marie Antoinette, and their two children, Thérèse and Charles, accompanied by the children’s two nurses.

  As they reached the south gate, Roederer drew a sharp breath in secret, then ordered two blue-uniformed guards to open the iron doors. As the gate creaked on its hinges, the Chief Provincial Prosecutor glanced back and motioned the party to step back two paces. He himself, without the least fear, strode forward through the opened gate and faced alone the forest of spears and the cold glint of bayonets.

  The brave man shouted, “I am Roederer, Chief Provincial Prosecutor of Paris. By order of President André Franck of the National Legislative Assembly, I am leading Citizen Louis Capet, Citizen Marie Antoinette, and their two children, Thérèse and Charles, out of the Tuileries to submit to the questioning of the nation’s representatives!”

  The sans-culottes and the Marseille volunteers looked at one another in confusion. To them, the Paris Chief Provincial Prosecutor was nothing; the Paris Commune was the authority. But the name André Franck was thunder in their ears. For the volunteers, André was their great patron. Even so, it was one thing for a man to speak; it was another to demand, on nothing but words, that a path be opened for a tyrant.

  Fortunately, Roederer’s assistant hurried up with a document just signed by President André. After confirming it again and again, General Santerre—now commander of the National Guard—finally waved his hand and ordered the armed crowd behind him to open a road toward The Manège Hall.

  Thus, under the gaze of tens of thousands of Parisians, Louis XVI and his family stepped onto a road with no return. Behind them, the Tuileries, like Versailles before it, lost the Bourbons forever.

  It was not yet deep autumn in Paris, but the trees in the Tuileries garden had already begun to shed their leaves. Having finally escaped the mob’s entanglement, the family felt relief that their lives were spared. From first to last, only Marie Antoinette kept a composed expression, struggling to preserve the dignity of a Queen, even though in law she was no longer Queen of France, and her husband was no longer King.

  The young Dauphin had none of the adults’ burdens. He wrenched himself from his father’s large hand and ran into a patch of fallen leaves, kicking them in mischief until Princess Thérèse came to fetch him away.

  Louis XVI looked silently at the yellowed leaves and sighed inwardly. “So many fallen leaves—today they fall far too early.”

  In truth, the deposed King understood perfectly that since July, Le Figaro had been declaring that the rotten, decadent Bourbon court would not survive to Paris’s late autumn. André’s humiliations had only confirmed it. The only consolation was that his family was still together—and still alive.

  When he reached the familiar assembly hall, Louis XVI’s first words were a plea for help. In the open space at the center of the chamber, the former King cried again and again, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, I need your help—I ask you to stop a crime! I believe this is safer than anywhere!”

  No one stepped forward to answer him. Even those Constitutionalist deputies who pitied him did not dare speak. Everything depended on a decision from the rotating President on the dais.

  “As citizens of a free country, you have the right to the protection of the nation’s representatives,” André pronounced in lofty tones. As he spoke, he could not even be bothered to look down at the refugees standing beneath him.

  But a deposed King had no right to sit among the people’s representatives—not even in the visitors’ gallery. Under arrangements made by the clerks, Louis and his party were forced into a low, stifling little room beneath the dais. It had once been intended as the presiding officer’s rest room, but no rotating President had ever been willing to sleep there, and it had soon been converted into a press room.

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  Now Louis and his family could only watch the deputies’ deliberations through a wooden barrier. In truth, this cramped room had become their first real prison. Two formal-dressed police officers with swords were posted at the entrance to guard it.

  Suddenly, Roederer remembered something crucial: the former King’s private guard—nine hundred Swiss mercenaries—still remained in the palace, without any order from their employer directing them to withdraw from the Tuileries.

  Louis panicked at once and begged Roederer to plead with the rotating President, hoping to release his private guard from the palace. Two minutes later, Roederer returned with his head lowered. With a sigh, he told Louis, “President André says this will be your second punishment.”

  Before the words were even finished, a dense crash of musket and cannon fire came from the Tuileries. Under the leadership of the Marseille volunteers, more than thirty thousand sans-culottes were launching the assault. The spear mass looked unstoppable—and could not be stopped—though many seemed to hide behind the southerners from Marseille as they shouted and surged.

  At first, the Marseille men, with their Mediterranean heat, tried to speak to the red-coated Swiss in Proven?al French—a dialect as far from Parisian speech as one tongue from another—urging them to lay down their arms and celebrate together, dance, and make peace.

  But no matter how the southerners pleaded, the German-speaking Swiss stood like granite, unmoved. Even if their commander understood French, the Proven?al dialect was too hard to follow. After a long time, the two sides still talked past each other like hens and ducks. The crowd grew impatient. One rash man threw his spear like a javelin at the foreigners. It missed, but it startled the Swiss badly.

  Then, at a sharp whistle, the red-coated soldiers on the palace steps pulled their triggers. After a volley, several Marseille men fell without a sound on the garden square. The spear-men who had caused the disaster fled out beyond the walls without losing a single man, crying as they ran, “The Swiss are slaughtering Frenchmen!”

  “Revenge—victory, or death!” The Marseille volunteers screamed in grief, raising their weapons to avenge their brothers.

  Once the fighting began, the blue-uniformed National Guards in formation on the garden square had no choice. They had to support their compatriots without hesitation, turning muskets and cannon against the foreigners. Everything else could be argued after the battle.

  Joined with the volunteers, the Guards rolled out more than ten cannon. In an instant, shot howled and smashed into the palace. Explosions tore great holes in the walls. Each blast drew cheers and thunderous applause from the men and women besieging from afar.

  As the Guard cannon broke the Swiss line, the spear units surged forward again. Parisian patriots, men and women alike, rushed like madmen through the gaping breaches torn by solid shot and plunged into the palace interior. Unarmed spectators also joined in: some picked up crude wooden clubs and followed to “kill the enemy”; more ran bare-handed, shouting nonsense and swearing to destroy every “red coat” to avenge the Marseille dead.

  Deprived of the palace structure as a defensive anchor, the Swiss quickly began to fear. They fell back, then, within minutes, scattered like headless flies. It was futile. At every exit stood Guards or volunteers; any red coat who did not surrender at once was met by volleys and bayonets.

  “At least two thirds must be killed as an example.” That was André’s order to Commander Santerre. In other words, the Guard and the volunteers would accept no more than three hundred Swiss prisoners. The rest—

  Outside the walls, a band of militants dragged out more than thirty half-dead Swiss soldiers and prepared to execute them publicly. Among the crowd were those who pitied the foreign mercenaries; someone suggested sparing the wounded prisoners, but the speaker did not dare step forward. The executioners held sabers, spears, and axes, and blood still dripped from the blades.

  At a command from the field leader Maillard, weapons rose together. The executioners, like beasts driven mad, hacked into the Swiss who had already resigned themselves to death—blow after blow, flesh and blood flying—until the former defenders were chopped into pieces.

  Desmoulins was in the crowd. He tried desperately to rush forward and stop the atrocity in the name of law, but Fréron seized him tightly, dragged him back, and hauled him away.

  “Are you trying to die? Those men have blood in their eyes—they do not care who you are!” Fréron shouted.

  “One Swiss was my friend,” Desmoulins cried. “He once helped me drive off a ruffian near the Palais Royal. I only wanted—” He could not finish. Kind and weak, he squatted on the ground and wept.

  In his heart, the romantic idealist screamed, “No—this is not the revolution I wanted. The revolution should be understanding, tolerance, and liberty. It does not need blood, corpses, and executioners!”

  …

  By three or four o’clock in the afternoon, the gunfire from the palace side began to subside. Someone came to report that thousands had broken into the Tuileries and were looting freely. Almost everything that could be carried away—tableware, tea sets, oil paintings, chairs, candlesticks, bedding, pillows, chamber pots, even biscuit tins—had vanished without a trace.

  Even the clumsy great desk had its surface gold scraped away with knives. Mattresses too heavy to move were slashed apart with sabers, and feathers floated everywhere in the air. In what had once been the Queen’s bedroom, several prostitutes from the Palais Royal shamelessly took clients there, claiming it was “historic.”

  Including André, most deputies treated it as nothing worth noticing. By the law of the jungle, the victor had the right to plunder the defeated. Besides, the palace looked splendid, but most furnishings and ornaments were not truly valuable. The gold, jewels, precious paintings, and historic masterpieces had long since been hidden after the events of June twentieth.

  Louis XVI had accepted Lameth’s advice and ordered that all royal treasures be gathered and stored in a cellar beneath a courtyard on the western side. Once the volunteers and the National Guard took the Tuileries, André dispatched more than one hundred gendarmes and, in the name of protecting the assembly, took over security around that western courtyard.

  Some deputies felt genuine pain at the sight. They watched the magnificent palace shelled repeatedly, then raked by tens of thousands of bullets, and now ruined by countless looters with no sense of value. They hoped the rotating President would order it stopped. André merely shook his head and refused. From his mouth came a phrase, unusually clear:

  “Without destruction, there is no rebirth.”

  André glanced back at the shabby, airless press room. The two royal children slept quietly. Queen Marie, unable to resist fatigue, had finally fallen asleep as she held the young Dauphin. Only Louis, thick-skinned and untroubled, still gnawed on a leftover chicken leg. From time to time, the suspended King showed a brief flash of sorrow, wiping his greasy fingers again and again on his purple coat until the chicken leg was gone.

  On the left side of the dais, Brissot spoke in low tones with Roland, the former Minister of the Interior, who had arrived. It was recess; no law required guests to remain seated.

  Roland looked ill and coughed lightly now and then. He told Brissot, “The Legislative Assembly must be dissolved. It has become André’s perfect weapon for striking his enemies at will. First it was the Constitutionalists, now it is the King—who will be next?”

  Brissot glanced around warily and whispered, “We still have 401 deputies—above the legal minimum of three hundred. And our rotating President has already had the Guard and patrols strengthen protection for deputies. Unless André himself wishes it, no one can pull him down from the position of dictator of the assembly.”

  “Then offer him a temptation he cannot refuse,” Roland said with a smile. He added that Robespierre had just sent a letter through his landlord, the carpenter, to the former minister. In it, Robespierre stated clearly that he was willing to lend a hand in “persuading André to leave Paris.”

  “That hypocrite,” Brissot thought with contempt for the sanctimonious Incorruptible. Yet as a politician, he still accepted Robespierre’s offered “friendship.”

  “And Danton?” Brissot asked, touching the key point. Half of Paris’s power now lay in the hands of the Paris Commune, and Danton was its leading figure; moreover, he was said to be on good terms with André.

  “Give him a ministry—Interior, or Justice,” Roland replied. He had already arranged it. Though his wife Manon detested the idea, she ultimately submitted to the priority of “driving out the dictator” first.

  “It must be said in advance: Danton is a thorough swindler,” Brissot said. “Very well—give him what he is good at: the Ministry of Justice.”

  …

  At two o’clock in the morning, after a late-night meal, President André announced to the four hundred deputies and more than thirty guests the final matter of the session: where to place Citizen Louis Capet and his family, whose royal powers and status had been suspended.

  Perhaps from exhaustion, the deputies could not even be bothered to mount the lectern. They sat in dull silence, waiting for the rotating President to present the solution.

  “Then the Temple.”

  With that single decision from President André, the motion was passed at once by the entire assembly. Soon, he ordered the gendarmerie to escort Louis and his family to the Temple for confinement—a medieval French fortress. Ever since October 1307, when King Philip IV had, by vile means, sent Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, and more than one hundred other knightly leaders to their deaths there, the towered royal complex had been abandoned for nearly five hundred years. Now the Temple would become France’s royal prison.

  After the meeting ended, André sprang down from the dais and went to the clerks’ office to sign and endorse the motions passed that night. By chance, he noticed that his polished shoe had stepped on a fine purple ribbon—one Louis had apparently dropped when leaving the hall. Fleur-de-lis embroidered upon it had been smeared and discolored by the deputies’ chaotic footprints, and the once-bright lilies now seemed to have withered.

  André smiled. He flung his arms wide in excitement and shouted to Deputy Thuriot and Deputy Carnot as they approached him:

  “Long live the Republic!”