The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA by Deborah Cadbury Page A

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 counterrevolution? 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 practice 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, he was a skilled strategist, whose passionate appeals for “patrie” and “virtue” 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 favor. 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 dehumanized 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.” 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