Excerpt from the book "Founders of Two Republics: Lafayette and Danton, 1787—1808"

Published in 1999

The Estates-General

As 1788 gave way to 1789, King Louis became more and more intransigent with regard to the demands made by the Estates-General. More and more, his ear was given over to the urgings of the arch-reactionary Comte d’Artois — his brother — who feared (with some ironic justification in hindsight) that making any questions on the questions of legitimate absolutism or on the question of privileges for the nobility would open the door to “Americanism” — a by-word, in his views, for degenerate mob rule. An exasperated Comte de Mirabeau, one of the early leaders of the Third Estate, is known to have remarked to Jean-Joseph Mounier that he was “more royalist than the King himself”. Disillusioned by Artois’ meddling, seeing his eloquent argumentation summarily ignored, and the King’s refusal to countenance any sort of accommodation on the question of representation for the Estates, Mirabeau announced in early January that he was taking a brief sabbatical to “consider his health”, and the torch for the cause of the Third Estate passed to the other public giant of the Estates-General: the Marquis de Lafayette.

Lafayette was already a national icon for his role — belated though it was — in the American Revolutionary War. French newsletters, pamphlets, and public gossip of the time tended to vastly exaggerate Lafayette’s role in the conflict, presenting his arrival as the critical turning point that took a war in the balance to a decisive victory against that most hated, ancient of enemies: the English. Unlike Artois, the French public viewed the American Revolution as an event to be celebrated and toasted and saw Lafayette as a conquering hero returning home. Lafayette’s diaries reveal that he was well aware that all this was untrue, and he was deeply uncomfortable with the adulation, but demonstrating some of the keen political instincts he found in America, he decided to ride, rather than correct, the wave, for he had a purpose in mind.

Almost immediately, Lafayette began making speeches that would not have been wildly out of place in the halls of the Cordeliers or Jacobin Clubs a year later. Outdoing even the sentiments of the sensational pamphlet “Qu’est ce que le Tiers-etat?” by the obscure monk Emmanuel Sieyès, he argued that the Third Estate — of which he was not a delegate — represented the only legitimate executive body of France. He called for the First and Second Estates to be dismissed, for all noble privileges to be ended, and for a new democratic Constitution to be promulgated on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. The speeches shocked the listeners — many had figured Lafayette to be an idealistic but otherwise mild-mannered noble, just like them, not an “Americanised” radical — and electrified the general population, amongst whom Lafayette was now second only to the Lord God himself in popularity.

Louis and Artois, naturally, counted amongst the former. Their mood deteriorated yet further when it was discovered that Jacques Necker, who had been Louis’s Finance Minister on-and-off for the last several years, had in fact been misrepresenting or outright fabricating part of his financial reports, culminating in a blatantly false accounting of the monarchy’s debts being released to the public. Necker was summarily dismissed — but Lafayette, sensing his moment, demanded a full accounting of the monarchy’s debts as far back as the Compte Rendu of 1781, alleging that it too was fraudulent — correctly, as later analysis would uncover. Incensed, Artois urged the Estates-General disbanded and Lafayette punished, but Louis was indecisive, stuck between his own outrage and his fear of triggering an uprising.

It was thus grimly ironic, from his point of view, that his subsequent actions set France inexorably on such a path…

The Revolution Begins

Today, most historians state that the French Revolution began officially on the 1st of February 1789, with the storming of the Bastile by the Bourgeois Militia of Paris. Hearing of this, Louis ignored the advice of Artois to crush the uprising by force and caved, giving in to Lafayette and the Third Estate’s demands. The next day, the Militia was reorganized by the National Assembly into the National Guard and Lafayette appointed its commander-in-chief, on top of his roles as Leader of the Assembly and Prime Minister. On this same day, Georges Danton volunteered for his local militia battalion for the Cordeliers district of Paris.

Unlike the regular French Army, the officers of the National Guard were elected, not appointed (a practice that continues to this day). However, while the vast majority of the elected officers of the first National Guard were bourgeois property owners, reflecting the roots of the National Guard as a bourgeois militia created to protect the capital from both invasion and from looting, the Cordeliers district was already known for its political radicalism and had played a significant role in the storming of the Bastile. Danton’s “noted political idealism, personal magnetism and razor-sharp wit” ensured he was elected as Commandant in the National Guard (equivalent to Major in most English-speaking countries).

The first few months of Danton’s time in the National Guard were not auspicious. A founding deputy of the Parisian Society of the Friends of the Constitution - later known as the Jacobin Club - he was initially far more aligned with the radical politics of Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat, and other future Montagnards than the bourgeois liberal politics of the Assembly. Furthermore, his physical condition was ill-suited to military work; the rest of the officer corps of the National Guard resented that this “fat, illiterate ogre” [2] was to be considered their equal and, in some cases, their superior. Danton himself disdained his fellow bourgeois officers, thinking them “more concerned with shopkeeping than protecting the people”, and railed against the property requirements for entry into the National Guard.

Danton’s relationship with Lafayette was a complex one from the beginning. Although Lafayette was nominally his superior as Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard, the Cordeliers Battalion under Danton remained largely autonomous, notably more radical and more representative of its poor sans-culottes population than any other district in Paris. Historians would later discover that Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Fabre d’Eglantine had been forging property deeds to allow impoverished men to skirt property requirements for joining the National Guard, though such requirements would soon become moot. Danton also vociferously opposed Lafayette’s decision to support the expulsion of Robespierre from the National Assembly in late August, believing it a betrayal of democratic principles, as well as the arrest of Jean-Paul Marat several days afterward for his call to violent insurrection against the Assembly and the Grand Châtelet. He railed against the “active vs passive citizen” distinction proposed by Mirabeau and Mounier in the Assembly, and excoriated Lafayette — highly unusual at the time — for allowing the resolution to come to the floor of the Assembly at all. It is during this time that Danton is known to have seriously considered leaving the National Guard, and he was instrumental in the founding of the radical Cordeliers Club in early September.

On his behalf, Lafayette appeared deeply suspicious of Danton, believing him to be a violent insurrectionary in waiting, and it was only his fear of triggering such an insurrection from the Cordeliers district which deterred him from expelling Danton from the National Guard or allowing the Grand Châtelet to break up the Cordeliers district and thus reduce Danton’s power. He wrote of the Cordeliers Club that they were “bloodthirsty terrorists in wait”, and in his diary appeared to be weighing up the possibility of declaring it a proscribed organization. He appeared to distinguish between Danton’s Cordeliers and Robespierre’s Montagnards, but his initial impressions were deeply negative and would take years to warm.

However, any incipient clash between Lafayette and Danton — the only man who could plausibly contest Lafayette as the most popular man in Paris — was circumvented by Lafayette’s “Ordre d’Egilisation” of 1 September, allowing all citizens of age eighteen or older to join the National Guard, entirely bypassing the property requirements imposed by the National Assembly. Danton would be one of the few officers in the National Guard to enthusiastically support this decision, and the Paris sections in which “Dantonist” sentiment was strong — in particular those with strong membership in the Cordeliers Club, which had quickly grown beyond the district itself — found membership in the National Guard swelling, even while the more conservative bourgeois battalions of the National Guard in other parts of France found both officers and rank-and-file deserting in droves. For the time being, Danton’s faith in Lafayette was restored.

The Birth of the Republic

The drastic change in the character and composition of the National Guard would have significant effects mere months later. By this stage, a farcical situation had developed whereby the Assembly would pass laws to one effect, and the King in Versailles would promulgate decrees that bore only vague, if any, resemblance to the laws upon which they were supposedly based. Worse than this seemingly dual governmental apparatus, one in Paris and one in Versailles, were rumors beginning in late September that Louis was considering suspending the Assembly, sacking Lafayette, and annulling many of the decrees passed since the Revolution had begun. Infuriated, calls had begun within Paris and the remaining radical members of the Assembly for a mass demonstration on Versailles to dissuade the King from taking such actions. Many of the most strident of such calls were made in speeches by Danton and other members of the Cordeliers Club. One such demonstration had already been attempted in October, but the King had refused to leave Versailles, and the marchers - largely women armed only with pots and broomsticks - had decided to disperse rather than take on the regular Army troops that had been deployed in defense of Versailles.

Worried that a second attempted demonstration would turn into an outright insurrection, in particular with the backing of the sans-culotte National Guard sections, but also deeply concerned about Louis XVI’s intransigence and mindset, Lafayette asked the King to come to Paris to make a speech to the Assembly reaffirming his commitment to constitutional monarchy and the Revolution. Instead, spurred on by his arch-reactionary brother, the Comte d’Artois, and believing that France’s financial situation had sufficiently recovered, Louis instead fulfilled the worst fears of the Revolutionaries: on the 15th of November 1789, he declared the Revolution to be “complete”, the Assembly to be dissolved and ordered the Army into Paris to “restore the natural order of things”.

The subsequent battle between the French Army and the heavily Dantonist Paris National Guard in the streets of Paris would be soon recognized as the opening battle of the French Civil War...

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Notes:

[1] "What is the Third Estate?"

[2] Danton was likely dyslexic; though he could definitely read and write he preferred not to do so, which is why very little survives that was authored by Danton himself. The derogatory comments on his physical appearance should speak for themselves.