THIS MOVIE FOLLOWS THE STORY AS USUALLY TOLD, IGNORING THE LIVERIES THAT TRUMPET THE OLD REGIME'S RETURN
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L'Evasion de Louis XVI (please scroll down) |
This drawing fits the sources:
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Harald Wolff |
A recent historian mentions them at last: "No one recognized the royal couple but everyone recognized the yellow liveries of the prince of Condé..." who 12 pages later turns out to be "The detested émigré leader of a counter-revolutionary army, and lord of numerous lands in the region..."
-- Le Roi s'enfuit by Timothy Tackett, 2004, pp. 101 and 89.
On another page the writer states that the king had chosen the liveries himself: "Louis had personally called Moustier [one of the guards] on June 17 and asked him to find courrier outfits for him and his two companions: yellow coats, leather trousers and round hats."
P. 84
Those facts are mentioned in passing, with no comment. Other historians leave out the liveries entirely.
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As well:
- Why didn't the royals take separate routes in ordinary vehicles, a method that would almost certainly have succeeded?
- The king's brother, travelling with an English passport and a single servant, left France the same day without incident, as did his wife and Axel von Fersen. When a year later the royalist writer René Chateaubriand and his brother tried to cross the frontier disguised as wine merchants, the problem they encountered came from a sleepwalking valet, not their disguises or passports. By the end of 1791 about 10,000 nobles had left the country, passing through Paris with no attempt to hide heading for the frontier.
-- Valet, Chateaubriand, Mémoires, ed. 1973; émigrés, 283-284 and Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution, pp. 128-129.
- The main difficulty was slipping out of the Tuileries palace, with its 2000 guards, servants and spies. That accomplished, the royals should have been even safer than the émigrés since they did not intend to cross the frontier. They had only to take different routes and blend into the environment by their vehicles and clothing.
Yet they travelled together — Louis, Marie-Antoinette, the Dauphin, the princess, their governess, Louis's sister, two chambermaids in a second coach and the three guards: 11 travellers, with a main coach that was not only colossal but painted in vibrant green and black or yellow and red. (Prints on the preceding page show the two versions.)
- Why leave out men whose presence would have been invaluable? The Count d'Agoult, who knew the route, was ready to come in the main coach and Fersen, an experienced fighter, to ride alongside it. Passionately in love with Marie-Antoinette, he would have given his life for the royal family.
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A Léonard creation / zoom |
- Why include Marie-Antoinette's hairdresser, Monsieur Léonard (who travelled by another route). In the provincial town the queen would need her own coiffeur, but he could have arrived next day.
- Why bring three guards when one sufficed to ride ahead to have relays prepare fresh horses? Choose subordinates who had been trained to follow orders but not take initiatives, who did not know the route and who had never fought when battle-hardened veterans were present?
"The King
[...] had asked Monsieur d'Agoult, head of the royal Guards, to give him three to carry letters to the princes, his brothers; ignoring their real destination, he chose the first that happened to be on hand. It would be an injustice to doubt their courage and devotion;[...] but accustomed by their status to perfect obedience, and having never been commanders themselves, such an enterprise was beyond their powers. They did not dare take an initiative, would ask for orders from the king that they would execute even at the peril of their lives, but they lacked the audacity essential to the circumstance in which they found themselves."
-- Madame de Tourzel, pp. 257-258
.- Why stagger 300 horsemen in striking uniforms along the last part of the route, terrifying the frontier population:
"The king had chosen to bring to our fields the thieving, hungry, outrageous cavalry of hussars and plunderers to spoil the life of France and assure famine under the hooves of horses."
-- Michelet
"Monsieur de Bouillé had placed the troops to protect the royal family in the following way: at Pont-de-Somme-Vesle, 40 hussards commanded by the Duke of Choiseul; at Sainte-Menehould, 40 dragoons commanded by Captain d'Andouins; at Clermont, 140 dragoons commanded by Count Damas. At Varennes, 60 hussards commanded by Mr. de Bouillé's son and at Dun, 100 hussars commanded by their chief, Mr. Deslon. »
-- Madame de Tourzel, p. 612 n.87
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The expedition is called "a miracle of recklessness," "an incomprehensible Odyssey."
-- "Recklessness," Michelet; "incomprehensible Odyssey," chapter heading of Varennes by Mona Ozouf, 2005.
The expedition posed a problem: Since the route passed through towns with radicalized populations, Louis had to take on the disguise as a commoner, and given the presence of his family (please read on) as a subordinate as well.* Yet he also had to persuade the émigré nobles massed at the border that he would restore the Old Regime in its entirety.
*As the accountant of the supposed baroness, really the governess in disguise.
The appearance of the unwarlike man in a brown coat and round hat, with Marie-Antoinette dressed as a maid and the children as ordinary, would confront their bedrock belief in a God-given hierarchy and suggest that this king would bring back only an adulterated version of the Old Regime.
Following tradition in its every detail would lessen that shock:
- Including the family in a spectacular coach with a second carriage in tow evoked centuries of royal convoys.
- Traditionally the governess could not be separated from the children without her consent. She would have ceded the place if asked, but that would have disrespected the ways of the past. Relegating a courtier of d'Agoult's importance to a seat next to the baggage and maids would have been still worse.
- Fersen could not accompany the coach because custom demanded that only a high-ranking Frenchman join the king on a mission of such importance, and he was Swedish.
- Monsieur Léonard was so identified with court coiffures that his very presence would indicate immutability.
But the two-carriage cortège would painfully contrast with former royal displacements. That is where the escort and liveries come in.
- The escort joining in group by group meant an increasingly spectacular march, with populations breaking the monotony of rural life as they always had, applauding the procession as it passed by. On reaching Montmédy the cortège would resemble the royal entries* that the surprised town would not have been able to prepare.*
- The bright yellow liveries mirrored those of the prince of Condé — cousin of the king, lord of the lands through which the coach passed and commander of the émigré army — broadcasted the Old Regime's return.*
*At the inquiry the guards stated that the choice was made by chance. But liveries identified nobles and that they, nobles themselves, should not know the liveries of the king's cousin is inconceivable. But what else could they say?
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Ensconced in their bubble,* surrounded by an entourage whose ignorance of the peasantry the art of the time portrays, the royals believed that the rural population remained attached to the God-given society and would welcome its restoration.
*Marie-Antoinette had often gone to Paris, but for festivities alone. Louis had left the court only twice, for his coronation at Reims and to visit the new port of Cherbourg (in 1786). The enthusiastic reception on these occasions did prove popular loyalty to the age-old ways — before the fall of the Bastille.
So the king would trade his commoner dress for this magnificent costume, make a traditional entry to Montmédy on a lovely June night and proclaim to the awed residents and delighted émigrés that the Old Regime was back.
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The liveries are the key to the epic. They...
- Announced to all eastern France (news travelling from market to market) the return of the Old Regime.
- Contributed to the fury that made rescuing the king impossible.
- Directed hate of the lord toward a ruler who until then was thought paternal, ending the monarchy's aura.
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The king's choices were rational from his point of view.
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what does not seem to fit,
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