"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," WROTE MICHELET.
But even historians who acknowledge the terror that the escort troops instilled pay no pay attention to the bright yellow liveries of the three guards who accompanied the coach.* That color recalled those of the hated lord of many of the lands through which the fugitives passed, and the leader of the émigré army whose invasion the population feared (the Prince of Condé).
*Michelet mentions the liveries briefly and the most recent historian implies that the king asked one of the guards to choose them (The King Takes Flight by Timothy Tackett, 2003, French version, p. 84). He then states that while no one in Varennes recognized the royal couple everyone recognized the liveries (p. 101) and that when questioned the guard who had chosen them said it was done by chance (p. 89). (What else could he say?)
These facts are given in passing, with no sense of their significance.
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The Evasion of Louis XVI (please scroll down) The movie skips the liveries because historians do.
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- Why didn't the royals take separate routes in ordinary vehicles, a method that would almost certainly have worked?
- Innumerable nobles had left since the taking of the Bastille. 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, who had organized the flight. A year later, the royalist writer René Châteaubriand and his brother tried to cross the frontier to join the émigré army as wine merchants (their problems came from a sleepwalking valet, not from their disguises or passports).
- Louis and Marie-Antoinette should have been safer yet, since they did not intend to cross the frontier. Taking different routes, wearing commoners' clothes and using ordinary vehicles, while the children travelled separately with their governess, seems almost foolproof.
Instead, they travelled together — Louis, Marie-Antoinette, the Dauphin, the princess, their governess, Louis's sister, three guards and two chambermaids — in two vehicles (a colossal coach, painted green and black or yellow and red* and a smaller carriage for the maids and baggage), plus two guards on horses and another riding on the roof: 11 travellers in all.*Images on the last page show both combinations. In either case the colors stood out.
- Why were men whose presence would have been invaluable left out? The Count d'Agoult, who knew the route, was ready to come in the coach and Fersen, an experienced fighter, offered to ride alongside it. Passionately in love with Marie-Antoinette, he would have given his life for the royal family.
The queen would need a coiffeur but given the number of émigrés who had settled beyond the border, others must have been able to create upscale looks.
- As for the guards, why choose subordinates who had not fought, were trained to follow orders but not take individual action and who did not know the route, when battle-hardened veterans who did know it had been suggested?
The King
[...] had asked Monsieur d'Agoult, aide-major of the royal Guards, two give him three to carry letters to the princes, his brothers ; and ignoring their real destination, he gave them the first three that happened to be on hand. It would be an injustice to doubt their courage and devotion;[...] but accustomed by their level 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, which 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 the escort?
- Since Louis wrote the commander to cancel it if he felt that it destabilized the population, he did not think it essential.
- Several hundred horsemen were staggered along the route after Chalons, to join the cortège as it passed by: That does not imply protection.
-- Madame de Tourzel, p. 612 n.87
- Didn't their striking uniforms make the unnecessary horsemen more obvious yet?
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A way that accounts begin: "The trip to Varennes was a miracle of recklessness," "An incomprehensible Odyssey."
-- Michelet, and the chapter heading of Varennes, the Death of Royalty by Mona Ozouf, 2005 (in French).
Historians admit that they are stumped.
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But if meant to announce the Old Regime's return to a population that still venerated traditional authority — thought Louis, isolated in Paris — that organization makes sense:
- The governess's official post meant that she could not be separated from the children without her consent. Though she said she would have given her seat to Agoult if asked, such a transgression would announce others to come.
- A similar reason explains Ferson's not riding alongside the coach: Traditionally only a high-ranking French noble might accompany the king on a mission of such importance, and he was Swedish.
- The presence of the queen's hairdresser meant the return of the ways of Versailles.
- The cortège would become increasingly impressive as each group of riders joined in. It would resemble the displacement of Louis's predecessors, spectacular and slow, with the population cheering as it passed.
- The huge, brightly-colored coach would be at the heart of that procession.
- The parade would culminate with a royal entry in the citadel of Montmédy on a luminous June evening, the escort in its dashing uniforms creating the show that surprise would have kept the town from preparing.
Historians agree that the fugue's success would have brought civil war. They explain the failure by ignorance of the change in mentalities since the fall of the Bastille, by Marie-Antoinette's habit of luxury, by the delay in meeting the escort, by its officers' mistakes and by bad luck.
They do say not that such was Louis's aim.
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