When the King Took Flight

The great movement of the Enlightenment, the surge of intellectual emancipation and reevaluation that had blossomed among the cultural elites of the major cities of eighteenth-century Europe, had been very distant indeed for the people of Varennes. Perhaps it was only with the institutional transformations of the Revolution itself that Immanuel Kant's "motto of the Enlightenment," sapere aude - dare to know and to understand for oneself came to have any real meaning for the great mass of small townspeople and villagers of provincial France. It is only in the light of this accrued sense of self-confidence and of identity with the nation as a whole that we can understand the actions of men like Drouet and Sauce and the various municipal leaders throughout the region during the crisis of June 21-22.

We will probably never know for certain how and when Louis made the momentous decision to take flight from Paris. The night he actually escaped from the palace he left behind on his desk a declaration written in his own hand containing a whole litany of grievances, justifying his decision to flee the capital and to cease cooperating with the Revolutionary leaders. He complained bitterly of all the royal powers that had been stripped from the throne by the National Assembly: direct control over the army, over diplomacy, over provincial administrators; the right to issue pardons; and indeed the power to reject outright any law of which he disapproved.

His [Louis XVI's] correspondence with his foreign minister, awkward and a bit clumsy at times, revealed nevertheless an able grasp of the complexities of international relations. He carefully followed the revolutionary events in the American colonies, and he measurably contributed in developing a policy of French intervention, in part to "support an oppressed people who have come to ask my help," but above all to direct a blow at England, "the rival and natural enemy of my house," for its past "insults to the honor of France." Yet he had always relied heavily on the advice and decisions of the two elder councilors who had directed and tutored him since he first became king, the counts Maurepas and Vergennes. With the successive deaths of his two mentors in 1781 and 1787, with the fiscal crisis of the 1780s becoming ever more intractable, with the intrigues and infighting among his remaining ministers intensifying, the king turned nervously from one adviser to another and seemed increasingly overwhelmed by the tasks at hand.