Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1

A high official from whom the Abbé Edgeworth had requested permission to administer the Sacrament replied that he deemed the request of the Abbé and that of Louis Capet conformable to the law, which declared all forms of worship to be free. “Nevertheless,” added the official, “there are two conditions. The first is that you draw up instantly an address containing your demand signed by yourself; the second, that your religious ceremonies be concluded by 7 o’clock to-morrow at latest, for at 8 precisely Louis Capet must set out for the place of execution.”

“These last words,” writes the Abbé, “were said, like all the rest, with a degree of cold-blooded indifference which characterised an atrocious mind. I put my request in writing and left it on the table. They re-conducted me to the King, who awaited with anxiety the conclusion of this affair. The summary account which I gave him, in which I suppressed all particulars, pleased him extremely. It was now past ten o’clock, and I remained with the King till the night was far advanced, when, perceiving he was fatigued, I requested him to take some repose. He replied with his accustomed kindness, and charged me to lie down also. I went, by his desire, into a little closet which Cléry occupied, and which was separated from the King’s chamber only by a thin partition; and while I was occupied with the most overwhelming thoughts I heard the King tranquilly giving directions for the next day, after which he lay down on his bed. At five o’clock he rose and dressed as usual. Soon afterwards he sent for me, and I attended him for nearly an hour in the cabinet, where he had received me the evening before. I found an altar completely prepared in the King’s apartment. The commissaries had executed to the letter everything that I had required of them. They had even done more than I had asked, I having only demanded what was indispensable. The King heard Mass. He knelt on the ground without cushion or desk. He then received the Sacrament, after which ceremony I left him for a short time at his prayers. He soon sent for me again, and I found him seated near his stove, where he could scarcely warm himself. ‘My God,’ said he, ‘how happy I am in the possession of my religious principles! Without them what should I now be? But with them how sweet death appears to me! Yes, there dwells on high an uncorruptible Judge from Whom I shall receive the justice refused to me on earth!’ The sacred offices I performed at this time prevent my relating more than a few sentences out of many interesting conversations which the King held with me during the last sixteen hours of his life; but by the little that I have told it may be seen how much might be added if it were consistent with my duty to say more. Day began to dawn, and the drums sounded in all the quarters of Paris. An extraordinary movement was heard in the tower – it seemed to freeze the blood in my veins. But the King, more calm than I was, after listening to it for a moment, said to me without emotion: ‘It is probably the National Guard beginning to assemble.’ In a short time detachments of cavalry entered the court of the Temple, and the voices of officers and the trampling of horses were distinctly heard. The King listened again and said to me with the same composure: ‘They seem to be approaching.’ On taking leave of the Queen the evening before he had promised to see her again next day, and he wished earnestly to keep his word; but I entreated him not to put the Queen to a trial under which she must sink. He hesitated a moment, and then, with an expression of profound grief, said: ‘You are right, sir, it would kill her. I must deprive myself of this melancholy consolation and let her indulge in hope a few moments longer.’ From seven o’clock till eight various persons came frequently, under different pretences, to knock at the door of the cabinet, and each time I trembled lest it should be the last. But the King, with more firmness, rose without emotion, went to the door and quietly answered the people who thus interrupted us. I do not know who these men were; but amongst them was one of the greatest monsters that the Revolution had produced. I heard him say to his King, in a tone of mockery, I know not on what subject: ‘Oh, that was very well once, but you are not on the throne now.’ His Majesty did not answer a word, but returned to me, contenting himself with saying, ‘See how these people treat me. But I know how to endure everything.’ Another time, after having answered one of the commissaries who came to interrupt us, he returned and said, with a smile, ‘These people see poignards and poison everywhere; they fear that I shall destroy myself. Alas! they little know me. To kill myself would indeed be weakness. No, since it is necessary, I know how I ought to die!’ We heard another knock at the door – destined to be the last. It was Santerre and his crew. The King opened the door as usual. They announced to him (I could not hear in what terms) that he must prepare for death. ‘I am occupied,’ said he, with an air of authority. ‘Wait for me. In a few minutes I will return to you.’ Then, having shut the door, he knelt at my feet. ‘It is finished, sir,’ he said. ‘Give me your last benediction, and pray that it may please God to support me to the end.’ He soon arose, and, leaving the cabinet, advanced towards the wretches who were in his bedchamber. Their countenances were embarrassed, yet their hats were not taken off. And the King, perceiving it, asked for his own. Whilst Cléry, bathed in tears, ran for it, the King said, ‘Are there amongst you any members of the Commune? I charge them to take care of this paper.’ It was his will. One of the party took it from the King. ‘I recommend also to the Commune Cléry my valet. I can only congratulate myself on having had his services. Give him my watch and clothes, not only these I have here, but those that have been deposited at the Commune. I also desire that, in return for the attachment he has shown me, he may be allowed to enter into the Queen’s – into my wife’s service.’ He used both expressions. The King then cried out in a firm tone: ‘Let us proceed.’ At these words they all moved on. The King crossed the first court, formerly the garden, on foot. He turned back once or twice towards the tower as if to bid adieu to all most dear to him on earth; and by his gestures it was plain that he was then trying to summon his utmost strength and firmness. At the entrance to the second court a carriage waited. Two gendarmes stood at the door. On the King’s approach one of these men entered the carriage, and took up his position in front. The King followed and placed me by his side. Then the other gendarme jumped in and shut the door. It is said that one of these men was a priest in disguise. For the honour of religion I hope this may be false. It is also said that they had orders to assassinate the King on the smallest murmurs from the people. I do not know whether this might have been their design, but it seems to me that unless they possessed different arms than those that appeared it would have been difficult to accomplish their purpose, for their muskets only were visible, which it would have been impossible for them to have used. These apprehended murmurs were not imaginary. A great number of people devoted to the King had resolved on tearing him from the hands of his guards, or, at least, of making the attempt. Two of the principal actors, young men whose names are well known, found means to inform me, the night before, of their intentions; and though my hopes were not sanguine, I yet did not despair of rescue even at the foot of the scaffold. I have since heard that the orders for this dreadful morning had been planned with so much art, and executed with so much precision, that, of four or five hundred people thus devoted to their prince twenty-five only succeeded in reaching the appointed rendezvous. In consequence of the measures taken before daybreak in all the streets of Paris, none of the rest were able to get out of their houses. The King, finding himself seated in a carriage where he could neither speak to me nor be spoken to without witness, kept a profound silence. I presented him with my breviary, the only book I had with me, and he seemed to accept it with pleasure. He appeared anxious that I should point out to him the psalms that were best suited to his situation, and he recited them attentively with me. The gendarmes, without speaking, seemed astonished and confounded at the tranquil piety of their monarch, to whom, doubtless, they had never before approached so near. The procession lasted almost two hours. The streets were lined with citizens, all armed, some with pikes and some with guns, and the carriage was surrounded by a body of troops formed from the most desperate people of Paris. As another precaution, they had placed before the horses a great number of drums intended to drown any noise or murmurs in favour of the King. But how could such demonstrations be heard, since nobody appeared either at the doors or windows, and in the street nothing was to be seen but armed citizens – citizens all rushing to the commission of a crime which, perhaps, they detested in their hearts. The carriage proceeded thus in silence to the Place Louis XV., and stopped in a large space that had been left round the scaffold. This space was protected on all sides with cannon, and, beyond, an armed multitude extended as far as the eye could reach. As soon as the King perceived that the carriage was stopping, he turned and whispered to me: ‘We have arrived, if I mistake not.’ My silence answered that we had. One of the guards came to open the carriage door, and the gendarmes would have jumped out; but the King stopped them, and laying his hand on my knee, said to them in a tone of majesty: ‘Gentlemen, I recommend to you this good man. Take care that after my death no insult be offered to him. I charge you to prevent it.’ The two men answered not a word. The King was continuing in a louder tone, but one of them stopped him, saying: ‘Yes, yes, we will see to it; leave him to us;’ and I ought to add that these words were spoken in a tone which would have frozen me if at such a moment it had been possible for me to have thought of myself. As soon as the King had left the carriage, three guards surrounded him and would have taken off his garments, but he repelled them haughtily. He undressed himself, untied his neckcloth, opened his shirt and arranged it himself. The guards, whom the determined countenance of the King had for a moment disconcerted, seemed to recover their audacity. They surrounded him again, and would have seized his hands. ‘What are you attempting?’ said the King, drawing back his hands. ‘To bind you,’ answered the wretches. ‘To bind me?’ said the King with an indignant air. ‘No, I shall never consent to that. Do what you have been ordered; but you shall never bind me.’ The guards insisted; they raised their voices, and seemed to wish to call on others to aid them.

“Perhaps this was the most terrible moment of the direful morning; another instant and the best of kings would have received from his rebellious subjects indignities too horrid to mention – indignities that would have been to him more insupportable than death. Such was the feeling expressed on his countenance. Turning towards me, he looked at me steadily, as if to ask my advice. Alas! it was impossible for me to give any, and I only answered by silence; but as he continued this fixed look of inquiry I replied, ‘Sir, in this new insult I only see another trait of resemblance between your Majesty and the Saviour who is about to recompense you.’ At these words he raised his eyes to heaven with an expression that can never be described. ‘You are right,’ he said, ‘nothing less than His example should make me submit to such a degradation.’ Then, turning to the guards, he added: ‘Do what you will. I will drink of the cup even to the dregs.’ The path leading to the scaffold was extremely rough and difficult to pass. The king was obliged to lean on my arm, and from the slowness with which he proceeded I feared for a moment that his courage might fail; so that my astonishment was extreme when, arrived at the last step, he suddenly let go my arm and I saw him cross with a firm foot the breadth of the whole scaffold; silence, by his look alone, fifteen or twenty drums that were placed opposite to him; and in a voice so loud, that it must have been heard at the Pont Tournant, pronounce distinctly these memorable words: ‘I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are now going to shed may never be visited on France.’ He was proceeding, when a man on horseback, in the national uniform, waved his sword, and with a ferocious cry ordered the drums to beat. Many voices were at the same time heard encouraging the executioners. They seemed to have re-animated themselves, and seizing with violence the most virtuous of kings, they dragged him under the axe of the guillotine, which with one stroke severed his head from his body. All this passed in a moment. The youngest of the guards, who seemed about eighteen, immediately seized the head and showed it to the people, as he walked round the scaffold. He accompanied this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures. At first an awful silence prevailed; at length some cries of ‘Vive la République!’ were heard. By degrees the voices multiplied, and in less than ten minutes this cry, a thousand times repeated, became the universal shout of the multitude, and every hat was in the air.”

“It is remarkable,” writes Mr. Sneyd Edgeworth, the Abbé’s brother, “that in this account of the last moments of Louis XVI., the Abbé Edgeworth has omitted to relate that fine apostrophe, which everyone has heard, and which everyone believes that he addressed to his king at the moment of execution —

“‘Fils de St. Louis, montez au ciel!’

“The Abbé Edgeworth has been asked if he recollected to have made this exclamation. He replied that he could neither deny nor affirm that he had spoken the words. It was possible, he added, that he might have pronounced them without afterwards recollecting the fact, for that he retained no memory of anything which happened relative to himself at that awful instant. His not recollecting or recording the words is perhaps the best proof that they were spoken from the impulse of the moment.”

The Reign of Terror had now begun. Foreign armies were marching towards Paris in order to liberate the King from prison and replace him on his throne. The Republican Government replied by removing the head of the monarch whom it was prepared to restore.

During the Reign of Terror the Place de la Concorde, as it was afterwards to be called, might fitly have been named, not merely the Place of the Revolution, the title it bore, but the Place of Blood. In the terrible year of 1793 Charlotte Corday was guillotined on the 17th of July; Brissot, leader of the Girondists, with twenty-one of his followers, on the 2nd of October; Queen Marie Antoinette on the 16th of October; and Philippe Égalité, Duke of Orleans (father of Louis Philippe), on the 14th of November. Among the victims of the year 1794 may be mentioned Madame Élizabeth, sister of Louis XVI., who was guillotined on the 12th of May; Hébert and several of his most bloodthirsty associates, who, at the instigation of Robespierre and Danton, lost their heads on the 14th of March; Marat and members of his party, who followed a few days afterwards; Danton himself and a number of his adherents, with the heroic Camille Desmoulins among them, on the 8th of April; Chaumette and Anacharsis Cloots, together with the wives of some previous victims on April 16th; Robespierre, Saint-Just, and other members of the Committee of Public Safety, on July 28th; seventy members of the Commune who had acted under Robespierre’s direction on July 29th; and twelve other members of the same body the day afterwards.

One of the most eminent figures in the Girondist party, Lasource, exclaimed to his sanguinary judges, on receiving his sentence: “I die at a moment when the people have lost their reason; you will die the day they regain it.”

In reference to Saint-Just’s arrogance, Camille Desmoulins had said: “He carries his head with as much veneration as though he were bearing the Church Sacrament on his shoulders;” to which Saint-Just playfully replied: “And I will make him carry his head as St. Denis carried his.” St. Denis, the martyr, it will be remembered, is said, after decapitation, to have marched some distance with his head under his arm.

In the course of the two years over which the Reign of Terror extended (though its duration is variously estimated according to the political principles of the calculator) nearly 3,000 persons are declared to have perished on the Place de la Révolution; though this estimate would certainly be regarded by some as excessive, by others as inadequate.

In reference to the Reign of Terror, Victor Hugo calls upon the world “not to criticise too closely the bursting of the thunder-cloud which had been slowly gathering for eighteen centuries;” as though, from the earliest period, France had always been grossly misgoverned, to be suddenly governed in perfection from the time of the Revolution. It is the simple truth, however, that the Reign of Terror was the result, not of the natural development of the Revolutionary forces, but of threats from abroad, the presence, real and imaginary, of foreign agents in Paris, and the advance of the German armies with a view to the liberation of the king and the suppression of the Republic. It ought also in fairness to be remembered that if the Revolutionists made a free use of the guillotine, they abolished torture and the cruel methods of executions (such as beating to death with an iron bar) in use under the ancient monarchy until the moment of the outbreak. Nor can it be forgotten that at various periods of French history (the Massacre of St. Bartholomew is an instance) life has been sacrificed more copiously, more recklessly, and more wantonly, than during the worst excesses of the French Revolution. When many years afterwards it was proposed to erect a fountain on the spot where the scaffold of Louis XVI. had stood, Chateaubriand declared that all the water in the world would not suffice to remove the blood-stains which had sullied the Place.

Of those who suffered under the Revolution, many, such as Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, well deserved their fate, and none more so than the infamous Philippe Égalité, who, after playing the part of a democrat, and democratically voting for the death of his cousin the king, was himself, on democratic grounds, brought to the guillotine.

Writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes four years after Louis Philippe’s election to the throne, Chateaubriand reproached the reigning king with being the son of a regicide. Arguing that since the execution of Louis XVI., and as a punishment for that crime, it had become impossible to establish monarchy in France, Chateaubriand added: “Napoleon saw the diadem fall from his brow in spite of his victories; Charles X. in spite of his piety. To discredit the crown finally in the eyes of the nations, it has been permitted to the son of the regicide to be for one moment in the blood-stained bed of the murderer.” That Louis Philippe suffered this outburst to be published unchallenged has been regarded as a proof of his extreme tolerance in press matters.

Probably, however, he thought it prudent not to invite general attention to words which by a large portion of his subjects would have been accepted as true. It has been said by the defenders of the “regicide” that Philippe Égalité did his best not to be present at the sitting of the Convention when sentence had to be passed on the unfortunate king; and that he was threatened by his friends of the Left with assassination unless he voted with them for the “death of the tyrant.” However that may be, he took his seat among the judges by whom the fate of his royal kinsman was to be decided; and when it came to his turn to deliver his opinion, he did so in these words: “Occupied solely with my duty, convinced that all those who have attacked or might afterwards attack the sovereignty of the people deserve death, I pronounce the death of Louis.” Philippe Égalité had looked for general approval, and had voted in fear of that death which awaited him nevertheless, and which came to him in the very form in which a few months before it had been inflicted on the unhappy Louis. When his vote was made known, cries of indignation from all sides warned him that he had transgressed one of the great moral laws which are observed even by men who violate all others. A former soldier of the king’s body-guard, hearing of Philippe Égalité’s unnatural offence, resolved to kill him; but not being able to find him, killed another less guilty “regicide” in his place.

Very different was the feeling excited by the conduct of Philippe Égalité in the breast of the king himself. “I don’t know by what chance,” says the Abbé Edgeworth in his “Relation sur les derniers Moments du Roi,” “the conversation fell upon Philippe. The king seemed to be well acquainted with his intrigues, and with the horrid part he had taken at the Convention. But he spoke of him without any bitterness, and with pity rather than anger. ‘What have I done to my cousin,’ he exclaimed, ‘that he should so persecute me? What object could he have? Oh, he is more to be pitied than I am. My lot is melancholy, no doubt, but his is much more so.’”

Under the Directory, when the worst period of the Revolution was at an end, and the Republic itself was disappearing, the Place de la Révolution was called Place de la Concorde, and this name was preserved under the Consulate and the Empire.

At the time of the Restoration, when endeavours were made to revive in every form the associations of the old French monarchy, the name of Place de la Concorde was set aside for the original one of Place Louis XV., which, however, in obvious reference to the execution of Louis XV’s successor, was changed in 1826 to Place Louis XVI. It was at the same time decreed that a monument should be erected to the memory of the unfortunate monarch, but the decree was never acted upon.

Soon afterwards, in 1828, an order signed by Charles X. gave the place of many names to the town of Paris on condition that it should spend within five years, in completing the architectural and other decorations of the square, a sum of at least 2,230,000 francs.

After the Revolution of 1830 the name of Place de la Concorde was re-adopted; and the Municipality was proceeding as rapidly as possible with the works ordered under the previous reign, when the cholera broke out, causing to the town an expenditure which rendered it necessary to stop the completion of the improvements.

The sum to be applied to the purpose was afterwards reduced to 1,500,000 francs; and this sum was conscientiously spent, but without by any means finishing the design contemplated by the architects.

The fountains, with the Naiads and Tritons, and the eight statues representing in personification the principal sights of Paris, had been duly placed; and in 1836 the Obelisk of Luxor, a present from the Pasha of Egypt, was made the central ornament on the spot which had been successively occupied by the statue of Louis XVI. and the figure of Liberty.

It was not until 1852, under the Empire, that the objects which still on one side mark the limits of the Place were set up. A large number of bronze candelabra which were at the same time fixed in various parts of the square greatly increased at night its picturesqueness and its beauty. For the last forty years the Place de la Concorde has remained as it was under the Empire. The Republic of 1871 could scarcely think it necessary to return to the truly Republican name of Place de la Révolution, which had been preserved for some two or three years during the worst period of the Revolution; and to the embellishment of the Place there was nothing to add. It remains what our Trafalgar Square was once, with or without reason, declared to be – “the finest site in Europe;” less admirable, however, as a mere site, than for the admirable views of such varied kinds that it commands in every direction.

The history of the Place de la Concorde would not be complete without a record of the fact that it has been successively occupied by Russian and Prussian troops (1814); by English troops (1815); and again by Prussian troops (1871). It was the scene, too, in 1871 of a desperate struggle between the Communards and the troops advancing against them from Versailles.