Champ de Mars massacre

After Varennes

When the royal family was brought back from the Flight to Varennes on 25 June 1791, the Assembly had already suspended Louis XVI from his functions. The question was what to do with him. The king had left behind a declaration disowning the work of the Revolution, and in the clubs and the popular press a republic, unthinkable a month earlier, was openly discussed.

The majority of the Assembly, anxious to finish the constitution and to keep the monarchy it was built around, chose a fiction: the king had been carried off. On 15 July it ruled that he could not be put on trial for the flight and laid the blame on those who had organised it, above all the Marquis de Bouillé. That night the Jacobin Club resolved to send a petition, drafted by Brissot, asking that Louis be replaced “by all constitutional means”. The next day, when the Assembly confirmed its decision, the Jacobins withdrew it — and most of the deputies in the club walked out to found a rival society in the former convent of the Feuillants, next to the Assembly’s hall.

The petition on the altar

The Cordeliers, the club of Danton and Camille Desmoulins, would not let the matter drop. On Sunday 17 July crowds went out to the Champ de Mars, the great parade ground in front of the École Militaire where, a year earlier, the Festival of the Federation had been held around an Altar of the Fatherland. There, on the altar, a new petition was drawn up. It asked the Assembly to treat the king’s flight as an abdication and to call a new constituent body to judge him and to organise a new executive power. Thousands signed it through the afternoon.

The day had begun badly. Early in the morning two men were found hiding under the platform of the altar — a wigmaker and an old soldier with a wooden leg. Suspected of some plot, they were killed by the crowd and beheaded. Their deaths gave the Assembly and the city authorities their reason to act.

Martial law

The evening of 17 July 1791

Under a law of October 1789, the city could proclaim martial law by hanging a red flag from the Hôtel de Ville; crowds then had to disperse when summoned. In the early evening the mayor, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, had the red flag raised and set out for the Champ de Mars with battalions of the National Guard under Lafayette. They came onto the field with the red flag carried before them. Stones were thrown from the crowd and at least one shot was fired at the guardsmen; the Guard answered with volleys — by some accounts first into the air, then into the crowd.

How many died has never been settled. The city’s official report spoke of about a dozen; the radical press of far more; historians have mostly put the figure at around fifty. What was clear was who had fired on whom: the Revolution’s own citizen militia, led by its hero, on a crowd of Parisians who had come to sign a petition.

The reckoning

Repression followed. The authorities arrested radical agitators and pursued journalists; Marat went into hiding again. Danton left Paris and crossed to England, returning only in September; Desmoulins went into hiding, and his newspaper stopped appearing. Robespierre, who had stayed with the Jacobins, found shelter that evening in the house of the carpenter Maurice Duplay on the rue Saint-Honoré, where he lived, with one short break, for the rest of his life.

The Jacobins survived their split. Most of the affiliated societies in the provinces stayed loyal to the mother club rather than go over to the Feuillants. The Feuillants, led by Barnave, Duport and the Lameth brothers, held the upper hand in the Assembly for its last weeks and used them to revise and complete the constitution, which the Assembly adopted on 3 September; the king swore to it on 14 September. An amnesty followed, and the fugitives came back.

Why it matters

For the radicals, the Champ de Mars was the day the Revolution’s own militia shot down the people of Paris, and it split the patriot camp in two: those who wanted to stop the Revolution at a constitutional monarchy, with the king restored, and those who no longer trusted him. Lafayette and Bailly, the heroes of 1789, never won back their popularity. Lafayette gave up his command in October 1791, and Bailly left the mayoralty in November. Two years later, on 12 November 1793, Bailly was guillotined on the Champ de Mars itself, the scaffold set up there to recall the day.

The question the petitioners had asked — whether France could keep a king who had tried to run away — was answered a year later, when Paris stormed the Tuileries on 10 August 1792.