The king sacks his popular minister, and Paris takes to the streets
On Saturday 11 July 1789 Louis XVI dismissed Jacques Necker, his popular finance minister, and ordered him to leave France quietly. To Paris, already ringed by royal troops, it looked like the first move of a coup against the National Assembly. The news set off three days of rioting that ended at the Bastille, and five days later the king had to call Necker back.
Who pressed the king hardest to part with Necker (the queen, the Comte d’Artois or Breteuil) is still debated; the decision itself was Louis’s own.
Jacques Necker was a Genevan banker and a Protestant who had made a fortune in Paris before turning to public finance. As Director-General of Finances from 1777 to 1781 he paid for France’s part in the American war largely with loans rather than new taxes, and in 1781 his Compte rendu au roi, the first public account of the king’s finances ever printed, made him famous. He resigned the same year, when the king refused him a seat in the royal council.
In August 1788, with the treasury empty, Louis XVIFigure: Louis XVI. The king who called a meeting and lost a monarchy called him back. Necker was the minister of the Estates-GeneralEvent: Opening of the Estates-General. The day France’s three orders met for the first time since 1614: in December 1788 he persuaded the king to give the Third EstateIdea: Third Estate. Everyone who was neither priest nor noble, and who in 1789 claimed to be the nation as many deputies as the clergy and nobility together. To the public he stood for honest accounts and for reform. When he stayed away from the royal session of 23 June 1789, three days after the Tennis Court OathEvent: Tennis Court Oath. The day the deputies swore not to go home without a constitution, word spread that he had resigned, and crowds poured into the courtyards of Versailles until the king asked him to stay.
By then the court was preparing to take back control. From late June regiments were marched toward Paris and Versailles, roughly 20,000 men, many of them Swiss and German, under Marshal de Broglie. Around the queenFigure: Marie Antoinette. The queen France loved to hate and the king’s youngest brother, the Comte d’Artois, a court party pressed Louis to be rid of the minister it blamed for the Assembly’s defiance.
On the afternoon of Saturday 11 July a letter from the king reached Necker at Versailles. It dismissed him and asked him to leave the kingdom at once and without fuss. Necker obeyed, discreetly: that same evening he and his wife left by carriage for the northern frontier and Brussels, so that his going would not stir up trouble. Three ministers who shared his views were removed with him: Montmorin, Saint-Priest and La Luzerne. In their place the king put the Baron de Breteuil at the head of the government, with de Broglie as minister of war. It would go down as the “ministry of a hundred hours”.
Sunday 12 July
The news reached Paris around midday on Sunday 12 July, at the hour when the garden of the Palais-Royal, the Duke of Orléans’s palace, was at its fullest. Open to the public, the garden was the city’s great market of rumour. At about half past two, by his own account, Camille DesmoulinsFigure: Camille Desmoulins. The journalist who called Paris to arms, then pleaded for clemency, a 29-year-old lawyer with a stammer, climbed onto a table outside the Café de Foy and, pistol in hand, called the crowd to arms. As a sign to know one another by he proposed green, the colour of hope; people tore leaves from the chestnut trees and wore them in their hats.
“Citizens, there is not a moment to lose. I have just come from Versailles: M. Necker is dismissed. This dismissal is the tocsin of a Saint Bartholomew of patriots: tonight all the Swiss and German battalions will march out of the Champ de Mars to slaughter us. We have one resource left: to rush to arms […].”
From the waxworks of Philippe Curtius the crowd took busts of Necker and of the Duke of Orléans, draped them in black crape and carried them through the streets; theatres were made to close in mourning. Towards evening the procession reached the Place Louis XVPlace: Place de la Révolution. The square built for a king, where a king lost his head, today’s Place de la Concorde. There the Prince de Lambesc led his Royal-Allemand cavalry across the swing bridge into the garden of the TuileriesPlace: Tuileries Palace. The palace where the monarchy was held captive and fell, where the crowd met them with stones and chairs and the horsemen struck out with their sabres. Several people were hurt. Later that evening soldiers of the French Guards took the people’s side and fired on the German horsemen. The Baron de Besenval, who commanded the troops in Paris, did not dare send in more and pulled his regiments back to the Champ de Mars.
Through the night and the next day crowds burned the customs posts in the city wall, where duties were levied on goods entering Paris, and hunted for weapons. On the 13th the electors of Paris, meeting at the Hôtel de Ville, formed a citizens’ militia. What it lacked was arms and powder, and the powder was in the Bastille. From there the road ran straight to the Storming of the BastilleEvent: Storming of the Bastille. The afternoon Paris took up arms — and the Revolution became real on the 14th.
The Bastille fell on 14 July, and with it the plan of force. On the 15th Louis went to the Assembly in person to announce that the troops would be withdrawn. On the 16th he wrote to Necker asking him to return; the Breteuil ministry broke up after barely a hundred hours, and that night the Comte d’Artois left France, the first of the great émigrés. On the 17th the king came to Paris and accepted the cockade from its new mayor, Jean-Sylvain Bailly.
Necker came back in triumph: on 30 July Paris cheered him at the Hôtel de Ville. But the Revolution had moved past him. The loans he launched that summer failed, the Assembly went its own way on the finances, and in September 1790 he resigned and went home to Switzerland, almost unnoticed.
The dismissal of one minister became the first great trial of strength between the king and Paris, and the king lost it. It gave the Parisians their first symbols, the cockade and the busts carried like banners, and their first militia. And it taught a lesson the Revolution would learn again and again: a move by the court, or only the rumour of one, could bring the city into the streets.
