The day the women of Paris fetched their king
On 5 October 1789 thousands of Parisian women, angry at the scarcity and price of bread, marched some 20 kilometres through the rain to the palace of Versailles, with the National Guard behind them. At dawn the next day the crowd broke into the palace, and that night the king, the queen and their children were brought to Paris. There the monarchy would stay, under the eyes of the capital, until it fell.
Two of the king's bodyguards were killed at dawn on 6 October. Most of the women who marched left no names in the record.
The harvest of 1789 was not a bad one, but the summer drought had left many mills without the water to grind it, and Paris went hungry into the autumn. Women queued for hours at bakers' doors, and a four-pound loaf, a household's daily bread, took a large share of a working man's wage. Rumours of hoarders and of plots to starve the capital ran along the queues.
Then came news from Versailles. On 1 October the king's bodyguards gave a banquet in the palace opera for the newly arrived Flanders Regiment; the royal family appeared, and the officers cheered them. The Paris papers reported that the tricolour cockade had been trampled underfoot. Louis had also put off giving his assent to the Declaration of the Rights of ManDocument: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Seventeen articles that turned subjects into citizens, voted in August. To many Parisians the court seemed to be preparing a counter-revolution while the city went hungry.
On the morning of Monday 5 October, women from the markets and the working districts gathered at the Hôtel de Ville to demand bread. They broke in, seized weapons, and would not go home. Stanislas Maillard, a court bailiff who had fought at the Bastille, put himself at their head and turned the crowd towards Versailles, where the king and the Assembly were.
Several thousand set off, some dragging cannon, many armed with pikes and kitchen knives, and walked some 20 kilometres through a cold, steady rain.
Behind them, the National Guard would not stay in Paris either. Lafayette, its commander, held out for hours; by late afternoon his own men and the city authorities had pushed him onto the road, at the head of some 15,000 guardsmen.
The marchers reached Versailles in the late afternoon, soaked and hungry. Many crowded into the Assembly's hall, sat on the deputies' benches and interrupted the debate; Maillard spoke for them about bread. The president of the Assembly, Jean-Joseph Mounier, took a small deputation of women to the king, who received them kindly and promised grain for Paris.
Some of his ministers, Saint-Priest foremost, urged him to leave for Rambouillet, out of the crowd's reach. Louis hesitated and stayed. Late that evening he accepted the Declaration of the Rights of Man without reserve. Around midnight Lafayette arrived with the National Guard, promised the king his protection and, in the small hours, went to rest — for which royalists later mocked him as “General Morpheus”.
The palace invaded, the balcony, the road to Paris
Soon after first light, part of the crowd found a way into the palace and ran up the stairs towards the queen's apartments. Two of the king's bodyguards were killed, and their heads were put on pikes. Warned by the shouting, Marie Antoinette fled half-dressed through a private passage to the king's rooms.
The National Guard cleared the palace, and the day became a negotiation from the balcony over the Marble Courtyard. The crowd called for the king to go to Paris, and he agreed. Then it called for the queen. She came out with her children, was told to send them in, and stood alone before the crowd until Lafayette bowed and kissed her hand.
In the early afternoon a vast procession set out for Paris: guardsmen, marchers, wagons of flour from the royal stores, and the royal family's carriage in the middle of it all.
“Nous ramenons le boulanger, la boulangère et le petit mitron.” — We are bringing back the baker, the baker's wife and the baker's boy.
It was night when the family, after a stop at the Hôtel de Ville, reached the Tuileries, a palace hardly lived in since the young Louis XV left it in 1722.
The October Days moved the centre of the Revolution to Paris. The king now lived under the eyes of the capital and its National Guard, half guest and half hostage. The Assembly followed him, sitting in Paris from 19 October, where the crowds in its galleries could press on it. Moderates who had wanted a strong king, Mounier among them, gave up and went home; Mounier left France the following year. And the women of Paris had shown that the market and the street could force the hand of king and Assembly alike. Twenty months later, the king's attempt to escape that hostage life would end at Varennes.
