Ségur, equally distressed, replied, “I am afraid so, Madame, and that is what makes it my duty to return.” When she invited him to stay for dinner and displayed the warmth of her feelings toward him, the parting became difficult. “When I went, I thought I was only going on leave,” he wrote later. “The departure would have been still more painful had I known I was seeing her for the last time.”
Catherine’s comments about events in France became increasingly caustic. The National Assembly was “the Hydra with twelve hundred heads.” In the new governing figures, she discerned “only people who set in motion a machine which they lack the talent and skill to control.… France is the prey of a crowd of lawyers, fools masquerading as philosophers, rascals, young prigs destitute of common sense, puppets of a few bandits who do not even deserve the title of illustrious criminals.” Her defense of monarchy followed from her belief in the need for efficiency in administration and the preservation of public order: “Tell a thousand people to draft a letter, let them debate every phrase, and see how long it takes and what you get.” She hated to see order crumbling and anarchy looming in France because she knew something about anarchy; she had seen it in the Pugachev rebellion.
She was unable to support her views with military action half a continent away, but even before the flight to Varennes, she was not wholly passive. She told her ambassador in Sweden that she wanted the future of France to become the concern of all European monarchs. It was not merely a question of crushing revolution, she wrote, but also of France resuming its role in the European balance of power. Knowing that Gustavus III of Sweden, always in search of glory, coveted the leadership of a monarchist crusade against the revolution in France, she chose him as the figure to support. In October 1791, only a year after the end of the short, pointless Baltic war between Russia and Sweden, she offered to provide Gustavus a subsidy to maintain a corps of twelve thousand Swedish soldiers to be used in an invasion of France. The date discussed for this operation was the spring of 1792.
A violent event in Sweden prevented this military enterprise. On March 5, 1792, Gustavus III was shot in the back and gravely wounded at a masked ball in Stockholm; he died at the end of the month. Although the assassin was a Swedish aristocrat and the issue was peculiar to Swedish politics, Catherine immediately saw it as part of a rising tide of antimonarchical violence. There were police reports that a French agent was on his way to St. Petersburg to assassinate the empress, and the number of guards at the Winter Palace was doubled. There was no further talk of landing Swedish troops in France.
In the spring of 1792 Catherine issued a ten-page memorandum, suggesting measures to suppress anarchy in France, reestablish the monarchy, and set France back on the road to tranquillity and greatness. She began by writing that “the cause of the king of France is the cause of all kings.… All the works of the [French] National Assembly have been devoted to the abolition of the form of monarchy established in France for a thousand years. [Now] it is important to Europe to see France resume her position as a great power.” As to how this could be achieved, she said, “A body of ten thousand men would suffice to march across France from one end to the other.… Perhaps mercenaries—the best would be the Swiss—could be hired, and perhaps others from the German princes. With this force, one could deliver France from the bandits, reestablish the monarchy, chase away the impostors, punish the rascals and deliver the kingdom from oppression.” Once a restoration was achieved, the empress advised against widespread, vindictive repression. “A few genuine revolutionaries should be punished and amnesty should follow for those who have submitted and returned to their allegiance.” She believed that many delegates in the National Assembly would accept forgiveness, realizing that “they had gone beyond their powers because the electorate had not demanded the abolition of the monarchy, much less the Christian religion.” It was essential in the newly restored kingdom, she continued, that there be a balance of the original three estates: the nobility, the clergy, and the common people. The property of the clergy should be restored, the nobility should regain their privileges, and the popular and valid demand for liberty “could be satisfied by good and wise laws.” Before everything else, she wrote, the royal family must be liberated: “As the troops advance, the princes and the troops must focus on the most essential point: the deliverance of the king and the royal family from the hands of the population of Paris.”
