The foiled escape exposed royal duplicity. ‘In that single night,’ noticed a courtier, Antoinette’s already greying hair ‘turned white as that of a seventy-year-old woman’. Imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace, Louis railed against Voltaire and Rousseau – ‘these two men have been the ruin of France’. Antoinette corresponded with Barnave, ascendant in the Assembly, and, through Fersen, with her brother Leopold. ‘Don’t worry about us. We’re alive,’ she told Fersen in code. ‘The Assembly leaders seem to want to treat us gently.’ But then: ‘Speak to my relatives about outside help.’ Two days later, she told him, ‘Look after yourself for me. I won’t be able to write any more. But nothing in this world can stop me adoring you until I die.’ Fersen was jealous of Barnave, noting, ‘It’s said the queen sleeps with Barnave.’ Louis and Antoinette staggered between desperate plans. She ordered Fersen to stop the intervention by Austria and Prussia: ‘Force will only do harm.’ In September, the agonized Louis took the oath to obey the constitution – which still empowered him to appoint ministers and veto laws – as Antoinette and Barnave hoped to steer a moderate course. ‘If I find myself in treaty with some of them,’ she reassured Fersen, ‘it’s only to use them.’ But the arming of Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns undermined Barnave – and condemned the Bourbons.*
In January 1792, a vanquished Barnave retired to the provinces, his vision of a constitutional monarchy discredited, overthrown in the Assembly by a pro-war government of the more radical Girondin faction, led by Brissot. A month later, Fersen, planning another rescue, crept into Paris in disguise (staying with one of his other mistresses) and, dodging the guards, penetrated Antoinette’s apartment. They spent the night together, their last meeting. ‘I am going to close,’ she wrote afterwards, ‘but not without telling you, my dear and very tender friend, that I love you madly …’
In February, the advance of the German monarchs threw Paris into a crisis that destroyed the Girondins. It was a colourless, awkward, myopic and ascetic lawyer from Arras with a reedy voice who filled the vacuum. The thirty-three-year-old Maximilien Robespierre, elected leader of the Jacobins, a more radical faction, had gradually emerged as the incorruptible voice of virtue and the interpreter of the general will: ‘Legitimately, sovereignty always belongs to the people,’ but a select elite must decide the general will of the people, who ‘want what is good but don’t always see it’. It was an idea that would justify much bloodshed. This puritanical guardian – possibly a unique virgin among swaggering womanizers – increasingly guided the people or rather the radical artisans, the Parisian sans-culottes (they wore trousers instead of breeches). ‘That man will go far,’ Mirabeau had joked; ‘he believes everything he says.’ Robespierre had argued against war, claiming it would strengthen the king. Now the crisis swept Robespierre to power and destroyed the Bourbons. The war, which would last – with short interludes – for twenty-three years, encompassing all Europe and much of the world, intensified the fanaticism and intolerance of the revolution. ‘Your friend,’ wrote Antoinette to Fersen, scarcely encoding her meaning, ‘is in the greatest danger. His illness is making terrible progress … Tell his relations about his unfortunate situation.’
As the Bourbons endured this crisis, a French subject, far away in Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean, was disappointed by the French revolution for very different reasons. Toussaint, the former slave, was launching the greatest slave rebellion since Spartacus and the
TWO REVOLUTIONS – HAITI AND PARIS: CéCILE AND TOUSSAINT, ROBESPIERRE AND DANTON
In August 1791, a cabal of slave leaders, Dutty ‘Zamba’ Boukman, Georges Biassou and Cécile Fatiman, coordinated by Toussaint, met by night in secret at Bois Caïman, to launch a rebellion on behalf of the 500,000 slaves. They swore vengeance with voodoo rituals, supervised by the twenty-year-old Cécile Fatiman, who acted as
