ABSTRACT
On the evening of June 21, 1791, in northwestern France, a soldier approached a large horse-drawn carriage that had recently arrived in the small town of Sainte-Menehould. “Plans have not worked out,” he whispered to the passengers. “I must leave for fear of raising suspicion.” He then walked away.1 What the soldier – a German-speaking commander named Andoins, serving under the command of the French general the marquis de Bouillé – knew, and what the inhabitants of Sainte-Menehould did not, was that this was no ordinary carriage. It contained the royal family itself: the king and queen, along with their two children. The royal family had left Paris the night before, sneaking out just before
midnight. They had left an hour behind schedule, but rather than hurry to make up for the lost time, they dawdled, falling behind still further. The mastermind behind the plan, Count Axel von Fersen, did not accompany them, and the royal couple was less than fully focused on the timeline. As a result, their intricate plan, hatched months in advance, was falling apart. They had expected the duc de Choiseuil to meet them earlier in the journey. He had not; they were concerned. So there they were. The royal family, largely on its own, traveling incog-
nito. They had succeeded in fleeing Paris; they were now trying to reach safe haven. They were not necessarily trying to flee France – a small detail to their critics, perhaps, but an important point to the king himself and to his supporters. Their goal was to reach Montmédy, a fort near the border. There, Bouillé was waiting for them, along with his soldiers. A military leader straight out of the Old Regime, and a marquis to boot, Bouillé had been in the French army since the 1750s, and had shown no sympathy for the changes that had taken place since 1789. He was the military leader whom the royal couple trusted the most and thought could get the monarchy set up in Montmédy. From there, the king thought that they would be able to govern France free of the menaces of the Parisian mob, free from the crowds
that had controlled his movements ever since October 1789. They were most of the way there. They would not, however, get much farther. The people of Sainte-Menehould knew something was amiss. Bouillé had
been preparing for the king’s flight, and as a result, troop movements had increased in recent days. It was not hard to link the mysterious carriage – clearly, these were important aristocrats – to the troop movements, and conclude that the counter-revolution was on its way, with the king supported by enemy armies, perhaps sent by the queen’s brother, the emperor of Austria. Their suspicions were not enough for the people of Sainte-Menehould to stop the royal family from proceeding on their journey. But there was one man in the town – a postal courier named Drouet – who had started to piece things together. He was convinced that the couple in the carriage, who claimed to be Russian nobility, were in fact the royal couple. He had once before seen the queen, and was able to recognize the king from his portrait on the paper money circulating in France. After much hemming and hawing, the town sent Drouet off to warn
other towns in the area. Drouet left Sainte-Menehould 90 minutes after the royal family. He was a strong rider, on horseback; they were traveling by carriage, with tired horses. According to the escape plan – which they had fallen even farther behind and which, by this time, everyone but them had abandoned – there would be fresh horses waiting for them just before the village of Varennes. Those horses were gone by the time the royal family arrived. While the drivers were looking for their horses, Drouet passed the
carriage. He arrived in the center of Varennes, an otherwise nondescript town near the Luxembourg border, at around 11 p.m., and informed the people there what was going on. The town sounded the alarm, ringing the church bells, the men arming themselves as best they could. When the royal family gave up trying to find the horses and headed into the center of town, they knew that they had been found out. Though they protested for some time, still insisting that they were Russian nobles (the Baroness Korff and her entourage), few were convinced. And when the local inhabitants summoned a local judge – the only local inhabitant to have seen the king before – to verify his identity, and when the judge’s instinctive response to seeing Louis XVI was to bow and say, “your highness,” Louis XVI could not respond otherwise: “Je suis bien votre roi” – yes, I am your king. The royal family had never fully understood the Revolution. They had
long been convinced that it was the plot of a few rivals, probably led by the king’s cousin, the ambitious if often overestimated duc d’Orléans; they had long been convinced, too, that the Revolution was a Parisian event, that the rest of the kingdom would not approve of the demands of the citizens in the capital. Varennes would prove them wrong.2 The citizens of that town would not let the royal family continue their journey.
