The French Revolution began as a dispute between the French monarchy and its traditional elites about where power lay. Its roots became tangled in “enlightened” discussion of the political virtues of the “nation” and the “public,” and put forth thorny branches of bitter social hostility as real state bankruptcy loomed in the later 1780s. By the time the Estates-General met in 1789, wholly new demands for the excision of all privilege from the body politic were poised to bear violent fruit. Aristocratic treachery was the leitmotif of patriotic understanding of everything that happened subsequently, through years in which a new blueprint of society, levelled but also centralized, was painstakingly crafted; and in which that blueprint was hastily redrawn in war and upheaval to become a map of republican virtues. Deep-seated conflict was never pacified, while convictions that unanimity was natural branded all dissent as treason, producing an accelerating spiral into “the Terror” of 1793-94. Although revolutionary upheaval also brought cultural innovation and a genuine new spirit of individual liberty, for the rest of the decade, France wrestled to reconcile a society of survivors and victims. It slid slowly, despite continued military triumphs, towards the suppression of civil society by dictatorship.

The initial perception of the journalist Gorsas, that the massacre signified a fundamental breach in the body politic, could not be sustained for long within the prevailing political climate. By 19 July as we saw, he would be driven to recant his initial suspicions of the Guard fulsomely, by which time other journals had already developed multiple levels in their arguments for an explanation based on brigandage. The Feuille du Jour was already taking the argument a stage further on that day: ‘All appear convinced that the movements which agitate us are fomented by outside instigators.’ Such ‘missionaries of all the powers’ apparently filled Paris, scattering gold and sowing discord. According to the Patriote François on the 20th, the affair was a plot among such agents, including ‘the jew Ephraim … an emissary of Prussia’, and various aristocratic officers, a plot concerning which the municipality and comité des recherches ‘have a great deal of information’.

This more convoluted plot construction seems to have been peripheral to the general understanding of the massacre, but the theme of brigandage ran through all sides' accounts. To reiterate the extent to which this was true even of the radical press, here again is how Marat put it in his own fashion on the 20th:

In January 1791 Parisian politics were already seething with doubt and fear, most of which was directed towards what had already become the Revolution's principal enemies – the aristocracy and the clergy. Around this time, former monarchiens and other royalist elements in the National Assembly coalesced under the leadership of Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre to form the ‘Society of Friends of the Monarchical Constitution’, commonly called the Club monarchique, and which in the first weeks of its existence had already become the preferred target of radical accusations concerning aristocratic conspiracy of all types. Meanwhile, in the face of clerical resistance to their new place in the Constitution, the National Assembly had decreed that all clergy should take what amounted to an oath of loyalty to the Revolution and its works – an oath refused by the vast majority of the bishops sitting in the Assembly itself. Across the country this would be one of the great polarising moments of the Revolution, and its effect within the city was no less significant.

The parochial clergy of Paris were to take this oath at their Sunday services in the first two weeks of January. The level of local tension aroused by the potential and actual resistance of the clergy is evident from the circular sent to Section officials on two occasions from the central police administration. On 9 and 14 January, police commissaires were asked to patrol their local lodging-houses on the following Saturday evening, to watch for ‘extraordinary movements’, and to remain at home ready to take action on the Sunday morning.

Popular disorder and political challenges, May--June 1791

The situation in the capital after Easter was one of constantly aggravating social and political confrontation. Tensions created by the perception of the aristocratic and brigand threat, and exacerbated by the clerical challenge of the spring, now began to impinge, as we have seen, on all aspects of social relations – repression of disorder was swift and violent, and economic grievances provoked bitter rhetoric. A continued undercurrent of confrontation with aristocratie heightened the atmosphere of instability. On 2 May, for example, Clermont-Tonnerre made a speech to the National Assembly in which he condemned the idea of annexing Avignon, and two days later a mob hounded him from outside the Tuileries back to his home, where it lingered abusively all afternoon, not dispersing until Lafayette and Bailly had been called to the scene with reinforcements. The actions of the clergy similarly continued to provoke unrest – we have already noted the alarming events in the Bonne-Nouvelle parish, and the complex response to the Ascension Day service at the Théatins.

Through all this, the police responded according to their predetermined model of the roots of disorder, but their interpretations of events and motivations were constantly threatened by the actions of the people. On 16 May a gauze-maker, ‘for want of work labouring on the demolition of the quai d'Orsay’, was arrested ‘for having for no reason [sans aucun sujet] insulted and mistreated a cleric… whom he had firstly challenged to tell him if he was an aristocrat’.

Popular assertion and political exclusion in revolutionary Paris

The Champ de Mars Massacre did not, in the end, change very much. In terms of the constitutional crisis ignited by the Flight to Varennes, it was a mere postscript, as the leaders of the Jacobin Club understood when they withdrew from the petitioning process. The train of events launched by the massacre itself, most notably the tortuous judicial inquiry dissected by Albert Mathiez, expired in the amnesty of September 1791 as France supposedly turned her back on past troubles. Insofar as the event lived on during the revolutionary era, it was thanks to its revival as part of a republican heritage after 10 August, going along with the municipal persecution of Marat as part of the infamous history that led Bailly to the guillotine in November 1793, and many of his colleagues to rather less formal deaths in September 1792. Here its value was largely symbolic, the specifics of the event and its antecedents absorbed into a generalised picture of monarchist misdeeds and aristocratic plots. For us, however, if we choose to see the massacre not as a finger pointing to the future, but as a culminating point in a long series of events, almost a catharsis, we can suggest it holds a deeper significance.

Of course the leitmotif of aristocratic plot had already shaped the events themselves, but the issues which need to be addressed more closely here go beyond that generalised concern.

The events of the journée of 28 February 1791 would offer every side in the revolutionary political equation the chance to validate its own interpretation of the forces at work. Several thousands of the ordinary population of the Faubourg St-Antoine chose that day to march to the château of Vincennes, a few miles to the east of the city. They were moved by a growing concern over the previous week that the municipality's recently-begun refurbishment of the château as an overflow prison had sinister connotations. It appears that on the 25th the Cordeliers Club had sent a deputation to the Jacobins to propose just such an expedition, but had been rejected. Gorsas subsequently linked this overture to the machinations of the Club monarchique. Popular concern, however, was noted, and to some extent shared, by the authorities of the Sections des Quinze-Vingts and de Montreuil, the latter Section's commissaire de police informing the municipality that a general sentiment to undertake a demolition had arisen within the Section by the 26th. Upon reaching the site 3–4,000 people occupied the courtyard, while a substantial number of men entered the keep, and began to demolish the building work which had been started.

When news that the march was getting under way reached the Hôtel de Ville, the general alarm was sounded, and substantial contingents of the National Guard, along with the headquarters staff, marched to intercept the crowd.

The tragic incomprehensions that formed the political landscape of Paris would be reflected again in responses to the confused journée of 28 February. Before returning to that we need to gain a clearer view of the operations of those charged with public order, an arena within which the Fayettist quest for political order was played out. The multiple demands of the Section de la Place-Vendôme on 22 February give a sense of the alarm that frequently arose in the population at the threat of disorder. The unauthorised wearing of Guard uniforms was a particular concern, considering both the revolutionaries' highly-tuned sense of visual identity and the licence such an imposture gave to go armed. Nor was it entirely an empty fear – on 18 January a man who worked on the fish boats was arrested wearing the full uniform and equipment of a grenadier, and passed nearly a month in prison before being released with a warning. On 5 February a journeyman locksmith dressed as a gunner was arrested, for that fact as well as for ‘having spread invective against the National Assembly’. He spent eleven days in prison. The next day a man threatened a deputy with a sabre, which was confiscated. He was allowed to keep the chasseur uniform he was wearing, however, so he may have been just an enraged patriot.

Whatever the reason for such impostures (and it is likely that the secondhand clothing trade had something to do with it) there was also a very real undercurrent of popular hostility to the National Guard itself.

Having looked directly at the place of the Champ de Mars Massacre and its actors in historians' writings, several broader dimensions of historiographical development will need to be explored to lay the foundations for the study which follows: work on policing, neighbourhood and culture under the Old Regime; on cultures of the artisanate in the eighteenth century; on the identity of the sans-culottes; and on the elite perception of the urban population at the beginning of the Revolution. This will be largely, with some important exceptions, an anglophone historiography, and some comment on this is needed.

It would be unfair to say that French historiography of the people of Paris has not advanced beyond the viewpoint established forty years ago by Albert Soboul, but it is difficult to see developments within this field as substantially revising that position. The presence of the historiographical trend marked most clearly by François Furet, which would dismiss concern with ‘the people’ (other than in terms of their use as a referent within discourse) as irrelevant to the real meaning of the Revolution, has led to a severe retrenchment by other French historians into defence of the notion of a ‘popular movement’ in Soboulian or quasi-Soboulian terms. This hinges on the conviction that the artisans and traders who made up the leadership of the politically-radical Parisian Sections in 1793–4 were genuine adherents of a socially radical political philosophy – not yet socialism, but the closest the era could get to that state.

The apparent calm which greeted the return of the king did not last long. The Argus Patriote reported that on 28 June ‘a crowd of workers went … to the Abbaye, to ask that they should be given the Gardes-du-Corps who are confined there’. This was not a rescue, but a lynch-mob, the dispersal of which required the summoning of the Guard by sounding the générale. It was in response to a ‘false rumour’ that the royal bodyguards, couriers for the Flight to Varennes, ‘were to be set free by their comrades’.

Some smaller incidents, meanwhile, point to the continued high level of social and political tensions. On 26 June, at around 6.30 p.m., Simeon Charles François Vallée, a former master-painter and gilder, now a seller of pictures and prints, was seized by a group of citizens in the Palais-Royal for reading from a copy of the Ami du Peuple. Two witnesses deposed that he had ‘occasioned tumult’ and had made ‘several commentaries against Lafayette, the Lameths and several other deputies … as well as against M. Bailly’. He had been charging them with complicity in the king's flight and general perfidy. Three other witnesses confirmed the substance of this accusation.

Vallée said he had been passing on his way through the Palais-Royal when he had met ‘around twenty women who were talking together and who asked him, “Hey brother, have you got today's Marat?”’. He had a copy in his pocket, and at their request read it out, but protested that this had lasted only ‘half a quarter-hour’ – not long enough therefore to have made the alleged ‘commentaries’.

Events during Passion Week were to further expose the fault-lines in the constitutional settlement, and would help to turn radical attitudes toward the authorities from muted hostility to outright opposition. This process, and its impact on popular opinion, was exacerbated by the city's economic difficulties, raising the spectre of famine plot through accusations of official collusion in currency speculation. At the same time, a series of clashes over the control of artisans' work practices set official laissez-faire on the side of former masters, while workers claimed that revolutionary justice and the Rights of Man backed their arguments for regulations and collective bargaining. Outbursts from the population suggested a similar attitude, despite a continuing crackdown in the name of social order, as both indigence and alleged sedition grew through May and June, and attitudes hardened among both moderates and radicals. However, there still remained ambiguities about popular consciousness and activities, underlying this evolving conflict, and becoming crucial in later events.

The Easter crisis

On Palm Sunday, 17 April 1791, perhaps at the very moment that dévotes were being whipped out of the church of the Théatins, Louis XVI gave in to his conscience. In a two-pronged move to preserve his spiritual purity, he took communion at the Tuileries from a ‘real’, non-juring, priest, while making plans to avoid his normal, and more public, Easter communion at St-Germain l'Auxerrois, where he would have had to be served by a juror.