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When the King Took Flight

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Timothy Tackett is one of the more curious members of the current generation of French historians. He actually goes into archives and tries to figure out what people thought and did. Ordinarily this is what historians do as a matter of course, but under the reign of the Pope of Revisionism, Francois Furet, extensive archival research is replaced with, in the works of Furet, Mona Ozouf or Keith Baker, long analysis of a select and limited number of documents. Tackett by contrast, after starting with a monograph on Catholicism in particular region, has provided two invaluable monographs based on the fullest research yet to date. The first was the on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, while the second was a thorough study of the National Assembly. In contrast to the Furet school's subtle insinuation that the Revolution was doomed at the outset because the Revolutionaries were dangerously utopians, Stalinist "avant la lettre," Tackett shows that the Revolutionaries were reasonable people in difficult circumstances. For the past few years he has been working on the origins of the Terror.

Somewhat to my disappointment, this is not that book. It is a sort of a preview, as once again we are told about the Flight to Varennes, as Louis XVI sought to flee a hostile Paris and move near the border where loyal troops. There he hoped to renounce everything that had happened to the revolution since several weeks BEFORE the fall of the Bastille, including he own public oaths of loyalty to the Revolution. However delays, along with several indiscretions by the King who was supposed to be in disguise, lead vigilant men to realize what was up and to capture him. The sources for this have all been reasonably available. We do learn some interesting details, such as the fact that Louis killed 200,000 animals in 14 years of hunting, but this part of the story tells us little we did not already know.

What Tackett does tell us is how much this affected the course of the French Revolution. For years this appeared obvious. The king tried to subvert his own constitution, and when the Assembly returned him to his throne with the fiction that he had been kidnapped, he and his wife secretly sought to betray their country. Understandably enough, nothing could have done more to encourage an atmosphere of paranoid conspiracy mongering than the fact that there was a conspiracy against parliamentary government, at the highest levels, and with the support of much of the officer corps and with the sympathy of many noble and clerical deputies, either at home and in emigration. But recemt writers, such as Simon Schama, have done so much to project the worst elements of the Terror back to the very beginning of the revolution, as well as contrasting the cruelties of mob violence with sentimental domestic portraits of the king with his (adulterous) queen, these points have been blurred.

And this is where Tackett's book becomes really valuable. He points out that there was enormous sympathy and good will towards the monarchy in the first two years of the revolution. Republicanism was very much a minority taste, most Enlightenment figures believed that republics were not possible in a country the size of France's, and the most prominent supporters of it before June 1791 were relatively marginal before and after the event. When the king suffered a sore throat in March 1791, pleas for his health flowed in from all over the country. But contrary to Louis' illusions, this support for the King was almost entirely because he supported the decisions of the National Assembly. Counter-revolution, although supported by many powerful people, was not a popular movement in 1791. Once people learned of the King's flight, people often panicked. They feared foreign invasions, they arrested nobles and clerics who had shown their lack of sympathy with the revolution. Rather intriguingly, Tackett points out that the panic was strongest in areas which had not known the Great Fear two years previously. Those areas which had were much more skeptical, showing that France did not live in a hothouse of undifferentiated paranoia. But what did not happen was any movement by the population to support the King's measures against the Assembly.

Once the King was caught, documents and addresses came from all over France. In late June a third were overtly sympathetic to the King. By Mid-July a sixth were, and by the end of July only a fourteenth were. As information slowly spread, it became clear that the king had not been abducted and in fact had lied about his loyalty to the constitution. There were intriguing growths of repulicanism in the countryside which was halted when the Assembly reluctantly decided to keep Louis king in the absence of a better solution. When the Paris crowds disagreed, the officials violently suppressed a relatively peaceful meeting at the Champ de Mars, killing at least fifty people, and causing bitterness to come. And all to no avail. As Robespierre pointed out at the time, how could France be governed by a ruler no-one trusted. A year later, France would find out that it could not and would not.

The Flight of the King from Paris was an event that shook the core of the revolution. Tackett is a great French Revolution historian and he does not disappoint here. The book is easy to read and stays on topic making you think about the idea of causality in the revolution. Tackett takes a great deal of time to explain how the flight of the king changed the opinion of the people in France. He does so very well and makes for a very interesting book. For those studying the revolution this is a much read about a crucial moment that changed the course of the revolution shifting it over to violence that had not been seen prior the flight of the king.

Being overly interested in history I must admit to a hole in my understanding of the when, the where, and the who, of the French Revolution. Tackett has painted an immensely readable picture of "when the king took flight" and how that pivotal event shaped events to come. It's not quite Tom Clancy (Whew!) but then again it's not the dry recounting of history that the casual reader fears. I enjoyed it greatly.

Maps and Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Prologue 1
1 Sire, You May Not Pass 3
2 The King of the French 26
3 The King Takes Flight 57
4 Our Good City of Paris 88
5 The Fathers of the Nation 119
6 Fear and Repression in the Provinces 151
7 To Judge a King 179
8 The Months and Years After 203
Conclusion: The Power of an Event 219
Abbreviations 227
Notes 229
Bibliography 247
Index 259

This book is a cross between scholarly and pop history, leaning more toward the former. But it's so beautifully written and well organized, with a fascinating topic, that anyone with even slight interest in history would probably enjoy it.

Tackett opens the book with the amazing story of the abrupt end to the flight of King Louis XVI and his family. They were stopped in Varennes as they tried to pass through on their way out of the country during the third year of the French Revolution. Later Tackett details all that went into planning the escape, which is one of the most fascinating moments of the Revolution.

But the ramifications and aftermath of this attempted escape are even more important, and Tackett does a reasonable job explaining why. However, this is the one area where he falls a bit short. He argues that the king's flight and the aftermath led to the Terror, but he didn't spend enough time explaining why, which is surprising since that seemed to be a main part of his thesis. Nevertheless, it's a great read and highly recommended.

Though avid reader of Enlightenment history, if I had not had to read this book for class, I never would have picked it up. I'll admit, I'm a sucker for a pretty cover, but I saw this book everywhere in stores when it came out, which gave it the stigma of being "popular" history written for the non-historian. But since I *had* to read it, I honestly did go in hoping that my first impression was wrong and that I would like it. But no.

I really, really disliked this book. Either Tackett is forgetful, or he assumes that the reader is. He defined a "cocarde" twice before page 150. Every time he mentioned Bailly, he felt the need to "remind" the reader who the man was, always saying something along the lines of "Bailly, astronomer and onetime friend of Benjamin Franklin." He repeats himself in a similar fashion over a number of people and subjects during the entire book. Perhaps someone new to the subject (probably Tackett's intended audience) would find the book more usetful, but I have my doubts. Tackett doesn't write very chronologically . Even as someone who has read a good many books on the French Revolution, I was still jarred by his strange order, which confused the points he was trying to make. He also leaves out a few things, such as many of the details of the Champs de Mars massacre. Whether or not Lafayette actually did give the order for troops to fire on the protesters, Tackett makes no mention of even the probability. Even Unger, whose rather poor biography of Lafayette does not (as I recall, it's been a while since I read the book) totally whitewash him in that respect! (And I'm a big Lafayette fan...)

When the King Took Flight is bland, poorly written, and Tackett fails to tie most of it into his main point in a significant, insightful way. It seems like he wanted to stretch a small amount of material into enough pages to make a respectably sized book. I will admit that his efforts to try and figure out what various kinds of contemporaries thought were commendable. His documentation of the spread of information was the best part of the book. If it had been an essay of about 30-60 pages, it might have seemed more meaningful. Don't forget, "brevity is the soul of wit!"

Authors to read instead: Hunt, Tilly, Bouloiseau.