When the King Took Flight

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

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.

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 e