SYMHC Classics: Women's March Versailles

This 2017 episode covers the moment in 1789 when a group of protesters -- mostly women -- marched from Paris to Versailles to pressure King Louis XVI to address France's food shortage.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The Women's March on Versailles took place on
October fifth, seventeen eighty nine, or two hundred and thirty
five years ago today, so that is today's Saturday classic.
This originally came out on February eighth, twenty seventeen. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production

(00:23):
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Hey, Tracy, you know
it's all over the news at the moment protests, Yeah,
protest marches. So I thought maybe we would talk about
the women's march, but not the one you're thinking about,

(00:45):
the one that happened on Versailles in the seventeen hundreds,
the one that the moment I heard about it, I said, hey, Holly,
I think you might want to do this episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's one of those things that I knew about
in sort of an abstract way, but I didn't realize
I was not really aware of all the details of it.

(01:07):
So this is an event that took place quite early
on in the French Revolution. As we mentioned before, anytime
we touch on the French Revolution is a long and
winding road, so this is at the very early start
of it, and it started with a bread shortage. This
is kind of one of the more famous aspects of
the French Revolution, and as with any historical event, there
are multiple causes that lead up to this thing happening.

(01:29):
So we're going to talk about each of them and
kind of put the pieces together before we get to
the actual march. And first in the setup, we're going
to talk about Versailles. Versailles is located twelve miles which
is a little more than nineteen kilometers from Paris to
the southwest of the city. The site originally featured Louis

(01:50):
the thirteenth. Chateau was a stonework hunting lodge designed to
be a getaway, but under the next king of France
it became something quite different. Eventually evolved into a very
opulent seat of the monarchy. The palace in a complex
of other buildings built during the seven decade reign of
Louis the fourteenth at the time just prior to the revolution,

(02:11):
included governmental office buildings, the royal gardens, the Grand Trional,
the Patitrional stables, hunting grounds, and multiple structures to house
all of the people who lived there, which included many
many servants. It's estimated that at the time of Louis
the sixteenth Rain, as many as sixty thousand people were
living on the grounds at Versailles. It was in effect

(02:34):
its own city, and it was a luxurious place. The palace,
of course, was the most lavish of all the buildings,
with more than two thousand rooms, more than seven hundred
and twenty thousand square feet which is about sixty seven
thousand square meters of the floor space, more than four
dozen staircases, and then all that space was decorated with
fine art and furniture. There were at least fifteen thousand

(02:58):
paintings in the palace, plus tap streets and glasswork and
lots of gold leaf. It took a staff of thousands
just to maintain the palace and the grounds. Yeah, so
if you've ever visited Versailles, you know it is massive.
But it's one of those things where you think about
like the house you live in and whatever the square
footage is, Like, you know, an average sort of apartment

(03:20):
eything in Atlanta is about twelve hundred square feet. So
then when you think about how massive, I mean, it's
a small town just in the palace. It was like
multiply that time, seven hundred and twenty. Yeah. And in
the views of the royals and the nobility who occupied Versailles,
it was a house of the people, or at least
that's what they told themselves. Anyone could visit and wander

(03:43):
around basically unimpeded. So but even though the lower classes
could visit, the really important thing about Versailles is that
it was where the king spent basically all his time,
and that meant that the seat of government was at
a remove from the city of Paris and the people.
By the time Louis the sixteenth was ruler in the

(04:04):
mid seventeen seventies, the grain market in France was deregulated.
This was part of a larger economic plan on the
part of an Robert Jacques Turgeaux, who was serving as
the Minister of Finance, Trade and Public Works under King
Louis the sixteenth, who had at this point become the
ruler of France, and Turjau's blanket philosophy was no bankruptcy,

(04:26):
no tax increases, no borrowing, and he did have a
positive impact on the French economy. His policies led to
a decrease in the deficit and an increase in credit
for a brief time. But while Trujeau did seem to
have some good ideas about handling France's money, he ran
into some pretty serious problems after a couple of years,
around seventeen seventy six. First, he established a freedom of

(04:50):
enterprise and competition policy, and this made France's craft guilds
really angry because they had previously controlled all that. And
then he shifted the taxes in kind, where a portion
of agricultural production was used as a form of payment.
He changed that to a direct money tax. This was
intended to garner the government a more liquid income, but

(05:12):
it really made everyone angry. Yees, so to him, this
would have fallen under no tax increases because we're still
taxing the same, we just now want the cash instead
of the crops. But of course that's not really the
same when you're the person making the payment. So Turjau
resigned at this point. Louis the sixteenth was really frustrated.

(05:35):
Marie Antoinette and the Minister of State kind of urged
Turjau to step down, and he was eventually replaced by
Jacques Nickaire, but his legacy in the grain market would
continue after the grain market went free trade without any
price controls. There were a number of years where the
grain harvest was also poor, and the seventeen eighty eight
crop was especially bad. Then the following winter was a

(05:59):
lot colder than Once the temperature rose enough to melt
some of the freeze, there was flooding, which affected grainaries
and fields, making seventeen eighty nine an especially hard year
for farming before there was even a chance to plant anything. Yeah,
it was basically kind of doomed from the start at
this point. And this was in addition to the fact

(06:20):
that the population of France had grown by about eight
million people over the course of approximately eight decades, while
France's agriculture, which was its primary economic driver, had stayed
roughly the same in terms of size. The grain shortage
drove up prices, first making it difficult for the average
citizens to afford to buy grain, and then there was

(06:42):
so little of it that only the very rich could
actually purchase it. In seventeen eighty eight, the laborers of
Paris were spending about half of their wages just to
purchase bread, and by the following year, the shrinking supply
had pushed that percentage up to about eighty percent of
wages just going to bread. Yeah, and that's an approximation,

(07:03):
because you'll see figures cited that are anywhere from seventy
to ninety percent. So I just went right in the
middle at eighty. And for his part, Nikier had actually
retired from government finance, but he returned to the position
of Director General of Finance in seventeen eighty eight at
the request of Louis the sixteenth. He would also be
dismissed and recalled again. You know, the king and his

(07:24):
directors of finance had some problems in seventeen eighty nine,
and during his two times being recalled to office, he
did make efforts to assuage the suffering of France's hungry
people by banning the export of grain, regulating the grain
market again, and arranging to have additional grain imported, but
it was not enough to make up the huge gap

(07:45):
that had been created by all of these poor harvests.
Coming up, we'll get into an effort on Louis the
sixteenth part to try to address these problems. But first
we're going to take a break for a quick word
from a sponsor. King Louis the sixteenth had already inherited

(08:07):
an economic train wreck from his grandfather, and things had
only gotten worse while he had been on the throne.
So to try to find a way to solve the problem,
he assembled the Estates General. In this general Assembly, consisting
of representatives of the estates of the realm. That would
be the clergy, which was the first estate, the nobility,
which was the second estate, and the commoners, which were
the third estate. Had not been brought together since the

(08:29):
early sixteen hundreds, but this situation was dire. At this point,
France was spending almost fifty percent of its national income
to pay the debt accrued over a very long period
of poor fiscal management. Of the remaining fifty percent, six
percent was allocated to the maintenance of Versailles. The rest
of it went to the military in public works. In

(08:52):
this assembly, and what came out of it could easily
be its own episode. There was a lot that happened,
but for the purposes of discussing the women's mark on Versailles,
we're going to keep it fairly simple and do pretty
much the broad strokes. So after a long series of
squabbles and a seeming impass, the Third Estate broke away
and formed its own initiative under the name of the

(09:13):
National Assembly. You've probably heard of the tennis court oath,
but just in case you haven't or you're fuzzy about
the details, this was a vow made by the members
of the General Assembly on a tennis court after being
locked out of the hall where they had been meeting, quote,
not to separate and to reassemble wherever circumstances require until
the Constitution of the Kingdom is established and consolidated upon

(09:36):
solid foundations. Yeah. So they wanted to develop a constitutional
monarchy and they were going to write that constitution, and
they promised they were going to stick together and do
it and work together until it was done. And after
the King concluded the Estate's General Meeting, which had spawned
the General Assembly, and nothing had really been resolved by

(09:58):
that Estate's general gathering, the group known as a General
Assembly sort of disbanded. You'll also just see it said
written that they'd renamed, but they reformed as the National
Constituent Assembly. And at that point too, we should note
that there were even though it's often called the Gathering
of the Third estate. There were people from the clergy

(10:19):
and the nobility that were on board with this and
we're kind of joining in. And this group was meeting
at a hall in the Versailles complex when the women's
march took place. So on October first, seventeen eighty nine,
there was a raucous party at Presailles in the opera
house that got a lot of publicity, and at the

(10:39):
Royal Flanders Regiment was welcomed by the King's bodyguard at
the palace there was a banquet, lots and lots of wine,
and things quickly lost any sense of behavioral constraint. The
soldiers in particular got very drunk and allegedly started slurring
insults about the revolution. Stories appeared in the press that

(11:00):
some of the soldiers had even thrown the tricolor cacods
those are those pleated ribbon badges that had become emblems
of the revolution onto the floor and both urinated on
them and stomped on them. And then they allegedly put
on the white ribbons of the Bourbons or black ribbons,
which were associated with the aristocratic counter revolution, and swore

(11:21):
their loyalty to Louis the sixteenth and his Queen, and
while Louis the sixteenth had been at the party for
some period of time, it was fairly brief, but some
accounts claimed that he had been there for hours partying
with these soldiers. This event was commemorated by printmakers that
they were largely fabricated depictions of this event. As the

(11:42):
artists were working from descriptions from other people and maybe
even rumors, they were basically filling in the details. Both
the stories and the prints were not considered to be accurate,
but boy, they were really proliferating throughout France at the time.
Though they were overblown reports, they still garnered the ire

(12:03):
of the public. For one, guests in Versailles were bad
mouthing the revolution, which was just in its infancy, and
people were really angry to think that the king was
hosting people that were basically saying that that was stupid
and useless. For another, these men were being treated to
a massive feast when many of France's people were going hungry.

(12:24):
And because this October first party was just another and
the long line of incidents of waste on the part
of the monarchy while the common people suffered, it sparked
lots of protest. Ye, yeah, certainly not the first protest,
but and we'll talk about that a little in a moment.
And additionally, there had been an expected bump in the
availability of bread, so the grain harvest had taken place

(12:47):
in September. There wasn't a lot, but there was some,
so it seemed like there should be some bread available,
and there had, as we said, benefforts on the part
of the French government, under the stewards of Director General
of Finance Jacques Nacaire, to import additional grain, so people
thought that there should be some food to eat, but

(13:08):
those supplies had not arrived yet. In early October, when
this was going on, the lack of grain, even though
there had been assurances that shipments had been arranged, caused
all kinds of rumors to circulate. As lines for even
meager portions of bread stretched for city blocks, people started
to gossip that the shortage was purposely being arranged by

(13:29):
the government to weaken the populace and make them more submissive. Yeah.
When you combine the fact that there is no food
with the fact that there are obviously these lavish parties
and a lot of spending going on at Versailles, you
know this ties in, of course to the whole let
the meat cake falsehood that is often reported that has

(13:51):
been talked about on the show before. I think my
previous hosts and we've certainly referenced it. Yeah, I think
that's like a really short episode in the Canvas and
maybe even Josh Days maybe yeah, Jane long time ago. Yeah.
But I mean basically everything that was being reported was
largely rumor, but people were so upset that conspiracy theories

(14:13):
were just sort of like the standard of the day,
and it was easy to believe that there must be
something the faery is going on if they were having
parties in the palace while no one else could even
get a loaf of bread. Uh, So that is why
rumors were so rampant at the time. There had been
multiple calls for organized protests in the days and weeks

(14:35):
leading up to October, but this grain issue, combined with
the bad press around the party at Versaill, served as
a catalyst. Protests started on October fourth, with people marching
in the streets to decry this rumored party at Versailles
as well as the food scarcity, but they didn't really
come together until the following day. On October fifth of

(14:56):
seventeen eighty nine, a march started that would eventually cover
the twelve plus miles from Paris to Versailles, but it
didn't begin with that intent. So when the first part
of the crowd assembled in the morning, it was outside
the Hotel de Ville that was the seat of the
Parisian City Council, somewhere between five and ten thousand people. Again,

(15:18):
that's one of those things that the reporting is very,
very widely varied. It was mostly women. They stood outside
this administrative building demanding that all the remaining grain stores
be released to the people. There was no response from
the Hotel di Villa. So at that point the crowd
decided to march right to the monarchy with their protest,

(15:39):
and by noon the group had armed themselves with clubs, muskets,
pikes and the like and headed out of Paris to
walk to Versailles, basically the length of a half marathon.
I know. That's what I kept thinking, is that you know,
Tracy's done a half. I've done quite a number of
half marathons. This is not a small distance. It's one

(15:59):
of those things that if you've ever walked a mile
and been that person's been like I could do that
twelve more times. Yes, you probably could, but it's exhausting.
You might hurt yourself like I did. And now imagine
doing that when you haven't had enough to eat in months. Yeah,
it's no small undertaking, and it speaks to the level
of frustration that was prevalent at the time among the

(16:20):
people of Paris. The royal family had received word of
the protesters headed toward the palace, so they sought refuge
in their private apartments and the gates were locked. While
women made up the majority of the marchers, they were
accompanied by a National Guard officer named Stanislas Maillard. This
was not for many of the marchers their first protest.

(16:43):
A lot of the women, as well as Mayard, had
been part of the storming of the Bastilles several months
earlier on July fourteenth, and the group as it made
its way from Paris to Versailles grew. The exact numbers
of the protest are difficult to gauge because they're varying accounts,
and as we know for more recent history, it's kind

(17:03):
of tough to estimate crowd size. Sometimes, yes, numbers vary
anywhere from ten thousand to thirty thousand people, and the
crowd had more than one aim in this protest, and
that happened because it had become a combination of the
initial group of women who were marching largely over food shortages,
and other groups that had joined in with their own

(17:23):
agendas regarding the revolution. So by the time they reached Versailles,
there were several demands kind of being put forth by
different factions of the group. One was for the monarchy
to address the food shortage, which had really been the
initial driver for this whole march. Another was for the
king to relocate to Paris and reign from a position
where he was with his people and not solely influenced

(17:43):
by the aristocracy. And then there were people who just
wanted to harm the king or really, more specifically Marie Antoinette,
because she sort of became to many people of France
emblematic of the fiscal problems they were having, because she
was known for spending a lot of money when they
had nothing. We will talk about how things played out
once this protest actually got to Versailles, but first we

(18:05):
will have another quick word from one of our sponsors.
The protesters would end up spending about twenty four hours
at Versailles. The two days of the protest October fifth
and sixth, are sometimes referred to as the October Days
or the October Days March, in addition to being called

(18:27):
the Women's March on Versailles. To add tension to the situation,
it was raining when the march got to the Versailles complex,
so some of the women, about twenty, made their way
into the hall where the National Constituent Assembly was meeting,
along with Myard. While this took the Assembly by surprise,
the group spoke with the protesters and heard them out,
and Maard did most of the talking on behalf of

(18:50):
the demonstrators. The women and Mayard explained that there was
no bread in Paris and that they needed the Assembly's help,
and so the men drafted a proposed decree requesting that
the king make every effort to get green circulating through
the population, and this proposal was read to the women
and Mayard for review. Jean Joseph Mugnier, who was President

(19:12):
of the National Constituent Assembly, deputized six of the women
present so they could enter the palace and make their
case directly to King Louis. The sixteenth and For his part,
the king seemed receptive. He heard what the women had
to say and assured them that he would take action
to address the foods shortage. The crowd, however, was not
placated by the words of the king. In an attempt

(19:33):
to mollify the situation, Louis the sixteenth declared that the
food stores of Versailles should be open and that the
supplies within should be distributed among them. Still, the crowd
was not soothed. To add tension to the moment, a
National Guard regiment led by the Marquis de Lafayette had
arrived at Versailles, should military intervention be needed, but Louis

(19:53):
the sixteenth was against the idea of using force in
the situation. Tensions waxed and waned throughout the night and all,
although there were occasionally stray shots fired, the situation did
not escalate into violence. Allegedly, there was even a fairly
friendly relationship between some of the guardsmen and the crowd.

(20:14):
Given the Marque to Lafayette's reputation in both the United
States and France, that does not completely surprise me. Yeah,
Apparently some of the guardsmen were just kind of mingling
with the people that were there hanging out. They were
trying to kind of make a go of it, like
we're all stuck here for the night, I guess. But

(20:34):
as the night stretched on and dawn of October sixth approached,
it became apparent that there were factions in the crowd
who had gotten really restless with the situation. They wanted
more action on the part of the monarch to come
to the aid of the people, and they had become
convinced that the Queen, Marie Antoinette would reverse the seemingly
magnanimous efforts of her husband. The section of the protesters

(20:56):
became more and more agitated, and eventually made their way
in to the palace in the early morning in search
of the queen. Their intent was to harm her and,
according to some accounts, to kill her. But as the
queen fled, the angry faction was unable to keep up
the pursuit. For the palace's complex floor pun and its
many many doors, yeah, all of those two thousand rooms

(21:18):
really paid off, because if you didn't know the entry
and exit points, it was hard to keep up with
someone that was running through them that knew them very well.
And in the midst of this pursuit. Those things turned
violent when a guard fired upon two of the women protesters.
One of them was killed, which fomented the rest of
the group into retaliatory violence. Two soldiers were killed and dismembered.

(21:42):
The Marquis de Ferrier, a nobleman who was adversis at
the time, wrote of that morning, and here is what
he said. At six o'clock in the morning, a crowd
of women and armed men assembled in the square. Summoned
by the beating of drums, shouts of rage against the
royal bodyguards were heard. One of those columns marched up

(22:02):
to the royal gate but found it locked. Another got
through by the gate of the chapel, which was open.
One of the national guards of the Versailles militia led
the way up to the king's staircase. Some of the
bodyguard ran up, quote, my friends, you love your king,
and yet you even come to his palace to disturb him.
No one answered. The column continued to advance. The bodyguard

(22:26):
mustered in their hall. The doors were soon broken down
and they were forced to evacuate it. The conspirators approached
the Queen's apartments, crying, quote, we are going to cut
off her head, tear out her heart, fright her liver,
and that won't be the end of it. Milmandra flew
to the door of the first ante room, opened it hurriedly,
and called to the lady whom she saw, save the queen.

(22:48):
They mean to kill her. I am alone, facing two
thousand tigers. My comrades have been obliged to quit their haul.
After these few words, Maumandra shut the door and bravely
waited for the conspirators. One of them tried to stab
him with his pike. He carried the blow. Another, taking
the pike by the head, struck him a blow with

(23:10):
the butt, which felled him to the ground. Stand back,
said the National guardsman, who led the column. The crowd
made room for him. Then, measuring the butt of his
musket against mout Ander's head, he struck him with all
his force, so that the trigger penetrated his skull. Mailmandra,
streaming with blood, was left for dead, and eventually, with

(23:32):
more manpower summons, the military was able to get all
of the protesters out of the palace, though the now
angry mob remained outside. Lafayette suggested that Louis the Sixteenth
address the crowd and The king went along with this plan,
walking out to the balcony to tell the gathered people
that he and the rest of the immediate royal family

(23:53):
would travel to Paris, and he declared his love for
his people. He also put on a tricolor cocad and
Louis's words sort of did the trick. His words were
well received by the crowd, and they did begin to
cheer for him, and he then left the balcony to
be replaced by his wife, And while she was not

(24:14):
met with the same cheers, it was not lost on
the crowd that she was showing an incredible level of
trust in making this appearance so immediately after this foiled
attempt on her life. The morning was spent preparing for travel,
and that very afternoon, Louis the sixteenth, Marie Antoinette, and
their children left Versi, accompanied by several members of the

(24:34):
National Constituent Assembly and the crowd that had been at
Persai throughout the protest. King Louis the sixteenth and the
National Constituent Assembly moved into the Palais de Tuilerie on
the right bank of the Sinne. And while the Tuleirie
was a palace originally built in the sixteenth century. It
had not been an active residence for decades, so there
was some effort required to make it liveable as a

(24:56):
home and serviceable as a governmental hub. It's one of
those things where people go, well, you've moved into another palace,
But it really was a significant shift in their lifestyle
from what they had been living in at Versailles. This
is the first time in one hundred years that France
was governed from Paris rather than from the Versailles complex,
and Louis the sixteenth and his family never saw Versailles again. Yeah,

(25:22):
so that was the women's march on Versailles. That seemed effective.
A little bit of bloodshed unfortunately, but yeah, I mean
you and I talked about it before we started that.
I have this whole thing where I when I read
about Marie Antoinette and Louis the sixteenth, and there have
been some writings in recent years that have fallen more
in this angle rather than the sort of more vilifying versions,

(25:45):
which is probably what I'm most influenced by. They made
so many stupid, stupid moves, but I really think they
just were not prepared for the roles that they've found
themselves in. Yeah, they sometimes are portrayed as like mustache
twirling villains, cackling over everybody else's misfortune. Yeah, are just

(26:07):
completely callous, and really I think they just didn't get it.
They had no grasp of the reality of France. I
think Louis the sixteenth wanted to do the right thing
but didn't know how. He didn't know who to trust,
He didn't he wasn't ever confident enough in any of
his advisors to really follow through on any plans that
may have helped in the long run. There are some

(26:29):
historians that theorized that if Turgieau had been allowed to
stay in his position running finances, that he actually could
have prevented the later events of the revolution. But we
don't know. But yeah, I I oh, they made so
many poor choices and just bad decisions. But I really
think above all else, they were just foolish and ill prepared.

(26:53):
And the whole situation was exacerbated so much by it
like huge feud shortages and this enormous disparity between the
like the world of Versailles and the world of everyone else. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's a thing like how can you govern people
you don't even know or understand uh, and it's it's

(27:15):
a fascinating I think that's why people are continue to
be fascinated by Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette. It's
just it's such a bizarre concept. They're so completely divorced
from the people that they are allegedly ruling. It's there's
a surreal level of out of touchness going on, which

(27:35):
is again, it's fascinating. Thanks so much for joining us
on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
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