On October 5, 1789, the women of Paris marched to Versailles to demand bread; on the morrow, the royal bodyguards fought about the precincts of the palace, and the royal family took the road back to Paris.
A scarcity of flour weighed heavily upon the capital. On October 4, agitation had already mounted amidst the debates of the Assembly and the persistent rumour that the King might withdraw to Metz. Cries were raised demanding that the King be fetched from Versailles, and clamours arose for bread. Bailly and Necker, Champagnac relates, had given orders for grain to be brought in abundantly; nevertheless, arduous transport, pillaging along the highways, and the impediments of trade prevented supplies from meeting the public need. The night of the fourth to the fifth had passed in relative calm, yet the crowds gathered anew with the dawn.
The women placed themselves at the head of the movement. The chronicler asserts that the ringleaders put them forward because the guards would hesitate to repel them with arms. He depicts them running through the streets to cry out that the bakers had no more bread, then converging upon the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. Men sought to join them; the women thrust them aside, declaring that men knew not how to act.
Upon the square, the women turned upon a battalion of the National Guard. They forced it to yield under a hail of stones; a door was then battered down, and the multitude surged into the Hôtel-de-Ville. Men armed with pikes joined the women; certain among them wished to set the edifice on fire. They were beaten back, yet they gained access to the great belfry and sounded the tocsin. The faubourgs stirred at once into motion. The crisis had outgrown the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville to become a summons to the entire city.
Stanislas Maillard seized a drum and offered to assemble the women and lead them toward Versailles. According to Champagnac, his initial design was merely to draw them away without conducting them thither; he found himself, however, compelled to follow their march. He led them along the quays and past the Louvre, then across the Tuileries to the Champs-Élysées. There, the resolve was reaffirmed: they must march to Versailles. The women carried staves, broomsticks, muskets, and cutlasses. An eyewitness cited by the chronicler describes a march under torrential rain, wherein pale women, shivering with cold, advanced with armed men mingled in their ranks.
Upon their arrival at Versailles, the multitude encountered several royal bodyguards. Insults were hurled, and musket shots were fired at the soldiers; none of them, Champagnac notes, was struck in this first encounter. A delegation of twelve women was admitted to the King’s apartments, alongside a deputation from the National Assembly. One among them, Louise Chabry, bore the petition of her companions. At the sight of the King, she stood overcome, could scarcely stammer a plea for bread, and swooned away. When she recovered her senses and offered to kiss the monarch’s hand, he embraced her. He bade her tell the crowd that orders would be dispatched to draw grain from Senlis and Lagny and to remove all obstacles to its transit.
The delegates departed with this pledge. They were greeted with cries of “Long live the King!” yet other women demanded firmer guarantees than their mere report. Some accused them of having allowed themselves to be seduced, and sought to chastise them. The bodyguards, led by the Count de Guiche, rode up to extricate these women. Gunfire broke out from both sides; two guards fell, and several women were wounded. The chronicle does not permit one to reconstruct the exact succession of the shots. It records, in parallel, that a man followed by several women broke through the battalion ranks to the palace gate; M. de Savonnières rode in pursuit of him and took a ball that shattered his arm.
The King, apprised of the peril, sent word commanding his guards not to fire and to withdraw to their quarters. During their retreat, musket shots were exchanged between them and the National Guard of Versailles. The source observes that none could ascertain from which side the first shot had been loosed.
The night proved comparatively quiet. The arrival of the Parisian National Guard, under the command of Lafayette, reassured those who believed the violence of the day would not rekindle. Yet at five o'clock on the following morning, the crowd that had marched from Paris began to stir. It was then that a stable-boy, defending the horses of the bodyguards, narrowly escaped hanging. The shout of “To the bodyguards!” broke off his ordeal: his assailants abandoned their victim to rush upon the soldiers.
The multitude was now drawn from both Paris and Versailles. Champagnac no longer paints the scene as merely grotesque tumult; he describes bodyguards fleeing, pursued and wounded, and records that two heads were soon displayed upon the points of pikes. Lafayette arrived with his National Guards and took the soldiers under his protection, expelling the armed men who had forced their way into the palace. Horses that had broken from the stables galloped through the avenues, ridden by individuals who had seized them and could not master them.
The Queen was in her bed when the fighting reached her apartments. A bodyguard, Champagnac relates, had his throat cut while defending the passage leading thither. The Queen had barely time to flee to the King’s chamber, half-dressed. The assailants, finding her bed empty, pierced it repeatedly with pikes and daggers.
The former French Guards, quartered not far from the palace, hastened forward and dispersed a portion of the attackers. They then presented themselves before the doors where the bodyguards had barricaded themselves, reminding them that at Fontenoy they had saved their regiment. Champagnac writes that all factions extolled the devotion and presence of mind of Lafayette, who repeatedly risked his life in organizing the rescue. Madame Adélaïde, the King’s aunt, clasped him in her arms and thanked him for having saved the royal family.
Two youths, between twelve and fifteen years of age, carried toward Paris the heads of two bodyguards, whom the chapter identifies as Deshuttes and Varicourt. The latter had perished defending the Queen’s apartment. The chronicle recounts that the heads were taken to a peruke-maker, who was forced to dress and curl their hair while it was still clotted with blood. The chronicler reports this scene without naming his informant. The General had the bands pursued by a detachment instructed to prevent their return, and issued orders to disarm those carrying the heads. He had the trophies seized. The author expressly denies that they preceded the King’s carriage upon his journey back to Paris.
The King’s return was the direct consequence of the insurrection. At the Hôtel-de-Ville, Bailly received him amidst an immense concourse. The women who had come to ask for bread the previous day marched at the head of the procession bearing green boughs; the vanguard sang of victory, boasting that they were bringing back the baker, the baker’s wife, and the little baker’s boy—epithets designating the King, the Queen, and the Dauphin. The King declared that he returned with confidence amidst his people of Paris, according to Champagnac. Bailly repeated the sentence; the Queen observed that he had omitted the word “confidence,” to which the mayor replied that the King was more fortunate than if he had uttered it himself. The royal family then took up residence at the Tuileries, an abode that had stood uninhabited for a century.
The King was thenceforth in Paris. The women had obtained far more than a pledge of grain: they brought back the very sovereign from whom they looked for bread. Behind this triumphant return, Versailles retained its dead and its wounded. Louise Chabry had delivered a petition; the stable-lad had defended his horses; guards had held the doors. In the chronicle, the great political day is measured also by these obscure deeds, and by the lives it came near to claiming or utterly consumed.