As the King’s intendants abandoned their offices and central authority collapsed, provincial towns established their own committees which agreed to respect the decrees of the National Assembly only when they coincided with the wishes of the local population. Attempts were made to put down the disturbances by raising companies of militia, but as most of those enrolled were in sympathy with the demonstrators, the disorders continued with angry crowds marching upon town halls crying for bread at prices they could afford, surrounding the homes of rich merchants and rentiers and, in some cases, pillaging them.
In the capital a deputy lamented that there was ‘no more army and no more police’, and Bailly admitted that ‘everybody knew how to command but nobody knew how to obey’. The lieutenant de maire of Saint Denis on the northern outskirts of Paris was chased through the streets by an angry crowd for contemptuously refusing to reduce the price of bread. Chased to the top of the church steeple, he was stabbed to death and decapitated. One of the Ministers in Breteuil’s reactionary government, Foullon de Doué, who was believed to have been speculating in the grain trade and plotting a counter-revolution, met an even more horrible fate. Accused of having said that the people should be made to eat hay if they were hungry, a collar of nettles was placed around his neck, a bunch of thistles was thrust into his hand and a fistful of hay was stuffed between his lips. He was then hanged on a nearby lampost. His son-in-law, Bertier de Sauvigny, the Intendant of Paris and the Île de France, was accused of similar abuses and murdered as well. His heart was torn out of his body and brandished at the windows of the Hôtel de Ville. Then his head was cut off and paraded with that of his father-in-law on a pikestaff through the streets and down the arcades of the Palais Royal, the one head being pushed against the other to cries of ‘Kiss papa! Kiss papa!’ Here Gouverneur Morris saw the ‘populace carrying about the mangled fragments with a savage joy’. ‘Gracious God,’ Morris thought. “What a people!’
There were strong protests against these murders, but they had their apologists, too. ‘Is this blood then so pure,’ asked Barnave defiantly in the National Assembly, ‘that one should so regret to spill it.’ Others cried that more heads would have to roll before justice for the people could be secured.
While the debates in the Assembly continued urgently but inconclusively, the wildest rumours, intensified by newspaper reports, were passed from mouth to mouth: the aristocrats were conspiring to suppress the National Assembly; the Queen had inspired a plot to blow it up; huge armies of hired brigands were on the march; foreign powers were preparing to invade the country to restore the King’s lost power; nobles were emigrating to enlist the help of mercenaries; the British fleet had been sighted off Brest; Polish troops had landed at Dunkirk; Spaniards were about to disembark at Bordeaux; Austrian soldiers had been seen on the march at Lyons.
Stories such as these, spreading through the country districts, led to waves of panic which were to become known as the Great Fear. As castles, manor houses, abbeys and tax and salt monopoly offices were invaded and sometimes set on fire, villagers fled in terror from their houses at reports of assassins paid to wreak revenge, and sought refuge in forests and church belfries. Fear led to further violence. Protesting that they were acting in the name of the King against aristocrats who were conspiring to thwart his wishes, the peasants grew ever more violent in their demonstrations against manorial dues, disregarding all authority. ‘There no longer exists either executive power, laws, magistrates or police,’ the Venetian Ambassador reported. ‘A horrible anarchy prevails.’
To the National Assembly the problem of restoring order seemed insuperable until the delegates from Brittany hit upon a clever tactical move by which certain of the liberal nobles were to offer to renounce some of those feudal privileges against which the peasants were so violently protesting. It was hoped that other nobles would then be persuaded to follow their example in a rising flood of emotional renunciations. These renunciations were to be provoked by the Duc d’Aiguillon, the greatest landowner in France, who was believed to have an annual income of 100,000 livres from his feudal rights alone. The debate was planned for the evening of Tuesday, 4 August.
It almost failed in its purpose: the Vicomte de Noailles, a young man who had fought in America with his brother-in-law, Lafayette, and who evidently had a mind to steal the thunder of those who were in the Breton plot, leapt to his feet before the Duc d’Aiguillon. His proposals for a programme of aristocratic self-denial were naturally not too well received, coming as they did from one who did not personally have much to lose. After the Duc d’Aiguillon’s speech, however, the mood the Bretons had been hoping for was created. One after the other, noblemen and prelates alike, stood up voluntarily to renounce rights and privileges in an atmosphere that became almost hysterical. Spurred on by the excited self-immolation of the earlier renunciants, spokesmen for parlements and privileged towns jumped up to offer further sacrifices in a stream of oblation so rapid that the Assembly’s clerks could not keep up with it and the Marquis de Lally-Tollendal, by now an exasperated conservative, passed a message to the President: ‘Suspend the session. They have all gone quite mad.’
But the session, which Mirabeau and Sieyés had both declined to attend, continued enthusiastically apace in what one witness described as ‘a contagion of sentimental feeling’ until two o’clock in the morning, deputies weeping and embracing one another, cheering each other’s selflessness or giving away, so one observer caustically commented, that which they did not own. ‘What a nation! What glory!’ declared Duquesnoy, a deputy from Bar-le-Duc, ‘What an honour to be French!’
With daylight however, came doubt and apprehension. There was talk of having to consult constituents for the endorsement of what one noble deputy termed the ‘annihilation of a whole property system’. There was a feeling that perhaps Mirabeau was right when he complained that it was just like Frenchmen to spend weeks squabbling over syllables and then within a single night to ‘overthrow the entire traditional order of the monarchy’. So, although the Assembly’s decree proudly announced that it had destroyed ‘in its entirety the feudal system’, the debates of the next few days severely modified the sacrifices which had been promised and ensured that, while ecclesiastical tithes were abolished, the most burdensome of the feudal dues were made subject to redemption, and, until they were redeemed, the peasants were bound by them, as they had been before.