In another timeline—one without André—the National Legislative Assembly, as the supreme organ of power, performed terribly on August tenth. Terrified by cannon fire and the cries of battle, and by the ghastly bodies strewn inside and outside the palace, the deputies not only accepted every political demand put forward by the Paris Commune under Danton; they even took the initiative, for a time, to place most of the state’s authority in the Commune’s hands.

  Now, however, André’s presence changed everything. The deputies of the National Assembly rallied with unprecedented unity around André, the rotating President. With 2,000 volunteers bought over to their side, 3,000 National Guardsmen who had switched allegiance, and several hundred gendarmes inside the Manège Hall, they had more than enough force to keep any mob that threatened the Legislative Assembly outside the doors.

  As dusk approached, perhaps drunk on earlier success, Hébert—acting in the capacity of the Paris Commune’s interim prosecutor—actually mustered a pike column of over ten thousand men and marched in arrogant display to the Manège Hall. He brazenly demanded that the Legislative Assembly immediately hand over “those aristocratic deputies who have been accused by the people of betraying the fatherland.”

  André’s answer, as President, was simple: suppress them without hesitation. He ordered the volunteers and the National Guard to cooperate with the gendarmes, arrest every unlawful agitator who dared offend the sacred National Assembly; if they resisted, they were to be shot on the spot.

  Five minutes after the order was issued, a dense volley shattered the pike column. The “army” of sans-culottes collapsed at once, scattering in panic; even Hébert and his associates were seized on the spot by the gendarmes. Had Danton and Marat not arrived in time, the gendarmerie colonel—acting under orders—would already have convened a makeshift military tribunal outside the Manège Hall, driven the offenders up against a school wall, and carried out a mass firing squad.

  As for Marat, André no longer had any reason to indulge that revolutionary madman. Had André not remembered the old revolutionary camaraderie he once shared with the so-called Friend of the People, the rotating President might have ordered his arrest as well. Yet Danton’s request was different: André could not simply ignore it—unless he intended, at that very moment, to declare open war on the Paris Commune, and to unleash a still harsher and bloodier civil war on the very day the King was overthrown.

  André believed that, with the support of half the Paris National Guard and most of the volunteers, taking control of Paris would not be especially difficult. But control was not obedience. Nearly seven hundred thousand Parisians, inflamed by revolutionary fervor, were like a vast living volcano, capable at any moment of spewing molten fury that would swallow everything. Unless André redeployed tens of thousands of elite troops from the Army of the North to Paris, he could not be certain of smothering the blaze before it erupted.

  Yet France on the Continent was not a British island sheltered by the English Channel. A Prusso-French Coalition force of one hundred and thirty thousand men was already poised for war, ready either to strike—or already striking—at the frontier towns of northeastern France. Without the Army of the North holding the line, and without Paris sustaining the rear, the Marne and Ardennes—André’s base of survival and power—were destined to fall to the Prusso-Austrian Coalition and to the émigré army of exiled nobles.

  With dangers pressing both within and without, André could choose only one principal direction of attack. After all, a war against foreign enemies was far more welcome than a war against fellow citizens.

  “The Paris Commune must immediately remove Hébert from all his functions, and he must serve two months of hard labor at the Versailles gravel works. As the chief parties responsible for this siege of the National Legislative Assembly, Frey and four others will be condemned to death by a provisional military tribunal—by firing squad. In addition, the Legislative Assembly guarantees that it will not pursue responsibility for the other participants in the riot.” After bargaining back and forth, this was André’s final reply to Danton, Marat, and the rest—as the protector of the National Assembly.

  Marat was furious. He rushed into the chamber and shouted that André was a dictatorial tyrant, swearing that he would summon the Parisians to overthrow the new despot. The moment he spoke, he was met with prolonged booing from the entire body of deputies. Men rose to their feet and shouted, urging the rotating President André to “in the name of the law and of the nation, execute this Swiss who clamors for extreme violence—only then can order and peace be restored to Paris!”

  Seeing the chamber on the verge of chaos, Danton hurriedly signaled Legendre and the others to drag Marat out of the Manège Hall. Then, facing André high upon the rostrum, he lowered his massive head—so often held high.

  “Citizen President,” he said, “the Paris Commune accepts this resolution of the National Assembly without conditions.”

  Amid the unceasing cheers of four hundred deputies, Danton and his party withdrew in gloom. Yet André felt no joy of victory. He knew that, in a moment of impulse, he had made himself the target of the revolutionary radicals’ hatred.

  But André did not regret it. As rotating President, he had promised the deputies protection—and he had to keep that promise in earnest, even to aristocratic deputies who had once opposed and despised him.

  Often, revolution truly does require extreme violence to smash what is old, rotten, and no longer fit for the age. But revolution needs order and conscience even more, to defend the last moral boundary of humankind.

  Before adjournment that night, André, in his capacity as rotating President, collectively issued official diplomatic passports for thirty-five aristocratic deputies accused by the Paris Commune—men of the Royalist Party or the Constitutionalists—authorizing them to leave on public duty with their families and seek political refuge in Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States.

  Outside the Manège Hall, the leaders of the Paris Commune, having suffered a crushing blow, looked as if they had lost their parents. They were carrying the more than thirty bodies of Frey and the others, searching for a suitable place to bury them. Even Danton had believed that Hébert’s probing move would force the Legislative Assembly toward compromise; yet no one had expected André to strike back decisively, openly ordering the National Guard, the volunteers, and the gendarmes to fire upon the very sans-culottes who, only hours before, had been hailed as “close comrades.”

  “I am sorry—this was my mistake!” The moment he returned to the Commune’s headquarters, Danton apologized publicly before the committee. He had forgotten—or deliberately ignored—the grave warning André had delivered the previous night at the villa on the ?le Saint-Louis.

  “There is no point saying that now.” Marat, regaining his composure, shook his head and stopped Danton’s self-reproach. “Our greatest problem is how to salvage the Commune’s morale, and then to review what measures we must take in future to guard against the National Assembly.”

  At once, the ten committee members fell into collective silence (of the other two, Hébert had been exiled, and Frey had been shot). Indeed, the pike host of the sans-culottes looked imposing, but in truth it was fragile as glass. One hour earlier, had that dictator of the National Assembly given a single order, the National Guard and the volunteers could have hunted them down as easily as chasing rabbits, wiping them out to the last.

  Just as everyone lapsed into wordless silence, Chaumette—still not a committee member—boldly burst in from outside. He addressed the men with excitement:

  “Hey, citizens, we have just won a victory—and we have won the support of the National Legislative Assembly. We will rouse the people and show no mercy to those lace-shirted, silk-stocking nobles—those Counts and Marquises who have already sold themselves to foreign powers. In the name of revolution, we can execute them quickly: first a knife to the belly, then a shot to the forehead, then fling them out the window—or dump them into the Seine. And in the end we add: ‘Damn you traitors who sold out the French fatherland—go to hell and give the Austrians our regards!’”

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  Marat and the others’ eyes lit up; they voiced support at once, and some even proposed bringing Chaumette into the Commune’s committee. When all eyes turned to Danton, the chairman hesitated briefly, then added:

  “Yes—fine. But remember: we must keep well away from the Manège Hall, and under no circumstances are we to intimidate or threaten the deputies. And yes—also the King’s family, who will be imprisoned in the Chateau du Temple.”

  Before night fell, at the Paris Commune’s call, the sans-culottes’ pike bands surged forth for the third time. They hunted down fleeing “stocking nobles” and red-coated soldiers across the city. One mob drove seven or eight nobles who had failed to escape into a sealed cellar, then flooded it, drowning them all.

  Under the tall chestnut trees of the Tuileries Garden, bodies of defending soldiers were piled high—around six hundred men. Some had been stabbed; others had been beaten to death with stones and clubs, their corpses mangled beyond recognition. Women stripped the dead of their clothes; some particularly vicious men castrated and dismembered the bodies, then hoisted severed heads on pikes and paraded them through the streets in boastful display.

  When some Royalist nobles learned that the Manège Hall could guarantee their safety, they abandoned their property and fled with their families to seek refuge there. André ordered the National Guard and the gendarmes to let them through, and to provide all refugees with food, clean water, and tents—on the condition that no one was to enter the Assembly chamber itself without permission.

  Not until August twelfth—the third day after the uprising—did order finally return to Paris. Patrolmen of the various districts and the National Guard went back to the streets; the provincial volunteers returned to their camps on the northern or southern outskirts to rest and regroup; and the sans-culottes, having put away their pikes, once again busied themselves with their families’ daily survival.

  Because the turmoil in the streets persisted, the transfer of Louis XVI and his family was forced back by thirty-six hours. Not until six o’clock on the morning of August twelfth did the Paris National Guard begin to carry out the resolution issued by the President of the National Assembly.

  On Sunday morning, the deposed King Louis XVI, his family, and the nursemaids of the two children set out for their “new home.” Mayor Pétion—restored to office by the National Assembly—and Manuel, prosecutor of the Paris Commune, led a National Guard battalion of six hundred officers and men to provide escort and security along the route.

  As André’s third humiliation inflicted upon Louis XVI and his wife, he ordered that, on the road to the Chateau du Temple, the two coachmen must remove every curtain from the carriage windows. They were to drive at a crawl, and, moreover, to make a wide detour through the Paris neighborhoods north of the Seine—the Right Bank—so that hundreds of thousands of Parisians could watch Louis XVI and Queen Marie in their most wretched embarrassment.

  When the carriage procession passed through Place Vend?me, spectators pointed and jeered. They shouted again and again, urging Louis XVI and his Austrian woman to look closely at the shattered remains of Louis XIV’s statue. That pitiful monument—like royal power itself—had been smashed into fragments by the people of Paris, and would never be restored to its former shape.

  The kind-hearted, beauty-pitying “King Pétion” feared that the Queen might show contempt on her face and provoke a new clash with the sans-culottes. Fortunately, Marie-Antoinette only kept her gaze lowered, ignoring everything outside.

  The carriage took a full two and a half hours to reach the Chateau du Temple. Along the way, though the crowd on both sides was vast, the order was, on the whole, quiet; only at Place Vend?me did the noise swell for a short while. The chant most often heard from the sans-culottes was not “Down with the King!”—for the King in the carriage had already been brought down—but the new slogan: “Long live the Nation!”

  Yet most people remained silent, watching with complex expressions as Louis Capet and Marie-Antoinette—figures they had once blessed at a royal wedding, cheered at an accession, hated for misrule and extravagance, and pitied in misfortune—vanished behind the gates of the Chateau du Temple.

  If one opens an eighteenth-century map of Paris, one finds that the Chateau du Temple—also called the Temple Palace—stood at the corner where the Tuileries and the Paris City Hall formed a crossing. Its broad main block rose five stories, over fifty meters high, with walls three meters thick. Beside it lay a small garden, and around it stood four ancient pointed towers like bastions.

  The chateau had once belonged to Louis XVI’s younger brother, the Comte d’Artois. In practice, however, he had scarcely lived there; his family resided permanently at Versailles. After the Revolution broke out, the Comte d’Artois and his household fled France and never showed their faces in Paris again. When, in October 1791, the National Legislative Assembly ordered the chateau confiscated, that former royal residence became an abandoned, infamous ruin.

  After humiliating the King’s family three times, André did not continue further. He ordered the National Guard under General Santerre to serve as the chateau’s guards—its jailers—rather than allowing the Paris Commune’s sans-culottes to run wild. Moreover, the deposed royal family was housed in the spacious, well-lit main block, not in a dark, cramped tower.

  Even so, to prevent any rescue attempt, General Santerre placed guard posts at every entrance. In ordinary times the main gate remained shut, watched day and night by a full battalion. The National Guard also demolished nearby houses; from a distance, anyone approaching could be spotted at once. The trees in the courtyard were cut down to the last trunk, so that no one could hide there…

  The so-called Chateau du Temple had now become a heavily guarded royal prison.

  …

  Almost at the same time, as Louis XVI and his family moved into their “new residence,” Robespierre finally crawled out from the carpenter’s cellar, once again presenting himself to the world as a great revolutionary—complete with his handsome wig. Before long, he questioned Couthon and Carnot about what had happened at the National Assembly and the Tuileries.

  Hearing that the Tuileries had been taken by the National Guard, the volunteers, and the sans-culottes, the sea-green-faced Robespierre rubbed his hands in excitement, itching to raise a little wooden club himself and imitate the sans-culottes’ swagger.

  But when Couthon described how the National Assembly under André had successfully suppressed the Paris Commune’s insolence under Danton and Marat, L’Incorruptible’s expression changed at once.

  “André has degenerated into an anti-national parliamentary dictator! We must strike him down—firmly, and without mercy!” Robespierre cursed.

  The cripple beside him nodded repeatedly, while Carnot frowned, plainly displeased by Robespierre’s rash certainty. Carnot did not like dictators either; but on August tenth, without the rotating President’s alertness, decisiveness, and hardness, the National Assembly might have been trampled and humiliated at the sans-culottes’ whim—perhaps with dozens, even hundreds, of deputies murdered by the mob.

  “Maximilien,” Carnot asked coldly, inwardly irritated, “do you think we still have the strength to contend with André now?”

  “We will ally with the Paris Commune! Danton and Marat will support us,” Robespierre replied, unconcerned.

  Carnot pointed out, “The Paris Commune’s sans-culottes now behave like lapdogs. The moment they see patrolmen, the National Guard, the volunteers, or the gendarmes, they keep their distance. They do not even dare to step forward and provoke.”

  Facing his comrade’s doubt, Robespierre did not grow angry. He explained patiently:

  “The Brissot faction—or the Girondins, if you prefer—has accepted my offer of peace. Tonight, Danton, Marat, Brissot, Vergniaud, and I will gather at a tavern on Peacock Street to discuss how to dispose of the problem of this parliamentary dictator.”

  “My friends—will you come?” Robespierre turned his gaze toward the two deputies.

  Carnot answered with blunt refusal:

  “On August tenth, André may have been dictatorial, but his term as President is ending. Unless he continues to cling to the rotating presidency after August twentieth, I swear, in the name of the law, that I will not stand up to oppose him.”

  With that, the stiff, obstinate captain of engineers left the room without looking back, leaving Couthon and Robespierre staring at each other.

  …

  Around the same time, at the townhouse of Condorcet, the Marquis—an academician of the Academy—was also on the verge of breaking with Brissot, Vergniaud, and the others because of André. Though Condorcet and his wife had gone to the suburbs to hide on August tenth and had not attended the meetings of the past two days, he fully supported André’s course—especially since, under the protection of the National Guard and the gendarmes, the Manège Hall had sheltered several of Condorcet’s relatives and friends.

  Brissot hurried to explain to his old friend:

  “We are not taking action against André. We only want, before André becomes a dictatorial Caesar, to push him away from Paris—so as to prevent his tendency toward further despotism.”

  Vergniaud added at the right moment:

  “Indeed, André himself previously wished to return as soon as possible to his Army of the North, to continue attacking the Austrian forces and ultimately to liberate the entire Southern Netherlands.”

  Condorcet held to his view.

  “Unless André himself chooses it, no one can drive him out of Paris.”