Women's March on Versailles
Several thousand women walked from Paris to Versailles on 5 October 1789 and brought the king back with them. Bread was the cause. The harvest of 1788 had failed, the price of a four-pound loaf had reached most of a labourer's daily wage, and the market women of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had been queuing at bakers' shops for months. The immediate trigger was a banquet at Versailles at which officers of the Flanders regiment were reported to have trampled the tricolour cockade. A crowd gathered at the Hôtel de Ville, took its weapons, and set out in the rain — some six or seven thousand women, with Maillard of the Bastille conducting them and the National Guard under Lafayette following later under pressure from its own ranks. They reached Versailles in the afternoon, filled the assembly hall, and sent a deputation to the king, who received them and promised grain. That was not the object. The crowd found an unguarded entrance in the small hours, killed two bodyguards, and reached the queen's antechamber; she escaped along a corridor to the king's rooms. In the morning Lafayette brought the family onto the balcony, and the crowd demanded that they come to Paris. They left that afternoon in a procession of some 60,000 people, with the heads of the bodyguards carried ahead of it and the marchers calling the family the baker, the baker's wife and the baker's boy. The court never returned to Versailles. The march is also the point at which the revolution acquired a method. A crowd that walked twenty kilometres and came back with the executive is a demonstration of where power now lay, and Paris used the same instrument in 1792, 1793 and 1795.
- Year: 1789 CE
- Category: Social
