The Grimaldis of Monaco, page 9
The people of Menton and Roquebrune had not been liberated from an oppressive country. Nor did they have a history of monarchy. They had been bought and sold along with their lands from one feudal lord to another, and their heritage and geographical situation gave them closer ties to Genoa, Sardinia and Naples than to France. They grew olive trees and grapes on their rugged, rocky terrain and ate bountifully from the nearby sea. They were poor but not starving, and the combined population (about 1,280 at this time) was made up of small individual landowners rather than feudal lords and serfs. Therefore, they keenly felt Honoré’s heavy taxation which took nearly 70 percent of their earned income, it being a true yoke about their necks.
The French were leading the way for them, and they presented a petition that demanded of Honoré reforms, representation, lower taxes, and roads to allow them better access over the mountains and to the ports in Monaco and Nice. The list made evident the Monégasques’ discontent, and the tone of the petition—a demand really—presented the possibility that they might well be moved to do something about it.
Honoré, sensing the danger but not the immensity of it, made his own compromise by permitting each town to form its own council while he ignored all their other demands. This, following the dramatic move of the French people in storming the Bastille on July 14, 1789, was not enough to appease the growing dissent.
Honoré’s world was shifting beneath his feet. Along with his troubles in Monaco, the new French National Assembly which had been formed in hopes of breaking the deadlock that was preventing emergency action to relieve the suffering of a hungry populace, had abolished all feudal rights and revenues. On September 4, 1790, Honoré protested to the Assembly that the taxes received from the duchy of Valentinois “were in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Péronne [forced on Louis XI in 1468 when he was defeated in that city in a war with Charles of Burgundy], compensation for the loss of the states in the Kingdom of Naples.” The issue was tabled while the Revolution moved inexorably on. The momentum and the seriousness of the growing rebellion eluded Honoré, although the rest of Europe’s monarchs and aristocrats had been stunned out of their apathy by the formation of the French National Assembly and the overthrow of the Bastille.
Money was Honoré’s solution to the increasing restiveness of the Monégasques, money in sufficient quantities to enable him to put their demands into effect and to hire troops to protect his threatened interests. How he could raise it was another matter. With Monaco’s long association with France, he could not expect to be helped by another nation. To solicit help from Austria because of Marie Antoinette’s connections would be considered traitorous by the French Assembly and would make it impossible for him to return to France, at least until the rebellion had been suppressed, which was what he expected to happen in the end.
He had arranged what he had believed to be a brilliant match for his older son, Honoré, by marrying him in 1777 at the age of nineteen to Louise-Félicité d’Aumont, heiress through her mother to the considerable fortune of Cardinal Mazarin and, ironically, the great-granddaughter of the infamous Hortense Mancini, erstwhile mistress of England’s Charles II and of Prince Louis of Monaco. Expecting a huge dowry from the bride’s family, Honoré had transferred the dukedom and peerage of Valentinois to his son and heir in order to seal the contract, thus severing his own links with the French Court. An even greater inducement than the money in the bride’s dowry had been the vast lands and possessions of the Mazarin-d’Aumonts which were to pass into his hands in 1781, upon the bride’s coming of age, as part of the wedding contract.
Confident that he had engineered a splendid marriage for his son while filling his own coffers, Honoré had lived ever more extravagantly, only to be faced in 1788 with the shocking knowledge that the Mazarin-d’Aumont “fortune” was uncollectable since it was encumbered by huge mortgages and numerous lawsuits. The debts had increased as the young Grimaldis lived high on borrowed money, Louise-Félicité running up vast bills with gambling losses, jewels and clothes. By May 1789, the liens against the bride’s dowry amounted to 1,390,000 livres—exceeding its actual worth. Not only was there no money to help Monaco’s woes, Honoré had to look elsewhere if he was to save his own estates.
In April 1790, he left Monaco in the hands of his self-appointed officials, none of them up to the task before them, and went to Paris where, after his petition had been rejected, he battled the Assembly for over a year for recognition of his claim to the revenues of his estates. Finally, in September 1791, it issued a decree allowing him an indemnity and charging the King’s government to pay over to him the amount of 273,766 francs. This was a farce, for three months earlier the Assembly had suspended the King from his royal functions. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their children were prisoners in the Tuileries while outside the gates of their palace-prison crowds shouted, “Austrian-whore [the Queen]!” Honoré stood no chance of collecting from the government of an imprisoned monarch.
There remained some hope that the struggle of the conservatives, led by Mirabeau, to make France a constitutional monarchy would succeed. The left wing demanded the abolition of the monarchy, but a majority in the Assembly prevailed. Despite this, nothing had changed for the royal family: they remained virtual prisoners.
The Paris to which Honoré had returned was in turmoil. Of the 650,000 people crowded into the city, over half were unemployed, roaming aimlessly through the narrow, winding, muddy streets of the still largely medieval city, their anger rising as their stomachs growled with increasing hunger. Even for those with a few sous in their pockets, bread was short, for there had been severe storms that winter and the wheat harvest had been nearly ruined. To add to the discontent of the French workers who, after the storming of the Bastille, had believed revolutions in other countries would help their cause, Europe did not follow their lead.
The frustration and inconclusiveness of their situation—the King unable to act and the Assembly playing a waiting game—enraged them further. During the harsh winter of 1792 when crops once again were sparse and the price of a loaf of bread exorbitant, calls for bloodshed “rose like a mad man’s shriek.” In April 1792, against the King’s judgment, the French Assembly declared war against Austria, which had announced itself ready to restore the King “to a situation in which he would be free to strengthen the foundations of monarchical government . . .”
The effect of this devastating war was not only that the Queen, Marie Antoinette, became an enemy alien (she was Austrian by birth), but that the country was now forced to feed, clothe, equip and shelter an army of 400,000 men.
Honoré remained in Paris, not knowing where to turn, for on January 13, 1793, the People’s Councils of Monaco, Menton and Roquebrune formed a Conventional Assembly, declared the end of Honoré’s reign and voted to ask for union with France, the first foreign land to do so. General Brunet, the commander of the French troops who were at the time engaged in hostilities in Sardinia, conveyed this request to the Assembly in Paris. It arrived and was acted upon only hours after a French tribunal of 749 members voted by a majority of 53 that the King, now a prisoner at Temple Prison, be condemned to death on the guillotine.1
The dangers on the streets of Paris were always present. However, having given his horses and carriages to the military and donated to the populist cause, Honoré III remained miraculously unharmed. His son, Honoré, in poor health and now separated from his wife, had come to live with him. His younger son, Joseph, who had married the beautiful Françoise-Thérèse de Choiseul-Stainville in 1782, traveled abroad trying to raise funds to extricate his family from their problems. This brought him under suspicion as a suspected enemy of the people and so he was forced to remain with his wife out of France, having left their two daughters in the care of a governess.
The King was executed on January 21, 1793, and on March 4, 1793, Monaco officially became part of the French Alpes-Maritimes département, which included Nice. Lazare Carnot, considered to be the military genius of the Revolution, stated that since “it appears that the ex-prince did not declare himself an enemy of France during the Revolution, and since he has always claimed her protection as a friend and ally, the committee is of the opinion that in abolishing his honorific and feudal revenues you ought to accord him protection and safeguard for what he may possess as an ordinary citizen.” This seemed to indicate that if Honoré did return to Monaco his life would not be in jeopardy. Jean-Michel Alexandre de Millo, seventy-three years of age and a former associate and friend of Honoré’s, was elected mayor on March 24. Only days later he was removed from office.
A revolutionary group called the Société Populaire came into control, and anyone unsympathetic to the cause was either banished or imprisoned. (Although deaths occurred, there is no official record of executions having been carried out.) There was a move to “dechristianization.” The sounding of church chimes was forbidden, as were any religious ceremonies not held in churches, which were closed at night, and priests were forbidden to celebrate midnight mass or hear confessions. Nonetheless, the Revolution in Monaco was at best a small replica of that in France. Since the Principality had never had an aristocratic or affluent society other than the Grimaldis, life simply became bleaker than before, and the people suffered deprivation but not the hunger (for farming continued) nor the fear that consumed France.
Severe storms sent massive waves crashing against the sides of the Rock on March 3, 1793, forcing a French ship with two commissars of the French Republic to wait until a day later to make the decree public. There are no reports existing that any great cheering was heard as the Grimaldi standard was taken down from the Palace. There was, however, tremendous pillaging of the art, silver and other treasures inside, perhaps by the French before they sailed. A meticulous inventory was then done of every room in the Palace; and it appears that after that day, nothing further was ever removed.
In September the ex-Prince, his ailing older son and his estranged wife, Louise-Félicité, and their younger son, eight-year-old Florestan, were imprisoned in the barracks of the rue de Sèvres as enemies of the people. The child and his mother were rescued by the Grimaldis’ friend and family doctor, a man named Desormeaux, who forged a release order and then hid them in his home until the end of the Reign of Terror.2 Françoise-Thérèse, the wife of Honoré’s younger son, Joseph, was not so fortunate. Unable to bear being apart from her daughters during this horrifying time, she had returned to Paris in November 1792, and was immediately arrested. Despite his imprisonment Honoré managed to secure funds on her behalf, and she was released against surety.
Honoré was very fond of Françoise-Thérèse, who, with Joseph, had spent several months at Carnolès with him when they were first married. She was a delicate girl, fair-skinned, with pale hair set off by violet eyes, and had a charming manner. When she was arrested again in September 1793, Honoré was also incarcerated and could not help her. Since Joseph was under high suspicion of being an enemy of the people (the reason for Honoré’s arrest), she feared the worst. Claiming to be ill, she was allowed to go into an anteroom to lie down while the charges against her were put before the magistrate. Somehow she managed to slip past a guard and onto the street. Eventually, she made her way to a convent in the rue de Bellechasse. The few remaining nuns took her in. Three months later, the convent was raided and Françoise-Thérèse was arrested for the third time.
In prison, Honoré appealed through every channel open to him for the safety of his family. A delegate from the People’s Union in Thorigny (the governing body where Honoré’s estate was located) reported to the Convention on December 1, 1793: “Citizen Grimaldi . . . very different from other seigneurs of the old order . . . has always shown himself kind, just, and understanding . . . always affable, sympathetic and generous [to the people]; mindful of the farms, he never went hunting or shooting over them except when no harm could be caused. He had fines imposed under the game laws refunded, he allowed poor people to gather wood from his park, had 900 loaves sent every week to families in want, and gave a number of other doles, pensions and help in kind.” In the end, the local council and People’s Union of Thorigny asked for his release and that he should receive safe passage to Thorigny (which was far more peaceful than Paris), where they would be responsible for him.
The plea was rejected and Honoré, his two sons and his daughter-in-law remained in prison. On July 25, 1794, Fran-çoise-Thérèse received an order to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal at ten o’clock the next morning. “She showed not the slightest sign of emotion,” one of her fellow inmates recorded. “She . . . kissed her maid, and took leave of us just as though parting from fellow travellers whose company had been pleasant and agreeable during a long journey.”
The sound of the guillotine was an ever-present daily terror at this time. Françoise-Thérèse, wife of Grimaldi-Monaco, aged twenty-six, was to be victim number 28 on July 26, condemned to die as an enemy of the people. Although frail even before her harsh imprisonment, Françoise-Thérèse stood erect when the verdict was delivered. She was then led to the records office, only a few steps from the place of execution. She had been advised by other prisoners to claim to be pregnant, which would give her time at least to try for an appeal, since pregnant women could claim exemption from execution until after the birth of their child, or proof that they had miscarried or lied. It meant confessing to have conceived adulterously as she and Honoré had not lived together for two years. There and then—the numbers 18 and 19 having been called—she announced she was pregnant, naming a dead prisoner as the father, and was promptly returned to a cell where she was left alone.
With her shoe she carefully broke a pane of glass in a narrow slit of a window and cut off two locks of her long fair hair. She then enclosed them in letters, one addressed to her daughters, the other to their governess, Madame Chevenoy. This accomplished, she wrote a note in a firm hand to the Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville: “I should be obliged if Citizen Fouquier-Tinville would come and see me here for a moment. I earnestly ask him not to refuse this request.” She covered her head with her shawl, gave the note to the guard on duty and waited.
When no one had appeared by the following morning, she wrote a second note: “I give you notice, Citizen, that I am not with child. I wanted to tell you [in person] and now, having no hope of you coming, I inform you in writing. I did not soil my lips with this lie for fear of death nor to avoid it, but to give myself one more day so that I could cut my hair myself instead of having it cut by the executioner. This is all I could leave to my children; it had at least to be clean.”
With rouge on her cheeks so as not to appear frightened, she waited once more in the records office. Forty-two heads were to fall that day. Françoise-Thérèse was the last to mount the guillotine. It was five in the afternoon and the sun had lowered beyond the wall of the prison when she died. The following day, Robespierre, whose key words had been “punish,” “terror,” “victim” and “blood,” had been overthrown by the Convention and the Reign of Terror had ended.3 He was to follow Françoise-Thérèse to the guillotine, preceded by the Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville a short time later. Had she waited twenty-four hours to send her note, Françoise-Thérèse need not have died.
Although he was released from prison in October 1794 and was living once again in his Paris town house—stripped of all its former furnishings and art and silver—the strain had been too much for Honoré. He was never to regain his strength. He died at the age of seventy-five on May 12, 1795. His elder son was now officially Honoré IV, but he did not have the right to be called Prince de Monaco. His health broken, he nonetheless succeeded in regaining control of his father’s estates. As he was not well enough to conduct his own affairs, he placed them in the capable hands of his brother Joseph, who returned to France at the end of 1795 exonerated from all charges, a few months after the death of Louis XVI’s ten-year-old son, and heir.
Monaco’s former ruling family did at least have a direct male heir, and he had two sons, Honore-Gabriel and Florestan. But Monaco was no longer a principality. It had even been renamed L’Hercule. So it seemed just as unlikely that the Grimaldis would occupy their Palace again as that a Bourbon king would sit on the throne of France.
Footnotes
1Françoise Scarron, born d’Aubigne and created Marquise de Maintenon by Louis XIV.
1Louis was married to Marie Leczinska, daughter of Stanislas, a Polish nobleman elected King of Poland in 1704 and subsequently deposed. She was older, unattractive and dressed “in queer-looking furs and peacock plumes,” which did not help to win her husband’s love. The night the Duchesse de Châteauroux died, the Queen lay awake thinking each sound was her ghost. Finally, her maid said, “Even if she did come back, would it be your room she’d come to?”
1Thirteen years later, in 1774, Marquis Sauveur Gaspard renewed this protest before the Vienna High Council. By all evidence in this hearing, the fiefs of Monaco, Menton and Roquebrune constituted imperial fiefs. The French Revolution, fifteen years later, prevented any further attention being given to this matter. But on January 21, 1841, the Marquis Charles Philippe Auguste de Cagnes, a retired general, revived the pretensions which had never been renounced and demanded suspension of the enfeoffment. The petition was ignored by the French Court.
2Marie-Catherine and the Prince de Condé went into exile in England at the time of the Revolution. She gave over her vast fortune to assist the royalist forces. She married the Prince some years after Honoré’s death in 1795. She herself died in England on March 8, 1813, at the age of seventy-four, her money entirely gone. The English royal family paid for her burial in England.
