Bourbon Treasures: The War Chest

The Austrian Emperor Leopold II was in a difficult position: there was a war going on with Turkey, Prussia was threatening war against him, his Belgian and Hungarian provinces were revolting. He could not risk a defeat in France. But with the French king out of Paris and at the head of an army, the situation would be different. It was on the success or failure of a flight from revolutionary Paris that the actions of Austria – and the rest of Europe – depended.

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The French king had to go to the fortress town of Montmédy, where a camp would be formed at the nearby old château of Thonelles. The German regiments of the royalist general de Bouillé would be joined by a number of émigrés, but above all by 10.000 Austrian soldiers. Once Louis XVI was out of Paris, he would dissolve the revolutionary Assembly and restore the clergy to their possessions. Thus the basis on which the value of the “assignats” rested, would be destroyed and the bankruptcy of France would deprive the Revolution of its sources of credit.

The flight of Louis XVI from Paris had long been planned and discussed. Money was an urgent necessity. “The Emperor had been asked, not only to send his troops to the frontier, but also to advance 15 millions of francs for the enterprise,” Oscar Browning says in his essay The Flight to Varennes. “The last demand he refused, and it became necessary to obtain supplies from every available source. The king was allowed by the Assembly 25 millions of francs, paid by monthly instalments. Two millions of this was due in the first week in June; and, considering the constant demands of Bouillé for supplies, the money could not be dispensed with.”

Franciscus Rombout (photo copyright by the author)

Thanks to a source I can not reveal here, I was placed in the possession of the “Memoirs of Brigitte Rombaut”, written in old Dutch, dating from 1854 to 1875, and found in a pile of dusty papers that once belonged to Franciscus Petrus Rombaut, who died in 1875. In this manuscript, it was stated that the Austrian Emperor did send 15 millions francs to his sister and his brother-in-law, the French king Louis XVI. But, of course, he did not send this War Chest to France, the money had to remain in a safe house on Austrian territory. And Louis XVI needed a hiding place too for his monthly installment of two million francs, and for the  the jewels of Marie Antoinette and the diamonds of his sister Madame Elisabeth. There were such safe houses in Brussels, in the Abbey of Orval (nearby Montmédy, just across the border, on Austrian territory) and in Mons. 

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The most active agent in the preparation for the flight was Count Axel Fersen, commander of the Royal Swedish Regiment in the king’s service, and an intimate friend – probably the lover – of the queen. On June 20, 1791 he paid a last visit to the royal family in the palace of the Tuileries. Fersen then returned to his own house to make his final preparations and to see whether the new coach built for the king’s journey had arrived from the coach-makers. The three body-guards who were to act as outriders to the royal party came to him for instructions. Meanwhile, the Comte de Provence – another brother of Louis XVI – was taking an affectionate leave. According to his custom every evening, he had come with his wife to supper. They were to leave Paris that night by different roads and did not know whether they should join the king at Montmédy, or should ever see him again. As a matter of fact, the brothers then saw each other for the last time. The Comte de Provence left the palace of the Tuileries never again to enter it, except in 1814, as Louis XVIII…

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