Terror > The Armoire de Fer

>  A Summary of what happened...

   The Armoire de Fer became a controversial issue from the moment its existence was exposed by a locksmith who installed it at Louis XVI's request in May 1792. This locksmith was a opportunist, who waited until the king's fall was immanent. In November 1792, the locksmith took his story to the Inspector-General of National Buildings. Heurtier, the Inspector-General at the time, made the locksmith repeat his story to the Minister of the Interior. After telling his story, the three men left for the Tuilleries palace. The King was exposed when the locksmith removed a wooden panel in the wall to reveal an iron plate. Inside the iron chest, which is known in French as an Armoire de Fer, there were bundles of papers.

   The Girondin Minister of the Interior should have been more attentive to the authentication of the documents. The minister's opponents claimed that he had examined the documents beforehand and removed material that incriminated his political allies, perhaps even inserting false evidence against Montagnard leaders. Although the Minister of the Interior had taken the documents directly to the Convention, he had no real defence against such attacks, and when the relatively harmless nature of the papers emerged, the Montagnards were able to insinuate that he might have removed documents in order to protect the king.

   The Commission appointed to catalogue the Armoire de Fer papers was expected to prove Louis' guilt in time for his trial in December. However, the documents were of little use and, although some were used in evidence against the King, the armoire itself was hardly mentioned. Although it had contained papers which Louis hoped to preserve, it yielded no systematic record of his anti-revolutionary activities. The armoire was an archive in which the King kept details of the royal household as well as reports on royal policy during the Revolution. Some documents discredited figures such as Mirabeau, Dumouriez and Lafayette, but the archive as a whole was not as useful to the prosecution as had been expected.

   The Armoire de Fer's main value to the Jacobins was propaganda to discredit the King at a time when public opinion was divided over his fate. Its contents and what they said about his attitude to the Revolution were less important than the symbolic use that could be made of images of secrecy and deception. This view of guilt by association was reinforced by the media.

   For the King's enemies, the Armoire de Fer, in spite of its insignificant contents, could not have been discovered at a better time.

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