Lafayette’s white horse cantered once again over the Champ de Mars, on Sunday, July 17, 1791. It was just as laughable, but this time the ceremony would find the symbol that was absent the first time, the symbol of all symbols: bloodshed.

According to Michelet, “the fiercest royalists were not perhaps the nobles, nor the priests, but the hairdressers.”¹⁷⁸ The slogan of the age—“Return to nature”—had mortally wounded them. “Everything was moving toward a horrifying simplicity.”¹⁷⁹ During the night of July 16, an out-of-work hairdresser with lustful intent began wandering the Champ de Mars. He had a tawdry scheme. He wanted to hide himself under the planks of the Altar of the Fatherland to peep under the petticoats of his lost clients, “the haughty women republicans, women tribunes with caps, women orators of the clubs, women in Roman dress, women literati,” who would soon “proudly be climbing onto it.”¹⁸⁰

The city was in turmoil. The Assembly, amid opposition, had just decreed “the inviolability” of the king. But a petition from opponents, which proposed no longer to recognize “Louis XVI or any other king,” had been carried to the Champ de Mars. The people were to sign it that Sunday, on the Altar of the Fatherland. The hairdresser had chosen an old disabled soldier as his accomplice. They took with them something to eat and a cask of water. Hidden in the darkness, they began to bore holes into the planks with a gimlet. But early in the morning, a woman vendor who was already there, waiting at the Altar of the Fatherland, heard a strange noise beneath her feet. The two scoundrels were busy making holes. They had been found out. A crowd soon gathered around them. The formidable washerwomen of Gros-Caillou rushed to the scene. It was rumored the two men had been caught with a barrel of gunpowder, that they wanted to “blow up the people.” Shortly after, their throats were slit. Around nine in the morning, the two heads were carried in procession to the Palais-Royal. It marked the beginning of a sequence of orders, counterorders, ploys, rumors, misunderstandings, altercations. Meanwhile the crowd gathered on the Champ de Mars. Many people were signing the petition with their names or with crosses. There was an air of celebration. Toward noon, some people started to organize dancing. One witness saw the Altar of the Fatherland as a “lively mountain, formed by so many human beings on top of each other.”¹⁸¹ Then Lafayette arrived with his men. Someone fired at him and was immediately arrested. Lafayette, magnanimous and vain, ordered him to be released. Later other guards arrived, together with cavalry, artillery, and along with Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the astronomer and mayor of Paris, who looked pale and overwhelmed by the events. A group of hairdressers also arrived carrying arms: they wanted to avenge their colleague. There were shots, clouds of dust, screams. The dead lay strewn over the planks of the Altar of the Fatherland. The number is not known: many were thrown into the Seine. From that time, the history books talk about the “Champ de Mars Massacre.”