Armed with pikes, kitchen knives, and cannon dragged from the city, the crowd of market women and their allies overwhelmed the palace guard and confronted the royal family directly. The march effectively ended the independent authority of the monarchy at Versailles, compelling Louis XVI to relocate to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where he lived under closer public and revolutionary scrutiny for the rest of his reign.
The march began at dawn on October 5 in the markets of Paris, where women furious over the price and scarcity of bread began gathering, banging drums and shouting. What started as a few hundred women swelled to a crowd of roughly seven thousand as they moved through the city collecting weapons, eventually setting off on the twelve-mile walk to Versailles in pouring rain.
By the time they arrived that evening, the crowd had grown further, joined by sympathetic National Guard troops under Lafayette. The women demanded audience with the National Assembly and then with the king himself, insisting he guarantee bread supplies and, more pointedly, that he return to live among his people in Paris rather than remain isolated at Versailles.
The following morning, after a tense night in which the crowd breached the palace and killed several guards, Louis XVI appeared on a balcony and agreed to accompany the marchers back to Paris. The royal family's procession back into the city, escorted by a crowd carrying the heads of guards on pikes, marked a decisive and irreversible shift in the balance of power of the French Revolution.
Key people: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marquis de Lafayette