The Only Deputy Who Refused the Tennis Court Oath Signed It Anyway
Detetive Curioso
·4 min read·History·4 views
In 1789 more than 500 French deputies swore the Tennis Court Oath. Joseph Martin-Dauch refused, wrote 'opposant' by his name, and the Assembly kept it.
On 20 June 1789, more than 500 deputies crowded into an indoor tennis court at Versailles and swore never to disband until France had a constitution. Only one man refused. Joseph Martin-Dauch, a lawyer elected for Castelnaudary in southern France, signed the register anyway and wrote a single word beside his name: "opposant", meaning opposed.
The oath came out of a standoff. Louis XVI had summoned the Estates-General, the old assembly of clergy, nobles and commoners, for the first time since 1614, because the kingdom was close to bankruptcy, as Britannica explains. On 17 June the commoners of the Third Estate declared themselves a National Assembly. Three days later they found their meeting hall, the Menus-Plaisirs, locked and guarded by soldiers.
The deputies walked to the nearest large room they could find, a court for jeu de paume, the ancestor of tennis. There, according to the Palace of Versailles, they swore "never to separate and to meet wherever circumstances require until the kingdom's Constitution is established and grounded on solid foundations." The Assembly's president, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, led the vow, and the members then came forward to sign.
When the signing ended, deputy Armand-Gaston Camus announced that Martin-Dauch had signed as an opponent. The official record, published in the Archives parlementaires, notes "a general cry of indignation." Bailly asked to hear his reasons. Martin-Dauch replied that he could not swear to carry out decisions that had not been approved by the king.
He did not back down, and the Assembly made a decision that still surprises readers today. It ordered that his signature stay on the register "to prove the freedom of opinions." The French National Assembly's biography of Martin-Dauch, taken from a dictionary of deputies published in 1889, credits Bailly with calming the room and saying that the opposition would bear witness to that freedom.
The protest changed nothing in the short term. On 27 June the king gave in and ordered the clergy and nobility to sit with the Third Estate. Martin-Dauch kept his seat, voted with the minority until the assembly ended in 1791, then returned home and faded from public life. He died in Castelnaudary in 1801.
The room itself had a royal past. It was built in 1686 for Nicolas Creté, the king's tennis master, and according to the Palace of Versailles the memoirs of Charles Perrault say that Louis XIV's doctor recommended the game to him as healthy exercise.
After 1789 the court became national property in 1793, then served as a storeroom and as a studio for the painters Antoine-Jean Gros and Horace Vernet. It was listed as a historic monument in 1848, and on 20 June 1883 it reopened as a museum of the French Revolution. Its end wall carries a 10 by 6 meter canvas by Luc-Olivier Merson, based on a drawing Jacques-Louis David showed in 1791 for a giant painting he never finished for lack of money, as the palace notes. The hall was restored again over eight months and reopened in 2022, according to the palace's restoration report.
Sources: Archives parlementaires, vol. 8, pp. 139-140; Assemblée nationale, Joseph Martin-Dauch; Palace of Versailles, Tennis Court Oath; Palace of Versailles, Royal Tennis Court; Palace of Versailles, restoration; Britannica. Cover: The Tennis Court Oath by Jacques-Louis David, Wikimedia Commons.
