The Age of Voltaire

  Monks, friars, and nuns were diminishing in number and growing in virtue26 and wealth. They were rarely mendicant now, for they had found it wiser to elicit bequests from the dying as a fee for Paradise than to beg pennies in the villages. Some of their wealth overflowed into charity; many monasteries maintained hospitals and almshouses, and daily distributed food to the poor.27 In 1789 many communities urged the Revolutionary government not to suppress the local monasteries, since these were the only charitable organizations in their region.28 Nunneries performed several functions now otherwise served: they provided a refuge for widows, for women separated from their husbands, and for tired ladies who, like Mme. du Deffand, wished to live away from the turmoil of the world. The convents did not entirely renounce worldly pleasures, for the well-to-do used them as havens for surplus daughters, who might otherwise, by requiring marriage dowries, have lessened the patrimony of the sons; and these discarded virgins were not always inclined to austerity. The abbess of Origny had a coach and four, and entertained both sexes in her comfortable apartment; at Alix the nuns wore hoopskirts, and silk robes lined with ermine; at other nunneries they dined and danced with officers from nearby camps.29 These were apparently sinless relaxations; many of the stories of conventual immorality in the eighteenth century were lurid exaggerations in the propaganda war of rival faiths. Instances of girls kept in convents against their will were now rare.30

  The Jesuits had declined in power and prestige. Till 1762 they still controlled education, and provided influential confessors to King and Queen. But they had suffered from the eloquence of Pascal and the skeptics of the impious Regency, and were losing their long contest with the Jansenists. These Calvinistic Catholics had survived royal persecution and papal bulls; they were numerous in the business and artisan classes, and in law; they were nearing ascendancy in the Paris and other parlements. After the death of their ascetic theologian François de Paris (1727), fervent sick Jansenists made pilgrimages to his tomb in the cemetery of St.-Médard; there they scourged themselves, and some fell into such cataleptic fits that they were called convulsionnaires; they groaned and wept, and prayed for cures, and several claimed to have been miraculously healed. After three years of these operations the authorities closed the cemeteries; as Voltaire put it, God was forbidden, by order of the King, to work any miracles there. The convulsions ceased, but the impressionable Parisians were inclined to credit the miracles, and in 1733 a journalist reported, with obvious exaggeration, that “the good town of Paris is Jansenist from top to bottom.”31 Many of the lower clergy, defying a royal edict of 1720, refused to sign the bull Unigenitus (1713), wherein Pope Innocent XIII had condemned 101 allegedly Jansenist propositions. The Archbishop of Paris ruled that the last sacrament should not be administered to anyone who had not confessed to a priest who had accepted the bull. The dispute shared in weakening the divided Church against the attacks of the philosophes.

  Huguenots and other French Protestants were still outlawed, but small groups of them gathered clandestinely. Legally a French Protestant’s wife was a concubine; her children were accounted illegitimate, and could not inherit property. Under Louis XV there were several outbreaks of persecution. In 1717 seventy-four Frenchmen caught in Protestant worship were sent to the galleys, and their women were jailed. An edict of 1724 decreed death for Protestant preachers; all persons attending a Protestant assemblage were to suffer confiscation of property, the men were to be condemned to the galleys, the women were to have their heads shaved and be shut up for life.32 During the ministry of Cardinal Fleury this edict was only laxly enforced, but after his death it was revived at the request of Catholic bishops in southern France.33 In 1749 the Parlement of Bordeaux ordered the separation of forty-six couples who had been married by Protestant rites. Children of parents who were suspected of Protestantism could be taken from them to be brought up in Catholic homes; we hear of a rich Huguenot spending 200,000 livres in bribing officials to let him keep his children.34 Between 1744 and 1752 some six hundred Protestants were imprisoned, and eight hundred others were condemned to various penalties.35 In 1752 the Protestant preacher Bénezet, twenty-six years old, was hanged at Mont-pellier. In that year Louis XV, under the influence of Mme. de Pompadour, ordered an end to these persecutions;36 thereafter, especially in or near Paris, Protestants could escape penalties provided they attended a Catholic service once in the year.37

  Despite the bigotry, worldliness, and will-to-power of their leaders, the French clergy included hundreds of men distinguished by laborious learning or devoted lives. Besides those bishops who squandered in Paris the tithes taken from the peasantry, there were others who came as close to sanctity as administrative duties would permit. Cardinal Louis Antoine de Noailles, archbishop of Paris, was a man of intelligence and nobility. Jean Baptiste Massillon, bishop of Clermont, was loved by the people despite the erudition of his sermons, which Voltaire liked to listen to at meals, if only for the beauty of their style. Gabriel de Caylus, bishop of Auxerre, gave all his wealth to the poor, sold his silver plate to feed the hungry, and then apologized to further suppliants, “My children, I have nothing left to give you.”38 Bishop François de Belsunce remained at his post in the terrible plague at Marseilles (1720), when a third of the population died and most doctors and magistrates fled. “Look at Belsunce,” wrote Lemontey:

  all he possessed he has given; all who served him [his personal staff] are dead [from infection]; alone, in poverty, on foot, in the morning he penetrates into the most horrible den of misery, and in the evening he is found again in the midst of places bespattered with the dying; he quenches their thirst, he comforts them as a friend, … and in this field of death he gleans abandoned souls. The example of this prelate, who seeems to be invulnerable, animates with courageous emulation … the parish priests, the vicars, and the religious orders; not one deserts his colors; not one puts any bounds to his fatigue save with his life. Thus perished twenty-six Recollect friars, and eighteen Jesuits out of twenty-six. The Capuchins summoned their brethren from other provinces, and the latter rushed to martyrdom with the alacrity of the ancient Christians; out of fifty-five the epidemic slew forty-three. The conduct of the priests of the Oratory was, if possible, even more magnanimous.39

  Let us remember, as we record the bitter conflict between religion and philosophy, and share the anger of the philosophes at stifling censorship and disgraceful superstition, that there was devotion as well as wealth in the hierarchy; dedication as well as poverty among the village priests; and, among the people, an abiding, indestructible love for a faith that gave some saving discipline to pride and passion, and brought a consoling vision to toilsome days.

  III. THE THIRD ESTATE

  1. The Peasantry

  The “political economy” that Carlyle branded as the “dismal science” wondered whether the poor are poor because they are ignorant, or ignorant because they are poor. The question can be answered by contrasting the proud independence of the French paysan today with the degrading indigence of the French peasant in the first half of the eighteenth century.

  His condition was improving in 1723 as compared with the extremity to which he had been reduced by the wars and exactions of Louis XIV. Subject to feudal dues and church tithes, he owned a rising proportion of the soil of France, varying from twenty per cent in Normandy and Brittany to fifty per cent in Languedoc and Limousin.40 But the average holding of these small proprietors was so small—three to five acres—that they had to support their families by serving as hired hands on other farms. Most of the land was owned by the nobles, the clergy, or the king, and was tilled by tenants, by métayers (sharecroppers), or by day laborers under the discipline of a steward. Tenants paid the owner in money, produce, and service; métayers, in return for land, implements, and seed, paid the landlord half the crop.

  Despite the growth of peasant proprietorship, there remained many survivals of feudalism. Only a small minority of proprietors—often as low as two per cent—held land in fr
anc-alleu, i.e., free from feudal dues. All peasants except these “allodial” freeholders were required to give the local seigneur several days of labor yearly, enough to plow and plant his acres, reap his harvest, and stow his barns. They paid him a fee for fishing in the lakes or streams, and for pasturing their cattle in the fields, of his domain. (In Franche-Comté, Auvergne, and Brittany, until the Revolution, they paid him for permission to marry.41) They were obliged to use his mill, his bakehouse, his wine or oil presses, and no other, and to pay for each use. They paid the lord for every fireplace they had, every well they dug, every bridge they crossed on his terrain. (Some such taxes exist amongst us today in altered forms, as paid to the state.) Laws prohibited the lord and his companions from injuring the peasant’s planting or animals while hunting, but these edicts were widely ignored, and the peasant was forbidden to shoot the seignorial pigeons nibbling on his crops.42 Altogether, on a conservative estimate, fourteen per cent of the peasant’s produce or income went to feudal dues; other estimates raise the proportion.43

  In a few localities literal serfdom remained. A distinguished economic historian estimated that “the total number of serfs” in eighteenth-century France “did not exceed one million.”44 Their number declined, but there were still some 300,000 in 1789.45 Such peasants were adscripti glebae— bound to the soil; they could not legally abandon, sell, or transfer their land, or change their dwelling place, without the lord’s consent; and if they died without children living with them and ready to carry on the farm, the farm and its equipment reverted to the seigneur.

  After paying his feudal dues and ecclesiastical tithes, the peasant had still to find money, or sell some of his produce or property, in order to meet the taxes laid upon him by the state. He alone paid the taille, or tax on posessessions. In addition he paid a gabelle, or tax on salt, and a vingtième—five percent of income—laid upon every household head. Altogether he paid a third of his income to the landlord, the Church, and the state.46 Tax collectors were authorized to enter, or force their way into, his cottage, search for hidden savings, and take away furniture to make up the sum allotted to the household as its share of the tax. And just as the peasant owed the lord labor as well as dues, so, after 1733, he was compelled to give to the state, annually, twelve to fifteen days of unpaid labor (corvée) for building or repairing bridges or roads. Imprisonment punished resistance or delay.

  Since taxes rose with income and improvements, there was, among the peasantry, little incentive to invention or enterprise. Agricultural methods remained primitive in France as compared with those of contemporary England. The fallow system left each tract idle every third year, while England was introducing crop rotation. Intensive cultivation was almost unknown. Iron plows were rare, there were few animals on the farm, and little manure. The average holding was too small to allow the profitable use of machines.

  The poverty of the French peasant shocked English travelers in this age. At every stop, wrote Lady Mary Montagu (1718), “while the post-horses are changed, the whole town comes out to beg, with such miserable starved faces, and thin tattered clothes, they need no other eloquence to persuade the wretchedness of their condition.”47 French observers gave no rosier picture until much later in the century. “In 1725,” said Saint-Simon, “the people of Normandy live on the grass of the fields. The first king in Europe is great simply by being a king of beggars, … and by turning his kingdom into a vast hospital of dying people, from whom all is taken without a murmur.”48 And in 1740 Marquis René Louis d’Argenson calculated that “more Frenchmen had died of want in the last two years than had been killed in all the wars of Louis XIV.”49 “The clothing of the poor peasants,” said Besnard, “and they were almost all poor, was … pitiful, for they had only one outfit for winter and summer.… Their single pair of shoes (very thin, and cleated with nails), which they procured at the time of their marriage, had to serve them the rest of their lives, or at least as long as the shoes lasted.”50 Voltaire estimated that two million French peasants wore wooden shoes in winter and went barefoot in summer, for high taxes on skins made shoes a luxury.51 The peasant’s dwelling was built of mud and roofed with thatch; usually it had but one room, low and ceilingless; in some parts of northern France, however, cottages were made stronger to bear the cold and winds of winter. The peasant’s food consisted of soup, eggs, dairy products, and bread of rye or oats; meat and wheat bread were occasional dissipations.52 In France, as elsewhere, those who fed the nation had the least to eat.

  From this hard life the peasant found consolation in drunkenness and religion. Taverns were numerous, and home brews helped. Character was coarse, brutality was standard, violence flared between individuals, families, and villages. But within the family there was a strong though silent affection. Children were numerous, but death cut most of them down before maturity; there was hardly any increase in the population of France between 1715 and 1740. War, disease, and famine operated with Malthusian regularity.

  2. The Proletariat

  Still lower than the peasant in social status were domestic servants, who were so poor that few of them could afford to marry. A notch above the peasantry was the proletariat of the towns: the artisans in shops or factories, the carriers of goods and purveyors of services, the craftsmen who built or repaired. Most industry was still domestic, performed in rural cottages as well as in urban homes; merchants supplied the material, collected the products, and pocketed nearly all the profit. In the towns industry was largely in the guild stage, with masters, apprentices, and journeymen working under old rules by which the guild and the government fixed the hours and conditions of labor, the types, quality, and price of the product, and the limited permissible area of sale. These regulations made improvements difficult, excluded the stimulus of external competition, and shared with internal traffic tolls in retarding industrial development. The guilds had become an aristocracy of labor; fees for acceptance as masters ran as high as two thousand livres, and mastership tended to be hereditary.53 Work in the shops began early, ended late; around Versailles the journeymen labored from as early as four in the morning till as late as eight at night;54 but toil was less intense than in factories today, and the ecclesiastical festivals provided numerous holidays.

  Most industry was “petty,” employing only three or four “hands” outside the family. Even tanneries, glassworks, and dyeing establishments were small concerns. In Bordeaux the employees were only four times as numerous as the employers. The government, however, maintained some large plants—soap factories, the Gobelin tapestry works, and the porcelain industry at Sèvres. Mining was becoming a large operation as coal replaced wood for fuel. Protests were made about coal smoke poisoning the air, but industry then as now had its way, and in Paris, as in London, people breathed at the risk of their health. There were steelworks in Dauphiné, paper mills in Angoumois. Textile factories reached considerable size in the north; so Van Robais employed fifteen hundred persons in one mill at Abbeville, and Van der Cruissen engaged three thousand men at Lille.55 Such multiplication encouraged division and specialization of labor, and stimulated the invention of machinery for routine processes. The Encyclopédie of Diderot (1751 f.) contained descriptions and drawings of a surprising variety and complexity of mechanisms already introduced in French industry, seldom to proletarian applause. When the Jacquard loom was installed at Lyons the silk weavers smashed it to pieces in fear that it would throw them out of work.56

  To encourage new industries the government, as in Elizabethan England, granted several monopolies, e.g., to the Van Robais family for the production of fine Dutch cloths; and it helped other projects with subsidies and interest-free loans. Over all industry the government exercised a rigorous regulation, inherited from Colbert. This system aroused a rising protest from manufacturers and merchants, who argued that the economy would expand and prosper if liberated from governmental interference. It was in voicing this claim that Vincent de Gournay, toward 1755, uttered the historic phrase “L
aissez faire” (Let it alone), which in the next generation, with Quesnay and Turgot, would express the physiocrat plea for free enterprise and free trade.

  The artisans too resented the regulations, which severely hampered their organization for better conditions and pay; but their chief grievance was that rural and factory labor was capturing the market from the guilds. By 1756 the manufacturers had reduced the artisans in the larger cities—and even the guild masters—to the condition of wage earners dependent upon the entrepreneurs.57 Within the guilds the masters underpaid their journeymen, who periodically went on strike. Poverty in the towns was almost as great as in the villages. Crop failures brought the urban proletariat to famine and riot every few years; so at Toulouse in 1747, at Paris in 1751, at Toulouse in 1752.58 Already, about 1729, Jean Meslier, the atheist priest, proposed to replace the existing system with a libertarian communism.59