Generally the philosophes were moderate in their politics. They accepted monarchy, and did not resent royal gifts; they looked to “enlightened despots” like Frederick II of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, even Catherine II of Russia, rather than to the illiterate and emotional masses, as engineers of reform. They put their trust in reason, though they knew its limits and malleability. They broke down the censorship of thought by Church and state, and opened and broadened a million minds; they prepared for the triumphs of science in the nineteenth century, even—with Lavoisier, Laplace, and Lamarck—amid the turmoil of revolution and war.
Rousseau disassociated himself from the philosophes. He respected reason, but gave high place to sentiment and an inspiring, comforting faith; his “Savoyard Vicar’s Profession of Faith” provided a religious stance to Robespierre, and his insistence upon a uniform national creed allowed the Committee of Public Safety to make political heresy—at least in wartime—a capital crime. The Jacobins of the Revolution accepted the doctrine of The Social Contract: that man is by nature good, and becomes bad by being subjected to corrupt institutions and unjust laws; that men are born free and become slaves in an artificial civilization. When in power the Revolutionary leaders adopted Rousseau’s idea that the citizen, by receiving the protection of the state, implicitly pledges obedience to it. Wrote Mallet du Pan: “I heard Marat in 1788 read and comment on The Social Contract in the public streets, to the applause of an enthusiastic auditory.”13 Rousseau’s sovereignty of the people became, in the Revolution, the sovereignty of the state, then of the Committee of Public Safety, then of one man.
The “people,” in the terminology of the Revolution, meant the peasants and the town workers. Even in the towns the factory employees were a minority of the population; the picture there was not a succession of factories but rather a humming medley of butchers, bakers, brewers, grocers, cooks, peddlers, barbers, shopkeepers, innkeepers, vintners, carpenters, masons, house painters, glass workers, plasterers, tilers, shoemakers, dressmakers, dyers, cleaners, tailors, blacksmiths, servants, cabinetmakers, saddlers, wheelwrights, goldsmiths, cutlers, weavers, tanners, printers, booksellers, prostitutes, and thieves. These workers wore ankle-length pantaloons rather than the knee breeches (culottes) and stockings of the upper classes; so they were named “sansculottes,” and as such they played a dramatic part in the Revolution. The influx of gold and silver from the New World, and the repeated issuance of paper money, raised prices everywhere in Europe; in France, between 1741 and 1789, they rose 65 percent, while wages rose 22 percent.14 In Lyons 30,000 persons were on relief in 1787; in Paris 100,000 families were listed as indigent in 1791. Labor unions for economic action were forbidden; so were strikes, but they were frequent. As the Revolution neared, the workers were in an increasingly despondent and rebellious mood. Give them guns and a leader, and they would take the Bastille, invade the Tuileries, and depose the King.
The peasants of France, in 1789, were presumably better off than a century before, when La Bruyère, exaggerating to point a theme, had mistaken them for beasts.15 They were better off than the other peasants of Continental Europe, possibly excepting those of northern Italy. About a third of the tilled land was held by peasant proprietors; a third was farmed out by noble, ecclesiastical, or bourgeois owners to tenants or sharecroppers; the rest was worked by hired hands under supervision by the owner or his steward. More and more of the owners—themselves harassed by rising costs and keener competition—were enclosing, for tillage or pasturage, “common lands” on which the peasants had formerly been free to graze their cattle or gather wood.
All but a few “allodial” (obligation-free) peasant holders were subject to feudal dues. They were bound by contract charter to give the seigneur—the lord of the manor—several days of unpaid labor every year (the corvée) to aid him in farming his land and repairing his roads; and they paid him a toll whenever they used those roads. They owed him a moderate quitrent annually in produce or cash. If they sold their holding he was entitled to 10 or 15 percent of the purchase price.16 They paid him if they fished in his waters or pastured their animals on his field. They owed him a fee every time they used his mill, his bake-house, his wine- or oil-press. As these fees were fixed by the charters, and lost value through inflation, the owner felt warranted in extracting them with increasing rigor as prices rose.17
To support the Church that blessed his crops, formed his children to obedience and belief, and dignified his life with sacraments, the peasant contributed to it annually a tithe—usually less than a tenth—of his produce. Heavier than tithe or feudal dues were the taxes laid upon him by the state: a poll or head tax (capitation), the vingtième or twentieth of his yearly income, a sales tax (aide) on his every purchase of gold or silver ware, metal products, alcohol, paper, starch …, and the gabelle, which required him to buy in each year a prescribed amount of salt from the government at a price fixed by the government. As the nobility and the clergy found legal or illegal ways of avoiding many of these taxes—and as, in wartime levies, well-to-do youths could buy substitutes to die in their place—the main burden of support for state and Church, in war and peace, fell upon the peasantry.
These taxes, tithes, and feudal dues could be borne when harvests were good, but they brought misery when, through war damages or the weather’s whims, the harvest turned bad, and a year’s exhausting toil seemed spent in vain. Then many peasant owners sold their land or their labor, or both, to luckier gamblers with the soil.
The year 1788 was marked by merciless “acts of God.” A severe drought stunted crops; a hailstorm, raging from Normandy to Champagne, devastated 180 miles of usually fertile terrain; the winter (1788–89) was the severest in eighty years; fruit trees perished by the thousands. The spring of 1789 loosed disastrous floods; the summer brought famine to almost every province. State, church, and private charity strove to get food to the starving; only a few individuals died of hunger, but millions came close to the end of their resources. Caen, Rouen, Orléans, Nancy, Lyons, saw rival groups fighting like animals for corn; Marseilles saw 8,000 famished people at its gates threatening to invade and pillage the city; in Paris the working-class district of St.-Antoine had 30,000 paupers to be cared for.18 Meanwhile a trade-easing treaty with Great Britain (1786) had deluged France with industrial products down-pricing native goods and throwing thousands of French laborers out of work—25,000 in Lyons, 46,000 in Amiens, 80,000 in Paris.19 In March, 1789, peasants refused to pay taxes, adding to fears of national bankruptcy.
Arthur Young, traveling in the French provinces in July, 1789, met a peasant woman who complained of the taxes and feudal dues that kept her always at the edge of destitution. But, she added, she had learned that “something was to be done by some great folks for such poor ones, … for the taxes and the dues are crushing us.”20 They had heard that Louis XVI was a good man, eager to reform abuses and protect the poor. They looked hopefully to Versailles, and prayed for the long life of the King.
II. THE GOVERNMENT
He was a good man, but hardly a good king. He had not expected to rule, but the early death of his father (1765) made him dauphin, and the tardy death of his grandfather Louis XV (1774) made him, at the age of twenty, master of France. He had no desire to govern men; he had a knack with tools, and was an excellent locksmith. He preferred hunting to ruling; he counted that day lost in which he had not shot a stag; between 1774 and 1789 he ran down 1,274 of them, and killed 189,251 game; yet he was always unwilling to order the death of a man; and perhaps he lost his throne because he bade his Swiss Guards to hold their fire on August 10, 1792. Returning from his hunts he ate to the steadily increasing capacity of his stomach. He became fat but strong, with the gentle strength of a giant who fears to crush with his embrace. Marie Antoinette judged her husband well: “The King is not a coward; he possesses abundance of passive courage, but he is overwhelmed by an awkward shyness and mistrust of himself…. He is afraid to command…. He lived like a child, and always i
ll at ease, under the eyes of Louis XV, until the age of twenty-one. This constraint confirmed his timidity.”21
His love for his Queen was part of his undoing. She was beautiful and stately, she graced his court with her charm and gaiety, and she forgave his tardiness in consummating their marriage. The tightness of his foreskin made coitus unbearably painful to him; he tried again and again, for seven years, shunning the simple operation that would have solved his problem; then, in 1777, the Queen’s brother Joseph II of Austria persuaded him to submit to the knife, and soon all was well. Perhaps it was a sense of guilt at so often arousing and then failing his mate that made him too tolerant of her gambling at cards, her extravagant wardrobe, her frequent trips to Paris for opera that bored him, her Platonic or Sapphic friendship with Count von Fersen or the Princesse de Lamballe. He amused his courtiers, and shamed his ancestors, by being visibly devoted to his wife. He gave her costly jewels, but she and France wanted a child. When children came she proved to be a good mother, suffering with their ailments and moderating nearly all her faults except her pride (she had never been less than part of royalty) and her repeated intervention in affairs of state. Here she had some excuses, for Louis could seldom choose or keep a course, and often waited for the Queen to make up his mind; some courtiers wished he had her quick judgment and readiness to command.
The King did all he could to meet the crises laid upon him by the weather, the famine, the bread riots, the revolt against taxes, the demands of the nobility and the Parlement, the expenses of the court and the administration, and the growing deficit in the Treasury. For two years (1774–76) he allowed Turgot to apply the Physiocratic theory that freedom of enterprise and competition, and the unhindered dictatorship of the market—of supply and demand—over the wages of labor and the prices of goods, would enliven the French economy and bring added revenue to the state. The people of Paris, accustomed to think of the government as their sole protection against greedy manipulators of the market, opposed Turgot’s measures, rioted, and rejoiced at his fall.
After some months of hesitation and chaos, the King called Jacques Necker, a Swiss Protestant financier domiciled in Paris, to be director of the Treasury (1777–81). Under this alien and heretical leadership Louis undertook a brave program of minor reforms. He allowed the formation of elected local and provincial assemblies to serve as the voice of their constituents in bridging the gap between the people and the government. He shocked the nobles by denouncing the corvée, and by declaring, in a public statement (1780), “The taxes of the poorest part of our subjects [have] increased, in proportion, much more than all the rest”; and he expressed his “hopes that rich people will not think themselves wronged when they will have to meet the charges which long since they should have shared with others.”22 He freed the last of the serfs on his own lands, but resisted Necker’s urging to require a like measure from the nobility and the clergy. He established pawnshops to lend money to the poor at three percent. He forbade the use of torture in the examination of witnesses or criminals. He proposed to abolish the dungeons at Vincennes and to raze the Bastille as items in a program of prison reform. Despite his piety and orthodoxy he allowed a considerable degree of religious liberty to Protestants and Jews. He refused to punish free thought, and allowed the ruthless pamphleteers of Paris to lampoon him as a cuckold, his wife as a harlot, and his children as bastards. He forbade his government to spy into the private correspondence of the citizens.
With the enthusiastic support of Beaumarchais and the philosophes, and over the objections of Necker (who predicted that such a venture would complete the bankruptcy of France), Louis sent material and financial aid, amounting to 240,000,000, to the American colonies in their struggle for independence; it was a French fleet, and the battalions of Lafayette and Rochambeau, that helped Washington to bottle up Cornwallis in Yorktown, compelling him to surrender and so bring the war to a close. But democratic ideas swept across the Atlantic into France, the Treasury stumbled under its new debts, Necker was dismissed (1781), and the bourgeois bondholders clamored for financial control of the government.
Meanwhile the Parlement of Paris pressed its claim to check the monarchy through a veto power over the decrees of the King; and Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duc d’Orléans—his cousin through direct descent from a younger brother of Louis XIV—almost openly schemed to capture the throne. Through Choderlos de Laclos and other agents he scattered money and promises among politicians, pamphleteers, orators, and prostitutes. He threw open to his followers the facilities, court, and gardens of his Palais-Royal; cafés, wineshops, bookstores and gambling clubs sprang up to accommodate the crowd that gathered there day and night; the news from Versailles was brought there speedily by special couriers; pamphlets were born there every hour; speeches resounded from platforms, tables, and chairs; plots were laid for the deposition of the King.
Harassed to desperation, Louis recalled Necker to the Ministry of Finance (1788). On Necker’s urging, and as a last and perilous resort that might save or overthrow his throne, he issued, on August 8, 1788, a call to the communities of France to elect and send to Versailles their leading nobles, clerics, and commoners to form (as had last been done in 1614) a States- or Estates-General that would give him advice and support in meeting the problems of the realm.
There were some remarkable features about this historic call to the country by a government that for almost two centuries had apparently thought of the commonalty as merely food providers, taxpayers, and a periodic tribute to Mars. First the King, again at Necker’s urging, and over nobiliar protests, announced that the Third Estate should have as many deputies and votes, in the coming assembly, as the two other estates combined. Second, the election was to be by the nearest approach yet made in France to universal adult suffrage: any male aged twenty-seven or more, who had paid in the past year any state tax however small, was eligible to vote for the local assemblies that would choose the deputies to represent the region in Paris. Third, the King added to his call a request to all electoral assemblies to submit to him cahiers, or reports, that would specify the problems and needs of each class in each district, with recommendations for remedies and reforms. Never before, in the memory of Frenchmen, had any of their kings asked advice of his people.
Of the 615 cahiers taken to the King by the delegates, 545 survive. Nearly all of them express their loyalty to him, and even their affection for him as clearly a man of goodwill; but nearly all propose that he share his problems and powers with an elected assembly that would make up with him a constitutional monarchy. None mentioned the divine right of kings. All demanded trial by jury, privacy of the mails, moderation of taxes, and reform of the law. The cahiers of the nobility stipulated that in the coming States-General each of the orders should sit and vote separately, and no measure should become law unless approved by all three estates. The cahiers of the clergy called for an end to religious toleration, and for full and exclusive control of education by the Church. The cahiers of the Third Estate reflected, with diverse emphasis, the demands of the peasants for a reduction of taxes, abolition of serfdom and feudal dues, universalization of free education, the protection of farms from injury by the hunts and animals of the seigneurs; and the hopes of the middle class for careers open to talent regardless of birth, for an end to transport tolls, for the extension of taxes to the nobility and the clergy; some proposed that the King should wipe out the fiscal deficit by confiscating and selling ecclesiastical property. The first stages of the Revolution were already outlined in these cahiers.
In this humble call of a king to his citizens there was a noticeable deviation from impartiality. Whereas outside Paris any man who had paid a tax was eligible to vote, in Paris only those could vote who had paid a poll tax of six livres or more. Perhaps the King and his advisers hesitated to leave to the 500,000 sansculottes the selection of men to represent in the States-General the best intelligence of the capital; the democratic problem of quality versus quantity, of getting brains
by counting noses, appeared here on the eve of the Revolution that was, in 1793, to declare for democracy. So the sansculottes were left out of the legitimate drama, and were led to feel that only through the violent force of their number could they express their aliquot part of the general will. They would be heard from, they would be avenged. In 1789 they would take the Bastille; in 1792 they would dethrone the King; in 1793 they would be the government of France.
CHAPTER II
The National Assembly
May 4, 1789—September 30, 1791
I. THE STATES-GENERAL
ON May 4 the 621 deputies of the Third Estate, dressed in bourgeois black, followed by 285 nobles under plumed hats and in cloth of lace and gold, then by 308 of the clergy—their prelates distinguished by velvet robes—then by the King’s ministers, and his family, then by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, all accompanied by troops and inspired by banners and bands, marched to their designated meeting place, the Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs (Hall of Minor Diversions), a short distance from the royal palace at Versailles. A proud and happy crowd flanked the procession; some wept with joy and hope,1 seeing in that apparent union of the rival orders a promise of concord and justice under a benevolent king.
Louis addressed the united delegates with a confession of near-bankruptcy, which he attributed to a “costly but honorable war”; he asked them to devise and sanction new means of raising revenue. Necker followed with three hours of statistics, which made even revolution dull. On the next day the unity faded; the clergy met in an adjoining smaller hall, the nobles in another; each order, they felt, should deliberate and vote apart, as in that last States-General, 175 years ago; and no proposal should become law without receiving the consent of each order and the King. To let the individual votes of the congregated deputies decide the issues would be to surrender everything to the Third Estate; it was already evident that many of the poorer clergy would side with the commoners, and some nobles—Lafayette, Philippe d’Orléans, and the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt—entertained dangerously liberal sentiments.