Imagine a handful of oiled ivory balls that you are trying to keep together.
The Comte d’Artois (later King Charles X) on his brother Louis XVI
IT IS GIVEN to few monarchs to be succeeded by their great-grandson; but such was the fate of King Louis XIV. His son Louis, the Grand Dauphin, had died suddenly in 1711, making his eldest son, Louis, Duke of Burgundy, the new dauphin. In the following year, however, both the duke and his duchess died within a week of each other of smallpox – as, shortly afterwards, did their elder son – while the duke’s younger brother, the Duc de Berry, was killed in a riding accident. The younger son, aged two, survived the smallpox and consequently, just three years later, became King Louis XV.
Yet again there was a regency. Philip of Orléans was the nephew of Louis XIV – son of Monsieur – and also his son-in-law, having married Louis’s youngest legitimised daughter, Françoise. (He never liked her, and later was to give her the nickname of Madame Lucifer, despite the fact that she was to bear him eight children.) He was a highly intelligent man of forty-one who modelled himself on Henry IV, though he beat him hollow in the number of his mistresses, which seems to have been well over a hundred. He drastically reduced court expenses and temporarily abandoned Versailles, moving the young king to the Tuileries and governing from the Palais-Royal. He detested censorship, ordering the reprinting of all books banned during his uncle’s reign. He acted in plays of Molière and Racine, composed an opera, and was a talented painter and engraver. Once again reversing his uncle’s policies, he made an alliance with Britain, Austria and the Netherlands and fought a successful war against Spain, while in the diplomatic field he opened up relations with Russia – resulting in a state visit by Peter the Great. In short, he served his country well, and left it in distinctly better shape when, on 15 February 1723, young Louis officially came of age and the regency ended. Philip himself was dead by the end of the year, and on the advice of his tutor, the future Cardinal Fleury, the king most unwisely put the government in the hands of his hopelessly incompetent cousin, the Duke of Bourbon.
One of the first problems Bourbon had to deal with was the choice of a queen. Already two years before, it had been decided that the king should marry the Infanta Mariana Victoria of Spain, who was duly packed off to Paris. The only trouble was that she was just three years old; it would be more than a decade before she was of child-bearing age, and who knew whether Louis – who had recently recovered from a serious illness – would still be alive by then? He must clearly produce a male heir as soon as possible, and there was no time to be lost. In March 1725 back went the infanta to Madrid, and Bourbon had to think again.
There was no shortage of eligible princesses – Bourbon’s list of possibles numbered ninety-nine – but the final decision seems to have been largely due to the influence of his mistress the Marquise de Prie. She persuaded him to select one of the poorest – and, we are led to believe, one of the ugliest – of all the candidates, Maria Leszczyńska, daughter of the uncrowned King of Poland. Her principal reason seems to have been that she could totally dominate the young queen, who would owe her everything;* but there were other advantages as well: at twenty-two Maria, unlike the infanta, could supply an immediate production line for royal children;† she was also honest, generous and a pious Catholic. She first met her husband on the eve of their wedding, which took place on 5 September 1725 at Fontainebleau. Despite her appearance the two were reported to have fallen in love at first sight, and Louis seems to have been faithful to her for the first eight years of the marriage, only then embarking on his long career as a womaniser. She herself had difficulties in earning the respect of the court – which tended to ignore her for having brought no dowry and being, as they considered, of relatively humble birth – and became in consequence a stickler for etiquette and protocol; but she punctiliously performed her royal duties and remained on friendly terms with the king, appearing at his side whenever the occasion demanded.
The king, at the time of his marriage, was distinctly unimpressive: handsome enough with a faintly girlish face, but listless, unfeeling and inclined to gloom. Louis XIV had been toughened by the fronde; Louis XV had known nothing but adulation and flattery. His former tutor, now effectively his first minister, Cardinal Fleury – described by Jules Michelet as ‘an agreeable nobody’ – had left virtually no mark upon him at all. In fact, however, though hopeless as a tutor, Fleury proved a rather better minister than might have been expected. Not entirely unlike his contemporary in England, Sir Robert Walpole, he had no grand ideas and no desire for glory; had the two of them had their way, peace in Europe would have probably been assured.
Louis, however, felt somewhat differently; and on the death of the King of Poland (and Elector of Saxony) Augustus II, the Strong, in 1733, he hastened to intervene on behalf of his father-in-law, Stanislas Leszczyński, whom Augustus had dethroned nearly a quarter of a century before. In this he was only moderately successful: Stanislas returned to Poland in disguise and was elected king by an overwhelming majority of the Sejm, or Parliament; but before he could be crowned Russia and Austria, fearing a Franco-Polish alliance, invaded the country and deposed him again, enthroning Augustus’s son as Augustus III. Stanislas fled to Danzig, where he awaited French assistance. When it came it proved perfectly useless, but he continued to fight valiantly until he was at last taken prisoner by the Russians. Eventually the Peace of Vienna of 1738 allowed him to keep his royal titles and also made him Duke of Lorraine,* on the understanding that on his death the province would revert to France.
But the Peace of Vienna did not last long. It must be accounted a misfortune for readers – and indeed for writers – of European history in the eighteenth century that the struggle for the throne of Spain should have been followed after only twenty-seven years by another, this time for the throne of Austria. The Austrian Empire, being not so much the successor to as the continuation of the Holy Roman, remained theoretically elective; during the three centuries of Habsburg rule, however, the duties of the Electors had become more ceremonial than anything else, until the throne was to all intents and purposes hereditary. Unfortunately, like their Spanish cousins, the Austrian Habsburgs suffered from an acute shortage of male heirs – to the point where, as early as 1703, Leopold I had decreed that, in default of males, females should be allowed to succeed – the daughters of his elder son, Joseph, naturally enough taking precedence over those of his younger son, Charles. But, as we have seen, everything was changed by Joseph’s sudden death in 1711 and Charles’s succession the following year. By a secret family arrangement, known for some ridiculous reason as the Pragmatic Sanction, Charles – now the Emperor Charles VI – gave his own daughters priority over those of his brother, insisting at the same time that in future the Habsburg possessions in northern and central Europe should be indivisible.
When his son predeceased him, Charles was the only male Habsburg alive in the senior line; he was therefore determined that his daughter Maria Theresa should succeed. This, according to the Pragmatic Sanction, should have posed no problems, and for the first few months after his death in 1740 all promised well. Charles had taken care to obtain solemn guarantees from all the principal European powers that they would respect his daughter’s succession; England and Holland, the papacy and the Republic of Venice all willingly recognised the twenty-three-year-old queen.* France, though non-committal, was friendly and reassuring; and the new King of Prussia, Frederick II – later to be known as ‘the Great’ – not only gave her his recognition but even offered military assistance should she ever need it. He spoke, as it happened, with forked tongue; but Maria Theresa was not to know it until, on 16 December 1740, a Prussian army of 30,000 invaded the imperial province of Silesia. This time it was the War of the Austrian Succession that had begun.
And France, after some hesitation, sided with Frederick. The king, although he had no quarrel with Austria – apart from the age-old resentment that existed between the Houses of Bourbon and Habsburg – saw no reason to object; Cardinal Fleury disapproved of his decision, but at eighty-six was unable to tip the scales. The fact was that the army wanted war, and public opinion was behind it. Louis was told that by siding with ‘liberal’ Prussia he would be striking a blow against Austria’s ally England – which was becoming too powerful by half – and allowed himself to be persuaded. For France it was a disastrous mistake, unleashing as it did a whole series of wars which were to give England mastery of the seas and Prussia control of Germany. Hostilities were to continue until 1748; particularly noteworthy, perhaps, were the battles of Dettingen in 1743, when George II became the last English king to see action on the battlefield, and Fontenoy two years later, the great triumph of Marshal Maurice de Saxe,† at which King Louis and his son the dauphin and his mistress Marianne de Mailly – newly ennobled as the Duchess of Châteauroux – were all present, if not actually combatant. Fontenoy was the most decisive battle of the war and the bloodiest: casualties were the highest since Malplaquet (in which de Saxe had fought as a thirteen-year-old) in 1709, the French losing some 7,000 killed or wounded, the allies up to 12,000.
At the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, Prussia emerged as the principal beneficiary of the war. Maria Theresa remained on her throne, but Frederick the Great kept Silesia, a humiliating defeat for Austria and a crushing blow to her claim for leadership of the German states. Neither of these conclusions caused particular surprise; far more astonishing was the attitude of France. Louis, who did not wish to be seen as a conqueror, voluntarily returned all his conquests to his defeated enemies, arguing that he was ‘King of France, not a merchant’. We may imagine the reaction of his generals, as indeed of French public opinion as a whole, among whom the phrase travailler pour le roi de Prusse – ‘to work for the King of Prussia’ – came to mean working for nothing. France had, in short, been ill repaid for her alliance. Twice during the war Frederick had made a temporary peace with Austria without even bothering to inform Louis – who cordially disliked him anyway.
Since we are principally concerned with France, the above very brief account of the war has been confined to the northern European theatre, not even touching the several campaigns in Italy; it was in fact a world war – perhaps the first in history. There was also fighting in North America, in India, in the East Indies, in Sweden and Finland, in the Bay of Bengal, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. This was, after all, the age of colonisation; wherever in the world one or more of the great powers was struggling to establish dominion, there the war was instantly reflected. Even when there was peace at home, across the seas to east and west England and France were still at loggerheads. Countless adjustments were made: to remove French troops from Flanders, Britain had to evacuate Cape Breton Island in Canada, where the fortress of Louisbourg was exchanged for Madras. But nothing was settled; it sometimes seemed as if the principal purpose of one war was to rearrange the scenery for the next.
The king’s popularity after his return to Paris, already at a low ebb after the surrender of his conquests, was not increased when his subjects learned of his private life. Marianne de Mailly was in fact the youngest of four sisters, with all of whom – in strict order of age – he had had affairs. In June 1744, on his way to the front, he had fallen seriously ill at Metz, so ill that his life had been almost despaired of. Public prayers were held across France, but the royal chaplain refused to give him absolution unless he renounced Marianne and Louis at last gave in, signing a personal confession which was later, to his considerable embarrassment, publicly distributed. Although his recovery earned him the epithet ‘well-beloved’, he was in fact nothing of the kind; his reputation had taken a hard knock and he knew it.
But still the mistresses came and went until, on the night of 25 February 1745, at a masked ball given to celebrate the marriage of the dauphin to yet another infanta of Spain, Louis met the twenty-three-year-old Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson. She was already married, but that did not seem to matter very much: a month later she was installed at Versailles, in the apartment immediately above his own, and in July she was the Marquise de Pompadour, maîtresse en titre* to the king. But she was very unlike her predecessors. First of all, she took care to be on excellent terms with the queen, whom the others had been inclined to snub; secondly she was highly intelligent and extremely well educated, able to hold her own in any conversation with the great philosophes of the day, from Voltaire down. None of this of course protected her from those who despised her plebeian origins, deplored her immense influence with the king and attacked her with cruel lies and libels which, inspired by her slightly unfortunate family name, were known as poissonades. She was certainly wounded by some of these attacks, but at the same time she was well aware that her position was unassailable. The king, she knew, relied on her absolutely – not only for the pleasures of the bedchamber but for her wise advice and her sparkling wit. She accompanied him everywhere – at the hunt, at the gaming tables, on his frequent travels around the country. She sang him songs at the clavichord, organised plays and operas for his amusement, and gave intimate private dinner parties where he could forget his worries and his deeply depressing family. In short, she irradiated his life.
Her political influence too was considerable, particularly in the all-important matter of senior appointments, and she was a major patron of the arts. With her brother the Marquis de Marigny she was involved in the planning of the new Place de la Concorde – known in those days as Place Louis XV – and the Petit Trianon at Versailles; she commissioned portraits from François Boucher and the court painter Jean-Marc Nattier; and she was in a large measure responsible for the setting-up and subsequent development of the porcelain factory at Sèvres, soon to become one of the most famous in Europe. She also vigorously – and, in the end, successfully – defended the Encyclopédie and its chief editor Denis Diderot when the Parlement of Paris and the city’s archbishop sought to have it suppressed. Although the physical side of her relationship with the king seems to have ended around 1750, she is said to have continued to provide mistresses for him at the Parc-aux-Cerfs (Stag Park), a house in the grounds of Versailles. He remained devoted to her, and when she was dying of consumption in 1764 scarcely left her bedside. Voltaire wrote of his own sadness on hearing the news of her death: ‘I was indebted to her, and I mourn her out of gratitude. It seems absurd that while an ancient scribbler, hardly able to walk, should still be alive, a beautiful woman at the height of a splendid career should die at the age of forty-two.’
Madame de Pompadour was the most dazzling of Louis’s mistresses, but not the last. Four years after her death she was succeeded by a woman of a very different kind. Jeanne Bécu, later known as Mademoiselle Lange and later still, after an extremely dodgy marriage, as the Comtesse du Barry, had for some years been well known in Paris as a high-class courtesan, who counted among her many lovers several members of the high aristocracy. She was no intellectual, and indeed had no pretensions to being other than what she was; but the king was captivated, showering her with dresses and jewels, of which she could never have enough. It need hardly be said that she was detested by the court – far more than the Pompadour had ever been – her greatest enemy of all being the Austrian princess Marie Antoinette, who had married the future Louis XVI at the age of fourteen in 1770 and who for two years refused to speak to her.
By this time France had survived yet another European conflict. The Seven Years’ War lasted in Europe from 1756 to 1763; but like its predecessor it had ramifications across half the world – particularly in America, where the by now very considerable French colonies in Canada, Illinois and Louisiana had almost surrounded the British ones, which were concentrated principally along the east coast. It was there that the war really began, continuing throughout the hostilities in Europe, with Britain steadily gaining ground: capturing Quebec in 1759 (when General James Wolfe was killed at the moment of victory) and, in the Caribbean, the valuable sugar islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.*
In Europe, France and Britain switched alliances. The French, seriously alarmed by the growing strength of Prussia – which had now, for the first time and thanks entirely to Frederick the Great, become a major European power – realised that the Austria of Maria Theresa no longer represented the danger that it had in the previous century, overcame their long hostility to the Habsburgs and sided with them in an attempt to recover Silesia, while Britain, long Austria’s ally, turned towards her former enemy Prussia. Most of the smaller nations, including the Dutch Republic, sensibly stayed out of harm’s way. France, with no general to compare with Maurice de Saxe, did not do well. A French invasion of Hanover and Saxony ended in a humiliating defeat by Frederick the Great at Rossbach, while a series of naval defeats prevented Louis from carrying out his plans for an invasion of England.
Where Britain and France were concerned, the war ended with the Peace of Paris in 1763 – ‘one of the saddest’, writes Maurois, ‘in French history. It cost France her empire and created England’s.’ A slight exaggeration, perhaps; but France lost Canada (‘a few acres of snow’, sniffed Voltaire),† together with those islands in the Caribbean, and was also obliged to cede the eastern half of what was then Louisiana – virtually the whole area from the Mississippi to the Appalachians.
On 5 January 1757, at around six in the evening, King Louis, who had been visiting his daughter in the palace, left her to return to the Grand Trianon where he was staying at the time. Suddenly, as he was walking across the marble courtyard on the way to his carriage, a young man emerged from the darkness and stabbed him in the side. Fortunately it was mid-winter and he was well wrapped up; his many layers of clothing probably saved his life. The would-be assassin was duly tried, tortured and executed on the Place de Grève.* It was in itself a relatively unimportant incident; the wound, though something a good deal more than the ‘pinprick’ – as Voltaire dismissed it – never gave cause for serious concern. The king himself seemed bewildered: ‘Why try to kill me?’ he asked, ‘I have done no one any harm.’
But he had – the people of France. He may have been unconscious of the fact, but he had let them down badly. He was weak – perhaps the weakest of the Bourbons – and easily led, by his mistresses and others. He was moreover incurably lazy, and all too ready to leave affairs of state to frequently incompetent ministers while he hunted or womanised. The result was lost wars, continual clashes with the Parlement, and, thanks to the incessant fighting, economic stagnation. His later reign was sad, as he faced constant intrigues by his rather unpleasant children, particularly the dauphin who fortunately died of consumption at the age of thirty-six, nine years before his father – and his eldest surviving daughter, Adélaïde. Madame du Barry doubtless gave him consolation of a kind, but he was growing old and she was no substitute for the Pompadour. When in the spring of 1774 he succumbed for the second time to smallpox he hastily dismissed her from his bed, both to avoid infection and also to obtain absolution for both of them – the poor girl had a good deal to absolve. He died on 10 May at Versailles, at the age of sixty-four.
His son the dauphin having predeceased him, the crown passed to his grandson: three reigns were to cover six generations and a century and a half. Louis XVI was twenty years old – for once, France had been spared a regency – and, as we all know, a tragic figure; he was also a strangely enigmatic one. To begin with, he totally lacked style. He was short – not much more than five foot six – flabby-faced and distinctly overweight, which was not surprising considering his gargantuan appetite.* He was also one of those men whose clothes, despite the efforts of the best tailors, always look ill-fitting; it was said, as he shambled round the palace, that he looked more like a peasant than a king. His manner, too, was unfortunate: although those who knew him well maintained that he was, in his heart, compassionate and tender-hearted, in conversation he was harsh and abrupt, even disagreeable. ‘I want to be loved,’ he said on his accession to the throne, but he never seemed to try very hard. He may have lacked charm, but he was not stupid: well before he was grown-up he spoke fluent English and Italian, and he had a passion for astronomy. He was also, rather more surprisingly, an expert locksmith. He was pious, and he was also chaste – which, after his grandfather, was something of a relief. Politics, however, bored him stiff – which perhaps explains the almost pathological indecisiveness which, ultimately, did him in.
On 16 May 1770, when he was fifteen, he had married the second youngest of the sixteen children of the Empress Maria Theresa. The given names of the fourteen-year-old archduchess were Maria Antonia, but she is better known to us in their French version: Marie Antoinette. Her parents had taken little trouble over her education, but she was a lot brighter than her husband; and with her deep blue eyes, thick fair hair and flawless complexion she had all the makings of a popular princess. But, alas, she was Austrian; and to the people of France Austria was bad news indeed. The marriage to ‘L’Autrichienne’ was deeply unpopular before it had even begun.
And Louis didn’t seem to enjoy her much either. Like Louis XIII, he was terrified of women. His gloomy, excessively pious father had regularly pointed out the countless mistresses of his grandfather Louis XV as an object lesson in depravity, to be avoided at all costs; and he had taken the advice to heart. He had first met his bride only two days before the marriage, when he had greeted her near the forest of Compiègne. They married two days later at Versailles, but the traditional bedding the same night ended in deep embarrassment all round: despite a liberal sprinkling of holy water over the sheets, Louis went straight off to sleep. A successful consummation was not to occur for another seven years – during which time the reputation of both parties suffered considerable damage. Pamphlets began to circulate, claiming that Her Majesty was now seeking her pleasures elsewhere, with women as well as men. Her reported activities with her closest friend, the widowed Princesse de Lamballe, were described in terms of almost unparalleled obscenity, although the princess – so sensitive that she had once fainted dead away at the sight of a lobster in a painting – was, it was said, far more affected by the libels than the queen herself.
But the babies came at last – the first just before Christmas 1778, after eight years of marriage – and there was particular rejoicing in 1781 when the long-awaited dauphin finally made his appearance. The queen pronounced herself blissfully happy; but she was full of energy and vivacity and, having no intellectual resources, dangerously easily bored; the court etiquette drove her to distraction. Besides, life with Louis was hard. ‘You know’, she somewhat disloyally wrote to the Austrian ambassadress, ‘the person with whom I have to deal? The moment you think him persuaded, a word, an objection raised, makes him change his mind without even suspecting it himself.’ In Louis’s defence it must be said that from the beginning he was torn: torn between the old conservative traditions in which he had been brought up – the benevolent, fatherly monarchy at the top with the nobility, the Church and the ancient constitution beneath it – and the new ideas of the philosophes, of which he might not entirely approve but which he knew represented the future. Thus, although his first cabinet was headed by the Comte de Maurepas, a witty, frivolous cynic who had been Minister for the Navy at the age of twenty-two but had subsequently been exiled after writing a bitchy epigram about Madame de Pompadour, it included one of the outstanding ministers of the century, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, who soon became controller-general of finance. Turgot was a man to be reckoned with: a thinker, a philosopher, and a writer whose works are still read today. ‘No bankruptcy,’ he warned the king, ‘no increase of taxation, no borrowing.’ Expenditure would be reduced across the board: ‘I shall have to struggle against the natural kindness, against the generosity of Your Majesty, and of the persons dearest to Him.’ Meanwhile, as an earnest of his intentions, he reduced his own salary from 142,000 livres to 82,000. He expressed his economic philosophy in an essay, ‘Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth’; ‘I have just read Monsieur Turgot’s masterpiece,’ wrote Voltaire; ‘It seems to me that here is a new heaven and a new earth.’
Had Louis given Turgot his full confidence and accepted all his advice without question, it is just possible that he might have spared his country a revolution. Alas, Turgot was to remain minister for less than two years. His cold, rather patronising manner often antagonised people. ‘Monsieur Turgot’, the king remarked sadly, ‘causes no one to love him.’ He might well have said the same of himself; but there was more to it than that. The queen, first of all, resented the constant curbs that Turgot was putting on her natural extravagance, and was furious at his refusal to make her favourite, the pro-Austrian Duc de Choiseul, a minister. The bankers and tax collectors saw their profits gravely threatened; the nobles and the Parlement – which the king had recalled – hated him for his attacks on privilege; the farmers for his attempts to establish free trade in grain. Ministerial jealousy did the rest. On 12 May 1776 he was ordered to resign his office. He lived to see all his work undone, all the abuses against which he had fought deliberately restored, and France set firmly on the road to the greatest catastrophe that she had ever known.
But the year 1776 has gone down in history for more than the fall of Turgot. When we consider all their losses across the Atlantic after the Seven Years’ War, it comes as no surprise that the French, from the king down, supported the American Revolution; for some time already they had been secretly sending armaments and supplies to the rebels. Soon after he had signed the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin arrived in Paris as the first American ambassador to France. His name was already well known; he was given a rapturous welcome and immediately admitted as a member of the Academy of Sciences. He naturally met Voltaire; the two old men publicly embraced, to enthusiastic applause. At first France held back from active participation in the hostilities; but in December 1777, emboldened by the surrender of the British general John Burgoyne with his army of 6,200 men after the two battles of Saratoga, Louis signed a treaty of alliance recognising American independence and officially entered the war. In the two years following, a French army of 7,000 – considerably more than Washington could boast – under the command of General Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau, ably assisted by the twenty-three-year-old Marquis de Lafayette,* fought at the future president’s side, while a French fleet successfully prevented the British from relieving Lord Cornwallis, who was finally to surrender after the siege of Yorktown.
It seemed as though the tables were turned. Britain no longer absolutely ruled the waves, while the French stood out as champions of liberty. They were, however, more deeply in debt than they had ever been before, to the point where they had to call in a foreigner. It was Jacques Necker, the dreary, capable and immensely rich Swiss banker who now became director general of finance – he could not be controller because he was a Protestant – and who now assumed the mantle of Turgot. His wife and daughter, Suzanne Curchod and Germaine de Staël, were as distinguished as he was, and a great deal more fun – Suzanne for her famous salon, Germaine in future years for her remarkable books, her incurable romanticism and her political enthusiasm. For the four years between 1777 and 1781 Necker was in sole charge of the wealth of France, in 1781 publishing what he called the Compte rendu au roi, the first-ever public record of national finances. It had a huge and quite unexpected success, introducing many people to economics for the first time in their lives. Unfortunately it lied in its teeth. While there was actually a deficit of some 46 million livres, Necker claimed that the country was 10 million in credit, thereby deliberately lulling the king and his subjects into a false sense of security when he should have been awakening them to danger.
Before very long, he too fell – not because he cooked the books but because he became a victim, as Turgot had been, of court intrigue. In 1787 he was exiled to forty leagues* from Paris. His successor, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, fared little better: his proposals included a new land tax, which was to be levied on the nobility and clergy and was therefore instantly rejected. Calonne’s successor, Loménie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, was an utterly unprincipled and probably agnostic prelate whom the Parlement detested even more than they had the others. In despair, Louis brought back Necker, who at least had the gift of inspiring confidence even when there was nothing to be confident about. Necker began with a generous gesture – by making the Exchequer a gift of two million livres from his personal fortune. This cheered everybody up, and he managed to keep going a little longer. But the writing was on the wall – not just for him, but for France itself.
The Estates General, consisting of the three estates – nobility, clergy and everyone else – had last been convoked 175 years before, in 1614. It had been suspended for so long largely because it possessed no power in its own right. It was essentially little more than an advisory body to the king, and for over a century and a half the king had not required its advice. But now, on 5 May 1789, he did – because decisive action was necessary. It was becoming obvious that something was rotten in the state of France.
What was the trouble? France was still the most powerful nation in Europe, with a population of 26 million (England could boast only 12 million). It had recently contributed in large measure to the victory of the United States in the War of Independence. Its reputation had never been higher, and its cultural influence was rapidly spreading across the continent. Why then was the whole country so seething with dissatisfaction? First, because it felt that the monarchy had let it down. This not to say that the French were anti-monarchist; they were nothing of the kind. But they expected the king to be on their side and to protect them, both from grasping tax-collectors and from groping noblemen. Instead, by deciding to live at Versailles, he had cut himself off from his people; and by gathering the nobility around him he had estranged them from the lands they owned and the peasants for whom they should have been caring. Then there was the Church. Out of a total population of some 26 million, the clergy numbered fewer than 100,000 but owned more than a tenth of the land. It was, in short, a bastion of fabulous wealth – very little of which, however, came down to the parishes. It levied tithes on the harvest – payable by the peasantry – but was itself, like the nobility, largely immune from taxation. There was a voluntary grant to the state every five years, but as the size of this grant was decided by the assemblies of the Church itself it seldom amounted to very much. The cardinals and bishops lived like fighting-cocks and frequently scandalised the faithful, especially the lower clergy; they did not seem to realise that this was the age of Enlightenment, and that they now had to contend with the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopédistes. And meanwhile, in many parts of France, the peasants were cripplingly poor, barefoot and in rags, crippled by taxes from which the nobility were excused, and looking, according to Tobias Smollett, like ‘ravenous scarecrows’.
With the revival of the Estates General, the principal question to be discussed was what was known as the third estate. The first two estates – the nobility and the clergy – were still much the same as they had always been; the third, however – which amounted to the rest of France – had changed radically in the past century. On those previous – and distant – occasions when the Estates General had met it had been not only outnumbered and outvoted by the other two; it had also been largely ignored. Now, in recognition of its vastly increased importance, its numbers were doubled – though no one had revealed whether the voting was to be by a count of individuals. (In the latter event it would be no better off than before.) Its importance was further emphasised by the Abbé Sieyès in an enormously influential pamphlet published in January 1789, entitled ‘Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?’ – ‘What is the third estate?’ He answered the question in a word: ‘Everything’; but then added, ‘What has it been till now in the political order? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something.’ The tone was moderate; the Abbé was against attacking the privileged too forcibly. Far better to move forward at a measured pace, to reform taxation and improve justice first; there would be time for further improvements later. But the underlying message was clear enough.
So the French, as the Estates General opened, demanded radical changes; but the last thing they wanted – or expected – was revolution. They had experienced no real violence since the fronde; the model before their eyes now was that of America – which, to be sure, had had to fight for its independence, but which without any serious civil unrest had managed to achieve a constitution based on sound philosophical principles. Surely France could do the same? And it probably could have – if Louis XVI had had an ounce of understanding of his country and people. Had he only been able to realise that the bourgeoisie – the third estate – was no longer what it had been a century before, that it had acquired wealth, culture and very considerable power, and that it looked for equal rights and careers open to talent – then he could perhaps have saved the monarchy. Instead, he identified himself with the privileged; and the mistake was fatal.
* Unfortunately Madame de Prie never had a chance to do any dominating: the king shortly afterwards dismissed the Duke of Bourbon and exiled her to her estate at Courbépine, where – according to André Maurois – she poisoned herself out of sheer boredom the following year.
† She was ultimately to produce eight daughters, but only two sons.
* He is commemorated in the magnificent Place Stanislas in Nancy, one of the loveliest squares in all France.
* She became empress only in 1745, and then only by marriage. On the death of her father the Empire had passed to her distant cousin from the Bavarian side of the family, who became Charles VII; only on his death was her husband Francis of Lorraine elected to the imperial throne as the Emperor Francis I. (He had surrendered Lorraine in 1738 to Stanislas Leszczyński, receiving the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in return.)
† He was the first of the illegitimate sons of Augustus the Strong – the list of whose offspring now numbers 356.
* This had been a semi-official position (which came with its own apartments) since the days of Henry IV.
* Guadeloupe was returned at the end of the war, but Martinique remained for the most part in British hands until the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
† She was allowed to keep fishing rights off Newfoundland and the two tiny islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, so that the fishermen could dry their catch.
* Now the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville.
* It was said that one morning before going down to the stables he consumed ‘four cutlets, a chicken, a plateful of ham, half a dozen eggs in sauce and a bottle and a half of champagne’ (Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution).
* A statue of Rochambeau – presented by France to the United States – stands in Lafayette Park in Washington DC. That of Lafayette himself can be seen in the square which bears his name.
* A league originally meant the distance a person could walk in an hour – between three and four miles.