‘Les Français étaient las d’un bonheur qui les ennuyait parce qu’il était tranquille.’
‘The French were tired of a contentedness that bored them because it was so peaceful.’
Alexandre de Tilly (1761–1816), French count, in his memoirs
IN 1789, FOR A large proportion of people in France – and not just the money-grabbing aristocrats and their bourgeois imitators – life was getting better. Very slowly, in many cases, it was true, because of the crushing weight of taxes on the poor. But overall, there did seem to be a sense that the lumière of progress and prosperity would soon shine on most classes of society, if not today then one day soon, and without the need for violent revolution.
The image of Louis XVI as a man who did little but hunt, make watches and locks and allow his wife to spend France’s tax income has been carefully constructed over the two centuries or so since his head was cut off. Today, it is much easier to explain away the violence of the Revolution if it looks as though it was all worthwhile.
It’s true that hunting was probably Louis XVI’s one true passion, but, as we have seen, this didn’t stop him trying to improve the lot of his subjects. And his desire to develop a more democratic (within reason) and more modern France extended far beyond reforming the tax system and improving prisons, hospitals and harbours. Like Necker, who loved the word lumière so much, and even Archbishop Brienne, the friend of Voltaire, Louis XVI was a man who wanted to nurture an innovative, dynamic France that would become a key player on the world stage, as a competitor to the economic might of Britain and the newly emerging independent America. The key to this, he thought, was education.
Without standardized reading tests, the measure of literacy used by historians is usually whether people were able to sign their names in the register of marriages. In 1688, 29 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women in France were capable of doing so. This didn’t mean that they could write a coherent letter or read one of Racine’s tragedies, but they had at least been to school. The others just scratched an ‘X’, and could probably not read the names of all the taxes they had to pay.
By 1788, over half of all French children were going to school, and the numbers of grooms and brides signing their names had risen to 47 per cent and 27 per cent respectively. In comparison, at the same time in England, around 66 per cent of men could sign their names, and 34 per cent of women. France still had some catching-up to do, but under Louis XVI, literacy rates were growing healthily, and were especially high amongst craftsmen and merchants, three-quarters of whom could read and write. (To put this into perspective, that is only about 10 per cent lower than the literacy rate in the modern-day USA.)
Almost every child in France had an elementary school near their home, ever since Louis XIV had laid the burden of education on the Church in 1698, with an edict ordering bishops to open a school in every parish and educate children up to the age of 14. Admittedly this meant that the King was denying any direct responsibility for educating his people, but Louis XIV clearly felt that the Church was rich enough to obey the edict, and so petites écoles, often for boys only, were set up throughout France, dedicated to ‘the arts of reading, writing and counting, and the catechism’. Naturally, the bishops were keen to improve souls as well as brains.
In towns, the standard of teaching was usually acceptable, but in the country, with parishes covering large areas, and children needed for farm work, the literacy and numeracy rates were much lower. Rural teachers, either lay people or priests or nuns, would visit farmhouses or go out into the fields to give lessons to the children working there. On the last Sunday of each month, each family would pay their school fees of five sous (about the price of a half-kilo of beef) directly to the teacher, who often received no other salary.
Unless these rural teachers were priests or nuns, they might not be much better at the basic skills than their young pupils. A report in 1793 noted that one teacher was 53 years old, had been teaching for 35 years, but ‘though he writes quite well, he cannot spell. A good arithmetician, he knows a little about measuring land.’ The reference to spelling probably meant that the man could not write French – lessons would often be given in the local patois, and children might be taught their alphabet using religious books in Latin. There was no such thing as a national French curriculum.
But at least the Church was fulfilling its duty to get the poor reading and writing – and in this, it was actually more enlightening than the so-called ‘enlightenment’ philosophers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, the champion of the ‘noble savage’, thought that ‘the poor do not need education.’ Their innate ability to interact with nature was sacred (as, presumably, was their natural tendency to die when they didn’t have enough to eat).
Similarly, in 1763, Voltaire wrote to the attorney general of the Brittany parliament, who had published an essay advocating scientific studies instead of religious education, congratulating him for saying that poor children should be excluded from this modernization of the education system. ‘I thank you for forbidding the ploughing classes from studying,’ Voltaire wrote. ‘I, who cultivate land [Voltaire was an absentee landlord], would like to put in a request for more workers, not more monks.’ Admittedly Voltaire was playing his anti-religious card, but he was also indulging in the snobbery that was a mark of the times amongst the upper classes, including the supposedly freethinking intellectuals.
Secondary education was almost entirely a privilege of the rich. The larger towns had collèges and lycées, most of them run by religious orders, and all of them for bourgeois and noble pupils. During Louis XVI’s reign, many of these secondary schools encouraged children to speak Latin amongst themselves, even during breaks, but the sciences were beginning to gain a foothold alongside the classic disciplines. Schools were moving with the times. Sadly, their intake wasn’t. For a start these secondary schools were almost all for boys only, and in 1789, they took in only about 13,000 new pupils – a tiny proportion when one considers that almost 10 per cent of the population, 2.7 million, were teenagers.
A young woman’s only hope of getting a decent education was at a convent. Even this was mostly restricted to the daughters of the well-off, who were sent away to be turned into respectable young ladies. Each convent girl had a tutrix, a nun whom she was encouraged to call tante (aunt), and who saw to her moral and intellectual upbringing – with the emphasis on the former.
The principles of girls’ education at the time are outlined by the Abbé Joseph Reyre (naturally this was a man’s job) in his novel L’École des jeunes demoiselles, published in 1786. In the story, a nun called Sister Rosalie speaks out against the influence of modern philosophers on young girls: ‘In the past they were taught nothing; now we are meant to teach them everything.’
Sister Rosalie is all in favour of female education, but she is horrified that the philosophers want to teach girls about science: ‘There is nothing more pointless than introducing [girls] to the secrets of chemistry and the mysteries of physics.’ Sister Rosalie recommends ‘a smattering of history and literature, with just enough mathematics to be able to keep household accounts’. Sewing and knitting were not to be neglected, of course, and girls should also learn to dance, Rosalie says, but only ‘danses décentes’ that will improve their posture, and definitely not the new steps that are practised at ‘dangerous balls that one cannot frequent without offending God’. In short, the last thing the convents wanted was to turn out a generation of Marie-Antoinettes.
There were calls for equal rights to education for girls. A century earlier, François Fénelon, the private tutor to Louis XV, had published a Treatise on the Education of Girls in which he asserted that ‘nothing is more neglected than the education of girls’ and ‘the weaker they are, the more they need to be strengthened’. He was not calling for total equality, but recommended that girls should learn literature, history, Latin, music, art, grammar, arithmetic and ‘the main rules of justice’.
This was the programme that was adopted for the Maison royale, a girls’ school (for upper-class demoiselles, of course) opened in 1684, and eventually closed under Louis XV, apparently because its students were too intelligent. The Marquis d’Argenson, Louis XV’s Foreign Secretary, declared in 1750 that the girls coming out of the Maison royale were ‘demanding’ and ‘drive their husbands to madness’. It was duly turned into a convent, and reverted to traditional teaching. Under Louis XVI, despite the rise of the Lumières philosophers, no one thought to revive its more challenging curriculum.
One of the early eighteenth century’s most famous female intellectuals, the Marquise de Lambert, adopted Fénelon’s principles in 1728 for a text entitled A Mother’s Advice to Her Daughter, in which she encouraged girls to concentrate on Latin because it ‘opens the way to the sciences’. But she didn’t intend her treatise for publication, and even forbade political discussions at her Tuesday salons, which attracted some of the greatest minds of the day (including Fénelon), so she clearly didn’t think that female education was anything more than a private affair.
During Louis XVI’s reign, the strongest call for equality in education came from a surprising source – Choderlos de Laclos, author of the erotic novel Dangerous Liaisons. In 1783, he wrote an 80-page text On the Education of Women in which he stated that ‘Wherever there is slavery, there can be no education; in all societies, women are slaves.’ Predictably, Laclos pontificates about their natural seductiveness, their beautiful hair and their puberty, but he also states bluntly that, without society’s influence, women are naturally the equals of men – ‘free and powerful’ – and that men have ‘corrupted everything’.
This interest in politics expressed by an eroticist is perhaps explained by the fact that Laclos was also secretary to the King’s cousin, Louis Philippe d’Orléans, who was espousing liberal causes in an attempt to undermine Louis XVI, and position himself as a potential successor if the regime fell. It may be that women’s education was one of the causes that Louis Philippe was toying with. If this was the case, he clearly didn’t consider it worth pursuing, because, like the Marquise de Lambert’s Advice to Her Daughter, Laclos’s text remained unpublished at the time – it didn’t appear until 1903.
It seems that in spite of the philosophers’ claim to call established thinking into question, and despite the attempts of Louis XVI’s ministers to introduce a degree of democracy into French society, even despite the influence of women like Madame Necker, no one gave much real thought to the need for women to get a decent education.
But if developments in girls’ education were more or less at a standstill, these were exciting times for the sons of wealthy families who managed to graduate from secondary education. Opportunities for rich young men, both common and noble, were becoming much more varied. The universities were still pretty medieval, offering traditional courses in law, letters and antiquated versions of medicine, mathematics and science, but Louis XVI launched a plan to create a range of new schools that would specialize in modern knowledge.
It was around this time that many of France’s famous grandes écoles were either founded or adapted from existing schools. Most of them still exist today, and though the intake might have become more democratic since Louis XVI’s day, the output still forms France’s technocratic elite.
The École nationale des ponts et chaussées (literally ‘of bridges and road surfaces’) had been set up in 1747, but was considerably updated in 1775, to train the engineers who were needed to improve France’s transport network – getting unskilled labourers to fill potholes and bolster old bridges was no longer going to be enough. And it wasn’t all about stone and gravel, either – students spent between four and 12 years at Ponts et chaussées, and had to master geometry, mechanics and hydraulics, as well as helping surveyors to update maps of France. After the Revolution, when roads were left unrepaired for a decade, it was graduates of this school who got them back into shape (mainly so that Napoleon’s armies could march off to war).
In 1783, Louis XVI founded the École royale des mines in Paris, with the aim of creating ‘intelligent directors’ for France’s mines, which were starting to rival those of England. The students were all from the moneyed (and mostly noble) elite, of course, and only they had access to the laboratories. But in a spirit of openness, members of the public were allowed to attend lectures, the idea being to instruct everyone in France about modern technology (well, anyone who had the time and leisure to attend, and who could follow lectures about ‘underground geometry’). The school was shut down during the Revolution, but reopened in 1794, without the ‘royal’ in its name. It is still very prestigious today, and has branched out from mining into all types of energy sources.
These great seats of modern learning were not confined to Paris. Louis XVI created the Ecole royale du géniefn1 at Mézières, on the Belgian border. This was mainly for aristocrats, and combined general engineering with military specialities like for-tress-building and siege tactics, and after two years, students could become military engineers. The head of this school was Gaspard Monge, a brilliant mathematician who, while there, invented descriptive geometry, the technique for accurately depicting three-dimensional shapes in two-dimensional drawings – a fundamental skill for architects and engineers.
Another great invention at Mézières was the very French system of organizing an entrance exam so difficult and competitive that all but the most brilliant and hard-working students simply don’t bother to apply. In Monge’s day, one out of six applicants were accepted – today, some French grandes écoles take fewer than one in ten of their candidates, most of whom have already done two years of classes préparatoires just to be able to understand the questions in the entrance exam. It is a brutal but efficient system which ensures that, just like the aristocratic students of Louis XVI’s day, these modern graduates are all too aware that they are superior to common mortals.
Overall, then, access to knowledge under Louis XVI was not becoming less elitist, but by 1789, France’s education system was starting to produce some of the best-trained scientists and technocrats on the planet.
Louis XVI’s avowed intention was that all this science should be used for the common good. As early as 1776 he created the Société royale de médecine, its mission statement: ‘To maintain a constant correspondence with all the most skilled doctors in the Kingdom, and even abroad, on the subject of practical medicine, and to provide help during epidemics’. More than 100 doctors and scientists met twice a week at the Louvre, on Tuesdays and Fridays, to share ideas and discoveries.
In 1778, the Société sent out health questionnaires to doctors all over France. They did not content themselves with asking who was suffering or dying of what – they wanted information about the water supply, the soil, the climate, health differences between town and country, common remedies used in the region, and how the sick were being cared for. If they had been operating in the twenty-first century, they would have been called holistic.
Inevitably, the doctors received plenty of depressing replies about epidemics and a whole profusion of fevers (dirty drinking water and mosquitoes still plagued large areas of France), but they also made some real breakthroughs thanks to this consultation process. One of the most interesting came from a doctor in Poitou, in western France, who wrote back explaining why he no longer bled patients who were already weakened by disease or fever. Sadly, his suggestion was not immediately adopted as general practice, in France or anywhere else, and in 1824, Lord Byron would be bled to death, complaining wittily and poetically to his doctor as he faded away that ‘less slaughter is done by the lance than the lancet’.
The study lasted until the Revolution, and it may not have stopped the practice of bleeding patients, but it did produce results that are of enormous importance to modern France. The Société was asked to look into ‘remedies for which permits and patents are requested’, and ‘the administration of mineral and medicinal waters’. If France is today home to a massive pharmaceutical industry and the producer of some of the world’s most famous mineral waters, it is partly due to Louis XVI’s patronage in the 1770s.
The members of the Académie des sciences were also given practical work to do. We saw in an earlier chapter how Louis got his Swiss minister Necker to improve conditions in hospitals (see Chapter 9). Not content with this, in 1785 the King asked the Académie to study the effects of his improvements. In 1787, he also commissioned them to report on how best to manage Paris’s abattoirs, after complaints from residents of the city centre that the blood from the killing grounds at Saint-Jacques in the Latin Quarter were turning the streets into smelly, fly-infested mudbaths. Under Louis XVI, the Académie could no longer content itself with theorizing about the universe – it was being brought down to earth.
The Académie des sciences had originally been set up in 1666, but before Louis XVI’s time it was not very scientific in appointing new members. In 1731, the Duc de Richelieu had been elected despite the fact that he was almost totally illiterate. During Louis XVI’s reign, however, the academy was given a complete overhaul so that its remit included agriculture, physics, mineralogy, metallurgy and mechanics, one of Louis XVI’s personal interests. The intake of members was increased to 2,500, and rejuvenated so that its average age was only about thirty – a startling statistic compared to today when most areas of French life are ruled by an ageing, unbudgeable elite.
Outside the official scientific bodies, research was also being put to functional use. In 1777 Louis XVI’s brother Charles set up a factory for salts and minerals by the Seine, at Javel on the south-western edge of Paris. In 1788, the Journal de Paris raved about one of the new products invented there, which had ‘the property of whitening canvas, thread and cotton, and threads on bobbins, in 24 to 30 hours’. The Journal explained that this miracle product had been dubbed ‘eau de Javel’, or ‘Javel water’, ‘to distract from the idea that there is acid in its composition, which does not act as such when it is used for whitening’. A clever piece of modern marketing that still works today, given that eau de Javel is the modern French name for bleach.
The factory also made high-quality, cheap sulphuric acid (useful for cleaning metals), white lead (a component in white paint) and the green pigment verdigris. All these quickly became excellent export products, and even began invading the British market.
But apart from eau de Javel, the factory’s biggest claim to fame was that, by pouring sulphuric acid over iron filings, it created hydrogen gas, which would be used in one of France’s greatest contributions to eighteenth-century technology – the balloon.
In the summer of 1783, France was the arena for a frantic race to send the first men up into the clouds. Aware of the experiments going on at the time, Louis XVI had launched a competition for ‘l’invention des machines aérostatiques’.
On 4 June, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier, two paper manufacturers, conducted the first public experiment, sending up an unmanned balloon in Annonay, in south-eastern France, where they had their paper mill. For this flight, they used heated air. Believing that it was the smoke rather than the air itself that caused elevation, they experimented with different ways of making the smoke thicker, burning a variety of substances like sheep droppings, wet wool and meat. On a wave of malodorous fumes, their first balloon rose 30 metres.
They knew that the race for the clouds was a close one. The French physicist Jacques Charles, the first man to formulate a law about gases expanding when heated, had been working on a similar idea in Paris with another two brothers, Anne-Jean and Nicolas-Louis Robert. On 27 August of that same year, they launched a 35-cubic-metre silk balloon filled with hydrogen gas. It flew for 21 kilometres before landing in a field and being pitchforked to rags by terrified peasants.
Meanwhile, Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier had been at work in the wallpaper factory of a friend, Jean-Baptiste Réveillon,fn2 in the east of Paris near the Bastille. There, they hand-sewed a 24-metre-tall balloon out of cotton canvas covered with paper. It got rained on during tests, and split, so in only five days they manufactured a new, 19-metre balloon.
On 19 September, they were ready to go to Versailles and give a demonstration before Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette and a crowd of some 130,000 people. Not daring to commit aerial manslaughter or suicide in front of the King, they sent up a sheep, a duck and a chicken. This miniature menagerie rose to 480 metres and travelled 3.5 kilometres before descending safely. In recognition of its services to science and the nation, the sheep was sent into happy retirement at the ménagerie royale, and may well have become one of the stars of Marie-Antoinette’s fake farm at the Petit Trianon.
Encouraged by this success, Réveillon and the Montgolfiers built a larger, heavier balloon – 21 metres tall and weighing 850 kilos – decorated in royal blue with fleurs-de-lys and two interlaced golden Ls in Louis XVI’s honour. It was finished in under three weeks (let no one say that workers in Louis XVI’s France were inefficient), and the world’s first manned flight took place in private at the Réveillon factory on 19 October, though in fact it was only an ascension to 81 metres, with the balloon held in check by ropes. The test pilot was a courageous 29-year-old called Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, a scientist who had recently created one of the world’s first science museums in Paris.
On 21 November 1783, Rozier, now joined by a slightly mad marquis called François Laurent d’Arlande (who had almost killed himself a year earlier testing a parachute in Montmartre), went to the royal château at La Muette, in the west of Paris, hoping to pilot the first manned free flight in a balloon. Until the last minute, Rozier and Arlande were afraid that they would be replaced by two condemned prisoners, because Louis XVI did not want innocent lives to be wasted. Finally, though, helped by Marie-Antoinette, they managed to persuade Louis that no one was going to die, and Rozier and Arlande went aloft, rising to around 1,000 metres above the Tuileries gardens before coming down 25 minutes later on the hilltop of the Butte aux Cailles in the south of Paris.
The American scientist and politician Benjamin Franklin was in the crowd at La Muette, and wrote an eyewitness account of the flight in badly spelt French, in which he said that: ‘We observed it lift off in the most majestic manner. When it reached around 250 feet in altitude, the intrepid voyagers lowered their hats to salute the spectators. We could not help feeling a certain mixture of awe and admiration.’
French inventiveness didn’t stop there. The danger with the hot-air balloons was that they needed a fire to keep the air heated and the heavy structure aloft. In the years to come, several accidents would be caused by paper balloons catching fire. An alternative light gas was required, and this was where Javel’s hydrogen came in.
On 1 December of that same year of frenetic experimentation, 1783, Nicolas-Louis Robert and the physicist Jacques Charles took to the air from the Tuileries gardens in the first ever hydrogen-filled balloon. They flew northwest for two hours, hotly pursued on horseback by Louis XVI’s cousin, Louis Philippe, and the 71-year-old Charles de Fitz-James, a grandson of the exiled King James II of England.
The two royal patrons saw the hydrogen balloon come down, and signed a document confirming what they had witnessed. Jacques Charles then took off for a second flight, rising to over 3,300 metres before the extreme cold and popping ears forced him to release some of the gas and come down again. We know the exact altitude he reached, because amongst other things, he had invented the altimeter (as well, incidentally, as the method of using sandbags for ballast). Charles also took up a thermometer and barometer with him, thereby conducting the first-ever experiment to measure atmospheric conditions above the earth’s surface.
As a reward for their exploits, Louis XVI gave pensions of 2,000 livres to Jacques Charles and 1,000 livres to Nicolas-Louis Robert. But it was the Montgolfier family who won first prize for innovation, and received an honour even greater than the one accorded to their flying sheep a few weeks earlier. The father, Pierre Montgolfier, was ennobled by Louis XVI, and his paper factory was given the label ‘manufacture royale’. The sons automatically became knights, as well as being elected to the Académie des sciences.
The motto chosen for the Montgolfier family by Louis XVI was a quotation from Virgil, ‘sic itur ad astra’, which could be translated as ‘this is the way to the stars’. It is unlikely that Louis was already thinking about space flight. But then again, in France at that time, the sky was no limit.
All of these French air pioneers continued their experiments, and the first-ever cross-Channel flight by a hydrogen balloon was successfully completed on 7 January 1785. Sadly, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier was to die that same month, while attempting to make the second crossing, thereby inadvertently establishing another scientific record for France – the first-ever death in a flying accident.
Of course, the Montgolfiers had no way of knowing that it was an awkward time to be made noble. Just a few years later, their new status, even if it had been acquired for truly noble reasons, would make them suspect. Fortunately, they were social reformers and survived the Revolution, though successive new governments were not interested in funding their research, and their experiments in manned flight came to a premature end.
Many aristocratic scientists followed the Montgolfiers’ example and stayed in France after the Revolution – as inventors and teachers they were less dangerous, and more valuable, to the new regime than the many aristos whose only economic activity was to own property. Most of these scientists carried on their work freely, but some were less lucky – Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, for example, one of the creators of modern scientific experimentation methods, who is remembered today as the ‘father of modern chemistry’, was guillotined in 1794 on a trumped-up charge of trafficking tobacco. When he asked for a reprieve so that he could finish conducting an experiment, the revolutionary judge refused, telling him: ‘The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists.’
Exactly the opposite of Louis XVI’s view.
In an age when the great military powers of Europe were still trying to colonize the rest of the planet, a lot of French brain-power was directed towards improving military technology. This was why Louis XVI founded some of Europe’s most modern military academies: in 1776, 13 of them were created, including Brienne, where the nine-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte would arrive as a cadet in 1779.
The idea was to recruit young men – virtually all of them of aristocratic birth – and turn them into modern military geniuses. Applicants to the new academies had to be ‘well instructed in the Latin, German and French languages, in history, geography, mathematics, drawing, and music, and be trained in arms and dancing.’ Clearly, it was thought that French officers should be able to conquer ladies as well as colonies.
By restricting most of this new knowledge to the nobility, Louis XVI was probably sending out a signal that, despite his attempts to reduce the power of the noble parliaments, he did value his aristocracy. In 1781, he went so far as to make his officer class even more noble: to become a sous-lieutenant in the army, cavalry or dragoons, candidates had to prove four ‘degrees’ of nobility, meaning that their paternal great-grandfather was an aristocrat. A certificate from the royal genealogist Bernard Chérin (who was himself the ennobled son of a merchant) would then be given to their commanding officer. The same conditions were applied to candidates for the École royale militaire, where Napoleonfn3 would study from 1784 to 1785. The only way for a non-aristocrat to gain access to these privileges was to be the son of a common soldier who had been awarded the Ordre de Saint-Louis, a medal given to exceptionally courageous officers with ten years’ experience. As such, the bravest, most experienced NCO had no hope of promotion to officer status or a place at the military academy.
This reinforced elitism in the army must have created tensions in the ranks, but Louis XVI also took steps to lighten the load of the common soldier. For a start, he put an end to dishonest recruitment. From June 1788, recruiting sergeants had to provide a legibly signed contract and a surgeon’s medical certificate attesting that a man was not drunk or under duress when he joined up.
At the barracks, conditions were improved – from now on, there were only two common soldiers to a bed instead of three. And to decrease boredom during peacetime, garrison commanders were ordered to create kitchen gardens so that soldiers could plant vegetables. This measure was not restricted to ordinary soldiers – at the Brienne academy, Cadet Bonaparte grew vegetables, too, and showed an early taste for invasions by annexing weaker students’ plots.
Many of the young officers who trained in Louis XVI’s academies would stay in the army after the Revolution, taking the opportunity for quick promotion when the old royalists fled or were ousted. That was exactly what Napoleon did. And the officers who would later serve alongside him and conquer most of Europe were mostly products of Louis XVI’s centres of military excellence.
All this time and effort poured into the military, including France’s active participation in the American War of Independence, did not mean that Louis XVI had an excessively belligerent streak. The pride of the nation was at stake, certainly, and Louis was keen to have the best fighters possible, but he did not let short-term political conflicts get in the way of his thirst for progress.
For example, the basic requirement for students wishing to become a naval officer was to master Étienne Bézout’s textbook on how to calculate longitude at sea (published in 1769) and his Complete Mathematics Course for Use by the Navy and the Artillery (1770). Louis needed his sailors to be able to fire cannons in the right direction, but he was also determined to send French ships to map out all the world’s oceans. Before his reign ended, the French navy was heavily present in the Arctic Circle, defining northern shipping routes and surveying fishing grounds in an open challenge to the British fleets.
Louis XVI’s attitude to the continuing expeditions of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (who had first been sponsored by Louis XV) also shows where his priorities lay. When open war broke out between Britain and France on the American continent in 1778, Louis XVI signed a royal order declaring that the French navy should not consider Britain’s own famous explorer, James Cook, as an enemy. A message drafted by the Secretary of State for the Navy, Antoine de Sartine, informed Bougainville and all of France’s sea captains that:
Since discoveries … interest all nations, I have the honour of informing you that the King wishes that, in case of a complete breakdown of relations between France and England, Captain Cook should be treated exactly as if he commanded a ship belonging to a neutral or friendly power.
To Louis XVI, science was more important than war.
He also showed his statesmanlike character when navigator Jean-François de La Pérouse set off around the globe in 1785. La Pérouse had fought against Britain in the Seven Years War and America, but this was a peaceful mission, and Louis ordered him to respect ‘savage peoples’ (it was much too early for political correctness), and to use weapons only ‘as a last resort, only in self-defence, and at a time when restraint would be sure to compromise the safety of French lives and vessels’.
All lives were important to Louis, including those of the common sailors, and the instructions for La Pérouse’s voyage stated that: ‘His Majesty would regard it as one of the expedition’s greatest successes if it could be completed without costing the life of a single man.’ In comparison to Napoleon’s disregard for individual soldiers’ lives a few years later, or even President Mitterand’s mission to sink the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand in 1985, Louis XVI comes across as one of the least warlike military leaders France has ever had.
Sadly, La Pérouse was unable to report back on how he had followed his royal instructions. His two ships disappeared, and later expeditions concluded that he had been wrecked in the Solomon Islands in 1788, and that the survivors had been slaughtered by the natives, who don’t seem to have known about Louis XVI’s peaceable intentions.
According to some witnesses, as Louis XVI was being taken out of his prison cell to be slaughtered by his own natives, his last question to his entourage was: ‘Is there any news of La Pérouse?’
The French are famous as a nation that questions everything, especially authority. If they had a referendum on any really key issue, it would need three reply boxes: ‘Oui’, ‘Non’, and ‘Pourquoi?’
It is often said this distrust of established facts and opinions dates back to the eighteenth century, when the writings of the Lumières philosophers and a series of scientific leaps made the French people doubt everything. If this was the case, Louis XVI was playing a suicidal game, because he actively encouraged freethinking.
Just before dying in 1788, the Duc de Richelieu, who had lived through the reigns of Louis XIV, XV and XVI, said that: ‘Under the first, one dared not speak; under the second, one spoke quietly; and now everyone says everything out loud.’ Loose tongues and loudly expressed opinions were not only a mark of disrespect towards Louis XVI and the monarchy (though that did come into account); they were also a sign that Louis XVI did not see strict censorship as a priority. He could have been forgiven for hunting down the writers, printers and sellers of the scandal sheets that poured mockery and slander on him and his wife – today, the French courts threaten any magazine that prints illegally obtained pictures of a president in his swimsuit, never mind the authors of a pornographic play.
In his memoirs, the politician Étienne-Denis Pasquier, who was arrested during the Revolution and later became Prefect of Police under Napoleon, confirmed that Louis XVI was all for free speech. He wrote that apart from actual enemies of the state…
… other citizens enjoyed total liberty; they could speak, they could write … they could defy authority in complete safety. The press was not legally free, but anything could be published, any audacious rumour could be spread … One might deny that it was freedom, but one has to agree that it was permissiveness.
Neither during the Revolution nor a decade or so later under Napoleon would there be such freedom.
In a book called Tableau de Paris, first published anonymously in Switzerland in 1781, Louis-Sébastien Mercier makes fun of the censors who were meant to stop seditious publications like his being sold in Paris. Their tactic, he says, is to make themselves look efficient by ostentatiously approving ‘insignificant books’, thereby giving ‘a passport to stupidity’. But they don’t stop more subversive books being distributed freely. If a writer fears censorship, he simply gets his text published abroad, and when it comes back to Paris, ‘the gates of the capital are opened’. Mercier says that satirists even welcome a grumble of disapproval from the censors, because ‘forbidden books are sold much more quickly and surely than if they had obtained approval.’
In fact, when Tableau de Paris was first imported into France, it was seized by the censors, as was its importer. Hearing about the arrest, Mercier took a copy to the chief censor, Jean-Charles-Pierre Lenoir, saying, ‘Monsieur, I hear that you are looking for the author of this work. Well, here is the book, and its author.’ The two men had an amiable chat before both Mercier and the importer were allowed to go free, along with their books.
Tableau de Paris wasn’t really a dangerous book, though Mercier wrote it as a poison-pen letter about the establishment. It divides Paris into more than 200 categories – professional, social, intellectual and recreational, and includes sketches depicting typical bankers, merchants, the idle rich, fashion addicts, smokers, drinkers and even people who just stare at everyone.
Mercier paints a portrait of a city plagued by charlatan doctors, over-zealous priests, pretentious writers and armies of uniformed servants who are as arrogant as their masters. But he is no more ‘dangerous’ than Molière a century earlier, who was invited to perform in front of Louis XIV. Mercier mocks university teachers who ‘torment their students and earn their hatred’ by teaching Latin grammar; he describes a craze amongst frivolous young women for swapping things – hats, dresses, lace – to avoid spending cash; he complains about smoking dens where ‘idle workers lazily waste their days’ (a pretty accurate description of modern Parisian cafés until the smoking ban); and he warns foreign visitors that the natives aren’t always friendly: ‘The Parisian does not waste his time, and is hard to pin down. He is polite, but he is not familiar.’ Not exactly a call for revolution. Perhaps it was not surprising that the censors treated him as something of a joke.
Louis XVI took a far bigger risk by allowing France’s arch troublemaker and champion of free speech, Voltaire, to return to Paris 27 years after he had fled to avoid being imprisoned by Louis XV. According to Marie-Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting Madame Campan, the Queen opposed the idea, because ‘[Voltaire’s] writings were full of principles that directly attacked religion and good morals,’ but Louis XVI recognized that the 83-year-old writer, who was dying of prostate cancer, deserved his hour of glory.
On 30 March 1778, Voltaire was paraded through the streets of Paris, cheered by the crowds, and presented with a victor’s laurel wreath by the Académie française. He was received as a hero by the Comédie-Française where his last play, Irène, was being produced – this was a provocative tragedy about a prince who overthrows a despotic emperor (albeit mainly because he is refused permission to marry the emperor’s daughter).
Voltaire, the man who had spent his whole career making fun of the clergy, sneering at aristocrats and calling for a British-style constitutional monarchy was being allowed the kind of triumphal homecoming given to Roman generals returning after a campaign – and all with Louis XVI’s approval.
In 1784, Louis XVI allowed another subversive writer the freedom to stage a play that Napoleon later called ‘la Révolution en action’. This was The Marriage of Figaro, by Beaumarchais, the former watchmaker and courtier who had disgraced himself under Louis XV, and then become a gun-runner for Louis XVI.
The play takes place in Spain, and depicts a ‘mad day’ in the life of a servant, Figaro, who is about to marry his beloved Suzanne, when Figaro’s master, the Count Almaviva, decides that he is going to reintroduce the droit de cuissage, the ancient right of feudal lords to have sex with their vassals’ brides. After a long, libidinous chase, the Count is publicly humiliated, has to beg his wife’s forgiveness, and Figaro is able to marry his Suzanne. The little man has triumphed over aristocratic privilege.
Beaumarchais wrote the play in 1778, and a reading was staged at the Comédie-Française in 1781, but Louis XVI heard about it and declared that the text was ‘awful, and makes fun of everything respectful’. It was, after all, a play about lust, which was not an emotion with which Louis sympathized, and adultery, a sin of which Louis was innocent, unlike almost all his predecessors on the throne and most of his courtiers. It was duly banned.
Beaumarchais did the rounds of the Paris literary salons, promising everyone that his play wasn’t meant to undermine aristocratic society en bloc. In his preface, published in 1785, we get an idea of the kind of things he was saying at the salons. It argues that: ‘A lord who is immoral enough to want to prostitute all his subordinates to his whims, and who toys with the modesty of his young female vassals, must end up, like this one, being mocked by his servants.’
But Beaumarchais was being disingenuous. The play’s famous monologue, one of the longest in pre-revolutionary theatre, is a frontal attack on aristocratic privilege. In Act V, Scene 3, Figaro gives a speech that later inspired the revolutionary Georges Danton to declare that ‘Figaro killed the aristocracy.’
Here is the best-known segment of the monologue, addressed to the Count (in his absence, of course):
Because you’re a great lord, you think you’re a great genius! Nobility, money, rank, position, they all make you so proud! But what have you done to deserve so much? You took the trouble to be born, that’s all. Apart from that, you’re a mediocre man. Whereas I, by God, lost amid the obscure masses, I’ve had to use more knowledge and strategyfn4 just to survive than have been used in the last century to govern the whole of Spain.
One phrase alone – ‘You took the trouble to be born’ – was enough to get the play banned after its initial reading, which probably explains a section later in the monologue, in which Beaumarchais ironizes about censorship. Here, Figaro says that he has tried to make a living writing plays and has been told that:
In Madrid, the free sale of texts has been established … and as long as my writing steers clear of the subjects of authority, religion, politics, morals, people in high places, public borrowing, the Opéra,fn5 other shows, or anyone who wants to hold on to anything, then I can print freely, and will only be inspected by three or four censors.
For all his irony about aristocrats and censors, Beaumarchais finally got permission to stage Le Mariage de Figaro, which premiered in Paris on 27 April 1784. After his initial objections, Louis XVI had backed down, and thanks to his objections, even contributed to the play’s succès de scandale. It was a huge hit, and within two years Mozart had turned it into an opera.
The play’s reputation nowadays as a political tract ignores the fact that Beaumarchais – who had been ennobled by Louis XV and then stripped of his titles, otherwise he too would have been living a life of privilege – had some purely personal axes to grind. When he began writing it, he was embroiled in a long lawsuit with a wealthy family who were accusing him of forging a will (see Chapter 5). In a way Beaumarchais was lucky that his purely personal resentments struck a chord with the general public – those who could afford a ticket to the Paris theatre, anyway.
It was also under Louis XVI that France’s first-ever daily newspaper was founded, the Journal de Paris. It was very literary, and its lead articles were often reviews or discussions on art, but its front page always gave the times of sunrise and sunset, the height of the River Seine, and a weather report from the previous day (no doubt intended for readers in the provinces who would receive their copy late), and there were real news stories.
The first issue, dated 1 January 1777, published two royal decrees, one ‘in favour of the workers and craftsmen of the faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris’ and another ‘concerning the free Royal School of Drawing’. But it also included a letter from Voltaire, who was still in exile at the time, a dangerous correspondent to publish in your first issue if you’re hoping to stay in business long enough to print number two.
In his letter, Voltaire was not calling for bishops to be publicly disrobed, or for aristocrats to shorten their names – he begged the editors to ‘tell the public the truth about the pamphlets that I am supposed to have written … in which there is not a line that I have composed’. It was message aimed at Louis XVI, perhaps – I, Voltaire, am not as satirical as people think.
This first issue had its lighter side, too, and printed a poem that starts…
Let’s make love, let’s make war:
Both occupations have their attractions.
… as well as a dubious report about a robber called Lefévre who was allegedly ‘resisting arrest’ when he stabbed himself – with two knives, one straight through the heart.
The Journal de Paris was no subversive publication. On 13 December 1786, for example, it ran an article rejoicing that Louis XVI was convening an Assemblée des notables, and said that the gathering would allow him to ‘communicate [to these decision-makers] the great plans with which His Majesty is busy, for the good of his state and the relief of his subjects … The Nation will note with joy that its sovereign is drawing near to it and uniting with it more and more closely.’ They sound like words straight out of Louis XVI’s mouth.
But the Journal can’t have been under Louis XVI’s thumb, because on 28 April 1784 it published a long, favourable review of The Marriage of Figaro, saying that the play produced ‘a strong sensation thanks to its originality, very good comic intrigues, witty lines, [and] numerous satirical remarks about all classes of society.’fn6 The reviewer noted that ‘from time to time it excited noises and murmurs’ from the audience, no doubt referring both to disapproving aristocrats and disgruntled democrats, and he thought it was over-long, but pronounced the play ‘un grand succès’. All in all, the article reads as if it was written by someone who was completely free to speak his mind.
It is worth noting that the freedom to express ideas in the Journal de Paris that was permitted under Louis XVI came to an abrupt end in August 1792, when revolutionaries ransacked the paper’s printing press and suspended publication. Not exactly Liberté.
By 1786, with Paris swamped in pamphlets about Marie-Antoinette, and his political struggles coming to a head, Louis XVI seems to have started regretting all this freedom of speech.
He wrote to the lawyer Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, a senior member of his council of ministers, saying that:
No doubt the freedom of the press widens the sphere of human knowledge … but men always go far beyond the point where prudence should stop them. We need not only a police force that is tough on book publication, but also active surveillance of those whose duty it is to examine them, so that bad books get as little publicity as possible.
This seems to be a reference to the lax disapproval that Louis-Sébastien Mercier had received from the censors for his Tableau de Paris.
Louis XVI’s letter sounds draconian, but he knew that Malesherbes was an open-minded man who believed in sharing new ideas. Malesherbes was known as ‘the protector of Rousseau’, and had permitted the publication of Diderot’s freethinking encyclopedia despite the huge intellectual turmoil it caused, especially about religion (see Chapter 5). Malesherbes was also the brain behind Louis XVI’s edict to give religious freedom to Protestants and Jews.
As a younger man, Malesherbes had served under Louis XV, and had once written to him with a series of ‘remonstrations’, one of which stated that: ‘God places the crown on the heads of kings solely in order to protect their subjects’ lives, personal freedom and the peaceful ownership of their property.’ Malesherbes had assured Louis XV that his remonstrations were intended to protect the monarchy, because ‘if they are not listened to by the King, they will be heard in the street, the salon and the café’ – but this frankness earned Malesherbes a temporary exile from Paris.
And yet this was the man whom Louis XVI appointed as one of his chief ministers. Further proof that he was a monarch in favour of openness and change.
The two men shared so many opinions that in 1792 Malesherbes volunteered to act as Louis XVI’s defence counsel during his trial for treason. Louis replied that ‘your sacrifice is especially great because you are risking your life and you will not save mine.’ Even so, Malesherbes went ahead with the defence, and his reward for daring to speak freely in a revolutionary court was to be guillotined two years after Louis XVI, at the age of 72.
The Revolution is often represented as a cleansing tidal wave of atheism that swept away the antiquated religious beliefs imposed on the people by the clergy and its worldly stooge, Louis XVI. French kings ruled by self-proclaimed ‘divine right’, so getting rid of the monarchy implied getting rid of God.
But this, like so much about the Revolution, is myth. It is true that the freethinking philosophers were encouraging the intellectual classes to question religion as they knew it, and especially to oppose the right of the Church to possess so much land, to tax the poor, and wield political power. But the vast majority of the French population in 1789 were incapable of reading a page of Diderot’s encyclopedia, let alone understanding its complex philosophical vocabulary. And even though le peuple were wholly in agreement that the Church’s taxes had to be cut, or even abolished, as a whole they were still very religious. They probably would have agreed with the line in Molière’s Dom Juan (first performed in 1665): ‘On n’a pas besoin de lumière, quand on est conduit par le Ciel’ (‘One doesn’t need light when one is guided by heaven’).
It has even been argued that the onslaught of challenging philosophical ideas in eighteenth-century France might have had the opposite effect, and made ordinary people react against modern thinking, in the way that the random splatterings of Jackson Pollock in the 1950s gave way to the pop-art realism of Warhol in the 60s. After a decade of visual anarchy, it was so relaxing to look at a picture of tomato soup.
The Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique was a highly intellectual magazine, founded in France in 1748. It was originally designed for a select readership of foreign aristocrats and royals (amongst its subscribers were Catherine the Great of Russia, and the rulers of Poland, Sweden and various German states). To protect its freedom of speech, each copy was handwritten, making it a sort of secret dispatch from inside France. By the time Louis XVI came to the throne, one of the editors was the philosopher Diderot, suggesting that the Correspondance was no establishment mouthpiece.
In April 1776, a contributor called Jacques-Henri Meister, a friend of the reformer Jacques Necker, wrote that the Jubilee year declared by the Pope ‘was celebrated in Paris with a devotion and regularity that would be astonishing in times less corrupt than our own. Does this religious effervescence prove that philosophy has not achieved all the progress it claims for itself?’ Diderot might have gnashed his teeth reading that question, but it was published nonetheless.
Meister observed that Parisians seemed to be reacting against ‘the philosophers who refuse to recognize any gods other than freedom and net profit’ (as well as freethinkers, some ‘philosophers’ were seen as pragmatists looking to make money out of scientific discoveries). ‘It would be amusing,’ Meister went on, ‘if philosophy had inadvertently helped to reheat religious faith.’
Out in the provinces and in the country, where most French people lived, religion did not need reheating. Religious festivals were heartily observed, partly of course because they were days off work – then, as now, holidaying was France’s national sport. In parts of Provence, there were so many saints’ festivals, processions and holy days that the year was reduced to about 260 working days.
But these religious festivals were much more than an excuse to laze about at home. There would be processions of crosses, icons and priests through the streets, and at least two masses, as well as rituals to observe. For Fête-Dieu, or Corpus Christi (a moveable feast that usually fell in May or June), country people would cover their houses in flowers and leafy twigs, while in the city they would hang out tapestries and pennants. Towns and villages would be swept clean, and holes in the streets filled in. Ditches and open sewers would be covered in planks to avoid unpleasant accidents during the parade. Then on the big day, bells would ring, and people would join the procession of the great cross and the Holy Sacrament.
According to François-René de Chateaubriand – a French aristocrat who took part in the storming of the Bastille but who later defended the Catholic faith against the revolutionaries – religious processions united all the social classes: ‘The humble, the poor, and children’ would lead the cortège, while ‘judges, soldiers and the powerful’ followed. Not forgetting the columns of monks and priests and, in cathedral cities, a bishop, who was forbidden to leave his diocese on that day. Young people would carry baskets of flowers, while children sang and wafted incense. It was, Chateaubriand suggested, a communal celebration untroubled by thoughts of atheism or revolution.
Very similar things happened across France on Assumption Day, Rogations (three days before Ascension) and Ascension Day itself. Religion was fun – the celebrations were theatrical, and not always very religious. In May 1781 a law was passed, forbidding people from ‘assembling to throw others into water, play pétanque, bang drums or dance’. In 1782, the Archbishop of Toulouse forbade processions in the evenings because ‘scandalous irreverences are committed under cover of darkness.’
But apart from these attempts to protect the decorum of religious ceremonies, the clergy’s influence on the laws of the land was weakening in Louis XVI’s France. Theoretically, blasphemy was still punishable by death, and according to the letter of the law, anyone who uttered blasphemous words could have their tongue pierced and be sent into a lifetime of slavery on the galley ships. But in practice, under Louis XVI this didn’t happen. Religion was having its harsh edges knocked off. At his coronation, Louis XVI even swore that he was independent of the Pope. France was creating its own brand of Catholicism – not exactly modern, but less oppressive than it had been. In everything but taxation, that is.
Aside from the element of fun, French religious festivals of the time were also important to ordinary people because they were an industry. The sweepers and road menders were all paid, as were the musicians, flower sellers, and even the faithful who carried the cross. Innkeepers and food sellers were especially happy, as were the growing numbers of beggars who managed to cadge alms off anyone richer (or drunker) than themselves.
In other words, if offered the choice, ordinary French people in 1789 would probably not have abolished religion. They would definitely have agreed with Louis XVI’s plans to end the dîme, the tax that fattened up their already bloated bishops and even the priests of relatively small parishes. But if asked to turn their backs on the God who had always been presented to them as the one reliable truth in a world of famine, disease, injustice and overwork, the answer would almost certainly have been a massive ‘non, merci’.
Many French people these days see France in 1789 as a country brimming with freethinking cynics, a population chomping at the bit to tear down the churches and decapitate statues of the Virgin Mary. But in fact, most of Louis XVI’s subjects simply aspired to go to church, pray for a decent harvest and then say grace before a hearty meal.
In his above-mentioned article about religious belief, Jacques-Henri Meister of the Correspondance littéraire wrote that: ‘It has been remarked more than once that … many things are done out of hatred for those that one wants to do away with, rather than out of affection for those for whom one wants the greatest good.’ He seemed to be saying that there were people in France who were against religious ideas themselves, and who therefore wanted to deprive everyone else of any succour (or holiday fun) that religion might bring. The haters were determined to throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater – abolishing not just religious taxes, but faith itself.
Unluckily for Louis XVI, they would apply the same principle to monarchy. After he had lost his power and most of his privileges, Louis remained popular amongst most French people. But for the more violent factions of the revolutionaries, this wasn’t enough. They would demand his head, too.
In the summer of 1789, Paris would become the blast furnace of the Revolution. The image that has come down to us is of an oppressed mass of skeletal paupers bursting out of their muck-strewn hovels to drag the privileged few down from their gilded carriages.
But a guidebook published in 1787 seems to suggest that life for the less well-off was not all that oppressed and muck-strewn. Luc-Vincent Thiéry’s Guide des amateurs et des étrangers voyageurs à Paris (Guide for Enthusiasts and Foreigners Travelling to Paris) gives a vivid, and fairly positive, idea of what Paris was actually like just before the Revolution.
Thiéry describes tourist sights like Notre-Dame, the Pont-Neuf, the île Saint-Louis, and dozens of churches, but unlike modern guidebooks, he also goes into great detail about the city’s more functional buildings. He lists, for example, 20 hospitals, including those for pregnant women and ‘poor found children’, a ‘medico-electric hospice, institutes for deaf mutes and blind children’, and the ‘hôpital des incurables’. He praises ‘the instruction to create vast, comfortable infirmaries in the different hospitals’, and highlights a hospital for children born with sexually transmitted diseases, created in 1780 because the government had noted that ‘all children who were born with venereal infections either died very soon afterwards or … lived a painful life that usually did not last until puberty’. The city had therefore founded a place for ‘these innocent victims’ and their mothers. Thiéry describes well-aired rooms equipped with fireplaces and tall candlesticks, chosen so they won’t be knocked over and cause a fire. Each mother has her own bed, with two blankets in winter, and the babies have cribs that are cleaned and perfumed regularly, as well as eight to ten nappies a day. Modern mothers in similar circumstances would probably not get better care, or less disapproval. It seemed that Necker’s reforms had taken effect.
Thiéry notes other improvements to urban life, like ‘new hot baths by the Seine, costing almost nothing, some of them free for the poor’, and river water stored in reservoirs which ‘thanks to a thousand canals is distributed into all the different districts of the city, cleaning them and providing a prompt remedy for fires’.fn7 And Louis XVI was beginning the work that Baron Haussmann would finish a century later, clearing slums and demolishing shanties on the bridges, bringing ‘increasing salubrity thanks to the breezes that can now circulate freely from dawn to dusk’, as well as creating boulevards that are ‘beautified and carefully maintained, making them an attractive place to walk’. Paris, Thiéry says, is now ‘better lit at night … the streets cleaner and less obstructed’. Obviously, after centuries of almost uncontrolled building, with no sewers and little running water, the work was only just beginning, but there was now light at the end of the street.
Thiéry lists markets, including the new buildings at Les Halles, a whole host of schools, seven public libraries and 30 private ones, and a fascinating variety of administrative offices, including the ‘bureau for confiding by domestic servants’ – where they could presumably complain about abusive masters.
Thiéry mentions public transport, organized by the Bureau des voitures des environs de Paris, but it is expensive, costing a passenger 15 sous per league in a four-seater coach, or eight in a river boat, the equivalent of half a kilo of bread per kilometre – out of reach of the poor.
He even talks about a swimming school, supported by the Académie des sciences, that offers lessons in life-saving, including sessions on how to swim fully-clothed in case one has to jump into the water to make a quick rescue – though these were apparently for men only, as swimmers had to be ‘in breeches or trousers’, and until the late nineteenth century, it was illegal for Frenchwomen to wear anything but dresses and skirts in public.
Tellingly, standing outside the Théâtre-Français, Thiéry describes ‘the marble statue of the immortal Voltaire, a precious work by Monsieur Houdon, the King’s sculptor’ – so Louis XVI not only allowed the old subversive to return from exile, he even gave permission for him to stand forever in the streets of Paris.
All in all, even if Thiéry is trying to sell Paris to tourists, he presents a picture of a benevolently run city where new improvements were coming every day, the kind of place a foreigner could visit without fear of being lynched for looking too rich by a mob of resentful paupers.
Even Louis-Sébastien Mercier, the author of the above-mentioned Tableau de Paris, finds some positive things to say, despite his obvious desire to be seen as a merciless satirist. He ends his book with a section called ‘Improvements’. Here, he thanks the city authorities for finally closing the cimetière des Innocents, right next to Les Halles market, which had created ‘the least salubrious air in Paris’. He is also glad that the city has cleaned up a sewer near Notre-Dame where ‘all the latrines poured out their filth’, and ‘the infected air … turned meat bad and discoloured silver and gold’. He congratulates himself, because he had campaigned on these issues and ‘by constantly complaining, one makes oneself heard by the men in power’.
Surely it is praise indeed when even the provocative Mercier concedes that Louis XVI ‘is being more careful than ever that people should no longer say: “In Paris, everything is done for the great, and nothing for the common people.”’
It is an English book that gives the most dispassionate, balanced view of France at the time of the Revolution. This is the impressively named Travels During the Years 1787, 1788, & 1789: Undertaken More Particularly with a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France, first published in 1792 by Arthur Young. For obvious reasons, it is usually known as Travels in France.
Young was a farmer and scientist, interested in agricultural, economic and social reform. He toured England and Ireland widely, writing about how farming could be made more efficient there, before deciding that he ought to take a look across the Channel, too. Serendipitously, he did so just as France’s political turmoils were coming to fruition.
More than anything else, Young was interested in France’s soil types, crop yields, land prices, livestock pedigrees, and similar agricultural minutiae, but he found the country in such a state of ferment that he could not help diverting from his main task. Even though Young was no revolutionary, he sometimes wrote like one. He was a plain speaker who thought that, as well as informing farmers about their cross-Channel competition, his book might serve as a wake-up call to the British people as a whole, and not just the monarchy. (A year after his French notebooks were published, he brought out a pamphlet called Example of France, a Warning to Britain.)
Young had harsh words for almost everything and everybody French, but it was constructive criticism. In the preface to his Travels in France, he quoted Jonathan Swift, saying that the reader was free to agree or disagree, but that they should ‘believe that I have proceeded at least with partiality, and perhaps with truth’. Even so, Young occasionally comes across as a bit of a jingoist. After visiting Amiens, he advises his readers to ‘view the cathedral, said to be built by the English; it is very large, and beautifully light and decorated’.
He sniffs at the quality of the average French country auberge. They’re cheap and the food is good, he says, but their…
… doors give music as well as entrance; the wind whistles through their chinks … Windows admit rain as well as light; when shut they are not easy to open; and when open not easy to shut. Mops, brooms, and scrubbing-brushes are not in the catalogue of the necessaries of a French inn. Bells there are none; the fille must always be bawled for; and when she appears, is neither neat, well dressed, nor handsome.
He clearly didn’t fall under the spell of France’s rustic charm. Young goes to Versailles, where he is introduced by a politician friend, Alexandre de la Rochefoucauld,fn8 and watches Louis XVI eating (as visitors could in those days). He notes perceptively that: ‘During the service the King was seated between his two brothers, and seemed by his carriage and inattention to wish himself a-hunting.’ Young adds some pertinent advice for Louis XVI: ‘To me it would have been a most uncomfortable meal, and were I a sovereign, I would sweep away three-fourths of these stupid forms.’ (‘Forms’ meaning protocols.)
By 1789, this was exactly Louis’s problem – he was trapped in the vestiges of his ancestors’ traditions like a pear baked on top of a tarte aux poires. The conscientious side of him was determined to help his ministers modernize France, dismantle the stagnant parliamentary system, curb Marie-Antoinette’s spending, and put an end to the worst follies of etiquette; his weaker side sat eating for the public gallery, wishing he could dash off and chase wild boar.
Young, the practical, democratically inclined English farmer, admits admiration for Louis XVI, who allows almost anybody to come into Versailles and observe the court and the monarchy in operation. It is a sign, he thinks, that the King is still popular:
It was amusing to see the blackguard figures that were walking uncontrolled about the palace, and even in his bed-chamber; men whose rags betrayed them to be in the last stage of poverty, and I was the only person that stared and wondered how the devil they got there. It is impossible not to like this careless indifference and freedom from suspicion. One loves the master of the house … for if there was danger of this, the intrusion would be prevented.
Young finds the palace itself less impressive. He laments that the grounds are being left to fall into disrepair (a symptom both of Louis XVI’s attempts to save money and the increasing laxity at court): ‘The extent and breadth of the canal are nothing to the eye; and it is not in such good repair as a farmer’s horse-pond.’ And he has a comical dig at Marie-Antoinette’s supposedly ‘English’ garden at le Petit Trianon, which makes the mistake ‘of cutting the lawn by too many gravel walks, an error to be seen in almost every garden I have met with in France’. Leaving the area on his way south to Orléans, Young is astonished by how empty the road is:
It is a desert compared with those around London. In ten miles we met not one stage or diligence; only two messageries, and very few chaises; not a tenth of what would have been met had we been leaving London at the same hour. Knowing how great, rich, and important a city Paris is, this circumstance perplexes me much.
The countryside – what interested Young most – is even worse. At one point he exclaims: ‘What a miracle, that all this splendour and wealth of the cities in France should be so unconnected with the country!’ In the east of France, he walks his horse up a long hill while talking to a peasant woman who describes the terrible tax burden she has to put up with:
She said her husband had but a morsel of land, one cow and a poor little horse, yet they had a franchar (42 lb) of wheat and three chickens to pay as quitrent to one Seigneur, and four franchar of oats, one chicken and 1 sou to another, besides very heavy tailles and other taxes … This woman, at no great distance, might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent, and her face so furrowed and hardened by labour – but she said she was only twenty-eight.
In Dordogne, Young notes that:
All the country girls and women are without shoes or stockings, and the ploughmen at their work have neither sabots nor feet to their stockings. This is a poverty that strikes at the root of national prosperity … The wealth of a nation lies in its circulation and consumption; and the case of poor people abstaining from the use of manufactures of leather and wool ought to be considered as an evil of the first magnitude.
Louis XVI would have agreed – his ministers had tried to improve the roads, both to boost trade and give paying jobs to the poor, and were trying to convince the nobility and the Church to reform taxes. But Young seems to be saying that these good intentions have had little or no effect.
And he has no doubt where the fault lies: ‘Whenever you stumble on a Grand Seigneur, even one that was worth millions, you are sure to find his property desert.’ England at the time was much more densely populated and intensely farmed than France, so Young cannot understand why lazy aristocrats would leave their land and their peasants idle:
The fields are scenes of pitiable management, as the houses are of misery. Yet all this country [would be] highly improveable, if they knew what to do with it: the property, perhaps, of some of those glittering beings, who figured in the procession the other day at Versailles. Heaven grant me patience while I see a country thus neglected – and forgive me the oaths I swear at the absence and ignorance of the possessors.
Young promises that: ‘Oh! If I was the legislator of France for a day, I would make such great lords skip again.’
Which was exactly what Louis XVI had been trying – and failing – to do.
Young meets aristocrats and challenges them face-to-face about all this, and admits that he finds ‘an invariable sweetness of disposition [and] mildness of character’, but a total unwillingess to face up to the country’s problems: ‘Tame and elegant, uninteresting and polite … conversation is like a journey on an endless flat.’
Besides, instead of taking action or decisions, even the men who purport to be doing some kind of business keep stopping for lunch and to preen themselves, habits that infuriate the hard-working Young:
Dividing the day exactly in halves, destroys it for any expedition, enquiry, or business that demands seven or eight hours attention, uninterrupted by any calls to the table or the toilette … What is a man good for after his silk breeches and stockings are on, his hat under his arm, and his head bien poudre?
But Young reserves his sharpest criticisms for the clergy, who are clearly in need of a dose of weed-killer if France is to survive:
St Germain … is the richest abbey in France: the abbot has 300,000 livres a year. I lose my patience at such revenues being thus bestowed; consistent with the spirit of the tenth century, but not with that of the eighteenth. What a noble farm would the fourth of this income establish! What turnips, what cabbages, what potatoes, what clover, what sheep, what wool! Are not these things better than a fat ecclesiastic?’
Publishing in 1792, Young swore that ‘I alter none of these passages’, but his notes from 1787 to 1789 contain some remarkably accurate predictions. Talking to less aristocratic people, he hears constant talk about revolution. At a dinner:
One opinion pervaded the whole company, that they are on the eve of some great revolution in the government; that every thing points to it: the confusion in the finances great; with a deficit impossible to provide for … no minister existing, or to be looked to in or out of power, with such decisive talents as to promise any other remedy than palliative ones: a prince on the throne, with excellent dispositions, but without the resources of a mind that could govern in such a moment without ministers: a court buried in pleasure and dissipation and adding to the distress … a great ferment amongst all ranks of men, who are eager for some change, without knowing what to look to, or to hope for: and a strong leaven of liberty, increasing every hour since the American revolution – altogether form a combination of circumstances that promise e’er long to ferment into motion.
Young is sympathetic to calls for reform, but is horrified to see that Louis XVI is not clamping down on free speech. At the Palais-Royal in the heart of Paris, he sees printing presses spewing out pamphlets:
Nineteen-twentieths of these productions are in favour of liberty, and commonly violent against the clergy and nobility … Is it not wonderful [meaning astonishing], that while the press teems with the most levelling and even seditious principles, that if put in execution would overturn the monarchy, nothing in reply appears, and not the least step is taken by the court to restrain this extreme licentiousness of publication?
It sounds as though Louis XVI’s permissiveness has turned into outright submission.
By June 1789, Young was sure that violence was about to erupt. The prices of bread ‘the common sort, eaten by the poor … are beyond their faculties, and occasion great misery’. Meanwhile, Paris’s coffee-houses…
… are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening to certain orators, who from chairs or tables harangue each his little audience: the eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the present government, cannot easily be imagined. I am all amazement at the ministry permitting such nests and hotbeds of sedition and revolt, which disseminate amongst the people, every hour, principles that by and by must be opposed with vigour, and therefore it seems little short of madness to allow the propagation at present.
And still the aristocrats don’t see the problem. Young writes about a dinner where ‘they ate, and drank, and sat, and walked, loitered, and smirked and smiled, and chatted with that easy indifference, that made me stare at their insipidity.’
He goes to Versailles to attend debates on the crisis, but despairs at the hot air being expended in unproductive arguments: ‘The rules and orders of debate in the House of Commons of England … would have saved them at least a fourth of their time.’ Worse, he realizes that the taxing, landowning classes are refusing to budge: ‘The nobility … are most disgustingly tenacious of all old rights, however hard they may bear on the people; they will not hear of giving way in the least to the spirit of liberty.’
Young is fearful for Louis XVI:
The King, who is personally the honestest man in the world, has but one wish, which is to do right – yet, being without those decisive parts that enable a man to foresee difficulties and to avoid them, finds himself in a moment of such extreme perplexity, that he knows not what council to take refuge in.
And there is little help to be had from Louis’s entourage, Young thinks, because his own brothers are scheming against him to protect the status quo, with Marie-Antoinette’s connivance: ‘The Queen is closely connecting herself with the party of the princes, with the count d’Artois [Louis XVI’s brother Charles] at their head.’
The only hopeful sign, in Young’s opinion, is that the people he speaks to are not in favour of a wholesale rebellion against Louis XVI: ‘They profess that the Kingdom ought to be a monarchy; or, at least, that there ought to be a king.’ People want radical reform, not total revolution; they want Louis XVI at the head of a completely renewed form of government.
And at the end of June 1789, with Louis XVI proposing one last attempt to force the nobility and the clergy to give increased powers to the commoners, Young reports that: ‘The joy this step occasioned was infinite; the assembly, uniting with the people, all hurried to the château. Vive le Roi might have been heard at Marly [a royal residence near Versailles]: the King and Queen appeared in the balcony, and were received with the loudest shouts of applause.’
As we now know, the joy was short-lived. ‘The events that followed’, Young confesses, ‘were as little to be thought of as of myself being made King of France.’