1
TWO FRENCH LIVES IN THE OLD REGIME
ON JANUARY 21, 1793, LOUIS XVI, KING OF FRANCE AND NAVARRE, HEIR to fourteen centuries of French monarchy, mounted the steps of the scaffold in Paris and met his death under the guillotine. His death became the symbol of the victorious revolutionary movement that had begun with the storming of the Bastille and the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. Among those who watched the king’s carriage on its way to his execution were thousands of the commoners of Paris: the artisans, workers, and shopkeepers whose fervent embrace of the promises of liberty and equality had enabled that movement to topple France’s old order. A few years later, a glazier (or glassfitter) named Jacques-Louis Ménétra would become one of the few ordinary people to write an account of his own life before and during the Revolution.
The experiences Ménétra recalled in his memoirs put him on one side of the gulf between the two worlds—the world of hierarchy and privilege, in which Louis XVI was raised, and the world of ordinary people—that collided so violently during the French Revolution. Ménétra’s experiences growing up had prepared him, if not to make a revolution, at least to understand the possibilities of a world in which individuals could make important choices about their own lives and expect to be treated as equals. Louis XVI, in contrast, had been taught from childhood that the existence of society depended on people accepting the ranks assigned to them by birth. Louis XVI did not always enjoy the strictly programmed life he had been given; at times, he may have dreamed of living a freer existence, one more like Ménétra’s. Certainly his wife, Queen Marie-Antoinette, had imagined such an existence: she had an artificial village, the “Hameau,” constructed on the grounds of Versailles, so that she and her companions could play at being peasants. Neither the king nor the queen, however, could imagine a society in which individuals were free to change the situation into which they had been born. What brought them to their deaths in 1793 was their inability to accept the values that had come to seem natural and just to their former subjects.
Louis-Auguste, the future Louis XVI, born in 1754, was the living symbol of the hereditary privileges and social inequalities the revolutionaries were determined to overturn. From the time of his birth, his life was shaped by his ancestry. Raised in the palace of Versailles, which his famous great-great-great-grandfather, Louis XIV, had built to showcase the grandeur of the French monarchy, he learned about the intricacies of status from an early age. He had an older brother, the duc de Bourgogne, and little Louis-Auguste would have been constantly reminded that it was this older sibling who would someday be the king, and that, as his subject, it would be his duty to obey him. Even as a small child, Louis learned to play his part in court rituals, dressed in elaborate costumes that emphasized his status. As was customary in aristocratic households, he saw little of his parents. They left childrearing chores to a staff overseen by the royal governess, who preferred his older brother, the presumed heir to the throne, and his younger brothers, the comte de Provence and the comte d’Artois, both livelier and more engaging children.
In the hothouse environment of Versailles in which the future Louis XVI was raised, the adults he encountered were either titled nobles, acutely conscious of the minute gradations of status among themselves, or servants whose obsequiousness served to emphasize their masters’ and mistresses’ sense of importance. Centuries earlier, dukes and barons had been warriors who ruled over their own local fiefdoms. Over the centuries, Louis XVI’s ancestors had deprived the nobles of their political independence, but the members of their caste whom the young prince encountered in Versailles remained influential as courtiers and as holders of well-paid positions in the royal administration and the Catholic Church. The courtiers of Versailles were part of a network whose members were scattered throughout the kingdom, bound together by their special legal and social status. To bind its most faithful servants more fully to them, monarchs such as Henri IV and Louis XIV rewarded judges and high officials with titles of nobility, even if they came originally from commoner families. This practice created a division between the noblesse d’épée, the “nobles of the sword” whose ancestors had been warriors, and the noblesse de robe, who had gained their status through service to the state.
Noble status was highly valued in French society because it brought with it important privileges. Nobles were exempt from many of the most onerous taxes, for example, particularly the taille, the basic tax levied on peasants. The most prestigious positions in the government as well as in the Church were reserved for them, as were a specified number of seats in the royal academies and almost all officer posts in the army and navy. Nobles had the right to wear swords at their side in public and to emphasize their status by adding the name of their estate to their family names with the noble “particle” de. They had special seating privileges in their local churches and at public ceremonies and the exclusive right to put weather vanes on their chateaux or manor houses in the countryside. Only nobles had the right to hunt game in the countryside: they could trample over peasants’ fields as they chased after stags and hares. When nobles were condemned to death, they had the privilege of having their heads cut off. This was considered a more dignified method of execution than hanging, which was reserved for commoners.
To make it clear that they were motivated by honor rather than monetary considerations, nobles were not supposed to engage in the grubby business of commerce or in any kind of manual labor. Various mechanisms allowed wealthy commoner families to obtain noble status, a process that usually took several generations, but once they became anoblis, they abandoned the occupations that had made their fortunes. In theory, nobles were expected to live on the incomes they derived from their landed estates, although in practice they found ways to share in the profits of France’s expanding commerce and manufacturing during the eighteenth century by investing in enterprises ranging from factories to slaving voyages. A small group of very wealthy aristocrats surrounded the king at Versailles, squabbling over the most desirable court positions and royal rewards. At the other extreme were impoverished noble families who owned little but their titles and a few acres of land, and who frequently resented the favors lavished on the well-connected court nobility. Still, nobles were, on average, richer than even the most prosperous members of the bourgeoisie. Commoners watched their expenses carefully, knowing they could lose their social status if they failed to pay their bills. Nobles had no such worries: their standing was secure, and as a class, they were notoriously careless about running up debts.
In the first years of his life, young Louis would have looked forward to a life as an unusually privileged member of the nobility, but he would not have expected to ever occupy a position of real power. When he was seven years old, however, his older brother died, leaving him second in line to the throne, after his father, the Dauphin. Even royal status could not confer immunity to the many diseases for which eighteenth-century medicine had no remedies.
To prepare him for the responsibilities he now stood to inherit, Louis received an intensive education from a variety of tutors. Religion was an important part of his upbringing, partly in reaction against his grandfather, the ruling king Louis XV, who notoriously flouted the rules of Catholic morality. The king’s official mistress during Louis XVI’s early years, Madame de Pompadour, exercised highly public influence at court, while a succession of younger women were brought in to satisfy the king’s insatiable sexual appetite. Louis’s parents made sure their son was raised in an atmosphere of piety and strict moral rules. Only on rare occasions were the royal children allowed some informal fun. One of those occasions, as the glassfitter Ménétra remembered years later, was when he and some other artisans were hired to repair windows at Versailles. In the evenings, “we climbed up on the tables and pretended to fence,” Ménétra recalled. “The royal children were brought in to watch our antics.”1
The future king grew up to be a shy young man who never became comfortable speaking in public. His reluctance to engage in conversation led those who met him to underestimate his intellectual abilities, which were nevertheless considerable. Louis took a special interest in geography; a skillfully drawn map of the area around Versailles demonstrates how well he had mastered the subject. Yet Louis XVI had almost no experience of the world represented in his maps. Except for ceremonial visits to Paris and the royal family’s annual stays at other palaces near the capital, he saw nothing of his future kingdom. Even after he became ruler, he made only two brief trips to the provinces, one for his coronation in the cathedral city of Reims in 1775 and another for the inauguration of new harbor facilities in the Norman port city of Cherbourg in 1786, and he never traveled abroad. The tutors who prepared young Louis XVI for the duties he would someday assume did not spend much time teaching him about the population spread across the territories he studied in his maps. In his own notes to his son, dictated nearly a century earlier, Louis XIV had observed that “every profession contributes, in its own way, to the support of the monarchy,” but he had accorded just one sentence to peasants and one to artisans.2 Louis XVI learned little more about the wealthier and more educated commoners—lawyers, doctors, merchants and manufacturers, lower-level government officials—who might, on Sundays, put on their best clothes and visit Versailles to gawk at the splendor of the palace and its elegant courtiers. No matter how successful such men became, they remained, like peasants and artisans, part of the “Third Estate,” the catch-all category for all royal subjects except titled nobles and members of the clergy.
Young Louis learned Latin, as did all educated young men in eighteenth-century France, and several modern languages. From his parents, the stern and gloomy Dauphin and the devout Maria-Josepha, he acquired an early interest in history. His father was especially fond of the British historian David Hume’s History of Charles I, the story of the seventeenth-century monarch who had been executed by his subjects in 1649. The image of a king brought to the scaffold by his own subjects was engraved in the future Louis XVI’s mind; he would later recommend the book to his wife, Marie-Antoinette. When Hume was received at Versailles in 1763, the nine-year-old Louis delivered a little formal speech to welcome him. The lengthy summary of the principles of French royal absolutism that Louis copied out for his gouverneur, the duc de la Vauguyon, during his early teenage years shows that he knew the major accomplishments of his royal ancestors and the lessons he was supposed to have learned from the many crises France had experienced through the centuries.
In most ways, the future Louis XVI’s childhood could not have been more different from that of his future subject Jacques Ménétra, whose horseplay had once entertained him at Versailles. Ménétra was born in 1738 in Paris. His father was a glazier, and Ménétra’s birth probably took place in the cramped apartment in the center of the city where the family lived. Like the future king, the future glasscutter saw little of his parents during his infancy: as was customary among Paris artisans, he was placed with a wetnurse so that his mother could return as quickly as possible to helping her husband run the family business. Ménétra was still boarding with the wetnurse’s family when his mother died giving birth to her next child: commoners’ families were even more familiar than the king’s with the ravages caused by eighteenth-century medicine’s helplessness in the face of disease. According to his memoirs, Ménétra’s wetnurse tried to supplement the meager payments she received for caring for him by teaching him “the profession of begging.” Stopping by to check up on him, his grandmother was appalled to see that the son of a respectable artisan was in danger of slipping into a life of poverty. She took him home with her and raised him until he was eleven.3
Whereas the future Louis XVI’s childhood and education were strictly regulated, Ménétra’s early years were chaotic. He had a sweet voice and was briefly a choirboy at the family’s neighborhood church, where he would have received an education that might have led to a career in the clergy, but he could not adjust to the school’s discipline and soon returned to his grandmother’s home. He did learn to read and write—by the middle of the eighteenth century, most boys in Paris got at least some schooling, although their sisters often did not—but in his memoirs he was more eager to recall how he became “one of the leading mischief-makers in my neighborhood.”4 From an early age, Ménétra was also immersed in the adult world of work. Just as Louis XVI was prepared for the family profession of kingship, from an early age Ménétra was trained to follow in his glassfitting ancestors’ footsteps.
Whereas young Louis XVI had only the most limited exposure to the realities of other people’s lives, Ménétra came into contact with all levels of French society. The glazier’s trade took Ménétra into the homes of the wealthy, and he spent a good deal of time working in churches, whose structures incorporated more glass than other buildings of the time. Exposure to religion made the future king a dutiful Catholic, but Ménétra’s work gave him a behind-the-scenes perspective on the Church that had the opposite effect. Working in the abbey of Saint-Denis, where the kings of France were traditionally buried, he learned that the monks themselves didn’t know which saints’ bones were in the reliquaries they displayed to earnest pilgrims, and he lost his faith in the sanctity of the Catholic Mass when he witnessed a priest giving out unconsecrated hosts to his parishioners. “So I never wanted to be with these hypocrites and have never liked their company,” Ménétra concluded.5
From his history lessons, Louis XVI learned to think of himself as a link in a chain of kings that extended back for over a millennium; Ménétra remembered episodes that affected the common people of Paris but that would never have found a place in the future ruler’s schoolbooks. In his memoirs, Ménétra described a popular riot that broke out in May 1750, when he was twelve, sparked by a rumor “that they were taking young boys and bleeding them and that they were lost forever and that their blood was used to bathe a princess suffering from a disease that could only be cured with human blood.”6 The story was false, but the willingness of the Parisians to believe it showed that the common people harbored a deep distrust of the elites who governed them. An angry crowd that included Ménétra’s father responded to the rumor by attacking a police station and burning a suspected informer alive. Although the riot was put down and three ringleaders were executed, it taught Ménétra that commoners could wield power when they acted together. In 1757, just before he set out from Paris on the tour de France that would complete his training as a glassfitter, he witnessed a very different kind of historical event, one meant to demonstrate the power of the monarchy: the torture and execution of Louis Damiens, a domestic servant who had stabbed Louis XV with a penknife. Damiens was drawn and quartered, his arms and legs torn from his body by straining draft horses in a prolonged procedure meant to inflict as much excruciating pain as possible.
By the time he witnessed the gruesome execution of Damiens, Ménétra was eighteen and nearing the end of the apprenticeship that prepared him for his adult responsibilities. Louis XVI’s transition from childhood to adulthood came more abruptly: his father died in 1765, making his eleven-year-old son, the Dauphin, the direct heir to the throne. Even though Louis’s grandfather, Louis XV, was still a vigorous man in his mid-fifties, the boy now knew that he might find himself obliged at any moment to take on the responsibilities of kingship. It was at this time that the royal governor, the duc de la Vauguyon, decided to have the young Louis write out a two-hundred-page summary of the main features of the French monarchy, an exercise that was meant to prepare him for his future obligations.
When Louis XVI’s mother died in 1767, it fell to his grandfather to take the place of his parents. In some ways, young Louis may have appreciated the change: his father had forbidden him to go hunting, so Louis XV, a passionate hunter himself, introduced his grandson to the sport. It became one of the future king’s great passions and the main theme of the daily journal he began to keep in 1766, when he was twelve. The practice of keeping private diaries to record the events of individual lives was just beginning to spread in France at the time. Although some of Louis’s contemporaries used their journals to record their private thoughts and develop a sense of themselves as distinct individuals, the dry and unemotional entries the future king put down give little clue to his personality. Instead, they faithfully record the thousands of stags, boars, and birds he shot in the royal forests that surrounded Versailles. Hunting was a privilege reserved for France’s nobility that set its members apart from the common people. Louis’s obsession with the sport put him on one side of the great divide that separated the privileged from the Third Estate, to which Ménétra belonged.
It was probably during his teenage years that Louis developed another hobby that, curiously, gave him something in common with Ménétra. The future king enjoyed working with his hands. A master craftsman named Gamain was engaged to teach him the skill of lockmaking, just as Ménétra learned his glasscutting skills from older artisans. Gamain claimed that, “in teaching his trade to Louis XVI, [he] treated him with a tone of authority,” although one imagines that his pupil was spared the beatings that were a normal part of an apprentice’s training. Eventually, a workshop was set up for Louis in a room in Versailles, where he frequently escaped to get away from palace routine. At the court, his interest in the mechanical arts was regarded as a bizarre eccentricity rather than as something that might bring him closer to his ordinary subjects.7
Surrounded by courtiers who hoped to advance their own careers by winning his favor, Louis was taught by his religious confessor to “never let people read your mind,” an injunction that strengthened his natural inclination to avoid conversation. Louis’s position as heir to the throne after his father’s death made it essential for him to be married as quickly as possible, so that he could carry out his most important royal duty: the production of a male heir who would assure the continuation of the Bourbon dynasty. That the king’s marriage would be arranged for him was a given, as was the fact that he could only be paired with a princess from another royal dynasty. Louis XVI’s grandfather and father had both been married to women from relatively minor ruling houses that were not in a position to demand much from the French in return for the honor of such an alliance. The arrangement that brought the fifteen-year-old Austrian Habsburg princess Marie-Antoinette to Versailles in 1770 to be united with the sixteen-year-old Louis was an entirely different matter.
Along with the Bourbons, the Habsburgs were the most illustrious and powerful of Europe’s dynasties. For centuries, the two families had been each other’s archenemies. The royal history young Louis had been made to memorize was a long saga of wars against Marie-Antoinette’s ancestors, and the aristocratic generals who commanded the king’s troops had also been raised on stories of victories over the “Kaiserlichs.” It was a shock to them and to the whole continent in 1756 when Louis XV and his closest advisers engineered a “diplomatic revolution” that made Austria, rather than Prussia, France’s main ally. Indeed, Austria and Prussia were bitter rivals, and the ambitious ruler of the latter, Frederick the Great, had plunged Europe into an era of conflict in 1740 when he had seized the valuable province of Silesia from his Habsburg neighbor.
The marriage of Louis and Marie-Antoinette was meant to consolidate the alliance between the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties. Whether the two teenagers were compatible with each other was irrelevant to the diplomats who negotiated the arrangement. Nor were they concerned about how the deep unpopularity of the Austrian alliance in France might affect the royal couple. The marriage was the last major victory of the minister Étienne-François de Choiseul, a fervent partisan of the pact who was ousted from power and exiled to his country estate shortly after its conclusion. Young and inexperienced in politics as she was, Marie-Antoinette understood that Choiseul’s disgrace left her without an ally in French court circles. She would quickly acquire a reputation for self-interested intrigue because of her efforts to win court favors for Choiseul’s supporters and bring him back to prominence.
Louis XVI’s bride was young and pretty, and Louis XV and his court became infatuated with her. “Nothing was spoken of except her charms, her liveliness and the cleverness of her responses,” her lady-in-waiting Madame Campan wrote in her memoirs. Her new husband was less intrigued. His governor, the duc de la Vauguyon, had warned him to be on his guard against any attempt to influence him in favor of Austrian interests. The spectacular fireworks display in honor of their marriage in Paris turned into a disaster when a panic in the crowd set off a stampede in which over a hundred spectators were trampled and suffocated. The young royal couple did not witness the event—much to Marie-Antoinette’s annoyance, Louis XV did not allow them to visit Paris for the first time until three years after their marriage—but the fact that their union began with a calamity was a bad omen. Ménétra never forgot the event. By 1770, he had completed his tour of France, returned to Paris, and married; he and his wife lost sight of each other in the crowd at the “night of celebration” that “changed into a night of mourning,” and he spent anxious hours before they were reunited.8
The young royal couple turned out to be woefully ignorant about how to accomplish their most important duty, the production of an heir. It took seven frustrating years before Marie-Antoinette’s brother, the Austrian emperor Joseph II, discovered that Louis “stays there for perhaps two minutes without moving, withdraws without ever discharging, and bids good night,” and explained to the “two incompetents” what they needed to do in order to consummate their marriage. By that time, Louis’s inability to get his wife pregnant had become the talk of Versailles and Paris, sorely undermining his reputation. Florimond-Claude, comte de Mercy d’Argenteau, the Austrian ambassador to France, served as Marie-Antoinette’s “minder,” lecturing her regularly on her duties and reporting the smallest details of her life to her mother, the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa. He found “the coldness of the heir to the throne, a young husband of twenty, with regard to a pretty woman… inconceivable,” and wondered if he suffered from some kind of physical deformity. Despite her best efforts, Marie-Antoinette could not divert Louis from his two passions, hunting and what Mercy described as “his extraordinary taste for everything that has to do with building, like masonry, carpentry and other things of that sort.” On one occasion, the two teenagers squabbled in front of their courtiers until Marie-Antoinette’s complaints about Louis’s behavior reduced him to tears.9
Distant as he may have seemed, Louis XVI was not entirely closed off from the world outside of Versailles. One of the first purchases he made when Louis XV gave him a personal allowance was a set of the volumes of the Encyclopédie, a reference work notorious for its expression of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment. He may have appreciated its detailed explanation of the various mechanical trades that interested him so much, but he could hardly have failed to notice its controversial articles on politics and religion. Not satisfied with the censored news in the official Gazette de France, he subscribed to the Gazette de Leyde, an uncensored newspaper published outside the kingdom.10 Nevertheless, when the celebrated author Voltaire, the symbol of the Enlightenment, made a triumphal visit to Paris in 1778 after years of exile in Switzerland, Louis firmly vetoed any suggestion that he be received at court, lest it appear that the monarchy approved his critiques of aristocracy and revealed religion.
The unhappy Marie-Antoinette, bored with the formality of a court routine that forced her to spend most of her time with older women—such as her husband’s unmarried aunts—developed her own social life. Once she was finally allowed to visit Paris, she often made evening outings to attend plays and masked balls, leaving Louis, who always wanted to be in bed by eleven o’clock, behind in Versailles. These expeditions inspired malicious gossip, as did the attention paid to her by various courtiers, including the king’s younger brother the comte d’Artois, and her close relations with two young friends, the princesse de Lamballe and the comtesse de Polignac. Even when she stayed at Versailles, her conduct caused scandal. Especially after Louis XV died, her passion for high-stakes gambling set tongues wagging and discouraged proper society women from frequenting the court.
Jacques Ménétra shared the young Marie-Antoinette’s penchant for amusement and adventures. By the time the young glassfitter set off on his tour of France, the traditional culmination of a skilled artisan’s training, he had already mastered the art of lovemaking that posed such a challenge for his future monarch. After learning the basics from a chambermaid in one of his clients’ homes, Ménétra became a regular customer of the prostitutes of Paris. “These interludes were so pleasant that every day I tried to make new conquests,” he wrote in his memoirs, although “in the end my reward was what you might well imagine and that made me a little wiser.” Whatever lessons he learned from his first bout of venereal disease, it hardly slowed him down. His memoirs mention fifty-two sexual relationships prior to his marriage at twenty-seven, a typical age for ordinary Frenchmen of the time, and an additional thirteen extramarital affairs afterward.11
The king may have been at the pinnacle of a society based on privileges, but his subjects had their own spheres of freedom, as Ménétra’s busy sex life proved. The glassfitter’s adventures reflected a sense of masculine entitlement shared by Louis XVI’s notorious grandfather. Ménétra left several of his partners pregnant—one confronted him and, he claimed, tried to stab him—and a number of the encounters he described crossed the boundary between seduction and rape. Marie-Jeanne “Manon” Phlipon, a young woman who grew up in an artisan’s household and who became famous as Madame Roland, an important figure in revolutionary politics, left one of the rare testimonies of the impact that casual sexual assaults like Ménétra’s could have on their targets. Aggressively molested on several occasions by one of her father’s apprentices, she was troubled by the memory for years. “Every time I tried to reflect about it, disturbing thoughts made the meditation difficult for me,” she recalled.12
The seven years Ménétra spent traveling around France gave him an acquaintance with the kingdom far more extensive than what Louis XVI learned from studying his beloved maps. In the course of his wanderings, Ménétra crossed the wheat-growing plains of France’s breadbasket around Paris; followed the slow-moving Loire River through cities such as Orléans, Tours, and Angers; sailed around the long Brittany peninsula on a privateering ship at the start of the Seven Years’ War; and stopped in the slave-trading port cities of Nantes, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux. In the Atlantic ports, he might have met blacks from the French colonies, some enslaved and some who were members of the “intermediate race” of free people of color produced by unions between white men and black women. These educated colonials would have been brought to France to serve their masters and to learn artisanal skills like his own, and like Ménétra, some of them would later join the revolutionary movement. From Bordeaux, Ménétra traveled through the southern provinces of Gascony and Languedoc to the Mediterranean coast and its main port of Marseilles, trekked up the valley of the Rhône to the silk-manufacturing center of Lyon, and then continued north through the Burgundian capital of Dijon and back to the capital. In general, Ménétra followed the well-maintained high roads that were one of the great achievements of Louis XV’s reign. Much admired by visitors from the rest of Europe, these roads knit the kingdom together so that by the last decades of the century, the trip from Paris to Lyon took only three and a half days by coach. (Today’s high-speed trains do it in two hours.)
As he tramped along, Ménétra passed by hundreds of villages, the homes of the rural peasantry who made up the vast majority of France’s population. They rarely figure in his memoirs. Able to read and write, equipped with a set of specialized skills and contemptuous of religion, Ménétra had little in common with country folk. Peasants were not potential customers for a glazier: their cottages seldom had glass windows. Ménétra and his companions thought nothing of stealing a peasant’s sheep to roast for their dinner; the owner of one farm set her dog on him, telling him that the animal was “doing his duty.”13 He was pleasantly surprised when another peasant offered him a meal, let him sleep overnight in his barn, and even gave him a little money to help him on his way.
Ménétra’s travels taught him little about the realities of peasant life. Neither he nor the villagers themselves would have had any idea that the country’s rural population had been growing rapidly since the last great climate crisis, the fearful winter of 1709–1710. He might have noticed how the main crops growing in the fields he passed changed from region to region—wheat in the Beauce near Paris; buckwheat and rye in poorer areas, including Brittany and the Sologne south of the Loire; wine grapes outside of Bordeaux; olive trees in the Mediterranean climate of Provence—but he did not care about the ways in which the lives of the peasants who worked those fields differed depending on what they raised, how much land they owned or rented, and what their relations were with their local seigneur, or lord. He certainly did not know that the introduction of new crops, such as American corn and potatoes, and of new farming practices were raising overall productivity and thus making an increase in population possible.
To Ménétra, the titled aristocrats, clergy, and wealthy bourgeois who held legal rights over the land were potential clients; to peasants, they were powerful presences who could grant or withhold leases, demand dues and payments that took a considerable portion of the crops, and control the local courts that administered justice in the countryside. Unable to appreciate this tangled web of relationships between seigneurs and peasants that would play such an important role in setting off the French Revolution, Ménétra was also oblivious to the ways in which peasants organized themselves in order to look after their community affairs and defend their interests. Even if few of them could read or write, peasants had a strong sense of their rights. Village councils, usually dominated by the heads of the wealthiest households, bargained with the local seigneur, or, more often, with his estate manager, about communal needs; with the priest about the upkeep of the church; and with the tax collectors about the community’s annual bill, which council members then had to collect from the inhabitants. The local priest, itinerant peddlars, and visits to nearby towns meant that peasants were not completely ignorant of the wider world.
Louis XVI understood that the peasantry made up the majority of his subjects and that their welfare mattered to him, because the taxes they paid were an essential part of the monarchy’s revenue. Distant as his life was from theirs, king and peasants shared the Catholic faith that Ménétra rejected. Within the little worlds of their villages, better-off peasant families also shared the royal Bourbons’ obsessive concern about making good marriages for their children. A good marriage for the king meant one that promised to keep the kingdom intact and even enlarge it; a good match in a village kept a family farm from being divided and ensured that the new couple would inherit their parents’ position in their community. Peasant families kept a close watch on their children to make sure they would be marriageable: in a village, no young man would have been able to compile a list of sexual conquests like Ménétra’s. The schoolmaster Pierre Delahaye, who kept a diary, noted the noisy charivari rituals villagers held to punish marriages with “outsiders” from other communities, and how unmarried women who became pregnant had to leave the town to hide their shame.
The world that really interested Ménétra was that of the towns where he stopped on his tour of France, often for months at a time, and looked for work. In the towns he visited, Ménétra met a far more varied range of people than Louis XVI encountered at Versailles, or than peasants saw in their villages. As a member of a journeymen’s organization, or compagnonnage, he could count on a friendly welcome in every town he entered, where he would be lodged in a local inn run by the compagnonnage’s mère, or “mother,” and put on the list of glassfitters available for hire. Long before 1789, the journeymen’s compagnonnages were practitioners of what would become the revolutionary ideal of fraternity. Members were supposed to treat each other as comrades, care for each other in case of illness or accidents, and stand up for each other in conflicts with employers, with local authorities, and above all, with members of rival compagnonnages. Neither the artisans’ compagnonnages nor the Masonic lodges, which attracted nobles and wealthy commoners, promoted subversive ideas, but members of both learned to govern themselves according to rules they had voluntarily sworn to obey. As a result, they began to think of themselves as parts of national and—in the case of the Masons—international networks that transcended local concerns.
The clients for glaziers’ services included local nobles who wanted the windows and mirrors in their chateaux repaired; members of the clergy, whose churches’ ancient stained glass needed new lead joints; prosperous local merchants and lawyers, whose elegant townhouses lined the streets of provincial cities; and municipal officials, who often wanted to imitate Paris by putting up glass lanterns to light their streets. In southern France, Ménétra encountered members of France’s Protestant minority and liked them better “than those fanatics who gave me a headache with their priests and their superstitions.” He attended some of the Protestants’ clandestine religious services and became convinced of the injustice of the laws that restricted their religious freedom. Initially, he was less sympathetic to the Jews he met in the Rhône valley town of Carpentras, one of the few places where they were legally allowed to live. Yet after seeing how badly the Jews were treated by the Catholic clergy, he reflected that “they are our brothers and… they are equal to us in the eyes of the Eternal.”14
Quick to make friends and always ready to join in drinking bouts, Ménétra lived up to his nickname, Parisien le bienvenu, the “welcome Parisian,” wherever he went. If we are to believe his memoirs, local women were among those who welcomed him most eagerly. The length of his stay in each location generally depended on how long it took before he decided he needed to move on, in order to avoid a permanent commitment to his latest girlfriend. The surprising number of widows he claimed to have bedded indicates that he paid special attention to women whose artisan husbands had left them the ownership of a functioning enterprise. Writing nearly forty years later, he regretted having turned down the most attractive of them, a woman in the southern town of Nîmes, because of religious differences. Such women needed a man with glassfitting skills to keep their businesses running; in return, they offered Ménétra the possibility of establishing himself as a master artisan with his own shop and an experienced partner to keep the books. Although he regarded most women as “prey,” Ménétra understood that these widows wielded real economic power.
According to the official doctrine of absolutism taught to the young Louis XVI, kings in France ruled, and subjects, especially those of lowly status, such as artisans, obeyed. Ménétra, although he was hardly a revolutionary before 1789, knew that reality was different. As a group, artisans had considerable power. If they objected to the pay and working conditions they were offered in a town, they could boycott its local guild masters, who would find themselves without qualified workers. When they became upset with the terms offered by the masters’ representative in Nantes, Ménétra and his comrades threw him out a window. In Angers, he claimed to have taken part in a battle between rival compagnonnages that involved over a thousand participants and resulted in a number of deaths; the local authorities stood by helplessly, outnumbered by the artisans and afraid to confront them. In Bordeaux, Ménétra represented several thousand artisans who objected to being drafted into the militia in negotiations that brought him face to face with the officials charged with strengthening the country’s defenses in the Seven Years’ War. He showed no fear in presenting their case to the royally appointed administrator of the province; the haughty head magistrate of the local royal court, or parlement; and even the duc de Richelieu, the royal governor and a member of the family of the famous Cardinal Richelieu, the seventeenth-century architect of the absolutist monarchy.
Clashes between compagnons were just one of the many forms of collective violence punctuating French life throughout the eighteenth century. Such events showed that members of the lower classes had ways of asserting their interests. In years of bad harvests, villagers used force to prevent middlemen from buying up grain to ship it to distant markets, and townspeople rioted to force local officials to set a maximum price on bread. Smugglers’ gangs could often rally local support when they confronted the armed guards of the tax-collecting ferme générale, or general farm, the octopus-like enterprise that worked, among other things, to enforce the unpopular state monopoly that drove up the price of tobacco.
Subjected to much harsher discipline than artisans and peasants in France, the slaves in France’s plantation colonies nevertheless had strategies of resistance of their own. A few were able to obtain their freedom: in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the 1770s, the future black leader Toussaint Louverture even briefly owned a small plantation and a handful of slaves of his own.15 Other enslaved blacks became maroons, running away from abusive owners and overseers and sometimes negotiating for improved conditions before they would return. Whites who depended on their black servants to prepare their food and care for their children lived in fear of the poisons Africans supposedly knew how to prepare. In 1758, shortly after the gruesome execution of Damiens in Paris, the authorities in Saint-Domingue staged a similar public execution, burning an accused sorcerer named Macandal at the stake. The memory of his martyrdom would help spur a slave uprising during the Revolution.
In 1764, after seven years of provincial life, Ménétra finally returned to Paris, where he would spend the rest of his days. Compared to the other French cities he had visited during his tour of France, the capital was in a class by itself. The second-largest city in Europe, with a population that grew from around 450,000 in 1715 to 600,000 by 1789, it was surpassed only by London in the European world. Concentrating within its walls the wealthiest elites in the kingdom, it was the main market for every kind of luxury product, from the fancy furniture turned out by the skilled artisans of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine around the Bastille to the elaborate dresses Marie-Antoinette and her court entourage ordered from her favorite designer, Rose Bertin. The sheer mass of the city’s population made it a voracious consumer of grain, meat, wine, firewood, and all the other basic necessities of life. Contemplating the capital’s appetite, one observer wrote that “one would have trouble imagining that there are sources capable of meeting the needs of this vast pit.”16
The Paris of the mid-eighteenth century was very different from the city tourists see today. The broad tree-lined boulevards of modern Paris would not be built until the 1850s and 1860s, and the Eiffel Tower would not give the city its universally recognized symbol until 1889. The center of the city was a maze of narrow streets lined with four- and five-story buildings whose inhabitants routinely emptied their chamberpots out their windows, letting the next rain wash the contents into the Seine River. The streets were constantly crowded with pedestrians dodging horse-drawn carriages, and vendors offering everything from water to dentistry: the Pont-Neuf bridge was well known as the place to go to have an aching tooth pulled.
The growth of the city meant that it was constantly changing. New public monuments, such as the church of Sainte-Geneviève, begun in 1758 and still unfinished when the Revolution transformed it into the Pantheon, altered the appearance of the city and kept hundreds of artisans like Ménétra employed. Whereas peasant villagers all followed the same daily routines, Parisians constantly encountered people from other social classes and professions whose lives were very different from their own. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, whose twelve-volume Tableau de Paris was a best seller in the 1780s, thought city life was bound to make people ask why some should be rich and others poor, why some rode in carriages while others went on foot, and why the population had to endure so many inconveniences when the possibilities of improvement seemed so obvious.17
Paris was also the center of France’s and Europe’s cultural and intellectual life. The royal academies of science, literature, and art attracted the most accomplished men in their fields. Women were allocated a handful of places in the art academy but excluded from most of the others. Actresses, however, were as important, if not more important, than their male colleagues in the troupes of the capital’s theaters and its opera. With its thirty-six licensed publishers and numerous bookstores, Paris was the center of the French book trade, even if controversial works were often printed abroad to avoid censorship. The authorities generally looked the other way when such works were smuggled into the capital: courtiers and government officials were often among their most enthusiastic readers, and many wrote provocative works themselves. The city’s hundreds of coffeehouses and reading rooms, where customers could pay for the privilege of scanning the latest periodicals, were the basis for the growing phenomenon of opinion publique (public opinion) a term that entered the French language around 1750 to describe the imagined consensus of educated individuals on matters of general concern.
As well as attracting the country’s elites, Paris was also home to France’s largest concentration of the poor. In the minds of the authorities and the upper classes, the urban working classes—such as Ménétra and his wife—were not that different from the truly destitute and the worlds of crime and prostitution. Charitable institutions and public workhouses, or hôpitaux, which took in beggars as well as orphans old enough to work, the chronically ill or disabled, and the elderly who could not care for themselves, attracted even the poor from the surrounding countryside. The desperately poor often engaged in petty theft, and women easily fell into prostitution, especially in the capital, where the sex trade ran the gamut from elegant courtesans, who sometimes had formal contracts with their lovers, to the less fortunate who sold sex for a few coins on the streets. By modern standards, however, violent crime, particularly murder, was relatively rare. Lower-class urban neighborhoods were tightknit communities in which everyone knew everyone else’s business and helped enforce social norms. Though wives were often treated with casual brutality, this was kept within certain limits by social pressure from other women, who would intervene collectively to scold abusive husbands. The urban poor were theoretically expected to attend church, but it was much harder for city parish priests, or curés, to supervise their flocks than it was for their counterparts in the countryside. More effective in maintaining order, as Ménétra’s memoirs indicate, were the police, whose agents kept a close eye on public gathering places, such as the cabarets, where working men went to drink.
Ménétra had no trouble making himself at home once he returned from his travels. He might have joined the family business, but relations with his irascible father were so poor that he preferred to strike out on his own. After a brief continuation of his womanizing, drinking, and brawling, a friend introduced him to “a nice good girl who had a little property,” and the two soon reached an agreement. As was common for couples from the popular classes, the bride brought with her savings that allowed her husband to purchase a workshop that would become the family business. Since he was over twenty-five, Ménétra did not need his father’s permission to marry. Because marriage was a religious sacrament, however, Ménétra had to get a certificate of confession from a Catholic priest, no easy matter in view of the life he had led. He found an obliging clergyman who gave him what he needed in exchange for “a few bottles and three livres,” but the transaction did nothing to improve his opinion of the Church.18
The match was no happier than the one between Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. “Getting ahead was her main passion and mine was to enjoy myself it was impossible to reconcile the two,” Ménétra wrote in his unpunctuated prose. Although the law made him the unquestioned head of the household, as was customary in lower-class families, reality was more complicated. Ménétra’s wife handled the family finances, paying for supplies and collecting from clients; she also invested the family savings without consulting her husband. Ménétra, for his part, never hesitated to give “the old marriage contract a few healthy stabs all in secret” when the opportunity presented itself.19 Some of his liaisons were with prostitutes, but others involved women who, to judge by his descriptions, possessed the same independence of spirit that made it difficult for him to live with his wife.
Just as in the days when he was on his tour of France, Ménétra continued to socialize with members of all levels of society. For a while, he even forged a friendship with the most celebrated French writer of the day, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had been allowed to return to the French capital by 1770, after being forced into exile for his controversial works in 1762. Ménétra met Rousseau when he was hired to do some repair work for the author’s landlord. Rousseau, himself the son of an artisan, enjoyed the tales Ménétra told about his adventures, and for a time the two met regularly. They went for walks or drank and played checkers in a café, an egalitarian setting where anyone who paid the price of a beverage could enter. Ménétra got a taste of Rousseau’s own difficult marriage and listened as the writer poured out the story of his unhappy life. Ménétra clearly enjoyed the friendship, but he knew he was not Rousseau’s equal. “Both of us had the same clothes but not the same knowledge,” he wrote. Another of his close friends was Henri Sanson, the official executioner of the city of Paris, who would conduct the guillotining of Louis XVI in 1793. “His profession aside he was a gentle friendly kindly man,” Ménétra recalled.20
Had Louis XVI had better fortune managing the affairs of the country, Ménétra might have lived out his days in obscurity, enjoying his friendships, his love affairs, and his work. Nothing in his memoirs suggests a man who felt oppressed by the institutions of prerevolutionary France. He was arrested occasionally and even once briefly imprisoned, owing to the frequent scrapes and quarrels he got himself into, but he took these misadventures in stride rather than cultivating a sense of injustice. Nevertheless, Ménétra’s story shows that, long before the Revolution, even members of France’s lower classes had come to value individual freedom and to regard themselves as the equals of their social betters. Ménétra never hesitated to stand up for himself, and he also knew how to work with others to defend their common interests. It is unlikely that he ever read his friend Rousseau’s famous political tract, The Social Contract, or his best-selling novel Emile, whose hero was brought up to be a self-supporting artisan, but in many ways, Ménétra exemplified the ideal of the autonomous individual that Rousseau’s works promoted. When the Revolution broke out, men like Ménétra—and some of the independent-minded women whom he encountered—would recognize themselves in its language of liberty and equality.
In contrast, Louis XVI’s personal life after his ascension to the throne in 1774 did little to prepare him for the crisis he would face in 1789. Only twenty years of age when smallpox suddenly claimed his grandfather’s life, the new king was overwhelmed by the responsibilities that immediately descended on him; unlike Ménétra, he had no opportunity for an apprenticeship to help him grow into his adult role. Pressured from all sides by ambitious courtiers, he called on an older political figure, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas, to act as his mentor, but even with Maurepas’s help, he found it difficult to steer a steady policy course. Few of his ministers held office for more than a short period, and there was little coordination between them. Louis acquired an unfortunate reputation for appointing men who would try to push through significant reforms and then dismissing them as soon as their actions incited opposition.
For the first three years of his reign, Louis XVI’s marriage with Marie-Antoinette remained under great strain because of his inability to make her pregnant. Finally, on December 19, 1778, the queen gave birth to a child. It was under circumstances that reminded the royal couple of how heavily their specially privileged positions weighed on every aspect of their lives. Time-honored ritual dictated that a royal child’s birth had to be a public event, so that there could be no doubt about the infant’s parentage. “The rule of letting everyone in… was observed in such an exaggerated way,” Madame Campan remembered, that “the flood of spectators… almost made the queen perish.” Told that her baby was a girl rather than the longed-for male heir, Marie-Antoinette fainted, leading to a moment of panic when it was feared that she had died.21 The experience was so traumatic that precedent was broken and attendance limited at her subsequent deliveries.
The birth of a son in 1781 finally secured the future of the Bourbon dynasty, but the royal couple still clashed. The queen had always resented the strictness of French court etiquette, which was much more formal than Habsburg court etiquette in Vienna. Louis XVI indulged her, giving her the Petit Trianon palace in the Versailles gardens as a private retreat, and allowing her to build the imitation peasant village, where she and her friends played at being milkmaids. He seems to have looked the other way when she made the dashing young Swedish nobleman Axel von Fersen her lover; evidence suggests that Fersen fathered the last two children she bore.22 Like Ménétra and his wife, however, Louis and Marie-Antoinette argued regularly over money. Marie-Antoinette gambled heavily in the years before the birth of her first child, counting on the king to cover her debts, and she lobbied for extravagant favors for the families of her favorites, especially the countess Jules de Polignac. The sums she paid to her dressmaker, Rose Bertin, inspired nasty criticism at court, as did the designs she favored, which were often made from imported cotton fabrics rather than the heavy silks produced by the weavers of Lyon, whom the court was traditionally expected to support with its patronage. Marie-Antoinette’s unconventional taste in dress was featured in the portraits she commissioned from her favorite artist, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, another strong-minded and independent woman.
CORONATION OF LOUIS XVI: This engraving celebrating Louis XVI’s official coronation ceremony emphasized the divine origin of his authority and gave no hint of the challenges to the church and the monarchy that led to the French Revolution. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Just as Ménétra settled down as he reached his late twenties, Louis XVI eventually seemed to become accustomed to his routine as king. Mercy d’Argenteau noted that, in spite of the many hours he spent each day hunting, he took his duties seriously, spending three or four hours every morning meeting with his ministers and minimizing the time he spent on formal ceremonies, such as the king’s daily lever, the elaborate ritual he had inherited from Louis XIV, in which courtiers had the privilege of handing him the various articles of his clothing. He might be impatient with court routine, but he did not question the necessity of maintaining it. So, too, the king expected that the monarchy he embodied and the country he ruled would continue to function as they had under his predecessors. That something might happen to shake the foundations of the palace of Versailles, and put power in the hands of men like the glassfitter who had once amused him when he was a child, never crossed his mind. Nor did it occur to Ménétra. And yet changes were afoot in France that would overturn the worlds of both the king and his subjects.