Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

  Almost without willing it the parlements, despite their conservatism, were caught up in a ferment of revolutionary ideas. The Discourses of Rousseau, the communism of Morelly, the proposals of Mably, the secret meetings of Freemasons, the Encyclopédie’s exposure of abuses in the government and the Church, the flock of pamphlets circulating through the capital and the provinces: all these stood in violent opposition to the claim of absolute power and divine right by a do-nothing and sexually promiscuous King. “M. Tout le Monde”—i.e., public opinion—was on the move as a force in history.

  Until 1750 the brunt of criticism had fallen upon the Church, but thereafter, goaded by the suppression of the Encyclopédie, it fell increasingly upon the state. Wrote Horace Walpole from Paris in October, 1765:

  Laughing is out of fashion. … Good folks, they have no time to laugh. There is God and the King to be pulled down first; and men and women, great and small, are devoutly engaged in the demolition. … Do you know who the philosophes are, or what the term means here? In the first place, it comprehends almost everybody; and, in the next, means men who, vowing war against popery, aim, many of them, at a subversion of all religion, and still many more at the destruction of regal power.105

  This, of course, was an exaggeration; most of the philosophes (Diderot particularly excepted) were supporters of monarchy, and fought shy of revolution. They attacked the nobility and all hereditary privilege; they pointed out a hundred abuses and called for reform; but they shuddered at the thought of giving all power to the people.106 Nevertheless Grimm wrote in his Correspondance for January, 1768:

  The general weariness with Christianity, which is manifested in all parts, and especially in Catholic states; the disquiet which is vaguely agitating the minds of men, and leading them to attack religious and political abuses—[all this] is a phenomenon characteristic of our century, as the spirit of reform was of the sixteenth, and it foreshadows an imminent and inevitable revolution.107

  X. THE KING DEPARTS

  Louis XV, like Louis XIV, lacked the art of dying in due time. He knew that France was waiting for him to disappear, but he could not bear to think of death. The Austrian ambassador reported in 1773: “From time to time the King remarks concerning his age, health, and the frightful account that he must one day render to the Supreme Being.”108 Louis was transiently touched by the retirement of his daughter Louise-Marie to a Carmelite convent, allegedly to atone for her father’s sins; there, we are told, she scrubbed floors and washed laundry. When he came to see her she reproved him for his way of life, begged him to dismiss Du Barry, marry the Princesse de Lamballe, and make his peace with God.

  Several of his friends died in the final years of the reign; two of them, their hearts failing, fell dead at his feet.109 Yet he seemed to take a macabre pleasure in reminding aged courtiers of their approaching demise. “Souvré,” he said to one of his generals, “you are growing old; where do you wish to be buried?” “Sire,” answered Souvré, “at the feet of your Majesty.” We are told that the reply “made the King gloomy and pensive.”110 Mme. du Hausset thought that “a more melancholy man was never born.”111

  The King’s death was a long-delayed revenge unwittingly taken by the sex that he had adored and debased. When his lust found even Du Barry inadequate, he took into his bed a girl so young as to be barely nubile; she carried the germs of smallpox, and infected the King. On April 29, 1774, the disease began to mark him. His three daughters insisted on staying with him and nursing him, though they had acquired no immunity. (They all contracted the disease, but recovered.) At night they left, and Du Barry took their place. But on May 5 the King, wishing to receive the sacraments, gently dismissed her: “I realize now that I am seriously ill. The scandal of Metz must not be repeated. I owe myself to God and to my people. So we must part. Go to the Duc d’Aiguillon’s château at Rueil, and await further orders. Please believe that I shall always hold you in the most affectionate regard.”112

  On May 7 the King, in a formal ceremony before the court, declared that he repented of having given scandal to his subjects; but he maintained that he “owed no accounting of his conduct to anyone but God.”113 At last he welcomed death. “Never in my life,” he told his daughter Adélaïde, “have I felt happier.”114 He passed away on May 10, 1774, aged sixty-four, having reigned fifty-nine years. His corpse, which infected the air, was hurried to the royal vaults at St.-Denis without pomp, and amid the sarcasms of the crowd that lined the route. Once more, as in 1715, France rejoiced at the death of her king.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Art of Life

  I. MORALITY AND GRACE

  HE who has not lived in the years around 1780,” said Talleyrand, “has not known the pleasure of life.”* Provided, of course, one belonged to the upper classes, and had no prejudices in favor of morality.

  It is hard to define morality, for each age makes its own definition to suit its temper and sins. Frenchmen had through centuries relieved monogamy with adultery, as America relieves it with divorce; and in the Gallic view judicious adultery does less hurt to the family—or at least to the children—than divorce. In any case adultery flourished in eighteenth-century France, and was generally condoned. When Diderot, in his Encyclopédie, wished to distinguish bind and attach, he gave as example: “One is bound to one’s wife, attached to one’s mistress.”2 “Fifteen out of twenty of the noble lords about the court,” according to a contemporary, “are living with women to whom they are not married.”3 To have won a mistress was as necessary to status as to have money. Love was frankly sensual: Boucher painted it en rose, Fragonard gave it lace and grace; Buffon said, brutally, “There is nothing good in love but the flesh.”4

  Here and there the finer love appeared, even in Crébillon fils;5 and among the philosophes Helvétius dared to be enamored of his wife, while d’Alembert remained faithful to Julie de Lespinasse through all the variations on her absorbing theme. Jean-Jacques Rousseau undertook in this age a one-man reform of morals; and shall we also credit the novels of Samuel Richardson? Some women put on virtue as a fashion,6 but some received gratefully the recollected gospel of premarital chastity and postmarital fidelity as saving them from the indignity of serving as steppingstones for philanderers. At least monogamy ceased to be a badge of shame. Roués, married, rediscovered old pleasures in family life; better to plumb the depths of unity than be forever scratching the surface of variety. Many women who had begun as frivolous surfaces settled down when children came; some nursed their children, even before Rousseau’s exhortations; and often those children, growing up under maternal love, returned it with filial interest. The Maréchale de Luxembourg, after an adventurous youth, became a model wife, faithful to her husband while gently mothering Rousseau. When the Comte de Maurepas died (1781), after serving both Louis XV and Louis XVI and suffering a long exile between his ministries, his wife recalled that they “had spent fifty years together, and not one day apart.”7 We hear too much—we ourselves have spoken too much—of women who gained entrance into history by breaking marriage vows; we hear too little of those who could not be made unfaithful even by infidelity. Mlle. Crozat, betrothed at twelve to the future Duc de Choiseul, bore with patience his infatuation with his ambitious sister; she accompanied him in exile, and even the sophisticated Walpole honored her as a saint. The Duchesse de Richelieu continued to love her husband through all his adulteries, and was grateful that fate allowed her to die in his arms.8

  Perversions, pornography, and prostitution continued. French law required the penalty of death for sodomy, and indeed two pederasts were burned in the Place de Grève in 1750;9 but usually the law ignored voluntary and private homosexual acts between adults.10 Economic morality was then as now; note the passage in Rousseau’s Émile 11 (1762) about the adulteration of food and drinks. Political morality was then as now; there were many devoted public servants (Malesherbes, Turgot, Necker), but also many who secured their posts by money or connections, and reimbursed themselves, in office, beyon
d the letter of the law. Many idle nobles lived luxuriously on the blood of their peasants; but public and private charity abounded.

  All in all, the French of the eighteenth century were a kindly people, despite a code of sexual ethics that violated Christian norms by its candor. See, in the career of Rousseau, the number of people who came to his aid and comfort despite the difficulty of pleasing him; and often these sympathetic souls belonged to that aristocracy which he had reviled. Chivalry had declined in the relation of men to women, but it survived in the conduct of French officers to war captives of their class. The irritable and hostile Smollett, traveling in France in 1764, wrote: “I respect the French officers in particular for their gallantry and valor, and especially for that generous humanity which they experience to their enemies, even amidst the horrors of war.”12 Goya pictured, but probably exaggerated, the cruelty of French soldiers to Spanish commoners in the Napoleonic Wars. Certainly the French could be callously cruel, presumably because they had been inured to brutality by war and the penal code. They were turbulent, given to knife-wielding college brawls, and to street riots as a substitute for elections. They were impetuous, and plunged into good or evil with little loss of time in deliberation. They were chauvinists who could not understand why the rest of the world was so barbarous as to speak any other language but French. Mme. Denis refused to learn the English word for bread—“Why can’t they all say pain?”13 Perhaps more than any other people they loved glory. Soon they would die by the thousands crying, “Vive l’ Empereur!”

  Of course the French were supreme in manners. The customs of courtesy established under Louis XIV were tarnished by hypocrisy, cynicism, and superficiality, but essentially they survived, and gave to life in the educated classes a grace which no society can rival today. “The French are so polite, so obliging,” said Casanova, “that one feels drawn to them at once”—but he adds that he could never trust them.14

  They excelled in cleanliness; in the Frenchwoman this became one of the cardinal virtues, practiced till death. And it was a part of good manners to be neatly dressed. The men and women of the court sometimes sinned against good taste by extensive finery or extravagant coiffures. Men wore their hair in a queue, which Maréchal de Saxe deprecated as dangerous in war, giving a handle to the enemy; and they powdered their hair as assiduously as did their ladies. The women raised their hair to such elevation that they feared to dance, lest they catch fire from chandeliers. A German visitor calculated that the chin of a French lady lay exactly midway between her feet and the top of her hair.15 Hairdressers made fortunes by changing hair fashions frequently. Cleanliness did not extend to the female hair, for this took hours to arrange, and all but the fanciest women kept the same hairdos for days without disturbing them with a comb. Some ladies carried grattoirs of ivory, silver, or gold, to scratch the head with piquant grace.

  Facial make-up was as complex as now. Leopold Mozart wrote to his wife from Paris in 1763: “You ask if Parisian ladies are beautiful. How can one say, when they are painted like Nuremberg dolls, and so disfigured by this repulsive trick that the eyes of an honest German cannot tell a naturally beautiful woman when he sees her?”16 Women carried their cosmetics with them, and renewed their complexions in public as brazenly as today. Mme. de Monaco rouged herself before riding off to be guillotined. Corpses were made up, powdered, and rouged, as in our time. Feminine dress offered a challenging mixture of invitations and impediments: low necklines, lacy bodices, hypnotizing gems, great spreading skirts, and high-heeled shoes, usually of linen or silk. Buffon, Rousseau, and others protested against corsets, but these remained de rigueur till the Revolution discarded them.

  The variety and gaiety of social life were among the attractions of Paris. The cafés Procope, La Régence, and Gradot entertained intellectuals and rebels, men about town and women about men, while the luminaries of literature, music, and art shone in the salons. The lords of pedigree or wealth kept Versailles and Paris dancing with dinners, receptions, and balls. In the upper classes the arts included eating and conversation. The French cuisine was the envy of Europe. French wit had now reached a refinement where it had worn all topics thin, and boredom clouded brilliance. The art of conversation declined in the second half of the eighteenth century; declamation overheated it, speakers outran listeners, and wit was cheapened by its own profusion and its careless stings. Voltaire, who himself could sting, reminded Paris that wit without courtesy is crudity;17 and La Chalotais thought that “the taste for cleverness … has banished science and true learning” from the salons.18

  In the parks—which were neatly groomed and alive with statuary—people strolled at their ease, or followed their children or their dogs, and gay blades pursued damsels skilled in vain retreat. The Gardens of the Tuileries were probably more beautiful then than now. Hear Mme. Vigée-Lebrun:

  The Opéra was close by in those days, bordering on the Palais-Royal. In summer the performance ended at half-past eight o’clock, and all the elegant people came out, even before the end, to walk about the grounds. It was the fashion for women to carry very large nosegays, which, together with the scented powder in their hair, literally perfumed the air.... I have known these gatherings, before the Revolution, to continue till two in the morning. There were musical performances by moonlight in the open. … There was always a great crowd.19

  II. MUSIC

  France took music as part of its gaieté Parisienne. She did not care to rival Germany in Masses and solemn chorales; she almost ignored Mozart when he came to Paris, but she forgot to be chauvinistic when her ears were charmed by Italian melodies. She made fêtes galantes out of her music; she specialized in forms fit for, or recalling, the dance—courantes, sarabandes, gigues, gavottes, minuets. Her music, like her morals, her manners, and her arts, circled around woman, and often took names that recalled her image—L’Enchanteresse, L’Ingénue, Mimi, Carillon de Cy thére.

  In France, as in Italy, opera buff a was more popular than opera seria before Gluck came (1773). A troupe calling itself Opéra-Comique had installed itself in Paris in 1714; in 1762 it merged with the Comédie-Italienne; in 1780 this enlarged Opéra-Comique moved to a permanent home in the Salle Fa-vart. The man who made its fortune was François-André Philidor, who traveled through Europe as chess champion, and composed twenty-five operas, nearly all of a humorous turn, like Sancho Pança and Tom Jones, but showing good taste and finished art. His operas are now forgotten, but “Philidor’s defense” and “Philidor’s legacy” are still remembered as classic moves in chess. Ballet was a favorite interlude in French opera; here French grace found another outlet, and motion became poetry. Jean-Georges Noverre, ballet master at the Paris Opéra, wrote a once famous treatise on choreography—Lettres sur la danse et les ballets (1760); this prepared the way for Gluck’s reforms by advocating a return to Greek ideals of the dance, with naturalness of movement, simplicity of costume, and emphasis on dramatic significance rather than on abstract configurations or virtuoso feats.

  Public concerts were now a part of life in all the major cities of France. In Paris the Concerts Spirituels (established in the Tuileries in 1725) set a high standard of instrumental music. While the Opéra-Comique played Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, the Concerts performed his Stabat Mater, which was so well received that it was repeated annually till 1800.20 The Concerts brought the compositions of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Jommelli, Piccini, and the Bachs to French acceptance, and provided a platform for the leading virtuosos of the day.

  These visiting performers agreed in one thing—that France lagged behind Germany, Austria, and Italy in music. The philosophes joined in this judgment. “It is a pity,” wrote Grimm (a German) “that people in this country understand so little of music”;21 he excepted Mlle. Fel, who sang with a lovely throat. Grimm concurred with Rousseau and Diderot in asking for a “return to nature” in opera; these three led the Italian faction in that Guerre des Bouffons which had begun with the presentation of an opera buff a by an Italian c
ompany in Paris. We have noted elsewhere this debate between French and Italian musical styles; it was not yet over, for Diderot was still fighting the “War of the Buffoons” in his Le Neveu de Rameau; and in his Troisiéme Entretien sur Le Fils naturel (1757) he called for a Messiah to redeem French opera from pompous declamation and fanciful artifice. “Let him come forward, who is to put true tragedy and true comedy upon the lyric [operatic] stage!”—and he gave as example of a fit text the Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides.22 Did Gluck, then in Vienna, hear that call? Voltaire repeated it prophetically in 1761:

  It is to be hoped that some genius may arise, strong enough to convert the nation from this abuse [of artifice], and to impart to a stage production … the dignity and ethic spirit that it now lacks. … The tide of bad taste is rising,* insensibly submerging the memory of what was once the glory of the nation. Yet again I repeat: the opera must be set on a different footing, that it may no longer deserve the scorn with which it is regarded by all the nations of Europe.23

  In 1773 Gluck arrived in Paris, and on April 19, 1774, he conducted there the French première of Iphigénie en Aulide. But that story must bide its time.

  III. THE THEATER

  France produced in this period no plays that have defied oblivion—perhaps excepting a few of those that Voltaire sent up from Les Délices or Ferney. But France gave the drama every encouragement of staging and acclaim. In 1773 Victor Louis raised at Bordeaux the finest theater in the realm, with a pompous portico of Corinthian columns, classic balustrade, and sculptural embellishments. The Comédie-Française, acknowledged by Garrick to be the best group of actors in Europe, was housed in the Théâtre-Français built in 1683 in the Rue des Fosses, St.-Germain-des-Prés: three tiers of galleries in a narrow oblong that compelled declamation and set the oratorical style of acting in France. Hundreds of families staged private theatricals, from Voltaire at Ferney to the Queen at Trianon—where Marie Antoinette played Colette in Rousseau’s Le Devin du village— and the Prince de Ligne thought that “more than ten ladies of quality play and sing better than any in the playhouse.”24 “Little theaters” sprouted everywhere in France. A Bernardine monastery, hidden in the woods of Bresse, built a small theater for its monks, “without” (said one of them) “the knowledge of bigots and small minds.”25