by Will Durant
Therefore we cannot doubt that the philosophers profoundly affected the ideology and the political drama of the Revolution. They had not intended to produce violence, massacre, and the guillotine; they would have shrunk in horror from those bloody scenes. They could properly say that they had been cruelly misunderstood; but they were responsible insofar as they had underestimated the influence of religion and tradition in restraining the animal instincts of men. Meanwhile, under those striking pronouncements and visible events, the real revolution was proceeding, as the middle classes, using philosophy as one among a hundred instruments, took from the aristocracy and the king the control of the economy and the state.
CHAPTER XXXVI
On the Eve
1774-89
I. RELIGION AND THE REVOLUTION
FINANCIALLY the Catholic Church was the soundest institution in the country. It owned some six per cent of the land, and other property, valued in sum at from two to four billion livres, with an annual income of 120,000,000 livres.1 It received an additional 123,000,000 in tithes levied on the produce and livestock of the soil.2 These revenues, in the view of the Church, were needed for its various functions of promoting family life, organizing education (before 1762), forming moral character, supporting social order, distributing charity, tending the sick, offering to meditative or unpolitical spirits a monastic refuge from the confusion of the crowd and the tyranny of the state, and inculcating a judicious mixture of fear, hope, and resignation in souls condemned, by the natural inequality of men, to poverty, hardship, or grief.
All this it claimed to do through its clergy, which constituted about one half of one per cent of the population. Their number had fallen since 1779,3 and the monasteries were in serious decline. “Many monks,” we are told, “were favorable to the new ideas, and read the writings of the philosophers.”4 Hundreds of monks abandoned the monastic life, and were not replaced; between 1766 and 1789 their number in France fell from 26,000 to 17,000; in one monastery from eighty to nineteen, in another from fifty to four.5 A royal edict of 1766 closed all monasteries having fewer than nine inmates, and raised the permitted age for taking vows from sixteen to twenty-one for men, to eighteen for women. Monastic morals were lax. The Archbishop of Tours wrote in 1778: “The Gray Friars [Franciscans] are in a state of degradation in this province; the bishops complain of their debaucheries and disorderly life.”6 On the other hand the nunneries were in good condition. There were 37,000 nuns in the 1,500 convents of France in 1774;7 their morals were good, and they actively fulfilled their tasks of educating girls, serving in hospitals, and offering asylum to widows, spinsters, and women broken in the battle of life.
The secular clergy prospered in the sees and languished in the parishes. There were many devoted and industrious bishops, some worldly idling ones. Burke, visiting France in 1773, found a few prelates guilty of avarice, but the great majority impressed him by their learning and integrity.8 An historian familiar with the literature of scandal concluded: “It may be broadly stated that the vices which had infected the whole body of the clergy during the sixteenth century had disappeared by the eighteenth. Despite the law of celibacy the country curates were, as a rule, moral, austere, virtuous men.”9 These parish priests complained of the pride of class in the bishops, who were all nobles; of the requirement to transmit to the bishop the greater part of the tithes, and of the consequent poverty that compelled the curates to till the soil as well as serve the Church. Louis XVI was moved by their protests, and arranged that their salaries should be raised from five hundred to seven hundred livres per year. When the Revolution came many of the lower clergy supported the Third Estate. Some bishops, too, favored political and economic reform, but most of them remained adamant against any changes in the Church or the state.10 When the treasury of France neared bankruptcy the wealth of the Church offered a tempting contrast, and bondholders, worried about the ability of the government to pay interest or principal on their loans, began to see in the expropriation of church property the only road to national solvency. The spreading rejection of the Christian creed concurred with this economic urge.
Religious belief flourished in the villages, waned in the towns; and in these the women of the middle and lower classes kept their traditional piety. “My mother,” Mme. Vigée-Lebrun recalled, “was very pious. I too was pious at heart. We used always to hear High Mass and attend the services of the Church.”11 The churches were crowded on Sundays and holydays.12 But among the men unbelief had captured half the leading spirits. In the nobility a gay skepticism had become fashionable, even among the women. “The fashionable world for ten years past,” wrote Mercier in his Tableau de Paris in 1783, “has not attended Mass”; or, if they did go, it was “so as not to scandalize their lackeys, who know that it is on their account.”13 The upper middle class followed the lead of the aristocracy. In the schools “many teachers were infected with unbelief after 1771”;14 many students neglected Mass, and read the philosophes. In 1789 Father Bonnefax declared: “The gravest scandal, and that which will entail the most fatal consequences, is the almost absolute abandonment of religious teaching in the public schools.”15 In one college, it was said, “only three imbeciles” believed in God.16
Among the clergy belief varied inversely with income. The prelates “accepted the ‘utilitarian morality’ of the philosophes, and kept Jesus only as a discreet front.”17 There were hundreds of abbés like Mably, Condillac, Morellet, and Raynal, who themselves were philosophes, or adopted the current doubts. There were bishops like Talleyrand, who made little pretense to Christian belief; there were archbishops like Loménie de Brienne, of whom Louis XVI complained that he did not believe in God.18 Louis refused to have a priest teach his son, lest the boy lose religious faith.19
The Church continued to demand censorship of the press. In 1770 the bishops sent to the King a memoir on “the dangerous consequences of liberty of thinking and printing.”20 The government had relaxed, under Louis XV, the laws against the entry of Protestants into France; hundreds of them were now in the kingdom, living under political disabilities, in marriages unrecognized by the state, and in daily fear that the old laws of Louis XIV would at any moment be enforced. In July, 1775, an assembly of the Catholic clergy petitioned the King to forbid Protestant meetings, marriages, or education, and to exclude Protestants from all public office; it also asked that the age of permitted monastic vows be restored to sixteen.21 Turgot pleaded with Louis XVI to ignore these proposals, and to relieve the Protestants of their disabilities; the hierarchy joined in the campaign to displace him. In 1781 the second edition of Raynal’s Histoire philosophique des deux Indes was burned by order of the Parlement of Paris, and the author was banished from France. Buffon was attacked by the Sorbonne for outlining a natural evolution of life. In 1785 the clergy demanded life imprisonment for persons thrice condemned of irreligion.22
But the Church, weakened by a century of attacks, could no longer dominate public opinion, and it could no longer rely on the “secular arm” to implement its decrees. Louis XVI, after much worry about his coronation oath to stamp out heresy, yielded to the pressure of liberal ideas, and issued in 1787 an edict of toleration prepared by Malesherbes: “Our justice does not permit us to exclude any longer, from the rights of the civil state, those of our subjects who do not profess the Catholic religion.”23 The edict still excluded non-Catholics from public office, but it gave them all other civil rights, admitted them to the professions, legitimized their marriages past and future, and allowed them to celebrate their religious services in private homes. We should add that a Catholic bishop, M. de La Luzerne, vigorously supported the emancipation of the Protestants, and full freedom of religious worship.24
No class in the cities of France was so disliked by the educated male minority as the Catholic clergy. The Church was hated, said de Tocqueville, “not because the priests claimed to regulate the affairs of the other world, but because they were landed proprietors, lords of manors, tithe owners,
and administrators in this world.”25 A peasant wrote to Necker in 1788: “The poor suffer from cold and hunger while the canons [cathedral clergy] feast and think of nothing but fattening themselves like pigs that are to be killed for Easter.”26 The middle classes resented the exemption of church wealth from taxation.
Most previous revolutions had been against the state or the Church, rarely against both at once. The barbarians had overthrown Rome, but they had accepted the Roman Catholic Church. The Sophists in ancient Greece, the Reformers in sixteenth-century Europe, had rejected the prevailing religion, but they had respected the existing government. The French Revolution attacked both the monarchy and the Church, and undertook the double task and jeopardy of removing both the religious and the secular props of the existing social order. Is it any wonder that for a decade France went mad?
II. LIFE ON THE EDGE
The philosophers had recognized that, having rejected the theological foundations of morality, they were obligated to find another basis, another system of belief that would incline men to decent behavior as citizens, husbands, wives, parents, and children.27 But they were not at all confident that the human animal could be controlled without a supernaturally sanctioned moral code. Voltaire and Rousseau finally admitted the moral necessity of popular religious belief. Mably, addressing to John Adams in 1783 some Observations sur le gouvernement … des États unis d’Amérique, warned him that indifference in matters religious, however harmless it might be in enlightened and rational individuals, is fatal to the morals of the masses. A government, he suggested, must control and direct the thought of these “children” just as parents do with the young.28 Diderot, in the second half of his life, pondered how to devise a natural ethic, and admitted his failure: “I have not even dared to write the first line; … I do not feel myself equal to this sublime work.”29
What sort of morality prevailed in France after forty years of attacks upon supernatural beliefs? In answering this question we must not idealize the first half of the eighteenth century. Fontenelle, shortly before his death in 1757, said he wished he could live sixty years more “to see what universal infidelity, depravity, and dissolution of all ties would turn to.”30 If that statement (which was probably unfair to the middle and lower classes) gave a true picture of upper-class morals in France before the Enecyclopédie (1751), we should hardly be justified in ascribing to the philosophes the defects of morality in the second half of the century. Other factors than the decline of religious belief were weakening the old moral code. The growth of wealth enabled men to finance sins that had been too costly before. Restif de La Bretonne showed a good bourgeois lamenting the deterioration of French character by the passage of population from villages and farms to cities;31 young men escaped from the discipline of the family, the farm, and the neighborhood to the corrosive contacts and opportunities of city life, and the protective anonymity of city crowds. In Les Nuits de Paris Restif described the Paris of the 1780s as a maelstrom of juvenile delinquents, petty thieves, professional criminals, and prostitutes female and male. Taine supposed that the France of 1756-88 was diseased with “vagrants, mendicants, every species of refractory spirit, … foul, filthy, haggard, and savage, engendered by the system; and upon each social ulcer they gathered like vermin.”32 This human waste of the social organism was the product of human nature and Bourbon rule, and can hardly be ascribed to philosophy or the decay of religious belief.
Possibly some of the gambling that flourished in Paris (as in London) was connected with unbelief; but everybody joined in it, pious and impious alike. In 1776 all private lotteries were suppressed to be merged in the Loterie Royale. Nevertheless, some part of the sexual chaos in the upper classes could reasonably be attributed to atheism. In Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) we find fictional aristocrats exchanging notes on the art of seduction, laying plans to have a fifteen-year-old girl deflowered as soon as she left the convent, and professing a philosophy of moral nihilism. The protagonist, the Vicomte de Valmont, argues that all men are equally evil in their desires, but that most men fail to effect them because they allow moral traditions to intimidate them. The wise man, Valmont holds, will pursue whichever sensations promise him most pleasure, and will disdain all moral inhibitions.33 Some Greek Sophists, we recall, reached similar conclusions after discarding the gods.34
This philosophy of amoralism, as all the world now knows, was carried ad nauseam by the Comte—usually miscalled Marquis—de Sade. Born in Paris in 1740, he served twelve years in the army, was arrested and condemned to death for homosexual offenses (1772), escaped, was captured, escaped again, was captured again, and was committed to the Bastille. There he wrote several novels and plays, as obscene as his imagination could make them: chiefly Justine (1791) and Histoire de Juliette, ou Les Prospérités du vice (1792). Since there is no God, he argued, the wise man will seek to realize every desire so far as he can without incurring earthly punishment. All desires are equally good; all moral distinctions are delusions; abnormal sexual relations are legitimate, and are not really abnormal; crime is delightful if you avoid detection; and there are few things more delicious than beating a pretty girl. Readers were shocked less by de Sade’s amoralism than by his suggestion that the total destruction of the human race would afflict the cosmos so little that “it would no more interrupt its course than if the entire species of rabbits or hares were extinguished.”35 In 1789 de Sade was removed to a lunatic asylum at Charenton; he was released in 1790, was recommitted as incurable in 1803, and died in 1814.
The philosophers might plead that this amoralism was a sickly non sequitur from their criticism of the Christian theology, and that a sane mind would recognize moral obligations with or without religious belief. Many people did. And among the normal population of France—even of Paris—there were in these years many elements of moral regeneration: the rise of sentiment and tenderness; the triumphs of romantic love over marriages of convenience; the young mother proudly nursing her child; the husband courting his own wife; the family restored to unity as the soundest source of social order. These developments were often allied with some remnants of the Christian creed, or with the semi-Christian philosophy of Rousseau; but the atheist Diderot gave them enthusiastic support.
The death of Louis XV was followed by a reaction against his sensuality. Louis XVI gave good example by his simple dress and life, his fidelity to his wife, and his condemnation of gambling. The Queen herself joined in the fashion of simplicity, and led the revival of sensibility and sentiment. The French Academy annually awarded a prize for outstanding virtue.36 Most literature was decent; the novels of Crébillon fils were put aside, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie set the tone of moral purity in love. Art reflected the new morality; Greuze and Mme. Vigée-Lebrun celebrated children and motherhood.
Christianity and philosophy together nourished a humanitarianism that spread a thousand works of philanthropy and charity. During the hard winter of 1784 Louis XVI devoted three million livres to relief of the poor; Marie Antoinette contributed 200,000 from her own purse; many others followed suit. King and Queen helped to finance the Deaf and Dumb School established by the Abbé de L’Épée in 1778 to teach his new deaf-and-dumb alphabet, and the School for Blind Children organized by Valentin Haiiy in 1784. Mme. Necker founded (1778) an asylum and hospital for the poor, which she personally superintended for ten years. The churches, monasteries, and convents distributed food and medicines. It was in this reign that a campaign took form to abolish slavery.
Manners, like morals, reflected the age of Rousseau; never, under the Bourbons, had they been so democratic. Class distinctions remained, but they were tempered with greater kindliness and wider courtesy. Untitled men of talent, if they had learned to wash and bow, were welcomed in the most pedigreed homes. The Queen leaped from her carriage to help a wounded postilion; the King and his brother the Comte d’Artois put their shoulders to the wheel to help a workman disengage his cart from the mud.
Dress became simpler: wigs disappeared, and gentlemen discarded, except at court, their embroideries, laces, and swords; by 1789 it was difficult to tell a man’s class from his garb. When Franklin captured France even the tailors surrendered to him; people appeared in the streets “dressed à la Franklin, in coarse cloth … and thick shoes.”37
The ladies of the bourgeoisie dressed quite as handsomely as those of the court. After 1780 the women abandoned the clumsy hoopskirt, but fortified themselves with stiff petticoats worn one over the next like a Chinese puzzle. Bodices were cut low in front, but the bosom was usually covered with a triangular kerchief called a fichu (fastening); these could be thickened to conceal underdevelopment; so the French called them trompeurs or menteurs —deceivers or liars.38 Coiffures continued high, but when Marie Antoinette lost much of her hair during one of her confinements she replaced the tower style with curls, and the new fashion spread through the court to Paris. There were two hundred styles of women’s hats; some were precarious edifices of wire, feathers, ribbons, flowers, and artificial vegetables; but in their easier hours women followed the style affected by the Queen at the Petit Trianon, covering the head with a simple scarf. In the greatest revolution of all, some women wore low heels or comfortable mules.39