by Will Durant
Soon all the Titans of the upheaval were glad to sit for him, and he transmitted them to us with a fidelity that turned marble and bronze into the flesh and soul of history. So we now can see Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d’Alembert, Buffon, Turgot, Louis XVI, Catherine II, Cagliostro, Lafayette, Napoleon, Ney. When Voltaire came to Paris in 1778 Houdon made several statues of him: a bronze bust now in the Louvre, showing exhaustion and weariness; a similar marble bust now in the Victoria and Albert Museum; another in the Wallace Collection; an idealized smiling head ordered by Frederick the Great; and, most famous of all, the statue presented by Mme. Denis to the Comédie-Française: Voltaire seated in a flowing robe, bony fingers grasping the arms of the chair, thin lips, toothless mouth, some gaiety still in the wistful eyes—this is one of the great statues in the history of art. In that same year, hearing of Rousseau’s death, Houdon hurried to Ermenonville and took a death mask of Voltaire’s rival; from this he made the bust now in the Louvre; this too is a masterpiece.
There were American heroes also, and Houdon made such lifelike heads of them that coins of the United States still bear his likenesses of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson. When Franklin returned to America in 1785 Houdon went with him; he hastened to Mt. Vernon and persuaded the busy and impatient Washington to sit for him, on and off, for a fortnight; so he made the statue that adorns the state capitol at Richmond, Virginia—a man of granite, sombered with costly victories and remaining tasks. Here again is that union of body and soul which is the sign and seal of Houdon’s art.
Such sculpture would have made painting a minor delicacy had it not been that Greuze and Fragonard continued to work throughout the reign and the Revolution, and that Jacques-Louis David, a painter, in a career as meteoric as Napoleon’s, rose to a dictatorship over all the arts in France. He learned his technique from his great-uncle François Boucher, and became a first-rate draftsman, a master of line and composition rather than of color. Boucher perceived that the change of morals since Pompadour and Du Barry to Marie Antoinette was reducing the market for bosoms and buttocks; he advised David to go and pick up the chaste neoclassical style in the studio of Joseph Vien, who was painting Roman soldiers and heroic women. In 1775 David accompanied Vien to Rome. There he felt the influence of Winckelmann and Mengs, of the antique sculptures in the Vatican Gallery, of the ruins exhumed at Herculaneum and Pompeii. He accepted the neoclassical principles, and took Greek statuary as a model for his painting.
Back in Paris, he exhibited a succession of classical subjects severely drawn: Andromache Weeping over the Dead Body of Hector (1783), The Oath of the Horatii (1785), The Death of Socrates (1787), Brutus Returning from Condemning His Sons to Death (1789). 67 (In the legend as told by Livy, Lucius Junius Brutus, as praetor of the young Roman Republic (509 B.C.), sentenced his own sons to death for conspiring to restore the kings.) David had painted this last picture in Rome; when he offered it to the Academy in Paris its exhibition was forbidden; the art public protested; finally the canvas was shown, and added to the revolutionary fever of the time. Paris saw in these paintings, and in the stern ethic they conveyed, a double revolt—against aristocratic rococo and royal tyranny. David became the radical hero of the Paris studios.
During the Revolution he was elected to the Convention, and in January, 1793, he voted for the execution of the King. Another deputy who had so voted was slain by a royalist (January 20, 1793); the body was exhibited to the public as that of a republican martyr; David painted The Last Moments of Lepeletier; the Convention hung it in its chamber. When Marat was slain by Charlotte Corday (July 13, 1793), David pictured the dead man lying half immersed in his bath; seldom had art been so realistic, or so calculated to arouse feeling. These two paintings established the martyrology of the Revolution. David worked enthusiastically for Danton and Robespierre; in return he was made director of all art in Paris.
When Napoleon took power with the Roman title of consul, David painted for him as zealously as he had done for the leaders of the Terror. He saw Bonaparte as the Son of the Revolution, fighting to keep the kings of Europe from restoring their like to France. When Napoleon made himself emperor (1804) David’s adoration was not subdued; and Napoleon made him painter to the imperial court. The artist produced for him several famous pictures: Napoleon Crossing the Alps, The Coronation of Josephine by Napoleon, and The Distribution of the Eagles; these immense paintings were later placed on the walls of rooms in the palace at Versailles. Meanwhile David displayed his versatility with excellent portraits of Mme. Récamier and Pope Pius VI.68 When the Bourbons were restored David was banished as a regicide; he retired to Brussels, where his wife (who had left him in 1791 because of his revolutionary ardor) came to share his exile. Now he returned to classical subjects, and to the sculptural style of painting favored by Mengs. In 1825, aged seventy-seven, he ended one of the most spectacular careers in the history of art.
Among his portraits is one of Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, who rejected revolution and preferred kings and queens. Toward the end of her eighty-seven years (1755-1842) she published memoirs giving a pleasant account of her youth, a sad story of her marriage, an itinerary of her artistic odyssey, and a picture of a good woman shocked by the violence of history. Her father, a portrait painter, died when she was thirteen, leaving no fortune, but Elisabeth had been so apt a pupil that by the age of sixteen she was earning a good income from her portraits. In 1776 she married another painter, Pierre Lebrun, grandnephew of the Charles Le Brun who had been master of arts for Louis XIV. Her husband (she tells us) squandered her fortune and his through “his unbridled passion for women of bad morals, joined to his fondness for gambling.”69 She bore him a daughter (1778), and soon thereafter left him.
In 1779 she painted Marie Antoinette, who so fancied her as to sit for twenty portraits. The two women became such friends that they sang together the tender airs with which Grétry was drawing tears from Paris eyes. This royal favor, and the genteel elegance of her work, opened all doors to the attractive painter. She made every woman beautiful, putting roses into faded cheeks; soon every moneyed lady itched to sit. She received such high fees that she was able to maintain an expensive apartment and a salon frequented by the best musicians of Paris.
Despite her friendship with the Queen, she went out three times to portray Mme. du Barry at Louveciennes. On the third occasion (July 14, 1789) she heard the sound of cannon firing in Paris. She returned to the city to find that the Bastille had been taken, and that the victorious populace was carrying noble heads on bloody pikes. On October 5, while another mob was tramping to Versailles to make the King and Queen their captives, she gathered what she could of her belongings and began thirteen years of voluntary exile. In Rome she made the familiar portrait of herself and her daughter.70 At Naples she pictured Lady Hamilton as a bacchante.71 She painted in Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg; and when the Revolution had run its course she returned to France (1802). There, triumphant over all vicissitudes, she lived another forty years, wisely dying before revolution was renewed.
VI. LITERATURE
In the brief period between 1774 and 1789 French literature produced some memorable works that still find readers and move minds: the Maximes of Chamfort, the Paul et Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the Liaisons dangereuses of Choderlos de Laclos (of which we have said enough), and the chaotic but revealing volumes of Restif de La Bretonne.
These were islands erupting from a literary sea of schools, libraries, reading circles, lectures, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and books—such a froth and ferment of ink as the world had never known before. Only a small minority of the French people could read;72 nevertheless millions of them were thirsty for knowledge and bursting with ideas. Encyclopedias, compendiums of science, outlines of knowledge, were in wide demand. The philosophes and the reformers were investing high hopes in the spread of education.
Though the Jesuits were gone and the schools were now controlled by the state, most of the teaching was still in th
e hands of the clergy. The universities, rigidly orthodox in religion and politics, had fallen into torpor and disrepute, and were only beginning, at the end of the century, to notice the sciences. But public lectures on science were eagerly attended, and technical schools were multiplying. In the colleges nearly all the students were of the middle class; young nobles went rather to one or another of the twelve military academies that Saint-Germain had set up in or after 1776. (In one of these, at Brienne, Napoleon Bonaparte was studying.) College students, we are told, “frequently formed organizations to support political demonstrations”;73 and as there were at this time more college graduates than the French economy could use, the placeless ones became voices of discontent; such men wrote pamphlets that stoked the fires of revolt.
The rich had private libraries, enviably housed, of books luxuriously bound and sometimes read. The middle and lower classes used circulating libraries, or bought their books—nearly all paperbacks—from stalls or stores. In 1774 the sale of books in Paris was estimated to be four times that of much more populous London.74 Restif de La Bretonne reported that reading had made the workers of Paris “intractable.”75
Newspapers were growing in number, size, and influence. The old Gazette de France, established in 1631, was still the official—and distrusted—purveyor of political news. The Mercure de France, which had begun in 1672 as the Mercure galant, had in 1790 a circulation of thirteen thousand copies, which was thought excellent; Mirabeau called it the ablest of the French newspapers.76 The Journal de Farts, the first French daily, began publication in 1777; the more famous Moniteur did not appear till November 24, 1789. There were many provincial newspapers, like the Courier de Provence, which was edited by Mirabeau fils.
Pamphlets were an inundation that finally swept everything before them. In the last months of 1788 some 2,500 were published in France.77 Some had historic effect, like the Abbé Sieyès’ Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-état? or Camille Desmoulins’ La France libre. By July, 1789, the press was the strongest force in France. Necker described it, in 1784, as “an invisible power which, though without wealth, without weapons, and without an army, dictates alike to town and court, and even in the palaces of kings.”78 Songs played a part in the agitation; Chamfort called the government a monarchy limited by popular airs.79
Chamfort himself was snatched up into the revolutionary current, and passed from being persona grata at court to taking part in storming the Bastille. Born the son of a village grocer (1741), he came to Paris and lived on his wits and wit. Women housed and fed him merely to have the stimulus of his conversation. He wrote several dramas, one of which, performed at Fontainebleau, so pleased Marie Antoinette that she persuaded the King to give him a pension of twelve hundred livres. He was made secretary to a sister of Louis XVI, and received an additional two thousand livres a year. Everything seemed to bind him to the royal cause, but in 1783 he met Mirabeau, and was soon changed into a caustic critic of the government. It was he who gave Sieyès the catching title for his famous pamphlet.
Meanwhile, inspired by La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and Voltaire, he jotted down “maxims” expressing his sardonic view of the world. Mme. Helvétius, who for years kept him as a house guest at Sèvres, said, “Whenever I had a conversation with Chamfort in the morning, I was saddened for the rest of the day.”80 He thought life a hoax upon hope. “Hope is a charlatan that always deceives us; and as for myself, my happiness began only when I abandoned hope.”81 “If the cruel truths, the sad discoveries, the secrets of society, which compose the knowledge of a man of the world who has reached the age of forty, had been known to this same man at the age of twenty, either he would have fallen into despair or he would have deliberately become corrupt.”82 Coming at the end of the Age of Reason, Chamfort laughed at reason as less a master of passion than a tool of evil. “Man, in the actual state of society, seems more corrupted by his reason than by his passions.”83 As for women, “whatever evil a man can think of them, there is no woman who does not think still worse of them than he does.”84 Marriage is a snare. “Marriage and celibacy are both of them troublesome; we should prefer that one whose inconveniences are not without remedy.”85 “Women give to friendship only what they borrow from love,”86 and “love, such as it exists in society, is nothing but an exchange of fantasies and the contact of two skins [contact de deux épidermes] .”87
When Chamfort stepped out of palaces and mansions into the streets of Paris his pessimism was intensified. “Paris, city of amusement and pleasure, where four fifths of the people die of grief, … a place that stinks and where no one loves.”88 The only cure for these slums would be childlessness. “It is unfortunate for mankind, fortunate for tyrants, that the poor and miserable do not have the instinct or pride of the elephant, who does not reproduce in captivity.”89
Chamfort at times indulged in an ideal. “It is necessary to unite contraries: the love of virtue with indifference to public opinion; the taste for work with indifference to fame; and the care of one’s health with indifference to life.”90 For some years he thought to give meaning to life by dedicating himself to revolution, but five years of dealing with Mirabeau, Danton, Marat, and Robespierre regenerated his despair. It seemed to him then that the Revolutionary motto “Liberty, equality, fraternity” had come to mean “Be my brother or I’ll kill you.”91 He cast in his lot with the Girondins, and lashed the more radical leaders with his reckless wit. He was arrested, but was soon released. Threatened again with arrest, he shot and stabbed himself. He lingered till April 13, 1794, and died after saying to Sieyès, “I go at last out of this world, where the heart must break or make itself bronze [Je m’en vais enfin de ce monde, où il faut que le cœur se brise ou se bronze |.”92
If the influence of Voltaire predominated in Chamfort, that of Rousseau was complete and avowed in Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. At the age of thirty-one (1768) he went as an engineer on a governmental commission to the He de France, now called Mauritius. In that mountainous, rainy, fruitful island he found what he thought was Rousseau’s “state of nature”—men and women living close to the earth and free from the vices of civilization. Returning to France (1771), he became a devoted friend of Jean-Jacques, learned to tolerate his tantrums, and to think of him as another saviour for mankind. In a Voyage à l’Île de France (1773) he described the simple life and sustaining religious faith of the island’s population. The bishop of Aix saw in this book a wholesome reaction against Voltaire, and secured for the author a royal pension of a thousand livres. Bernardin responded with Études de la nature (1784) and Les Harmonies de la nature (1796), in which he described the wonders of plant and animal life, and argued that the many instances of apparent adaptation, purpose, and design prove the existence of a supreme intelligence. He went beyond Rousseau in exalting feeling above reason. “The further reason advances, the more it brings us evidence of our nothingness; and far from calming our sorrows by its researches, it often increases them by its light. … But feeling … gives us a sublime impulsion, and in subjugating our reason it becomes the noblest and most gratifying instinct in human life.”93
To a second edition of the Etudes (1788) Bernardin appended a romance, Paul et Virginie, which has remained a classic of French literature through a dozen shifts of taste. Two pregnant Frenchwomen come to Mauritius, one whose husband has died, the other whose lover has deserted her. One gives birth to Paul, the other to Virginie. The children grow up in a mountain valley, amid majestic scenery scented with natural flowers. Their morals are formed by maternal devotion and religious teaching. As soon as they reach puberty they fall in love with each other—no one else being around. Virginie is sent to France to collect an inheritance—which does not often happen in a state of nature. She is offered marriage and great fortune if she will stay in France, but she rejects them to return to Mauritius and Paul. He runs down to the shore to see her ship approaching; he is overjoyed with thoughts of love and happiness; but the vessel runs into shallows, is grounded,
and is shattered by a storm; Virginie is drowned in trying to reach the shore. Paul dies of grief.
The little book is a prose poem, told with a simplicity of style and a purity and music of language nowhere surpassed in French literature. Its piety and sentiment fell in with the mood of the time, and no one was disturbed by the fact that these virtuous women and children had slaves.94 Bernardin was hailed as the authentic successor of Rousseau; women wrote to him in the same tone of devout admiration with which they had comforted the author of Émile. Like him, Bernardin did not take advantage of his fame; he shunned society, and lived quietly among the poor. The Revolution left him unharmed. Amid its violence he married, at fifty-five, Félicité Didot, aged twenty-two; she gave him two children, who were named Paul and Virginie. After Félicité’s death he married again, at sixty-three, a young woman, Désirée de Pellepou, who took care of him lovingly till his death in 1814. Before he departed he saw the rise of Chateaubriand, who took the torch of French romanticism and piety from his hands, and carried it into the nineteenth century.
There were in this age some minor books which are no longer read, but which shared in giving voice and color to the time. Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy published at the age of seventy-two (1788), after working on it for thirty years, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, which purported to describe the physical appearance, the antiquities, institutions, customs, and coins of Greece in the fourth century before Christ, as seen by a Scythian traveler; it came on the crest of the classic wave, and was one of the outstanding literary successes of the age. It almost established the science of numismatics in France.
Its popularity was rivaled by Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires, which Comte Constantin de Volney issued in 1791 after four years of travel in Egypt and Syria. Seeing the shattered remnants of ancient civilizations, he asked, “Who can assure us that a like desolation will not one day be the lot of our country?” We should now hesitate to give an optimistic answer to this question, but Volney, cqming at the close of the Age of Reason, and inheriting, like Condorcet, all its hopes for mankind, informed his readers that the collapse of those old empires had been due to the ignorance of their peoples, and that this had been due to the difficulty of transmitting knowledge from man to man and from generation to generation. But now these difficulties had been overcome by the invention of printing. All that is needed henceforth to avert the ruin of civilization is the wide dissemination of knowledge, which leads men and states to reconcile their unsocial impulses with the common good. In this equilibrium of forces war will give way to arbitration, and “the whole species will become one great society, a single family governed by the same spirit and by common laws, enjoying all the felicity of which human nature is capable.”95