by Will Durant
Probably the poverty of the peasants was exaggerated by travelers because they noticed chiefly the visible conditions, and did not see the currency and goods concealed to avoid the eye of the tax assessor. Contemporary estimates conflict. Arthur Young found areas of poverty, brutality, and filth, as in Brittany, and areas of prosperity and pride, as in Béam.19 By and large, poverty in rural France in 1789 was not as bad as in Ireland, no worse than in Eastern Europe or in the slums of some “affluent” cities of our time, but worse than in England or in the ever bountiful valley of the Po. The latest studies indicate that “there was, at the end of the Old Regime, an agrarian crisis.”20 When drought and famine came, as in 1788-89, the sufferings of the peasantry, particularly in the south of France, were such that only the charities distributed by the government and the clergy kept half the population from starving.
The peasant had to pay for the state, the Church, and the aristocracy. The taille, or land tax, fell almost entirely upon him. He supplied almost all the manpower of the army’s infantry. He bore the brunt of the government’s monopoly on salt. His labor maintained roads, bridges, and canals. He might have paid the tithe more cheerfully, for he was a pious “God-fearing” man, and the tithe was collected with mercy, and seldom took a literal tenth;21 but he saw most of the tithe leaving the parish to support a distant bishop, or an ecclesiastical idler at the court, or even a layman who had bought a share of future tithes. The direct tax burden on the peasant was reduced by Louis XVI; the indirect taxes were in many districts increased.22
Was the poverty of the peasants the cause of the Revolution? It was a dramatic factor in a complex of causes. The very poor were too weak to revolt; they could cry out for relief, but they had neither the means nor the spirit to organize rebellion, until they were aroused by the more prosperous farmers, by the agents of the middle class, and by uprisings of the Paris populace. Then, however, when the powers of the state had been reduced by the intellectual development of the people, when the army was dangerously infected with radical ideas, and local authorities could no longer rely on military support from Versailles—then the peasants became a revolutionary force. They assembled, exchanged complaints and vows, armed themselves, attacked the chĊeaux, burned the homes of unyielding seigneurs, and destroyed the manorial rolls which were quoted as sanctioning the feudal dues. It was that direct action, threatening a nationwide destruction of seignorial property, that frightened the nobles into surrendering their feudal privileges (August 4, 1789), and so bringing a legal end to the Old Regime.
III. INDUSTRY AND THE REVOLUTION
Here especially the pre-Revolutionary picture is complex and obscure.(1) Domestic industry—of men, women, and children in the home—served merchants who provided the material and bought the product. (2) Guilds-masters, journeymen, and apprentices—produced handicraft goods, chiefly for local needs. The guilds survived till the Revolution, but by 1789 they had been fatally weakened by the growth of (3) capitalistic free enterprise—companies free to collect capital from any source, to hire anybody, to invent and apply new methods of production and distribution, to compete with anybody, and to sell anywhere. ‘These establishments were usually small, but they were multiplying; so Marseilles alone, in 1789, had thirtyeight soap factories, forty-eight for hats, eight for glass, twelve sugar refineries, ten tanneries.23 In textiles, building, mining, and metallurgy, capitalism had expanded into large-scale enterprises, usually through joint-stock companies—sociétés anonymes.
France was slow to adopt the textile machines that were inaugurating the Industrial Revolution in England, but large textile factories were operating in Abbeville, Amiens, Reims, Paris, Louviers, and Orléans, and the silk industry flourished at Lyons. The building trades were raising those massive blocks of apartment houses that still give French cities their characteristic physiognomy. Shipbuilding employed thousands of workers in Nantes, Bordeaux, Marseilles. Mining was the most advanced of French industries. The state kept all rights to the subsoil, leased the mines to concessionaires, and enforced a code of safety for the miners.24 Companies sank shafts to depths of three hundred feet, installed expensive equipment for ventilation, drainage, and transport, and made millionaires. The Anzin firm (1790) had four thousand workmen, six hundred horses, and twelve steam engines, and mined 310,000 tons of coal per year. The mining of iron and other metals supplied material for an expanding metallurgical industry. In 1787 the Creusot stock company raised ten million livres of capital to apply the latest machinery in the production of ironware; steam engines operated bellows, hammers, and drills, and railways enabled one horse to pull what had required five horses before.
Some startling inventions were developed by Frenchmen in these years. In 1776 the Marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans amused crowds along the River Doubs with a sidewheeler boat propelled by a steam engine, thirty-one years before Fulton’s Clermont steamed up and down the Hudson. Even more spectacular were the first steps in the conquest of the air. In 1766 Henry Cavendish had shown that hydrogen has a lower density than air; Joseph Black concluded that a bladder filled with hydrogen would rise. Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier worked on the principle that air loses density when heated; on June 5, 1783, at Annonay, near Lyons, they filled a balloon with heated air; it rose to a height of sixteen hundred feet, and descended ten minutes later when its air had cooled. A hydrogen-filled balloon, designed by Jacques-Alexandre Charles, made an ascent from Paris on August 27, 1783, before 300,000 cheering spectators; when it came down fifteen miles away a village crowd tore it to pieces on the theory that it was a hostile invader from the sky.25 On October 15 Jean-François Pilátre de Rozier made the first recorded human flight, using a Montgolfier balloon with heated air; this ascent lasted four minutes. On January 7, 1785, Francois Blanchard, a Frenchman, and John Jeffries, an American physician, flew in a balloon from England to France. People began to talk of flying to America.26
Nourished with industry and commerce, the towns of France prospered during the fatal reign. Lyons hummed with shops, factories, and enterprise. Arthur Young was amazed by the splendor of Bordeaux. Paris was now a business rather than a political center; it was the hub of an economic complex that controlled half the capital, and so half the economy, of France. In 1789 it had a population of some 600,000.27 It was not then an especially beautiful city; Voltaire described much of it as worthy of Goths and Vandals.28 Priestley, visiting it in 1774, reported: “I cannot say that I was much struck with anything except the spaciousness and magnificence of the public buildings, and to balance this I was exceedingly offended by the narrowness, dirt, and stench of almost all the streets.”29 Young gave a similar account:
The streets are nine-tenths dirty, and all without foot pavements. Walking, which in London is so pleasant and so clean that ladies do it every day, is here a toil and a fatigue to a man, and an impossibility to a well-dressed woman. The coaches are numerous, and what is much worse, there are an infinity of one-horse cabriolets, which are driven by young men of fashion and their imitators, … with such rapidity as to … render the streets exceedingly dangerous.... I have been myself many times blackened with mud.30
In the cities and towns a proletariat was taking form: men, women, and children working for wages with tools and materials not their own. There are no statistics of them, but they have been estimated, for the Paris of 1789, at 75,000 families, or 300,000 individuals;31 and there were proportionate masses in Abbeville, Lyons, and Marseilles. Hours of work were long and wages were low, for a ruling of the Paris Parlement (November 12, 1778) forbade the workers to organize. Between 1741 and 1789 wages rose twentytwo per cent, prices sixty-five per cent;32 the condition of the workers seems to have deteriorated in the reign of Louis XVI.33 When demand slackened, or (as in 1786) foreign competition became severe, workingmen in great number were discharged, and became a burden on charity. A rise in the price of bread—which constituted half the food of the Parisian populace34put thousands of families close to starvation. At Lyons in 1787 t
hirty thousand persons were on public relief; at Reims in 1788, after an inundation, two thirds of the population were destitute; at Paris, in 1791, a hundred thousand families were listed as indigent.35 “In Paris,” wrote Mercier about 1785, “the [common] people are weak, pallid, diminutive, stunted, and apparently a class apart from other classes in the state.”36
Defying prohibitions, laborers formed unions and went on strike. In 1774 the silk workers of Lyons quit work, alleging that the cost of living was rising much faster than wages, and that the unregulated laws of supply and demand were driving workers to a level of mere subsistence. The employers, with well-stocked larders, waited for hunger to bring the strikers to terms. Frustrated, many workers left Lyons for other towns, even for Switzerland or Italy; they were halted at the frontier and were brought back by force to their homes. The workers rose in revolt, seized municipal offices, and established a brief dictatorship of the proletariat over the commune. The government called in the army; the revolt was suppressed; two leaders were hanged; the strikers returned to their shops beaten, but hostile now to the government as well as to their employers.37
In 1786 they struck again, protesting that even with eighteen hours’ work per day they could not support their families, and complaining that they were treated “more inhumanly than domestic animals, for even these are given enough to keep them in health and vigor.”38 The city authorities agreed to a rise in pay, but forbade any meeting of more than four persons. A battalion of artillery took charge of enforcing this prohibition; soldiers fired upon the strikers, killing several. The strikers returned to work. The increase in pay was later revoked.39
Riots against the cost of living occurred sporadically throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. In Normandy there were six between 1752 and 1768; in 1768 the rioters captured control of Rouen, sacked the public granaries, pillaged the stores. Similar riots occurred at Reims in 1770, Poitiers in 1772, Dijon, Versailles, Paris, Pontoise in 1775, Aix-en-Provence in 1785, and again at Paris in 1788 and 1789.40
What role did the poverty of the proletariat, or of the urban populace in general, play in bringing on the Revolution? On the surface it was a proximate cause; the bread shortages and consequent riots in Paris in 1788-89 raised the fever of the people to a point where they were willing to risk their lives in defying the army and attacking the Bastille. But hunger and wrath can give motive force; they do not give leadership; it is likely that the riots would have been calmed by a lowering of the price of bread if leadership from higher strata had not directed the rioters to take the Bastille and march on Versailles. The masses had as yet no idea of overturning the government, of deposing the King, of establishing a republic. The proletariat talked hopefully of natural equality, but it did not dream of taking possession of the state. It demanded, whereas the bourgeoisie opposed, state regulation of the economy, at least to fixing the price of bread; but this was a return to the old system, not an advance toward an economy dominated by the working class. It is true that when the time for action came it was the populace of Paris which, moved by hunger and roused by orators and agents, took the Bastille and thereby deterred the King from using the army against the Assembly. But when that Assembly remade France it was under the guidance, and for the purposes, of the bourgeoisie.
IV. THE BOURGEOISIE AND THE REVOLUTION
The outstanding feature of French economic life in the eighteenth century was the rise of the business class. It had begun to prosper under Louis XIV and Colbert; it benefited most from the excellent roads and canals that facilitated trade; it grew rich on commerce with the colonies; it rose to prominence in administrative posts (till 1781); it controlled the finances of the state.
But it was harassed to the point of revolt by the tolls exacted for seigneurs or the government on roads and canals, and by the time-consuming examination of the cargo at each toll station. There were from thirty-five to forty such tolls to be paid by a boat carrying cargo from south France to Paris.41 Businessmen demanded free trade within frontiers, but they were not sure that they wanted it between nations. In 1786, moved by physiocratic theories, the government reduced tariffs on textiles and hardware from England, in return for reduction of English tariffs on French wines, glassware, and other products. One result was a blow to the French textile industry, which could not meet the competition of English mills equipped with later machinery. Unemployment in Lyons, Rouen, and Amiens reached an explosive point.
Nevertheless, the lowering of tariffs promoted foreign trade, and filled the coffers of the merchant class. That trade almost doubled between 1763 and 1787, rising to over a billion francs in 1780.42 The port cities of France swelled with merchants, shippers, sailors, warehouses, refineries, distilleries; in those towns the business class was supreme long before the Revolution sanctioned its national supremacy.
Part of mercantile prosperity, as in England, came from the capture or purchase of African slaves, their transport to America, and their sale there for work on the plantations. In 1788 French slave dealers shipped 29,506 Negroes to St.-Domingue (Haiti) alone.43 French investors owned most of the soil and industries there and in Guadeloupe and Martinique. In St.-Domingue thirty thousand whites used 480,000 slaves.44 A Société des Amis des Noirs was formed in Paris in 1788, under the presidency of Condorcet, and including Lafayette and Mirabeau fils, for the abolition of slavery, but the shippers and planters overwhelmed the movement with protests. In 1789 the Chamber of Commerce of Bordeaux declared: “France needs its colonies for the maintenance of its commerce, and consequently it needs slaves in order to make agriculture pay in this quarter of the world, at least until some other expedient may have been found.”45
Industrial, colonial, and other enterprises required capital, and generated a spreading breed of bankers. Joint-stock companies offered shares, the government floated loans, speculation developed in the sale and purchase of securities. Speculators hired journalists to disseminate rumors designed to raise or lower the price of stocks.46 Members of the ministries joined in the speculation, and so became subject to pressure or influence by the bankers. Every war made the state more dependent upon the financiers, and made the financiers more vitally concerned with the policy and solvency of the state. Some bankers enjoyed a personal credit superior to that of the government; hence they could borrow at a low rate, lend to the government at a higher rate, and increase their wealth merely by bookkeeping—provided their judgment was good and the state paid its debts.
The farmers general (financiers who bought, by an advance to the state, the right to collect indirect taxes) were especially rich and especially hated, for the indirect taxes, like sales taxes in general, were most burdensome to those who had to spend much of their income on the necessaries of daily life. Some of these fermiers généraux, like Helvétius and Lavoisier, were men of relative integrity and public spirit, contributing abundantly to charity, literature, and art.47 The government recognized the evils of the tax-farming system, and reduced the number of farmers general from sixty to forty in 1780, but public animosity continued. The tax farm was abolished by the Revolution, and Lavoisier’s was one of the heads that fell in the process.
As taxation played a leading role among the causes of the Revolution, we must once more call to mind the various taxes paid by Frenchmen. (1) The taille was a tax on land and personal property. Nobles were exempted from it because of their military service; the clergy were excused because they maintained social order and prayed for the state; magistrates, head administrators, and university officials were exempt; almost all the taille fell upon the landowners of the Third Estate—therefore chiefly upon the peasants. (2) The capitation, or poll, tax was laid upon every head of a household; here only the clergy were exempt. (3) The vingtieme, or twentieth, was a tax on all property, real or personal; but the nobles escaped a large part of this and the poll tax by using private influence, or engaging lawyers to find loopholes in the law; and the clergy avoided the vingtiéme by making a voluntary payment perio
dically to the state. (4) Every town paid a tax {octroi) to the government, and passed it on to its citizens. (5) Indirect taxes were levied through (a) transport tolls; (b) import and export dues; (c) excise taxes {aides) on wines, liquors, soap, leather, iron, playing cards, etc.; and (d) governmental monopolies on the sale of tobacco and salt. Every individual was required to buy annually a stated minimum of salt from the government at a price fixed by it, always higher than the market price. This salt tax (gabelle) was one of the chief miseries of the peasant. (6) The peasant paid a tax to escape the corvée. Altogether the average member of the Third Estate paid from forty-two to fifty-three per cent of his income in taxes.48
If we take together merchants, manufacturers, financiers, inventors, engineers, scientists, minor bureaucrats, clerks, tradesmen, chemists, artists, booksellers, teachers, writers, physicians, and untitled lawyers and magistrates as constituting the bourgeoisie, we can understand how by 1789 it had become the richest and most energetic part of the nation. It probably owned as much rural land as the nobility,49 and it could acquire nobility merely by buying a noble fief or a post as one of the many “secretaries” to the king. While the nobility lost numbers and wealth through idleness, extravagance, and biological decay, and the clergy lost ground through the rise of science, philosophy, and an urban epicurean life and code, the middle classes grew in money and power by the development of industry, technology, commerce, and finance. They filled with their products or imports the boutiques, or stores, whose splendor astonished foreign visitors to Paris, Lyons, Reims, or Bordeaux.50 While wars were bankrupting the government they enriched the bourgeoisie, which provided transport and matériel. The growing prosperity was almost confined to the towns; it eluded the peasantry and the proletariat, and appeared most visibly in merchants and financiers. In 1789 forty French merchants had a combined wealth of sixty million livres;51 and one banker, Paris-Montmartel, amassed a hundred million.52