by Will Durant
The essential cause of the Revolution was the disparity between economic reality and political forms—between the importance of the bourgeoisie in the production and possession of wealth and its exclusion from governmental power. The upper middle class was conscious of its abilities and sensitive to its slights. It was galled by the social exclusiveness and insolence of the nobility—as when the brilliant Mme. Roland, invited to stay for dinner in an aristocratic home, found herself served in the servants’ quarters.53 It saw the nobility milking the coffers of the state for extravagant expenditures and feasts while denying political or military office or promotion to those very men whose inventive enterprise had expanded the tax-yielding economy of France, and whose savings were now supporting the treasury. It saw the clergy absorbing a third of the nation’s income in maintaining a theology that almost all educated Frenchmen considered medieval and infantile.
The middle classes did not wish to overthrow the monarchy, but they aspired to control it. They were far from desiring democracy, but they wanted a constitutional government in which the intelligence of all classes could be brought to bear upon legislation, administration, and policy. They demanded freedom from state or guild regulation of industry or commerce, but they were not averse to state subsidies, or to support from the peasants and the city populace in achieving middle-class aims. The essence of the French Revolution was the overthrow of the nobility and the clergy by a bourgeoisie using the discontent of peasants to destroy feudalism, and the discontent of urban masses to neutralize the armies of the king. When, after two years of revolution, the Constituent Assembly had become supreme, it abolished feudalism, confiscated the property of the Church, and legalized the organization of merchants, but forbade all organizations or gatherings of workingmen (June 14, 1791).54
Specifically and immediately the financiers were alarmed by the possibility that the government to which they had lent so much money might declare bankruptcy—as it had done, in whole or in part, fifty-six times since Henry IV.55 The holders of government bonds lost faith in Louis XVI; contractors who worked on state enterprises were uncertain of their payment, or of its value when it came. Businessmen in general felt that the only escape from national bankruptcy was (and so it proved to be) the full taxation of all classes, especially of the wealth accumulated by the Church. When Louis XVI hesitated to extend the taille to the privileged classes, lest he lose their support for his shaking throne, the bondholders, almost unconsciously, and despite their generally conservative principles, became a revolutionary force. The Revolution was due not to the patient poverty of the peasants but to the endangered wealth of the middle class.
V. THE GATHERING OF THE FORCES
All these revolutionary forces were subject to the influence of ideas, and used them to clothe and warm desires. In addition to the propaganda of the philosophers and the physiocrats, there were scattered communists who continued and extended the socialism expounded in the preceding generation by Morelly, Mably, and Linguet.56 Brissot de Warville, in Recherches philosophiques sur le droit de propriété (1780), anticipated Pierre Proudhon’s “La propriété, c’est le vol” by arguing that private property is theft of public goods. There is no “sacred right … to eat the food of twenty men when one man’s share is not enough.” The laws are “a conspiracy of the stronger against the weaker, of the rich agairíst the poor.”57 Brissot later apologized for his early books as schoolboy ebullitions; he became a leader of the Girondins, and was guillotined for moderation (1793).
In 1789, shortly before the taking of the Bastille, François Boissel issued a Caté chisme du genre humain, which went the whole distance to communism. All evils are due to “the mercenary, homicidal, and antisocial class which has governed, degraded, and destroyed men till now.”58 The strong have enslaved the weak, and have established the laws to govern them. Property, marriage, and religion have been invented to legitimize usurpation, violence, and deceit, with the result that a small minority own the land, while the majority live in hunger and cold. Marriage is private property in women. No man has a right to more than he needs; everything above this should be distributed to each according to his need. Let the rich idlers go to work or cease to eat. Turn the monasteries into schools.59
The most interesting and influential of these radicals was François-Émile Babeuf. After serving nobles and clergy in their assertion of feudal rights against the peasants,60 he sent to the Academy of Arras (March 21, 1787) a proposal that it offer a prize for the best essay on the question “With the general sum of knowledge now acquired, what would be the condition of a people whose social instincts were such that there should reign among them the most perfect equality; … where everything should be in common?”61 The Academy did not respond; so Gracchus Babeuf (as he later called himself), in a letter of July 8, 1787, explained that by nature all men are equal, and in the state of nature all things were in common; all later history was degeneration and deceit. During the Revolution he gathered a numerous following, and was about to lead a revolt against the Directory when he was arrested by its agents and sentenced to death (1797).
Such ideas played only a modest part in engendering the Revolution. There was hardly a trace of socialist sentiment in the cahiers (bills of grievances) that came to the States-General from all quarters of France in 1789; none of them contained attacks upon private property or the monarchy. The middle class was in control of the situation.
Were the Freemasons a factor in the Revolution? We have noted the rise of this secret society in England (1717), and its first appearance in France (1734). It spread rapidly through Protestant Europe; Frederick II favored it in Germany, Gustavus III in Sweden. Pope Clement XII (1738) forbade ecclesiastic or secular authorities to join or help the Freemasons, but the Paris Parlement refused to register this bull, so depriving it of legal effect in France. In 1789 there were 629 Masonic lodges in Paris, usually with fifty to a hundred members.62 These included many nobles, some priests, the brothers of Louis XVI, and most leaders of the Enlightenment.63 In 1760 Helvétius founded the Loge des Sciences; in 1770 the astronomer Lalande expanded this into the Loge des Neuf Soeurs, or Lodge of the Nine Sisters (i.e., the Muses). Here gathered Berthollet, Franklin, Condorcet, Chamfort, Greuze, Houdon, and, later, Sieyés, Brissot, Desmoulins, Danton.64
Theoretically the Freemasons excluded the “godless libertine” and the “stupid atheist”;65 every member had to profess belief in “the Great Architect of the Universe.” No further religious creed was required, so that in general the Freemasons limited their theology to deism. They were apparently influential in the movement to expel the Jesuits from France.66 Their avowed purpose was to establish a secret international brotherhood of men bound in fellowship by assemblage and ritual, and pledged to mutual aid, religious toleration, and political reform. Under Louis XVI they entered actively into politics; several of their aristocratic members—Lafayette, Mirabeau pére et fils, the Vicomte de Noailles, the Due de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and the Due d’Orléans—became liberal leaders in the National Assembly.67
Last came the definitely political clubs. Organized at first on the English model—for eating, conversation, and reading—they became, toward 1784, centers of semi-revolutionary agitation. There, said a contemporary, “they hold forth loudly and without restraint on the rights of man, on the advantages of freedom, on the great abuses of inequality of condition.”68 After the assembling of the States-General the deputies from Brittany formed the Club Breton; this soon widened its membership to include non-Bretons like Mirabeau fils, Sieyés, and Robespierre. In October, 1789, it moved its headquarters to Paris, and became the Société des Jacobins.
So, as with most pivotal events in history, a hundred diverse forces converged to produce the French Revolution. Fundamental was the growth of the middle classes in number, education, ambition, wealth, and economic power; their demand for a political and social status commensurate with their contribution to the life of the nation and the finances of the state;
and their anxiety lest the treasury render their governmental securities worthless by declaring bankruptcy. Subsidiary to this factor, and used by it as aids and threats, were the poverty of millions of peasants crying out for relief from dues and taxes and tithes; the prosperity of several million peasants strong enough to defy seigneurs, tax collectors, bishops, and regiments; and the organized discontent of city masses suffering from the manipulation of the bread supply, and from the lag of wages behind prices in the historic spiral of inflation.
Add to this a maze of contributory factors: the costly extravagance of the court; the incompetence and corruption of the government; the weakening of the monarchy by its long struggle with the parlements and the nobility; the absence of political institutions through which grievances could be legally and constructively expressed; the rising standards of administration expected by a citizenry whose intellect had been sharpened beyond that of any contemporary people by schools and books and salons, by science, philosophy, and the Enlightenment. Add the collapse of press censorship under Louis XVI; the dissemination of reform or revolutionary ideas by Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d’Alembert, d’Holbach, Helvétius, Morellet, Morelly, Mably, Linguet, Mirabeau pére, Turgot, Condorcet, Beaumarchais, Mirabeau fils, and a thousand other writers whose sum and brilliance and force had never been equaled, and whose propaganda penetrated into every class but the peasantry, into the barracks of the army, the cells of monasteries, the palaces of the nobility, the antechambers of the King. Add the catastrophic decline of faith in the credibility of a Church that had upheld the status quo and the divine right of kings, had preached the virtues of obedience and resignation, and had amassed a hoard of enviable wealth while the government could not find the means to finance its expanding tasks. Add the spread of belief in a “natural law” that required a humane justice for every rational being regardless of birth, color, creed, or class, and in a bountiful “state of nature” in which all men had once been equal, good, and free, and from which they had fallen because of the development of private property, war, and caste-oriented law. Add the rise and multiplication of lawyers and orators ready to defend or attack the status quo, and to arouse and organize public sentiment; the profusion and fury of pamphleteers; the secret activity of political clubs; the ambition of the Due d’Orléans to replace his cousin on the throne of France.
Bring all these factors together in the reign of a gentle and benevolent, weak and vacillating King bewildered by the maze of conflicts about him, and the contradictory motives within him; let them operate upon a people more keenly conscious of its grievances, more passionate, excitable, and imaginative than almost any other people known to history; and all that would be needed to unite and ignite these forces in a disruptive explosion would be some event affecting multitudes, and reaching deeper than thought to the most powerful instincts of men. Perhaps that was the function of the drought and famine of 1788, and the cruel winter of 1788-89. “Hunger alone will cause this great revolution,” the Marquis de Girardin had predicted in 1781.69 Hunger came to the countryside, to the towns, to Paris; it was sharp enough in the masses to overcome tradition, reverence, and fear, and to provide an instrument for the aims and brains of well-fed men. The dykes of law and custom and piety broke, and the Revolution began.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
The Political Debacle
1783-89
I. THE DIAMOND NECKLACE: 1785
IN June, 1783, Axel von Fersen, after gallant fighting for America, and having earned distinction at Yorktown, returned to France, and found Marie Antoinette as fascinating as when he had left her three years before. Even in 1787, when she was thirty-two, Arthur Young thought her “the most beautiful woman” he had seen at the court that day.1 She readily seconded the request of Gustavus III that Louis XVI appoint the handsome Fersen colonel of the Royal Swedish Regiment in the French army—which would allow him to spend considerable time at Versailles. Axel confessed to his sister Sophie that he loved the Queen, and he believed that his love was returned. Certainly she felt a warm affection for him, and eight years later, after his brave attempt to get her and the King out of France, they exchanged tender letters; but her invitation to Sophie to come and live near him suggests a resolve to keep her feeling for him within proper bounds.2 Hardly anyone at the court except her husband believed her innocent. A song popular among the populace admitted no doubt of her guilt:
Veux-tu connaître
Un cocu, un bâtard, une catin?
Voyez le Roi, la Reine,
Et Monsieur le Dauphin.3
Would you know
A cuckold, a bastard, a whore?
See the King, the Queen,
And Monsieur the Dauphin.
Louis-Philippe de Ségur summed up the matter: “She lost her reputation but preserved her virtue.”4
On March 25, 1785, Marie Antoinette gave birth to a second son, who was named Louis-Charles. The King was so pleased that he gave her the Palace of St.-Cloud, which he had bought from the Duc d’Orléans for six million livres. The court condemned the extravagance of his appreciation, and Paris nicknamed the Queen “Madame Deficit.”5 She used her power over her husband to influence his appointment of ministers, ambassadors, and other dignitaries. She tried, and failed, to change his distaste for the alliance with Austria, and her efforts increased her unpopularity.
Only against the background of this public hostility to “L’Autrichienne” can we understand the credence given to the story of the diamond necklace. This collier was itself incredible: a string of 647 diamonds allegedly weighing 2,800 carats.6* Two court jewelers, Charles Bôhmer and Paul Bassenge, had bought diamonds from half the world to make a necklace for Mme. du Barry, confident that Louis XV would buy it for her. But Louis XV died, and who now would buy so expensive an adornment? The jewelers offered it to Marie Antoinette for 1,600,000 livres; she rejected it as too costly.7 Cardinal Prince Louis-René-Édouard de Rohan came to the fore.
He was a ripe product of one of France’s oldest and richest families; he had, it was said, an income of 1,200,000 livres per year. Ordained a priest in 1760, he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Strasbourg; in that capacity he officially welcomed Marie Antoinette when she first entered France (1770). Finding Strasbourg too narrow a field for his ambitions, Rohan lived mostly in Paris, where he joined the faction hostile to Austria and the Queen. In 1771 Louis XV sent him to Vienna as special envoy to ferret out Austrian maneuvers in the partition of Poland. Maria Theresa was offended by the lavish fetes that he gave, and by his dissemination of scandalous gossip about the new Dauphine. Louis XVI recalled him to Paris, but powerful relatives induced the King to make him grand almoner—head disburser of the royal alms (1777). A year later the gay and handsome priest was raised to the cardinalate, and in 1779 he became archbishop of Strasbourg. There he met Cagliostro, and was charmed into believing the impostor’s magic claims. Having risen so high so soon, it seemed to Rohan that he might aspire to be chief minister to Louis XVI, if only he could atone for his years of opposition to the Queen.
Among his amusements in Paris was the attractive and ingenious Mme. de La Motte-Valois. Jeanne de St.-Rémy de Valois claimed descent from Henry II of France by a mistress. Her family lost its property, and Jeanne was reduced to begging in the streets. In 1775 the government confirmed her royal lineage, and gave her a pension of eight hundred francs. In 1780 she married Antoine de La Motte, an army officer with a penchant for intrigue. He had deceived her about his income; their marriage, as she put it, was a union of drought with famine.8 He appropriated the title of count, which made Jeanne the Comtesse de La Motte. As such she fluttered around Paris and Versailles, making conquests by what she called her “air of health and youth (which men call radiance), and an extraordinarily vivacious personality.”9 Having become mistress to the Cardinal (1784),10 she pretended to high intimacy at the court, and offered to win the Queen’s approval of his aims. She engaged Rêtaux de Villette to imitate her Majesty’s hand
writing, and brought to the Cardinal affectionate letters allegedly from Marie Antoinette; finally she promised to arrange an interview. She trained a prostitute, the “Baroness” d’Oliva, to impersonate the Queen. In the “Grove of Venus” at Versailles, in the dark of night, the Cardinal briefly met this woman, mistook her to be Antoinette, kissed her foot, and received from her a rose as token of reconciliation (August, 1784); or so the “Countess” relates.11
Mme. de La Motte now ventured upon a bolder plan which, if successful, would put an end to her poverty. She forged a letter from the Queen authorizing Rohan to buy the necklace in her name. The Cardinal presented this letter to Bôhmer, who surrendered the gems to him (January 24, 1785) on his written promise to pay 1,600,000 francs in installments. Rohan took the brilliants to the Countess, and at her request he turned them over to an alleged representative of the Queen. Their further history is uncertain; apparently they were taken by the “Comte” de La Motte to England and sold piece by piece.12
Böhmer sent a bill for the necklace to the Queen, who replied that she had never ordered it and had never written the letter that bore her name. When the date arrived for payment of the first installment (July 30, 1785), and Rohan offered only thirty thousand of the 400,000 francs then due, Bôhmer laid the matter before the Baron de Breteuil, minister of the King’s Household. Breteuil informed the King. Louis summoned the Cardinal and invited him to explain his actions. Rohan showed him some supposed letters from the Queen. The King saw at once that they were forgeries. “This,” he said, “is not in the Queen’s handwriting, and the signature is not even in proper form.”13 He suspected that Rohan and others of the faction hostile to his wife had plotted to discredit her. He ordered the Cardinal to the Bastille (August 15), and bade the police find Mme. de La Motte. She had fled to a succession of hiding places, but she was apprehended, and she too was sent to the Bastille. Also arrested were “Baronne” d’Oliva, Rêtaux de Villette, and Cagliostro, who was wrongly suspected of having planned the intrigue; actually he had done his best to discourage it.14