Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

  On Necker’s advice the King again recalled the Parlement (September 23). Intoxicated with its triumph, it made the mistake of declaring that the coming States-General should operate as in 1614—sitting as separate classes and voting in class units, which would automatically reduce the Third Estate to political impotence. The general public, which had credited the Parlement’s claim to be defending liberty against tyranny, perceived that the liberty intended was that of the two privileged classes to overrule the king. The Parlement, by so ranging itself on the side of the feudal regime, forfeited the support of the powerful middle class, and henceforth ceased to be a factor in shaping events. The révolte nobiliaire had shown its limits and run its course; now it gave place to the bourgeois revolution.

  Necker’s task was made harder by the drought of 1788, which was ended by hailstorms that ruined the stunted crops. The winter of 1788-89 was one of the bitterest in the history of France; at Paris the thermometer fell to 18 degrees below zero Fahrenheit; the Seine froze solid from Paris to Le Havre. Bread rose in price from nine sous in August, 1788, to fourteen in February, 1789. The upper classes did their best to relieve the suffering; some nobles, like the Duc d’Orléans, spent hundreds of thousands of livres feeding and warming the poor; the Archbishop gave 400,000 livres; one monastery fed twelve hundred persons daily for six weeks.31 Necker forbade the export of grain, and imported seventy million livres’ worth; famine was averted. He left to his successors or to the States-General the task of repaying the loans that he raised.

  Meanwhile he persuaded the King, over the opposite advice of powerful nobles, to decree (December 27, 1788) that in the coming States-General the deputies of the Third Estate should equal in number those of the other states combined. On June 24, 1789, he sent out to all districts an invitation to vote for representatives. In the Third Estate every Frenchman above the age of twenty-four who paid any tax was entitled—and even commanded—to vote; so were all professional men, businessmen, guildsmen; in effect all the commonalty except paupers and the poorest laborers had the vote.32 The successful candidates met as an electoral committee which chose a deputy for the district. In the First Estate every priest or curate, every monastery or convent, voted for a representative in the electoral assembly of the district; archbishops, bishops, and abbots were members of that assembly ex officio; this assembly chose an ecclesiastical deputy to the States-General. In the Second Estate every nobleman above the age of twenty-four was automatically a member of the electoral assembly which chose a deputy to represent the nobility of his district. In Paris only those who paid a poll tax of six or more livres had the vote; there most of the proletariat was left out.33

  Each electoral assembly in each class was invited by the government to draw up a cahier des plaintes et doléances— a statement of complaints and grievances—for the guidance of its deputy. The district cahiers were summarized for each class in provincial cahiers, and these, in whole or in synopsis, were presented to the King. The cahiers of all classes united in condemning absolutism, and in demanding a constitutional monarchy in which the powers of the king and his ministers would be limited by law, and by a nationally elected assembly meeting periodically and alone authorized to vote new taxes and to sanction new laws. Nearly all deputies were instructed to vote no funds for the government until such a constitution had been secured. All classes denounced the financial incompetence of the government, the evils associated with the indirect taxes, and the excesses of royal power, as in lettres de cachet. All demanded trial by jury, privacy of the mails, and reform of the law. All pleaded for liberty, but in their own fashion: the nobles for the restoration of their pre-Richelieu powers; the clergy and the bourgeoisie for freedom from all state interference; the peasantry for freedom from oppressive taxes and feudal dues. All accepted in principle the equal taxation of all property. All expressed loyalty to the King, but none mentioned his “divine right” to rule;34 that, by common consent, was dead.

  The cahiers of the nobility stipulated that in the States-General each of the classes should meet separately and vote as a united class. The cahiers of the clergy rejected toleration, and asked that the civil rights recently granted to Protestants be revoked. Some cahiers called for a greater portion of the tithe to be left to the parish, and for access of all priests to positions in the hierarchy. Nearly all the ecclesiastical cahiers deplored the immorality of the age in art, literature, and the theater; they ascribed this deterioration to excessive freedom of the press, and called for exclusive control of education by the Catholic clergy.

  The cahiers of the Third Estate voiced chiefly the views of the middle class and the peasant proprietors. They pleaded for the abolition of feudal rights and transport tolls. They demanded career open to talent for all classes to all posts. They condemned the wealth of the Church and the costly idleness of monks. One cahier suggested that to meet the deficit the King should sell the lands and rents of the clergy; another proposed the confiscation of all monastic property.35 Many complained of the devastation of farms by the animals and hunts of the nobility. They asked for universal free education, for the reform of hospitals and prisons, for the complete extinction of serfdom and the trade in slaves. A typical cahier of the peasants asserted: “We are the principal prop of the throne, the true support of the armies. … We are the source of riches for others, and we ourselves remain in poverty.”36

  All in all, this election of the States-General was a proud and generous moment in the history of France. Almost, for a while, Bourbon France became a democracy, with probably a larger proportion of the people voting than go to the polls in an American election today. It was a fair election, not as disorderly as might have been expected in so novel an operation; it was apparently freer from corruption than most of the elections held in the later democracies of Europe.37 Never before, so far as we know, had a government issued so broad an invitation to its people to instruct it in modes of procedure, and to communicate to it their complaints and desires. Taken altogether, these cahiers gave the government a more complete view of conditions in France than it had ever before possessed. Now, if ever, France had the materials for statesmanship; now she had freely chosen her best men, from every class, to meet with a King who had already made brave overtures to change. All France was filled with hope as these men, from every part of the country, made their way to Paris and Versailles.

  V. ENTER MIRABEAU

  One of them was a noble elected by the commonalty of both Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles. Distinguished by this anomalous and double dignity, Honoré-Gabriel-Victor Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, ugly and fascinating, became a dominant figure in the Revolution from his arrival in Paris (April, 1789) till his premature death (1791).

  We have celebrated his father—Victor Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau—as physiocrat and “Friend of Man,” i.e., of everybody except his wife and children. Vauvenargues described this “Ami de l’homme” as “of an ardent, melancholy temper, prouder and more restless … than the sea, with a sovereign insatiability for pleasure, knowledge, and glory.”38 The Marquis admitted all this, and added that “immorality was for him a second nature.” At twenty-eight he resolved to discover if one woman could be enough; he asked for the hand of Marie de Vessan, whom he had never seen, but who was heiress apparent to a sizable fortune. After marrying her he found that she was a slovenly and incompetent termagant; but she gave him in eleven years eleven children, of whom five survived infancy. In 1760 the Marquis was imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes for seditious writings, but was released after a week. In 1762 his wife left him and returned to her mother.

  Honoré-Gabriel, the eldest son, grew up amid this domestic drama. One of his grandmothers died insane, one, of his sisters and one of his brothers were subject to occasional insanity; it is a marvel that Gabriel himself, buffeting one calamity after another, did not go mad. He had two teeth at birth, as a warning to the world. At three he suffered an attack of smallpox, which left his face scarred and pitted like a battlefield
. He was an exuberant, quarrelsome, and willful boy; his father, who was exuberant, quarrelsome, and willful, beat him frequently, generating filial hate. The Marquis was glad to get rid of him by sending him, aged fifteen (1764), to a military academy in Paris. There Gabriel acquired mathematics, German, and English, and read eagerly, being consumed with a passion for achievement. He read Voltaire and lost religion; he read Rousseau and learned to feel for the commonalty. In the army he stole the mistress of his commanding officer, fought a duel, took part in the French invasion of Corsica, and won such commendation for courage that his father momentarily loved him.

  At twenty-three he married, frankly for money, Émilie de Marignac, who expected to inherit 500,000 francs. She bore a son to Gabriel, and took a lover; he discovered her infidelity, concealed his own, and forgave her. He quarreled with a M. de Villeneuve, broke an umbrella over his back, and was accused of intent to kill. To have him escape arrest his father secured a lettre de cachet by which Gabriel was forcibly confined in the Château d’If, on an island off Marseilles. He asked his wife to join him; she refused; they exchanged letters of rising wrath, until he bade her, “Farewell forever” (December 14, 1774). Meanwhile he kept warm by sleeping occasionally with the wife of the chateau’s commandant.

  In May, 1775, his father had him transferred to laxer custody at the Château de Joux, near Pontarlier and the Swiss border. His jailer, M. de Saint-Mauris, invited him to a party, where he met Sophie de Ruffey, the nineteen-year-old wife of the seventy-year-old Marquis de Monnier. She found Mirabeau more satisfying than her husband; his face was deterring, his hair was woolly, his nose was massive, but his eyes were on fire, his disposition was “sulfurous,” and he could seduce any woman with his speech. Sophie gave herself to him completely. He escaped from Pontarlier, fled to Thonon in Savoy, and seduced a cousin there. In August, 1776, Sophie joined him at Verrières in Switzerland, for, she said, to live apart from him was “to die a thousand times a day.”39 Now she vowed, “Gabriel or death!” She proposed to go to work, for Gabriel was penniless.

  He went with her to Amsterdam, where Rousseau’s publisher, Marc Rey, hired him as a translator. Sophie served as his amanuensis, and taught Italian. He wrote several minor works, in one of which he spoke of his father: “He preaches virtue, beneficence, and frugality, while he is the worst of husbands, and the hardest and most spendthrift of fathers.”40 Mirabeau père thought this a breach of etiquette. He united with Sophie’s parents in arranging the extradition of the couple from Holland. They were arrested (May 14, 1777) and brought to Paris. Sophie, having failed in an attempt at suicide, was sent to a house of correction; Gabriel, raging, was imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes, following in the footsteps of his father and Diderot. There he languished for forty-two months. After two years he was allowed to have books, paper, pen, and ink. To Sophie he sent letters of passionate devotion. On January 7, 1778, she gave birth to a daughter, presumably his. In June mother and child were transferred to a convent at Gien, near Orléans.

  Mirabeau appealed to his father to forgive him and have him freed. “Let me see the sun,” he begged; “let me breathe a freer air; let me see the face of my kind! I see nothing but dark walls. My father, I shall die from the tortures of nephritis!”41 To alleviate his misery, to make some money for Sophie, and to keep from going mad, he wrote several books, some erotic. Most important was the Lettres de cachet, which described the injustices of arrest without warrant and detention without trial, and demanded reform of prisons and the law. Published in 1782, the little volume so moved Louis XVI that in 1784 he ordered the release of all the prisoners held at Vincennes.42

  Mirabeau’s jailers took pity on him, and after November, 1779, he was allowed to walk in the gardens of the château and to meet visitors; in some of these he found outlets for his overflowing sexual energy.43 His father agreed to have him liberated if he would apologize to his wife and resume cohabitation with her, for the old Marquis was anxious to have a grandson to carry on the family. Gabriel wrote to his wife asking forgiveness. On December 13, 1780, he was released under custody of his father, who invited him to the paternal mansion at Le Bignon. He had some liaisons in Paris, and visited Sophie in her convent; apparently he told her that he intended to rejoin his wife. Then he went to Le Bignon, and charmed his father. Sophie received money from her husband, moved to a house near the convent, engaged in works of charity, and agreed to marry an ex-captain of cavalry. He died before the marriage could take place, and on the next day (September 9, 1789) Sophie killed herself.44

  Mirabeau’s wife refused to see him; he sued her for desertion; he lost his case, but astonished friends and foes with the eloquence of his five-hour speech pleading his own impossible cause. His father disowned him; he sued his father, and obtained from him an allowance of three thousand francs a year. He borrowed money and lived sumptuously. In 1784 he took a new mistress, Henriette de Nehra. With her he went to England and Germany (1785-87). En route he had tangential liaisons, which Henriette forgave, for, she said, “If a woman made him the least advances he took fire at once.”45 He met Frederick twice, and learned enough about Prussia to compose (from material supplied him by a Prussian major) the book De la Monarchie prussienne (1788); this he dedicated to his father, who described it as “the enormous compilation of a frenzied workman.” Calonne commissioned him to send some secret dispatches about German affairs; he sent seventy, which amazed the minister by their keen perception and forceful style.

  Back in Paris, he perceived that public discontent was nearing revolutionary ardor. In a letter to the minister Montmorin he warned that unless a States-General met by 1789, revolution would come. “I ask if you have reckoned with the convulsive energy of hunger acting on the genius of despair. I ask who will dare make himself responsible for the safety of all who surround the throne, nay, of the King himself?”46 He was caught up in the agitation, and rushed into the current. He achieved a tenuous reconciliation with his father (who died in 1789), and offered himself at Aix-en-Provence as a candidate for the States-General. He invited the nobles of the district to choose him; they refused; he turned to the Third Estate, which welcomed him. Now he left his conservative cocoon and took wings as a democrat. “The right of sovereignty rests solely … with the people; the sovereign … can be no more than the first magistrate of the people.”47 He wished to keep the monarchy, but only as a protection of the people against the aristocracy; meanwhile he urged that all male adults should have the vote.48 In a discourse to the Estates of Provence he threatened the privileged classes with a general strike: “Take care; do not disdain this people, which produces everything; this people, which, to be formidable, need only be immobile.”49

  A bread riot arose in Marseilles (March, 1789); the authorities sent for Mirabeau to come and calm the people, for they knew his popularity. The populace gathered in a crowd of 120,000 to acclaim him.50 He organized a patrol to prevent violence. In an Avis au peuple marseillais he advised the commonalty to be patient till the States-General should have time to find a balance between producers wanting high prices and consumers wanting low. The rioters obeyed him. By the same persuasiveness he pacified an uprising at Aix. Both Aix and Marseilles chose him as their deputy; he thanked the electors, and decided to represent Aix. In April, 1789, he left for Paris and the States-General.

  VI. THE LAST REHEARSAL: 1789

  He passed through a country facing famine and rehearsing revolution. In several districts, in the spring of 1789, there were repeated revolts against taxes and the cost of bread. In Lyons the populace invaded the offices of the tax collector and destroyed his registers. At Agde, near Montpellier, the people threatened a general pillage unless the prices of commodities were reduced; they were reduced. Villages fearing a shortage of grain forcibly prevented the export of grain from their districts. Some peasants talked of burning all châteaux and killing the seigneurs (May, 1789).51 At Montlhéry the women, hearing that the price of bread had been raised, led a mob into the grana
ries and bakeries, and seized all available bread and flour. Similar scenes at Bray-sur-Seine, Bagnols, Amiens, almost everywhere in France. In town after town orators aroused the people by telling them that the King had postponed all tax payments.52 A report ran through Provence in March and April that “the best of kings desires tax equality; that there are to be no more bishops, nor seigneurs, nor tithes, nor dues, no more titles or distinctions.”53 After April 1, 1789, feudal dues were no longer paid. The “voluntary” surrender of these dues by the nobility on August 4 was not an act of self-sacrifice but the recognition of an accomplished fact.

  In Paris the excitement mounted almost daily as the meeting of the States-General approached. Pamphlets poured from the press, oratory lifted its voice at the cafés and clubs. The most famous and powerful pamphlet in all history appeared in January, 1789, written by the freethinking Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, vicar general of the diocese of Chartres. Chamfort had written, “Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état?—Tout. Qu’a-t-il?—Rien” (“What is the Third Estate? Everything. What does it have? Nothing.”) Sieyès made this explosive epigram into an arresting title, and turned it into three questions that soon half of France was asking:

  What is the Third Estate? Everything.

  What has it been, till the present, in the political order? Nothing.

  What does it ask? To become something.54

  Of the 26,000,000 souls in France, Sieyès pointed out, at least 25,000,000 belonged to the Third Estate—the untitled laity; in effect the Third Estate was the nation. If, in the States-General, the other classes should refuse to sit with it, it would be justified in constituting itself the “Assemblée Nationale.” That phrase endured.