Nor did the damage end there. The Crown, too, was indelibly tainted by the memory of Maupeou. Louis XV’s willingness to tolerate a measure of defiance from his sovereign courts, despite the extreme claims he had made for his own authority in 1766, had marked the French monarchy out as law-abiding and receptive to the legitimate expression of the subjects’ discontents. The parlements enjoyed considerable popular support, and the king’s occasional concessions to their opposition served to reassure his subjects that he was no tyrant. Maupeou, supported by a monarch now ageing and tired of endless obstruction, swept this subtle structure of confidence away. His attack on courts of law which traced their origins and powers almost as far back as the monarchy itself showed him up as the agent of despotism, of government by no law except the monarch’s will, where no person and no property was secure against his whims. If Louis XVI had kept Maupeou in power, and preserved his reforms, he would have been called a tyrant seventeen years before he was. But even the restoration of the former parlements could not efface the memory of their suppression. The French now knew what power their king might deploy if he had a mind to, and few of them found much comfort in the knowledge. The institutions and the men of before 1771 were brought back, but the atmosphere of political confidence, innocence even, in which they had operated was irrecoverable.
The magistrates of the parlements numbered around 1,200. Together with perhaps 1,000 more officers in other sovereign courts mainly exercising special financial and fiscal jurisdiction, they made up the ‘nobility of the robe’. All sovereign court offices ennobled, but few members of the parlements by now owed their nobility to their offices. Mostly they had several generations of noble forebears behind them, and by this time a number of parlements had decided to admit nobody without such credentials. In their provinces these men dominated all local affairs, which was why they so often came into conflict with intendants and governors. In Paris they dominated national affairs. Not only did the parlement and certain other metropolitan sovereign courts enjoy wider powers and jurisdiction than their provincial counterparts; the Parisian robe nobility also provided most of those who went on to become intendants, councillors of state, and ministers. After a few years on the bench, young magistrates of ambition would seek to buy one of the 80 offices of Master of Requests. By shining there they could legitimately hope to be appointed to one of the 33 intendancies, which were always filled from their ranks. And whereas most intendants never ended up as ministers, many ministers had served their time as intendants. All this meant that the worlds of government and the law in the capital were closely linked, and the intermarriage common in these circles made the relationship yet closer. Everybody involved in political conflicts had relatives on both sides, and the great confrontations were not always as serious as they appeared. Knowing each other intimately, those involved realized their opponents had appearances to maintain. Maupeou, himself recently first president of the Paris parlement, shocked this cosy world when he exiled the most vocal of his former colleagues to places seemingly chosen for their discomfort. No wonder he aroused such personal hatred. And when, to fill up the posts in his new system, he brought in outsiders, ‘intruders’ as they were known, he only compounded the insult. The narrow legal and administrative élite who controlled most of the levers of power in the kingdom did not welcome new blood, and even members of the provincial ‘robe’ only broke in occasionally. Only two other groups enjoyed as much say in the government of the kingdom; and one of these had only attained complete respectability within living memory.
This group was that of the financiers, or ‘finance’ as contemporaries called it. Numbering no more than two or three hundred individuals, it kept the government solvent by handling its revenues and outgoings, providing short-term credit, and raising longer-term loans from contacts in the private world of banking and trade – a system historians have called ‘Court capitalism’. Most of the indirect taxes were collected by the Farmers-General, a rich syndicate who leased the monopoly under a contract renewed every six years. Revenue from direct taxes was received and paid out by venal office-holders who were also financiers. They made their living from handling public funds, and the spectacular profits of this activity placed them among the king’s richest subjects. Few of them were far from humble, mercantile beginnings; but few omitted, either, to buy themselves ennoblement, and their daughters were among the most prized heiresses in the kingdom. They lived in ostentatious luxury, and the fact that this dazzling wealth came from public resources created the suspicion that it had been made at public expense, and despite some attempts earlier in the century to praise them for the stimulus their wealth gave to economic life and good taste, financiers were widely hated. Old nobles regarded them as jumped-up—although they were eager enough to ‘regild the arms’ with their daughters’ dowries. Professional men thought the same, while envying their success. And taxpayers considered them public bloodsuckers, regretting the days, still just within living memory, when financiers were put on trial for embezzlement whenever a new reign began. In 1774 there was no question of that: they were now too influential. Attempts were made by successive finance ministers during the decade to eliminate some of the offices through which financiers operated, but in 1781 these efforts were abandoned. Four years later the Farmers-General began to build a new ten-foot-high wall around Paris to prevent evasion of entry tolls. The gates or barriers they commissioned were severe masterpieces of modern design, and several still exist. But most were burnt down during the disorders of July 1789, as hated symbols of fiscal oppression and misapplication of the king’s revenues.
To find a really staggering example of extravagance at the taxpayers’ expense, however, it was necessary to travel twelve miles to the west, to Versailles. Here was the seat of the royal Court, and of the courtiers who constituted the third key power-group within the French body politic. Fifty thousand people lived in Versailles, making it France’s tenth largest town. Ten thousand of them lived or worked in the palace, the king’s household, and the whole life of the town depended on it. Thirty-five million livres, or about 5 per cent of the king’s annual revenue, were spent on the Court, and most of this outlay ended up in the pockets of a few hundred courtiers. Anybody who was decently dressed could enter the palace of Versailles: ‘It is impossible’, marvelled Arthur Young,18 ‘not to like this careless indifference and freedom from suspicion.’ But only those who had been presented to the king and hunted with him were true courtiers, and to be admitted to these ‘Honours of the Court’ one had to have authentic proofs of noble ancestry reaching back to 1400, or enjoy exemption by special favour. Fewer than a thousand families had this distinction, and many of those took no advantage of it after presentation, since life at Versailles was ruinously expensive. Only the richest could afford the clothes, the retinue, the entertaining, and the upkeep of quarters both there and in Paris that were essential to lead the life of high fashion. Those who could afford it were the kingdom’s uncontested social élite, the cream of the nobility, dukes, peers, and other holders of exalted titles, great officers of the Crown, ministers, generals, and archbishops, or simply favourites of the monarch or his consort. And most of them would still have found it difficult without further pensions, sinecures, and other lucrative orders and distinctions in the gift of the king. This was entirely as Louis XIV, the architect of the whole system, had intended. His aim had been to assemble the great of the kingdom around his person, where he could see and control them. Those who came were richly rewarded—and thereby domesticated and made dependent. All Louis XIV denied them was real power in the form of high political office; but by Louis XVI’s time courtiers had reconquered even that. From the late 1750s dukes and peers were found holding ministerial portfolios alongside the professionals of the robe. And even without formally holding office, people who mingled daily with the king, his ministers, and favourites could hardly fail to be influential. Life at Court was in fact an endless pursuit of advantage, status, pensions, offices,
and perquisites from those whom royal favour endowed with power to bestow them. News of the death of Louis XV came to his successor, Marie-Antoinette’s first lady of the bedchamber recalled,19 when ‘A terrible noise exactly like thunder was heard in the outer room of his apartments; it was the crowd of courtiers deserting the antechamber of the dead sovereign to come and greet the new power of Louis XVI.’ Such graphic recollections fill the pages of countless diarists and memorialists who chronicled the intrigues of the Court in loving detail from the time of Louis XIV onwards. Most of them sound astonishingly trivial; but the prestige, wealth, and power they were about were real enough. France was ruled from Versailles, and the rewards of success at Court were limitless.
Some measured it by the public money they were able to amass. At the height of their influence in the 1780s the family of the Duchess de Polignac, the queen’s closest friend, were together drawing an annual 438,000 livres in pensions and salaries. When she retired from Court in 1774 on the death of her royal lover, Mme Du Barry, who had started out in life as a penniless but stunningly pretty milliner, sold her three houses in Versailles but eventually went to live, on a generous pension, in a lavishly furnished country house a few miles away, owning a fortune in jewels. Under the lascivious Louis XV, indeed, royal mistresses could make or break ministers. The Duke de Choiseul, greatest of his servants, reached the highest office by persistent cultivation of Mme de Pompadour; Count de Maurepas, Secretary of State for the Navy, was disgraced and exiled in 1749 for circulating smutty verses about her. He remained in exile until 1774, when a new king, who was not interested in mistresses, plucked him out of oblivion to make him his chief minister and adviser. Until he died in 1781, Maurepas had a hand in the appointment and dismissal of every holder of the four secretaryships of state (foreign affairs, war, the navy, and the royal household), the offices of Comptroller-General of the Finances and Keeper of the Seals (head of the judiciary), and all other places of importance such as intendancies and the Paris lieutenancy of police. As the principal minister of state, with a seat on the most important of the royal councils, he had a predominant voice in all policy-making, and the young monarch gladly yielded to his knowledge and experience even though it had been gained more than a generation previously, when the problems facing the government had been far less acute.
But who else could he turn to? His parents were long dead, and his grandfather Louis XV had done little to initiate him into the duties and mysteries of kingship. He was just 20 when he inherited the throne. His wife, who had been 15 when she had married him in 1770, had been born an archduchess of Austria, but she was still a girl who thought of little but pleasure, and she resented his disinclination to perform his husbandly duties. He had been carefully educated, read several languages, and was conventionally devout. He had a strong sense of duty, and was determined to rule well. That was why he recalled Maurepas, of whom his old tutor had always spoken highly. But his podgy appearance and waddling gait were unimpressive (‘the King looks’, sneered an English nobleman in 1780,20 ‘much like a Castrato’) and the attack of smallpox which unexpectedly carried off Louis XV left his heir feeling, as he put it, as if the universe were falling in on him. He came to the throne, he wailed, too young. There was nothing like the effortless assumption of authority and clear plan of action shown by the 22-year-old Louis XIV, 114 years before-hand, on the day Mazarin died. All Louis XVI had was good intentions.
His Majesty wishes to place Himself out of the Reach of all Intrigue [observed the British ambassador]. This, however, is a vain Expectation, and the Chimera of a Young, inexperienced Mind. The throne He fills, far from raising him above Intrigue, places Him in the Centre of it. Great and Eminent Superiority of Talents might, indeed, crush these Cabals, but as there is no Reason to believe Him possessed of that Superiority, I think, He will be a prey to them and find Himself more and more entangled every Day.21
* See below, pp. 55–6.
2
Enlightened Opinion
The Court of Versailles, where Louis XVI passed his days according to a timetable first elaborated a century earlier, was Louis XIV’s most spectacular legacy. Nor was its influence confined to France. By the early eighteenth century admiring fellow monarchs were building imitations of the sprawling palace and its lavish ornamental gardens all over Europe. From Tsarskoje Selo outside St Petersburg in the east to Aranjuez near Madrid in the west; from Drottningholm, refuge of Swedish monarchs, in the north to Caserta in the Neapolitan south, rulers built themselves out-of-town seats to display their power and flaunt their pleasures. Nor were such piles the only homage paid by foreigners to French cultural prestige in the afterglow of the Sun King. French architecture, French furniture, French fashions dominated continental taste down to the middle of the eighteenth century; and even when, after that, things English came into vogue they made their appearance in a French mirror. Above all, educated Europe adopted the French language. With the exception of England and Spain, it was the preferred tongue of courts everywhere. Recalling court life at Schönbrunn under the Empress Maria Theresia, one of her familiars noted that ‘French was then the language of the upper classes and indeed of cultivated society in general … In those days, the greater part of high society in Vienna could say: I speak French like Diderot and German … like my nurse.’1 In Frederick II’s Berlin or Catherine II’s St Petersburg monarchs gorged on Parisian culture created an atmosphere in which their courtiers almost completely forgot their native languages from lack of use; but even at lower levels nobody now considered themselves educated without a thorough familiarity with French. By the 1770s a certain backlash was beginning. Writers like Herder in Germany or Alfieri in Italy were raging against their compatriots’ servile deference to an alien culture. But as yet their followers were few. Meanwhile, people of education found themselves unprecedentedly well equipped to follow events in France, form judgements about what was happening there, and absorb the ever-swelling outpourings of French literary life.
While monarchs willingly subscribed to the Correspondance littéraire issued from Paris by the expatriate German Baron Grimm, from 1754, their subjects, at less cost, found an expanding range of other journals to keep them well informed. The unadventurous could confine themselves to the long-established Mercure de France for news of public events, or the Journal des savants for learned ones; but both these periodicals were semi-official and subject to close government censorship. From mid-century a wide range of more independent journals, some specialized and some not, became available. Most had an ephemeral existence, and few of those which survived could have done so without the efforts of one or two persistent individuals. Nevertheless in the seventy years between 1715 and 1785 the number almost quadrupled (from 22 to 79), and it was quite beyond the government’s resources to supervise the contents of them all. Indeed, the one it was always keenest to censor, the Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, which from 1728 onwards kept up a regular critical commentary on the management and outlook of the established Church, always eluded attempts to find its presses. Journals identified openly with particular individuals, such as the popular, conservative Année littéraire of Fréron (appearing from 1754) or the unpredictable Annales politiques civiles et littéraires produced from 1777 by Linguet, were more vulnerable. Linguet spent the years 1780–2 in the Bastille for his journalistic excesses. But even then surrogates kept his fortnightly commentary going, and the memoirs he wrote on his release, initially appearing in his Annales before separate publication, became a best-seller with their lurid evocation of the living death suffered by all those whom the whim of despotism chose to consign to that lowering and mysterious fortress. Henceforth, however, Linguet took the precaution of publishing outside French jurisdiction, in the Austrian Netherlands. In fact, the boldest French language periodicals had always been produced beyond the frontier. Oldest and most respectable was the Gazette de Leyde, founded in Holland by Huguenot refugees in 1677 and still under Protestant direction. It provided its re
aders with detailed and well-informed accounts of French domestic politics and the issues at stake in them, with a gentle but persistent bias against authority. Almost as popular, though less well known, was the fortnightly Courrier d’Avignon, published from 1733 in that enclave of papal territory in the south. The more conservative but well-informed Courrier du Bas Rhin was produced in Prussian Cleves; while the intellectually radical Journal encyclopédique came out in the tiny independent south Belgian principality of Bouillon.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution Page 7