Both Émile and the Social Contract were condemned when they appeared, and Rousseau fled the country, only returning permanently after eight years of wanderings. But it was not the political content of either work that the parlement of Paris, decreeing his arrest, found offensive. It was the affront to religion in his remarks on civil religion in the Social Contract, and the moving ‘Profession of faith of the Savoyard curate’ in Émile. The former declared Christianity a perpetual source of civil disorders, and denounced priests; the latter proclaimed that the true gospel was belief in a benevolent god of nature rather than any particular body of Christian doctrine. Rousseau’s temperament was emotional and religious, but in the eyes of the devout he appeared no less blasphemous than the mocking, irreverent Voltaire. To stem the rising tide of irreligion increasingly came to appear as the main task confronting the Church. Refutations of philosophic impieties poured from the presses, and pious laymen in positions of authority used every available means to suppress dissent. But the Church itself was not united, and its divisions opened it to yet further ridicule. Bitter quarrels over the bull Unigenitus, promulgated in 1713 against Jansenism, lasted half a century, and only died down in the late 1760s. Jansenists rejected many of the doctrines and emphases imposed on the Church after the sixteenth-century Council of Trent. The puritans of the Catholic Church, they opposed lax theology, excessive papal and episcopal power, and above all the influence of the Jesuits in Church and State. It was Jansenists in the parlement of Paris who engineered the Jesuits’ downfall, although philosophers appalled by the prospect of a Jansenist-dominated Church hurriedly claimed it as a victory for Enlightenment. But the course of the previous quarrel, with its persecution of priestly dissidents, refusal of sacraments to dying opponents of Unigenitus, and occasional spectacular displays of hysteria and holy-rolling (the so-called ‘convulsionaries’ of Saint-Médard), brought no credit or dignity to any of those involved. So it was not only the scoffing of infidels which spread the conviction that the religious life of France needed comprehensive reform. Besides, sensibilities were changing even among the orthodox. Less ostentatious forms of piety were finding greater favour. When they made wills, testators endowed fewer memorial masses, and expressed their dying beliefs in less elaborate terms. Alive, they lit fewer votive candles, and showed less interest in religious confraternities or the austerities of the monastic life. Horace Walpole, prizing in France the romantic devotional trappings that England had lost at the Reformation, was disappointed at the change of atmosphere he found in the convents of Paris in 1771:
It is very singular that I have not half the satisfaction in going into churches and convents that I used to have. The consciousness that the vision is dispelled, the want of fervour so obvious in the religious, the solitude that one knows proceeds from contempt, not from contemplation, make these places appear like abandoned theatres destined to destruction. The monks trot about as if they had not long to stay there; and what used to be holy gloom is now but dirt and darkness.7
By then, smaller monasteries were being suppressed or merged wholesale. By then, too, the quarrels over Unigenitus had lost their urgency with the defeat of the Jesuits. And, beset by unbelievers, Catholics were even showing themselves more tolerant towards French Protestants. Since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Protestants had enjoyed no legal existence. Their baptisms, marriages, and burials enjoyed no status at law, and their pastors committed a capital offence in conducting services. In the course of the 1760s, however, active persecution of pastors ceased, and the open-air services traditional among the Protestants of Languedoc were no longer molested. Parish priests might still fulminate against heresy, but the barbarity of intolerance was the preferred theme of many of their bishops; and while the civil authorities still sent out troops to break up Protestant services, they always sent them deliberately in the wrong direction. The horrors of intolerance seemed vividly demonstrated when, in 1762, the Toulouse Protestant Jean Calas was put to death by the parlement of Languedoc for allegedly murdering his son to prevent him embracing Catholicism. Voltaire, appalled by recent news of what proved to be the last execution of a pastor in the same area, concluded that this was a case of judicial murder inspired by superstitious bigotry. He launched a furious journalistic campaign to rehabilitate Calas, which in 1765 achieved success before the king’s Council. In 1775, after a longer struggle, he secured rehabilitation of the Sirven family, also condemned in Languedoc for murdering an apostate daughter, although they had escaped Calas’s fate by fleeing to Switzerland. Such cases stirred the conscience of educated laymen; and by the 1780s few could be found, openly at least, to uphold the penal laws against Protestants. In Necker, Louis XVI even had a Protestant minister between 1777 and 1781. The final abrogation of their disabilities, already in practical abeyance, seemed only a matter of time.
It was not only the bigotry of the Toulouse judges that outraged Voltaire. It was also the cruelty and injustice of the laws which they applied. Calas was broken on the wheel, a grisly process in which the condemned person’s limbs were smashed with iron bars and the mutilated corpse raised up for public display on a cartwheel. Even more atrocious punishments were possible. Damiens, a dim-witted jobbing servant who stabbed Louis XV with a penknife in 1757, was first tortured to obtain the names of accomplices, then pinched with red-hot irons, after which four horses tried (in vain) to pull him apart. Regicide was of course a particularly heinous crime, with dreadful echoes in French history, and Damiens’s execution was based on carefully researched precedents. Thousands thronged the place de Grève, outside the Paris Hôtel de Ville, to watch these once-in-a-lifetime refinements on the everyday spectacle of public execution. Another case Voltaire took up was that of La Barre, who in 1766, convicted of various petty adolescent acts of blasphemy and sacrilege, was tortured and burned at the stake. A copy of Voltaire’s own Philosophical Dictionary was thrown into the flames after him. Laws which condoned such things, the philosopher argued, were monstrous, irrational, and absurd, and he welcomed the French translation in 1765 of Beccaria’s plea for a more measured, humane, and torture-free system of criminal justice, Of Crimes and Punishments (1764). By the early 1770s the government was announcing plans for a general reform and codification of the laws, and Voltaire led the applause for this promise. Nothing, however, emerged during his lifetime, or for a decade afterwards, apart from the abolition in 1780 of torture to obtain confessions. But in the mid-1780s there surfaced a whole series of miscarriages of justice, which, exploited by an able younger generation of polemicists, who swamped the public with thousands of copies of legal briefs not subject to censorship, reawakened concern at the law’s cruelties, inconsistencies, and failure to safeguard innocence.
Their inspiration was Voltaire’s campaign over Calas. In order to restore the dead martyr’s name, he had successfully mobilized public opinion. The idea of public opinion was not new, but in the mid-eighteenth century its meaning changed. Previously opinion had meant something distinct from knowledge or truth; merely something that people happened to believe. Now increasingly, opinion came to imply informed judgement, and public opinion was often described as a ‘tribunal’ whose verdict was final and usually correct. ‘Among the singularities which mark out the age we live in from all others’, wrote Rousseau in 1776,8 ‘is the methodical and sustained spirit which has guided public opinions over the last twenty years. Until now these opinions wandered aimless and unregulated at the whim of men’s passions, and the endless interplay of these passions made the public float from one to another without any constant direction.’ Philosophers sought to provide such direction, and after his success over Calas, Voltaire believed it was possible. ‘Opinion governs the world,’ he wrote,9 ‘and in the end philosophers govern men’s opinions.’ But in fact they were not the first in the field. Both sides in the religious quarrels of mid-century had sought to whip up public support, the Jansenists with their elusive, secretly published Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, the Jesuits
with their Journal de Trévoux, not to mention furious pamphleteering by each. And even further back, the parlements during the Regency had begun to print and publicly distribute their remonstrances, a deliberate tactic to involve educated readers in their political disagreements with the government. These techniques became standard in the 1750s as religious and financial disputes between the Crown and the sovereign courts reached a new intensity. The years between 1758 and 1764 saw a last attempt by the traditional organs of censorship to prevent open discussion of matters of state, whether religious, administrative, or financial. Attempts to suppress the Encyclopédie, the works of Rousseau, and other speculative writings were part of this pattern. So was a royal declaration of 1764 prohibiting public sale of any works relating to the finances or administration of the State. But the line could not be held; and indeed government ministers themselves came increasingly to feel that it was perhaps better for the public to be well informed than uninformed. They even turned to courting opinion for themselves. Preambles to royal edicts grew longer and longer. Unwelcome remonstrances from the parlements were not only quashed, they were refuted. When Maupeou remodelled the parlements, he hired a team of writers to praise and defend what he was doing. But, mused an anxious and well-placed observer, ‘each step makes matters worse. Somebody writes, another replies … everybody will want to analyse the constitution of the state; tempers will be lost. Issues are being raised which nobody would have dared think of … the knowledge the peoples are acquiring must, a little sooner or a little later, bring about revolutions.’10
Nothing did more to fuel this surge of public discussion than the Seven Years War. Undertaken with no clear aims, in alliance with Austria, a traditional enemy of centuries’ standing, it led to humiliating defeats on land and sea at what seemed like enormous economic cost. Taxes and state borrowing had soared, but there was nothing to show for such efforts. In these circumstances an inquest began which spared no aspect of French society or institutions, and was encouraged at a certain level by the government itself. In 1763, unprecedentedly, it even asked the parlements to make proposals for economic and fiscal reform—which produced nothing very constructive, unwisely flattered their pretensions, and left them aggrieved when, ignoring their suggestions, ministers turned in preference to the untried theories of a group calling themselves by the new and unfamiliar name of ‘Economists’.
Their founder was a royal doctor, Quesnay, who in a number of articles in the Encyclopédie in 1756, and later in his Tableau économique (1758), argued (in curious parallel to Rousseau) that there existed a natural, benevolent economic order which had been distorted by ill-judged and artificial human intervention. Economic wealth could only be unlocked by removing all unnatural burdens, particularly on agriculture, which was the only true productive activity. These ideas were developed by a number of other authors throughout the 1760s, including Mirabeau, Le Mercier de la Rivière, and Dupont de Nemours, whose book Physiocracy (1768) gave the Economists an alternative name. Paradoxically, the economic freedom preached by the Physiocrats implied a powerful, interventionist role for governments, for only they had the strength to sweep away artificial impediments to the natural economic order. Le Mercier even advocated a sort of despotism, which he called legal because its sole purpose would be to bring in the greatest of all laws, that of nature itself. Ministers had no wish to be thought despotic, but they were attracted to Physiocracy because it promised wealth. A natural, free market, with all artificial constraints removed, would make producers rich. They could then pay more taxes. As Quesnay had put it in the Encyclopédie: poor peasant, poor kingdom.
The constraints on free production were of course innumerable—customary and collective methods, feudal dues, indirect taxes, internal tolls and customs barriers, productive monopolies like guilds, local and sectional privileges. No wonder it would take a despot to remove them all. But one seemed easier to deal with than the others, since it had always been closely co-ordinated by the central government. The whole elaborate apparatus of controls on the grain trade, fixing prices and limiting export and even inter-provincial commerce, seemed ripe for rationalization. The trade had always been so carefully controlled, of course, because guaranteed supplies of bread were deemed fundamental in ensuring public order. But Physiocrats argued that freedom would create greater abundance, thereby banishing the fears immemorially associated with famine. Accordingly, in May 1763, a free internal market in grain was proclaimed, and just over a year later free export was also allowed when prices were below a certain level. A generation’s good harvests underlay the optimism behind this policy, but in the late 1760s they came to an end. When crops failed no amount of administrative tinkering could guarantee abundance, and the new freedom was blamed for aggravating if not causing the shortages of these years, A furious public debate broke out, in which partisans of the old controls accused the reformers of starving the king’s subjects and abandoning, at the behest of visionary theorists, the Crown’s age-old commitment to keeping them alive. To arguments that in the long run the high prices resulting from lack of controls would stimulate production and so eventually bring prices down, magistrates facing bread riots replied by urging practical realism. ‘The people are not wrong to complain, they are in no state to pay for their bread,’ wrote the first president of the parlement of Bordeaux to the province’s governor in 1773, after tumults which he thought had come within inches of putting the city to sack.11 ‘ … their normal remark is to say we prefer to die on a gibbet rather than die of hunger, it’s shorter … Why insist on keeping up the price of bread? As for me, I confess, it seems to me that in a country where taxes are carried to excess, the king is bound to assure his subjects the only thing they have left: their lives.’ Faced with such problems, ministers wavered, but attempts to reimpose controls through preferential contracting in the early 1770s scarcely restored confidence. They were now accused of deliberately plotting to starve the people by a ‘famine pact’ which put the trade in the hands of a profiteering private monopoly.
Around 1770, in fact, confidence in the way France was governed in general rapidly began to run out. Although some of the losses of the Seven Years War were made up with the annexation of Lorraine (1766) and Corsica (1768), the Austrian alliance, which survived the war, remained deeply unpopular. When it was renewed in 1770 with the marriage of Louis XV’s grandson and heir to the Archduchess Marie-Antoinette, celebrations in Paris went wrong, and 136 people were killed when a crowd stampeded. It seemed like an omen; and the feasting which continued at Versailles left bitter memories in the capital. By now the insatiable sexual appetites of Louis XV were common knowledge, and although French subjects did not begrudge their kings manly pleasures (the equally insatiable Henry IV remained the popular ideal of a good king) the latest official mistress, Mme Du Barry, was little more than a prostitute from the streets of Paris. Her position made it impossible for her not to be drawn into politics, but her role was much criticized, for she was associated with the rise of Maupeou and Terray, and the fall of the popular Duke de Choiseul. Terray, in addition to arousing popular suspicions of promoting a famine pact, declared a partial bankruptcy which outraged all holders of government stocks. His later attempts to revise tax-assessments and improve the efficiency of their collection soon won him the reputation of an extortioner. Maupeou’s attacks on the parlements, meanwhile, raised a nation-wide outcry. Although Voltaire, who always believed a strong and benevolent monarch was the best means of achieving reforms, applauded the striking down of a magistracy whom he saw as the obscurantist murderers of Calas and La Barre, most other philosophers joined the general protest. ‘We are on the verge of a crisis’, wrote Diderot as Maupeou struck,12 ‘which will end in slavery or in freedom; if it is slavery, it will be a slavery similar to that existing in Morocco or at Constantinople. If all the parlements are dissolved … farewell any … corrective principle preventing the monarch from degenerating into despotism.’ He, like everybody else, had absorbed the lesson
s of Montesquieu. A monarchy untempered by intermediary powers was a despotism, the worst of all governments, whose subjects enjoyed no rights, and no security. The parlements, whatever their flaws, had seemed to offer the French some protection against authority. It was now shown to be an illusion. In the protests which greeted Maupeou’s action, whether in printed remonstrances from the stricken courts or individual pamphlets, a new theme was heard: the Estates-General. The ancient national representative body had not met since 1614, and nobody had more than the haziest notion of its composition or powers; but few doubted that it would have more authority than the parlements. As Maupeou’s reforms established themselves, and the initial clamour against him died down, so did the calls for the Estates-General. But the idea was launched, and it kept recurring in political discussion over the ensuing decade and a half.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution Page 9