After these traumas the accession of Louis XVI was widely regarded as an opportunity for a new start. As the coffin of Louis XV was hustled away under cover of darkness, boundless hopes and expectations were invested in the unsullied young monarch. But his unsullied qualities rapidly became a public joke. Married since 1770, he seemed incapable of siring an heir, if not positively disinclined even to try. His first child, a daughter, only arrived in 1778, after medical attention. Meanwhile pamphleteering ribaldry ran riot, much of it directed against the presumed frustrations of his queen. From the safety of London ruthless scandal-mongers blackmailed the king’s ministers for several years into paying them not to publish ever-more scabrous tales about her. Her extravagance, frivolity, and indiscreet political meddling in turn made her an easy target, as her unpredictable brother the Emperor Joseph II blundered through international affairs threatening to drag France at any moment into war on Austrian coat-tails. When in 1785 rumours arose that she wished to buy a fabulously expensive diamond necklace, nobody was surprised. A credulous courtier prelate, the Cardinal de Rohan, sought to ingratiate himself with her by securing it, but found himself merely the victim of an elaborate swindle. The queen was not involved, but Rohan had to vindicate himself before the parlement of Paris in 1786 in a show trial which inevitably cast implicit aspersions on her conduct. She took his acquittal as a personal insult, even though the perpetrators of the fraud were punished. The huge crowds which fêted the cardinal after his release were plainly delighted at her humiliation, and went on to condemn the petulance of the royal reaction which sent the acquitted Rohan immediately into provincial exile. With two sons now to his credit (born in 1781 and 1785), the king himself stood perhaps higher in public esteem than a decade earlier. But the scandal brought the whole world of the Court into a disrepute every bit as deep as that of Louis XV’s final years—especially when, in 1787, its cost to the taxpayers was revealed for the first time.
Nor did the restoration of the parlements bring back the political confidence shattered by Maupeou. They returned to their various seats amid huge displays of popularity, but several soon squandered their credit in vicious quarrels between ‘returner’ magistrates who had been exiled under Maupeou and ‘remainers’ who had co-operated with him. That of Paris, after a show of resistance to the reforms of the Physiocrat minister Turgot in 1775 and 1776, took no further stands against authority. ‘No doubt’, remarked a disgusted provincial judge in 1783,13 ‘there was a time when the magistrates of that august tribunal, animated by the public weal … gave forceful opposition to the ruinous enterprises of ministers … Today, enervated by the pleasures of a voluptuous life, led by ambition, they yield with blind deference to the monarch’s wishes.’ The search therefore continued for institutions that would give France more effective protection against despotism—whether ministerial, at the centre, or local, in the form of the intendants who wielded royal authority in the provinces. The intendants had never been mere passive agents of their master. Their duties were so widely defined that the scope for independent initiative had always been wide. But during the later eighteenth century they seemed to be interfering in more and more aspects of provincial life, driven by a mission to improve the lot of those whom (as they put it) they administered, whether the latter liked it or not. Some were avowed disciples of the Physiocrats, like Turgot himself before he became a minister. All were believers in rationalizing wherever they could, and putting the latest knowledge to practical public use. But, whether in forcing the alignment of streets, promoting inoculation against smallpox, moving insanitary graveyards from town centres, refusing to control bread prices, preventing the sale of diseased cattle, or devising schemes for forcing the poor to work, they outraged popular prejudices and intensified their basic unpopularity as agents of taxation. Their activity also brought them into conflict with other authorities like parlements or provincial estates, whose members did not necessarily disagree with their enlightened ends, but challenged their authority to pursue them. An intendant, declared the parlement of Besançon in September 1787,14 ‘is subject to no inspection; … his arbitrary activities, arbitrarily directed and executed, are regulated by no principle other than the most blind Despotism … His absolute power, like that of his underlings, is completely exempt from all accountability … and may with impunity effect the most shocking vexations.’
The answer to such problems was increasingly seen as provincial representative bodies in some form or other. Some provinces had them already, of course, in the form of estates. Pays d’états had intendants like other regions, but at least they could bargain with them, and share some of their powers. In Brittany, the mid-1780s were marked by repeated clashes between the two. Despite the obvious challenge to their own authority, more thoughtful magistrates in the parlements had begun to advocate the establishment of estates, or restoration of long-defunct ones, in their respective provinces from the late 1750s. In the 1770s a number of sovereign courts, like the Paris Court of Aids and the parlements of Grenoble and Bordeaux, took up the call, at least intermittently. Assemblies of leading landowners were also a favourite proposal among the Physiocrats, although they had increasing doubts about estates as a model: they were too heterogeneous and tradition-bound. Turgot and his adviser while in office, Dupont de Nemours, dreamed of a uniform hierarchy of assemblies representing landowners from village (or ‘municipality’) level up to that of provinces. The only practical step to be taken before 1787, however, was the introduction of ‘provincial administrations’ by Necker in 1778. These bodies of landowners, nominated in the first instance and comprising (like the estates of Languedoc) a quarter nobles, a quarter clergy, and one-half members of the third estate, sat not as representatives of ancient provinces but as adjuncts to intendants in their generalities. Berry and upper Guyenne received them first, and a third one was projected for the area around Boulogne when Necker lost power in 1781. It never came to fruition; but the other two, and their intermediary commissions when they were not sitting, functioned smoothly right down to the Revolution, a working if much debated model for a more representative way of administering the kingdom.
Everything Necker did was much debated. In fact his whole career and outlook was a standing challenge to established ways of doing things. A Swiss Protestant banker, largely self-made, he became well known in Paris intellectual society in the 1760s and early 1770s thanks to his wife’s much-frequented salon. Here, while he sat silent and inscrutable, she carefully cultivated his reputation for financial wizardry and general wisdom. Then in the spring of 1775, at the height of the ‘Flour War’, he published a book advocating a controlled grain trade, much to the fury of Turgot and his free-trading supporters. It won him enormous popularity—the beginning of a ‘Neckeromania’ that lasted, with ups and downs, until 1790—and carried him, though a foreigner and member of a proscribed faith, to the directorship of the treasury. Failure to find a more orthodox candidate showed how far established circles had already lost faith in their own capacities. In addition to his spectacular management of the finances,* Necker began to reorganize central accounting procedures and the structure of taxation, commissioned a nationwide survey of venality of offices in the hope of curbing its excesses, and set up provincial assemblies in part at least to offset the influence of the parlements. Above all he made constant efforts to keep public opinion on his side, recognizing more clearly than anybody so far the political importance of this new force that had emerged since mid-century. He discovered its limits too: when in 1781 he attempted to use his popularity to win a greater say in high policy-making, he was rebuffed. Nor was Louis XVI intimidated when, in another break with precedent, he resigned in protest. But that only led him further down the path of innovation. Instead of returning to banking, he spent the next few years writing a defence of his record, De l’Administration des Finances, which laid bare in great detail how central government worked. Appearing in three volumes in 1785, it was an international best-seller, setting out its
author’s claims to be regarded as the natural alternative minister, whom the king must sooner or later recall to power if his government were to have any hope of retaining public confidence.
But that was only the Neckerite view. Ministers still in power felt that they had every right to public confidence. The most important policy the king had pursued, after all, had been gloriously successful. The humiliations of the Seven Years War were finally avenged in 1783 when Great Britain was forced to recognize the independence of her North American colonies. French help, on both land and sea, had played a crucial part in this achievement. Scarcely less impressive had been the way peace was maintained on the European continent while the overseas struggle went on. No wonder Vergennes, the architect of these achievements and most important of the king’s ministers after Maurepas died, viewed Necker’s antics with some contempt. But apart from its cost, involvement in America raised a whole range of further discontents in France.
Conservatives warned from the start that a king was unwise to give support to republican rebels against a fellow monarch; but public interest in America had been stirred long before the colonists declared their independence by the quarrels that preceded the break. Readers were prepared for it, too, by the Histoire philosophique des deux Indes appearing in 1772 under the name of the Abbé Raynal (though in fact a co-operative work whose contributors included Diderot). A sensational attack on European overseas expansion, it predicted the independence of colonial settlements, and, as its prophecies came true, went through over fifty editions before the end of the century. From the start of their quarrel with British authority the Americans used the language of liberty and representation, striking immediate echoes in a France obsessed with despotism. When John Adams arrived in Bordeaux in 1778, the first president of the local parlement welcomed him with the declaration that:15 ‘He could not avoid sympathising with every sincere friend of Liberty in the world … He had reason he said to feel for the Sufferers in the Cause of Liberty, because he had suffered many Years in that cause himself. He had been banished … in the time of Louis the fifteenth, for … Remonstrances against the arbitrary Conduct and pernicious Edicts of the Court.’ Few Frenchmen knew much about America first hand, until the return of the 8,000 soldiers who served there, after the peace of 1783. Raynal, who published a further book on the revolt in 1780, had never made the voyage, and nor had the authors of many of the accounts of life in the new world which attempted to satisfy public enthusiasm. But translations soon appeared of the key documents in the struggle—pamphlets like Paine’s Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, and the constitutions of several of the new states. And Parisian high society was conquered between 1777 and 1783 by the brilliant propaganda of Franklin, the new republic’s ambassador. Already famous as the inventor of the lightning conductor, his homespun philosophizing and simple style charmed the world of the Court and the intellectual salons alike. He seemed a living advertisement for the virtues of Rousseauistic simplicity, the product of a sylvan paradise far from the jaded artificiality of Europe. And although he flourished amid metropolitan glitter, and declared publicly that he saw no prospect of changing it, he sponsored the first open attack on the principle of nobility. The renegade Count de Mirabeau’s Considerations on the Order of Cincinnatus (1784) condemned a hereditary order of chivalry which officers in the War of Independence had set up to commemorate their involvement. It was Franklin who brought the issue to Mirabeau’s attention as returned French officers like the vainglorious Lafayette appeared in Paris flaunting the new society’s insignia. Thus issues raised in America reflected critically on French society as well as French politics, and interest in the new republic and the principles it stood for continued unabated after the peace. With the return of the veterans, it even grew better informed.
But the most important thing about America did not depend on accurate information. It was the simple fact that new starts had been shown to be possible. Existing political authority could be thrown off, and institutions rebuilt from their foundations on more rational, freer lines. The improvement, the regeneration, of human laws and institutions was no longer a mere matter of Utopian dreaming. It was happening before men’s eyes in America. As Jacques-Pierre Brissot, a jobbing journalist quick to cash in on every passing fashion, wrote when he read the most popular account of America, Crèvecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer, in 1784,16
These letters will inspire or reawaken perhaps in blasé souls of Europeans the taste for virtue and the simple life … Energetic souls will find in them something more. They will see here a country, a government, where the desires of their hearts have been realised, a land which speaks to them in their own language. The happiness for which they have sighed finally does in truth exist.
America appealed, in fact, to what Jean-Joseph Mounier, one of the leading revolutionaries of 1789, would later remember as ‘a general restlessness and desire for change’.17 It manifested itself in the vogue for wonders of all sorts, whether Franklin’s lightning rod, or the first manned flights in the hot-air balloons seen rising over so many cities in 1783 and 1784, or a craze for Mesmerism and miraculous cures effected by tapping the supposedly hidden natural forces of ‘animal magnetism’. Established religion might be losing its mystic appeal, but science was bringing other miracles to light. Seekers after this newer, truer, wisdom believed themselves most likely to find it in the ‘royal art’ of freemasonry. Between 800 and 900 masonic lodges were founded in France between 1732 and 1793, two-thirds of them after 1760. Between 1773 and 1779 well over 20,000 members were recruited. Few towns of any consequence were without one or more lodges by the 1780s and, despite several papal condemnations of a deistic cult that had originated in Protestant England, the élite of society flocked to join. Voltaire was drafted in on his last visit to Paris, and it was before the assembled brethren of the Nine Sisters Lodge that he exchanged symbolic embraces with Franklin. Masonry was riddled with hierarchy. Women were excluded (although a handful of defiant all-female lodges surfaced in the 1780s), men tended to join lodges where they would find their social peers, and there were innumerable grades of perfection through which adepts could pass. But within the lodges masons spoke of themselves as brothers and equals, and they elected their officers according to their talents, not their rank. Like the members of the literary societies mushrooming everywhere over the same period, most masons were well-educated commoners—often in fact the same people—and in masonry their cultural equality was fully recognized. And whereas most masonic assemblies consisted of rituals, followed by much eating and drinking, some brothers dreamed of putting the organization to more practical use. Philanthropic collections were organized; and the Nine Sisters Lodge threw itself into the vindication of wronged innocence in the judicial crusades of the mid-1780s. Mostly they steered clear of politics; but the sensational exposure in 1787 of a plot by self-styled Illuminati to use masonic organization to subvert the government of Bavaria threw general suspicion on to a movement much of whose appeal lay in its secrecy. Belief in plots and conspiracies was yet another sign of the credulity of the times. The same cast of mind also tended to seek simple, universal formulae to resolve any problem, no matter how complex. Its limitations would be tragically exposed in the storm that was about to break.
* See below, pp. 66–8.
3
Crisis and Collapse, 1776–1788
Ever since the disasters of the Seven Years War Frenchmen had longed to see British arrogance humbled, and the power of ‘the modern Carthage’ broken. By the time Louis XVI ascended the throne that process seemed well under way, as the quarrel between Great Britain and her thirteen North American colonies deepened. French observers looked on with growing interest, and by the spring of 1776 Vergennes, the Foreign Secretary, was convinced that ‘Providence had marked out this moment for the humiliation of England’.1 He persuaded the king that it would be to France’s advantage to intervene. In April secret supplies began to be sent to the Americans, and the fir
st steps were taken to mobilize French naval strength. Thus began a deterioration in French relations with the British which culminated in February 1778 in a treaty of alliance between France and the United States, followed by five years of all-out warfare. When it ended, the British empire did indeed appear to have been shattered, France was revenged, and her international prestige stood gloriously restored. Yet Anglo-American trade was soon more vigorous than ever, while France reaped few commercial benefits. And the effort of the war had brought the State to the brink of financial exhaustion.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution Page 10