The Fall of Toulon

by Bernard Ireland

  Laws and royal edicts required the approval of one of the thirteen high courts of parlement. Brienne approached that of Paris but here ran into trouble, its senior figures arguing that the opportunity should be taken to challenge the absolute authority of the monarch. Any new plans for taxation, they argued, must be the responsibility of the Estates General, which must include a high proportion of commoners, the so-called Third Estate. Their obstinacy on the issue struck a chord with the populace, which created individual heroes. Pamphlets, posters, the press and street theatre all lampooned authority. This responded with a heavy hand, unsuccessfully seeking to defuse the issue through a physical relocation of the parlement.

  Emboldened by public acclaim, the Paris parlement told the king in April 1788 that his will alone was insufficient to make law, and that the Estates General must be involved. Gravely displeased, Louis’s response was to limit the powers and functions of the middle-ranking judiciary that formed the core of the parlements.

  This was followed, on 6 May, by the arrest of the most influential members of each of these bodies. The courts themselves had been surprised, even dismayed, by the volume of public support that they suddenly attracted as catalysts of a greater process, a growing popular revolt at what was held to be a repressive regime. If anything, feelings ran higher in the provinces than in the capital.

  Through the so-called lits de justice (literally ‘beds of justice’; in reality, a royal hearing), the king possessed the ultimate power to overrule intransigent parlements and, days after the arrests, he invoked these to enforce his will. The public mood was now dangerously volatile and, on 7 June, the powder train was ignited when a military detachment was sent to arrest magistrates of the Grenoble parlement. Business came to a standstill as townsfolk rallied to prevent the arrests. Insults and scuffles escalated to stone-throwing. Injuries to soldiers led, inevitably, to shots being fired. The reformers had their first martyrs.

  Anxious to defuse the situation, the local intendant (provincial administrator) and the military governor offered to withdraw the troops on condition that the magistrates volunteered their own arrest. Well aware that matters were getting out of control, the latter were ready to comply but by now the mob was calling the tune. It was the governor who had to leave, his residence then being comprehensively sacked. The triumphant townsfolk then installed what, by this time, must have been thoroughly apprehensive magistrates in their courthouse for a special sitting.

  Omens were bad. The events at Grenoble had shown how easily control could break down in the face of mass disobedience, and how little stomach the military had for firing on unarmed civilians. For would-be reformers of the system, they also demonstrated how easily matters could spiral beyond their control.

  Tax collection became almost impossible as disobedience and disturbance became general. Brienne appealed to the clergy for their calming influence, only to be told that they disagreed with government’s reforms. In July 1788 he announced that the Estates General would be summoned the following May. He then resigned.

  For the interim, the king relented and re-established the parlements with full powers. He ran into immediate trouble, however, when the obdurate Paris parlement declared that the estates, when they met, must do so in their traditional form. This meant that the three constituent bodies – the nobility, the clergy and the commoners (the Third Estate) – should have equal numbers of representatives. The first two could thus always collude to out-vote the third, maintaining privilege and crushing popular aspirations. This situation could no longer be tolerated, and what had begun as a disagreement between the king and the aristocracy had widened into one setting the privileged against the unprivileged. Fiery public debate demanded that the Third Estate would have to be equal in number to the other two combined and for voting to be by a simple head count as opposed to one vote per grouping. In the framing of the hoped-for new national constitution, the people were insisting on a fair say. By the end of the year the king had acceded to the first demand, although doubts remained as to how the voting itself would be organized. Selection of deputies began early in 1789.

  At over 1,200 strong, the Estates General was large. The nobles were not of the Court but were wealthy landowners, mostly conservative, a few liberal. Eighty per cent of the clergy were parish priests, in touch with the congregations that they served but, like the nobility, keen in general to safeguard their existing rights. For the most part, commoners were professional people of some substance. The Estates General’s remit appeared reasonable enough, including the retention of the monarchy, albeit one stripped of its absolute authority. There would be an assault on official waste and, importantly, the people would be given a voice in the future framing of its affairs.

  During 1788 France had experienced exceptional weather, sufficiently extreme to be a national disaster. Lashing summer hailstorms followed by drought had ruined both vines and grain. Poor harvests had then preceded a particularly severe winter when mills, dependent upon water power but completely frozen, were unable to produce flour. The thaw had then resulted in floods. Inevitably, the price of staples had risen beyond the capacity of working folk to pay. Destitution and debt were followed by mass evictions. The widespread deprivation was also widely blamed on hoarders and speculators withholding stocks until such time as they could be released for maximum profit. General unrest provided a fertile field for agitators of all persuasions.

  Wishing to improve matters, the king invited each parish to submit a cahier (or register) of grievances upon which the work of the Estates General would be based. Overall, these proved to be remarkably consistent and noble in sentiment. In taxation, all should be treated equally with no exemption due to privilege. All government expenditure should be accountable. Imposition of taxes should be a matter for the Estates General, which should henceforth meet regularly as a national assembly. Land reform and a national education policy also figured largely. But what emerged above all was a desire for freedom of speech, for individuals as much as for the press.

  At Versailles on 2 May 1789 the Estates General duly processed before King Louis XVI. The latter began badly by receiving the nobles and the clergy in the prestigious Hall of Mirrors, but the Third Estate (to whom he did not speak) in a neighbouring apartment.

  The assembly commenced business against a backdrop of widespread popular dissatisfaction. A volatile populace was played upon by a veritable infestation of hotheads, encouraging them to demonstrate against all manner of targets, from the government to their own employers. Violence was increasing, with bodies such as the City Watch and Gardes Françaises frequently having to enlist the assistance of regular forces to restore order. Many of the latter, however, were supportive of the crowds that they had been called in to suppress.

  On 17 June, with a Third Estate majority, the Estates General voted to restyle itself the National Assembly, usurping the king’s authority in also declaring that all existing taxation was illegal until it reaffirmed and authorized its validity. Louis, grief stricken at the recent death of his 7-year-old son and heir, was not inclined to use force to reimpose his will, deciding instead to declare a séance royale, or royal session. Here, all would meet in a forum in which, theoretically at least, any opinion might be freely aired. His intention was to rule illegal the decision to form a National Assembly but to mitigate the inevitable outcry such a decision would provoke by a promise of rapid implementation of agreed reforms.

  The usual venue for so formal an occasion had needed to be closed for necessary alteration. Apparently poorly informed, the assembly leaders construed this as some form of lockout and all gathered in a nearby covered tennis court. Having agreed not to push the monarch too far they (with a single exception) then took the famous oath that, before God and the nation, they would not be separated before they had produced ‘a solid and equitable constitution’ and established it on solid foundation.

  The séance royale of 23 June 1789 was a tense affair. Louis addressed a silent gathering, the com
moners separated from the other two orders. He proposed concessions but hedged them with provisos. All reforms, he declared, must be seen as by royal initiative and not as concessions won by demand. He then commanded the assembly to disperse and to reassemble the following day in their separate chambers. At this, he and his Court withdrew.

  After the king’s departure, the somewhat chastened gathering was harangued by the imposing person of the comte de Mirabeau. He reminded deputies of their collective oath, that their sovereign had treated them with disdain and that their prerogative was to remain and go about their legislative business. Reminded of the royal command by the Master of Ceremonies, a youthful marquis, Mirabeau asserted that they were assembled by ‘the will of the people’ and would be dispersed only by bayonets. The supervising dean of debates, the respected academic Jean-Sylvain Bailly, added that ‘the assembled nation cannot be given orders’.

  The king, still distracted by bereavement, apparently conceded defeat in the face of this defiance, satisfying himself by formally requesting those of the two privileged orders who had not yet aligned themselves to the assembly to do so. His acquiescence, however, may have resulted from rumours that a large throng was preparing to march on Versailles.

  To reinforce his remaining authority, Louis began to move army units towards the capital. Regiment by regiment, the troops numbered a reported 20,000 by the end of July. This was increasingly read by Parisians as the means by which the king proposed to suppress the assembly. The popular mood turned ugly and, even as the assembly debated the form of the proposed constitution, supporters of the Third Estate roamed the streets, challenging all who did not overtly declare their loyalties through the wearing of a green favour.

  When the king dismissed the increasingly unpopular Calonne, the director-general of finance, the value of money plummeted. This was at that time of the year when, just before the harvest, the price of bread was at its highest. Mobs ransacked shops and suppliers for weapons, prompting the electors (those qualified to select the deputies to serve in the parlement) to fund their own militia. Within the city, smaller units of regular troops, many of them foreign mercenaries, were being spontaneously attacked. A half-battalion of the unpopular Gardes Françaises defected to join the crowds, precursors of many more. A mass of seditious pamphlets was in circulation, exhorting both the Gardes and regular troops to support the popular drive to jettison the old order.

  By 12 July, Paris was in disorder. Crowds openly defied troop detachments who, unwilling to use lethal force, were reduced largely to bystanders as stored staples were pillaged. The citizens’ militia had reached imposing numbers but was essentially untrained and lacked uniforms. As a distinguishing mark, each member wore a red-white-and-blue favour, comprising the heraldic colours of the city with the white of France. In addition to restoring order, their task was to prevent any repression by the military.

  Firearms were in short supply, a situation resolved when a large crowd, more mob than militia, invaded the Invalides. Neither army guards nor resident veterans took any action as the armoury was ransacked for some 30,000 muskets, which were distributed at random. There was, however, virtually no powder. Wisely, this was stored separately but it was known that the bulk, about 15 tons of it, had been removed to the fortress-prison of the Bastille. The general public knew little of the functions of this establishment but its forbidding appearance, coupled with unsubstantiated rumour, made it symbolic of the repressive regime. Those incarcerated there (of whom there were only a handful) were not guilty of crimes against common law but for the most part had been committed under the detested lettres de cachet. These were issued by high authority against those who had offended the establishment. There was no trial, no specific sentence.

  The Bastille itself was held by a garrison of a hundred or so, the majority pensioners, and, on the morning of 14 July, they looked down on a motley gathering, ten times their number, that had come for the powder. Considerable time was spent parleying with the governor who, without orders, refused to surrender anything.

  Upon rumours of a military relief column, the mob forced its way into the undefended outer courtyard. A few desultory shots were fired. Then, defecting Gardes aimed two small cannon they had brought at the inner drawbridge. Seeing little future in prolonged resistance, the governor threatened to blow up the entire powder stock if the garrison’s safety was not guaranteed. Tempers were high, misunderstandings abounded. As the parley dragged on, the cannon were on the point of being fired when the drawbridge was suddenly dropped and the mob surged in.

  Confined for hours in the stifling outer courtyard, they had taken scores of casualties from the muskets of the nervous garrison. Although the latter accordingly found themselves roughly handled, their lives appear to have been spared as the crowd was distracted by the need to remove the powder. This, along with the unfortunate governor and the seven prisoners (all that there were), was brought triumphantly to the Hôtel de Ville. As the powder was distributed the governor was murdered, his head becoming one of the first of thousands to be paraded as trophies on the end of the citizens’ pikes.

  Long the stuff of legend, the Bastille became an instant attraction as thousands came to probe its supposed horrors. Its significance was immediately apparent to Mirabeau of the Third Estate who, within days, had symbolically knocked out the first stone to signal the process of demolition. It was a metaphor for the whole ancien régime.

  NO SMALL CONTRIBUTOR to unrest was widespread unemployment. In the engineering and technical sector this had been exacerbated through the contemporary industrial revolution in Great Britain. French trade in general was doing rather well but the trade agreement signed in 1786 had opened the door to the products of British mechanization, and the effects of new processes and volume production were making themselves felt (although, in return, traditional French producers of such goods as wine and silk prospered).

  Then, as now, no nation could exist isolated, complete in itself and, contemporary with the upheaval in France, much else was happening in Europe. Events here, it may be argued, might have had very different outcomes had France been actively involved instead of being hobbled by her own internal divisions.

  For years, while France and Great Britain had been absorbed in their mutual hostility, Russia had made considerable territorial gains. The nononsense Empress Catherine II had dealt with her own domestic revolts and carried through necessary reforms, going on to acquire significant tracts of land in eastern Poland, the Baltic coast in the north and around the Crimea in the south. Russia was thus increasingly able to access the world’s oceans not only via the Arctic and Pacific but also through the Baltic and Black Seas.

  These developments caused concern in Britain, whose Baltic trade was of great importance. There also appeared every chance that a vigorous, expansionist Russia would push strongly against the flabby Ottoman Empire, driving southward to dominate the Levant and even Egypt, to negotiate porting rights on the Mediterranean and to create a potential barrier across the route to India. Relationships between Great Britain and Russia had cooled by 1785 but there existed a degree of schadenfreude with the former with respect to France, which viewed the area as a particular sphere of influence and which was considerably irritated at Russian ambition.

  Frequently at war to protect her trade and foreign interests, Britain regularly squabbled with neutral states over her assumed right to stop and search their ships at sea for contraband cargoes. This caused huge resentment and, back in 1780, Russia had enlisted the cooperation of Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands in forming what was termed the First Armed Neutrality specifically to resist the practice. The alliance directly threatened British Baltic trade, the British also being anxious lest Dutch ports became controlled by overtly hostile forces, which quickly proved to be possible.

  The Habsburg powers of Austria and Prussia controlled much of present-day Belgium but then, as now, Dutch Flanders was excluded. As long as this was the case, traffic bound to and from the great
port of Antwerp had to pass through Dutch waters in the lower reaches of the Scheldt. However, since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which had ended the Thirty Years’ War, the waterway had been effectively closed to international commerce, while the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht had seen the establishment of a line of Dutch-garrisoned ‘barrier towns’, intended to act as a first line of defence against French adventurism. It was in Britain’s interest to maintain this situation.

  In 1780, however, Maria Theresa of Austria and Hungary was succeeded by her son, Joseph II. Aggressive by nature, he bundled the Dutch military from the barrier towns and, unhappy at having to use the inconvenient port of Ostend as his nation’s main conduit for commerce, made clear his intention to reopen Antwerp for the purpose. But as Austrian forces in this region were isolated, their routes for supply and reinforcement were exposed in flank to action by a hostile, and more powerful, France. A thriving Antwerp might just prove to be too much an attraction for the French. An added complication was the increasingly benign attitude of Russia toward both Austria and France so that, whatever the outcome, she would be guaranteed a friendly port in a generally unfriendly western Europe.

  Catherine’s new relationships were spelled out when she signed a generous trade agreement with France while pointedly allowing an existing agreement with Britain to lapse. The Dutch, meanwhile, were split into factions variously supported by the British or by the French. With the latter in the ascendancy, Louis XVI warned Joseph that any Austrian move against the Netherlands would be met by force. Support by Prussia, however, looked very likely. Notwithstanding her new-found rapport with France, Russia decided to accept the fait accompli of the Austrian occupation. At this, Sweden and Turkey, of which both had lost considerable territory to the Russians, began to mobilize in opposition.