The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  At home, Ernest Semichon claims that during Louis XVI’s reign ‘nearly every political, religious and judicial problem was investigated and in many cases solved’. If exaggerated, this claim is still not entirely without substance. Even Tocqueville admits that, ‘During his entire reign Louis XVI was always talking about reform, and there were few institutions whose destruction he did not contemplate before the Revolution broke out and made an end of them.’ He tried to improve conditions in prisons and hospitals, and ordered free treatment for sufferers from venereal disease. He abolished the death penalty for desertion. It was the King, not Necker, who was responsible for abolishing the ‘Preparatory Question’ (torture by water or the boot to extract a confession after arrest) in 1780, but the Parlements prevented him from abolishing torture before execution. Louis also put an end to serfdom on Crown lands, though it was retained on the estates of the clergy and nobility. As will be seen, he envisaged legal reforms which would have swept away the Parlements.

  New canals were dug between the greatest French rivers, while the naval harbour at Cherbourg was protected by an impressive sea wall. A Royal Society of Medicine was founded, together with a Veterinary College and a School of Mines, and the Academy of Sciences was expanded to include agriculture, biology, mechanical sciences and mineralogy. An institution for deaf mutes was established and also an institution for the blind. The world of European science was dominated by such Frenchmen as Lavoisier—‘the father of modern chemistry’—and the agriculturalist Parmentier, who, with the King’s encouragement, popularized the potato. Most dramatic of all, the brothers Montgolfier were making their first ascents in hot air balloons. It was not only for reasons of sycophancy that statues of Louis were erected all over the country with inscriptions like ‘Servitude abolished’, ‘The Navy restored’, and ‘Commerce protected’. If it had not been for ‘the unfortunate reality of the deficit’, as he described the monetary crisis, Louis XVI might have bumbled happily on for the rest of his natural life.

  It was a bad time for anyone to be poor. About 1778 France entered into a long depression, both agricultural and industrial. The rural economy, which was in any case backward enough, was severely damaged by a steep decline in grain prices and an even more catastrophic drop in the price of wine; as a result peasants could not make a living from their produce. The repercussions affected the hitherto advancing economy of the towns, where production fell disastrously in such industries as the cloth trade, and many workers were laid off. There was poverty and unemployment throughout the entire country, in painful contrast to the comparative affluence of Louis XV’s reign. All classes found themselves short of money. Unfortunately, the recession coincided with a crisis in the national finances.

  Tocqueville was perfectly correct in claiming that ‘France was ruined before she ceased to be victorious’. It has been calculated that the American War may have cost the French government as much as 2,000,000,000 livres (well over £ 80 million). When Necker was dismissed in 1781, he had only avoided state bankruptcy by massive borrowing, and during his last year of office, the annual deficit—the gap between revenue and expenditure—was at least 50 million livres (more than £ 2 million), quite apart from the hundreds of million livres of national debt. But the wily banker had concealed the full horror of the situation by his Compte rendu.

  Necker was dismissed largely because old Maurepas had grown jealous of him, and had made the aristocratic party fearful of the half-hearted reforms which the Director of Finances had been trying to introduce. The opposition was led by the Duc d’Orléans, his son Chartres, Monsieur (the Comte de Provence) and the Comte Artois; characteristically, the latter called Necker ‘a fornicating foreign bastard’. As soon as the Director had gone, a number of reactionary measures were brought in—four proofs of nobility (ie to show that all four grandparents had been noble) now became necessary for any candidate for a commission in the army. None the less, Louis insisted that bourgeois sailors should have the chance of becoming naval officers.

  Despite Louis’s good intentions, to survive a minister had to keep both the Queen and all the Princes on his side. Maurepas (who died at the end of 1781) understood this very well and would go to almost any lengths to ensure their support. During Marie Antoinette’s first pregnancy, when she was unable to go to a ball and a torchlight charade was staged by the court to divert her, the venerable and all but octogenarian minister—who had been famed even as a young man for his impotence—appeared in pink silk as Cupid.

  For Louis, the 1780s were probably the happiest years of his life. In 1777 he had at last consented to the very minor operation which made it possible for him to have normal relations with his wife. On 30 August of that year, Marie Antoinette wrote to her mother, ‘I am so deeply happy … my marriage was perfectly consummated a week ago.’ (The tone of her letter indicates that much of her objectional behaviour hitherto may well have been due to frustration.) Ingenuously, the King told Mesdames Tantes that the physical pleasure was even greater than he had anticipated. Nevertheless, he still did not sleep with the Queen as much as she would have liked, despite her ‘tormenting him to come more often’, and Maria Theresa remained sceptical about any hopes of a pregnancy. However, in December 1778 Marie Antoinette at last gave birth to a child, the Princess Marie Thérèse—Madame Royale. (This grave little girl was later known as Mousseline la sérieuse, on account of her old-fashioned expression.)

  Louis was overjoyed, as indeed was the entire country; when the Queen went to Nôtre Dame for her churching, she was cheered by the crowd. An exception to the general rejoicing was Monsieur who, at the christening, asked sourly who was the father. On 21 October 1781 Marie Antoinette had a second child, the Dauphin Louis-Joseph; the King was so overcome that he wept and stammered. Again gossips, led by Monsieur, said that the real father was Artois. It was a delicate creature, tormented by rickets and bone tuberculosis, whose health gave cause for alarm from the very beginning. But another son was born in 1785, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie—the future Louis XVII. There was also a fourth child, the Princess Sophie Béatrice, who did not reach her second year. Now that she had children the Queen led a much quieter life. Despite occasional squabbles, she and the King had always been good friends, and now fell genuinely in love with each other. She too grew fatter, with a bust measurement of forty-four inches (according to her dressmaker’s order book).

  Louis was extremely popular, especially with those who came into contact with him. Artois’s Scots gardener, Thomas Blaikie, obviously liked what he saw; ‘The King was dressed almost like a country farmer, a good rough stout man about twenty-five.’ At thirty he was even fatter, as a consequence of hunting a little less and of reading rather more while continuing to indulge his extraordinary appetite. But the French have never blamed anyone for enjoying their food. When he visited the new naval base at Cherbourg in 1785, although the expense of the trip was sharply criticized in Paris, the King had a personal triumph; peasants lined the roads to cheer him as he passed. Louis was noticeably moved, kissing the girls and shouting back, ‘Vive mon bon peuple!’ when the crowd cried ‘Vive le Roi!’ Indeed most Frenchmen still felt an extraordinary reverence for the King—what the normally unsentimental Tocqueville defines as ‘both the natural love of children for their father and the awe properly due to God alone’. Foreigners were astonished by the passionate interest which the French took in the person of their sovereign. The Scot John Moore, who visited France in 1779, noted that Louis’s slightest illness alarmed the entire country: ‘Did he cough?—Yes, by Gad! And strongly—I am in despair.’ This reverence continued right up to the Revolution. His subjects did not blame the deficit and the hard times on the King—it was all the fault of his advisers and that ‘Austrian bitch’ of a wife.

  Many years later, the Comte de Hézecques, a royal page from 1786–92, gave a fascinating portrait of the King he had served. ‘When seated on the throne Louis XVI looked well enough, but it has to be confessed that he walked with an unpl
easant waddle … He dressed very plainly in grey or brown coats, with a steel or silver sword, though on Sundays and feast days he wore white velvet.’ Hézecques adds, ‘I spent nearly six years at court and I never once saw the King act rudely, even in the slightest way to any one of all his servants.’ He also emphasizes that Louis had no favourites.

  The basic ritual of Louis XIV’s court was still observed, with Lever and Coucher, daily Mass and dining in public. Everything that the King ate, even in private or between meals, was tasted by an ‘Officer of the Goblet’ for fear of poison. Hézecques tells us that though only very ancient noblemen bowed to the State Bed when Louis was not in it, even the youngest and most modern courtiers backed to the wall when he approached, shuffling their feet in the hope of attracting their sovereign’s attention. Even those on intimate terms could only address him in the third person: ‘Has the King had good sport today?’ ‘Has the King caught a cold?’

  Yet fewer and fewer people bothered to go to court. This was largely the fault of the Queen, who had no use for anybody outside her own set. The Duc de Lévis remembered that, ‘Except for a few favourites, chosen by caprice or intrigue, everyone was shut out; rank, service, interest, high birth, were no longer sufficient to procure admission to the royal family’s circle.’ In consequence many noblemen began to consider presentation at court a waste of time. The Duke tells us that Versailles became ‘no more than a little provincial town which one visited reluctantly and left as quickly as possible’. Even so, the pomp and ceremony remained as splendid as ever—Châteaubriand says that those who did not know Versailles before 1789 have no conception of true magnificence.

  According to the Comte de Ségur, by the 1780s, ‘from one end of the kingdom to the other, opposition had become a point of honour.’ Opposition meant different things to different people, even if the vast majority of educated Frenchmen subscribed to the Enlightenment and considered the Ancien Régime ruinously inadequate. Noblemen envied the power which the English ruling class had gained after their ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and, for all their love of Rousseau, had little taste for equality. Unfortunately for them, égalité was to be one of the French Revolution’s great slogans; by Louis XVI’s reign the sharp difference which once existed between the classes had been eroded; many an haut bourgeois was infinitely richer and more polished than some titled country booby squire, but the law denied him the status, privileges and opportunities which belonged to nobility alone. There was also the psychological factor, that artificial gap between noble and bourgeois, which gave rise to deep resentment. At the same time, because of the aristocratic counter-revolution, social mobility was far less in the later eighteenth century than it had been during its early years.

  The dissatisfied bourgeois—businessmen, doctors, architects, lesser lawyers, minor civil servants and all the other professional people—had small concern for the miserable lot of the peasants. Throughout the countryside, hatred of the nobility was growing. Because of the economic depression, landowners were increasingly short of money in the 1780s and resorted to what has been called ‘the seignorial reaction’; not only were long-forgotten feudal dues exacted once again and the corvée extended, but common land was expropriated. Lawyers busily disinterred old title deeds and terrorized peasants with their documents. In consequence there was a vast increase in the already large numbers of indigent rural poor, while bad harvests drove even the most stolid peasant into a fury of resentment at the lord of the manor’s greed.

  Yet, despite all Michelet’s horror-stories about the Bastille, the government was far from harsh. Someone asked the nonagenarian Duc de Richelieu—he did not die until 1788—if life had changed. The Duke replied that under Louis XIV people had not dared to even speak, that under Louis XV they had whispered, and that now they spoke out loud. As Tocqueville points out, Beaumarchais’s brief imprisonment shocked Paris far more than the persecution of the Huguenots in the previous century.

  When Louis first read Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro in 1781—he read it aloud to Marie Antoinette—he cried out ‘Detestable’, complaining that, ‘That man makes fun of everything which should be respected’, and forbade the play’s performance. For two years Beaumarchais campaigned to save his play, giving readings and enlisting support from very important personages like Artois. The play tells how a grand seigneur, Count Almaviva, plots the seduction of a servant girl and how her fiancé—his valet, Figaro—joins with the Countess in thwarting the Count’s attempt to revive the droit de seigneur. Throughout, the valet’s superiority over the nobleman is emphasized, and the unfairness of the social order—‘You nobles merely take the trouble to be born’, Figaro tells the Count. Eventually the King gave way to the popular clamour, and the play’s first night on 27 April 1783 was a succès de scandale, cheered to the echo by the glittering audience whom the author ridiculed so subtly; some spectators realized its implications, but the fashionable world ignored them. Beaumarchais at once published a mocking pamphlet, whereupon he was arrested and sent to the St Lazare prison; the public outcry was so enormous that he was released after only twenty-four hours.

  Talleyrand’s claim that anyone who had not lived under the Ancien Régime did not know how sweet life could be, has often been questioned. Nevertheless he seems to be born out by Tocqueville. ‘France in those days was a nation of pleasure seekers, all for the joy of life … The upper classes were far more interested in living beautifully than in comfort, in making a name for themselves than in making money.’ It was not only the world of Beaumarchais but of Mozart too, of Gluck and Grétry. Of its popular songs, Plaisir d’Amour, with its bittersweet yet simple elegance, conveys perfectly the spirit of the times. Stateliness went hand in hand with simplicity—at court, French country dances alternated with minuets. The fashionable painters, perhaps a little too relaxed, were Mme Vigée Le Brun, Greuze and ‘L’aimable Frago’ (as Fragonard liked to be called), though Neo-classical giants were emerging—the sensation of the Salon of 1785 was Louis David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’. The period’s delightful furniture was also Neo-classical, made by Reisener, Weisweiller, Molitor, Schichtig, and Jacob. Under the influence of Rousseau, clothes were becoming simpler, though no less elegant; men no longer wore wigs but powdered their hair and often wore riding boots and English hunting coats and breeches. Women tried to look like shepherdesses. Furthermore, the eighteenth century had invented the café and the restaurant—by 1785 there were 600 cafés in Paris alone. Even the life of the poorer classes could be surprisingly gay, to judge from the novels of Restif de la Bretonne, who writes not only of the debaucheries of underworld Paris, but also of the joyous life of the well-to-do peasant household.

  In 1783 Yolande de Polignac coaxed Marie Antoinette into persuading the King to appoint Charles-Alexandre de Calonne as Controller-General. He was a most agreeable man in his late forties, handsome, always beautifully dressed and invariably charming, with exquisite taste in pictures (he owned ten Titians), furniture and mistresses: the Duc de Lévis said that he was the only member of the noblesse de la robe who knew how to behave like a gentleman. He had had an impressive career in administration, having been an Intendant for nearly twenty years, and he was hailed as a new Colbert. Calonne always lived above his means and on being appointed he joked, ‘The finances of France are in a deplorable state and I would never have accepted responsibility for them if my own were not in an equally shaky condition.’ His policy was original, to say the least. He believed, ‘A man who wants to borrow must appear to be rich; to seem rich one has to impress by lavish expenditure.’ Calonne had no problems with Marie Antoinette, who was enchanted by him (whatever her loyal Mme de Campan may say to the contrary). When the Queen made one of her demands for an enormous sum of ready cash, he replied, ‘If it is possible, Madame, it is already done; if it is impossible it shall be done.’ He levied no new taxes. His method was the same as Necker’s—simply to borrow.

  Yet outside matters of finance, Calonne was surprisingly ima
ginative. He tried to encourage a French industrial revolution on the English model, and—with Louis’s support—suggested to a number of rich noblemen that they invest in mines and factories. But like his master, the Controller-General had no understanding of the way in which Pitt in England was able to dispose of a national debt far larger than the French deficit, by means of a sinking fund.

  Two years after Calonne’s appointment, the monarchy was badly shaken by the comic opera affair of the Queen’s necklace. A seedy young adventuress (and occasional prostitute), the Comtesse de la Motte-Valois, had been ‘befriended’ by the Cardinal de Rohan, Prince-Bishop of the fabulously rich see of Strasbourg and Grand Almoner of France. This ornament of the boudoirs was a handsome, womanizing fop in his forties, straight out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, whose boundless conceit was matched only by his fatuity. His conduct as French ambassador in Vienna had been so scandalous that the Empress Maria Theresa had actually asked for his recall; later, as a friend of Mme du Barry, he had offended the Queen. However, Louis de Rohan had ambitions of becoming a second Richelieu, and was convinced that only Marie Antoinette’s disfavour stood between him and the highest office. Somehow Mme de la Motte persuaded the Cardinal that she had the Queen’s ear; the Countess arranged an ‘interview’, in the park at Versailles on a moonless night, Marie Antoinette being impersonated by a young prostitute from the Palais Royal, dressed in white, who bore a striking resemblance to her and who gave him a rose. Rohan was completely taken in. His pliability was in part due to the influence of the self-styled alchemist, magician and prophet, Count Cagliostro, who had thoroughly bemused this useful patron and had ‘foreseen’ a woman in white transforming the Cardinal’s life.