Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  On the morning of July 14, the mob surged through the city, searching for weapons and powder. More than 7,000 stormed the arms depot at the Hôtel des Invalides and seized 30,000 muskets. After finding no powder, they cried out, “À la Bastille,” which they knew held a large supply. The mob surged along the rue Saint-Antoine past Beaumarchais’s unfinished house to the entrance of the fortress-prison, where the prison governor stepped forward to try to calm the crowd and negotiate with crowd leaders. When part of the mob streamed around him and broke into the inner courtyards, he ordered guards to fire. Ninety-eight besiegers fell dead and seventy-three others lay wounded. After recognizing relatives, friends, and neighbors in the mob, many of members of the French Guard joined the insurrection, turning five cannon around 180 degrees, blasting through the outer walls, and letting the mob surge into the prison. After setting free the only prisoners they could find — four forgers, a libertine, and two madmen — mob leaders massacred prison defenders, then seized the prison governor and dragged him through the streets to the Hôtel de Ville, or city hall, where they hung his torn body from a lamppost and disemboweled him.

  As the mob’s lust for blood intensified, militiamen joined in the frenzy, roaming the streets in drunken, disorganized bands, looting shops and homes and assaulting anyone who stood in their way or otherwise displeased them. Thousands of brigands, vagabonds, army deserters, and other lawless elements merged with them, donning the red and blue cockades of the revolution and forming a giant, amoeboid mass that oozed unpredictably in and out of the city’s maze of streets and alleyways, its jelly-like arms extending in one direction before contracting and reemerging in another. American minister Gouverneur Morris bore witness to its terrifying appearance outside his club in the Palais Royal:

  A Paris mob stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and seized the prison governor. A short time later, they dragged him through the streets and hanged him from a lamppost near city hall.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  After dinner … under the arcade of the Palais Royal waiting for my carriage … the head and body of Mr. de Foulon are introduced in triumph. The head on a pike, the body dragged naked on the earth. After, this horrible exhibition is carried into the different streets. His crime is to have accepted a place in the ministry. This mutilated form of an old man seventy-five is shown to Bertier, his son-in-law, the intendant [comptroller] of Paris, and afterwards he also is put to death and cut to pieces, the populace carrying about the fragments with a savage joy. Gracious God, what a people.32

  As the American envoy watched, a dragoon passed before him, waving a bloody piece of meat above his head and shouting triumphantly, “Here is Bertier’s heart!” Behind him, others, their faces splattered with blood, waved pikes carrying other body parts and marched out through the gates of the Palais Royal onto the rue St. Honoré.

  When an aide reported the mob’s uprising to King Louis XVI, he seemed perplexed. “Then it is a full-blown riot?” he asked.

  “No, sire,” his aide replied softly. “It is a full-blown revolution.”33

  What Did You Do to Earn So Many Rewards?

  THE DAY AFTER the Paris mob stormed the Bastille, Lafayette, the hero of the Battle of Yorktown, took nominal control of the local militia and reestablished a semblance of order. It was difficult. Unlike American militiamen, who had returned to their farms after their revolution, demobilized French troops had nowhere to go after the war with England. France had no frontier wilderness for the disenfranchised to claim, settle, and plant — no forests in which to hunt to sustain themselves and their families. The king, the aristocracy, and the clergy owned all the land, forests, and streams of France, and none but they could hunt, fish, or even set foot on their properties without permission, let alone settle.

  As on the previous day, the crowds continued surging through the streets, moving unpredictably in one direction, then another, and eventually tramping over the new Beaumarchais property, where they found little of interest. Laborers were still digging here and there in anticipation of the complex installations. Safely at home in the Hotel de Hollande, Beaumarchais, whose provocative plays and pamphlets had helped incite the uprisings, suddenly awakened to the social ramifications of Figaro’s challenge to the comte d’Almaviva:

  Because you are a great lord, you think you are a genius. Nobility, wealth, rank, position — it all makes you so proud. And what did you do to earn so many rewards? You took the time to be born — nothing else. Apart from that, you’re quite an ordinary man! while I, by God, lost in the faceless crowd, had to apply … knowledge and skills merely to survive.1

  Across Paris, the “faceless crowd” running riot transformed Figaro’s air in Le Mariage into a revolutionary march:

  By accident of birth,

  One is born shepherd, another born king.

  Chance alone has set them apart,

  But their spirits carry no titles or names.

  That is why the son of a clod

  Can be worth his weight in gold.2

  Unprepared for the flames of revolution he had helped ignite, he tried to steer a course of conduct that would tie him to neither the court nor the mob. On July 15, the new mayor of Paris asked him to superintend the demolition of the Bastille, calling on his knowledge of engineering to prevent damage to neighboring houses and keep accumulations of rubble from blocking sewers and drainage ditches. In the months that followed, Beaumarchais assumed authority over what had become a lawless area, wandering the neighborhood to set up food kitchens and sleeping quarters in deserted buildings at his own expense for the poor, homeless, and hungry. Often he saved innocent targets from mob violence.

  “On returning to my home, sir,” he wrote to the commander of a regiment, “I was happy I could prevent your soldier from setting out in broad day light; he would have been torn to pieces. I gave him an overcoat and hat, which I’d like you to return to me, and I made him take off his gaiters to prevent his being recognized.”3

  Beaumarchais had the foresight to slip away to Switzerland several times and transfer the bulk of his liquid assets to secret accounts he had long earlier established in several Swiss banks.

  In the weeks that followed, the king agreed to end thirteen centuries of absolute monarchy in France, with the establishment of a constitutional monarchy under a somewhat representative National Assembly as a national legislature. The king and his ministers would remain the executive branch of government, with the king retaining power of veto over all legislation. With Lafayette in full charge of the National Guard, order returned to the streets of Paris. In Saint-Antoine, the people elected Beaumarchais to the district council, and by early 1791, with the city relatively calm and work on his new house all but completed, he moved into his little palace with his family and sold the Hotel de Hollande. He enrolled Eugénie in a convent school, whose head took full advantage of his frequent visits and renowned generosity to lament the plight of some of the school’s other students.

  “I send you, Madame, 200 livres for your unfortunate pupil,” he responded to the Mother Superior’s pleas for one of Eugénie’s schoolmates, whose father’s financial reverses left her unable to continue at the school. “This is for the year. I will … give you three louis, which will make six francs a month (for spending money) for this year, the same as I give my daughter. … That she remains in school is all the thanks I ask. Keep the secret for me.’ ”4

  With the forbidding Bastille fortress no longer obstructing its view, Beaumarchais’s house now looked over a breathtaking panorama of orchards and vineyards to the eastern horizon, where the walls, towers, and spires of the Château de Vincennes soared to the sky. He had grown stout and was so hard of hearing that he used an ear trumpet, but he still enjoyed an audience and gladly welcomed visitors to tour his gardens — often waddling about the gardens with them to explain the relationship of plantings and vistas to stage sets. Evenings saw the most distinguished figures of politics, literature, and the arts gather at hi
s table for food, wine, song, music, and laughter. After dinner, Gudin said, he would often lead his guests into “a great circular salon, partly ornamented with mirrors, partly with landscapes of vast dimensions and … seats for an audience.” A desk and armchair stood on a dais, where, as in a theater, Beaumarchais read his newest dramas, playing each part with a different inflection and “the pantomime which should characterize him.”5

  His performances so charmed the young Amélie Houret de La Marinière that she all but swooned at the clumsy advances of the fifty-eight-year-old playwright with his ludicrous ear trumpet. Twenty years his junior, she agreed to become his part-time mistress, and his secret visits to her quarters would eventually yield the old playwright some life-saving benefits.

  The winter and spring of 1791 saw violence return to the streets of Paris, as the king exercised his veto to block all socially progressive legislation. While gangs roamed the streets attacking homes of aristocrats, hundreds of noblemen fled with their families across French borders to Austrian and Prussian territory. After the king’s two brothers fled the nation, the prince de Condé — the king’s “Master of the Palace” — fled to Worms to organize an army to return to France and restore the king’s absolute powers. With the departure of the nobility, the flow of taxes all but stopped, and the National Assembly ordered all Roman Catholic Church funds turned over to the government instead of Rome. The pope retaliated by severing diplomatic relations and provoking a wave of attacks on churches and church properties in France. Fearing for his daughter’s safety, Beaumarchais withdrew Eugénie from the convent school and was so overjoyed at her safe return that he composed a paean to her that became a popular song and won the hearts of Parisian women — along with a slew of unwanted proposals of marriage to Eugénie from Parisian men of all ages.

  Should a handsome bonhomme see stars in your eyes,

  Tell him to speak to your father, so wise;

  He judges with love and knows how to reason

  The man you should marry this beautiful season.

  What matters his fortune, position, or name?

  Judge, writer, or soldier are one and the same.

  Spirit and virtue, and talents, my dear,

  Are the only titles with real value here.6

  Embarrassed by most of the marriage proposals his song provoked, Beaumarchais did receive one he deemed so “serious and honest” that he believed he owed its author a reply:

  You have been deceived regarding my daughter. Scarcely fourteen years old, she is far from the time when I will allow her to choose a master. … Perhaps you are quite ignorant of the exact situation. I have only lately taken my daughter from the convent. The joy of her return drew from my indolence a song, which after having been sung at my table, went the rounds. I used the term bonhomme in jest of her future home, but it made many persons think that I was already planning her settlement.

  But may I be preserved from engaging her before the time when her own heart will give her a consciousness of what it all means, and, Monsieur, this will be an affair of years, not of months.

  What the song says jestingly, however, will certainly be my rule to enlighten her young heart. Fortune impresses me less than talents and virtue, because I wish her to be happy. …

  Beaumarchais7

  Beaumarchais’s joy at his daughter’s return was short-lived. The violence racking Paris — and much of France — was taking on a life of its own, erupting randomly, unexpectedly, in any neighborhood, at any time, often with little more provocation than a dispute between a housewife and the baker over the price of a loaf of bread.

  “All Paris is up in arms,” Gouverneur Morris wrote to George Washington. Morris had replaced Jefferson as American minister plenipotentiary to France and was an eyewitness to much of the violence.

  There has been hanged a baker this morning by the populace. … The poor baker was beheaded according to custom and carried in triumph through the streets. He had been all night at work for the purpose of supplying the greatest possible quantity of bread this morning. His wife is said to have died with horror when they presented her husband’s head stuck on a pole. … Paris is perhaps as wicked a spot as exists. Incest, murder, bestiality, fraud, rapine, oppression, baseness, cruelty; and yet this is the city which has stepped forward in the sacred cause of liberty. The pressure of incumbent despotism removed, every bad passion exerts peculiar energy.8

  In April, the National Guard ignored Lafayette’s orders and prevented the king and his family from leaving the Tuileries Palace to attend Easter services. As the Guard watched a mob burn an effigy of the pope at the nearby Palais Royal, Lafayette resigned his command, and the National Assembly elevated a savage, power-hungry attorney Maximilien Robespierre to the post of public prosecutor, then the most powerful government office in France. On June 20, the king and queen and their children fled Paris, hoping to reach the eastern frontier and a safe haven in Austrian territory. Troops caught their carriage the next day and returned the royal family to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where they imprisoned them in their quarters.

  Although troops kept some parts of Paris relatively calm, two of the poorest, most heavily populated areas festered with misery: Montmartre, to the north, where 20,000 emaciated unemployed peasants had migrated from the drought-stricken countryside to seek nonexistent manufacturing jobs they imagined they would find in the city. The second social sore stretched across the eastern industrial suburb of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where Beaumarchais now lived and where hunger and despair gripped 50,000 unemployed workers and other “heroes of the Bastille.” With the drought extending into its third year, millers had little wheat to make flour, and bread prices climbed 60 percent.

  In the midst of bread shortages, malcontents rained leaflets across the city to inflame public passions with descriptions of the king, queen, and aristocrats gorging themselves on exotic foods and wines while the people starved. The king had lost all power to rule, and the National Assembly had fallen under the control of Robespierre and his band of political enragés, a double entendre in French that can mean either “enraged men” or “madmen.” On August 1, Robespierre addressed the nation, declaring the French people “indivisible” and effectively rendering any dissenters guilty of treason if they threatened that “indivisibility.”

  Acting on Robespierre’s principle, his enragés forced the assembly to ignore the new constitution and usurp the powers of a supreme governing council — a politburo that revoked the king’s authority, abolished aristocracy, dissolved the Roman Catholic Church, and expelled members who opposed its decrees. To reduce the staggering national debt, the assembly ordered all religious artifacts in church and cathedral treasuries seized and melted into gold and silver bullion, destroying centuries of religious artworks. It then nationalized the lands of the king, the church, and all émigré noblemen (i.e., those who had fled the country), and it eliminated private property rights, giving every citizen the right to hunt, fish, and trespass on anyone’s property. The new laws provoked immediate, widespread class warfare, with workers surging through city streets and alleyways, stripping every unguarded mansion of its treasures and slaughtering their owners, servants, and anyone else they found who could not identify himself or herself as a bona fide revolutionary. Outside the cities, peasant mobs burned and looted stately homes, châteaus, and castles, destroying a millennium of French art.

  Added to the savagery of class warfare were the brutalities of religious conflict, with more than half the priests in France refusing to abjure their faith and take secular vows to the state. Parishioners split accordingly — often into armed camps in the same city neighborhood or village, with refusés attacking jureurs (those who swore allegiance to the state) as religious heretics, while jureurs attacked refusés for political heresy and treason.

  With mobs slaughtering women and children as well as men, Beaumarchais grew frantic. The individual liberties that Figaro had embraced on theater stages had produced nothing but anarchy in r
eal life on Paris streets. Afraid for his family’s safety, he sent his wife and daughter and his sisters to the English Channel port city of Le Havre, where violence had not yet erupted and where, if necessary, they could escape quickly by boat to England.

  “His house was at the entrance of that terrible faubourg, like the Palace of Portici at the foot of Vesuvius,” explained his friend Gudin. “The eruption of the volcano was as yet only at rare intervals … [but] with the lava always boiling, it was inevitable that it would overflow and engulf the house.”9

  Although Beaumarchais had promised to follow his wife and daughter to Le Havre, he became entangled in a plot too complex for even him to have written for Figaro — or for even the clever Figaro to have untangled. Two years earlier, the Austrians had crushed a rebellion in Belgium and seized 200,000 muskets, of which it had sold 52,345 to a Dutch merchant, who stored them in a warehouse in the small Dutch seaport of Terweren, Zeeland. Knowing that Beaumarchais had supplied American forces with arms and ammunition, the merchant suggested that he buy them for the French army. It would be a scandal, the merchant warned, if the French playwright refused such an opportunity to serve his country.