by Antal Szerb
By the eighteenth century all the institutions of the monarchy were to some extent dated or obsolete, and everywhere riddled with corruption, the justice system not excluded. Those who wanted reforms naturally played that up. They complained that judges were often too young, inexperienced, ill-educated, and susceptible to undue influence. Legal costs were intolerably high, secretaries had to be paid vast sums to expedite the astonishingly slow procedures, as did the huissiers, to deliver sentences already pronounced. The criminal justice arrangements were outmoded, cruel and inhumane. France, like Italy, was coming under the influence of the teachings of Beccaria, who urged radical changes to the system. He also demanded reform of the prisons. In 1782 the horrific For l’Évêque prison, whose inmates had to stand in water during years of high rainfall, was closed and the Hôtel de la Force built, where every prisoner had his own bed, and—to contemporary eyes—the whole place appeared astonishingly clean and comfortable.
The monarchy had tried on many occasions to reform the criminal system, but their intentions were always frustrated by the stubborn resistance of the Parlement. It was one of the most conservative bodies in all history. Every new law, and almost every other new development, was seen as an affront to its ancient rights and privileges. It is quite extraordinary the way it objected to everything: to the petite poste, by which private individuals delivered letters and packages; to the planting of potatoes, and even to the use of emetics. Above all, it opposed reform. In the eighteenth century, every right-thinking proposal for change made by a monarch foundered because of its opposition.
These abuses of power did nothing to harm its popularity. Neither the die-hard conservatives nor Voltaire, Diderot and the entire reformist camp of acerbic-minded philosophers ever attacked it. It never lost its popularity, because its members were eminent, belligerent and fearless, and were seen by the people as the representatives of the very idea of freedom.
Their ideal, since the start of the century, had been the British constitution, but by the time of Louis XVI their political theories had moved on. It was now accepted that every aspect of power, and all legal process, derived ultimately from the person of the King, but there was nonetheless a need for some sort of mediator between the monarch and his people to supervise the enactment of the laws he handed down: and that role fell to the Parlement.
In reality it had exercised this supervisory function for centuries, by virtue of the fact that its duty was to ‘register’ bills promulgated by the King—without such registration, bills could not become law. If the Parlement saw fit, it could block them. Naturally France was for this reason never an ‘absolute’ monarchy, since the King could not flatly impose his will against its members’ wishes. If the latter dragged their feet for too long and formally remonstrated with the King, he could call a lit de justice in his palace, at which he simply informed the relevant authorities that the bill was now in force. But this was very much a two-edged sword. It poisoned relations between the King and the Parlement, and with the passing of time the latter body became identified with protest, resisting everything, including the most welcome and necessary social reforms, since the very notion of ‘reform’ had come to be associated with ‘tyranny’.
It obstructed generally welcome measures because it felt that any increase in popular contentment resulting from initiatives handed down from above would at best treat the symptoms of the malaise rather than the malaise itself, or indeed, would exacerbate it by reinforcing the power of absolutism. And in these struggles the people, or at least the ‘Third Estate’ (the collective citizenry) stood not on the side of those reforms that would improve the lot of the people as a whole, but with the conservatives, the old reactionary Parlement, because they felt that freedom was more important than mere prosperity. Paradoxically enough, this conservatism did indeed represent a kind of freedom, as it had once before in the Roman Senate, against the ‘progressive’ dictatorship of Julius Caesar.
Under Louis XV the Parlement had waged war above all on the clergy. Its members mostly shared the mental outlook of the Jansenists. That grim tendency has very much the same sort of place in French history as Puritanism, the nonconformist movement, has in England, with its prohibition on worldly pomp and beauty in the church.
The Parlement’s long war against the clergy reveals the sociological roots of its animosity. As we have mentioned, by virtue of its upper-middle-class elements it represented the bourgeoisie as against the Church, the nobility and the Court. A century-and-a-half before the French Revolution, the same social stratum in England had fought in Cromwell’s revolution and then, at the end of the seventeenth century, in the ‘Glorious’ (and thoroughly bourgeois) Revolution, to create the British constitution. The citizenry no longer languished behind the nobility in terms of wealth and culture, and began to question why it was inappropriate for them to benefit from the laws and the higher life generally, as did the privileged few.
Such was the Parlement on whom the responsibility fell to decide Rohan’s case. Now we can understand why one of its most influential councillors, Fréteau de St Juste, rubbed his hands in glee when he heard that it was to come before it, and cried:
“What a stroke of luck! A swindling cardinal and the Queen embroiled in a fraud case! All that mud on the cross and the sceptre! What a triumph for the ideals of freedom! And how it will raise the importance of the Parlement!”
Now that we have introduced the Parlement, we must bring in the other side, the King. In all honesty we should have preferred to introduce him at the start, centre stage, along with the other dramatis personae. The only reason we did not was that the queue of people waiting to come on was rather lengthy, and we feared we might weary the reader who is interested in the ‘action’. But the fact that we were able to leave the King until now means that he is already established as a character. “The principal reason for the downfall of the French monarchy,” we read in Lavisse’s great Standard History of France, “was the failure of the King.”
Louis XVI was a very different person from the French Kings, the endless line of the Capet dynasty, who preceded and followed him. In some respects, both morally and as an individual, he was unlike any of them. The Kings of France owed their popularity to the fact that they shared the character traits of their people. For the most part they saw living as an art form: they loved women, food and drink; they relished brave, brief, triumphant adventures; they hated boredom, work and anything that went on too long, and they always wanted to be in the thick of things. That was true both of the grandest of them—Francis I and Henry IV—and of the gloomiest—Henry III, Louis XV and, after the Revolution, Charles X. But wise or cunning, they also produced kings worthy of the Age of Reason, such as Philippe-Auguste and, again after the Revolution, Louis XVIII. The most exceptional were both wise and chivalrous, like St Louis and Louis XIV. But our Louis was neither wise nor chivalrous. It was his brothers who inherited the royal qualities. The Comte de Provence was shrewd and cunning, while the Duc d’Artois had the adventurous traits. In his younger days it tormented the King that his brothers were so much more successful than he was, and when on one occasion a speaker praised his intellect, he ungraciously interrupted him:
“You are mistaken: I am not the clever one; that is my brother, the Comte de Provence.”
He possessed none of the characteristic traits of a French king. He was more like a German or some other northern prince. Which is not really all that surprising. The leading members of the French royal family had always found wives among the ruling houses of neighbouring countries, so there was far more foreign than French blood in his veins. His ancestor Louis XIV was married to Maria Theresa, the Infanta of Spain; his son, the ‘Great Dauphin’, to a Bavarian princess; his son, the Duc de Bourgogne, to the Princess of Savoy; his son, Louis XV, to the Polish Princess Maria Leszczynska, and his son, the Dauphin, to Louis XVI’s mother, the Saxon Princess Maria Josepha. So even if we consider only the interbreeding that had taken place since Louis XIV, Loui
s XVI had scarcely any French blood at all, not to mention the fact that Louis XIV’s mother had not been French, and so on and on. Viewed in this way, Louis XVI’s queen, the Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette, comes across as much more typically French in her character; which again should hardly surprise us, since she was Habsburg only on her mother’s side. On her father’s she sprang from the effectively French house of Lotharingia, or Lorraine, so that there was considerably more Gallic blood in her than in that scion of the Bourbons, her husband.
Naturally, until science sheds rather more light than at present on the secrets of heredity, this is all just a game. The King was unquestionably French, made so by the whole atmosphere and tradition, by upbringing and destiny, and no one in their wildest dreams would have called his Frenchness into question. But what is also beyond question is that there is every good reason why, in his external appearance, his physical movements, his gestures and temperament, he might have resembled one of his German or Polish ancestors.
Joseph II said of his brother-in-law that he was like primal matter before the proclamation Fiat lux. He classified him with those people whose minds are ruled by their bodies. This was shown by his favourite diversions: spending his free time in wood and metal workshops, or playing billiards. Had he not been born to be King, he would have been a conscientious, respectable, and no doubt perfectly contented craftsman.
But his real passion was for hunting—the sport of kings—which he pursued with even greater dedication than his forebears, clearly because only through frenzied activity and vigorous movement of the body could he work off his excess physical energy. It was the only time, it could be said, when he lost his timidity and clumsiness, found himself in his element, and emerged as a man. “His gentleness and altruism notwithstanding,” says Boiteaux, “he hardened, and would deal ruthlessly with people if anything got in the way of his freedom to exercise his royal prerogative of hunting, like some old Germanic tribal chief. If a peasant strayed into the royal forest he would be in a rage for the rest of the day. The roads would be closed and all work would stop in the fields for miles around.”
On these occasions he would even dispute the prize with his brother the Duc de Provence, and often did. The numbers were huge: in the fourteen years of his reign he took part in thirty-five fox, a hundred and four boar, one thousand two hundred and seven stag and two hundred and sixty six deer hunts.
As is well known, almost the only thing he ever noted in his diary, apart from where he attended mass, was the outcome of these expeditions. Even in the stormiest days of the Revolution, if he had done neither he would simply enter ‘rien’ (nothing). One cannot be sure whether this should be taken as yet another sign of his mental hebetude; the diary was his personal secret, in which he wrote only what touched on his most personal life. Hunting and religion—these were the two areas in which his soul felt truly at home. Alongside the painstaking craftsman, there was a medieval lord of the manor inside him.
But also a minor civil servant, and an accountant. He kept a meticulous accounts book. In it he wrote what he spent his pocket money on, carefully totting up the receipts, his gains and losses at cards, and even what he paid his ‘royal secretary’ (for duties he carried out himself). He notes that he gave twelve thousand livres to the Queen, a figure that recurs frequently. But he also records that he spent three livres on bathwater; thirty-six on shoes; one livre, eighteen sols on a leg of mutton; twelve sols on a bottle of red wine; three livres on a dozen fresh herrings … What is really mystifying about these notes is that there were eight cobblers in the royal household who submitted large bills every year, while the bouche du roi, the ‘King’s mouth’, as the royal kitchen was known, spent several thousand livres on his victuals every day. But then nothing is more impenetrable than the finances of the Ancien Régime. Apparently even Louis occasionally found them confusing. In 1782 he writes in his accounts book that some sort of error must have crept in, since he finds an item in the same notebook which he had completely overlooked, and he has to start the whole reckoning again from the beginning. The sum he had failed to notice was 42,377 livres …
This is the outer aspect of the man who is ruled by his body. However active he is, he remains fat. This is true even in his youth, and thereafter he puts weight on ‘in the twinkling of an eye’. His gaucheness is clearly a version of the fat little boy’s withdrawn and embarrassed shyness. Otherwise his obesity is not a pathological symptom; there is no need to think about mysterious glandular problems. In one respect he had a great deal in common with his ancestor Louis XIV: he too ate a huge amount.
The public dinners at which he sat with the Queen (though Marie-Antoinette absolutely refused to touch food in front of an audience) consisted of fifty courses: four soups, two large entrées—beef and cabbage, tenderloin veal spit-roasted; sixteen entrées—giblets of turkey au consommé, sweetbreads en papillotte, suckling pig, roast mutton chop, calf’s head, and so forth; four hors d’œuvres—forequarters of veal, fillet of rabbit, cold young turkey cock, leg of veal. Then six baked dishes, two intermediary entremets and sixteen small entremets—vegetables, eggs, milk dishes; next, the dessert—grapes, pomegranates, pears, bitter oranges and so forth; and last of all, four hundred chestnuts and forty-eight slices of bread and butter. It seems unlikely that he ate all of these, but it is said that he set about doing so with a will.
He was not just fat: he was slovenly. While he was still the Dauphin, the Neapolitan ambassador described him to Queen Maria Carolina as “selvaggio e rozzo, a segno che sembra nato ed educato in un bosco”—like a wild man of the woods. Mme Campan, who was truly well-disposed towards him, later wrote: “His features were noble enough, and expressive of a certain melancholy; his deportment was clumsy and lacked distinction; his person was worse than neglected; his hair, though tended by a skilled barber, was always unkempt, because he took no care of it. His voice was not particularly harsh, but nor was it pleasant: when he became excited in conversation, it became sharp and high-pitched.”
Along with this physical makeup went a certain boorishness. Louis had a tendency to brawling. Even after he was married he came to blows with his brother the Comte de Provence over some trifle, in the presence of their two wives. He loved crude jokes, if only to make a stand against the over-refinement of the Court. When Benjamin Franklin visited Paris it became the fashionable thing to sing the praises of the hero of American freedom and inventor of the lightning conductor, and women wore medallions bearing the inscription:
Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis
Lightning burst from the sky and dashed the sceptre from the tyrant’s grasp.
So the King had a chamber pot made in Sèvres carrying the same quotation, and sent it to the Duchesse Diane de Polignac, one of Franklin’s enthusiastic admirers.
Otherwise, his mental and moral attitudes were inherited from his father (the Dauphin, the son of Louis XV, who died young). The Dauphin had lived his exemplary married life, with the ‘gloomy Pepa’, as Louis XV called his daughter-in-law, in scorned and scornful isolation in his father’s frivolous and sinful Court, and, like so many sons, had made it his business to oppose everything his father did, to expiate his sins. He was deeply religious, immersed himself in serious studies, and gave much thought to how he might make the French people happy.
Louis XVI also enjoyed serious study. He read English readily and well (he was especially fond of Milton) and concerned himself above all with history and geography, the true subject matter of kings. But literature held little interest for him, and this was a great pity. It was a major deficiency in a French king at a time when his people read feverishly and unceasingly, and acquired their ideas about the world through the medium of the printed word.
He was deeply religious. That was how he had been raised, first by his father and then by the man entrusted with his upbringing, the Duc de Vauguyon—about whose own piety there is little to be said. But his own nature inclined him that way too, and his religion gav
e a deeper colouring to his innate good-heartedness and the love he felt for his people. His faith was the secret, immeasurable source of inner strength that enabled him—a man who in life was so shy and self-effacing—in his hours of trial and affliction to face death like a hero and a martyr: a death that retrospectively ennobled the memory of all he had done before.
He lived in Puritan simplicity. He loathed the pomp of the Court, and his first act after mounting the throne was to incur the bitterness of the aristocracy by trimming the royal household. Amongst its members was a class of persons known as the menus plaisirs, the ‘little diversions’, whose honour and duty it was to attend to the monarch’s pleasure. No sooner had he been crowned than their intendant La Ferté presented himself to the King, who asked him:
“Who on earth are you?”
“I am the person in charge of the ‘little diversions’, sire.”
“Well, my little diversion is to take a stroll in the park,” the King replied.
But the greatest of his virtues, and what might indeed be considered his dominant characteristic, was his goodness of heart. This was a king who spontaneously and sincerely loved his people. This sincerity shines through his remark: “Il n’y a que Monsieur Turgot et moi qui aimons le peuple.”—It is only Monsieur Turgot and I who love the people.
Gentle and humane, he had a horror of cruelty and bloodshed. He was prone to tears and full of sensibility, as was the entire age, but in his case it came from the heart. When Chamfort’s neoclassic drama Mustafa and Zéangir was staged in the royal theatre—a play that celebrates sibling love—he shed a fountain of tears. He actually loved his own brothers and sisters, which, in the circumstances, and considering their own cooler feelings for him, was rather remarkable.
I could continue to enumerate his virtues, and that might seem well worth doing in view of all that has been said about his weaknesses. But there really is no need. In recent decades royalist historians have reiterated to the point of tedium what a kind and noble soul he was.