The Age of Voltaire
Page 39
By the middle of the century Paris, Rouen, Lille, Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles were teeming with prolétaires. Lyons for a time surpassed Paris as a manufacturing center. Thomas Gray, the English poet, described it in 1739 as the “second city of the kingdom in bigness and rank, its streets excessively narrow and nasty, the houses immensely high and large (25 rooms on a floor and 5 stories high), and swarming with inhabitants.”60 Paris was a turbulent hive of 800,000 souls, of whom 100,000 were servants and 20,000 were beggars; dismal slums and magnificent palaces; dark alleys and dirty streets behind fashionable promenades; art fronting destitution. Coaches, public cabs, and sedan chairs were engaged in vituperative collisions and traffic jams. Some thoroughfares had been paved since 1690; in 1742 Trésaquet paved roads with rolled stones (chaussée empierrée et roulée); but most of the streets were plain dirt, or laid with cobblestones fit for revolutionary barricades. Street lamps began to replace lanterns in 1745, but were lit only when the moon was not full. Street signs appeared in 1728, but there were no house numbers before the Revolution. Only the well-to-do had faucet water in their homes; the rest were supplied by twenty thousand water carriers, each bearing two buckets, sometimes up seven flights of stairs. Water closets in the home, and bathrooms with running hot and cold water, were privileges of the very rich. Thousands of shops, marked with their picturesque emblems, maintained their own chaos of discordant and suspected weights and measures till the Revolution established the metric system. There were honest shopkeepers in maisons de confiance, but the majority had a reputation for short measures, rigged prices, and shoddy goods.61 Some shops were assuming a specious splendor for the carriage trade. Poor people bought chiefly from peddlers, who laboriously toted their wares in pails or baskets on their backs, and contributed to the music of the streets with their traditional, unintelligible, welcome cries, from “Baked potatoes!” to “Death on rats!” Rats contested with humanity the housing facilities of the city, and men, women, and children rivaled the rats in the race for food. Said Montesquieu’s Persian visitor:
The houses are so high that one would suppose they were inhabited only by astrologers. You may imagine that a town built in the air, with six or seven houses the one on the top of the other, is densely populated, and that when all the inhabitants come down into the street there is a pretty crush. I have been here a month, and I have not yet seen a single person walking at a foot-pace. There is no one in the world like a Frenchman to get over the ground. He runs and flies.62
Add the beggars, the vagabonds, the pickpockets, the street singers, the organ players, the medicine mountebanks. All in all, a populace with a hundred human faults, never to be trusted, always alert for gain, heartily and profusely profane; but, given a little food and wine, the kindest, jolliest, brightest populace in the world.
3. The Bourgeoisie
Between the lowly and the great, hated by the one and scorned by the other, the middle class—doctors, professors, administrators, manufacturers, merchants, financiers—subtly, patiently made its way to wealth and power. The manufacturers took economic risks, and demanded commensurate rewards. They complained that they were harassed in a hundred ways by governmental regulations, and by guild control of markets and skills. The merchants who distributed the product raged against a thousand tolls impeding the movement of goods; at almost every river, canal, and crossroads the noble or ecclesiastical lord of the domain had an agent exacting a fee for permission to proceed. The seigneur explained that these tolls were a reasonable reimbursement for his expense in keeping roads, bridges, and ferries in service and repair. A royal edict of 1724 suppressed twelve hundred such tolls, but hundreds remained, and played their part in earning bourgeois support of the Revolution.
French commerce, hampered inland, was spreading overseas. Marseilles, a free port, dominated European trade with Turkey and the East. The Compagnie des Indes, reconstituted in 1723, extended its markets and political influence in the Caribbean, the Mississippi Valley, and parts of India. Bordeaux, chief outlet for the Atlantic trade, raised its maritime commerce from 40 million livres in 1724 to 250 million in 1788. Over three hundred vessels sailed to America from Bordeaux and Nantes every year, many of them carrying slaves to work the sugar plantations in the Antilles and Louisiana.63 Sugar from French America was now outselling English sugar from Jamaica and Barbados in European markets;64 this may have been a motive for the Seven Years’ War. The total foreign trade of France rose from 215 million livres in 1715 to 600 million in 1750.65 Voltaire estimated that the number of trading vessels in French service had increased from three hundred in 1715 to eighteen hundred in 1738.66
The rising profits from maritime commerce were the chief stimulus to the conquest of colonies. The zeal of French merchants and missionaries had won for France most of Canada and the Mississippi basin, and some Caribbean isles. England challenged these French possessions as enclosing and endangering its colonies in America; war would decide that issue. A like rivalry divided the French and the English in India. At Pondicherry, on the east coast south of Madras, the French had established themselves in 1683, and in 1688 they received from the Mogul Emperor full control of Chandernagor, north of Calcutta. Under the energetic lead of Joseph Dupleix these two ports captured so much trade and wealth that the English East India Company, which had set up strongholds at Madras (1639), Bombay (1668), and Calcutta (1686), felt itself compelled to fight the French for the disintegrating Mogul realm.
When England and France found themselves on opposite sides in the War of the Austrian Succession (1744), Mahé de La Bourdonnais, who had made a record of enterprising administration in the French islands of Mauritius and Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, proposed to the Versailles government a plan “to ruin the commerce and colonies of the English in India.”67 With a French squadron, and the jealous consent of Dupleix, he attacked Madras and soon compelled its surrender (1746). On his own responsibility he signed an agreement with the English authorities to restore Madras to them for an indemnity of £420,000. Dupleix refused to sanction this arrangement; La Bourdonnais persisted; he sailed on a Dutch ship to Europe, was captured by an English ship, was released on parole, entered Paris, and was sent to the Bastille on a charge of insubordination and treason. He demanded trial; after two years of imprisonment he was tried, and acquitted (1751); he died in 1753. Meanwhile a powerful British fleet besieged Pondicherry (August, 1748); Dupleix defended it with such spirit and skill that the siege was abandoned (October). Seven days later the news reached India that the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had returned Madras to England. The French government, knowing that the inferiority of its navy doomed it to defeat in India, refused to support Dupleix’s schemes of conquest; it sent him only minor forces and funds, and finally recalled him to France (1754). He lived long enough to see the utter rout of the French by the English in the India phase of the Seven Years’ War.
At the top of the Third Estate were the financiers. They could be old-fashioned small-scale moneylenders, or full-scale bankers handling deposits, I loans, and investments, or “tax farmers” serving as revenue agents for the State. The restrictions laid by the Catholic Church upon the charging of interest had now very little effect; John Law found half of France eager to trade in stocks and bonds. Paris opened its Bourse in 1724.
Some financiers were richer than most nobles. Paris-Montmartel had 100 million livres, Lenormant de Tournehem 20 million, Samuel Bernard 33 million.68 Bernard married his daughters into the aristocracy by giving each of them a dowry of 800,000 livres.69 He was a gentleman and a patriot; in 1715 he himself fixed the tax on his property at nine million livres, so revealing a wealth that he might have partly concealed;70 and when he died (1739) the examination of his accounts disclosed the great extent of his Secret charities.71 The four brothers Paris developed their banking firm into a political power. Voltaire learned from them much of his financial cunning, and shocked Europe by being both a philosopher and a millionaire.
The best-hated financiers in e
ighteenth-century France were the “farmers general.” The ferme générale had been organized in 1697 to collect indirect taxes—chiefly on subsidies, registrations, drafts, salt, and tobacco. In order to spend these revenues before they were collected, the government farmed them out to some individual who paid it a stipulated sum for the right to gather them over a period of six years. The increase in taxes, wealth, and inflation is reflected in the rising price paid for this lucrative lease: 80 million livres in 1726, 92 million in 1744, 152 million in 1774; no government has ever been at a loss for ways to spend its people’s money. The lessee delegated the collection of the taxes to forty or more “farmers general” (fermiers généraux), each of whom paid a million or more livres as advance security, and licked his fingers as the revenues passed through them; so the profits of the forty farmers general for 1726–30 exceeded 156 million livres.72 Many of such collectors bought estates and titles, built costly palaces, and lived in a pompous luxury that aroused the ire of aristocracy and clergy. Some of them collected art and artists, poets and mistresses, and opened their homes as havens or salons to the intelligentsia. Helvétius, most amiable of the philosophes, was one of the most generous of the fermiers généraux. Rousseau was long the guest of Mme. d’Épinay, a farmer general’s wife; Rameau and Vanloo enjoyed the hospitality of Alexandre de La Popelinière, chief Maecenas among the financiers. The upper bourgeoisie, anxious for social recognition, revenged themselves for ecclesiastical censures and titled contempt by supporting the philosophers against the Church, and later against the nobility. Perhaps it was the financiers who financed the Revolution.
IV. THE GOVERNMENT
The middle classes were now powerful in the state, for they filled all but those lofty ministries that needed the aura of a family tree. They were the bureaucracy. Their wits having been sharpened by natural selection in the economic arena, they proved more skillful and competent than the un-prodded and lackadaisical scions of the vegetating nobility. The noblesse de robe in the parlements and the magistracies really belonged to the bourgeoisie in origin and character. The middle class governed the communes, the forty provinces, the commissaries of war, supplies, and communications, the care of mines, roads, streets, bridges, rivers, canals, and ports. In the army the generals were nobles, but they followed campaigns planned for them by middle-class strategists in Paris.73 The bourgeois form of the French state in the nineteenth century was already prefigured in the eighteenth.
The administration of France was generally acknowledged to be the best in Europe, but it had mortal defects. It was so centralized, pervasive, and detailed that it checked local initiative and vitality, and wasted much time in the transmission of orders and reports. Compared with England, France was a stifling despotism. No meetings of the people were permitted, no popular suffrage was taken except in minor local affairs, no Parliament checked the king. Louis XV improved the government by neglecting it, but he delegated to his ministers such royal powers as the issuance of lettres de cachet, and this authority was often abused. Sometimes, it is true, such “secret letters” served to accelerate governmental action by evading technical details of administrative procedure (“red tape”). One lettre de cachet of Louis XIV established the Comédie-Française in 1680. Some lettres saved the reputation of a family by summarily imprisoning a miscreant member without a public trial that would have bared private woes; some, as in Voltaire’s second sojourn in the Bastille, prevented a forgivable fool from completing his folly. In several cases they were issued at the request of a desperate parent (like the elder Mirabeau) to discipline an unruly son. Usually, in such instances, incarceration was genteel and brief. But there were many cases of flagrant cruelty, as when the poet Desforges was confined for six years (1750–56) in an iron cage for denouncing the government’s expulsion of the Young Pretender from France.74 If we may believe the generally accurate Grimm, the government was so grateful to Maurice de Saxe for his victories on the battlefield that it sent a lettre de cachet to the poet Charles Favart commanding him to add his wife to the list of Saxe’s concubines.75 Any offense to a noble by a commoner, any major criticism of the government, might bring a lettre de cachet and imprisonment without trial or stated cause. Such arbitrary orders created a mounting resentment as the century progressed.
French law was as retarded as French administration was advanced. It varied from province to province, recalling their former isolation and autonomy; there were 350 different bodies of law in different regions of France. Colbert had made an unsuccessful attempt to systematize and define French law in the Ordonnance Criminelle of 1670, but even his code mingled confusedly medieval and modern, Germanic and Roman, canon and civil legislation. New laws were made on the need of the moment by the king, usually at the urging of his ministers, with only a hurried inquiry into their consistency with existing laws. It was difficult for the citizen to discover what the law was in his particular place and case.
Criminal law was enforced in the counties by the maréchaussée, or mounted police, and in the larger cities by municipal police. Those in Paris had been well organized and trained by Marc René de Voyer d’Argenson, who not only fathered famous sons, but, as lieutenant general of police from 1697 to 1718, earned the nickname “Damné” because he looked like the Devil. In any case he was a terror to the criminals of Paris, for he knew their haunts and ways; and yet (Saint-Simon assures us) he “was full of humanity”76—a Joubert before Les Misérables.
An arrested person was confined, before his trial, under conditions hardly different from those designed for punishment. He might, like Jean Calas, spend months in chains and mental torture, in filth and daily danger of disease. If he tried to escape his property was confiscated. If charged with a major crime he was not allowed to communicate with a lawyer. There was no right of habeas corpus, no trial by jury. Witnesses were questioned separately and privately. If the judge believed the suspected man guilty, but had insufficient evidence to convict him, he was authorized to use torture to elicit a confession. Such judicial torture declined in frequency and severity under Louis XV, but it remained a part of French legal procedure until 1780.
Penalties ranged from fines to dismemberment. The pillory was favored for punishing dishonesty in business. Thieves and other petty criminals were flogged as they were drawn at a cart-tail through the streets. Theft by domestics might be punished with death, but employers rarely invoked this law. Condemnation to the galleys was officially ended in 1748. Death was the statutory penalty for a great variety of offenses, including sorcery, blasphemy, incest, homosexuality, and bestiality. Decapitation and burning at the stake were no longer used, but execution could be enhanced by “drawing and quartering” the condemned, or by breaking his limbs with an iron bar as he lay bound to a wheel. “A capital execution,” we are told, “was always looked forward to with delight by the people, especially in Paris.”77
The judiciary was almost as complicated as the law. In the countryside there were thousands of feudal courts administering local law, and presided over by judges appointed by the proprietary seigneur; these courts could deal only with petty cases, could impose no penalty beyond a small fine, and were subject to appeal; but the peasant found it difficult and expensive to win a suit against a lord. Above these seignorial courts were those of the territorial bailli and sénéchal. Many towns had communal courts. Over all these lower tribunals were presidial courts administering royal law. The king might appoint special courts for special purposes. The Church tried its clergy by its own canon law in ecclesiastical courts. Lawyers swarmed in and around the various courts, profiting from a French passion for litigation. Thirteen major cities had parlements composed of judges acting as supreme courts for these cities and their environs; the Paris Parlement so served nearly a third of France. Each parlement claimed that until it had passed upon, accepted, and registered it, no edict of king or government became law. The royal Council of State never admitted this claim, but often allowed the parlements the right of remonstrance
. The drearier part of French history revolved around these contested claims of parlements and king.
Between the Paris Parlement and the king stood the ministries and the court. All the ministers together constituted the Conseil d’État, or Council of State. The court consisted of the ministers plus those nobles or clergymen or distinguished commoners who had been presented to the king, plus the aides and servants of these courtiers. Strict protocol marked out each courtier’s status, qualifications, precedence, privileges, and duties, and an elaborate and detailed code of etiquette eased the friction and burdened the lives of several hundred proud and jealous individuals. Lavish ceremonies alleviated the monotony of court routine, and provided the mystic ambience indispensable to royal government. The favorite amusements at court were gossip, eating, gambling, hunting, and adultery. “In France,” reported the Neapolitan ambassador, “nine tenths of the people die of hunger, one tenth of indigestion.”78 Enormous sums were lost and won at play. To pay their debts courtiers sold their influence to the highest bidder; no one could obtain an office or a perquisite without a substantial fee to some member of the court. Nearly every husband at court had a mistress, and nearly every wife a lover. No one grudged the King his concubines; the nobles merely complained that in Mme. de Pompadour he had taken a commoner to his bed when they would have felt honored to have him deflower their daughters.