30 Th
e Unseen Terror
royal edict of toleration for the Protestants was too vague ‘because it seems to open the doors to all the sects; it is a sort of announcement of this universal toleration which the impetuous ( fougueux) denouncers of our century decorate with the good name of philosophy and which, in reality, conceals a profound hatred for our religion’.
Th
at last phrase has a prophetic quality in view of what would be happening in a very short time to these same priests from Saintes who refused to take the Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.21
Th
e cahier produced in the town of Jonzac22 shows how fully local opinion had been infl uenced by what was in the public domain on a national scale. In this case, it is the preamble that counts, since it is full of the ideas of Rousseau’s Contrat social. Th
e local specialist in these ideas was the con-
spicuous Protestant, marchand philosophe, Joseph-Augustin Bourrilhon. He had devoured works of the Enlightenment, and sat tightly to his Protestant upbringing. Although he was in commerce,23 the greater part of his income came from his investments in the French colonies.24
Th
e preamble is worth quoting in translation at some length:
Th
e object which the province of Saintonge ought to adopt for itself is the public good, the end to which all individuals ought to strive if they want to make the best of the advantages they have purchased by the sacrifi ce of a very small part of their liberty. Woe to the individual who, losing sight of the social agreement without which men on their own would be the most unfortunate beings on the globe, undertakes to substitute himself for the public, referring everything to himself and making himself the centre of everything. If that were so, weighed down by the multitude, he would have tasted all the delicacies society off ers only the more keenly to sense their loss to him. He would be prey to misery and remorse, to which he would inevitably succumb.
Each individual, nevertheless, guided by his own selfi sh sense, seeks to break the primordial contract (Bourrilhon says pacte) on which his happiness entirely depends. What can be set against this tendency? Good teachers, worthy pastors and magistrates of integrity.
Th
e cahier goes on to outline the training of these three professions, representing what will emerge as the programme of the Revolution before it turned sharply into the way of the Terror: money set aside for training teachers and priests, adequate supervision of elected offi cials, and an
impartial law, accessible to all and administered by local, properly qualifi ed justices of the peace.
Elections, Grievances, and Feudal Dues
31
Th
at such principles were held so far from the intellectual salons of Paris is fascinating evidence of the genuinely national characteristic of the desire for change and readiness to accept it when it came about.
* * *
Th
e Vicomte de Malartic was a deputy from the nobility of La Rochelle who kept a journal of the Estates-General at Versailles as it changed into the sovereign National Assembly. He eventually withdrew his support, but he remained interested long enough to say how the deputies from Aunis and Saintonge divided, and to draw attention to the prominence of Regnaud, the young lawyer from Saint-Jean-d’Angély, as a constitutional monarchist.
Th
e immediate impulse for the famous Tennis Court Oath was given by a man born in Saintes, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.25 When he and his colleagues found themselves locked out of the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, where they usually met, because it was being altered for a meeting with the king that they did not know about, Guillotin called out that they should meet in a tennis court owned by a friend of his, and not let themselves be dispersed until the king should agree to the deputies of the clergy and nobles joining them to form the National Assembly.
Th
e third estate deputies did what Guillotin said, and waited for noblemen and clergy to arrive. Th
ree curés from Poitou – Ballard, Jallet, and
Lecesve – joined them immediately and were soon followed by others.
De Malartic and most of the other nobles, including the bishop of Saintes, Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld, held aloof until the king ordered them and the clergy to become part of the National Assembly on 27 June.26
Deputies from Aunis and Saintonge took offi
ce in the new body. Alquier,
Garesché, Regnaud, and de Bonnegens found themselves on select committees.27 Lemercier and Augier from Saintes supported the changes.
De Riché, a deputy of the nobility from Saintes demanded that justice should be freely available to all; Landreau, one of the clergy from Saint-Jean d’Angély and Pinélière curé of Saint-Martin-de-Ré supported the Revolution, but the rest of the clergy from these provinces held back on the instructions of the bishops of Saintes and La Rochelle.
Th
e shortage of grain in Paris, at its most acute form on 14 July, together with the fear that troops surrounding the city might be ordered to attack it by the courtiers at Versailles, led Camille Desmoulins to jump on a table
32 Th
e Unseen Terror
in the gardens of the Palais Royal to incite the protesting crowd to take up arms.28 Th
ey already had cannon and ammunition, so they stormed the
Bastille fortress to obtain gunpowder.
It was not only elected deputies from the Saintonge who were in Paris.
Th
ere was also a young man from Pont l’Abbé d’Arnoult, a few miles north of Saintes, Jean-Martin Bienassis, 23 in 1789 and on his tour of France to complete his apprenticeship as a maker and repairer of heating stoves. He was among the fi rst to cross the Bastille’s drawbridge, and was afterwards honoured as a vainqueur de La Bastille. His local patriotism showed in the new name he gave himself for the occasion: Saintonge, La Liberté.29
When the welcome on his return home had died down, he built up his business and, on 24 June 1791, married Marguerite, daughter of a tailor of uniforms like Citizen Bouquet. Bienassis died in his early seventies on 19 March 1838, and his memorial is in Pont l’Abbé cemetery. As well as recording his achievement in fl owery terms, an inscription says, Passer by, if ever hatred of despotism could become weak in your heart, come to this tomb on each anniversary of the day in which he became immortal, to call to mind the conqueror of the Bastille and refresh it in his memory.
Th
e lettering is crowded and homely on a monument in the shape of a stove surmounted with a well-made chimney.
* * *
A rumour fl ew round in villages at the southern end of the Saintonge30 that thirty thousand men in the pay of the nobility had come to Barbezieux and set light to everything they could fi nd. Women and children fl ed into the woods. Th
e men armed themselves and looked in vain for attackers.
Th
ey heard the rumours in Sousmoulins too, so more than two hundred tenants and labourers armed with fi rearms, forks, and scythes marched on the château owned by Baron de Bonnevin, their seigneur, to take the national cockade for him to wear in his hat. Warned by the curé, Bonnevin went to meet the villagers and off ered to go and drink in a bar with them, accepting the cockade. He had barrels brought out into the château yard, and drank the health of the king and the third estate with the intruders. He agreed to obey a decree of the National Assembly by taking down his weathervanes, since they were regarded as unnecessary symbols of social superiority. His
Elections, Grievances, and Feudal Dues
33
tenants also demanded his renunciation of all seigneurial dues, asserting that
‘there are no longer any seigneurs, no messieurs, we are all equal’.31
He agreed to have a deed of renunciation drawn up, but no one was willing to witness it, until de Bonnevin ordered the notary and three others to sign. He put his seal on it. A mil
ler called Neven seized the document and tore it up, shouting that it was worthless if de Bonnevin did not hand over all his original deeds. By this time, some of the crowd were ransacking his house and others were levelling their weapons at him, so he gave his document case to the miller, who jumped on the kitchen table, gave each tenant his own title deeds and threw the case on the fi re. Some women had cornered Madame de Bonnevin and her daughters, screaming at them that they ought to dress as ordinary women did, since everyone was equal now.
After de Bonnevin and his family barricaded themselves upstairs, his attackers threatened to set the house on fi re. His daughter bravely came down to bring them her father’s Cross of Saint Louis that they had asked for, and they left the château, shouting that they would come back later that night to set it on fi re. When they did come back after two days, the curé and the notary delayed them long enough to warn the family at the château who got away in time, and the attack fi zzled out.
His tenants brought M. de Bonnevin to court the following April – the Revolution meant that they could do so now – and it was found that he had been manipulating the law to revise his land register to the disadvantage of the tenants, had tampered with the weighing pans to take more of their harvest produce from them,32 and had been buying up land to which others had a prior claim.33 Th
is explains what they did at his château on 31 July:
equality before the law had been affi
rmed, so they would no longer accept
weathervanes as distinctive signs of superiority, nor his rank as a baron, nor ostentatious dresses being worn by the baroness and her daughters.
A year later, de Bonnevin left France as an émigré.
* * *
During a year of change, tension between some seigneurs and their tenants remained. Tenant farmers still did not know whether they had to pay feudal dues or not. Th
e dues in question were the periodic land taxes due to the
seigneurs, like terrage 34 and the lods and vente, taxes on the sale of tenants’
property on a seigneur’s domain. Th
e intention of the National Assembly
to abolish them was stated as early as the night of 4 August 1789, but
34 Th
e Unseen Terror
they were not abolished until decrees were passed on 15 March and 3 May 1790. Even then, the burden of proof in disputes about them fell upon the tenants who did not have the necessary legal knowledge or forensic skill to win their cases. Dues on individuals had been annulled, but the National Constituent Assembly upheld payments on the land itself, unless a tenant farmer released himself from the obligation by making a one-off settlement payment to his seigneur.
It seemed to the tenant farmers of the Charente-Inférieure that nothing had, in fact, changed in this respect. No one in authority appeared able to give a clear answer about whether seigneurial land taxes were still due or not. Even on 4 August, the nobles who rushed to give up the right to charge them did so in expectation that they would be compensated in some way, and the emigration of nobles on a grand scale did not begin for another year, so a good number were still on their estates, expecting to receive their dues as before, while their tenants were becoming more exasperated at the uncertainty. Th
e abbess of the Abbaye aux Dames in Saintes expected to receive her dues from her farms, and the District Directory upheld the necessity of paying them.
Th
e unlikely focus of this acrimonious issue coming to a head was a Sunday sermon preached in April 1790 in the church of Saint-Th omas
de Conac, a village in the south of the department between Mirambeau and the Gironde estuary. Th
e preacher was the 26-year-old Jacques Roux,
who had been assistant priest ( vicaire) there since September 1788. Previously, he had been a teacher at the seminary in Angoulême, where he had been involved in some unspecifi ed way in an incident where one of the students was shot at,35 and moved to be vicaire at Jonzac and then at Cozes.
In his address, Roux praised the achievements of the ‘brave Parisians’
in overthrowing the enemies of public well-being when they stormed the Bastille nine months earlier, and claimed that their achievement was an act of God, comparable with the call of Joan of Arc. Nevertheless, he asserted, nothing of signifi cance had yet happened as a result of it to improve the lives of tenant farmers, and they must not let up on the struggle. All men
‘in slavery’ had to take part, and shed their blood for the cause, if that became necessary.
So, when a popular rising broke out at the end of the same month, Roux was accused of having incited it. However, he had warned his hear-ers to act prudently, otherwise ‘the sweet moment would degenerate into
Elections, Grievances, and Feudal Dues
35
darkness . . . to prostitute [their] weapons, only to devote them to actions of slaughter and blood’.
On the afternoon of 25 April 1790, after a municipal offi
cial,
Morisset, in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Georges-des-Agoûts had announced to the people at the end of Mass that seigneurial dues had been done away with, an argument arose because it appeared to the farmers that the 1789 changes had had no eff ect after all and they set the church benches on fi re. More violence broke out three days later when about two hundred men went protesting into the seigneur of Bellegarde’s estate at Saint-Bonnet down the road, and then on to the chateau at Saint-Georges-des-Agoûts. According to the curé of Saint-Bonnet, the chateau of Boisroche was burnt down after the crowd had taken all the barrels from the cellar, drunk what they contained, and did a good deal of other damage besides. Th
en they went on and burned and pillaged at
Saint-Georges.
It stopped on 1 May when a military contingent arrived and arrested more than a hundred rioters who were locked up in the church at Saint-Th
omas for the night. Th
ere were old men and children among them.
Th
ey were taken on to Saintes and guarded in a large open space because the prisons were full. In the end most of them came home. Forty, however, were put on trial, but what sentence they received, if any, is not known.
As for Jacques Roux, perhaps he did no more than raise the idea of the demonstration in the minds of those who perpetrated it, who seemed to have plenty of what Dominique Rousseau calls ‘revolutionary energy’
regardless of what he had asserted.36 In this rural setting, there was no question of there being an organized group of sans-culottes ready to rise against the seigneurial establishment, but what Roux had done was to unleash the spirit of the Jacquerie, which had been deep within the subconsciousness of the rural peasantry since the fourteenth century.
Precisely when he left Saint-Th
omas is uncertain. His last signature in
the parish register is dated 19 April, and the rising erupted on 25 April.
He turned up one or two weeks later near Cognac, and we fi nd him in Paris afterwards leading the Enragés faction to the left of Robespierre’s Jacobins, for which he was condemned by them. Roux took the Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the church of Saint-Sulpice, and declared himself a radical by giving addresses using the same extremist idiom as Jean-Paul Marat – so much so that people called him ‘petit
36 Th
e Unseen Terror
Marat’. He became a prominent member of the Cordeliers Club entrusted with delivering the Enragés’ manifesto at the bar of the Convention. Th is
manifesto demanded that speculation in grain prices should be a crime punishable by death and asserted that the new Constitution would be worthless for the poor if it were not.37 As a member of the general council of the Paris Commune, Roux was sent to take Louis XVI from the Temple Prison to the scaff old, but it was another priest who told the king that he was ascending to his reward. Roux even brusquely refused to look after the king’s will and see that i
t reached the queen. All that was nearly three years in the future still.
* * *
Violence was not confi ned to the south of the Charente-Inférieure. A serious incident occurred at Varaize near Saint-Jean-d’Angély six months later, in October 1790, which led to an uprising in nearly all the district, since the issue of seigneurial dues had still not been eff ectively resolved. Th e land
around Varaize had belonged to Comte Michel-Noel Amelot, an honorary councillor of the Paris parlement, and seigneur of three other villages besides.
He had died in 1768, but his widow stayed on in the village and her estate was valued at 1,800,000 livres in 1769. Th
e countess demanded feudal dues
in kind in wheat instead of oats, and increased the quantities she required from the tenants, while having their hunting guns confi scated and forbidding them the use of a stream which crossed her land.38
She moved into the centre of Saint-Jean-d’Angély in 1789, and made her registrar, Pierre Latierce, her agent in Varaize. He was known to be feathering his own nest when he married the grandaughter of the landowner at Richardière and bought himself a house in the village and lands of his own. In 1790, he was a taxpayer substantial enough to be an elector of the district, and became the maire.
At the same time, a lawyer called Jacques-Michel Laplanche came to Varaize, after marrying Mademoiselle Lavarenne, who already lived there.
He gave free advice to the tenant farmers at Varaize, and a witness at his trial, after the riots that were provoked around him, reported that Laplanche had said to him ‘that it was as clear as water that there had been a decree of 15th March which required them [feudal dues] to be paid no longer’, but he had not mentioned the possibility of tenants buying themselves out of having to go on paying.39
Elections, Grievances, and Feudal Dues
37
On Sunday 3 October, outside the south door of Varaize church after Mass, Laplanche read his carefully prepared petition against the payment of seigneurial dues to Countess Amelot, complaining that the redress the peasants had in the law-courts was too expensive for them, even if such action were to be successful. People gathered round Laplanche to listen to him, and then Maire Latierce objected. Th
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